Уильям Макгиверн - Summitt

Selby took her hands. “Let me get you a glass of milk or a drink or something. You better get to sleep.”

“I drove myself to the police station that night...”

Her voice was steady and quiet; she apparently hadn’t heard him.

“I told a detective what happened. I signed a charge sheet. They picked up Toby Clark at his rooming house and called the Bryn Mawr Hospital and my father. Toby Clark told the police he’d been in the dressing room picking up towels because he thought everyone was gone. Then I’d come in and laughed at him and pulled off my bathing suit. The detectives asked more questions. Fortunately my arm was in a cast and my lips were badly swollen. That was a plus,” she added bitterly. “But a captain suggested to my father that we should probably drop the attempted rape charge. Which we did. My father was glad to, I realized. Toby Clark was given a suspended one-year sentence for simple assault. He was also fired, which some of the university staff thought was a rotten thing for a poor young man just starting off in life. Some of them wrote letters for Toby, character references, pointing out that he was a good worker. That s what the Cadles got hold of. The Bryn Mawr police reports.” She sighed. “What I’d said, what he’d said, the charges filed against him and dropped by a privileged, hysterical — Toby Clark is dead, by the way. He was shot in a woman’s apartment in Fresno, California, four years ago. He was forty-two. We’d all thought he was about our age.”

Selby rubbed her shoulders. Her muscles, tight as coiled springs, loosened some under the pressure of his hands.

“You’re something else, Brett. You actually dredged up that nightmare to help Shana.”

“Yes... in a way... I told her about the pool and the darkness as a sort of metaphor to let her know I understood. I didn’t tell her about Toby Clark. I wouldn’t add that to what she’d been through.”

“But you still went into court each day knowing those bastards at the defense table, including Earl Thomson, knew about Toby Clark.”

“That wasn’t courage, Harry... It might have been just the opposite. A way of escape, doing something for Shana I hadn’t been brave enough to do for myself.”

“You can play Freud on yourself, I’m telling you that I think it took tremendous guts.”

“Whatever... Harry, the thing is, I want Shana to be able to come to terms with her anger.” She tightened her grip on his hands. “Anger doesn’t give you confidence. It doesn’t make you a better or nicer person. When I was fourteen I knew I was attractive. I didn’t care whether I was or not, I knew I was. It was just a comfortable fact. I didn’t mind being wrong or taking chances. I could be reckless and make a fool of myself if I wanted to. But the kind of anger I’m talking about changes all that. You become an expert in limitations. You’re afraid you won’t be believed or liked or accepted, so you retreat into anything that’s secure, even if it’s restricting or deadening. You find yourself specializing in dull economies... not risking honestly felt passion. They say you’ve been profaned, you feel like a victim of some new and awful original sin.”

“Maybe there’s something that’s still too important for Shana to give up, something she won’t talk about. I can understand her fear... your talk about Spain makes me afraid I won’t know all the old campfire songs.”

She brushed at her eyes. “I could buy a used Camelot, but I’d want to knock some walls down and—”

“Don’t talk anymore,” he told her. “That’s enough now.” He took the pillow from her, plumped it up and turned down the blankets, then went into the kitchen and turned on the lights.

The rear garden was dark, with reflections shimmering on the shrubs. He opened the refrigerator and took out a carton of milk. In a cupboard he found saucepans. He filled one with milk and put it on the stove. Maybe she did know more about pain than he did. But he knew how love between people ended. It ended in pain. People got tired of each other or betrayed each other or died. Someone was left with the pain.

He put the glass of milk on the table beside the brass animals. Brett was lying slack as a spent child, one narrow foot trailing off the sofa. Her hair was curled and damp at the temples. She was breathing deeply, each breath stirring strands of hair across her cheek and throat. When she listened and talked her features were irregular, swiftly expressive. But in repose, they were exquisitely proportioned. He realized he had never heard her laugh.

He straightened out her arms and legs, put the covers over her and tucked them around her. He was surprised how light her body was. He sat on the edge of the sofa and looked at the shine of her tumbled hair on the pillow. Watching the rise and fall of her chest, he remembered how touching it had been to look at his children sleeping...

He leaned over to kiss her forehead, and she raised her chin without opening her eyes and kissed him on the mouth. Her arms went around his shoulders and drew him down to her, her lips opening.

He held her very tight, and when she pulled back, saying only his name, he felt the place inside him that had been cold and empty so long beginning to fill with a rush of expectation, and a longing for the profound warmth that was almost always too much to hope for, but never too much to accept and believe in...

A silver light glistened on the dewy shrubs in the rear garden. Selby looked out and saw the trees beyond the house moving against a still dark sky. A river wind created a shrill but musical sound on the windows.

He made fresh coffee. Pulling on his duffel coat, he poured a second cup. Sipping it, he looked at a bulletin board beside an herb rack. A quotation was typed on the back of a business card partially hidden among messages and recipes. It read: “He was an old man who fished alone in a skiff in the Gulf Stream and he had gone eighty-four days without taking a fish.”

He poured orange juice into a glass and filled another cup with coffee. As he looked for a tray, her light footsteps sounded on the stairs. She wore a short white robe.

“I was going to bring up a tray,” he said. “I thought you’d sleep until the alarm went off.”

She put her head against his shoulder. “Look at the garden,” she said. “The light, I mean. I’ve never seen it so clear. On the other hand, I’ve never seen the river mist so... misty.” She laughed, and Selby was almost startled by the sound, so strangely unfamiliar and exciting coming from her.

“You’re a nice person to be with,” she said quietly. “I’d like to walk with you somewhere for a long time and talk until there wasn’t anything left to talk about. Then just go on walking.”

“You’d get very tired,” he said.

“We’d stop then. Sit on the beach and watch the waves.”

“What about winter? How are you and skiing?”

“I’ll have you know I spent most of my growing-up life in Maine, Harry. I liked cross-country better than downhill. Maybe I had more stamina than nerve. I learned to ski on a hill behind our house. That’s one advantage of having older sisters. They taught me, and I was pretty good. Why?”

The phone rang then, sending its shrill insistent demand through the early stillness. Brett’s hands shook suddenly. Coffee splashed into her saucer.

Selby took the cup from her. “It’s okay, it’s a wrong number or the poodle’s having pups. I’ll get it.”

It was a woman’s voice, a familiar one. He remembered mascara and spiky eyelashes as he listened to Victoria Kim say, “I’m calling for Senator Lester, Mr. Selby. Hold on a moment.”

Selby covered the phone and waved to Brett, who was watching from the doorway. “Pick up the extension...”