by Susanne Beck
Figuratively, of course.
And in that nanosecond of eternity between the words "oh" and "shit" when I realized just what I had done and who I had done it to, my anger was gone, replaced with a recrimination so deep, I could have drowned in it, if it would have let me.
If Ice had decided to return the favor, I most likely wouldn’t be writing this today.
Instead, with a patience rarely shown to anyone but me, she offered a strong shoulder and a listening ear, if I would just reach out and take them.
And I repaid her kindness with words that shame me to this day, proving that my anger hadn’t left entirely, coward that it was. Only waited for another chance to ambush her in a fit of jealousy so green the world seemed bathed in it, a bloody wound for which there is no salvation.
Her face set in stony lines, she turned away from me, dropping the money she’d hoped to spend on a nice evening for both of us at my feet, then walked away without saying another word.
And so it was that I found myself sitting alone on a couch in Ruby’s house, staring at words in a book I had no desire to read, listening to soft orchestral music from the kitchen that I had no desire to hear, and watching a clock giving up minutes as sparingly as a miser extends loans.
So deep within the well of my thoughts was I that I didn’t hear the knocking on the door, and nearly jumped from my perch on the couch when Ruby’s graying head poked itself from the door to the kitchen, a slight smile creasing her lips. "There’s someone here to see you, Tyler."
I was half-way across the room, my apology ready to birth itself from my throat before I was stopped by the vision, not of Ice, but of a young woman walking into the room, a clutch of books clasped awkwardly to her chest.
Stopping in my tracks, I gaped at her, my mind changing gears with the swiftness of a semi lumbering uphill. From somewhere unknown, my manners managed to reassert themselves, and a smile which was most likely totally false bloomed on my face. " ...hello ..."
The young woman returned my smile, though hers was notably more genuine. "Hello, Ms. Moore," she said with a shyness known only to pretty young woman of her age.
"Do I ...know you from somewhere?" Oh yes, the old eighteen wheeler was still chugging uphill alright. In first gear.
The girl blushed. "Um, yes, Ma’am. We met in the café a few months ago. I’m afraid I wasn’t very polite to you."
Then it clicked. The young woman looking at me through half-lowered eyelids was the same waitress I’d taken for twice her age when we first came into town. Amazing how slathering makeup on with a trowel ages a person, my still-laboring mind supplied cheerily. Someone should tell her that this look’s much better than the ‘rode hard, put away wet’ one she seems to favor.
Silence made its presence felt in the suddenly-too-hot room.
Oh. She’s waiting for some kind of response. "Um ...nice to see you again." Ok, that didn’t come out very well. Shall we try again? "Is ...there something I can help you with?"
The woman blushed again. "I ...um ...heard you were a teacher?"
From who? Then I remembered telling Ruby a severely edited tale of the teaching I’d done prior to making the move up to Canada. She didn’t need to know that my students were hardened criminals, after all. Our gracious, if nosy, host probably passed that information on during one of her weekly gossip exchange sessions that masqueraded as bridge tournaments. "I’ve done some teaching," I allowed, curious as to where this particular conversation was going, since I didn’t have the faintest clue.
The girl’s face lit up. "Cool!"
The silence stretched out once again.
"Was there something you needed?" I asked, finally, imagining I could feel moss start to grow on the north side of my body.
"Oh! Yeah. Um ...I need some help. I ...kinda ...dropped out of school last year. I got bored with it, I guess." She shrugged. "Wasn’t learning that much anyway. Figured I’d be better off taking the waitress job full time and having some money in my pocket."
I nodded. "And now you think you made a mistake."
She snorted. "A big one. I don’t wanna be a waitress all my life, but without a diploma, no one will look twice at me, so I’m kinda stuck."
"Why don’t you just go back to school, then?"
"It’s not that easy. See, I raised kind of a big stink about leaving. I’d be to embarrassed to go back now."
I nodded again, then waited for her to state whatever case she was interested in bringing to the bar.
She took in a deep breath, then let it out slowly. "So ...when I heard that you were a teacher, I wondered if maybe you could help me out. See, there’s a way I can get my diploma without having to go back to school. There’s a test I can take, and if I pass it, I get my diploma. And I really only need help with two classes. English and World History." She showed me the text-books she still held close to her body. "I borrowed these from my brother. He was smart and stayed in school." She took in another breath. "So, if you’re interested or anything, I was hoping you might be able to help me out. You know, like tutor me? I’d pay for your help. My parents even offered to put up some money," she hastened to add, her face as earnest as her plea to me. "I’ll come every day after work, if you want. Stay as long as you need me to. Anything."
I thought about it for a long moment, staring into her eyes and watching as she fought hard not to fidget beneath the weight of my gaze. I realized that the answers to some of my problems was standing before me and refused to look a gift equine in the cuspids. "Sure. Why not? We can start tomorrow, if you want." Another thought struck me. "Ruby?"
The graying head popped out, too quickly, from the kitchen beyond. "My house is yours, Tyler. You know that. You’re welcome to use the study."
I resisted shooting my most menacing glare at my snooping hostess. Instead, I tried my most gracious smile on for size. It was almost a perfect fit. "Thanks!" I turned back to the girl. "Looks like we have a deal then ...um ...I don’t know your name."
"Oh! I’m sorry. It’s Kelly." She stuck out her hand, and promptly dropped her books.
We knocked heads reaching down to pick them up.
Then burst out laughing.
If only making things up to Ice could be so simple.
After Kelly had left, thanking me profusely and apologizing yet again about the rapidly swelling knot on my head, I poked my head into the kitchen and smiled down at Ruby who was studiously working on a crossword puzzle and drinking coffee. "Thanks."
She looked up, her eyes magnified behind the reading glasses she wore for close work. "For letting you use the study? You’re welcome, but you really didn’t need to ask."
"Well, for that too. But really, thanks for spreading the word that I was a teacher. I was worried about not having a job, and you helped me get one."
"Wish I could take the credit for that one, Tyler, but I really haven’t told anybody anything about you or Morgan. It’s up to you to share whatever you want with them. It’s none of their business, otherwise."
"But if you didn’t ... ."
But even as I asked, I knew. Knew it with every fiber of my being. Knew there was only one person who would go to such lengths to assure my happiness.
Ice.
* * *
If my lover ever made it home that fateful evening, I don’t know. We’ve never spoken of it, even to this day when so much water has gone over, under and around the bridge that spans our life together.
All I know for sure is that she hadn’t returned when at last my eyes rebelled against my edict to stay open or else, leading me down into a fitful sleep filled with night terrors. If she came to my bed to soothe my dreams, I never woke to feel it, and when I awoke the next morning, she was gone from the house as if she’d never been. Even Ruby didn’t know; or if she did, she wasn’t talking.
The only thing that stilled my fears, if only by the tiniest of measures, was that her room was exactly as she’d left it, all her possessions stored away with the almost military pr
ecision so characteristic of her. How I resisted the almost overwhelming impulse to bury my face in the lone T-shirt that lay at the bottom of her hamper, I’ll never know, but with a firm resolution I thought near lost, I turned from the room, determined to track her down and settle the lingering business between us.
* * *
I should have known that trying to hunt down a woman who was, in her former life, a Mafia assassin was a fruitless task at best, but with a stubbornness that would have done my father proud, I searched almost every square inch of the town in the hopes of finding my deliberately missing lover.
And came back empty-handed and heavy-hearted to the place where it all started; the half-built cabin by the lake.
She sat near the cornerstone, her back pressed flat against the foundation, one leg cocked, the other resting flat against the ground. A pine needle twirled and whirled between long fingers as she looked down over the path which led to a lake which was whipping up whitecaps in response to the wind’s intermittent gusts.
Thunderheads stacked, a child’s block castle, one atop the other far across the water, but I sensed that the tempest brewing beneath the gathering clouds could well give the encroaching storm quite a run for its money.
I stared at her for long moments, running opening gambits through my mind as I tried to ignore the fact that she was ignoring my presence. The coward in me wanted to run and hide, but the woman my lover had helped develop stood her ground, wanting nothing more than to breach the walls my own words had erected around her heart.
An apology, no matter how heartfelt and brimming with tearful promises, seemed much too shallow a thing to give.
Finally, the wind whipping the forest around us into a frenzy, I stepped forward, breaking the palpable distance between us. "Thanks," I said simply, too soft to be heard over the wind’s howling cry, yet knowing she would hear it anyway.
She turned to me then, and the look in her eyes, one of absolute resignation, tore at my heart more than any angry recrimination ever could. "For what?"
Swallowing against the feelings her expression was engendering in me, I took a step closer, then stopped once again. "For sending Kelly my way. That was an incredibly wonderful thing to do, especially for someone who treated you the way I did."
Lifting her shoulder in a half-hearted shrug, she nimbly leapt to her feet and pushed off of the foundation. "Glad it helped."
She closed the distance between us and moved to brush by me. In a sudden fit of what I can only describe as insanity, I reached out and grabbed her forearm to keep her from passing. She stopped, then turned, then looked down at my hand on her arm. Then looked into my eyes, her own flashing a message that even the most slow-witted among us could easily divine.
Snatching my hand quickly away, I opened my mouth to say something, anything, when the strangest sensation came over me. The wind, which up until then had been changing directions as if trying to make up its mind which way it wanted to blow, stopped suddenly. Every hair on my body then lifted and a curious, and not very pleasant, tingle erupted along my nerve endings.
The next thing I knew, I was being borne to the ground, covered by a living blanket of protection as something fast and bright and loud and stinking of burned wiring exploded all around me, deafening me to anything else.
Then something, I didn’t know what, collapsed down on top of us, driving the breath from my lungs, and when my head impacted with the cement foundation behind me, everything went black and silent once again.
When I awoke, it was to the sound of a heavy rain rattling off of the plastic tarp which covered the partially finished roof of the cabin.
At least, that’s where I thought I was. With a head that felt like day six of a five day bender, and a chest that wondered if it had been used as a Chicago Bears tackling dummy some time in the recent past, I could have been trapped within a plastic bag and not known the difference. Or cared much, really.
After a moment, it occurred to me that opening my eyes might be a good idea, and so I did. Then closed them quickly when four of everything stared back at me through a blurry mist.
Something brushed against my head and I jumped, then immediately regretted it as the world around me spun threateningly out of control for a long moment. My stomach instantly rebelled, but thankfully, there wasn’t anything in it, and so after a moment, it grudgingly settled back down.
When I was quite sure that everything that was in my body was going to stay there—and for a moment there, it looked like my brains were lobbying hard for an exit through my ears—I chanced opening my eyes again. When the blurriness cleared, I saw Ice looking down at me, concern etched clearly in every line of her face. I smiled weakly. "Hey."
"You alright?" she asked, the look in her eyes belying the gruffness of her voice.
"As soon as you give me the license plate number of the truck that hit me, yeah." When she didn’t rise to the bait-- and poor as it was, I didn’t blame her--I sighed, shifting a little. "I’m fine. Really."
The touch to my head came again, and this time I recognized it for what it was, Ice’s hand stroking through my hair. I then realized that the hard surface my head was pillowed upon was, in fact, her thigh. I resisted the urge to snuggle, not knowing how things were between us, even given the relative intimacy of my current position. "What happened?"
"Lightning strike. It hit the big pine next to the house and one of the limbs came down on us." She shifted a little, and I caught a carefully controlled, and almost hidden, look of pain cross her face for the briefest of moments.
"You’re hurt."
"I’m fine."
"But ... ." I struggled to sit up, a truly hopeless task as her free hand rested itself on my chest, anchoring my body to the floor.
"I’m. Fine."
If the tone of her voice hadn’t gotten through, the look in her eyes certainly finished the job, and so I obediently settled back down on her thigh. After a moment, her hand began to stroke my hair again, softly, doing more for my pounding headache than an entire mountain of painkillers. Chancing things, I reached up and covered the large hand which rested on my chest, giving it the briefest of squeezes. "Thank you for saving my life. Again."
That got the reaction I was looking for, a small, wry smile that even reached the blue of her eyes. "Comes with the job."
I could feel my eyebrows raise behind the fringe of my hair. "Job?"
Her smile deepened minutely. "Someone’s gotta look after you. Might as well be me."
I returned her smile with a rueful one of my own. "Hard job, sometimes. The working conditions aren’t always the best. And the salary sucks." I swallowed hard against the tears closing my throat as the conversation suddenly took on a deeper meaning.
Her hand left my hair, and I felt her knuckles as they gently grazed against the skin of my cheek. "Maybe. But the experience it’s given me is something I wouldn’t trade for all the money in the world."
The tears came then, rolling hot and heavy down my cheeks and dampening the hand which continued to gently stroke my skin. "I’m so sorry, Morgan. I ...I don’t know what came over me yesterday. I didn’t mean those words I said. Not one of them. God ...I’m ...I’m sorry." When had words suddenly become so inadequate? How could they cut to the bone one minute, and become anemic the next?
Giving in to my misery, I shifted to my side, curling up in a fetal ball and pressing my heated face up against her lower abdomen, sobbing my heart out like a small child.
She said nothing, just continued to stroke my hair, letting me get out everything trapped inside, her very presence telling me more about her love for me than any words spoken ever could.
Finally emptied of the poison inside, I rolled back onto my back and looked up at her through tear-swollen eyes. "Can you ever forgive me?"
Reaching down, she brushed her finger tenderly against my lips. "Yes," she whispered.
The relief that ran through me was nothing short of dizzying. "Thank you."
She s
miled at me, then gathered me close, and we waited out the storm in comfortable silence.
* * *
Summer was rapidly drawing to a close, and with it, our time under Ruby’s generous, if sometimes intrusive, hospitality. The cabin was almost complete, needing only a few finishing touches to make it into the home I had dreamed of for so long.
On a certain summer’s morning, I made my way into town on an errand for Ice, to retrieve a particular tool she had left back at Pop’s garage. Walking down the main street, my curiosity was caught, as it often was, by the open door of The Silver Pine. Ruby had filled my head with stories of the new owner’s many eccentricities, and so I decided that a quick detour to assuage my curiosity would be just the ticket for my somewhat mischievous mood.
Arriving at the front door, I was just about to poke my head in for a quick look around when a large chartreuse mountain collided with me, sending me back into the courtyard, my arms flailing to keep my balance.
"Are you alright, dear?" the mountain asked in a thick Bronx accent. "I wasn’t expecting any visitors this time of the day. Do I know you from somewhere? You seem terribly familiar to me. The Hamptons, perhaps?"
Completely taken aback, I could only stare dumbly at the woman as she peppered me with her rapid-fire inquisition. Not even in prison had I ever seen a woman quite so large. She easily topped even Ice’s six foot-plus frame and was perhaps three or four times as wide. All done up, from head to toe, in blinding pink made her a true sight to behold, and behold it I did, my jaw slack with amazement.
Her body was literally dripping with jewels—faux or real I couldn’t tell—and gaudy ones at that. Rings adorned every finger and hideous broaches attached themselves, like leeches, to her massive chest. A heavy cloud of perfume wafted from her, trapping me in its none-too-fragrant net. I rubbed my nose against the urge to sneeze.
Underneath one massive arm peeped the head of a tiny dog of indeterminate ancestry, though I guessed, by its white fluffiness, that poodle was buried somewhere deep within the mix. Just how deep, I couldn’t tell. Its brown beady eyes bulged at me and I was treated to the sight of needle-sharp teeth and a curled tongue, leading me to believe, in my fuzzy-headed way, that perhaps a rat was also among this creature’s less-than-noble forbearers.
