Marc Zicree - Angelfire

By unspoken consensus, we granted Goldie and Magritte the right of a room to themselves. The rest of us slept in a pleasant bedroom made up with a large canopy bed and several cots. Colleen first opted for one of these, but after some argument, Cal convinced her the bed offered the best chance of comfort. She agreed, but only on the condition that one of us share it with her. It was not an unreasonable request; we had shared tents, plots of earth, and straw bales for months.

Calvin, eyes spilling worry, took me aside to ask, “Is Colleen all right, really?”

“You know Colleen. It is impossible to tell how much discomfort she is hiding.”

Cal glanced over to where Colleen sat cross-legged before a potbellied stove, drying her hair, wearing nightclothes composed of long, gray thermal underwear and a man’s red and black plaid woolen shirt. Shapeless, androgynous. “You take the bed. In case she needs you.”

I closed my eyes and thanked God my friend could not possibly see the precipice my thoughts teetered above. “Da,” I answered, not trusting myself to say more.

“So, who’s my bunkmate tonight?” Colleen had gotten up from the stove and moved toward us, combing her hair. It had grown in the past weeks and curled disobediently around her ears, framing her face.

Cal nudged my shoulder. “Here’s your man,” he said. “He looks like he could use a soft feather mattress and a down comforter, doesn’t he? Besides, I’m not really ready to turn in yet. Enid and I are going to do some sleuthing. See if we can find out a little more about Papa Sky and his mysterious buddy. Maybe unearth some more tales of disappearing musicians.”

“Good luck.” She yawned. “Jeez, I’m tired.”

He leaned over and kissed her forehead. “Sleep tight,” he said, touched my shoulder again, lightly, and left us alone.

Neither Colleen nor I spoke again until we lay side by side under the canopy, veiled slightly from each other by the semidarkness of the room. Firelight wove itself through the bed curtains and played across the ceiling, having crept from the slotted door of the wood stove, which Colleen had carefully banked down for the night. There was moonlight, too, equally clandestine, slipping between sash and sill. It was a luminous violet.

We lay in silence for a time, then she reached up and knocked on the headboard. “God, this thing reminds me of my childhood. I ever tell you about the bedroom set from hell?”

“No, I don’t believe you did.” I glanced sideways in time to catch her grimace.

“I was about, oh, thirteen, I guess. We’d just moved… again, and Mom wanted to make up for it by buying me new bedroom furniture. Well, I’ll tell you, what I really wanted was Mom and Dad’s bed. Big, old, heavy, mahogany four-poster. I came home from school one day and here was this wretched gold and white French Provincial thing with dust ruffles and pink roses all over the quilt. Pink , for God’s sake. She’d bought me her dream furniture, not mine. I wanted a pirate’s bedroom, not a princess’s.”

Pirate Colleen. I could almost picture her at the helm of a ship flying the Jolly Roger. I smiled in the soft darkness. “Did you tell her?” I asked.

“Yeah. Eventually. She really did feel bad about it. About six months later she bought her and Dad a new bed and gave me theirs.” She reached out a hand and tugged at the brocade draperies. “Okay, so this isn’t exactly a pirate’s bedroom, either. More like a lord and lady’s. But it’s closer. I asked her why she got me that trashy white stuff, and you know what she said? She said she thought I was just pretending to be a tomboy. So Dad would treat me like the son he never had. She was afraid I thought Dad had wanted a boy and that was why he’d taught me to play baseball and shoot and ride a horse.”

“But you weren’t pretending.”

“Hell, no. And neither was he.” She rolled over on her side to look at me. “Pretending sucks, Viktor. Promise me you won’t pretend with me.”

Were I not a doctor, I would have sworn my heart had stopped beating in my chest. “What do you mean? What pretense would I make with you?”

“The ‘old bull’ shit. You’re not old, Viktor. But you’ve let yourself feel old. You don’t have to explain why. I know why. But it’s a lie you’ve made up about yourself and I don’t buy it. Neither should you. Promise me: no more old bull shit.”

“Yes, boi baba . No old bullshit.”

“Okay. And you can also stop pretending to be a father figure.”

“Colleen…”

She raised herself up on one elbow and looked down into my face. “Viktor, you are not my father .”

I looked up at her for what seemed an eternity, her face illuminated by the warm, red amber of firelight on one side and cool moonlight on the other. Fire and ice.

I wanted to kiss her. I wanted to take her in my arms and hold her, and sleep, and awaken in the Preserve where there was no quest and no danger and no dreams of blood and death. I wanted more than that, and it terrified me. She terrified me. I tried desperately to call Yelena to mind, but she would not come. She left me alone with Colleen.

“No,” I whispered. “I am not your father.”

She gave me a smile that was at once smug and shy, then put her head down on my chest, wrapped her arms around me, sighed deeply, and slept.

I lay awake as long as I could, savoring her nearness, while my heartbeat slowed and desire ebbed.

By morning I had convinced myself I had suffered some sort of mental confusion. I was glad, desperately glad, that I had not acted out of misbegotten passion. Colleen could not possibly have meant what I had taken her to mean through my veil of exhaustion. I had seen her with Cal. I had seen the way he looked at her, spoke to her, touched her. I had seen them kiss.

Certainly, my dear friend Colleen had only meant to keep me from becoming old before my time.

I might have asked her, but she had risen and was gone; only Enid still snored peacefully in a nearby cot. That was good. It saved me further confusion, further possibility of betraying myself. Daylight grounded me, ordered my thoughts. I was well-rested, sober. And I recalled clearly that I had not let slip anything revealing. I recalled, with equal clarity, that I had promised to forswear pretense. Honor would have me go to Colleen and confess… what?

Say it, you old fool. What possible good is to be gained from lying to yourself ?

Old bullshit, indeed. Here I was late in my forties, pretending to myself that life was over. I had told myself life was over when I took up that damned hot dog cart. And since then, since I had given up on myself, look where I had been and what I had done. And I had not taken a single step of the journey without repeating that old chestnut: Your life is over, Viktor Lysenko. You are an old, dead, hollowed-out man.

I sat up in the empty canopy bed, hand over my heart, and felt it beating. I was not old, she had said. Most assuredly, I was not dead… yet. And at this moment, I did not feel hollow. Truthfully, I had not been hollow since Cal brought me to his apartment to examine his sister. Since the four of us had set foot on the road together. With that first step outside myself, the cavity within had begun to fill, until this moment when I was forced to recognize that it was half full. Perhaps more than half.

Downstairs in the restaurant, breakfast was on. It was simple but substantial fare, and it seemed the whole neighborhood, such as it was, had shown up to partake. I took bread and porridge to a table near a window, where Colleen sat drinking hot tea.

She smiled at me as I sat down across from her. “I’d kill for some coffee,” she said, “but Jelly says they exhausted the supply about three weeks ago. He thinks he can arrange to get some more from ‘a certain warehouse on the waterfront.’ We’ll probably be out of here by the time he gets the deal set up.” She cocked her head to one side and checked me over thoroughly. “You look better this morning. Still like to see you get rid of those dark circles under your eyes, though.”