LILAH
by
Marjorie DeLuca
Text Copyright©2015 Marjorie DeLuca
All Rights Reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher or author, except in the case of a reviewer, who may quote brief passages embodied in critical articles or in a review. This is a work of fiction. Any similarity to persons living or dead is coincidental and not intended by the author.
Other books by Marjorie DeLuca:
THE PITMAN’S DAUGHTER
CHASING A THRILL
For Young Adults:
THE FOREVER ONES
THE PARASITES
The dead cannot cry out for justice; it is a duty of the living to do so for them.
Lois McMaster Bujold
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
FIVE YEARS LATER
1
The night Lilah came to Silver Narrows, Minnesota, the wind changed direction, and so did Nick’s life.
He was sipping his last Americano of the day at The Beanery on Main Street, when the night seemed to click into a different gear. The tiny hairs on the back of his neck prickled as the moon moved out from the clouds and shed its pearly light on a lean, black Mercedes that edged past the window, purring to a standstill outside the vacant storefront where Friendly Toad Toys used to be.
Suddenly the striped awnings along Main Street began to flap like wet sheets on a clothes line, and clouds the color of wet plaster rolled in from the north, bringing swirling clouds of fresh snow.
“Sweeeet,” said Danny, the owner, whistling through the gap in his teeth. “Don’t see many fancy European models like that round here.”
Farmers’ pickup trucks, old-man Buicks and the odd jacked-up muscle car were the usual traffic in these parts.
Nick stared from his window seat as the car door opened and a woman stepped out, picking her way around the puddles and slush mounds. Slim and tall in a white parka with a fur-trimmed hood and a white scarf pulled up to her chin, her face was obscured by a thick flurry of snowflakes. She bent her head against the wind and ran up to the front door of the empty store, where she fumbled with the lock - probably frozen solid from the nasty mix of freezing rain and wet snow that winter had dumped on them.
“Why’d a gorgeous chick with a sweet ride wanna start up something in a no-name dump like this?” said Danny, adjusting his grizzled pony tail.
“You’re here,” Nick said. “What does that say about you?”
“And you also, wise ass,” Danny said, his face so close to the window a circle of steam formed where his open mouth pressed at the glass.
Danny wiped the condensation from the window. “She’s gonna be two doors down from your office, so you’ll have to drop in with some welcome cookies.”
“Got no time to bake,” Nick said. “Think she might like Twinkies?”
She was still fighting with the door lock.
“Go give her a hand, you bum,” Danny said. “I’d go only I can’t leave the till. Big money in here.”
He fumbled in his drawer and handed Nick some lock de-icer.
Nick hesitated. But he was intrigued. And it took a lot to get his attention. He’d been the fidgety kid at school. An hour of sitting still in a classroom was equivalent to having a pack of nails driven through his eyeballs. A steady diet of Ritalin had gotten him through high school but things didn’t get better in adulthood. Now he was the guy always looking for the next new thing – the elusive golden something just outside his grasp.
“Okay, here goes,” Nick said, struggling into his parka and grabbing the de-icer.
“Not too eager,” Danny said, giving Nick a sly wink, “and avoid cheesy grins.”
“Like you’re the expert,” said Nick pushing open the door. A squall of fat snowflakes blew at him like a cloud of wedding confetti. He shivered and pushed through it.
Main Street was quiet for a Wednesday night. Shop windows blank and black, though some were already trimmed with bright Christmas lights that winked pink and blue reflections on the wet pavement. Snow swirled in a white cloud around his face, so he pulled up his hood and made a dash across to the idling car. A white cloud of exhaust billowed around the storefront. And that’s how he first saw her. Through a frozen whitish mist.
“I think you might need this,” he said, coming up behind her and trying not to sound too creepy.
She turned around and all the clichéd poetic phrases he’d ever trashed from of all the poems he’d ever written, came flooding back into his head, illuminated in warm, rosy light. He’d never seen anyone like her. He could usually place someone’s ethnicity in a matter of seconds. Not hers. Cool greeny blue eyes, like frozen lake water. Strong arched brows, slim, straight nose, full lips, goldish complexion. She was exotic and catlike with the face of an ancient Egyptian goddess .
“Need what?” she said. She had a husky voice. Maybe it was the cold, maybe it wasn’t. He was staring like an idiot at her.
“Oh- yeah – this,” he said, sticking out his hand with the de-icer in it.
“Wanna do the honors?” She didn’t sound like she came from anywhere around Silver Narrows. Maybe she was Canadian. The border was less than a hundred miles north, but it was a pretty treacherous drive this time of year what with blowing snow and black ice patches.
“How’s the road?” Nick said, trying to sound like his heart wasn’t actually choking his airways. His hand trembled a little as he sprayed the inside of the lock and the outside of the key.
“Not bad – a few patches of black ice. Just missed the storm I guess.” She had a clear voice with a bit of a lilt to it – the kind you’d never get tired of listening to. His mind was teeming with a stack of questions for her, but he bit his tongue and shelved them for later. It was enough to stand inside the cone of bluish white light and share the dreamlike moment with this beautiful, mysterious stranger. A veil of snow wrapped itself around them and he felt like he’d become a character from those Scandinavian thrillers he devoured every week.
The lock clicked over, breaking the spell. “Voila,” he said as the door swung open into a dark, shuttered room.
“You speak French?” she asked, tilting her head.
“A little. Why?” His mouth was dry and his tongue felt too large.
“Just wondered,” she said, stepping inside and turning to him. “Thanks for the help.”
That seemed like his cue to leave. He backed up, almost tripping on the step. His heart beating a wild tattoo. Then she smiled. Not a fake, polite, thank you and get lost type grin. She lit up. Shining eyes, curved lips, and those even white teeth. Radiant and glowing were two words that came close to capturing that smile.
“N- Nick Hendricks,” he stuttered, sticking out his hand, thankful he’d actually remembered to introduce himself.
“Pleased to meet you Nick,” she answered, the
tips of her fingers grazing his. She said his name as if it was no surprise to her - like she was already comfortable throwing it around. The familiarity jarred him a little. He blinked as if she might disappear when he opened his eyes again.
“I’m Lilah.”
“Lilah,” he repeated, still holding her fingers like a dumb kid. She laughed and he dropped his hand to wipe away the stream of water dribbling from his snow-caked hair down his cheeks and into his mouth. He used his sleeve to wipe away the drips.
“Good to meet you, Nick,” she said, standing in the doorway, her eyes gleaming in the darkness.
He gave a lame wave, turned, then took off down the street towards his car. He forgot about Danny’s lock de-icer, clutched tightly in his hand, forgot about the snow pelting wet flakes into his face, forgot about the long, lonely night ahead of him. Here you go again, Nicky, he told himself. But he couldn’t shake the feeling that this moment – this meeting – would be a time post in his life. All other moments would be measured against this one, and they’d always come up short.
2
Nick had been in the habit of setting the alarm on his cell phone, then shutting it off three, four, even five times before he dragged himself out of bed, but the morning after Lilah arrived, he was up and showering way before the damn thing went off. It wasn’t like he had to be in his office by a certain time. He ran the Silver Narrows Sentinel, a one-man operation that served the town and all surrounding areas within a fifty mile radius.
After graduation, he’d scraped up enough money working construction in the North Dakota oil patch to get to journalism school in Minneapolis. He followed up with a stint as a junior reporter in the local news section of the Minneapolis Star Tribune, and quit after four mind-numbing years writing about grain trading and hog prices, to take charge of his own operation in Silver Narrows. He’d done the interview in the summer when Silver Narrows expanded into a cool, bustling little tourist mecca with a youthful vibe. Groups of buff guys and cute, bronzed girls screeched back and forth across the lake - wakeboarding, tubing and waterskiing during the hot summer days, then partied till the early hours by blazing campfires under a glowing moon. Add in a little bit of local reporting, some small concert reviews and a whole lot of advertising and he was sure he’d found the perfect job.
He settled into an easy life, reporting on local fishing derbies, fish fries, golf tournaments and the like during the day, then drank, toked and screwed like a madman on hot summer nights when fireflies flickered like tiny candle flames around him and endless skies dripped with stars. Until winter hit, the crowds disappeared and he was forced into a kind of semi-hibernation with the occasional local girl to keep him warm in the bone-chilling cold.
And that’s as far as it went. Where women were concerned he was no better than his old high-school self. Fidgety, restless, with the attention span of a gnat. Incapable of settling into something deep, meaningful or intimate. Trouble was, he couldn’t stand to hurt anyone – girls in particular. Consequently his relationships were like sparklers. Blinding flare and lots of sparks at the start, brief warm glow, then the whole thing fizzled out into a burnt out mess. Afterwards he usually stuck around like a dumb, but solid piece of furniture, until the girls were sickened by his apathy and bland niceness. So at thirty-four he was a hopeless single guy with an untapped imagination, a decent job and a string of distant female acquaintances. The only positive was that life in a small town had calmed him down a bit. Fewer distractions meant he could actually focus better on his work.
Once he’d made it through one winter, the next six became easier. Soon he could just pull up the same files each year, then cut and paste the names and dates. It was like coasting through life on cruise control, but the old restlessness still lay beneath his laid back veneer. Some deep longing that nagged at him to get off his ass, get out there and really search for some sort of meaning to his life.
He held it at bay with poetry - his secret passion - a faint beacon flickering across a wild sea. Nick loved to read it, listen to it and scratch out pages of rambling, earnest, alcohol-fuelled imagery. He was one of those guys who kept a journal full of angst-filled verses clutched tightly to his chest. The secretly sentimental guy who might just open up on some drowsy wine-soaked August night and, his heart turning somersaults, read to a peach-faced girl in the moonlight. He’d even self-published a slim chapbook with the corny title of Exit to Dreamland. He’d clutched it in sweaty, shaking hands as he offered it to Violet Olsen who put a few on the shelves at The Book Cove. All told, he made $12.95 in royalties. After that debut, he kept the stuff to himself. Didn’t like the looks he was getting from the few people who’d leafed through it in the bookstore and were probably thinking so this is the cheesy garbage inside that guy’s head.
Over a period of four short months, it crept to the back of the shelf, behind all the Fabio-six pack romance covers, the creepy S and M sagas and the teen werewolf trilogies. Then one day he slipped into the store, lifted all the copies out and took them away. Violet didn’t notice. The security alarm didn’t even ring. He gave a few to the girlfriends he thought might share his abstract meanderings. Most didn’t.
But the morning after Lilah’s arrival, he took extra care getting ready. Usually he rolled out of bed, spit on his hand and ran his fingers through the thick mat of his hair. Next he’d pick up whatever was lying closest on the floor, sniff it, spray it and wear it if it didn’t smell too funky. But today was different. He actually found a tube of styling goop that hadn’t crusted over and ran it through the hank of hair that always seemed to fall across his eyes. Nick was proud of his thick, dark hair. His Dad had died suddenly in a work accident when Nick was only eight, but at forty two he had a full head of browny-black hair. Nick inherited his lazy blue eyes too. Something to remember him by and silently thank him for, every time he looked in the mirror.
He shaved carefully, making sure to leave just enough of a shadow on his chin to add the right level of ruggedness to his face, then he rifled through the jumble of his closet to find some respectable jeans and a sweater. Finally he selected a black cable knit his Mom had sent from Phoenix. She’d remarried soon after becoming a widow. Rolf, some long-time commodity trader had stepped in with a wad of money and a cast iron retirement account and swept her off to the land of endless summer.
After a quick slice of toast and a slug of orange juice, he stepped out into the damp Monday cold and scraped the wet blanket of new snow off the car. Fashion was a tough call during a Silver Narrows winter. You froze the tips of your ears or crushed your styled hair with a wooly hat, then those Arctic parkas inflated you to the size of a giant Yeti.
The one constant love in Nick’s life was his house, a thousand square foot, brick one and a half story on the outskirts of town. Built in the 1930’s, it backed onto a massive grove of fir trees, had two dormer windows up top, and a front door with a real porch made of carved wood lintels and columns. In the winter he lived in a Christmas card - one of those scenes with the snow covered evergreens and the little house with the wood smoke curling out from the chimney. In the summer he’d sit in an old rocker on the porch with the beer chilling in the cooler, the sprinkler whooshing out a cool spray onto the lawn and pile of bargain hardbacks stacked up beside him. Heaven. He climbed into the car and said a silent goodbye to the house. Life wasn’t so bad in Silver Narrows. Especially now Lilah had arrived.
The ploughs hadn’t been out on Main Street and his washer fluid was on empty, so it was a messy drive. By the time he pulled up outside his office, two muddy arches obscured his windshield, forcing him to jump out and scrub it with a handful of snow so it wouldn’t dry into a brown crust. Then it was coffee time. An absolute necessity to get his day going in the right direction.
The Beanery was Silver Narrows’ only real coffee joint. Jake Hardy’s gas station, at the end of the block, served up sour, brown slurry. Only palatable if you were too drunk to taste it or too high to care.
As usual
Danny had Nick’s morning coffee and a flaxseed nut bar waiting on the counter. He made all his own health food and was in pretty good shape considering he was on the wrong side of sixty. Danny was the town’s resident hippie. The last of a horde of scrawny, disaffected city kids from Minneapolis who streamed into Silver Narrows in the late sixties for the Lake Land Love In Rock Festival and a taste of small town summer living. Heady reefer nights on warm lakeside beaches and the mingled sounds of congas, tambourines and steel guitars had lured him there. But one sniff of cold October air and the tents were pulled up, pickup trucks loaded and the convoy moved out. Summer dreams died with the first frost. But not Danny’s. He fell in love with the place and came back in the late eighties when he’d tired of big city life.
Nick never tired of that story. He’d listen, enjoying the dull ache of nostalgia, conscious that he may have been born in the wrong generation. The rebel child of a generic, plastic pop era. Born in 1980 and fed on a tasteless diet of New Kids on the Block, Kool and the Gang and Tiffany.
Danny always bugged Nick about his lousy eating habits.
“So, did you meet the lovely lady?” he asked, pushing the cup and plate towards Nick.
Nick took a good slug of coffee and felt his brain clicking into wakeup mode. “I did,” he said. Couldn’t beat Danny’s brew.
“So,” said Danny. “Fill me in.”
“She’s indescribable,” Nick said, gazing over the street at the magical doorway where he’d stood, awestruck at the warmth of her smile. “Words fail me.”
“You got bitten already?” he said.
“Nah,” Nick shrugged, returning to reality. “We’ll see.”
“You’ll see? Well all I can see is you got it bad and you just met her.”
“It’s early days yet,” Nick said, anxious to get the day going so he could catch a glimpse of her. “But I’ve got a good feeling about this one. She’s different.”
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