by Swept Away
Jody sat on the edge of the king-sized bed and wondered how she could avoid letting him back in.
Despite the fact that her face had been lathered with aloe all through the night, her mouth was still swollen, her chin was still blistered, and her eyelids, while not swollen shut, were puffed. She'd shrieked when she'd caught a glimpse of herself in the mirror. How could she face Jeremy with her face so distorted?
The doorknob rattled and she ducked under the pillow. There was no way he was going to see just how ugly she was.
"Jody?" he asked softly.
"Go away," she grumbled miserably into the mattress.
"Jody, what's wrong?"
"I look like a ghoul. I'm not leaving this room. Ever. Go away."
"Sooner or later, you're going to get pretty hungry, you know."
"Promise me that, if I starve to death, you'll make them cover my face before they bring the body out."
"Jody, it's not as bad as all that."
"Yes, it is. I thought you said that the aloe would fix it."
"I said the aloe would help it heal. If your skin was already badly burned, it can't reverse that. What it can do is help it to heal quickly. Open the door," he said patiently.
"No. I can't let you see me like this, Jeremy."
"I already did."
"You didn't!"
"Sorry, but you were right there, next to me in the bed when I woke up this morning."
Jody got out of bed and padded on bare feet to the door to let him in.
Jeremy placed the bag down on the dresser and began to unload its contents. "Coffee, orange juice, an English muffin, and some cantaloupe."
"Jeremy, this is very sweet of you," she said, trying to keep her head down.
Was it possible to eat with your head at such an angle? How did one drink coffee without raising one's head?
With the fingers of one hand he tilted her face up to his. When she tried to turn away, he stopped her, saying, "We might as well get this over with now." He peered closely. "My, my, those blisters are really impressive. And I didn't expect that the swelling would be quite so bad this morning; too bad we didn't get the aloe on earlier."
She pulled away and averted her eyes.
"The blisters will heal, Jody, and with any luck, the swelling will be down by the end of the day," he told her gently, hoping he was right.
"I look hideous."
"If you say so." He turned his back and opened one of the bags. Handing her a cup of coffee, he asked, "Would you rather have breakfast out by the pool? There are a few tables in the shade, so you won't have to worry about getting more sun."
She put the cup down, wanting to protest. She'd never felt uglier in her life. But here was Jeremy, holding out his hand to her.
"I can't believe you'd want to be seen in public with me."
He shook his head. She was, in his eyes, beautiful, the blisters and puffy eyes inconsequential. How did you make a woman understand a thing like that?
"And I hurt. I really hurt." Tears welled in her eyes. "I never knew that sunburn could hurt so much."
"Jody, if you are still in that much pain, I think you should go to the nearest hospital."
"Jeremy, this is sunburn. I'd feel like an idiot going to the hospital for sunburn."
"You'll feel like a bigger idiot if you get really sick, Jody. And people do get really sick from sunburn. You could have sun poisoning."
She sat up and looked at him through slightly swollen eyelids.
"I really think you should let me take you."
Reluctantly, and with the greatest of care, Jody swung her legs over the side of the bed. She gathered elastic-waist shorts and an old, oversized tee-shirt from her suitcase, and walked to the bathroom.
As she closed the door, she said over one shoulder, "Just give me five minutes to get dressed."
The day was overcast, the fog thick as they went from her room to his car, and Jody was thankful for the fact that she needn't fight the sun's rays that morning. She slid cautiously into Jeremy's car, wincing as her sensitive thighs met the leather seat.
They followed the signs for Island Memorial Hospital, just four blocks away. As the sedan rounded the corner to the emergency room entrance, shrill sirens split the morning calm, and Jeremy stopped to allow an ambulance to precede him into the parking lot. He pulled into the nearest parking spot just as the first ambulance was followed by a second, then a third.
"What do you suppose that's all about?" Jody shifted in her seat to watch the last of the ambulances pull into the line that had formed at the doorway to the emergency room.
"Stay here," Jeremy told her, "and I'll find out."
He was back in minutes, his face white.
"There's been a really bad accident out on the Garden State Parkway. A tractor trailer jackknifed, and there was a six-car pileup because of the fog. Apparently there were a lot of severe injuries. You can't get near the emergency room right now. I think there's another hospital farther up the coast, though. We can try that one."
"I'll bet they're jammed, too. There are only three ambulances here, Jeremy. There must be others on their way to every hospital within miles." She nodded her head in the direction of the ambulances that were lined up, and the flurry of activity that had erupted. "Compared to that, a little sunburn seems pretty insignificant."
"Jody, what you have is more than just a little sunburn."
"There's no way that I would expect anyone to tend to me in the midst of what those people must be going through. Let's just go back to the motel, Jeremy, and try a little more aloe." Jody shifted uncomfortably in her seat and tried to smile.
One possibility nagged Jeremy all the way back to her motel room.
It nagged him as he watched Jody walk across the room on swollen feet and smile at him ruefully as she eased onto the side of the bed.
It nagged him as he watched Jody try to sip coffee between swollen lips, and his insides twisted, knowing that she was in pain.
It nagged him as he bit his bottom lip pensively, knowing he had a choice to make, right here and now. Jeremy had hoped that the visit to the hospital would have provided relief for her discomfort, but now, with the hospital personnel concentrating on patients with more immediate, more critical concerns, Jeremy had to face the fact that he had one option left.
Help was less than an hour away, if he was man enough to take that one giant step backwards into his past.
His heart turned over in his chest, and he knew that there was, after all, really no choice to be made. She was hurting, and there was only one person that he knew for certain could help her.
Miz Tuesday, the older-than-the-hills healer from deep in the Pines, could heal wounds in a fashion that never left scars. In his youth, Jeremy had seen Miz Tuesday set bones and cure everything from pneumonia to snake bites with concoctions that had been passed down through generations of healers.
Surely, Miz Tuesday could t
reat Jody's sunburn, could take away her pain.
Assuming, of course, that Miz Tuesday was still alive.
And if his own wounds were opened, well, he would just have to deal with it, as he always had.
The drive was not a long one, but Jeremy was numbly aware of every mile, every turn in the highway. It wasn't until he pulled off the main road onto the first of the more narrow country lanes that his senses began to come alive. Sights and sounds, smells, some long forgotten, all but overwhelmed him. Forced to slow down once he hit the dirt roads, he found himself surrounded by a half-dozen varieties of pine and as many of oak. Here and there he stopped momentarily to look around, but never spoke. Jody sat quietly, watching his eyes, knowing that wherever he was taking her, he was paying a toll that she had yet to understand. She suspected that before the day had ended, she would learn.
We're going into the Pines," she said finally as the forest deepened around them.
"Yes." He nodded.
"There aren't as many trees as I would have thought."
Jody said. "I always imagined the Pines to be thick with trees and densely overgrown."
"Fires are very common here," he said, sounding detached. "Plants that can't adapt, don't survive. That's why there is so little diversity of plant life here. Some are structurally better insulated from heat than others. Some are better adapted genetically to the conditions. Some seeds germinate more quickly when heated or when they raff onto the bare soil left behind after a fire. Some produce root sprouts that grow more quickly after being exposed to intense heat. Several of the pines that thrive here-the pitch pine, for example-have thick bark and can send up new shoots from the base if the top of the tree is killed."
His voice had taken on the flat monotone of a tour guide who had recited his lines a time or two too many, but she let him continue, since talking seemed to be distracting him from whatever it was that he was trying to avoid winking about.
"The hot- air balloon pilot said there were lots of streams back here."
He nodded. "There's a whole network of them farther in, back in the swamps. I used to know the streams like I know the streets in D.C. now. like the back of my hand."
"You grew up back here."
"That's right"
They drove in silence for a very long five minutes.
"How does a boy from the Pines get to go to Princeton?" she asked.
"It's a very long story, Jody," he answered without looking at her.
She was about to ask when he'd be telling her that story, when they rounded a bend in the road that broadened into a clearing, beyond which stood an ancient cabin of wood that seemed to grow out in all directions from a central square.
All Jody could think of was Hansel and Gretel.
Jeremy stared ahead at the cabin for a long, quiet time, his left hand on the door handle. Jody kept waiting For him to open the door, but he did not. Finally, from around the side of the cabin, an old woman appeared, her Brillo-like gray hair partially hidden by the dark blue scarf around her head. A faded brown dress that must have had a belt at one time hung on her slight frame. She leaned on a thick walking stick of white birch.
Jody's eyes widened. Hansel and Gretel indeed!
Upon seeing the car, she stopped and stared intently at them, her eyes seeming to dismiss Jody's presence as she appeared to focus solely on Jeremy.
"Who is that?" Jody whispered.
"That's Miz Tuesday," he said softly.
"Miz Tuesday?" she repeated.
"My stepfather's great-grandmother." Jeremy pushed open the car door and stepped out without waiting for Jody and walked slowly to where the old woman stood.
Jody opened her own door, and forgetting the bubbly appearance of her face, followed behind.
"Jeremy." The old woman said. " Jeremy."
He nodded slowly, and they eyed each other without speaking.
" 'Bout time." The old woman turned toward the house and pointed the stick in Jody's direction without turning to look at her. "Bring your friend."
Jody touched Jeremy's arm. He looked back over his shoulder at her and said, "She hasn't changed in sixteen years. She hasn't changed at all."
"Are we going inside?"
"Yes."
He held the door for Jody, and she stepped into a darkened parlor. The shapes of furniture loomed here and there around her, but there was no light. Jeremy led her through the dim room into the kitchen, where the light was only slightly better.
"Miz Tuesday, this is my friend, Jody Beckett." Jeremy said as they crossed the worn threshold.
The old woman nodded to acknowledge the introduction but did not turn around.
"I'm makin' you a dish of tea." The old woman told them as she placed a few short pieces of wood into the big woodstove that dominated one whole wall. Thanks, Miz Tuesday."
She nodded that they were welcome.
"You ever get electricity, Miz Tuesday?" Jeremy asked.
"You been away a long time." She turned and smiled slyly. "Even stump jumpers got elec-tricity these days."
Jeremy laughed for the first time that day.
"How've you been, Miz Tuesday?" Jeremy's face softened as he watched the old woman fill a teakettle with water from the spigot of an old porcelain sink.
She nodded her head briskly. "Pretty middlin' smart."
"I'm glad to hear that."
The old woman pointed to the wooden chairs that sat around the old round table in a corner of the room.
"Set there," she told them as she cleaned the dust from mismatched teacups, long unused, and placed them on the table.
He sat where he was told to and said, "You haven't changed much, Miz Tuesday."
"Not much do back here." She nodded. "Roads been science'd, some 'em. 'Bout all. You bein' a Clam Towner, wouldn't know."
"I don't live in Tuckerton anymore," Jeremy told her. "I haven't lived there in a long time."
"Then where?"
"Outside of Washington, D.C."
Her eyes widened. "All that far?"
He nodded.
"Lotsa folks going from here, but me, I beant going nowhere." She sat and leaned back in her chair. 'Our Martha, she bent down to Mays Landing, and her son John, he bent all the way to Trenton, to a school to learn to be a teacher. I always figured him for a weighty man. like you, Jeremy Noble. You grown up to be a weighty man? A schoolteacher? A bookkeeper, maybe?"
"I'm an investigator. I don't know that what I do makes me 'weighty,' Miz Tuesday, but I guess sometimes you have to be smart enough to find people who don't want to be found."
Her eyes narrowed and she studied his face.
After a long minute, she turned and leaned over to cup Jody's face in her hand.
"You're here for a curin'," she said, and underneath her sunburn, Jody blushed.
Drawn in by the unknown drama unfolding around her, she had forg
otten just how awful she looked.
Self- consciousry, Jody raised a hand to cover the blisters on her chin.
"Aloe." Miz Tuesday pronounced.
"Tried that."
"Where'd you find aloe in D.C.?" She pronounced the letters as if they were in quotation marks.
"Not in D.C. In Ocean Point. In the drugstore."
" Boughten?" She raised her eyebrows. "From a store?"
"Yes. They sell it in bottles."
"Fancy that." She shook her head. "Next thing you'll be saying they sell turpentine and Jersey lightnin' too."
Jeremy laughed.
Miz Tuesday stood up and went to a cabinet that hung from the wall next to the stove.
"Turpentine and Jersey lightnin'?" Jody whispered. "And what the hell's a 'stump jumper'?"
"Stump jumpers are the backwoodsmen." He grinned. "Turpentine, in one form or another, has been the traditional treatment of choice here in the Pines for any number of conditions. And there are some that maintain that Jersey lightnin'-homemade applejack whiskey- can cure just about anything. If, of course, it doesn't kill you."
Miz Tuesday shuffled back to the table with several small vials in her hand. After reinspecting Jody's face, she turned her attention to the shoulder burns, then to those on her chest. She nodded to herself, then went to the sink, refilled the teapot, and turned the burner back on.
"First thing you need is to get out of that dress. Then you soak in the tub in flower water…"
"Flower water?" Jody mouthed the words silently.
"… then you have salve, then later, some pure aloe." Miz Tuesday gestured for Jody to follow her through a doorway to the right, muttering under her breath, "Boughten aloe. Hmmph!"
"Jeremy, you can cut me some short pieces for my woodstove.' She pointed to a woodpile about ten feet from the back door. "And you can stack 'em right here, near the door."
