Burnt Mountain (29 page)

“One is for my husband,” I said finally, lifting my head. “The other one is mine.”

“I don’t imagine I have to ask which is which,” Nick said, smiling. His smile seemed to grow until it filled my entire field
of vision. I closed my eyes. The smile was still there. So were the freckles; I could have charted them like stars. Only the
faint crow’s-feet were new, but somehow they were where they should be.

“Mine’s the Mary Roberts Rinehart,” I said thickly. My head was spinning, and my face and mouth prickled. “My husband doesn’t
read mysteries.”

He was silent for a moment, and then he said, “Thayer? Are you all right?”

“I think so,” I said in a small voice. “It’s very hot. I should go home, probably. My husband… Nick, I have a husband. Did
I tell you that?”

“Yes,” he said. “You did. Look, I think we’d better sit down someplace and get you some coffee or something. You look like
you’re about to hit the floor. God, I hope it’s not me….”

“No,” I whispered. I felt as if I were underwater, naked
and drowning. The bubble was gone; not a shard of it remained. I did not remember when it shattered. When I first saw him,
I supposed. When I first heard his voice…

“Have you got time? I just can’t let you leave like this….”

“I have time,” I said. Where did this child’s trembling voice come from?

We went out of the vast, book-smelling cool and into the blazing street. Passersby crowded into margins of shade. He held
my elbow. In a few minutes we turned into the lobby of a nondescript fifties hotel that had, I knew, apartments on the top
floors. The air inside was stale and glacial, smelling of carpet cleaner.

“You live here?” I said. “In Atlanta? Somehow I thought you lived somewhere like California, or maybe back down on St. Simons.
I thought I’d know it if you were here….”

“No. I’ve got an apartment here because I’m designing part of the Olympics complex and our firm thought I ought to be on the
spot. I live and work in New York, actually. Have since I got out of Yale.”

“You did go to Yale, then….”

“Yeah. Did you go on to Agnes Scott?”

“No, I went to the University of the South. Sewanee. It’s on a mountaintop in Tennessee. They call it the Domain. You’d have
liked it, I always thought.”

“I’ve heard of it. The Domain… sounds like you.”

“How so?”

“Oh… kind of mystical, maybe. A little magical.”

“I’ve given up magic,” I said, trying for lightness, and failing.

He was silent till we got off the creaking elevator and I had followed him from the dim, sauce-smelling hallway into a large
room blazing with afternoon light and very nearly empty.

“Did you give up magic when… you and I didn’t get together?” he said quietly, settling me onto the couch. “Because if you
did, I really may have to go kill your mother….”

“No. I guess what I mean is that I’ve learned that most of the time when you think you’ve found some magic, you really haven’t….”

He didn’t answer and went into the spartan kitchen. I was glad. The direction our talk had veered into frightened me.

I sat on his low blue couch and stared out the huge uncurtained glass windows at the immensity of Atlanta rearing itself up
around us. He had very little furniture, but stacks and stacks of books and plans and sketches were scattered all over. Apparently
he worked at what should have been the dining room table; it was a mare’s nest of drawings and sketches and crumpled tracing
paper. On a counter between the kitchen and living room stood a photograph of two very small girls, hardly past babyhood,
with balloons on a seashore.

When he came in with coffee for me and a drink for himself, I pointed at the photo and said as brightly as I could, “Yours?”

He sighed and sat down beside me.

“Yeah. Beth and Carrie. They live in California now with their mother. I don’t see much of them unless I go out there. It’s
not working out very well.”

There was bitterness in his voice. I had never heard it before.

“Why did you get divorced? I mean, if you did,” I said, and blushed furiously. Why could I not stop my tongue? This was not
my territory now.

He was silent for a while, and then he said, “Yeah, we did. I guess it was because it was sort of—what came next. You know,
you meet, you marry, you have children, you get divorced….”

I did not say anything. There seemed nothing to say. It was too late; too much lay between us; we had gone so far down such
widely divergent paths….

I looked up at him helplessly.

“Who did you marry, Thayer?” he said.

“I married an Irishman. His name is Aengus O’Neill. He’s a professor of Celtic mythology at a college here. Coltrane. He’s
writing a book now.”

“Children?”

“No,” I said. “I don’t have any children.”

He studied my face and then said, “What’s your husband’s book about?”

“I don’t know anymore,” I said. “I don’t see him very often.”

And to my horror I began to cry.

We sat in the big room until the lights of the city began to bloom, and by the time the sky had darkened completely I had
given him most of my life after him. I could not stop the words, except the part about the baby—his baby, ours—and the subsequent
illness that had left me barren. I knew that
that would be simply too painful for him to hear and for me to say. Later. It could come later….

But there could not be a later. How could there be? There should not even have been this much, this afternoon.

I stopped talking. My tears had dried, though several tissues around me on the sofa were damp balls and my voice was a drowned
croak. I did not think I could have possibly drawn Aengus clearly enough for Nick to understand him, all that complexity,
all that passion now skewing so inevitably toward obsession. All the very real magic that once had shimmered around him, and
still sometimes did. It was I who had lost the magic, not Aengus.

After a time Nick said in a low voice, “We shouldn’t be sitting here talking about this.”

“I know,” I said, tears starting again. “Of course we shouldn’t.”

“I mean… we should be catching up on what we did today. We should
know
what we did all those years. We should have done it together.”

I moved jerkily on the sofa. It was time for me to go. It was way past time.

“I have to go home, Nick,” I said.

He did not urge me to stay. He said, “I don’t know yet exactly what I should do about this, but I think I have to do something.
I can’t… know you’re so unhappy. I just can’t. We should talk more; maybe I should meet him….”

“Oh, please, Nick.” I cried softly. By this time we were standing by my car in the parking lot and he was holding the
front door open for me. His face was tired and sharpened; there was anger in his voice. He seemed decades older.

“Please don’t feel you have to do anything.” I almost wept again. “I shouldn’t have unloaded all this on you. My God, you
get a lot for your nickel with me, don’t you? I can work this out. Aengus and I can. You’ve got your own row to hoe. And I
haven’t really been fair to him; he’s so much more than all that….”

Nick put his hand over mine on the steering wheel. I could feel him on every inch of my skin. Safety. His touch was, as well
as so many other things, the warm, engulfing feeling of safety.

“I’m here for several more weeks, Thayer. We’ll figure something out. Just don’t go away again. Promise me that.”

“Where would I go?” I said, putting the car into reverse to back out of the parking space. My foot trembled on the pedal.

“I’ll see you soon. I want you to call me when you have some free time. If you don’t call before long, I’m going to call you.
I mean that, Thayer,” he said.

“No,” I said. “You can’t call me. I mean
that.
”

“Thay…”

I looked at him. Tears stood in his eyes. In the neon-flashing lights of the underground parking garage they shimmered; a
tiny trickle started down one sharp-planed freckled cheek. Grief and guilt flooded me, and I felt, suddenly, a cold emptiness
deep inside me where our baby had so briefly lived.

“Oh, God!” I cried out, and stamped down on the
accelerator. My car shot accidently backward. I slammed it into forward gear. I did not look back.

I snapped the bubble in place before I even got out of the garage. Outside it the entire world howled and hammered and shrilled.
Inside it there was the old, soothing peace. Just outside the globe the faces of the two men who had defined me loomed close.
They were talking. Talking. Talking to me.

It was not the time to hear them.

When I pulled the car up into my cool, green-tunneled driveway, I saw that a light on the third floor was on. Aengus was home,
then, but his study door was closed and I knew that he was oblivious to all but the old ones who moved with magic through
dark air. He did not hear me.

I slipped into bed without washing my face, clicked off the bedside lamp, and buried my head under the creamy linen pillows
we had gotten for a wedding present. I still can’t remember who gave them to us.

I
woke late the next morning and scrambled, sleep stunned, out of bed before I realized that it was Saturday and I did not
have to go to the bookstore. I sat back down on the edge of the bed and shook my head hard, several times. I had not thought,
when I had slipped between the covers last night, that I would sleep at all, but I had, deeply, not waking once, until five
minutes ago. Aengus was not in bed beside me, but he seldom was this late. I wondered if he had slept on the sofa in his office,
as he sometimes did when he worked or read late. I thought I would get up and go and find him, but the world was still heaving
and rolling like a ship’s deck under me, and I sat back down and stared into the gloom of the big bedroom. I thought if I
got up and turned on the lights and opened the drapes the room would flood with morning light and my thoughts would slide
back into their ordinary morning
progression of Let’s see, what do I have to do today? Who am I going to see? Do we have anything special planned?

But I did not move. For a long time I wanted absolutely no sense of the day and what it held. After last evening’s time with
Nick, I did not think there could be any more ordinary days. But neither could I imagine what there could be in place of them.
I could not think at all.

“Maybe I’ll sleep a little longer,” I said to myself, and was preparing to slide back under the covers when I heard the Volvo’s
engine start up outside. I leaped up and ran barefoot down the stairs and out through the veranda to the driveway, my nightgown
fluttering around me. Aengus saw me and stopped backing out of the driveway. He opened the window on his side and leaned out
and grinned at me.

“Who have we here, fluttering like a butterfly in her shimmy at nine o’clock in the morning? I wasn’t sneaking out; I just
didn’t want to wake you. I thought you must really be tired; you were dead to the world.”

I put my hand out tentatively and touched his arm. It was warm and still a little damp from his shower. There was a cup of
coffee in the holder between the seats. He reached up and covered my hand with his. I drew a deep breath. It was truly Aengus,
Aengus in the morning as he always was, with lines smoothed out of his dark face and his blue eyes clear. I could already
smell the sun on the pines and feel it on my bare shoulders and arms. I smiled; I could feel the smile trembling a little
on my mouth.

“Morning,” I said. “Where you going?”

He reached out and smoothed the hair back from my face. I knew it was wild and tangled.

“Up to camp,” he said. “I’ve just about finished the book. I started the last chapter early this morning. I want the boys
to hear it before I finish. The last chapter of anything always carries the payload. By the way, where were you last night?”

“I ran into a friend of mine from camp when I was at the library,” I said. “We spent longer than I meant to catching up.”

It was precisely what I’d meant to say: the truth and no more. There had seemed to me no reason for Aengus to pursue it, and
I doubt that he would have if I hadn’t felt my mouth opening and words tumbling from it: “He has an apartment in the old Findlay
building around the corner from the library. We went there because there wasn’t anyplace to sit in the library and it was
so hot….”

Aengus said nothing, and I pulled my arm away from the open window of his car and said, “I’ve got to get dressed. I can’t
stand around all day out here in my shimmy.”

“What was his name, your friend from camp?” Aengus said in a smooth, polite voice. I sighed, not because I thought he’d make
a thing about my having seen a male friend but simply because I did not feel like standing in the sun explaining the whole
thing. That had been last night. This was this morning. Last night was over.

“His name is Nick Abrams,” I said. “You know who he is. I haven’t seen him since the summer before college. He’s an architect
in New York, and he’s down here to do some stuff for the Olympics. Housing and things…”