Jeffery Deaver - Praying for Sleep

Lis continued a few feet toward the dam, then stopped, uneasy, reluctant to go further, watching the white jet of water shoot into the creek.

Her hesitation had nothing to do with the safety of the dam or the ragged spume. The only thought on her mind at the moment was the picnic.

Many, many years before: a rare event-a L’Auberget family outing.

That June day had been a mixture of sun and shade, hot and cold. The family strolled from the house to this beach, and hadn’t gotten more than ten yards before Father started carping at Portia. “Calm down, quiet down!” The girl was five, even then cheerfully defiant and boisterous. Lis was horrified that because of the girl’s rowdiness Father would call off the picnic and she bluntly shushed her little sister. Portia tried to kick Lis in retaliation and, with a dark glance from her husband, Mother finally swept up the squirming girl and carried her.

Lis, then eleven, and her father hefted picnic baskets packed by him so efficiently that she nearly tore muscles under the weight. Still, the girl didn’t complain; she’d endured eight months of her father’s absence while he was in Europe on yet another business trip and nothing on earth would stop her from walking at his side. She was thrilled speechless when he complimented her on her strength.

“How about here?” Father asked, then answered himself. “Yes, I think so.”

It seemed to Lis that he’d developed a minuscule accent in his recent travels. Portuguese, she supposed. She observed his dark slacks and white dress shirt buttoned at the neck, without tie, and short boots. This was hardly American fashion in the nineteen sixties but he’d have nothing to do with Brooks Brothers or Carnaby Street and remained faithful to the look favored by his Iberian business associates. It wasn’t until after he died that Lis and her mother would laugh that Andrew’s style could best be described as post-immigrant.

That afternoon he’d watched his wife arranging the meal and gave her strident instructions. The food was cut geometrically, cooked perfectly, sealed in containers airtight as the NASA capsules that so fascinated him. Mother set out expensive stainless-steel utensils and ceramic plates the shade of milky plums.

A Warre’s port appeared and they each had a glass, Father asking Mother her opinion of it. He said she had an uneducated palate and for that reason was worth more than a dozen French sommeliers. Lis had never heard her mother utter a single negative syllable about any of the wines in her husband’s inventory.

On the day of Lis’s birth, Andrew L’Auberget was in Portugal, where he happened to drop a bottle of Taylor, Fladgate 1879 because he was so startled by the sharp ringing of his partner’s telephone-on the other end of which happened to be his mother-in-law with the news that he was now a father. The story goes that he laughed about the catastrophe and insisted-there, on the phone-that they name Lis after the city in which she’d destroyed seven hundred dollars’ worth of port. Two things about this incident had always seemed significant to Lis. The first was the generosity with which he treated the loss.

And second: why wasn’t he with his wife at such a time?›

That day at the beach, sitting beside the dam, he’d lifted a silver spoon and, against Mother’s protests, poured a scant teaspoon down Lis’s throat.

“There, Lisbonne, what do you think? That’s a 1953. Not renowned, no, but good. What do you think?”

“Andrew, she’s eleven! She’s too young.”

“I like it, Father,” Lis said, repulsed by the wine. By way of compliment she added that it tasted like Vick’s.

“Cough syrup?” he roared. “Are you mad?”

“She’s too young. ” Mother sent Lis out of harm’s way and the girls went off to play until lunch was ready.

While Portia sat in a cove of grass and picked flowers, Lis noticed a motion from the state park nearby and stepped closer to explore. A boy of about eighteen stood with a girl several years younger. She was backed against a tree and he was clutching the bark on either side of her shoulders. He would ease forward and kiss her then back away quickly as she wrinkled her nose in mock disgust. He reached suddenly for her chest. Lis was alarmed, thinking that a wasp or bee had landed on her and he was trying to pick it off. She felt an urge to call out to him to leave it alone. They sting when they’re scared, she nearly shouted, astonished that a high-school boy wouldn’t know this plain fact of nature.

It wasn’t of course a bee he was after but the button of her shirt. He undid it and slipped his fingers inside. The girl crinkled her face again and slapped his knuckles. He withdrew his fingers reluctantly, laughed then kissed her again. The hand crawled back inside and this time she didn’t stop him. Their tongues met outside their mouths and they kissed hard.

An eerie radiation of warmth consumed Lis. She couldn’t tell from which portion of her body it arose. Maybe her knees. Drawing some vague conclusions about the spectacle of the two lovers, Lis cautiously lifted her own hand to her blouse, beneath which was her swimsuit. She undid buttons, mimicking the young man, and eased her fingers under her suit as if his hand directed hers. She probed, with no discernible results at first. Then as she fumbled the heat seemed to rise from her legs and center somewhere in her belly.

“Lisbonne!” her father called harshly.

Gasping, she jumped.

“Lisbonne, what are you doing? I told you not to wander far!” He was nearby though apparently he hadn’t seen her crime-if a crime it was. Her heart quivering madly, she began to cry and dropped to her knees. “Looking for Indian bones,” she called in a shaking voice.

“How horrible,” her mother shouted. “Stop that this minute! Come wash your hands.”

“You should respect the remains of the dead, young lady! When you’re dead and laid out, how’d you like someone to molest your grave?”

The girls returned to the picnic blanket, washed and sat down to the meal, while Father talked about the paste that astronauts would have to eat on extended space flights. He tried, without success, to explain to Portia what zero gravity meant. Lis was unable to get down more than a few bites of anything. When they finished she hurried back to the cleft in the bushes on the pretense of looking for a dropped comb. The couple was no longer there.

Then came the part of the day that Lis had been dreading. Father took her down to the dark water. He removed his shirt and slacks, beneath which he wore his burgundy trunks. He had a dense body-not strong but with fat distributed evenly, in approximation of muscles.

Her shirt came off, then her culottes, revealing the plain red swimsuit. A thin woman now, Lis was a thinner girl then, but she pulled in her stomach vehemently-not in shame at a belly but hoping, futilely, that it might inflate her chest.

They strode into the cold lake. A championship swimmer in college, Andrew L’Auberget was, he’d told his daughter on a number of occasions, troubled by her fear of the water. He never missed an opportunity to get her into a pool or river or ocean. “It’s dangerous, yes. It’s far too easy to drown. That’s why you must learn to swim, and swim like a fish.”

Nervously she flexed her knees, feeling the gracious bed of mud beneath her arched toes. Father made a stern show of these lessons. When he noticed that she was resisting putting her head under water he ordered her to take a breath and pushed her face beneath the waves. Panic finally sent her scrambling upright. As she sputtered and shivered he laughed and told her, “See, that wasn’t so bad. Again, for ten seconds. I can do it for two minutes. Two whole minutes without a breath!”