by Ann Mauren
Chapter 34
A few moments passed as the wind blew and the birds sang. It was beautiful and tranquil and totally at odds with my state of mind. I’d spent the night thinking about what I needed to do today. I decided to get it over with. This was as private a venue as we were ever likely to encounter and I was certain that being alone for this was critical.
“Gray, if I ask you about something, will you promise to tell me the truth, no matter what?” My voice shook as I tried to muster up the courage I needed.
I turned to look at him for the first time since joining him on this perch.
He smiled like something was funny, but then I could see another thought play across his eyes and he turned more pensive.
“Only if you promise not to be mad at me for whatever you make me tell you,” he responded strategically.
That was a fair request, and not one I had anticipated having to agree to.
“Okay.”
I paused to get my next words in order.
“Tell me what happened between us the night of the fireworks, in Reykjavik. I know something happened, but I have no memory of it.”
He looked stunned and totally guilty. It was just as I’d feared. It was bad and I was right to have waited until I was certain we were alone to get the story.
“If you have no memory of it, how did you know to ask about it?” he countered, once he had gathered his thoughts to make a defense.
“You know that phone you let me borrow, that I never gave back?” I asked.
He nodded but there was no comprehension in his eyes.
“Well, I just recently checked the messages, and there was one from you…”
That still didn’t register with him. But that would make sense because he’d sounded a little out of it to me. He probably had no recollection of leaving that sentimental message at two in the morning, not long after Grandpa’s funeral.
“You asked me if that night in Reykjavik with the fireworks meant as much to me as it did to you. I was wondering what happened, and why you’d ask that question.”
I spoke in a hushed tone. I could barely get the words out.
He looked stunned again. He was tense as he stared at me, clearly trying to manage the inner conflict about being truthful and upsetting me or lying to me and upsetting me.
“Just tell me the truth. Please?”
I tried to be soothing instead of accusatory. After a long pause when I thought he just wasn’t going to answer me, he finally began.
“So that was your first day in Reykjavik. And you’d spent the afternoon with Dana, as I recall.”
Though his eyes were turned out over the meadow, his mind was much farther north and east.
My luggage had been lost on the final leg of our journey. Dana was the only other girl in our group, though she was at least five years older than me, which made her a grown-up, in my estimation. Dan Gregory had given her a credit card and instructions to take me into town and buy me the things I would need until my luggage appeared. As it turned out shopping was her favorite thing in the world, and shopping with a bottomless credit card was the coup d’état (revolutionary seizure of power).
I met Gray for the first time at dinner that night, after having undergone an extreme makeover where Dana had purchased clothes and makeup (for both of us) and then dressed me up so that I looked like her twin. My own Grandpa hadn’t recognized me at first…that’s how different I looked.
“I thought you were older,” he said, already apologetic.
I was beginning to think that ignorance might be bliss in this one instance and that I should never have asked about this.
“Did you notice how taken I was with you that night when we all had dinner together? Dana did.”
He smiled ruefully. I didn’t answer, but no, that had not been my impression—a convincing accismus, (feigning disinterest in something one finds extremely interesting) and quite reciprocal, if I was being honest.
“Are you aware that you’re a sleepwalker?”
Significantly, there wasn’t a trace of teasing in his question.
“Sometimes.”
Oh no.
“Well, I wasn’t.”
He stopped talking for a while, deciding what he would tell me, and how to do that, I imagined.
“Anyway, Dana was mad at me and she’d gone back in to Reykjavik to do some clubbing…alone.”
He laughed, shaking his head and rolling his eyes.
“I’m pretty optimistic, or maybe arrogant is the right word. When you came into my room so late I just thought you’d picked up on my vibes and that you were being very…friendly.”
He chuckled at his joke.
I was feeling more ill than I ever had up to this point, which was an extreme low for me. I was so thankful to already be seated.
“It was strange though. You were there, but you weren’t. The bold move of showing up like that was offset by the total silence,” he continued, laughing softly at the memory.
“That didn’t occur to me at first, though. It was dark, but I knew it was you. The only other girl in the house was never quiet, especially when she was angry at me.”
I was breathing in tiny breaths that were too shallow. The edges of my vision were starting to blur.
“So I pulled you close, but when I kissed you I realized something was wrong. You were soft and warm, but you were like a statue. I wasn’t getting any response. That’s when I switched on the lamp and figured it out. It was a totally different version of you than what I thought I’d been kissing. You had no makeup on, your hair was in two braids and you had pink socks on your feet. You weren’t even looking at me.”
He smiled, wistfully, his mind still far away.
“So I walked you back out into the hallway. Then the fireworks started.”
The suburb we were staying in was having a founder’s celebration and midnight fireworks were shot off the entire week.
“I grabbed a couple of blankets and took you out on the deck to watch them with me. Do you remember that?” he asked, hopefully.
I shook my head, completely speechless. I had watched the fireworks on a different night, probably the next night, but I was with Grandpa, not Gray.
“It was nice. I could tell you were still asleep, but you’d started talking, well, answering questions, that is. I don’t know how, but you managed to stay asleep during all that racket,” he chuckled.
“I was just playing around and I asked you if you liked me the way that I liked you. I thought I was just being facetious, but later I realized that even then I meant it. Seeing you so innocent and sweet like that, tasting you like that, I was totally addicted. I wanted to believe there was meaning to the way you’d been drawn to me, even unconsciously.”
He paused, replaying scenes of our time in Iceland. I was doing the same thing.
“Then over the course of the next few weeks, when I really got to know you, there was no going back. You treated me like a friend, instead of a…conquest.”
He was playing with the ring on my right hand. Then his eyes flashed up to mine, capturing them inescapably.
“I couldn’t tell how you felt about me, but I knew I had to have you, Ellie. No one else would ever do for me. But I wanted you for every reason, not just the right ones. That’s why I had to back off, and keep my distance…across the Atlantic.”
He smiled that half smile I loved, though it was dusted with a bit of ruefulness.
It was a tremendous relief to hear that things hadn’t gone nearly as far as I was beginning to fear.
“What did I say?”
I would probably be sorry I asked this.
There was a tender sweetness in his expression that melted my reserve.
“I asked you if you liked me and you said ‘Yes.’ So then I asked you if you’d like to be my girlfriend and you said ‘Yes.’ On our last night in Reykjavik you stopped by to see me again. I asked you if you’d marry me and you said ‘Definitel
y yes.’”
He laughed quietly and I realized I was in his arms now. I’d been concentrating so hard on what he was telling me that I’d missed that part. It was a familiar pose. His lips were on my neck, kissing in a path that started under my ear and made its way down and around to the top of my spine and then across to the other ear. The guilty pleasure was astonishingly immobilizing. It felt like I was dissolving. Before I was overcome by speechlessness I managed a caveat, though weak and unconvincing.
“If you keep that up I’ll never be able to climb down from here,” I warned without moving, in a voice that was barely there.
I couldn’t make myself pull away, even if I wanted to. He needed to learn to respond to verbal cues anyway.
He paused for a moment and said, “It’ll be worth the wait. Besides, you recover amazingly quickly.”
And he started in on the kissing once more. When it seemed like I might truly pass out—the old familiar blurred edges of vision in combination with that strange hollow roaring inside my ears—I dropped back into his chest, blocking any further advances from that angle. He held me silently for a while, just breathing.
My mind was sorting though a basket of recurring dreams. What I used to consider world-class mental concoctions regarding the men I loved began to take on new dimensions in light of the information Gray had just provided. Which were truly dreams and which were actually memories, masquerading as dreams?
If he asked me to marry him during one of these sleepwalking episodes—the very thing my soul would have craved above all else at that point—then it was no wonder I imploded after Grandpa died and I thought I’d never see Gray again.
It was unfortunate and pitiful, but my response to the facts of my conscious knowledge being at war with what was true in my subconscious mind explained so much. It was almost a relief.
Then I began to consider some of the more intensely physical, ‘next level’ dreams I’d had about Gray…
“Do you still sleepwalk?” he eventually asked.
“Apparently I’m not the right person to ask. It’s pretty scary, but I have to admit, I honestly don’t know.”
My mom hadn’t mentioned it in ages, so I thought it was a thing of the past.
“Hmm. When we’re married I guess I’ll just have to handcuff you to our bed at night.”
And he laughed at his joke, nuzzling the top of my head with his nose and chin.
I could hear the click in my mind. It was the sound of the switch as my vision went slightly red, but sharper and more in focus than it had ever been. It was just a stupid joke. But it was also a symbolic truth. I was never going to be given a choice in this. It was long past being a done deal in Gray’s mind. In fact, he’d paid a whole group of people to watch and ‘block’ me from making any choices for myself. He was so good at manipulating my emotions and my memories that I’d never be sure whether any decision I made was truly mine.
It felt deceptively good at the moment, but I knew that this lovesick hormone induced haze would burn off eventually, probably in the bright light of hindsight, once I was married to someone infinitely more powerful and intelligent than me, who possessed me body and soul, who would handcuff me so that my spirit and will were no longer mine to direct, and never ever would be.
Though this spot felt very private, seconds later when the scopophobic sensation broke through my consciousness, I realized that we were actually perched upon what was a natural stage. I was certain that Phil and Elsie must be nearby, and that he was watching me now—watching Gray have his way with me. And watching me let Gray do it, consciously, this time. I hated myself. I hated being manipulated and I hated being watched. I was done.
The self-disgust and anger translated into action as I abruptly pulled away from Gray’s hold, stood up and moved to the place where I had come from, trying to get down. He didn’t understand my motivations, but he understood my object, and gently pushed me aside.
“Let me go first, and then I’ll help you down,” he suggested, cautiously.
He knew he’d crossed the line and that an apology wouldn’t undo the damage at the moment. I tried to hide the tears as I walked silently back up the path toward the main fire road in the direction of our campsite. The tissues were a good idea after all, and I quietly wiped my way through all of them. Gray walked by my side, kindly redirecting me with a hand but no words at several points when I started to head in the wrong direction. He knew I was aiming for the relative comfort and solitude of my place in Elsie’s tent.
When we got back to camp we were alone. I headed for cover. He stopped me before I could unzip the door, holding my wrist.
“Can we talk about this?”
I shook my head. I couldn’t talk at all…about anything.
“Ellie, honey, I’ve really upset you. I’m so sorry.”
He was perfectly sincere.
“I’m sorry too,” I whispered, tears surging.
Then I pulled my hand away, turned my back on him and escaped inside the tent, zipping the door behind me. I tried to be quiet, but I couldn’t stop crying. I was too distraught for the normal censor of embarrassment to quiet me.
Walking back to camp, I’d made my mind up about what I was going to do next but I was having trouble psyching myself up for it. It was really going to hurt, if it worked, that is. The tears had more to do with the finality of my decision and its repercussions, as opposed to offense at Gray’s faux pas joke, though that offense had sparked my new determination. I felt bad for him about that; he would not know there was a distinction.
About ten minutes later Elsie came inside. She was all concern.
“What’s wrong Ellie?”
“My back is really sore…and…it hurts when I pee.”
It wasn’t exactly true, the way that saying ‘my head is really sore, and it hurts when I think’ would have been, but I was preparing to fly standby on my only ticket out of there.
She felt my forehead, checking for fever. All I needed to do was think about the handcuff remark, or one of any number of ‘dreams’ and a convincing fever simulation could be arranged.
“When did it start?”
“Yesterday, I guess. I don’t know. I wasn’t paying attention.”
I was still weepy. That was good. It camouflaged my weak acting skills with some realism.
“I didn’t think you were drinking enough. Damn. Well, I’d walk you out today but it’s a little later than I’d like, and you’ll be moving even slower than normal. The boys could take turns carrying you…”
“No!”
That was way too desperate sounding.
“No. Can we just go first thing in the morning?” I suggested.
I knew both men were listening intently to our conversation.
“Did you bring any aspirin?” I asked as pathetically as possible in a tone that was low but not too low.
“Yeah, but you need Advil. It’ll help with the inflammation. Do you have your water bottle in here?”
I could hear movement outside the tent now. That would be Gray getting my water bottle out of my daypack that I’d dropped at the edge of camp.
“No,” I said, very weakly.
“I’ll be right back,” she said reassuringly as she patted my hand before she turned to exit the tent.
She stepped outside to get my water and to inform my loved ones of her diagnosis and the recommended procedures.
“What’s wrong?” demanded Phil, who sounded far more alarmed than he probably should have.
“She’s got a U.T.I.,” Elsie informed, and because someone’s face must not have registered understanding, she elaborated, “Urinary Tract Infection. She probably hasn’t been drinking enough water or she took one too many hot baths.”
That was genius! I hadn’t thought of that. Now Gray might actually think it was true instead of me just faking my way back to civilization because he’d hurt my feelings.
“What does that mean?” pressed Phil, who wasn’t fin
ished being overly concerned yet.
“Usually it means you feel like crap. It burns when you pee. You get muscle spasms in your bladder that hurt like the devil. Walking is uncomfortable. Fever is uncomfortable. It’s serious. It can go into kidney failure if you don’t catch it quickly enough. I have to get her to a doctor. She’ll need to start antibiotics right away, and probably pain medication.”
Elsie was doing a great job sounding just like a doctor…or someone who had experienced a U.T.I. And she was making it sound far more serious and urgent than it really was, especially considering it was a hoax.
