Guilt by Association (12 page)

“No,” Karen assured him. “It won’t hurt a bit.”

“Is the arm all healed?”

“Pretty much.”

“Do you think you’ll be ready for the fall semester?”

Karen looked off somewhere past his shoulder. “I don’t know,” she said. “I haven’t really thought about it.”

“You haven’t?”

“No,” she said flatly.

A college degree, which had once been a primary goal, now seemed irrelevant to her, and the cloistered atmosphere of the Ithaca campus incredibly impractical. Nothing she had learned at Cornell had prepared her for, or protected her from, the nightmare of the real world.

“You’ve only lost one term,” he continued. “That shouldn’t be very hard for you to make up.”

“I don’t want to think about it now,” she insisted, a bit more sharply than she had intended. “I have a lot of other stuff to figure out first.”

“I wasn’t trying to rush you,” he assured her. “It’s just that I know how important it is to you.”

Was,
she thought sadly. It was strange how she had come to see many of the things that had mattered before December 22 as part of the past, not the future.

“I just need some time,” she said more reasonably.

“Of course you do,” he agreed, letting go of her hand.

“Time to get my priorities back in order.”

There was an awkward silence then, with each of them tense and unsure, trying to figure out what was really going on in the mind of the other.

“Does that mean maybe we should put our plans on hold for the time being?” he asked tentatively, deciding to give her the option, but hoping she would reject it.

Karen’s heart lurched painfully at his words. Her worst fear was about to be realized. Now that he was here, now that he had seen how awful she looked, he had decided he didn’t really love her after all, and was trying to find a kind way out.

“If you think that would be best,” she said.

Peter sighed. “I just want you to be sure.”

“I understand.”

There was another pause as the two of them sat there surrounded by the fragrant darkness, together but apart.

“You almost died in that accident,” he said after a while. “I suppose an experience like that can have a profound effect.
So I think you should take all the time you need to decide what it is you really want.”

“Thank you,” she murmured, wishing he wouldn’t worry so much about letting her down easy and just say what he needed to say and get it over with.

That was it then, he thought. But he couldn’t let her slip away from him without one last effort. He got out of his chair
and stood beside hers, looking down at her through the shadows.

“Just do me a favor, while you’re doing all that heavy thinking, okay?” he pleaded. “Remember how much I love you.”

Karen gasped with relief. He wasn’t trying to end their relationship. He still loved her, despite what she looked like, despite how she behaved. What had she been so worried about? She was so caught up in the moment that she didn’t notice him bending down to brush his lips against hers.

It was so unexpected, his coming down at her out of the dark, that Karen couldn’t help herself, she shuddered and cried out.

“What’s the matter?” he asked, startled. “Are you in pain?” He leaned toward her. “Are you cold?”

The words came out of her nightmare.

Are you cold?
he had asked.
Welly I can certainly take care of that.

Without warning, she was fighting for air and pushing against him with all her might.

“What’s the matter?” he cried.

“Get away!” she wheezed, trying to cover her face. “Get away from me!”

He tried to grab at her flailing hands. “Tell me what’s wrong,” he shouted. “Tell me what to do.”

At this angle, the lights from the house slanted across his face. Somehow, through her panic, she could see genuine concern in the brown eyes—
brown
eyes—and realized that it wasn’t the demon from Central Park, it was Peter.

“I don’t know what happened,” she gulped as her body, soaked with perspiration, went limp. “I couldn’t breathe there for a bit.”

“You scared me half to death,” he admitted, his own heart racing. “I mean, you were staring at me like I was some kind of monster.”

“Was I?”

“Do you need some medicine or something?” he asked,
peering at her, not only with concern in his eyes but with bewilderment.

She shook her head. “No, no medicine. I’m fine now.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes, I’m sure. It was nothing, really.”

“I wouldn’t exactly call what just happened nothing.”

“I’m fine,” she insisted, feeling like a fool. “I promise.”

“Well, even so,” he said, still a little unsteady, “maybe we’d better call it a night.”

Karen let him lead her inside without resistance. She was more than ready to escape his scrutiny. They said their whispered good-nights in the upstairs hallway, just outside her room. Peter ran his index finger lightly down her cheek.

“I do love you,” he murmured.

“I love you, too,” she echoed.

He smiled, a happy smile that spread across his whole face. “Then, as far as I’m concerned,” he breathed, “that’s all that really matters.”

Karen shut her door with a soft click and leaned against it, wondering if he were right.

Peter Bauer had never been her mother’s choice of a suitable husband. Beverly had made no bones about that. He wasn’t going to be a doctor or a dentist or a lawyer, he wasn’t going to graduate from Harvard or Yale, and his family was not prominent in any way. That was three strikes against him, in her mother’s book, which flatly eliminated him from any serious consideration.

He had, however, one thing in his favor, and if truth be told, it was the only reason Beverly had not insisted that Karen put a speedy end to the relationship the moment it became serious. Peter’s father ran a very successful small business which,
according to all indications, Peter would eventually own. So, although the boy might never set the world on fire, he would at least be able to provide well for his family, even as an engineer, and even if it meant that her daughter would have to live in the middle of absolutely nowhere.

Peter had told them that his father’s manufacturing company would soon convert into producing parts for computers.
Beverly knew nothing about computers, but Leo did and told her that they were going to be very important one day.

Although Beverly continued to encourage Karen to seek out what she called better options, she had resigned herself to Peter’s presence in her daughter’s life.

“After all,” she would say with a shrug, “until you catch a bigger fish to fry, you don’t want to let go of the one in the pan, or you may end up with no supper at all.”

Until the “accident.”

Without bothering to wash her face or brush her teeth, Karen undressed and hoisted herself into bed, snuggling deep under the covers, despite the muggy night.

In the past five months, Beverly had not been able to say enough about Peter—about how thoughtful he was, how sincere, how loyal, and how much he obviously cared for Karen. Suddenly, all the doctors and dentists and lawyers that had been out there for the seeking were forgotten, there was no longer anything so terribly wrong with being an engineer, and she took every opportunity to tell Karen how fortunate she was to have found such an exceptional suitor.

The message was clear: a mere engineer should be grateful to have Beverly’s daughter, even though she did come to him a little damaged. After all, he would be marrying up, as they said, and couldn’t very well expect perfection. Karen didn’t bother to protest the assumption. Peter was everything she had ever fantasized about in the dreamy nights of her girlhood, and she wanted nothing more than to marry him and live the fairy-tale life they had so often talked about.

Abso-u-lutely-topia,
he had called it.

“We’re going to have it all,” he would say. “The beautiful wife, the hardworking husband, the cozy cottage, the white picket fence—and at least half a dozen cherubic children. Abso-u-lutely-topia!”

Karen frowned, remembering with a painful tightness in her chest that there weren’t going to be any cherubic children, and that, in the detailed recounting of her injuries, it was the one thing her mother had somehow neglected to tell Peter.

“You can tell him yourself, when the time is right,” Beverly had said with a shrug. “That, but nothing else.”

Karen squirmed at the directive. In her mind, she referred to it as selective honesty, which, as far as she was concerned,
was the same as dishonesty. Not for the first time she wondered how she and Peter were going to share a life without truth.

But what was truth? she asked herself. Her mother, who had once preached the importance of total honesty between a husband and wife, now insisted that it wasn’t necessary to disclose every sordid little secret. She was quick to point out that Peter had never considered it necessary to share the details of his previous exploits. Had he done so, Karen might have found cause not to marry him—just as he might find cause, were he ever to discover the truth about her “accident.” It was infinitely better,
Beverly concluded, that they both bury their pasts in the interests of building a wonderful future together.

Karen reached into her nightstand drawer for her thought box and pulled out a blank piece of paper and a pen. In the gentle pool of lamplight, she wrote:

Love is truth,

the careful truth of time

and constancy.

Between eyes,

between sighs.

From girl to woman,

from woman to wife.

To life.

Without bothering to reread the words, she closed the box and tucked it safely away in the drawer, snapped off the light,
and settled back against her pillows. Visions of white lace and rose petals began to dance before her eyes as she saw herself floating down the aisle, Peter standing there, waiting for her. He would smile and take her hand in his, and then he would take her away from all the pain and pity and reproach.

She closed her eyes with a contented yawn and pulled the
covers up over her head, as though she were already nestling into that cozy little cottage with the white picket fence. She would find a way to tell Peter they would not be able to have children. He would be devastated, of course, but, as always,
he would be loving and understanding, and perhaps, sometime in the future, they would think about adopting. There were bound to be some adorable little ones out there, with shiny faces and bright eyes, just waiting for a picture-perfect home.

At the other end of the hall, Peter lay in the guest bed with his lamp still lit, listening to the subtle sounds of the Kern household as it settled itself down for the night, thinking how different it was from the rambling home in which he had grown up. The walls and floors back in Bangor creaked and groaned freely to accommodate the noisy brood who lived there. These walls and floors didn’t seem to yield at all. Rather, it was the people who did the accommodating.

He laced his fingers under his head and stared up at the ceiling. His body was weary and sore from the long drive and yearned for sleep, but his mind would not cooperate. Not when there was so much to think about.

The change in Karen had almost overwhelmed him. The happy-go-lucky girl he remembered had become a frightened animal. While he could understand her reluctance to think about a future when her present was still somewhat in turmoil, her reaction to him had not been exactly normal.

He was now forced to concede that being run over and left for dead like a dog in the middle of the road had probably been much more traumatic than he had imagined and he could feel his anger rising, almost out of control, toward that nameless person who had stolen not only her health but her self-confidence as well. The quality that had always most charmed him about her was the funny little way she had of combining self-assurance with naïveté that always managed to make him feel just a bit more sophisticated than he actually was, and he loved her dearly for it.

Of course, it went without saying that sexually he was the
more experienced. In fact, her innocence was one of the first things that had attracted him. Although he’d made a few half-drunken attempts at tempting her, in the back seat of his Pon-tiac, he was secretly pleased that she wanted to wait until marriage.
He enjoyed the idea of being able to teach her, when the time came, and it meant a great deal to him to know that he would be her first.

Her accident was a setback, but he hoped it was only a temporary one. He wanted to believe that, as soon as she recovered physically, her confidence would return and her emotional distress would dissipate and she would be her old self again.

All she needed was enough love and encouragement to see her through, and that, he realized, was precisely where
he
came in. He could give her as much love and encouragement as she could handle. It was there, bubbling up inside him, in that part of his heart that had her name engraved on it. He would show her, in every way he could, that he was with her to the end. He would find a way to let her know that she could lean on him, depend on him, and share the bad as well as the good with him. A little smile began to play across his face, because he knew exactly how to accomplish that.

He reached over and picked up the small box he had placed on the nightstand beside the bed. Karen had said she needed time,
but it was now perfectly clear to him that what she really needed was reassurance—reassurance that his feelings for her hadn’t changed and weren’t going to change, and that their life together was going to be exactly as they had planned it.

He flipped the box open. Inside, nestled against dark velvet, a diamond engagement ring sparkled in the lamplight.

T
he smell of coffee awakened him. For a moment, Peter thought he was at home in Maine, but it was much too quiet for the rambunctious bunch in Bangor. No floors complained, no walls grumbled. He opened his eyes. Sunlight flooded through the window between Beverly’s damask draperies.

Peter glanced at his wristwatch, astounded to see that it was almost ten-thirty. He shook his head to clear away the cobwebs.
It was practically the middle of the day, and he couldn’t remember the last time he had slept so long.