Burnt Mountain (32 page)

“How did you know where I live?” I whispered, the awfulness of the scene washing over me. Oh, God, Aengus…

“I looked you up in the city directory right after you left my place the other night. And I drove out and took a look. It’s
a nice place, Thay. Somehow I knew you’d live in the
trees…. I can’t see him living here, though. Anybody who could conceive of that monstrosity…”

“Grand gave the house to us,” I said. Talking hurt my chest. “It was a poem, Nick. He was using a poem to explain how the
camp got its name. The old Celtic words Tir Na Nog mean ‘the Land of Forever Young.’ He always has his students reenact things,
legends and myths and things, when he can—”

“I know Yeats, Thayer,” Nick said. I could feel him smile faintly against my chest. “Yale has a pretty fair English department.
Yeats doesn’t make it any less… ugly and brutal. If he truly didn’t know how this thing could affect the audience, not to
mention the boys, he might have considered what it would do to his wife. Jesus! I think they call it borderline personality;
I’d call it psychotic. It doesn’t matter what anybody calls it; you can’t live with that man, Thayer. If you don’t live with
me, you at least can’t live with him—”

“You don’t know anything else about him!”
I almost screamed it at him.
“You don’t know how he’s always been with me….”

“I don’t need to know anything else about him,” he said softly.

“Oh, Nick.” I wept, drained and lost. “I’m so cold. I feel so dirty.”

“Come here, love. Come with me,” he said, almost whispering.

I let him pull me up off the rumpled bed and walk me into the bathroom with his arms around me. I stood still, trembling,
as he unzipped the white linen sheath I’d worn
and slid me out of my underthings. His hands were warm and sure. I closed my eyes. I thought that it had almost felt like
this when my father had helped me get ready for my bath. Almost…

Warm water sluiced over me, and I abandoned myself to it. I stood, eyes closed, as it soaked my hair and engulfed my body.
He simply held me still and let me receive the water. Pretty soon I felt a bath sponge full of creamy soap and bubbles start
gently over my body, and leaned backward in one of his arms as the other washed me gently, gently, all over. Not until he
turned off the shower and said, “Okay, now step out,” did I open my eyes and look at him. He was dressed in his seersucker
pants and his white shirt, unbuttoned, with its cuffs rolled up; the front of him was soaking wet. His dark hair was pasted
damply over his face.

I got out and stood on my bath rug, naked and almost unaware that I was. The terrible shivering had stopped. I felt, simply,
steamy warm and as scrubbed clean as a child. My knees buckled, but I smiled at him and he smiled back.

“Feel better?” he said.

“Yes. When did you get that chipped tooth fixed?”

“The minute I got home from camp my father had me in the dentist’s office. When did you get those boobs?”

“When I got…,” I started, and then stopped. Not there. I would not go there with Nick Abrams.

He knew, though. He stood still, his finger tracing my breasts very, very softly. My knees almost gave way. I knew that finger,
that brown hand. I had known it first….

“But you didn’t have it,” he whispered. He knew that, too.

My eyes closed again.

“No. My mother took me to a doctor…. He said… It was so early, Nick…. He said it was… damaged….”

“It wasn’t… his,… then.”

I could not see his face; I would not open my eyes to see his face. “No. This was… right after we left camp….”

After a long silence, he said, “Did you want it, Thay?”

I nodded my head, feeling the hot tears roll again down my cheeks.

“I wanted it more than anything. More than anything. I’d never have let them take it, no matter what, but the doctor said…
he said I needed hydrating and he put a needle in my arm and when I came to it was… just gone. And then I got an infection
and I was awfully sick for a long time and after I got well I found out I couldn’t… not anymore….”

“And all this time I was calling and your mother was telling me you didn’t want to see me and that you’d moved away. Your
mother…”

“I guess so.”

“May God damn her to hell,” Nick said without any inflection.

“Aengus didn’t care,” I sobbed. “He said we’d adopt. And I didn’t think I’d ever see you again….”

I looked at him then. His face was contorted with pain, and tears ran down his brown face. I could not bear his pain. It was
worse by far than any I remembered feeling.

He took my robe from the hook on the back of the bathroom door and slid it around me. I turned into his arms and simply laid
myself against him, letting him take my full
weight. I wanted to absorb this pain, all of it… the tears; the anger…. I wanted them to seep back into my body from his.
I wanted his grief for that child that never was to come back into me. I thought, I cannot let him hold the pain of a child
that wasn’t and my own pain, too. He can’t carry
that.
He still held me closely, but I could feel that his muscles had gone slack and heavy.

“I’m mostly over it,” I said into his neck. “I do all right with it now.”

“Oh, God, sweetheart,” he whispered, “I am so sorry.” He picked me up and carried me into the bedroom and put me down on the
bed and pulled the covers over me. He sat down beside me.

“We’ll have a baby, you and I,” he said softly, smiling at me. It was his old smile, slow and full. “There are more ways than
one, you know. But you’ll have to decide what you want before we can… I’m sorry, baby, but that will have to happen.”

I began to shake my head back and forth, in sheer fatigue.

“I don’t expect you to decide tonight, but it’s something that you’ll have to settle with yourself. Do you think you’ll be
able to do that? I can walk away from you if I have to. If that’s what you want. But I can’t come back again if I do. You
know that, don’t you?”

“I know that.”

“You go to sleep then. I’ll stay right here beside you till morning. I have to be in Macon by noon to get a project started….
It’s a big one or I’d cancel, but I’ll be back late
tomorrow night and you don’t have to see him until Saturday, do you? I’ll come back tomorrow night and stay….”

I could feel sleep taking me down like a riptide. I put out my hand and he took it and I whispered, “Thank you,” and he whispered
back, “Sleep tight, baby,” and I slid far down where nothing but his breathing could reach me.

T
he light from the skylight beat directly down on my face when I woke. I knew that it was mid-morning. I knew, too, eyes still
shut tight, that Nick had been here beside me all night. I reached over and touched the bedcovers on the other side of the
bed; they were rumpled. If I looked over it would be the imprint of his body that I saw.

I sat up and looked around the room. Everything was in order; even the clothes that I had worn to the amphitheater last night
had been put away. There was no sign of anyone, not even me. But the entire room pulsed with Nick. We had not made love, however;
I remembered that.

Not yet, he had said.

Was I sorry?

Yes.

Could I make the choice he had told me I needed to make? No. Not yet. Dear God, not yet.

Then when? Ever?

I was suddenly sick of it all. I wanted my ordinary life back. I needed normalcy as I needed food to eat and water to drink.
I am not going to think about any of this until tomorrow, at least, I thought. I am going to clean the house and go into work
this afternoon and maybe call Lily and see what she and Goose have been doing. Maybe I’ll even ask them up over the weekend.
That way I won’t have to talk to Aengus about anything much, at least for a while, and maybe by then I’ll know what I need
to do next. I think it’s a pretty safe bet we aren’t going to the beach, though. In the meantime, I’ll call Carol and see
if she’d like—

Then I stopped. Carol would know about last night by now. About Chris and Ben, half-naked and gilded with paint in homemade
chariots, holding up severed heads that dripped fake blood onto the stage before five hundred people. And about Aengus, keening
to the sky about gods with their hair afire, who had led them there.

I doubted that Carol would be eager to talk to me. I went in to make coffee and found a note on the counter, weighted down
with a Yale money clip. There was a telephone number scrawled on it.

“Call if you need me,” it said. “Don’t go up there till I’m back. We need to talk.”

For some reason it annoyed me.

“The one I need to talk to is Aengus,” I said to the note. “I owe it to him to find out what he was thinking with that stuff
last night. It could have just been… a benign idea that didn’t work like he thought it would, or… something. We
don’t know what he had in mind. I’m going to call him. I should have done it last night.”

He should have called you last night, Nick’s voice said in my head.

“Shut up,” I said aloud, and sat down on the counter stool and dialed the number for Coltrane College. I glanced at the wall
clock. Eleven thirty. He would be supervising sophomore English class now. I knew that I should wait until lunch break, but
I didn’t.

A woman’s voice I did not know answered. It was not Patricia, who usually manned the central Coltrane line. This voice sounded
younger and was thick with an accent I could not quite decipher.

“Dr. O’Neill, please,” I said. “I think he’s in sophomore English now, but I really need to talk to him….”

“Docker O’Neee?”

“Dr. O’Neill. Aengus O’Neill. This is his wife.”

“You wait pliss.” I heard papers ruffling.

“We got no Docker O’Neely.”

“Oh, for… Can you ring Dr. Thornton for me?”

Craig Thornton was the school’s vice president and a close friend of Big Jim’s. We had met him on several occasions.

“Craig Thornton,” his no-nonsense voice said when the new receptionist finally managed to ring his number.

“Craig, this is Thayer O’Neill, Aengus’s wife,” I said.

“Well, Thayer, what a nice surprise.”

“I hate to bother you in the middle of the day, but I really do need to speak to Aengus, and I wasn’t having much luck with
your new receptionist. I wonder if you could…”

For some reason I stopped. For a long time he did not reply. Finally I said, “Craig?”

“Thayer, Aengus hasn’t worked here for the past three weeks,” he said in an oddly formal voice. “He left us on a Friday without
notice. I thought surely you knew….”

“No. No problem, though. Thanks,” I said brightly and stupidly, and hung up.

I sat at the counter for a long time, holding the phone and staring out into the blazing flower borders of the backyard. Finally
I put the phone down and picked up Nick’s note and started to dial the number he had written on it and then pushed it away.
Then I picked up the phone again and got midway through Carol’s number and hung up. There seemed no one right to tell.

The number for Camp Forever was written on the wall calendar that hung over the phone mount. It was scrawled in big red Magic
Marker strokes, in Aengus’s hand. It had been there most of the summer.

I did not dial it.

I went into my bathroom and splashed cold water on my face and then looked into the mirror over the vanity. In the dim light
I looked back at myself. It was a much younger me than now. Me just out of a cold lake, shaking water drops from my hair and
smiling a smile of pure joy. Joy given, still unearned.

Young. Young.

I knew that if I could see just a bit further into the mirror I would see Nick Abrams, smiling back at me.

I whirled and ran out of the bathroom and lowered the
blinds in the bedroom and curled up in the middle of the bed again, and pulled the still-rumpled covers up over me. I was
asleep in less than a minute. When I woke again, the sun had slid past the skylight and rich late-afternoon light washed over
me. Nothing in this blazing, barren day had touched me. Suddenly it seemed the silence would kill me. I would choke on it,
smother under it. I needed a voice in my ear like blood in my veins, it hardly mattered whose.

I was midway through dialing Carol when I heard her voice behind me and turned to meet her. She was coming in from the veranda,
dragging a white-faced, protesting Bummer with her, and her face was terrible to see.

“Carol!” I cried, starting toward her, my arms out. “My God, what…”

She was gasping so she could hardly speak. Her face was slack and paper white, and her eyes were enormous and red rimmed.

“Can you take Bummer?” she managed to get out. “Can you keep him for a little while? I have to go… I have to go…”

She doubled over my kitchen counter and I caught her with one arm and put the other around Bummer. He nestled into me like
a small animal, a pet dog or cat.

“Sit down before you fall and tell me!” I cried.

Her yellow head was down on the counter, and she shook it back and forth. “Can you take Bummer? Can you?”

“Of course. Now sit up! I’m going to pour you a splash of bourbon—”