Moonlight on Butternut Lake

by Mary McNear

  “No, I can’t,” Mila said honestly. And the difference wasn’t confined to Reid, either. She hadn’t thought she’d be able to sleep last night after the cabin’s alarm had gone off, but she’d been wrong. She’d slept more deeply than she had all summer. She’d felt so safe in Reid’s arms, so protected, and so . . . so cherished, she realized, with a little jolt of surprise. So completely and utterly cherished. What would it be like, she wondered, to feel that way every night of your life, and every day, too?

  “So what do you think?” she heard Lonnie ask her now from across the kitchen.

  “About what?” Mila said, embarrassed. She hadn’t heard a word of whatever Lonnie had been saying.

  “About Hank asking me out for dinner,” Lonnie said, frowning slightly as she came over to the table.

  “I think it’s wonderful,” Mila said honestly.

  “I think so too,” Lonnie said, sitting down across from Mila. “The thing is, though, I haven’t dated a man in twenty-five years. I’m not sure I remember how to.”

  “It’ll come back to you,” Mila said encouragingly.

  “Will it?”

  “Absolutely.”

  But Lonnie looked unsure. “Do you think,” she said, after a moment, “that instead of going out to a restaurant with Hank I could have him over to my house for dinner? I think I’d feel more relaxed.” She added, almost shyly, “And I think he’d like my chicken pot pie.”

  “Lonnie, he’ll love your chicken pot pie,” Mila said. “Just thinking about it makes my mouth water.”

  “Then there’s only one other thing I’m worried about.”

  “What’s that?”

  “I’m worried that if he comes over, he’ll want to sit in Sven’s—my late husband’s—armchair. It’s right in the middle of the living room. And my God, Sven loved that chair. If he was home, he was sitting in it. And now, when guests come over, they seem to gravitate toward it. Why, I don’t know. It’s nothing to look at. You know the kind. Brown leather, all cracked and worn. Sort of like an old shoe,” she said, with a chuckle. “But it is comfortable. I’ll grant it that. And I have a feeling that if Hank comes over, he’ll sit right down in it. And it’ll just feel . . . I don’t know, wrong somehow. Disrespectful to Sven’s memory.”

  “And you don’t want to give it away?” Mila asked gently, hoping she wasn’t overstepping her boundaries here.

  “Oh no, I couldn’t. Not yet, anyway.”

  “Could you . . . put it in another room? A bedroom, maybe?”

  Lonnie wavered, then shook her head. “No, that would feel wrong, too. Like I was banishing it or something.”

  Mila thought about it some more. “I know,” she said. “Keep the chair. And leave it exactly where it is. But before Hank comes over, put something on it—a pile of folded laundry, maybe—so he can’t sit down on it.”

  “That might work,” Lonnie said thoughtfully. “But what about the next time he comes over? If there is a next time, I mean.”

  “More laundry?” Mila suggested.

  “But I live alone,” Lonnie pointed out. “How much laundry can one person have?”

  Mila laughed. “It doesn’t matter. Just put something there until you’re ready to let another man sit in it.”

  “And if I’m never ready?”

  “Then you’ll put one of those velvet ropes across it. The way they do to the antique chairs in museums.”

  Now it was Lonnie’s turn to laugh. “Well, I better be getting back to work,” she said, getting up from the table. “Are you done with that?” She motioned to Mila’s breakfast plate, which had only a crust of French toast left on it.

  “I’m done,” Mila said, as Lonnie cleared it away. It was still hard for her, even after two months, to let Lonnie wait on her this way. But now she reached for the package on the table. “I guess I’ll take this in to Reid, then,” she said, with elaborate casualness. “Oh, and Lonnie? The house alarm malfunctioned again last night. Reid said he was going to call someone to come out today and fix the faulty sensor.”

  She carried the package to the study and tapped lightly on the closed door, her heart beating annoyingly fast. Not with fear, like last night, but with excitement. “Come in,” Reid called immediately, and Mila remembered the long sulky silences that used to greet her whenever she knocked on Reid’s bedroom door. Lonnie was right. What a difference a summer had made.

  “Hi,” she said, cracking open the door. “The UPS man delivered this.” She held up the package. “I thought you might need it.”

  “Oh, thanks,” Reid said, smiling and leaning back in the swivel chair. His left leg, in its brace, was stretched out in front of him, and his crutches were propped by the side of the desk. “I’ve been expecting that.”

  Mila came into the office, feeling suddenly shy. It happened every time she saw Reid now. No matter how much time she spent thinking about him when they weren’t together, she was completely unprepared for the reality of him when they were together. Objectively, of course, she knew he was good-looking. But knowing it was different from feeling it. And this morning she was struck, with a whole new force, by the sheer physicality of his presence.

  It was amazing to her, really, that someone who had been in such a devastating accident such a short time ago could radiate such good health now. He’d put back on the weight he’d lost after the accident, and it looked good on him. His new tan, which he’d gotten watching Mila’s swimming lessons, looked good on him too. He smiled at her, and his smile caught at her heart, and the feeling was sweet and bittersweet at the same time. Sweet because she knew that she loved him, and bittersweet because she knew that she shouldn’t.

  She came over to him then and handed him the package. “I don’t want to disturb you,” she said, starting to leave.

  “You’re not disturbing me.”

  “I did last night,” she said guiltily, turning around.

  “The alarm going off disturbed both of us.”

  “After the alarm went off, I mean. I’m sorry. I’m a grown-up. I should be able to sleep alone.” That wasn’t all she wanted to apologize to him for. But that list was long and complicated. Too complicated, probably, for this conversation.

  “Well, I should be sleeping alone too,” Reid said. “But that hasn’t stopped me from asking you to spend the night with me, has it?” He picked up the package and held it out to her. “This is for you, by the way,” he said.

  “For me?” she said. It was addressed to Reid.

  “Well, I ordered it for you. Go ahead, open it,” he said, reaching into his top desk drawer and handing her a letter opener. She used it to slice through the flap of the padded envelope, then reached inside and pulled out two new test prep books. “You ordered these for me?” she asked, looking up in surprise.

  “Uh-huh. I knew you’d been studying the same ones all summer. I thought you were probably ready for something new.”

  “I don’t have these two yet,” she said, excited by her new windfall. But then she caught herself. “Reid, you know you didn’t have to do this,” she said.

  “I wanted to.”

  “Well, I’ll pay you back,” she said.

  “Whatever,” he said.

  “No, I mean it.”

  “Okay, fine. But I’m going to owe you, too.”

  “For what?”

  “For providing me with a new source of entertainment.”

  She looked at him questioningly.

  “Starting tonight, I’m going to be administering your practice tests,” he said. “And scoring them, too.”

  “Why would you want to do that?”

  “Because it’ll be fun.”

  “It doesn’t sound fun.”

  “Well, maybe not for you. But only because you’ll be the one doing all the work.”

  She hesitated, touched by his offer, but he misread her hesitation. “Mila, look, it’s not a big deal,” he said. “Friends help each other out sometimes, that’s all.”

  Do
friends also sleep in the same bed together? she wanted to ask him. But she already knew the answer to that. They did not.

  Something about her expression made him smile at her, though, and she felt it again, that tightening around her heart. “What are you thinking, Mila?” he asked.

  “I’m thinking that it was incredibly thoughtful of you to order these books for me,” she said. But what she was really thinking was that if she spent the night in the same bed with him again, there was no way she was going to be satisfied with having him just hold her.

  Time,” Reid said, looking up from his watch later that evening.

  “Already?” Mila said in dismay, dropping her pencil onto her open test prep book.

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Can I have five more minutes?”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because you’re not going to get five more minutes when you take the real test.”

  “You’re right.” Mila sighed, rubbing her eyes.

  “Here, let me see that,” Reid said, reaching for her answer sheet across the card table they were sitting at in the study. He compared her answer sheet to the answer key in the book while Mila massaged her temples and wished they were spending this chilly evening playing a board game, or watching television, or doing almost anything other than what they were doing now. She’d liked doing the practice problems before tonight, but that was because she’d done them alone, without timing herself, and without thinking too much, either, about what taking the actual test would be like.

  “Not bad,” Reid said, looking up from the answer key. “You got nineteen out of twenty-one right. But that’s out of the problems you did. You never got to the last four problems.”

  “No kidding,” Mila said, feeling discouraged. “But I don’t think I’ll ever finish all the problems in the time allotted.”

  “Of course you will.”

  “Reid, it can’t be done.”

  “Of course it can,” Reid said.

  “How do you know that?”

  “Well, I don’t know it. But the people who design the tests know it. Besides, Mila, you’re accuracy is good. It’s excellent, in fact. You just have to do the problems faster.”

  “And how am I going to do that?”

  “By timing yourself every time you do one of those sections, and by learning to pace yourself so you never spend too much time on any one problem. And by not getting discouraged,” he added. “Take tonight, for instance. This was just your first try being timed. I’ll time you on a different section now, and then another one after that, and you can see if your scores get better. I think they will.”

  “Reid, you have got to be kidding about my doing another one of those now,” Mila protested.

  “I’m completely serious,” he said.

  “But my brain . . . my brain already feels like it’s about to explode.”

  “Well, it might feel that way,” he said, “but I think even without a nursing degree you know that’s not actually possible.” He reached for her test booklet and flipped through it until he found what he was looking for, then passed it back over to her.

  “Here, try this section,” he said. “You have twenty minutes to do it in.”

  “Can I have twenty-one?” she asked.

  “You know what?” he said, feigning seriousness. “Just for asking that, I’m going to give you nineteen.”

  She laughed. “And what are you going to be doing for those nineteen minutes?”

  “I’m going to be watching you do those problems.”

  “That sounds fascinating.”

  “You’d be amazed, actually, at how fascinating I’m finding it,” he said, and he smiled at her, a smile that made her think of everything else they could do in nineteen minutes.

  “Are you ready?” he said, tapping on his watch.

  She nodded and managed, finally, to stop staring at him long enough to glance down at the problems on the page in front of her.

  “All right, go!”

  CHAPTER 21

  Goddamned waste of time, Brandon thought, as he dropped some quarters in the vending machine slot and pushed the “coffee” button. This was the third time in the last ten days that he’d been at the bus station, showing Mila’s picture around to ticket agents, bus drivers, maintenance people, and even, as it turned out, the occasional homeless person and vagrant. And so far . . . nothing. Not a single hit. So either Mila had never been to this dump before, or all the morons who worked here, and all the losers who hung out here, had lousy memories. As he heard the plunk of the paper cup landing and the hiss of the coffee filling it up, he remembered what Ed Tuck had said about knowing when to quit.

  That smug bastard, he fumed. There was no way he was taking his advice. No way in hell. Because while the nine weeks that Mila had been gone might feel like a long time, it wasn’t long enough for her trail to be completely cold. It wasn’t enough time for her to completely disappear. There was still somebody out there, somewhere, who knew where she’d gone and how she’d gotten there. He reached down and picked up the cup of coffee and took a tentative sip. He grimaced. It was awful. He tossed it angrily in a nearby garbage can and then shoved the whole can over, littering the floor with empty soda cans and crumpled chip bags.

  “Whoa, what do you think you’re doing?” a cop said, materializing out of nowhere. “Pick that up now and put the garbage back in it.”

  So he took a deep breath and waited while his vision cleared. “Officer, I’m sorry,” he said. “I lost my temper. I’m having a bad day.”

  “Well, go have a bad day somewhere else,” the cop said.

  “Yes, sir,” Brandon said, trying to keep the panic out of his voice. He must have succeeded, because the cop didn’t say anything else. He just waited while Brandon picked up the garbage can and put whatever had spilled out of it back into it.

  The cop, satisfied, nodded toward the exit. “Now, get lost,” he growled. And Brandon, in a cold sweat, headed toward the exit. That was close, he told himself. He’d had a thing about cops since he’d gotten arrested a few years ago, before he’d met Mila. An ex-girlfriend of his had stupidly called the cops, and because it was a Friday night he’d spent the weekend in jail. He hadn’t known then he was claustrophobic. He knew it now. Just the thought of being in a jail cell again made his skin crawl.

  He pushed through the bus station door, but once outside, he took a quick look over at the bus bay and saw, almost immediately, a bus driver, a white-haired old guy, he’d never seen before. He was helping passengers unload their baggage. Brandon waited until he was done, glanced around to make sure the cop wasn’t around, and then walked over to him.

  “Excuse me, um, Bob,” he said, reading the man’s name tag, and smiling the smile he reserved for those occasions when he wanted something from someone. “Can I ask you a favor?”

  “You can ask,” the man said mildly. “But I’m going off duty soon.”

  “This’ll just take a minute,” Brandon said, keeping the smile fixed in place as he reached into his blue jeans back pocket and took out the photo of Mila. It was one he’d taken of her soon after they’d met. He’d surprised her that day with a picnic in the country, and in the picture she was sitting on a blanket, smiling into the camera. He couldn’t look at it now without feeling a wave of fury. Blind, hot fury. They’d been so happy together. Both of them. But her especially. All you needed to do was look at her to see how happy she’d been then. So why had she gone and wrecked everything by leaving him?

  But as he held the photograph up for the driver to see now, he was careful not to look at it himself. He needed to stay focused on the task at hand. “Have you seen this woman before?” he asked. “She might have taken a bus from this station several weeks ago. Probably around the first week of June.”

  Bob considered the picture. “May I?” he asked, reaching for it.

  “Of course,” Brandon said, letting him take it. Inwardly, he seethed, He hated old people. They w
ere so slow. This guy, for instance, was acting as if he had all the time in the world. Whereas Brandon needed to get back to work. Either that, or get fired for taking too much time off.

  “Why are you trying to find her?” Bob asked now, glancing up from the picture. “I mean, if you don’t mind my asking.”

  “I don’t mind,” Brandon lied. You nosy bastard. “I’m looking for her because she’s sick. She’s very sick.”

  “She looks okay to me,” Bob said.

  “Mentally, I mean. Mentally, she’s very sick,” Brandon said quickly. “She’s had some kind of a psychotic break. She could be a danger to others, and she’s definitely a danger to herself. We need to bring her back home so she can get the treatment she needs.” He tried out his concerned expression on Bob.

  “I see,” Bob said. “And you are?”

  “Me? I’m her brother.”

  Bob took one last look at the picture and shook his head. “I’ve never seen her before. And if I had seen her, I’d remember her. I have an excellent memory for faces.”

  “Well, aren’t you lucky, Bob,” Brandon muttered, not bothering to be polite anymore. And as he stuck the photo back into his pocket he thought about how good it would feel right now to punch Bob. A hard, clean punch, right to the jaw. Or no, on second thought, a one-two punch, right into that doughy stomach of his. But he remembered the cop and turned away from Bob.

  He’d had enough of the bus station for one day, he decided. In the meantime, he’d go back to the apartment tonight and ransack the place again. There must be something, however small, that he’d missed the first two times he’d done it.

  “It ain’t over till it’s over, Mila,” he muttered, heading back down the block. “And it ain’t over yet. Not by a long shot.”

  CHAPTER 22

  And the dreams? What about the dreams? Are they becoming less frequent?” Dr. Immerman asked, leaning back in his swivel chair.

  “The dreams . . . the dreams are definitely getting better,” Reid said, after a moment’s hesitation. He hadn’t really been listening to what Dr. Immerman was saying. He’d been thinking about Mila, who was sitting in the waiting room, on the other side of the office door. But now, with a conscious effort, he turned his mind back to the therapy session. “It’s been at least a couple of days since I had one of the dream,” he said. “And it was different from the others.”