Larque on the Wing (20 page)

But at that exact moment Argent walked up behind him.

Shadow knew what had happened almost before Lark did. He turned to see. “Uh-oh,” he said.

“Daddy,” Lark whispered, and sudden, unexpected tears started down her face. For there next to Argent, dressed only in baggy boxer shorts and a sleeveless undershirt, stood an overweight, balding, middle-aged, bespectacled, and bewildered man—the father she remembered.

“Daddy!” another voice cried—faintly, as if it came from far away. Only a few feet from Lark, but barely visible, Sky hovered like a wraith above the creek mud.

“Daddy!” Sky wailed.

Lark gasped, forgetting all her anger. The child was thinner than ever—how could she have gotten so terribly thin overnight? She looked emaciated, almost skeletal. Her skinny, see-through face twisted with emotion, her frail body trembled, her twiggy arms stretched toward her father. Partly running—but leaving no tracks in the mud—partly hurtling herself through the air, Sky sped to—

Her daddy? Not her father, really. Only a doppelganger of her father.

Mute and peering, the apparition stood stupidly and did not respond to Sky's approach. Her embracing arms cut right through it—even in her translucent state Sky was still more solid than this particular phantom. Already it was starting to fade.

“No!” Sky cried. She struck at the dull thing and burst into vehement sobbing, then threw herself to the ground. “No, don't go!”

Lark slogged her way out of the mud, struggled up the creek bank and went to her. The Ryder O'Connell look-alike was gone. Argent, like it, had not moved or spoken through all this.

“Babe.” Lark sat down on the ground by Sky and gently gathered the little girl into her strong young tough-guy arms. “Sky, it's okay. Don't cry. That wasn't really Daddy. He's”—She glanced at Argent's flat, pale face and decided against what she had been going to say. “He's not here, I'm sorry, but look. I brought you food. Look, I brought you Twinkies.”

Sky was listening to none of this. Sobbing against Lark's chest, Sky now felt as solid as Lark did—which wasn't saying much, really—but also pitifully starved.

“Daddy went away,” she bawled. “He—just went away and—left me.”

Lark made herself look up at Argent again to see how he was reacting to all this. Daddy had indeed gone away and left her, and at this point she nearly hated him for it. But she was back-burnering her own feelings for a while. Before she could do anything about them she had to figure out what to tell Sky about this white-hat cowboy.

Argent, she saw, looked as cornered as before. And Shadow, like her, was eyeing him.

“
No
,” Argent said in reply to Shadow's silent query.

“Things would still be the same between us,” Shadow said.

“No. You think they would, but—how could you live with an old poop? No. Absolutely not.”

“I think you're going to have to.”

“No! I can't do it!”

“Shhhhh,” Lark said to all three of them, the two men and the weeping child. Only the men shushed. “Babe, listen, we've got Butterscotch Krimpets,” Lark tried again, her lips close to Sky's ear. “And candy corn. And Devil Dogs.” She had bought all the junk foods that she remembered Sky, the kid she once was, had craved.

Sky just cried.

Lark pulled back. “Hey, Sky,” she asked conversationally, “where you been?”

The child sobbed but sat up to answer her. “Captured—by the—Indians.” With some degree of pride Sky added, “Cheyenne.”

“I believe it.”

“They were good to me,” Sky elaborated, taking time out from weeping, “but they didn't have much to eat. The white man had taken their hunting lands.”

“Really? Well, here.” Lark reached into the grocery bag, which Shadow had brought and placed beside her. Luck handed her something semihealthy, an apple turnover. “Do you want to eat this, or should I?”

“I'll take it.” Ignoring the snot on her own thin face, Sky ate.

Shadow sat down alongside Lark and Sky. After a moment Argent joined them. They all settled on the dank grass and ate Twinkies and sugar wafers and peanut butter cups. They drank nutritionally obscene Kool-Aid from environmentally obscene plastic-coated boxes. Night had fallen; stars shone overhead like distant spur rowels on the black velvet back of Gypsy Davy's wagon. Argent was quiet and did not eat much. Shadow did not speak to him, but sat staring at Lark.

“You startled me,” he said to her. “Caught me off guard.”

“I'm sorry.”

“You tried to—what's that word you use?”

“I tried to doppelganger you. I'm really sorry. It was just that—I was frustrated.”

“So are we all. Don't do it again.”

“No. I won't.”

Shadow said, “I imagine it must feel a lot like that to have a bullet bounce off you if you're wearing a Kevlar vest.”

“I won't mug you that way again.” It was a solemn promise, something she could not have said if she hadn't meant it; she could never speak less than the truth to him. “Donut?” She offered him a box of Tastykake powdered ones.

He shuddered slightly. She and Sky ate most of the donuts between them, for dessert. Afterward, Sky headed for the creek bed and some bushes to take care of a natural function. She was that real? Apparently so. Lark, who had followed along, squatted beside her before she remembered she was no longer exactly one of the girls. Oh well, it was just Sky. Anyway, it was dark.

“Will you stay with me now?” she asked Sky softly before they rejoined the others. “Don't be scared of Mom. She blinked me, but I got me back.”

“I guess,” Sky mumbled. “Will we find Daddy?”

“Maybe.” What the hell else could she say?

When they got back to the others, Argent was complaining to Shadow, “You're crazy. Sleep here?”

“Go back by yourself if you don't like it.” Shadow did not look up from what he was doing: clearing away stones and laying down a mat of last year's dried grass, making himself a bed.

They all did the same, though Argent did it sullenly. In a way they were just on the edge of Soudersburg, but in another way camping along their trail made sense; they might as well have been in the middle of Indian Territory. They had walked out here—the Chevette was still sitting behind the Valu-Mart Plaza, or else the cops had taken it, or else it had gone with the trash. There was no phone anywhere near. It had been a long, strange day, and they were all tired.

Lark did not sleep well, though, and her wakefulness was maybe not due entirely to the chill night and the hard, damp ground. A thought was disturbing her: now that she had found Sky, and now that Shadow was okay again, she could have him turn her back into Larque.

She could be a pear-shaped middle-aged woman again and go home to Hoot and her boys. That was the plan, wasn't it?

Of course, the V.W. was not in the original plan. But the idea of booting her out was not unappealing.

And the idea of being back in Hoot's arms was not unappealing. One thing she knew as well as she knew anything in this world: she loved him.

Why, then, did she also know damn well she did not want to do it?

She did not want to go back to dog hair and laundry piles, stain removers and sitcoms, mammograms and monthly utilities bills, that was why. But those things went along with marriage and maturity. She ought to accept them. She ought to feel guilty as hell if she stayed away a minute longer.

The minute passed. Why did she not feel guilty as hell?

Didn't she want to be a halfway normal American married woman anymore?

Evidently not.

But since when was life about what Skylark Harootunian wanted?

Lark got up and quietly walked away from the others, out to the middle of the weedy field, where she stood looking at the night. There was not much to see out here—stars, a few nighthawks or bats or something flitting between her and them—but there were possibilities. She should go somewhere. It was only the second time in her life that she had ever been out in the night on her own, with no fear and nobody worrying. And maybe, if she did the right thing, it would be the last.

Certain phrases—Do the Right Thing, A Good Marriage—that used to clunk the great balance of things smack over to the safe side for her, now scarcely seemed to weigh in at all.

“I've gone over the edge, that's what,” Larque muttered to herself. “I've dropped out, I've turned into a mid-life hippie or something. I'll be smoking pot next, and humming a mantra.”

With scarcely any sound a shadow, Shadow, came and stood beside her.

Argent got up, took his linen jacket off, and laid it over the sleeping child, Sky. Lark had gone wandering into the night, and Shadow had gone after her, so there was no one around to see, which was good, but why he wanted to keep Sky warm he was not sure. He was shivering himself because of this half-assed idea of sleeping out, and now he would be colder. Fine. Maybe he would catch pneumonia and die. Maybe it would be a blessed relief to all concerned if he did.

Not being blind, and knowing Shadow better than Lark did, he had an idea what was on Shadow's mind. It explained why Shadow had wanted to stay out here, rather than in the apartment where all the memories were, and where it would be impossible to get far enough away.

The thought pushed him beyond peevishness toward a clearheaded despair. He had no excuse to go after them—he did not own Shadow. Never had, never would. No one ever could. It would be like trying to possess the sound of thunder, the smell of lightning in the air. Shadow was often kind, affectionate even, but there was a cold core in him that was all his own, that Argent could never touch. Maybe no one could touch it. Maybe no one could coax him to admit to love.

And Lark—Argent knew he had no hold on her either. Maybe someday he would try to explain to her that the years had gone by differently for him, that when you are in a body that doesn't grow old there are things you don't think about, that you don't notice how time is piling up—but she probably wouldn't buy it. She adored Shadow, as well she should, and she didn't think much of him, her father. She had no reason not to hurt him.

For Shadow to go to someone else—that was his right. Argent knew he could handle it. For Lark to hurt the father who had deserted her—Argent was standing so knee-deep in guilt that it made sense, even to him.

But for the two of them to do it together was maybe more than he could bear.

Argent tried not to think anymore. Like a pacing guard he strode in circles around Sky, flailing his arms, beating himself with his hands to try to stay warm.

In the night Lark saw Shadow only as a keener darkness, a sharp-edged presence—just her male height, she had not realized that before. It was touching, somehow, that he was no taller than she.

He stood quite close to her. “Something troubling you?” he asked softly. “Keeping you awake?”

Lark shrugged and shied away from really talking about it. “Just that I seem to be short on conscience these days,” she muttered. “I think it went with the V.W.”

“Quite probably. But why does that concern you? Is it such a bad thing to be amoral?”

“Isn't it?”

“Why should it be? You are daring now, you will do whatever seems good and appropriate to you. Laws and dogmas and codes of behavior mean little to you, but you try not to hurt the people you love.”

How would he know? “Are you describing yourself?”

He moved half a step away from her and did not answer. For a moment she thought
Bingo
, but then she was not so sure. How could anyone know what Shadow was thinking? He still stood too near. Were there amoral fantasies flashing through his mind, the way there were in hers? Were they flooding hot into the rest of him, the way they were in her?

No. What an asshole thing to think. He would never want her, she would never have him, because he knew what she really was: the f-word. Female.

Lark sighed and started talking again, this time telling him all of it. “I was thinking—now that you're feeling better, I ought to get you to put me back. You know, the way I was before. So I can go home.”

In the starlight she saw him nod by the movement of his battered black leather hat. “But,” he said.

“But marriage is—just a word to me.”

“Go on. There's more.”

“I love Hoot.” Her voice started to shake. “But I can't—I don't—I don't want to give this up.”

“Your new body?”

“Yes!” Though it was more than just the body—it was the way of life, the way of thinking engendered by the body. “I love it. I hate being a woman.” He had surprised bottom-line truth out of her, and it shocked her so that she burst out to defend it, “Well, of course I do! Every book I read the whole time I was growing up, men did important things and women brought drinks on trays.”

“So when it came to the stories, the myths,” Shadow said quietly, “you learned to think of yourself as a man? So for your own life to have a story to it, a meaning, you have to be—a cowboy?”

There was gentle mockery in the last two words, but not aimed entirely at her. “You should talk,” Lark retorted.

“Yes. I buy into the literature too. But Lark, think.”

Then he stopped talking. “Think what?” Lark asked after waiting a while.

He was still silent, and she could see by the tilt of his hat brim that he was looking down at the ground now, not at her. “Think of what you really are,” he said finally, very softly, to her feet. “You did not let me make over your heart and soul, remember?”

“So I'm a middle-aged woman in a boy's body. In other words, I am a walking hormone war. I'm a mess.” Lark's laugh surprised her by coming out warm and easy. Being a half-assed sort of he-she was a predicament, but her rebel soul was loving it. And maybe also her wide-open heart.