Meeting at Midnight (14 page)

“Yes.” She hesitated. “You've already guessed, haven't you? He tried to molest me. To…feel me up, at least. I don't know how far he would have gone.”

“You were
eight,
” I said, sick and baffled. “You were only eight.”

“It's why my grandmother hates me, of course. She refused to believe the judge could have done anything like that.”

I thought about that for a moment. “He didn't die.”

“No, I…once I realized what I'd done, I kept him alive until help arrived. I didn't know how to heal the damage, though. Not then.” She shuddered. “It was horrible, having to touch him to keep his heart beating. But what I'd done was worse. I hadn't known…he'd exposed himself, you see. When he tried to make m-me…anyway, I screamed at him to stop. I screamed it with everything in me. I wasn't thinking about stopping his heart, but that's what I did.”

I couldn't speak. I could only hold her and pet her and try to be glad for her sake that she hadn't killed the bastard.

After a while she straightened. Her eyes were moist, but she smiled. “You mustn't be picturing me as horribly traumatized. Daisy wouldn't permit that. My father sent me home to her after it happened…he wouldn't talk to me about it, but Daisy did. She helped me sort things out so that I didn't blame myself, or feel smirched.”

Maybe she didn't blame herself for the way a sick old man had tried to molest her, but she was carrying a load of hurt over having defended herself the only way she could. I didn't know what to do about that. I rubbed my knuckles across her cheek, wiping away the dampness. “I knew I liked your mother.”

“I like her myself.”

She still looked tired, but the haunted look was gone. There was a shy sort of happiness in her eyes instead. “So.” I cleared my throat. “No more big, shocking secrets to reveal?”

“That was about it,” she agreed gravely.

“How'd I do? Did I pass?”

“Ben, I wasn't testing you. I wouldn't…oh, all right,” she said before I could interrupt, her smile spreading slowly in the way I loved. “You passed with flying colors.”

“Then maybe you'll agree to marry me.” Even as her eyes
rounded I cursed myself. “Hell. I didn't mean to blurt it out that way.” But I couldn't help smiling. “That's the second time I've made you speechless tonight. Must be a record.”

“I think it is,” she agreed faintly. “Ben, we talked about—we said we wouldn't—”

“I know you didn't want this to turn into anything serious.” I captured her hands and held them between us. “But think about it. We're good together, in bed and out. Good for each other, I think. I'm not good with words,” I said gruffly, “but I think you're special. Incredibly special. I'm not talking about your gift, but about…well, you. All of you.”

Her eyes were getting damp again. I didn't know if that was good or bad, so I rushed forward, hoping to convince her. “I think about you when you're not around. I think about how it might be with us twenty years from now, too. And about how beautiful you'd look growing round with my child. You're great with Zach. You'd make a wonderful mother.”

She jerked, nearly pulling her hands out of mine. “Ben—”

“I wouldn't be marrying you to give Zach a mother,” I said quickly. “That's not what I mean. He's got a mom already. I mean—aw, hell, you're crying. Don't do that. Don't cry, Seely.”

But the tears spilled over anyway. “B-Ben, I can't have children. I told you that, right at the start.”

For a moment I just stared at her. Then, carefully, as if I were threading a path lined with land mines, I said, “You meant that you were on the pill.”

But she was shaking her head. “I meant exactly what I said. You didn't need to use protection because I can't catch or transmit venereal diseases. And I can't get pregnant.”

I dropped her hands. In the whited-out blankness of my brain, thoughts began to whirl. She'd said she didn't have any
more shocking secrets, but she hadn't thought this was a secret. She'd thought I knew. That I accepted… I shook my head. “You can't be sure. Unless you've had some kind of accident or surgery—and you could fix that sort of thing, couldn't you? You could heal it.”

“I tried to get pregnant, Ben. Me a-and the twit.” Her smile wobbled and broke. “We both wanted a child, and we tried for years. We were both tested and the doctors didn't find anything wrong, but—”

“Then maybe there isn't anything wrong. Maybe his sperm just weren't compatible with you somehow.” Hadn't I read about that sort of thing somewhere?

“It's my gift.” Her voice was bitter. “The women in my family aren't very fertile. My mother had only one child. So did my grandmother and my great-grandmother. Supposedly, the gift is stronger in me than in any of them. It…maybe it ‘heals' a pregnancy before it can get started. Maybe it kills the sperm as soon as they hit my womb, just as it kills viruses that enter my bloodstream. I don't know.” The shrug of her shoulders was infinitely weary. “And I don't suppose it matters.”

“Of course it matters.” I scrubbed a hand over my hair, but that wasn't enough to quiet the screaming jitters making a mess of my insides. I pushed off the bed and began to pace. “Maybe you're wrong about your gift doing it. Maybe it's incompatible sperm.”

“Steven wasn't my only lover. And I've never used birth control.”

What was it about me that I had only to reach out, try to touch a dream, to have it turn to dust? “Maybe there's some way to control it. You must be able to control your gift most of the time.”

“I control whether I reach out with it or not, but the gift—oh, we don't have words for this!”

“Try. Please try.” Maybe she was too close to the problem. Maybe I'd be able to see something she'd missed, if only I could understand how her gift worked.

She sighed, shoved back her hair and tried. “In my own body, the gift is sort of on autopilot. It heals me automatically. When I heal someone else, I impose…call it a template, the template from my own energy field. That's why I told you not to let anyone touch Mrs. Bradshaw while I was working on her. Another person's touch interferes with the template. Once someone's body accepts my template, it knows how to heal quickly. I help that healing along, but it's like—oh, like pushing a wagon as opposed to steering it.”

“Is there any way to, uh—to adjust the template?”

She shook her head. “Tampering could destroy it. Maybe me, too. I could develop cancer or some degenerative condition.”

“No. God, no.” I stopped, hands clenched.

“This is why I said our relationship needed to be temporary.” She laughed once, mirthlessly. “Though you can be forgiven for thinking I didn't mean it, because I didn't. But if ever a man needed to have children, it's you. I knew you were in the market for marriage, but I kept hoping—”

“Wait a minute. How did you know that?”

She looked at me, a wry twist to her mouth. “One of the things I love about you is your honesty. You don't hide what you're thinking or feeling very well, even if sometimes you might like to.”

One of the things she loved? My heart gave a little jump. I told myself firmly that it's possible to love some things about a person without being in love. But still…

I rubbed my chest as if I could calm a jumpy heart that way. “Okay, maybe I have been giving marriage some thought lately. That doesn't mean…” But marriage
did
mean kids to
me. In my mind, in my heart, marriage and children were so intertwined I didn't know how to think of one without the other. “I have to think about this. I need a little time to think things out.”

“You'll have plenty of time to do that.”

Something in her voice dragged my attention away from the turmoil within. “I'm an idiot. This was no time to hit you with everything, when you're exhausted from helping Mrs. B.” I went to the bed, sat down and patted her hand. “You lie down. I'll get rid of the tray and be right back. We'll work things out,” I said firmly. “But in the morning, not now when we're both tired.”

I was talking too much and too fast, trying to sound positive when I felt anything but. Seely was right. I wasn't good at pretending. I hadn't had much practice.

I wasn't used to running away, either, but that's what it felt like when I carried the tray down to the darkened kitchen. I took my time putting things away. And when I returned to the bedroom and found her asleep, I was relieved.

I was also genuinely wiped out, though, so maybe that was excusable. Waiting for Seely to wake up had been rough. Nothing that had happened since she did had been exactly easy, either. I closed the curtains, stripped and climbed in beside her, close enough to drape an arm over her. Tomorrow, I promised myself. Tomorrow I'd sort things out. But the ghostly sound of dreams crumbling made a dismal music to carry with me into sleep.

In the morning Seely told me she was leaving.

“W
hat do you mean, you're moving out?” I growled. I was sitting up in bed. Seely was bustling around the room, removing things that hadn't been there very long.

I'd woken up to the sound of her pulling her suitcase out of the closet. Not a good way to start the day.

“Just what I said.” She opened another drawer. “You need some time to think about things. Well, so do I.”

“One big difference.” I threw back the covers, climbed out of bed and stalked over to her. “I wasn't going to kick you out while I did my thinking.”

“Oh, Ben.” She stopped and looked at me, and her face was so sad it made me feel even worse. “I'm sorry. I know this is sudden. But I've done everything suddenly with you, from going to bed together to agreeing to live together.”

“Those were good ideas. This is a mistake. A huge mistake.”

“What's one more mistake? I've already made such a mess
of things. I thought—hoped—oh, I hoped far too many things. And without much reason,” she added bitterly. “It isn't as if you led me on.” She tossed a stack of T-shirts into her oversize suitcase.

“No, I just proposed to you. Dammit, quit that.” I grabbed her shirts and stuck them back in the drawer. “You're overreacting. This whole relationship bit is about working things out. How can we work anything out if we aren't together?”

“I'll overreact if I want to!” She snatched up the T-shirts and crammed them into the suitcase. “Oh,” she said, closing her eyes. “Just listen to me. I sound about five years old.”

“You need some food in your system. Coffee. Get your blood sugar stabilized, and things won't look so—so however they look that makes you think you have to do this.”

She shook her head. Her eyes were just about drowning in sadness, but her mouth was set in a stubborn line. She reached for the next drawer.

I pushed her hand away from it. “Tell me why,” I said. Or maybe I was begging by then. I was beginning to feel desperate, and I didn't like it. “The least you can do is tell me why you're leaving.”

She flicked me a glance. “You don't want an explanation. You want an excuse to argue me out of it.”

“Don't I deserve a chance to do that?” My voice was getting louder.

“Okay. Yes. Oh, damn,” she said as her eyes filled. Angrily she dashed her hand across them. “I promised myself I wouldn't cry. Here's the deal, Ben.” She met my eyes. Hers were shiny with the tears she refused to shed. “I'm not as honest as you are. I went into this saying one thing, but hoping for something else. I…I hoped you'd grow to care for me.”

“It worked.”

“Which is why it was so wrong of me. Oh, don't you see?” She took two jerky paces and whirled to face me again. “I went after you with both barrels. I wanted you, and I persuaded myself I could have you, that you wouldn't be hurt.”

“So now that you've got me, you want to throw me back?”

“I thought you knew!” she cried. “I thought you knew I couldn't have children, that you were okay with it. But that was my fault, too—that you misunderstood. I was so busy protecting myself. I didn't tell you about my gift. I didn't explain.”

“If you're leaving in order to save me from myself,” I growled, “don't.”

“I'm not. At least, not entirely. I'm still protecting myself. I don't know what to do. I thought I could handle whatever happened, but…” She hugged her arms around herself as if she were cold. “I'm already hurting. I don't want to be hurt more.”

Another kind of pain blended with the unholy mix churning in my gut. “I wouldn't hurt you, Seely. You have to know that.”

“No?” For the first time, her eyebrows had a comment to make, lifting incredulously. “Tell me you still want to marry me, Ben. That it wouldn't wreck your dreams if you never had more children. That you wouldn't come to regret it—and resent me.”

I wanted to say that. I
wanted
to. But… “Dammit, I need a little time to get used to the idea. From what you said, you've had years to grow accustomed to it.”

“I'm going to give you time. And while you're getting your head straight, I'm going to do the same.”

“But…” I rubbed a hand over my face. I wasn't going to beg, dammit. I took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “You believe you have to leave to do that.”

“I do.” Her chin went up another notch. “Maybe I'm wrong. Tell me one more thing. Are you still in love with Gwen?”

My mouth opened—and closed again.

She nodded slowly. “That's what I thought.” She turned back to the bureau, yanked a drawer open and pulled out some jeans. They went in the suitcase. She zipped it shut.

“You aren't giving me a chance! You hit me with that question out of the blue, when I didn't have a clue you even suspected…. Dammit, how do I know? I'm feeling
everything
right now! Everything all at once!”

“Me, too,” she whispered, and jerked the suitcase upright. “I'd like you to promise me that you won't call me or come around, not until I contact you.”

I was shaking my head before she finished. “Forget it.”

“I know you, you see.” Her smile made a brief appearance, dying on a tremble of her bottom lip. “Once you've set your sights on a goal, you're as likely to turn aside as an avalanche. Look at the way you kept crawling up that mountain, when anyone else would have given up and died.” Again her smile flickered—fast and uneasy, so unlike her usual molasses smiles. “It's rather awe-inspiring to be the target of all that determination. But I can't handle it right now.”

I was breathing fast, as if I'd been running uphill. I forced myself to take a breath and hold it. I had to stay calm. Stay in control. We couldn't both panic at the same time—and that's what she was doing, whatever she said. “You've got money coming to you. I need to know where you'll be staying so I can send it on.”

“I'll give you my address when you give me your promise. If you won't promise, I'll leave Highpoint. I'll vanish. I can do it. I'd rather not, but I will if I have to.”

So I promised. It was like chewing on ground glass, but I promised. “You will call,” I told her. “You said you'd call.”

She nodded.

I let her carry that big, heavy suitcase downstairs herself. I didn't go with her. I stood in my bedroom and tried to make my breathing work right and listened as the suitcase thumped down those stairs behind her. Listened as the front door opened. And closed.

Then I spun around, grabbed the first thing I saw and hurled it against the wall. And stood there in among the shards of my mother's pretty china lamp, stood there and kept breathing, surrounded by thousands of unmendable pieces.

 

Four days later, I was returning to the office from the Patterson site. It was about six o'clock. Dr. Harold Meckle pulled into the parking lot just before I did, and the jerk took my parking place.

“Mr. McClain,” he called as he got out of his shiny Lincoln. “I need to talk to you.”

I was not in a good mood. I hadn't even wanted to be around my family since Seely walked out. I sure didn't have the patience for Harry. “I'm busy right now.” I slammed the truck door.

“This will just take a moment. I'd like to examine you.” Harry's eyes glittered with excitement. “I'm on to something. Something big.”

“Yeah? I think you're just on something.”

“It's that woman. I know it is.” He followed me to the office door. “I don't know what she does, but I mean to find out. I understand the two of you have broken up. I had hoped you would persuade her to speak with me, but perhaps that wouldn't be feasible.”

I snorted. “Since she isn't talking to me—yeah, that's a good assumption.” I stuck my key in the office door.

“I treated Mrs. Bradshaw when she arrived at the E.R., you
know. She had a major heart attack, yet there is no cardiac damage.”

“Go away, Harry.” I opened the door.

“I can't put together a paper without solid facts. I have to examine you. You're using that shoulder normally. That shouldn't be possible.”

“Consider the possibility that you've made a mistake,” I said, stepping inside. “A big one.”

He was still jabbering when I shut the door in his face.

I sat at my desk without turning on the light. I didn't really have any work I couldn't do at home, but I wouldn't go there until I had to. As hard as it can be to face an empty house, one filled with might-have-beens is worse.

I thought about Harry, who wanted to write a paper and get famous, and never mind the consequences to the human lab rat he proposed to write about. That made me think about Seely, of course, but there was nothing new about that. I hadn't had a moment free of her since she left me.

The worst of it was that stupid promise she'd pulled out of me. Lord! I leaned back in my chair, staring at the ceiling. How had I let myself be maneuvered into such a miserable position? If I could just go to her, talk to her…

And tell her what? I was still torn up about not having children. I hated knowing I'd never get to meet the curly-haired little girl I'd imagined swinging in the backyard. Dammit, did Seely expect me to be happy about that?

I knew where she was. She'd sent a polite little note giving me her address—a cheap, rent-by-the-week motel on the edge of town. I'd mailed her paycheck to her, but my damned promise kept me from doing anything else. I couldn't even let her know Harry was determined to make trouble for her.

Wait a minute. I couldn't contact
her
…but I hadn't promised anything about her family.

Seely's brother, Jonathan, I'd learned, was on the hospital board.

Paper crinkled as I bent and retrieved the phone book. Her stupid, polite little note was in my shirt pocket because I couldn't stand to put it away.

Jonathan Burns might be a decent sort, or he might take after his grandmother. Either way, I figured he had an interest in seeing that Dr. Harold Meckle didn't turn Seely into some sort of medical tabloid star. Maybe Jonathan would worry about what that would do to her. Maybe he'd just be worried about the consequences for the rest of his precious family.

Not that Seely would threaten to divulge what her grandfather had done, but I had no such compunctions. Besides, she still had those issues. She needed to find out if she liked her brother or never wanted to see him again.

I reached for the phone.

 

Seely had been gone a full week when I pulled into another parking lot. This time I was in a taxi, though. And the parking lot belonged to the Wagonwheel bar.

I'm not much for what the younger crowd calls clubbing. If I want to play pool, I go to Binton's. If I want to dance, I go to the resort. Tonight I wasn't interested in pool or dancing. I wanted to honor an old tradition and try to drink a woman out of my mind.

Not that I thought it would work, but a desperate man will try anything.

The Wagonwheel was the right spot for serious drinking. It wasn't a dive, but it wasn't fancy, either. At eight o'clock
on a Thursday night the place was busy but not packed. I passed a few people I knew on my way to the bar, including a couple of men from Manny's crew. I nodded but didn't pause. I wasn't here to socialize.

I'd ordered a double bourbon when someone slapped me on the back. “Hey, there, Ben! Haven't seen you around lately.”

I turned my head and grimaced. Chuck Meyers is a big, bluff, party-loving kind of guy who'd played football with me back in high school. He's one reason I don't spend much time in bars. Too easy to run into men like him. “I've been busy recuperating.”

“That's your story and you're stickin' to it, huh?” He chuckled. “Don't guess it had a thing to do with that sexy nurse of yours. Saw her when I went to get my kid's school records the other day. Whew. Hot stuff.” He shook his hand as if it had been singed.

“Shut up, Chuck.”

“Hey, I saw her, too.” That came from the man on the other side of Chuck, a scrawny little runt with a mustache. I recognized him vaguely from the hospital—he was an orderly or something. “She was at that Chinese place on Elm with this good-looking blond dude.” He gave me a bleary grin. “Tough luck, McClain. Got to bite to lose one like that.”

Now that was just what I needed to hear. I turned away, doing my best to ignore the two men. Seely hadn't called me. No, she'd decided to go out with some blond guy instead of working out our problems.

My drink arrived. I told the bartender to run me a tab and got my first swallow down. But Chuck and his buddy were hard to ignore. They were talking about Seely.

“Man, what I wouldn't give to have just one little taste of that,” the scrawny one said.

“Some men don't know when they're lucky. Not that I'd want to stop with one taste, myself. Did you get a look at those tits?”

I sighed. “Chuck, I told you to shut up.”

“I'm talkin' to Bill, here,” he told me. “Since you're so unfriendly tonight.”

“Well, you won't be talking about Seely anymore. To Bill or anyone else. Got it?”

“Don't see how that's any of your business. Can't blame you for being touchy, though.” He slapped me on the back again, grinning. “Be strange if you weren't out of sorts after losing that piece of ass. And oh, man, those tits!” He made grabbing, squeezing motions in the air.

So I hit him.