In the Midnight Rain (11 page)

"Who is this?" She pointed to the girl in India cotton.

"I don't know." He took the picture, narrowing his eyes. "There was a hippie bus that got stranded, broke down completely, outside of town that summer. I don't really remember a whole lot, but there were four or five of them that stayed most of the summer. My brother thought they were total trash."

In sudden horror, Ellie wondered if Blue's brother could have been her father. That would make Blue her uncle. "How old was he?"

"About. . . fourteen or fifteen, I guess."

Whew. "Hmm." She studied the faces carefully, trying to generate a lie that might sound plausible if he thought her interest was strange. "Is he in this picture?"

"No. He'd have been too young." He shuffled through a handful more, all taken the same day, and passed them over as he finished. "Oh, I bet I know what this was. The VFW hosted a party for the boys shipping out every summer. Potluck supper and a big keg of beer in the park. They did it up to the very end of the war. I went with my brother." He flipped through a handful more. "Yeah." He shook his head and held one up of a bunch of boys, including Marcus, the light-skinned kid who was his best friend, and three white boys. "Only Marcus and one other kid in this group came back." He raised his eyes. "And this is where the memorial is going up."

Oddly pierced, Ellie took the picture. "Poor Marcus." The boys looked up from a sunny day, with their whole lives ahead of them. Few of them were old enough for beards, and their bodies held that awkward thinness that boys seemed to hang on to so much longer than girls.

When Blue turned away to pick up another stack of pictures, Ellie pretended to be shuffling back and forth through the stack, and then as if she'd lost interest, set the first few down by her knees, using her index finger to separate out the one that had captured her mother.

"How sweet they all are," she commented, looking over his shoulder at the next shot. It was an ordinary run of photos, people eating, laughing, making faces, mugging for the camera in a dozen ways.

Blue halted his quick shuffling when he came to another of Marcus and his best friend. This one showed the two of them bent over their hot dogs, hair glittering in the sun. The photographer had captured an expression of secret amusement flashing between the pair of boys.

"They were so young," Ellie said. When she reached for it, he gave her the whole pile with a haste that made her glance up. "Is something wrong?"

"No." The word was heavy. "That's my wife." He grunted softly.' 'I forgot what a pretty little girl she was."

"Wife?"

"She died. Car accident five years ago."

Pierced, Ellie looked up. "I am so sorry. You haven't had the best luck, have you?"

A shrug, then a retreat. He shoved the pictures in her hands and stood. "I'm gonna go find us something to drink. Be right back."

She nodded, let him go without following him with her eyes, hungry eyes that would want to probe into those hurt places and find them, and—what? That was the thing. She never knew what she wanted to do with those wounded places in a man, but they always snared her. Maybe she wanted to put her hands on them, like an old faith healer, and draw out the pain.

It never worked. She blew out a sigh, shaking her head, and took the chance fate had offered to shuffle through the photos, looking for any that might show Ellie's mother again.

There were two. In one, she stood with another girl, dressed in the same hippie style. In the other, she was leaning over the table where Marcus and the boy with the walnut-colored goatee were playing a board game. Some other bodies were on the edge of the shot, and Diane appeared to be grinning at someone—but it was impossible to tell if it was the man with the goatee or someone just out of range.

The one with the goatee was Connie's beau, Blue said. If Diane had mixed herself up with him, that was all the more reason for Ellie to keep her secret a little while longer. She really didn't want to hurt anyone with this quest.

Feeling guilty—Rosemary had thrown open her home and Ellie was going to steal some of her photos—she tucked all three photos into her notebook, taking care to make sure they were secured. She promised herself she'd bring them back ASAP. It wasn't stealing if she brought them back.

When Blue didn't reappear, her curiosity led her to go through the stack more slowly, searching for the one of Blue's wife. In a picture of Marcus and his friend having a food fight, a little blond girl was laughing at the edge of the shot, and she showed up again in another one. Stringy long hair, scruffy-looking clothes, so skinny her knees and elbows looked like knobs. Not more than five or six—probably a younger sister of one of the others.

She heard his step on the stairs and wondered briefly if she ought to leave it alone. But when he gave her a Coke, she guilelessly lifted the picture. "She really was pretty. How long were you married?"

"Six years. I went to Ecuador to study orchids for my thesis, and she was waiting when I got back, all grown up and gorgeous." He looked at the photo, a rueful grin on his mouth. "She chased me my whole life, and I never even noticed till I came home."

"Were you happy?"

He nodded, slowly. Remembering. "All widowers were happily married, right?" He smiled, but the bleakness she'd glimpsed last night was there in his eyes again. He sobered. "Yeah, we were happy."

Ellie smiled, meeting his gaze calmly. "Good."

His mouth twitched. "Water under the bridge." He settled again. "We don't have much more time. Let's get busy."

* * *

Before Blue dropped Ellie off, he swung by the vet's to pick up his cat. Piwacket was fully recovered, by the look of her, her nose and ears pink once again. When he took her out of the cage, she gave him that deliriously pleased expression and tucked herself under his ear, trilling her happiness. The vet chuckled.

"What a cat." He gave Blue a bottle of antibiotics to offset the infection that had caused her decline this time, then his face sobered. "Blue, you know she isn't gonna last a whole lot longer. Some folks think there's a lot to be said for letting a cat be a cat—let her live life to the fullest at the end. You might think about that."

The familiar twist in his gut made Blue sharp. "She can be rehydrated every week if necessary, right?"

"She
can
be—"

"Thank you." Blue paid the bill, balancing Piwacket on his shoulder, the carrier in the other hand. At the truck, he opened the door and Pi leapt happily into the middle, greeting Ellie with a cheery bit of chat and settling in her lap for the ride home.

"What was wrong with her?" Ellie asked, lightly touching the shaved spot on her front paw.

"Nothing big," he said. "She has to have a special diet, low-protein, and some antibiotics to clear up an infection."

Ellie bent her head to Pi's nose. "Low protein? Tell him, Pi. Go ahead." She altered her voice to a high, sweet note. " 'Excuse me, Blue darlin', but cats are carnivores.'"

"I know." He grinned reluctantly. "But she has to have it, or she'll just keep getting sicker."

"Does she actually eat it?"

He paused. "Not very well."

Ellie chuckled and pretended to whisper. "Come see me, honey. I'll take care of you."

"No!" Blue scowled at her. "Lanie does the same damned thing. Would you give a person recovering from a heart attack a bunch of bacon?"

"Well, probably not. Unless they were a hundred and two and had been eating bacon all along."

"Piwacket isn't a hundred and two."

She touched his arm. "I'm only teasing you, Blue. It's sweet that you take such good care of her. I wouldn't really slip her anything forbidden." As if she spoke English, Pi trilled suddenly, as if saying, 'Please?' They both laughed.

As they pulled out of the lot, Ellie said, "Blue, is there some way to drive through the black side of town on our way home? Maybe by the black school?"

He gave her a sideways grin. "Wouldn't have been no black school in those days, sugar. The colored school, maybe."

"Right." She smiled. "Will the cat mind being in the car longer?"

"Looks happy enough to me." Pi was settled serenely on Ellie's lap, purring loudly. "It won't take long, anyway."

Even now, the town was divided into two sections, black and white, without much crossover except at the edges, or in the case of land belonging to both black and white, as was the case with Gwen Laisser and Blue's family. Blue skirted a swath of farms, drove past the Dairy Queen and the Laundromat and the bowling alley, and turned on a narrow blacktop. He pointed toward a stretch of newly plowed earth, rich and dark. "Mabel's daddy owned about a hundred acres just over that rise. She'd have walked about three miles to school, down this road, and probably across those fields."

Ellie rolled down the window, letting in the thick midday air. Wind blew her hair back from her serious, intent face. Blue imagined she was imprinting details, and as if to give that theory credence, she inhaled deeply, lifting her nose like a dog scenting the air. He smiled.

"When she got through the fields," he continued, turning, "she would have crossed this bridge"—the truck rumbled over the wooden slats spanning a creek—"and then ducked under that stand of trees, cut through the alley there." He turned the corner and stopped in front of the school. "And she'd have been here."

The building had recently been turned into a clinic, but the general shape remained, a two-story stone building with long windows all the way across the front. Not much different from all the other buildings of the same age in town, though it lacked some of the more Gothic details.

Ellie didn't speak, only looked careful at everything, across the road to the small cluster of houses that stood there, and back over her shoulder to the creek. Her hand moved on Piwacket's back, idly. "Mrs. Laisser said Mabel was kind of stuck-up," she said, suddenly, and flashed him that impish grin.

It changed her face, tilting up her eyes at the corner, exaggerating the slant of cheekbones, showing her good, strong white teeth. Blue found himself thinking about kissing her. He looked at her throat, at her hands on the cat, at her slim thighs, then back at that wide, pretty mouth, and narrowed his eyes.

She noticed. The smile faded, and her head dipped, letting hair fall down and obscure that pretty line of cheek.

Blue stuck his elbow out the window. Looked at the school. "I imagine she was. Stuck-up, I mean. Her daddy was the richest black man for thirty miles, and then she came up with that voice." He thought of the pictures. "Not to mention she was gorgeous."

Ellie laughed softly. "Yeah. Exactly."

He put the truck in first gear. "Seen all you needed, or do you want me to drive around some more?"

"We can go back now. Thank you."

"My pleasure, ma'am."

The Lovers

She lay next to him in the rumpled bed, lazy with sunlight that fell through the windows, drenching both of their naked bodies with yellow. He lay on his belly, the wrinkled sheet against his thighs, uncomfortable, but he was too sated to move, and gazed over the crook of his elbow at her. Light caught on the edges of her eyelashes, turning them white. Her skin glittered with beads of moisture, along her lip and cheeks, down her neck, along the smooth swell of one breast, in the shadowy hollow of her navel. His hand lay alongside her waist and he lifted it, brushing one finger over the strong rise of her hipbone, liking the powerful look of it, thinking a baby might one day rest there, a baby they made. He tried to think how her belly, almost concave now, would look swollen up with fruit from this, and his lips pulled into a half smile.

She opened her eyes and caught his smile and gave it back to him, her eyelids heavy, showing only a half moon of iris. Her lashes made spider leg shadows on her cheeks. "Penny," she said, and stroked his head.

He put his chin on his fist and put the other hand across her belly. His hands were big, like his father's, according to his grandmother, but there was room for all of it to fit across the cradle of bones. "I was thinking of babies."

Shock tightened her body. He felt something draw in under his hand, felt her fear. "Why?"

He looked at his hand, felt the smooth flesh of her belly against his palm, the brush of hair against his little finger, and imagined limbs, back, head, genitals all forming inside of her skin, some of him, some of her. But he had no answer. "I don't know," he said, and looked up at her, and surprised a wariness in her eyes.

"What would you do?" she asked, and he felt in her belly, and the faint tightness of her hand on his head, the unease in her.

He had not meant to drag real things, the outside, into this stolen, sacred time, and moved now to push it away. Rousing himself, he bent over her and pressed his mouth to her navel, then just below, where that body would grow, kissed her again. "I would kiss it every day."

She laughed, low in her throat, and curled up, ticklish after so much touching. He tumbled around her, joy
welling in him, hot and sharp as they wrestled and tickled and teased, reveling in the slide of skin against skin, thigh to thigh, and arm to arm, the bump of a breast and the sway of his sex, and the brush of lips and hands and mouths. And he was whole, with her, as he never was when they were apart.

Whole.

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