Flashback (7 page)

She turned and fled.

As she ran from the house, Denise sagged against the kitchen table with a gesture speaking of great tiredness, and her gaze travelled to the quiet man in front of her. There was no expression on his face, and she asked him, “And what are you thinking now, Mr. Raymond?”

Pale himself, he looked at the door that Dana had slipped out of, and he said softly, “I’m thinking that I wish I hadn’t had to force the situation.” He turned his head and looked at her, and though his face was devoid of feeling she caught her breath at the depth of emotion in his eyes, feeling for a fleeting second a hint of what her daughter had felt her entire life. “I’m thinking that I’d better follow her, to make sure she’s all right.”

But Denise shook her head. “No, I think you’d better give her a moment or two to calm down a bit, please. Give yourself time to calm down, too. If you get near her in a state that is anything but calm, you’ll do her more harm than good. She needs time to breathe—may I call you David? Good. I don’t suppose you’re going to tell me just why you are so involved in this, are you?” She smiled, unsurprised as he shook his head wryly. “I didn’t think so. I’ll just have to trust Grace’s judgment, then. Oh, yes, I’d known that she had figured out something near to the truth when my husband died but until now everything has been better left unsaid. I hope you will be careful with Dana, whatever it is that you have to say to her. I hope that you are the kind of person to handle this kind of dangerous knowledge with wisdom and that you won’t exploit her, like so many people would. She’s been very sheltered.”

David just looked at the ground, his dark head bent, and something about his solid, broad shoulders and the look on his face made her relax even before he said, “Mrs. Haslow, I hope you can tell how sincere I am when I say that the last thing in the world I’d want to do is hurt your daughter, or anyone else.” His quick eyes flickered up to hers with a glimmer of smile in their dark chocolate depths, and as invulnerable as she knew herself to be to that sort of thing, Denise couldn’t help an involuntary smile back at him. He was a very attractive man. “And with your permission, I think I’d like to try to find your daughter now. I’m a bit worried about her.”

She found herself nodding. But as he started immediately for the door, she called after him, “I don’t believe you’re going to have any success, though. There’s a lot of wood out there, and Dana knows every inch of it. She won’t be found unless she wants to be found.”

The back door swung shut and if he’d answered, it was lost in the slam of wood against hard wood.

The further that Dana travelled, the easier she was able to breathe. She still found herself trembling with dread and with something else. That tension inside of her was not just a wire pulled tight, but a shakingly delicate state of being. Anything touching that wire would, she thought, make it snap and then where would she be? Falling down into the pit? And what did the pit hold, craziness? Oblivion? An impenetrable depression?

She didn’t want to know.

She climbed up a rising slope, having left any discernible path, and clambered up the rising ground until she reached the top of the hill and then she struck south, moving easily. The blue skies of summer hummed serenely above her with the sounds of living things. A jackdaw scolded, a squirrel chattered, and something rustled busily in the nearby bushes. She’d apparently walked too close, for a rabbit’s composure broke, and he bounded from his cover in a silly, mindless panic, big eyes staring and ears twitching madly as great long feet thumped him away from the suspected danger. Stupid, cute little thing, she thought, watching him disappear. She smiled and continued on her way. If either her mother or David came after her, they wouldn’t be able to find her. There was too much ground to cover and this was not one of her haunts that she was known to frequent, which was precisely why she’d picked it. She cleared the trees, having come to a grassy clearing, and she sank to her knees. Only her head and shoulders were above the long, tangled green strands. The sun pulsed down, she could nearly hear its beating, it was so palpable. She let her muscles relax, feeling incredibly weary. Emotional states are so hard to sustain, and when she caught the lash of another’s upheaval, it always would wring her dry inside.

She took a deep, easy breath, as if she was lacking oxygen. All of her life she’d lived in as much of a cocoon as her parents could weave around her. She felt so stifled suddenly she could barely breathe, and she yearned intensely to go out and experience life with gusto. And yet for her it was like a moth’s attraction for deadly, beautiful flames. It could kill her if she succumbed to it. So she stood outside of the magic circle, not knowing the incantation that would get her in, watching achingly while life and her own youth slipped by like water trickling through fingers, wistfully wanting to be near people but unable to be near them. How balanced would she be if she happened to befriend someone with suicidal tendencies? What would happen if she got psychically involved with someone like that and became so empathetic that she would die also? Would she become totally unbalanced and commit suicide in the midst of another person’s depression? It was the rhetorical question of her life, and one she dared not find the answers to.

She huddled into a small bundle. It was so close, like that black pit, so very close…

“May I join you?” David asked, his voice coming from behind her. Her head snapped up. Strange, to feel surprise. She rarely got surprises of that sort.

“How on earth did you know where to find me, for Heaven’s sake?” she asked, unable to keep the astonishment out of her voice. Grass rustle. He dropped easily down beside her.

“So you occasionally miss with that radar of yours?” he asked in return, smiling at her. She mentally sniffed at the air, finding a soothing lack of turbulence. She relaxed.

“It’s by no means infallible. I can’t control it or direct it very well. Either it happens with a person or it doesn’t and never will. Alack and alas, I can’t even block it.” She drew in a deep breath then, amazed at herself.

“Please don’t be distressed because I know,” he said carefully, and she knew he was trying to be gentle for her sake. “I won’t do anything to hurt you. I know it must be very frightening at times for you, and hard. If you’d rather just take a little time to adjust to me knowing about it, we can just be quiet, or I could leave. I don’t want to upset you. I just came to see if you were all right.”

She smiled at him at that, incredibly touched, and saw him stare with an arrested look. But before she could wonder at what he was feeling, the look was wiped away as carefully and as cleanly as someone clearing a slate. She in turn stared. It seemed he was very good at control, then. “You haven’t told me how you found me,” she reminded him. “Did I do something incredibly obvious, like track mud or white paint?”

A flash of amusement at that, barely shown but swiftly caught by her, like a tossed ball. “No. I don’t know. I just started to randomly search around. Intuition, I suppose.” At her stare, he had to chuckle, a rumbling sound in his chest. “An odd word to someone like you, I’ll bet. No, nothing came down out of the sky like a lightning bolt. I simply wandered around, and hit on you by luck.”

“I—see. Oh, I see what you mean. Yes, it’s a bit hard for me to believe in a vague thing like luck when it’s more definite for me. I guess I’m continually surprised when other people don’t sense the things that I do.” Her eyes fell away and she reached out to pluck absently at the grass. The harshness of the green strands slit into her skin slightly. “It’s lonely.”

His hand came out quickly at that and took hold of hers, and after the first startled jump, she let her stiff fingers relax in his warm grip. “Would it help to talk about it?” he asked quietly. “All of that input into that small body and hardly anyone to listen to the output…”

Her vision blurred and the leaf she’d been concentrating on vanished into water. “I don’t know.” It was a quickly whispered, almost ashamed admission. His fingers tightened.

“Grace told me that you must have felt it when she fell down the stairs. Did you feel her pain, or did you hear her cry out with your mind? How did you know?” he asked her, and she glanced at him with something like apprehension.

“You—you don’t disbelieve any of this, do you? I mean, you really think this is real. You aren’t laughing at me?” She couldn’t for some strange and perverse reason sense anything from him right at the moment, and she felt the frustration of knowing that when she wanted to she couldn’t seem to force her extra sense to work, while at other times she couldn’t get it to stop.

“I’d like to,” he replied, after a hesitation. “It would be more comfortable for me if I could. But I have too much respect for that picture you drew and for Grace’s observations, and your own mother’s utter and familiar certainty. And mostly I respect those painfully honest eyes you’re turning on me right at the moment. I most seriously believe you.”

She sighed and felt the weight of a life-long fear slip off her slim shoulders. “I’ve always been afraid that if someone were to find out about me, they would scoff. You see, it’s something so utterly and immediately—there to me. It’s my reality.”

He picked up her train of thought easily, and it was as if they were old friends instead of two people just getting to know one another. “And no one likes to have their version of reality ridiculed. Trusting someone’s opinion is a dying trait in this world, I’m afraid.” His fingers played with hers idly, and she flushed at the intimate contact, furious at herself for flushing and still unable to help it. She suddenly remembered her agitation when he’d been so close a short time ago, and suddenly the age-old premise that she’d been leaning on was not so sure anymore as she realised that the unfamiliar emotion was coming from herself and not him.

“I’m sorry I blurted out what I did on Thursday,” she offered hesitantly. “If it had been anyone but Grace, I would have just died—”

He interrupted her. “Forget it. It’s understandable, now that I know a little better about what goes on in that little head of yours.”

“Forgivable, too, I hope.”

“As long as you forgive my unpleasantness,” he returned, and she heard the smile in his voice.

She smiled involuntarily, echoing his words to her, “It’s understandable. Forget it. There’s nothing to forgive.” A bird winged by overhead and she lifted her head to stare up after it. The sun was full in her eyes as she looked straight up and for a split instant all she was aware of was golden white blindness, the downward beat of the summer warmth, a hand whose strength she could guess at by the very carefulness by which it was cradling hers, and the fresh smell of green, growing grass. Then she looked down and the world shifted back into visual awareness.

David was asking her, “That night we first met, did you sense me in the trees or did I somehow make a noise you heard? I could have sworn that I was being quiet and was very surprised when you knew I was there. I’d wanted to watch you to find out if you’d had dishonourable intentions towards the house, and I was planning a few nasty surprises of my own.”

Dana looked at the grass right in front of her, where a beetle was assiduously and earnestly climbing up a long thin blade of grass. The grass bent, and the beetle fell to the ground. It picked itself up and started to blindly climb again, this time on a different blade of grass. She wondered where it was going to, or if it even knew. “I didn’t hear you,” she said quietly.

“And you weren’t afraid?” His tone was strange. She looked at him quickly and found him, not watching her as she’d suspected, but looking off into the wood as if he would see some answer to a vitally important question. He looked tired, and she realised that many of the lines on his face were from exhaustion, not age. He couldn’t be much older than thirty-five or so. It didn’t seem old to her. And she wondered with a bit of a jolt if she’d ever been young.

“No,” she said, and this time the quietness in her voice was firm. “There was nothing in that night that would have hurt me.” She felt him relax and tried to guess at what she’d said to reassure him. Her eyes travelled to her hand, clasped in his. “Do you know,” she said, almost at random, “how fascinating mythology can be?” His attention caught, he turned his head to look at her, trying to figure out the change of subject. “I’ve just reread the myth of Eurydice and Orpheus. Do you know it? I’ve always been struck at how he travelled all the way to Hades just to bring her back to life, because he loved her so.” Her eyes filmed over with dreaminess and she whispered musingly. “It seems everybody gets to some version of hell, some time in their life. I guess it’s just that some of them make it back.”

It was as if she’d struck him, he was so still. And suddenly she was overwhelmed with the desire to get away from him, from everyone, and just be alone. She was so unused to having someone look at her exposure. She tugged her hand away and stood abruptly. “I’m sorry,” she said to him, voice slightly unsteady. His head had jerked up. She backed away. “Excuse me. I don’t mean anything personal about this, it’s just—just—I need to be by myself…” She looked at him pleadingly, and something in his eyes softened. “I know you wanted to talk, but c—could we leave it right now?”

He just smiled a queer, twisted smile and said quietly, “You need time. You weren’t expecting anything like this, were you?” He hesitated. “Who am I to say one way or another, after all? You don’t mind me knowing, do you?”

“I guess I do,” she said uncertainly. “But it’s not anything we have any control over anymore, is it? I—what was it you wanted to talk about, anyway?”