"Stop by anytime," Mike called after her.
The woman waved goodbye from inside her Datsun, then backed out of the driveway and drove off down the road.
"She certainly is a nice person," Robin said, to make conversation. She felt slightly uncomfortable, standing there speaking with a man who was a complete stranger to her.
"Mrs. L. is one of the good ones," he agreed. "Say, I was planning to barbecue up a burger for myself later this afternoon. Since we're neighbors, maybe you and Paul would like to join me for a get acquainted dinner. What do you say?"
"Hey, that would be great!" Paul enthused.
Robin felt put on the spot. "Uh, I don't think so, Paul. That's very nice of you, Mike, but—"
"Please don't think I'm coming on," he added. "I'm not. I just thought it would be a nice way to get acquainted, since we are neighbors."
"No, it isn't that. Really." She could feel Paul staring daggers at her. "It's just that . . . it's been a long couple of weeks, the move, the drive out here and all. We still have to unpack and clean the house and . . . it's a very nice offer. Could we take a rain check?"
"Of course. Maybe after you're settled in."
"That would be nice."
"So I guess I'll let you guys get to work. See you later."
"See you, Mike," Paul said.
Paul waited until Mike had reached the house next door; an adobe practically identical to theirs, across twenty yards of open scrub brush already brown and brittle from the lowering night temperatures. When Mike Landware entered his house, disappearing from their sight, Paul faced his mother with a pained expression.
"Mom—"
"Paul, he seems like a very nice man. But I was telling him the truth. We do have a lot to do and we'd better get started."
Paul wasn't too happy about that but, thankfully, he didn't argue about it, either, choosing instead to throw himself into the task of unloading the car.
How did you explain to a boy of Paul's years that, in her mind and heart, she still felt too—well, too roughed up and confused by wounds not yet healed. She wasn't sure if she was ready to let a man into her life at this point even if it was just as a friendly neighbor who also happened to be a good-looking, buff, intelligent, eligible man. She did not want her mind even starting down that direction! She didn't like the needs she felt when her mind drifted towards those kind of thoughts. No, she could not explain these feelings to Paul. She could hardly explain them to herself.
At one point, she noticed her neighbor glancing out his side door in their general direction. Or maybe he was looking at the mountains. When she returned his gaze, directing her attention in his direction, he turned away, retreating into his house, again disappearing from sight.
Chapter Five
Sunday night after Paul went to bed, Robin sat at the kitchen table, intending to review her notes and lesson plans for the first day of school. But her mind kept wandering.
They'd spent Saturday and Sunday unpacking, moving in. The former tenants had left the house clean enough, yet she could never really feel comfortable in a new place until she had personally given every room a good cleaning. Then there had been grocery shopping and doing the laundry that had accrued during the trip.
There had been no recurrence of those brief, peculiar flashes of panic and dread she'd experienced that first night on the highway or the morning when Mrs. Lufkin was showing her the house. She decided that those sensations were due to a combination of travel exhaustion, the sensory overload of the whole relocation process and that initial uncertainty and trepidation anyone experiences when adapting to new surroundings. She was not an experienced traveler. She was thousands of miles away from everything and everyone she knew, in a place foreign to any previous experience she'd had, surrounded by strangers.
Throughout the weekend, Paul had been his usual helpful self, doing his fair share without being asked. She didn't work him too hard, though. He hadn't said much yet about what he thought of Devil Creek, as if still in the process of forming an opinion. She hoped it would be a favorable opinion as he got out, made friends, and in general became acclimated to the place. She wasn't concerned, as she would have been back in Chicago, about Paul being on his own, riding his bike or walking around Devil Creek. There were always terrible crimes being committed against children back in Chicago, it seemed. The TV and newspapers were full of such stories. But this was a world away from Chicago.
During the weekend when she had looked out a window for Paul, he'd usually been sitting under a tree, reading. Twice she saw him standing at the property line, conversing with their next door neighbor, the conversation appearing animated and good natured. When she asked Paul later what they'd been discussing, he said science fiction writers, that Mike also liked science fiction and had been suggesting authors Paul hadn't heard of. When her son had first started reading westerns, Robin read one to monitor his tastes and had approved of the clear-cut, black and white parables of good versus evil. She'd read enough science fiction on her own to know that novels in that genre were thematically far more complex, that their moral statements could be ambiguous, but she accepted Paul's reading of them as a healthy sign of an inquisitive nature. She decided it was good he had someone like Mike to discuss these books with.
She too had some contact with their neighbor. Mike seemed like a nice guy. He'd been working under the raised hood of his Jeep late Saturday afternoon while they were unloading the car and they'd exchanged friendly waves. Then, as they were returning from the supermarket the next day, he'd been leaving his house for a walk down the road that fronted their properties. They'd exchanged pleasantries, talked about the weather, and spoke again of their mutual fondness for Mrs. Lufkin. Friendly, neighborly chitchat, which she appreciated.
So now the unpacking was completed, the house still had the vaguely aseptic scent of a hospital room after all the cleaning they'd done, and the refrigerator and cupboards were well-stocked. There still remained a tentative feel to the house, which she knew only living here would erase. And here it was, Sunday night, and Robin finally had some quiet quality time alone, all set to prepare for her first day as a teacher . . . when she realized how totally exhausted she was.
Not too exhausted, though, to prevent her mind from wandering, and she found herself considering, more than she wanted to, the man who lived next door. This was somewhat irritating. What she needed in her life at this point was a new place to live, a new job, and a new start. What she definitely did not need was romance.
She couldn't deny that there was a throaty timbre to the man's voice that was pleasant to her ear. Mike's manner suggested intelligence, sensitivity, and a quiet strength. He was not unattractive to her. She sensed something tragic about him. He smiled easily enough, yet there was a sadness not far beneath the surface. She wondered about that.
He was nothing like Jeff.
Robin had met her ex-husband in college. They'd married a month after graduation and she was soon pregnant with Paul. She became a housewife. At first she'd experienced some guilt and frustration at becoming so domesticated, but she convinced herself, and Jeff had agreed, that it would be in their child's best interest for her to stay home and be a full-time mom. Jeff had gone on to amass considerable real estate holdings, masking his cold, shrewd, calculating intelligence beneath a breezy, flippant outer facade. The facade also masked a manipulative personality driven by blind greed and ambition. As their marriage and their son grew older, she had witnessed this side of him gradually blot out the good qualities she once saw and loved about him. Or perhaps those qualities too had only been part of the facade. As they climbed the social ladder in their suburban community, as Christmas after Christmas found a perfect family pictured on the cards she sent out, she eventually, inexorably found herself falling out of love with the man she had vowed to love and cherish forever.
Then, when Paul was seven, she found out that Jeff was regularly and routinely cheating on her. At first, after the shock, the hurt, th
e rejection, and the determination to do something about it, she'd told herself that it had to have been some lack on her part, that she was not fulfilling her duties as a good wife. But the more she thought about it, the more hurt and angry she became. She had always been faithful to him. The perfect little wife. Initially, she thought it was just his secretary. She confronted the woman. Woman? Girl was more like it. A dumb, busty little twenty-three-year-old with a big butt. During their ugly, catty confrontation, Robin was stunned when the girl brazenly told her that Jeff had had affairs with other women in his office, too.
Jeff conned her when she initially confronted him with his infidelity. He sobbed confessions and remorse and begged her forgiveness, pledging his love for her alone. He lavished her with presents. They went to a marriage counselor until Robin discovered that Jeff had never stopped carrying on his affair with Little Miss Big Butt. Theirs became a marriage in name only. Jeff didn't want a divorce because of his standing in the community. He was entertaining the notion of entering local politics and a failed marriage would not have helped. He never did get into politics, for which Robin thought the local electorate should have been profoundly grateful, apparently deciding that there was more money to be made in shady real estate deals than by lying to voters and taking graft. Ultimately, she realized that she was only holding the marriage together for Paul's sake. She came to understand that the real reason she could not let go was her fear of losing the comfort and false security of the materialistic life she had become used to.
Then one day she and Paul came home unexpectedly, when they had planned to be gone for the day, and she found Jeff in bed with another woman. It wasn't even Little Miss Big Butt. It was some bimbo she'd known nothing about. She packed one suitcase for her, one for Paul and they moved out that day. She took a sales clerk job at a mall, filed for divorce, and began applying by mail for teaching jobs around the country, accepting the furthest offer from Chicago that she could find.
Devil Creek would be her first teaching job. She'd always had a great rapport with kids. She considered herself a perceptive, caring person and she assumed that these qualities and her degree were what sold her during the job interview despite her lack of experience.
She'd been a bit surprised at how easily she'd adapted to being a single working mom. There were pressures and day-to-day problems, of course, but she found it a giant step up from being emotionally victimized in a bad marriage. She'd recognized long ago that while her mother had ingrained into her a compassion and sensitivity for others, her father, a career military man, had taught her to be self-reliant in most things. In fact, she'd become a loner years ago, even while still living with Jeff.
But sitting at her kitchen table this Sunday evening with her mind drifting from the notes and lesson plans spread out before her, she had to admit that at moments like this, late at night, when the world was a quiet place and she was alone with her thoughts, she was plagued with an elusive insecurity, a pestering self-doubt that sprung mostly from the fact that this really was the first time she'd ever truly set out on her own to make a go of it without the help or support of anyone else. Even as a college student, her parents had generously paid for her education.
Of course, she was not totally alone. She had Paul. Jeff had not offered to discuss alimony or child support, and she would have refused it anyway, though she understood that she was legally entitled. She wanted it this way, as long as she could provide for Paul on her own. She'd effectively cut loose from her cushy life and struck out on her own. She welcomed the challenge. This was a turning point in her life and she would make it. This was no time for romance. Or was she being presumptuous and foolish, self-delusional even, to think that her next door neighbor could be attracted to her? Either way, this was no time to complicate things by allowing herself to become attracted to him.
So why did her thoughts tonight keep drifting over to that single light visible from the house next door, that pale silver square shining in the nighttime gloom? He was an interesting man, and there could be the beginnings of some sort of attraction between them, unless she was completely off base. Intuitively, she didn't think she was. She sensed that it was a mutual attraction, or at least a mutual interest in a man-woman kind of way. She hoped her curiosity about him was not reciprocated because he was just a nice guy, friendly to her as he would be to anyone else. She hadn't dated in Chicago in the year since her divorce. At the age of thirty-four, the whole concept of dating, not to mention going to bed with someone, terrified her. Talk about insecurities. Jeff was the only man she'd ever slept with.
She rose from the kitchen table, drew the curtain so she could not see the light from the house next door, and returned to her notes and lesson plans, mentally reprimanding herself for succumbing to such dopey, late night thoughts. Tired or not, she had to be fully prepared tomorrow when she showed up for work. A small corner of her mind continued to consider Michael Landware, the man with the cordial, aloof smile and the sad aura. She wondered what he was doing right now. What was he thinking, next door in that house?
Stop it, she told herself. Stop it. It was just that Mike Landware was so different from Jeff.
The ringing of the wall phone struck her nerve ends like the detonation of a bomb. She found herself grasping the receiver with both hands before the end of the first ring.
"Hello?"
"Hello, sweetheart."
Jeff. . . .
Her blood ran cold. She hadn't heard that voice—that oh-so-pleasant salesman baritone—since she'd moved with Paul out of their house. Her ex-husband hadn't made contact once throughout her and Paul's apartment life together in Chicago. Lawyers had handled all communication between them, and that in itself had seemed a clear enough message to her and Paul from Jeff: good riddance, and stay away. And now, after all this time, after all those miles traveled, to be sitting here in her home hearing his voice as if he were here across from her at the kitchen table.
"Jeff. Jeff, where are you calling from?"
He laughed; more of a snicker. "I'd think you'd be wondering why I was calling, sweetie pie."
"Don't call me that."
"Well, don't you wonder why I'm calling?"
She glanced through the archway, into the living room. Paul and the television were beyond her line of vision, but the sounds of the science fiction movie continued unabated.
She struggled to suppress her rising emotions, which included panic.
"Very well, Jeffrey," she said with exaggerated patience. "Why are you calling? And where the hell are you calling from?" Nothing else came across the connection, and she thought they may have been disconnected. "Jeff?"
"I just want you to know, you bitch." His words hissed like the rattle of a snake, dangerous and cruel; not quite sane. "I don't care if you and that brat of yours move to the other side of the goddamn earth. I just want you to know that I can find you. Understand? I can mess with this 'start a new life' pipe dream of yours anytime and any way I feel like it."
"Jeff, please—"
"You think you can run out on me, you bitch? I know exactly where you are at this very minute."
The cold blood in her veins froze to ice.
"Jeff, where are you calling from?"
"Think about it, darling." His sneer slithered across the connection like a slurred obscenity. "You never understood how powerful I am, Robin, or how many people I know who can see to it that things happen."
"Jeff, please. Don't threaten me. Let us go. It shouldn't come to this. Please."
"Quit your whining." He snickered. "I'm just wanted you to know that I can turn that paradise you think you've found into a living hell whenever I feel like it. And you know what, you bitch? I think I feel like it."
The line went dead in her ear.
She sat at her kitchen table, holding the telephone receiver until the beep-beep-beeping of the unused line startled her, and she hung up the phone.
She left the table, left her kitchen, the schoolwork forgotten. Sh
e would not tell Paul about the call. But she did need to be in front of that television with him, giving her son a hug with all her strength whether he liked it or not.
Chapter Six
He sat, trying to write at the battered old IBM Selectric he'd set up on the kitchen table. Its soft, quiet purr hummed contentedly, a relaxing sound that usually drew him into that space where the ideas came from. Tonight, though, the ideas would not come. He was blocked. The well, at least for tonight, was dry. He could not write.
He kept thinking about his neighbors. The woman, Robin, and her son. He found himself thinking about Robin's eyes. He blocked these thoughts, blocked those eyes, from his mind. He tried to concentrate on the blank piece of paper in the typewriter.
Nothing would come.
Damn, he thought. Damn.
He thought about the bottle on the top shelf of the kitchen cabinet. The sealed bottle. It would be so easy to unseal. Then the memories would stop, and so would the pain, and so would his thinking about the eyes of the woman next door. No, he told himself. No. That would be too easy. That bottle was not the answer. He'd bought the bottle the same day he'd had his last drink. The same day he'd told himself that he would never take another drink.
The bottle had traveled with him ever since, a sealed bottle allowing him to prove to himself that he was strong enough to resist. So far, he had been strong enough. So far.
He stared at the blank sheet of white paper.
He'd used computers at the newspaper in Denver and at the university, but for writing fiction he found that nothing would do but the pounding of typewriter keys, hearing the snappy punch of the element on paper, watching those sheets of paper fill up with scenes and characters.
"Yeah, right," he told himself.
He'd completed forty pages, all of them in the three days since he'd come to this town, moved into this house, begun this new life. Yet tonight the words would not come. Memories triggered by the eyes of the woman next door gnawed at his mind. The blank sheet of paper in the typewriter was like a movie screen upon which he viewed the past.
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