In Wilderness (23 page)

“Lie back now, that’s a good girl.”

He brushes her damp hair out of her eyes, loves it how she’s like a child there on the quilt and he’s her daddy. He can touch her now and does so. Does things to her he’s only heard about, which is most things. Does new things he makes up on the spot.

“Don’t do that, it hurts. I don’t like it.”

Loves how her words come all thick-sounding.

“Yes, you do. You just don’t want to like it.” He’s heard talk that that’s the way of it with some things at the first. “Or you don’t want me to know you like it.”

“That’s not true.”

“Want me to stop?”

“Yes. No.”

“Which is it then?”

“Don’t stop. No, please don’t stop.”

Her face is ugly and contorted and her hands are claws that dig into his shoulders. He loves her so hard right now he dares not think of it. Knows he must not, will not hurt her.

Inside, she’s so hot it burns him, burns all through him. Makes it so everything he touches burns him, even air. Him dying from it, that will be all right.

No, not all right. It will be beautiful, more beautiful than he can ever say. So beautiful to die from how his Katherine burns him.

“Be still,” he tells her.

“I am.”

“Be still inside, too.”

“I can’t. Can’t be still there anymore.”

Her face twists up and her whole body arches hard and quick, like some animal hit in the road. Her eyes fly wide open and she stares at him like she might kill him to get all of him she wants. Wants him that bad. Wants Danny.

And he is made of glass that’s going to shatter. Sees outside the window that bright star, knows it must fall because he can feel inside himself the arc it’s going to make, how it will burn.

All stars must fall into place.

All.

Right.

Now.

T
HEN IT
’
S OVER
. H
IS
head rests against her breast and he is in a strange and unknown world where he has everything he’s ever wanted. He stays a long time there, afraid to move. Her body is this new world’s hills and valleys and his breath’s a breeze on her moist skin to cool her.

He runs a finger down her belly and she squirms beneath it.

“Want to.” Her words come slurred inside a whisper.

Truly, his heart stops beating. He draws her close to him again. “Me too.”

This time is different. As are the rest, each from the others. Different in the way all clouds are different. Or all people. Or all fingerprints. He knows that that’s the way of it, no two will ever be the same.

At last, when Danny’s bright star has become the morning star, he folds her in his arms and gazes at her face until she sleeps. Knows this is how he’ll hold her all his days.

S
HE LIES IN THE LOFT
,
WITH THE NOON SUN HIGH AND A FLY BUZZING
at the window to get out. She has slept much too late. She has not gone to the garden. She is sore and sticky and her mouth feels bruised and swollen. The quilts, her gown, her body, the entire loft, maybe the whole cabin, the surrounding forest, reek of their lovemaking. Irrelevant, all of it, this morning’s word to live by. Irrelevant when weighed against all that took place in last night’s darkness, how she wants it all again. Irrelevant against this morning’s fact she did not wake—will never again wake—alone.

He’s downstairs doing something with the stove that makes its iron eyes clank, a warlike sound if you’re not the one making it. Frying something. Fish. And she wants him so soon again. Wants him beyond shame. Even beyond hunger—the fish smells awfully good. Wants to lie up here and think about the night before, relive it, revel in it, wallow in it. Until he comes back and starts it all again.

In one night he’s made her thoroughly a whore. She wants him, this boy, even though she can’t remember what he looks like, can remember only that he looks like what he is, barely out of his teens. Beyond that it’s bits and pieces. His scraggly beard that day in the courthouse park, not sun-bleached like his hair but red, the color of his pubic hair. His eyes, how their clear gray films over in desire. Thin lips, a mouth that tastes of mint. A body leaner than hers, stronger. That’s all. Not someone she could pick out in a crowd.

Or want to.

But that doesn’t matter, none of it. What he looks like is just one more irrelevance; she knows all of him she needs.

Because that’s what it is. A need, like food or water. No, like air. She’s never known a need so strong, her mommy’s little good girl who never once did anything she shouldn’t have, who made Phi Beta Kappa and learned how to draw so very fine. Oh, there are many explanations for why she squirms down in the quilts, wants him before she’s even washed herself. But they all pale beside the strength of her desire itself. Last night. Some things. Things he did to her, or made her do, or that she did unbidden. Shameful things she wants to do again—her mind lingers on them, even as it wants to move away. In less than twelve hours he has changed her into someone she no longer knows. Dazed, disgusting, disquieting. Someone who begs, “Please, please, don’t stop; don’t ever stop,” as tears run down her face.

Before last night she could not have imagined it. That she, that anyone, might find themselves so thoroughly, exquisitely alive.

Beyond that, what does she feel for him? She doesn’t know, perhaps doesn’t want to know. She was right that evening by the pond, there are great gifts in everything. For now that’s enough. She rises, slips on her gown, smooths it over her bruised body imagining his hands, and descends barefoot from the loft.

He is standing at the stove, his back to her, wearing only the wrinkled linen pants that were the white thread in her weaving. His shoulder blades stick out like wings on a bird too young for feathers, bird far too young to fly. His youth, the pale skin of his back, repulse her: that she has done such things with someone still a boy and that this boy
has mentored her. She stands quiet a moment, so she can know that seed of distaste nested deep in her desire, how one feeds the other, makes it grow.

He senses her and turns. “Morning.”

“Afternoon.”

“Whatever.”

That deep voice that always catches her off guard. He gives a lazy smile and looks her up and down, seems older now despite his innocent white back, more assured than even yesterday. Older than she herself. The daddy.

She comes up behind him, circles her arms around his waist, pulls him against her.

“Watch it. The grease.”

“Sorry.” She backs away, her breath unsteady.

“It’s almost ready.” He turns to face her, nods toward the table in the front room. “Sit down. There.”

He looks at her differently than yesterday. If he were to look at her that way on a street somewhere, a street with other people, she would die of shame for how it makes her want him.

He slides a perfectly fried fish onto her plate, adds to it sliced tomatoes. If she reaches out, touches his hand, his arm, it doesn’t count. He has to be the one. This boy young enough to be her son.

He eats his fish and watches her eat hers. Watches her jaw grow slack from wanting him, until she has to gouge the tiny bones out from the sides of her mouth with her fingers.

“When did you get them?” Can’t steady her voice.

“I set the lines last night. Checked them this morning before you got up, and there they were. You like yours?”

She nods. Wants him with fish bones dropping from her mouth.
Oh, God, please let him touch me
.

She lays her left hand on the table, flat, and doesn’t look at it. He reaches out, traces along her finger bones.

“Want to.” She can hardly mouth the words.

“Eat your fish. And wash your hands after.”

His voice sounds harsh, and yet he smiles at her. His eyes are filled with light.

A
ND THIS IS HOW
it is and will be, the sun so bright on everything it touches, the darkness a soft feather bed, and never anything to keep Danny and Katherine apart. Chores left undone, quick, guilty visits to the garden, kindling split in a race with the setting sun. Always knowing nothing matters but the two of them together.

How they devour it—there is no better word. She thinks of nothing else but him, the two of them together. Are they the only ones to ever live this way? Surely they must be. If they were the norm, societies, economies, whole nations would disintegrate. No one to teach the children, heal the sick, collect the garbage—they’re all home in bed screwing their brains out.

She’s changed, she feels it. How can anyone live constantly in such a heightened state and not be? She brought no mirror, thinking she would not live long enough to need it. One afternoon she tears herself away from him while he is sleeping, makes her way down to the pond to see her face reflected in its dark, still water. Sleepy, half-lidded eyes, a soft, complacent mouth—her very features cause her to desire him, that he has done these things to her and that it will continue. She runs her hands across her breasts and down her belly. Thinks how he sleeps always with one hand between her legs.

“I was afraid of sleep when I got back,” he’s told her. “I’d wake in the dark and not know where I was. Now when I wake up I always know—I’m here with you. You don’t mind, do you?”

“No, it’s all right.”

“Yeah.”

And so she wants him even in her dreams.

Who is he, this boy with a man’s voice and old eyes, this boy she has let come into her life so completely? How much is there of him to know? It doesn’t matter. He and she are so alike in all the ways that count. They two in all the world have found each other, recognized each other as members of the same lost tribe. And she has emigrated with him to some wild and undiscovered country. How lucky she is, luckier than anyone who’s ever lived.

She runs back to the cabin, up the stairs, lies down beside him, presses her breasts against those sharp, white shoulder blades. Slides his hand between her legs, ashamed for doing so. Repulsion and desire. She is a goddess; she loves and is loved; compared to this, all the rest is irrelevant.

T
HEY
’
RE SITTING NAKED IN THE LOFT
,
HIS BACK TO HER
,
HER LEGS
straddling him. She is combing out the tangles in his long hair with her fingers.

“I need to go to town.”

She has put off telling him, hates to say it now, when the afternoon sun slants through the open window where the maples and the hickories are just starting to turn. When the weather is just cool enough for her to nest into his warmth, stay quiet there.

He sighs, turns. “What for?”

“Food.”

“I’ll catch more fish.”

“I want to leave a weaving at the gallery.”

The muscles tighten in his back.

“If you go, I go.” He grins, reaches around and pulls her to him. “Elsewise, somebody might steal you.”

A thrill runs through her. That he would rescue her like some prince in a fairy tale. How silly. Yet he already has. She spreads her legs farther apart and slides in firm against him. Rocks gently there until he twists around and reaches for her.

A
FTER BREAKFAST THE NEXT
morning she rolls up the one weaving she’s finished since he came, puts it in the cart, then kisses him in thirsty gulps. “Let’s get it over with.”

How used to their solitary life she’s grown. To give it up for even a day disquiets her. On the trail they travel fast and rarely speak. Just before the big bend, the last place no one can see them, they stop—simultaneously, as if they had discussed it—cling hard to each other for a moment and then move apart.

She points toward the patch of laurel below them. “My car’s down there, what’s left of it. Somebody stripped it and then bashed it all to pieces.”

He frowns. “You didn’t need to be living here alone. No telling what some folks might do.”

“For a while I was frightened they might come looking for me, but they never did.”

He studies her a moment, slides his left hand into her right back pocket, kneads her buttocks until she plants her feet and doesn’t want to move.

“Now. You put your right hand into my left back pocket. That way we’ll keep each other close, even in a crowd. I’ll always take care of you. You know that.”

The way he looks at her makes her flush, makes her feel once more that he’s the older, wiser one, this boy who’s seen so much.

“We’ll both push the cart one-handed.”

She nods, and then they’re on the dirt road headed for the highway. From here out for the whole day, even with his hand inside her pocket he will not be close enough. Already she knows this.

A truck whizzes past and she jumps back.

He pulls her to him, gives her butt a squeeze. “That truck won’t hurt you. It knows you’re with me.”

She laughs, but it’s strictly for his benefit. She is more frightened now, with him here, than when she walked this road alone. Familiar dimples in the asphalt become places she might stumble. (“Careful, watch out.”) He has made her conscious of such things, of all the ways she needs him and has all along. Needs always his hand caressing her inside the dark of her back pocket, until she feels it everywhere, in all the places where she once felt only fear and pain. Needs him like that day she needed him out in the snow, to save her very life. Needs him to turn her body into some electric thing she can’t control and doesn’t want to. If this isn’t love, she doesn’t know what is.