Abduction (13 page)

Even before she could dismiss those ridiculous thoughts she was filled with anxiety, dull and nauseating, that he had found something. A pack, a piece of clothing.

Even a body. Some sign that Conrad was close by, that he had followed her. She looked, dreading, into the void where Vaughn's eyes told her to look.

Then she heard it, over the thudding that came from inside her. A faint chorus of tiny whimpers. Like puppies. Then she saw it—a little spot of sunlight on a tiny grayish paw deep in the shadows of the hollow side of the hidden hill. And then, as her eyes focused to the proper depth and adjusted to the dimness, she saw a huddled mass of little furry bodies wriggling about. Vaughn turned back to see if she had seen. The look on his face was so innocently happy it almost hurt her, and she forced a small smile to show him she had seen the hidden treasure he had shown her. Quickly and quietly, then, they left.

He knew he had frightened her. He had touched her arm almost without thinking, and when it seemed she was about to scream, he'd put his hand to her mouth on instinct. He'd only wanted to quiet her without speaking, to keep their presence a secret from the mother wolf who had to be nearby. When he'd seen how frightened, how terrified she was, the only thing he could think of to calm her was to let her see why, why he had taken her arm that way, in a moment of careless excitement. But when she'd seen, she hadn't softened into childlike joy, as he had. She had put on a rigid little smile. For him. But he had seen. Looking in on that little scene, those tiny pups nestled and squirming had made her…wretched. Her reaction was, for him, one of those moments when someone surprises us to the point that our understanding of human nature, of the world around us, is shaken.

"Wolves?" she asked when they'd left the little den far behind, trying to seem normal, knowing how oddly she'd acted.

"Mmmhmm."

"What about the mother?"

"Somewhere close."

Later that night she noticed him looking at her strangely.

"What?" she asked softly.

"Sorry." He smiled abashedly, feeling ashamed to have been caught staring. "I was just thinking about earlier."

"Earlier?"

"In the woods. Wondering what you were thinking when we saw those cubs."

She looked at him a moment, not wanting to pretend she'd been enchanted, not wanting to lie and say, "I was thinking how little and adorable they were," but knowing how peculiar her actual thoughts, her real reaction had been.

"When I noticed them I wanted to show them to you, you know, because I thought you'd be excited. But when I looked over you looked so…sad."

"I guess," she started softly, feeling that same wave of sadness come over her again, "when I saw them there, so tiny, so helpless, and I felt myself there, so close, and I thought, I won't hurt them, but someone else could have just as easily found them there, their mother gone, and killed them all. Even cruelly. And then I thought, even I, if I were just very slightly different—in a different frame of mind, different circumstances, maybe even I might do something terrible to something so small and fragile. It was just one of those moments where I feel afraid of myself, of people."

He went cold and weak at her words that echoed so closely his own fear of himself, with her.

On the fourth day, after lunch, Vaughn set off for a walk in the woods. Anything to get out of the cabin and away from her. The day before he couldn’t bear the idea of her alone in the cabin, but today he could not bear to be alone with her. As he left he passed her, sitting on the back porch, nose buried among the yellowing pages of Dostoyevsky's Siberia.

Devan closed the book and sealed Raskolnikov's fate. The moment she stopped reading, her gaze and her mind went to the forest, after Vaughn, back to Conrad. With the thought of Conrad a flood of images washed over her: him forcing her spread her 111

legs; his hand slipping into her panties; his face, challenging, incredibly resolved; the night he had kissed her; those other men, the way they had held her down, the look on Conrad's face as the blond one had held him back…

"Fuck!"

Devan jumped up, her vision bleared with tears.

Another book. She needed another book. Charging back inside, she stared for a few minutes at the rows of worn paperback spines, then settled on Camus. She glanced at the couch, but at this moment she could not bear the close darkness of the cabin that reminded her of that other cabin. She went back outside to try to shake her misery in the crisp air and bright sun, and plunged into the fresh mirage of her new book.

Given Vaughn's usual lone wolf habits, Devan was surprised when, an hour or so later, he came and sat down by her on the porch as he returned from his walk.
The
Stranger
lay open on her thigh since she had fallen into contemplation, gazing across the clearing at the bordering trees.

"I'm beginning to see a pattern in your choice of reading material," Vaughn said, glancing from the book to her eyes.

"It's hard to get one's fill of murdering sociopaths."

She found herself throwing a glance toward the woods. With his eyes still on her she felt caught out, and tried to cover her embarrassment with chatter, her words flowing from the stream of thoughts Vaughn had interrupted when he'd joined her.

"It’s so rare for me to be in a place like this, really in nature."

She paused, and then, a few moments later, picked up again with an absentminded air.

"I forget sometimes how artificial my daily environment is. Everything paved.

Everything clean. Water, food, everything always there when I need it. So easy. But it’s kind of like being an animal in the zoo. Walking around on concrete, sleeping in a little shelter, being fed my three meals every day, but so separated from the real world, the natural environment. Totally cut off from a life of instinct and physicality and survival.

Just performing my little human tricks every day, keeping the trainers happy and the visitors amused. It all seems so trivial at times."

Devan was thinking out loud. Trying, as always, to put Vaughn a little at ease, to comfort herself with the sound of voices in the long, silent voids of their confinement together. Vaughn was quiet beside her.

He wanted to talk with her. It was so rare to just sit down with someone and talk.

Exchange thoughts. It was always band business. Or schmoozing—those demoralizing interactions that were all small talk and fake smiles. He wanted to say, yes, he had thought those same thoughts, that he often felt he was a creature bred in captivity and forced to live in conditions utterly inimical to his nature. But the lies and the omissions were an impenetrable force field between them. He wanted it gone.

"What were you singing?" He didn't sound angry, exactly.

She realized, instantly flooded with regret, that she had been singing aloud.

Softly, but audibly.

"I don't know, I just…"

"That's the song I've been writing."

She felt like a thief.

It wasn't what you'd call a catchy tune. The melody was too complex. But there was something in the arduous progression of notes that had captured Devan's imagination as she heard them filing out one by one and leaping up in groups from the strings of his guitar and scattering in the air. Later, after he had set the guitar aside, she caught him humming the tune, end to end, over and over, under his breath. The powerful feeling she had gotten from the notes sung by the instrument was overwhelming from his body. The resonant sounds in his throat, on his lips, filled her with melancholy and, at the same time, made her ache sweetly.

When had the words begun to take shape in her mind? She couldn't have said, but they were there, clear, inevitable, as if they had been part of the song all along. Now when she heard the notes flying off the strings of the guitar, or resonating in his mouth, she heard the imagined lyrics as distinctly as if he were singling them.

"I know. I'm sorry. It sticks with me, I guess. I didn't realize I was humming it out loud." As usual when she was nervous she was speaking too quickly.

"You weren't humming. You were singing."

He came closer. She shrank back a little.

"Sing it again."

"What?" Her face went hot.

"If you don't mind, sing it again."

"Oh. I can't. I can't sing, my voice is awful."

"No it isn't."

"No, really, I can't sing."

He smiled a little.

"All right. Just tell me, what was the line here?" He hummed a few notes.

"A bruising beating of wings," she whispered, blushing, eyes cast down.

"And here?" He gave her the next few bars.

"Slender shadows steal up, cold hands with smooth skin."

"Right," he said wistfully, maybe to himself.

He was looking at her strangely. A studying, measuring gaze. Then he smiled softly, almost warmly—a look different from the coolly patient grin he had given her a moment earlier.

"I've been killing myself trying to write the lyrics for this song," he confessed, still regarding her rather oddly. "Usually, you know, lyrics come to me, no problem. Half the time, actually, I get the lyrics before the music. But with this song, nothing."

"They'll come to you, don't you think?"

"I think they came to you."

She flushed again.

"Would you mind writing them down for me?"

"Write them?"

"Since you're being so obstinate about singing," he said with a teasing grin.

"Sure. All right."

He gave her a pen and a sheet of paper and she sat down at the dining table to write. The words appeared, line by line, start to finish, without a second's hesitation.

When she had finished he took it up from the table. He gave her a long, penetrating look. Then he read.

As he took in each word, each line, he felt deeply the feelings of her phrases, and it was as if this was her thing—a poem intimately hers yet made for the music he had been writing since arriving at the cabin. It was a thing of fragile, dark beauty. And in those lines he felt something inside of him answering her. He lifted his eyes from her words to her face.

"You're a poet."

She blushed.

"Really, Devan. This is…impressive. Very evocative. You did write it?"

"Yes."

"May I have this?" he asked, holding up the sheet of paper lined with her tight, slanted pen.

"Sure."

"Mind if I try it? With the music?"

"No."

To her mind they belonged together—those words and those notes. The words would never have come to her on their own; they had been brought to her by the music.

Practically all her life she had written poetry—rather decent poetry, she sometimes thought. But seeing those words in ink on paper, they were cold, dead things. Inert without the sustaining energy of his melody.

He sat on the hearth, took up his guitar, and played, humming the notes as his eyes roamed over the page marked with her writing. Then he started over, from the 116

beginning, and sang her lyrics. Hearing those words, her words, heavy with unnamed pain and hope, warming in his throat, brought to life on his lips, taking flight on his voice, she felt almost as though she were being physically touched. It was, in some incomprehensible way, one of the most intimate things she had ever experienced.

After dinner that night Devan watched as Vaughn poured himself a drink, and asked if she might have one, too.

"Sure."

She rose and started toward the kitchen.

"Sit down," he said in his usual manner, terse but gentle, his voice large and soft and low all at once. "I’ll bring it to you."

She sat back down on the floor before the fire, and leaned against the base of the couch. A moment later he was standing over her, handing her a glass.

"What is it?"

"Whiskey on the rocks."

She tried it tentatively and winced.

"Not much of a drinker, are you?"

"No, not really."

He smiled his wan smile, then went to the kitchen and returned with a can of cola.

"Maybe like this," he said, pouring until the fizz almost overflowed the rim.

She tasted and smiled approvingly.

They sat quietly by the fire, sipping their drinks, she on the floor, he on the sofa.

When her glass was finally empty he took it from her and went to the kitchen to make a second round.

"Here you are, my dear," he pronounced chivalrously as he handed her the whiskey and cola.

His words were sunnier than his tone. He was half-heartedly playing at being gallant, unconsciously trying to make up for how cold he had been to her, to paint over days of dark thoughts with a fresh coat of kindness. And, though he would only half-admit it to himself, he felt like talking. After a moment of indecision he sat down, not on the sofa, but on the floor, next to her.

Feeling flushed and sleepy from the first drink, she held the second untouched on her thigh. He was so close now. A small fear fluttered in her chest and an aching arousal followed the throbs radiating out to her limbs. Glancing at his arm, bent on the cushion beside her, she was surprised once again at its size, at how muscular it seemed, at the smooth milky whiteness of the delicate skin of his inner arm. When she glanced at his face he was looking at her and she felt embarrassed, as if he had read her thoughts. He gave her a small smile, and she nervously blurted out the first half-way appropriate thing that came to her mind.

"Being here reminds me of being a kid, and going with my friend Jenny to her family's cabin."

"Yeah?"

"Yeah. I remember hanging out by the fire in the evenings, and Jenny and I would play monopoly or scrabble or whatever. And one time, when Jenny's uncle came 118

up, they taught us poker." She laughed a little. "Jenny and I felt all grown up, playing poker with the men."

"Jenny's mom didn't play?"

"She died when Jenny was little."