Sarah's Window

by Janice Graham

  He heard the door open and casually glanced up from his journal. When he saw Sarah walk up to the counter and pause to read the chalkboard menu on the wall, there was such a sudden change in his countenance that any casual observer would have noticed the effect she had on him.

  He waited, following her with his eyes until she had paid and then paused to pick up a napkin from the service corner. When it seemed she was moving toward a table near the door and might not see him, he laid aside his journal and rose.

  She saw the movement, turned her head. Her eyes held a look of disbelief, utter amazement; only slowly did she smile and walk toward him.

  She was dressed as he had seen her before, in worn denim jeans and a loose, heavy-knit sweater, a backpack slung over her shoulder, the uniform of those who wish to blend in.

  "Here," he said, "please, come join me," and he cleared room on the table.

  "I won't disturb you? Were you working?"

  "No," he answered and quickly rolled up his journal and stuffed it down behind the worn leather briefcase near his elbow. "Please, sit down."

  "Thanks," she said, and set down her tray.

  He hid his hands under the table, tried to hide his nervousness.

  "I never expected...," he began, then her backpack knocked over his iced tea and he grabbed for it.

  "I'm so sorry," she said, quickly mopping it up with her napkin.

  "It's all right."

  Finally she was settled, the sandwich and Coke removed from her tray, and both of them took a deep breath and looked at each other and smiled.

  "I like this place," Sarah said.

  "So do I. One of my favorites."

  "I used to work over at the Paradise Cafe. When I was in school here."

  "You went to school here?"

  She nodded. "Didn't graduate, though."

  Carefully, she picked up her sandwich. There was a conscious reserve about her, and he wondered if she was as nervous as he.

  He had forgotten about his own sandwich, had lost his appetite.

  She cleared her throat. "How did your conference go?"

  He smiled, relieved to have the conversation turn to something he could handle. "Very well. The paper'll be published next month."

  She put down her sandwich and turned an inquisitive gaze on him. "So, tell me, what does a physicist do in a typical working day?" Then, with narrowed, smiling eyes, "In five words or less."

  He leaned forward on his elbows. "I'll give it to you in one."

  "Only one?"

  "Math."

  "I should have known."

  "Why?"

  "From what Amy said about you."

  "Oh, yes. Amy. She tells me you helped her a lot more than I did."

  "Only because I'm on her level."

  "I should think you were a good deal above it."

  "Perhaps because I enjoy it."

  "Math?"

  "Because it's logical. There are answers." She lowered her head and bit into her sandwich, but her eyes were still on him, watching him.

  "My math isn't logical."

  "It isn't?"

  "No, not at all. Not in pure math. Like when you're dealing with integers and primes. Then it's really more intuition than logic. I come up with these theorems that work and I know they work, but I can't prove how. It's all really very mysterious. Which, I suppose, is why I love it."

  Sarah had fallen into his eyes, was lost in their gentle blue gaze, and suddenly her appetite was gone and the roast beef sandwich she had eyed so hungrily seemed dry and tasteless in her mouth.

  She put down the sandwich and reached for her Coke. "I thought you needed laboratories. Don't you? Things like... I don't know, electron accelerators?"

  "I fly back to Berkeley every so often."

  "And the rest..." She fingered her straw. "The rest is in the math."

  "Yes. In the equations."

  "What can you see?"

  "A lot. Its own kind of imagery. Certain things, certain physical realities. Things that are easier to describe with an equation than with words."

  She nodded. "Yes. I think I see what you mean."

  She glanced toward the window. The afternoon light streamed through the blinds, falling in narrow, bright shafts across the room. She pressed the backs of her hands to her flushed cheeks.

  "Goodness, it's warm in here."

  "Yes, it is bright, isn't it."

  She unzipped the pocket of her backpack and removed a wide green clip and, with the same gesture he had observed in his car that night, wrestled her sorrel hair into a loose knot and secured it on top of her head.

  Suddenly, he could think of nothing else to say, nothing that made sense. He rose and offered to get them some ice water, and she thanked him.

  She watched him while his back was turned—the lean, muscular body, the brittle energy that seemed locked in every movement. In his absence she scanned his belongings, the scuffed briefcase with his initials engraved on the bronze latch, the old leather jacket thrown over the heap, the scientific journal, as if she might find the answer to why he so intrigued her, why she could not get him out of her thoughts.

  He set down her water and she thanked him.

  "Now," he said as he settled back opposite her, "tell me about Doughty."

  It took her a moment to follow him.

  "Doughty?"

  "Your book."

  "Oh, yes...," and he noticed a faint blush rise to her cheeks. "I never thanked you."

  "No need to."

  "I kept meaning to. And the envelope."

  "I sealed it."

  "Thank you."

  "I assumed they were personal."

  "Yes." Then, with a slow shake of her head, "I can't believe I did that."

  "You were still half-asleep when you left."

  "I guess I was." She took a sip of her water, eyed him over the rim of the glass. "Did you read them?"

  "Yes," he replied without hesitation, freezing her with a look of such directness that her heart fluttered in her chest. "You seemed like a different person. In the letters."

  "I was."

  The blue eyes warmed inquisitively.

  "I was different with him. I became someone else."

  "And did you like who you became?"

  She narrowed her gaze on him and smiled. "Yes. Very much."

  "He was English?"

  "Oh, yes," she replied, lifting one of her fine, arched brows. "Very."

  "You didn't leave with him."

  "Oh, but I did. For two years."

  "Married?"

  "No." She took a deep breath. "We had serious disagreements."

  He watched her closely, could read the shadows of some not-yet-forgotten pain, saw it between her eyes, the way she furrowed her brow. He was aware of a sensitivity toward her that he had never felt toward any other woman, a kind of tender curiosity.

  "Are you still..."

  She shook her head. "No," she replied. "The last time I heard from him, he was in Argentina. That was almost," she paused to calculate, "three years ago."

  There was a clatter when a busboy rolled his trolley up to the booth behind them. When he had cleaned off the table and squeaked on by, Sarah continued.

  "I think in many ways we were well suited to each other. But we wanted different things. In the end."

  All this while he watched her fingers caress the glass, and now the fingers grew still.

  "He lives only for himself. But that wasn't apparent at the beginning."

  She raised the cold glass and pressed it to her cheek and then to her neck.

  John said, "God, what a fool he was."

  Again, the color rose to her cheeks, and she kept her eyes lowered.

  "I think maybe now he regrets it. Maybe."

  She shrugged and leaned back, finally lifting her eyes to meet his, and said, "He will become what he is to become, and fatherhood will not be part of that experience."

  "I see," John said, a shade embarrassed, and looked away,
at the young man with the trolley.

  After a moment he added, "And you're still here."

  "Yes."

  "No desire to leave."

  "Sometimes."

  "But you don't."

  "I will."

  "But not now."

  "I have ties here. Ties that bind."

  "Are you waiting for that to change?"

  She looked up at him, a little off guard.

  "Good question."

  He searched her eyes for the longest time, and once again it seemed as if a wordless communication flowed between them.

  "Why we do what we do," she said.

  "Mystery."

  "Yes. Mystery."

  She smiled, and he returned the smile. He would have liked to reach out and take her hand, but then he thought it wasn't really necessary.

  John had always been drawn to the invisible: more specifically, the invisible connections between things. As a child he had puzzled over the phenomena ordinary men take for granted in modern life: the connection between a flick of a switch and the sudden appearance of light, or sound, or image. He tore things apart—old lawn mower engines, radios, watches— looking for the connections. But his interest went beyond the engineer's obsession with mechanical cause and effect, with deconstructing and reconstructing physical reality: he searched for things that would leave him awestruck, things residing in mystery and obscurity. Invisible connections.

  It was this fascination and a high tolerance for ambiguity that led him to the doorstep of the world of particle physics: here there were no absolutes, no unequivocable rights and wrongs. Truth took a meandering path, and what appeared absolute one day could be refuted or proven to have limitations the next. In the world of physics, rules broke down beyond certain parameters; in extreme states—at extreme velocities or extreme heat or cold, in extremely massive or minute dimensions—matter behaved strangely, bizarrely.

  He had devoted his life to observing the invisible and constructing mathematical devices and inventing terms to describe the indescribable. The subjects of bis research could be neither touched nor measured, scarcely even imagined. And these things did not frighten him.

  But what he was beginning to feel for Sarah frightened him. He had always been the observer, and now he was the phenomenon itself.

  CHAPTER 18

  The last thing Sarah wanted that Saturday morning was a scene at the Cassoday Cafe. John Wilde had come in around eleven and taken a corner table. She brought him the menu and tried to keep her hand steady as she poured his coffee, tried to keep her voice just kind of quiet and neutral while they talked briefly about little Will, who had just come home from the hospital. She caught him watching her a few times, discreetly, nothing that drew attention, but she could feel the heat in his eyes and it made her go weak at the knees. Then Billy Moon came in with a couple of guys from his baseball team, and they took the table next to John. When she brought their order, Billy cracked a joke, hinting that Sarah had been over at his place the night before. The guys gave Billy a good ribbing, which embarrassed Sarah something awful since she knew John could hear every word of their conversation. Right after that the strangers walked in, and that's when the trouble started.

  She tried to let off a little steam to Joy, but it wasn't enough, thought it best not to tell Joy how the beefy guy had pressed his elbow into her crotch while she was taking their order, and how he had stacked the menus on the far side of the table so she had to lean in front of him to retrieve them. Then he had made a move as though to pass them to her, timing his gesture just right so he brushed her breast with the back of his hand. It was so casual, one could easily believe it inadvertent. But Sarah knew better; she suspected he had perfected it over the years on many a waitress.

  "They're sick!" She picked up an order of baked ham from the counter and stabbed the scalloped potatoes with a sprig of parsley. "And so crude! First all these vulgar jokes about women, now they're on to the Mexicans."

  "Buncha slugs," Joy muttered as she ladled gravy over an order of meat loaf and handed it to Sarah. "Good dose of pesticide. That's what they need."

  "They're so loud. Like they want everybody to hear. Millie got up and moved to another table. It really upset her."

  "Calm down, honey. They're not from around here. Probably won't ever see 'em again."

  "We'd better not."

  "Just ignore 'em. Don't get all worked up. Spit in their coffee if it'll make you feel any better—that's what I do—but don't say anything."

  She approached the table with plates balanced on both arms. They saw her coming and quit talking and sat back in their chairs. The big man tucked the edge of his napkin into his belt and laid his hands on the table and stared at his paper place mat like a dog waiting to be fed. At the sight of them something in Sarah snapped and she knew she was going to do something she'd probably regret.

  When she hesitated they thought she couldn't remember their order and so the big guy looked up at her with a lewd grin and said, "I got the ham, honey."

  "The ham," repeated Sarah, and he nodded. So she served the cheeseburger with extra fries and the meat loaf to the other two, then she smiled at him and set the ham plate down in front of him and said, "Gentlemen, this is on the house."

  They looked up at her like they'd heard wrong. The big man leaned back in his chair and grinned at the other two, and the little man with plaster-splatterd arms sneered and said, "Why? You got cockroaches back there?"

  "No," intoned Sarah, with her hands on her hips, "we've got roaches out here." She paused just a second before adding, "Three of them." Then she looked them all in the eye, rapidly, one after the other, and said very sweetly, "You gentlemen don't need to come back here. If you do, you won't be served. Now eat up, 'cause it's gettin' cold."

  She turned away then and the room was dead still.

  "You callin' us names, little bitch?"

  It was the big man talking, and as he spoke he lunged forward and grabbed Sarah's arm, squeezing it tight like a vise so that she gave a startled cry of pain. He yanked her back around like a whip, and she lost her balance. There was a sudden crack that might have been her arm, or might have been the sound of her head as it hit the table.

  Even before she fell, John was on his feet and knocking over chairs to clear a path toward the guy. Billy had his back to them and hadn't seen a thing. When he looked up from his scrambled eggs, John already had the beefy guy by the scruff of the neck and had slammed him facedown on the table. The plaster-splattered man had scrambled to his feet with a knife in his hand.

  Randy, the county's undersheriff, was just coming out of the men's room, double-checking his fly, when he heard a commotion—dishes breaking and bodies rustling—and saw John Wilde wrestling the big guy and Sarah crumpled on the floor. On reflex he popped the snap on his holster and in three strides was there with his gun drawn in their faces, and then things got real still again. The plaster-splattered man dropped the knife and it fell, breaking one of Joy's dishes. That was the only sound they heard—that and the sound of John Wilde's breathing as he held his face right down on the beefy guy's ear. Randy ordered everybody to stay right where they were. He asked Sarah if she was all right. She was struggling to her knees, one hand pressed to her forehead, as Billy Moon bent over her and helped her to her feet. Randy was more worried about what John Wilde might do because he had the beefy guy in an armlock and his shirt twisted so tight around his neck that his eyes were bulging something awful. Randy thought the big guy had "heart attack" written all over his face, and then wouldn't that put them in a fine fix.

  "It's okay...," Randy said in a low monotone, but he couldn't remember John Wilde's name. "It's okay. Just back off now."

  John moved slowly, but finally he calmed down a little and let up on his bulldog grip, and the beefy guy stumbled to his feet.

  Nobody got nasty, what with Randy's Smith & Wesson aimed steady at the big guy's back, and he was able to persuade them in but a few short words to kindly
take their business elsewhere. The strangers responded swiftly, although not without some crude parting words, and in a minute they were out the door and gone.

  Upon hearing Sarah's cry, Joy had burst out of the kitchen gripping a bottle of ketchup by the neck. Randy was holstering his weapon when he looked up and saw her standing there in her chef's apron smeared with raw meat loaf and the bottle poised in midair. He chuckled and said, "What the hell were you gonna do with that thing, Joy?"

  That just sort of knocked the tension right out of them and the dining room exploded in laughter; then everybody started talking at once.

  Billy lifted Sarah onto a chair, but she had a little blood on her forehead and scalloped potatoes all down the front of her apron. She looked up at Billy and Randy with tears in her eyes and mumbled how sorry she was, but she was still trembling.

  Then Sarah turned to look at John, and even through her blurred vision she could see the way he was looking at her. His eyes no longer seemed blue and pale and distant, but angry and dark and pounding like the sea.

  Billy dropped down into a squat beside her chair.

  "You okay, kid?"

  Tenderly, he cupped her chin in his hand and tilted it up so he could see her face.

  John saw that gesture. It was a strange feeling, on top of the blood pumping through his temples, the adrenaline still on the rise, to feel this sudden plummeting sensation in his chest, a kind of free fall of the heart.

  Joy was bending over Sarah. She swept the hair off Sarah's face and examined her forehead. There was a swelling already, a red knot just above her eyebrow.

  "Let's get some ice on that."

  "I'm okay," whispered Sarah.

  "You'd better stay down for a minute," said Billy.