One Good Turn (17 page)

“And now you put the bad guys behind bars.”

“That’s the basic idea,” she confirmed. The circulation began to return to her fingers, and she felt a healthy, welcome pang of hunger. Telling Luke these things wasn’t so bad, after all. “I’ve been taking self-defense courses for a few years, too. I’ve got muscles, Luke. And I went back to visit the Smith College campus. I didn’t fall apart. I’m doing fine, Luke.”

“Yes,” he said uncertainly.

“I am,” she emphasized, smiling. “Please don’t pity me.”

“I don’t pity you.” He released her hand and shifted in his seat, tilting his head as he appraised her. “But I still don’t understand...” His brow dipped slightly as he contemplated everything she had told him. “I can accept that you went through a traumatic experience, Jenny—but I can’t accept why you couldn’t tell me. I called you at school and one of your friends told me you didn’t want to hear from me ever again. You just shut me out. I didn’t do anything to you, Jenny, but you had your friend tell me to get lost.”

She closed her eyes. She had revealed so much to him. What she’d said was the truth. But the rest of it...

No, that was hers alone. That was private. That was where the scars were most gruesome, most permanent. Luke didn’t have to know about it.

“I never meant to hurt you,” she said contritely. “I’m sorry if I did. When it happened...” She shook her head, as if conscious that even her best explanation might not be good enough. “I was crazy, Luke. I couldn’t think rationally about how you’d feel or what you’d want to know. Don’t take offense if I say you weren’t my top priority at the time.” She pressed her lips together, aware that she was skirting very close to the line between truth and lies. She had been thinking of Luke at the time—maybe not rationally, but he had been very much a part of her thoughts, and her decision to leave him had been quite deliberate.

“Of course,” he quickly agreed. “You had more important things to deal with. But once you were out of danger...would it have been so hard just to get some word to me? I tried so hard to find you—I badgered the girls in your dorm with phone calls. I even tracked down your old pal Sybil, from Emory. She didn’t know anything. I wrote letters. I sent them to the Dean of Students at Smith and asked her to forward them to your home. I didn’t know where you were, but I thought your parents might. And if they didn’t, maybe we could have joined forces to locate you. I didn’t know whether you were dead or alive, Jenny,” he muttered, staring past her. “You could have at least sent me a note saying you weren’t dead.”

She remembered the letters. She remembered her mother handing them to her, one less than two weeks after she’d left school, one at Thanksgiving and one at Christmas. She’d handed each one back to her mother unopened. “Throw it out,” she’d said. Her mother had suggested that Jenny might consider simply letting the young man know what had happened, and Jenny had screamed, “Never! Never!” and become hysterical.

“I never saw your letters,” she whispered. She felt ghastly lying to him, sick about it. But maybe she was deluding herself to think she could still be friends with Luke. Even if they could be friends, it would never be the honest friendship they’d once had. Jenny had learned in the past seven years that self-protection was as important as candor.

Luke probed her with his eyes. Had he guessed that she was lying? Only about the letters, though—the rest was the truth. He had to believe her.

After a pregnant minute, he sighed. “You did get better,” he pointed out. “Didn’t you ever—” He averted his gaze, as if to deflect the pain her answer might bring. “Have you ever thought about me? Have you ever considered just letting me know?”

“I had no idea where you were,” she said. “So much time had passed. You would have been done at Princeton, maybe attending law school somewhere...probably in love with someone else.”

“Jenny—”

“You might have been married, and a letter from me would have stirred up trouble for you. Yes, Luke—I have thought about you. But it was a long time. Life goes on. For all I knew, you’d forgotten about me.”

“Forgotten about you? Jenny—how could you think I’d forget about you?” He pressed his lips together and wrestled with his anger. “I’m sorry,” he said softly. “I’m in no position to judge you. I can’t imagine how I would have behaved if something that terrible had happened to me.”

But it wouldn’t have happened to him, she thought with an unexpected surge of bitterness. He might become a crime victim; even tall, strong, athletic men were crime victims. But he would never have suffered as Jenny had. He might have been in pain, he might have been left with scars, he might even have gone temporarily insane, as she had. But his loss could never have been as great as hers.

She had lost hope. She’d lost the ability to trust. She had been brutalized not by some deranged stranger, some thief or addict desperate for money or alienated from society, but by someone she’d liked, someone she’d wanted to help, someone she’d counted as a friend.

She had been savaged not just by her friend but by her own senseless yearning to believe the best of everyone.

And in the process she had lost a large part of her soul.

MIDNIGHT FOUND LUKE
sitting motionless on the wooden steps leading down to the beach, his arms resting on his knees and his gaze absorbing the moonlit vista of sea and sand and dune grass. His trouser legs were rolled up to mid-calf and his bare feet were dusted with a pale film of sand. The wind tangled through his hair and a stubble of beard darkened his chin. He’d been on the beach steps for hours, waiting for the shore breezes to sweep the clutter from his brain, waiting for his emotions to sort themselves. Waiting for the universe to make sense.

He heard footsteps behind him, alerting him to the fact that Taylor had gotten home from work. Taylor’s shoes resounded first on the wooden planks of the deck and then on the boardwalk connecting the deck to the stairs. Without turning to greet his friend, Luke slid to one side of the step he was sitting on, leaving room for Taylor to join him.

Taylor accepted Luke’s unspoken invitation and lowered himself onto the step. He removed his loafers and socks, then yanked his tie free of its knot and unbuttoned his collar button. “Warm night, isn’t it,” he said.

Luke nodded. His gaze remained on the beach, on the silver tufts of foam glistening along the edges of the waves, on the reflection of the full moon splintering across the surface of the water.

“How are you?” Taylor asked. No need to loosen up with banter about the restaurant, no need to open the dialogue with a report on the customers or the latest gossip concerning the dessert chef’s infatuation with a busboy ten years her junior. Tonight there could be only one reason for Luke to sit in solitude on the steps at this unseemly hour, and Taylor knew what it was.

“I’m all right,” said Luke.

“You want to talk?”

Luke tugged a long spike of grass until it tore free. “About what?” he asked, shooting Taylor a humorless grin.

Taylor didn’t smile back. “I thought you might come over to the restaurant tonight. I was watching for you.”

“Nah.” Luke twirled the reed between his fingers. “I needed some time to think.”

Now it was Taylor’s turn to nod. He gave Luke a chance to elaborate, and when Luke remained silent he asked, “What’s she like?”

“She’s okay,” Luke said. He heard her alluringly husky voice running through his head:
There are scars, but I’m okay
. “God,” he whispered, for not the first time since he’d walked her back to the Superior Court Building, since he’d shaken her hand and mumbled something about keeping in touch and then climbed into his Hyundai hatchback and driven away. His voice trembled slightly with rage. “God, Taylor—it was all—the whole thing was so damned senseless.”

“Not to say I told you so,” Taylor muttered, “but you shouldn’t have gone chasing after her.”

“Chasing after her wasn’t the senseless part,” Luke argued. “It was good to see her. She’s still smart and funny, and she’s still got the most beautiful hair—shorter than it used to be, but it’s still that same incredible color. And her voice, and her eyes...”

“Oh, swell,” Taylor groaned. “Adolescent lust time.”

“Forget about lust,” Luke retorted. “We were adults. We shook hands. It was all very civilized.”

“How charming.”

“I mean, it was nice. We were friendly.” Not passionate, though. Luke had absorbed everything about Jenny—the nuances, the inflections, the way she’d moved her head, the occasional, unexpected shimmer of tears in her eyes, the instant of indecision in her face before she’d taken his hand in welcome. Her pleasure at seeing him had seemed authentic, but he’d sensed a definite barrier—one of Jenny’s construction—standing between them.

He was willing to respect that barrier. He wasn’t looking for a replay of that long-ago Washington summer. He’d sought Jenny out of curiosity, nothing more.

“Did you talk about the good old days?” Taylor asked.

“Yes.” Luke’s voice dropped to a whisper again. More than Jenny’s appearance, more than her choice of career, more even than the invisible wall that separated her from him, his mind lingered on what she’d told him about the good old days, which had been about as far from good as he could imagine. He had been sitting outside for most of the evening, thinking about the horror Jenny had endured and grieving for her, grieving for everything had been destroyed thanks to a single, irrational act of violence. Jenny had been strong enough to recover, and Luke—to his eternal amazement—had also been strong enough to survive the sorrow of losing Jenny.

Oh, yes, they were both okay. They were both fine. No pity necessary for either of them.

“So?” Taylor nudged him. “By my reckoning, she still owes me a weekend with a gorgeous Smithie. I assume she came up with some excuse for having gone AWOL that weekend.”

“She did,” Luke snapped, effectively stifling Taylor’s flippant tone. “She was attacked, just days before we were supposed to visit.”

“Attacked?”

“Yes, attacked—as in crime. She was beaten up by some thug. Pretty badly injured, from what I gather.”

“Jeez.”

“And then she had a nervous breakdown.”

Taylor cursed. Luke couldn’t blame him. He himself had been doing a lot of cursing since he’d said good-bye to Jenny eleven hours ago. “Bummer,” Taylor grunted. “Is she okay?”

“Now? Yes. She says she is, anyway.” Luke thought for a minute. “I don’t know.”

“What kind of attack?”

“I really don’t know,” Luke admitted, turning his thoughts over and over in his head, examining them compulsively, searching for some new insight that would illuminate everything for him. “It was a classmate of hers, she said.”

“A classmate? I thought Smith College was all-women.”

“Women can be thugs, too,” Luke pointed out, although he’d also found it hard to believe that someone intelligent and hard-working enough to get into such a selective college could be pathologically violent. “I think men are allowed to take classes at Smith—guys from Amherst and Hampshire and UMass. Maybe it was a man. She didn’t say.”

“Well—like, was she shot? Was she stabbed? Was she—”

“I don’t know,” Luke groaned, unable to smother his frustration at how little he
did
know. “How could I ask her for specifics like that? If she’d wanted to go into the details she would have. For me to ask would have been...I don’t know, voyeuristic.”

“She broke your heart. You have a right to ask.”

“She didn’t mean to break my heart,” Luke reminded his friend, just as Jenny had reminded him. “She was a basket case at the time. As she put it, I wasn’t her top priority.”

Taylor raked his hair back from his sun-burnished face. “Nervous breakdown, huh,” he murmured, his tone forgiving.

“I can believe it,” Luke admitted. He couldn’t help but believe it, and it was the part of her story that caused him the greatest pain. “She was such an optimist, Taylor. You never got to meet her, but if you had you would know what I mean. She trusted everyone. She trusted panhandlers on the street. She trusted my father, for God’s sake. And then something like this happened to her... It must have destroyed her value system. It must have demolished her entire view of the world. I feel bad for her.”

Taylor gave him a long, searching look. “Do you still love her?” he asked, not bothering to disguise his apprehension.

“No,” Luke said decisively. “She’s changed. She isn’t the same person I fell in love with that summer.”

“Then what? You’re angry? Bitter? What?”

“Sad.” Speaking the word forced Luke to recognize its inherent truth. “I feel very sad, and sorry that it happened. Damn...” He sighed. “She says she’s okay, Taylor, but she’s not. I know it. There’s something different about her—and it isn’t good.”

“She’s been through hell. She’s had a breakdown. What do you expect?”

“It’s not what I expect,” Luke maintained. “It’s what I want. I don’t have to be in love with her to worry about the change in her. I don’t have to love her to wish there was something I could do to help.”

“What do you think she wants?”

“From me? Probably to be left alone,” Luke muttered, then discarded that obvious answer. “No. If she’d wanted me to leave her alone she would have said so. One thing that hasn’t changed about her: she isn’t coy. She looks you in the eye and tells you what she’s thinking.” He engaged in a quick mental review of the time he’d spent with Jenny that day and couldn’t come up with a single word or gesture of hers implying that she resented him for tracking her down. “I’m not going to leave her alone,” he resolved.

“Great. Maybe I should call her up and warn her.”

Luke ignored the sardonic undertone in Taylor’s words. He felt determined, heartened, infused with hope. “Jenny saved my life, you know,” he remarked, as much to himself as to Taylor. “I was a mess when she met me. I was floundering. I didn’t know which way I was going, and she swooped down on me and took me in hand and showed me the way. She saved my life. The least I can do is save hers.”

“Really, Luke—don’t you think you ought to let well enough alone? The lady fell apart, and somehow she pulled herself back together. Maybe you should leave it be. She’s functioning, right? She’s brainy, she’s attractive, and she’s got a high-profile job as an assistant D.A. Maybe the most you can do is congratulate her on her spectacular recovery and kiss her good-bye.”