She cried out as I dragged her to the cabin. Inside we went down on the hard wooden floor, me on my back, her straddling me, cushioned on top of me with her knees digging into the thick, woven cotton of a country rug Delta had given me. Her hands were as rough as mine as we wrestled my jeans open and down. I groaned as she jammed my cock inside her. She didn’t care if she was wet enough, and at that moment, I only cared that I was alive, that she was alive, that we were together. I lunged upward to meet her, my hands on her breasts, her riding me with her head bent over me so the unscarred side of her face was against my hair. I dug my fingers into her hips and came instantly, convulsively, as if I’d never released myself before. I want to live.
She held my head with her hands in my hair on both sides, and bent her forehead to mine, and cried with relief.
With my arms tight around her, holding her on top of me against the cold, I cried, too.
Chapter 22
Cathy Halfway to Dawn
Thomas and I were a mess that night. Too many emotions, too much to say, so we kept it simple. Everything turned on the pulse of sex—sex to forget and forgive, sex to heal, sex to bond. I wanted to know what was in the letter, but that would have to wait.
An antique mantel clock chimed three times. The cabin was pitch black. The fire he’d built before I arrived was long gone, and I, of course, would rather shiver than build another one. We sprawled on the floor by the hearth in a jumbled nest of quilts and pillows, naked, sweaty and exhausted in each other’s arms, shivering whenever the cold air hit our bare skin. His hair streamed over his shoulders in brown tangles, his beard was wet with me. He loved all the parts of women, all the nether regions, the caves where only the brave and the noble go. I preferred a term my aging Southern-belle aunts had optioned.
Tunnel.
That woman is decorating her tunnel for traffic.
You’d better put a toll booth on your tunnel, or you’ll surely pay the price.
Thomas loved all the tunnels of a woman’s body, heart and soul. He and I weren’t sure where to tread, what to say, or how to say it, so we shoved and grabbed and licked and bit and slammed into each other until I felt bruised all over and his bloodied lower lip was swollen and raw. The mood was urgent, not tender. And yet very gentle.
I fumbled for the overturned vodka bottle on the hearth, found just enough liquor to fill my mouth, and, holding that warmed fluid on my tongue, pushed him down, bent my head to his cock, and cleaned it with a quick, efficient suck. He was hard again in an instant. Thomas groaned and curved his hands over my head, lacing his fingers in my hair. But then he pulled me away, guided my head upwards, kissed me. He was on my tongue and lips, his semen, the blood from his lip. He cleaned my lips with his tongue.
“Since we’re dealing in moments of truth,” he said grimly, “you’re going to build a fire.”
I went very still. He slid out of the quilts, and his naked heat became a shadow in the blackness. My heart raced at the melodic thud and rustle of split wood being arranged on the iron grate only a few feet away across a narrow apron of flat stone. Bile rose in my throat, and the clammy claustrophobia of terror hummed inside my brain. Hugging a quilt around me, I scrambled backward, stopping only when I backed into the rough wooden posts of his narrow bed.
He closed a hand on my shoulder. “You can do it.”
“No.” High-pitched, horrified. “Not yet.”
“Cathy.” His disembodied voice was deep, calm, but unrelenting. “You threw bullets at me and punched me in the mouth. When I carried you in here you cared more about taking care of me than you did about the dying embers on the hearth. You can build a fire.”
I crept forward until I felt the coarse hearth stone beneath my knees. He slid his hand down, parted my quilt and outlined one nipple with a forefinger. Then he bent his head to my breast and sucked the nipple gently. The effect was overtly seductive, and very effective. Thomas versus the flames. Thomas won. He sat back, then reached behind him for firewood stacked on the hearth. I watched anxiously as he arranged it with kindling underneath.
When he finished he took my right hand, his fingertips gentle on the sensitive scar tissue. My arm coiled against my body even as my thighs dampened for him. He pried my arm free, extended it. My hand shook. Thomas wedged a smooth, metal obelisk inside my curled fingers. “It belonged to my old man. He lit three packs a day with it. That’s why he died of emphysema the year I married Sherryl. I keep it because I forgive him for fucking up his life, but I don’t want to be like him. Click it and prove you want me more than you want to be afraid of the fire.”
I rolled my thumb on the tiny, coarse wheel. A blue-orange flame popped up. My hand jerked, the flame snapped off, and Thomas caught the lighter as I dropped it. “Try again,” he said.
“I can’t.”
“You can.”
He pressed the lighter back into my palm. I clicked it. The terrible little flame shot up, again. I stared at it. Beyond it, in its faint, flickering light, I saw Thomas’s strained face, the injured lip, the handsome, tired eyes, needing to put my miseries ahead of his own. “Help,” I begged, holding the lighter out stiffly. He guided my hand to a fragile pile of kindling and crumpled newspaper beneath the logs. I touched the deadly little flame to the paper and pulled back all my nerve endings as the edge of the paper flared and blackened. The kindling caught. The fire was started. “There,” I said hoarsely, and snapped the lighter shut. “Now make it worth my while.”
Thomas pulled me to him and kissed the top of my head. I pressed the good side of my face into the crook of his neck. Shaking, I held onto him and stared as the fire rose to a cheerful, crackling pyramid of aromatic orange and red flames, just an arm’s length away. I hated it.
He laid me down and stretched out over me. I wrapped my legs around him and he slipped inside me without a hitch, as if buttered. The deep thrust, the filling sensation radiated outward, comforting muscle and skin and memory. Tragedy and fear seep into our cells like a poison, they aren’t just intangible thoughts, they change our DNA. Trust and desire have to be re-learned at the core. I curved my arms around his neck. In the soft, terrifying firelight I looked up at his face, that strong, sad, compelling face, marred by ragged beard and shaggy hair and wounds I had given it.
And all I thought of was him.
Thomas
Cathy came the last time. I wasn’t sure about the other times that night, when she was intent on saving my soul or staring worriedly at the fire or both, but the last time, I had no doubt. The deep breath, the electric arch of her back, the incredible stroking contraction around my cock. And then she relaxed under me, turning her face languidly to the burned side. This was how I knew she’d had an orgasm: She forgot to pose.
A proud moment for us both.
In the last, deepest hour of full night I built up the fire again and we sat, dazed, in the eddying river of the quilts. She squatted behind me, wrapped only in a blanket that formed a tent around us both, on an old milking stool I’d bought at a flea market. Her knees hugged the sides of my arms; occasionally I felt the hard nub of a nipple caress one shoulder as she bent over my head. My gardening shears weren’t meant for cutting hair. She had to concentrate.
Cripz. The sound the thick blades made as she snipped my foot-long hair at the nape of my neck. She methodically pinched each shorn section, handed it to me over my shoulder, and I laid it on the hearth. I threw the first section she handed me into the flames; the odor of burnt hair went up, and her hands shook so badly she dropped the pruning shears on the floor. She didn’t say a word, but I realized why the scent gave her flashbacks. From then on, I laid my hair on the stones.
“Done,” she said, handing me the final section. She stroked her fingers through the shaggy remnants. I relished the feathery caresses on my scalp, the tops of my ears, my temples. Her touch went straight into my brain, a gentle therapy. She got up, holding the blanket around her as if suddenly shy, moved around in front of me, and sat down cross
-legged with her knees against my mine. She studied the new me solemnly. “You’re the most handsome man I’ve ever seen,” she said, “with a bad lip, a bruised cheekbone, a ratty beard, and a haircut from hell.”
I nodded. “It’s a start.”
“Is it? Don’t you think it’s time you told me what was in that letter from New York?”
I offered it to Cathy without a word. She took the letter in both hands and bent her head close to the words in the dim light. I stared over her into the fire.
“Oh, my God,” she whispered at first. Then, “I’m sorry you were the last to know.” But finally, after reading further, she drew back, staring at the paper with no sympathy at all. “Ravel is one sick, sad woman. Now, I see why.”
“Why?” I said wearily.
“Your sister-in-law blames herself for what happened. No wonder she’s spent the past four years trying to unload that guilt on you. It must be hell for her to live with it.”
I frowned at her. “What are you talking about?”
“She suggested the restaurant at the World Trade Center that day. Your wife went there to meet a boyfriend because her sister recommended it as a safely public place where they wouldn’t be suspected of having a romantic tryst.” Cathy tapped the paper with a hard fingertip. “Didn’t you read that part?”
“What part?”
“Thomas,” she said in hoarse rebuke. “You’ve accepted your blame for so long that now you can’t see the truth, can you?”
“I saw that my wife intended to take our kids away from me. When I realized what she was saying—that my children would have grown up without me, with another man acting as their father—when that sank in, I thought one thing, and one thing only: If I couldn’t have them, no one should. Do you understand, Cathy? Do you get what I’m saying? I was glad my children died.”
There. The bloody hulk of my real self lay exposed. Poker-faced, Cathy looked up at me. Her eyes shifted slowly, scanning my face, scraping the skin off my skull, boring into the bone, searching inside the folds of my mind. Whatever she was looking for, she found it. She exhaled and relaxed. New breath curled from her lungs to mine. My ribs expanded. I felt my heart slow down. She looks relieved.
“I don’t mean to sound flippant,” she said gently. “But . . . Thomas. A thought is only a thought. Not a wish. Not a plan. Not a hope. Just words in the rough draft of a movie script. Not reality. You didn’t want your children dead.”
“Yes, I did. I wanted revenge, even if it hurt them. I was no better than the men who destroyed the towers. The men who killed three-thousand people that day, including Sheryl, Ethan, and our unborn baby.”
“Oh, Thomas, no. If you could wish Ethan alive again, if you could hold him and your other child in your arms, would you?”
“Of course.”
“There. See? You’ve nullified the other thought. No thought can be taken seriously in the heat of the moment. Especially when fueled by liquor or drugs or depression. Thomas, if thoughts were destiny, if all thoughts were serious, I’d be in prison now.”
“This is no time to joke, not even to make me feel better.”
“I’m not joking. I planned to kill Gerald.”
“Come on.”
“Really. I planned to lure him into visiting me, to hide a kitchen knife in my robe, and when he stepped close, I’d stab him. I made the arrangements. I invited him to my house. He thought I wanted to discuss the details of my promotions contract for Flawless. He thought I was eager to forgive and forget, to help him sell his products.” She touched the scars on her face. “He thought I’d work for him behind the scenes, of course, where I wouldn’t make anybody squeamish.”
I studied her eyes the way she’d studied mine. Yes, she had been capable of murder that day. “What stopped you?”
“One of your letters. It doesn’t matter which one, what the subject was, it was just a typical letter from you, one of the letters I loved reading, about my grandmother’s house. It came with a box of Delta’s biscuits.” Tears gleamed in her eyes. “I ate biscuits and read your letter about an hour before Gerald was supposed to arrive. I definitely meant to kill him that day. I was drugged on tranquilizers, and I’d downed most of a bottle of wine, but as I lay on my bed reading your letter one clear thought came to me: ‘If I go to prison for murder, Thomas might not write to me anymore.’” She gave a shaky chuckle and wiped her eyes. “Whether you know it or not, you saved Gerald’s life that day. And you kept me from a life behind bars.”
I sat there looking at her, drinking her in, absorbing the strange comfort she offered inside a maze of conflicting ideas. Every time I’d written her, I thought, ‘I want to keep her alive.’ I had wanted everyone I loved to live. I didn’t want my children dead. I didn’t mean it. I didn’t want Sherryl dead, or even Gibson, her boyfriend.
All this time, the only person I had wanted dead was me. Life sometimes came down to such simple realizations. I bent my head beside Cathy’s. “I wish my children had lived,” I whispered, absolved. “I wish Sherryl had lived.”
Cathy made a soothing sound and put her arms around me. “I know.”
I sat back and took the letter. It fluttered from my hand, falling lightly among the long streamers of my hair on the hearth. “There’s some symbolism there, but I’m not sure what,” I said.
Cathy nodded. “Burn the letter.” She looked toward the shelves where Ethan’s mangled toy truck lay. “And bury Ethan’s toy. Put a part of your heart into the ground with his memory. Then go on and live your life, the way he’d want you to. When you’re ready.”
“I’m not ready to let him go like that, yet.”
“Okay. When you’re ready, you’ll know.”
I picked up the letter. My heart broke, but the fracture was manageable, for once. “I had a second child on the way,” I said gruffly. “I lost another son or daughter.”
“I know,” Cathy soothed again, leaning close, patting my blanketed knee gently. “I know. But it wasn’t your fault. It wasn’t your fault, Thomas.” Her voice shook. “I’ll put that letter in the fire for you, if you want me to. It’ll be the first time in ten months I can honestly say I like what a fire can do.”
Courage. What she’d do for me. I touched the back of my fingers to her scarred cheek in gratitude. Then I leaned toward the fire, laid the last truth about my marriage, my wife, and my children, into the flames, and watched it turn to clean ashes.
I took her in my arms. She put her head on my shoulder, scarred side up. We lay down, burrowing inside the quilts, holding on tight, then relaxing, breathing easier. The first hint of daylight made ghostly rectangles at the cabin’s windows. “I think we can rest now,” she murmured.
I pulled her hair to my nose so the scent would fill me and nestled my forehead against her temple. I shut my eyes as close to her face as I could get. We had survived the elements—fire, ice, water, wind, heat, cold. We had climbed mountains, fallen off cliffs, been lost inside black monoliths of memory and forgetting. This was something we’d had to work out of our systems like a poison, to get it to the surface, the air and the light. It had taken all night, and every sensation, and every emotion, until we were exhausted and newly opened, rebirthed.
We had lives, now. Imperfect, newly minted, the skin still fresh and vulnerable and easy to burn, but we wanted to live. She had tested her scars, and mine, by fire.
“Cathy?”
“Hmmm?”
“I’d have written to you in prison.”
She tucked her right hand between us and unfurled her fingers along my heart. “Good thing I didn’t know that then,” she said.
We slept.
Chapter 23
Cathy Beginnings
The next morning I buried Thomas’s revolver in the deep loam of the forest below his cabin. I also quietly removed all his vodka bottles while he slept, pouring out their contents on the frosty ground. I was walking up the hill to the cabin when he stepped quickly outside, dressed only in jeans. He scrap
ed a hand over his raggedly chopped hair when he saw me. It was nice to see him look relieved. He strode down to meet me. “There’s blood on the quilts. Did I hurt you?”
“Oh, ye of grand ego,” I said as lightly as I could. “My period started.”
“You’re sure? It was a hard night. I’ve never roughed up a woman before.”
“You didn’t rough one up, now. And if anyone looks abused, it’s you.”
“I’m fine. Are you? No condoms, no responsibility. That’s not me.”
“Not my modus operandi, either. But I think we’re okay, this time.” I looked up at him tenderly. “I haven’t had a period for months. Stress, medication, all that. I’m . . . back in the flow of things, now. Good.”
“If you’re happy.” He studied me carefully, making sure.
I looked up at him the same way. “Are you? Will you be? I buried your gun where you can’t find it. And I poured out all your liquor. But look at the lovely display the empty bottles made. I’m an expert with bottle arrangements.”
He glanced at the creative display of empty vodka bottles on one corner of his porch. “All right. But . . . you can trust me with the gun. I swear to you. I’d like to have it back. It’s an antique.”
“Good. When archaeologists dig it up a thousand years from now, they’ll be impressed.”
A stalemate. We looked at each other a long time. “If that makes you happy,” he conceded.
I nodded.
He exhaled. “Okay.”
With that understanding in the bag, we stood looking at each other a minute more, like teenagers at an awkward prom, trading a thousand unspoken memories from the darkness, sensations, the exposed soft spots, the vulnerable moments, the feverish images that make knees weak and blushes rise even in the freezing air of a winter morning. “It’s cold out here,” he said gruffly. “Come back inside and I’ll heat up some Spam for breakfast.”
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