Sweet Everlasting (15 page)

She’d recovered much faster than he; he still felt like a starving man chained inches out of reach of a banquet. Was it possible she didn’t
know
what they’d just barely avoided? It would explain her unnerving composure.

“You’ll have to show me the way back,” he told her. She nodded readily and reached for his hand. “Thank you for bringing me here. It was a beautiful gift. I’ll think of you in this magical place you’ve made, Carrie, and it’ll make me smile.”

Her eyes misted. She touched her lips to his fingers in the lightest, swiftest kiss, then pulled him out of paradise and into the darkening woods.

H
E OUGHT TO HAVE
waited for Carrie to come home. Pulled that cane chair with the broken bottom into the shade on her slanting front porch, sat down, and waited for her. If he had, he’d be cool and comfortable now, feet propped up on the peeling porch rail, sipping from a glass of cold well water. Not panting for breath, using a beech sapling to help haul himself up another steep, slippery, rock-mined ridge, at the top of which he would look around and see nothing, absolutely nothing, that looked familiar. That was the worst—not the bugs or the sweat or even the dull throbbing in his thigh. The worst was the sneaking, gathering suspicion that he was lost.

Wouldn’t Frank Odell love this? If he didn’t print it in the
Clarion,
he’d
threaten
to print it, and Tyler could already picture the headlines he’d think up to torture him with: “Doctor Caught Dreaming on Dreamy”; “Jungle War Hero at Sea in Woods of Pa.”

He muttered an earthy cavalryman’s curse as his toe snagged in a low-growing vine and he came close to pitching face first onto the nonexistent path. His shirt was sticking to him and he was ready to murder everyone, including Carrie, who had ever told him it was always ten degrees cooler on the mountain than it was in the valley. It might be a
little
cooler, he’d concede that, but the bug quotient was about ten times higher. On a steamy June afternoon, there really wasn’t all that much difference, he decided sourly, between getting lost on High Dreamer and getting lost in the Cuban jungle.

He halted beside a fallen log and mopped his face with his handkerchief. His leg hurt and the log looked inviting; he sat down. Every rich green vista was starting to look the same, but didn’t that line of pine trees forty feet dead ahead have a familiar shape? He remembered trailing behind Carrie toward a thick barrier of trees just like that. She’d stopped in front of it and made him close his eyes. If he was right, her secret glade was just beyond those trees.

And she’d better damn well be there, because if she wasn’t he was going to feel even stupider than he did now. Not to mention disappointed.

He was aware that he wasn’t behaving like a man trying to discourage an innocent girl’s unrequited crush. He’d told himself he was only visiting Carrie so soon after their last meeting so that he could give her a present—his old army field glasses. But the truth of the matter was, he wanted to see her.

See
her. Not touch her. Touching her was dangerous and irresponsible. It dismayed him that on two separate occasions he’d kissed her without intending to, and that the last time he’d come close to not stopping with kissing. It wasn’t fair to Carrie, and he cared for her too much to hurt her by raising unrealistic hopes. It was past time to recall that he was a responsible, professional adult, not an undisciplined boy. He was calling on Carrie today—if he ever found her—for only two reasons: to give her a gift, and to let her know that Dr. Peterson had set a date for a consultation.

It hadn’t been easy nailing Peterson down. He was a busy, overworked specialist, and it was only after several letters and a bullying telephone call that Tyler had convinced him he had time to examine a mute country girl whose problem might not even be physical.

Getting to his feet, he stuffed his handkerchief in his pocket and hefted his field glasses back onto his shoulder. The longer he stared at the pine trees in the distance, the surer he grew that they marked the secret boundary line of Carrie’s hospital. If she were there, she’d be tending to her flowers, or maybe one of her wounded wildlings. She would smile her enchanting smile when she saw him, and write him one of her ingenuous notes. He’d ask for a drink, and she’d bring him an icy-cold glass of water from the stream he’d heard but not yet seen. The binoculars would amaze her; she’d try them out immediately, and she’d be overcome with gratitude to him for giving them to her.

He was counting on that. His conscience didn’t bother him a bit that the field glasses were as much a bribe as they were a gift. She was afraid of something, but he wasn’t going to be put off this time by her odd, incoherent excuses. One way or the other, Carrie was going with him to Baltimore to see Dr. Peterson.

The woodchuck was still peering at her. Beady-eyed, flat head resting on his forepaws on top of the big boulder. Unblinking, perfectly still. The scratching of Carrie’s pencil and her occasional sighs didn’t bother him. She’d already sketched him twice; it was time to get out of the hammock and feed the rabbits. But she delayed, knowing he would disappear as soon as she moved, and she liked his company. She liked looking at his little round ears, his bushy tail, and his tiny black feet. Farmers down in the valley killed groundhogs, as they called them, every chance they got.
You‘re lucky you live up here on Dreamy,
she told her silent, staring friend.

High overhead in the dark spruce tree, a bird called.
You again,
Carrie thought, with more than a touch of frustration. For weeks she’d been trying to identify the bird, but he kept eluding her; try as she might, all she could ever seem to see of him was a flash of red feathers. He sounded like a robin with a sore throat, but she’d narrowed him down to either a scarlet tanager or a summer tanager. She was tempted to get up and try for another look now through the branches—but of course, if she did, her woodchuck would desert her.

Before he’d come, she’d been writing in her journal. Reading over the last page, she could feel herself smiling and her cheeks getting warm all over again with self-conscious pleasure. “And then he kissed me on my forehead,” she’d written, “and all that sadness in me flew away like a startled bird. We stood together so still and quiet, and I didn’t know what he was thinking. He has eyes like wild hyacinths, and his lips are strong and firm—but so warm! And then—then—he kissed my mouth. I thought my heart would burst out of my chest, it felt so full. I don’t have any words to say what it was like when he touched me, but it’s a memory I will keep forever. And afterward he said he wasn’t sorry. And he said my hospital is ‘magical.’ He likes me, I know it, and I will love Tyler Wilkes until I die.”

Carrie closed her eyes and pressed the open journal to her chest, as if she could press the words into her heart. “Always,” she vowed, feeling the love swell and rise like bread, until she couldn’t contain any more. Tears wet her lashes, and she laughed and called herself a spoony goose. How could she cry when she was overflowing with happiness? For two whole days she had lived in a spell, lit up from the inside like a flame in a lantern. Could this be how other people felt
all
the time? No, of course it couldn’t be. This was rare, special, and if everybody went around feeling the way she did right now, they’d never have time to be mean or sad or scared. Besides, there wasn’t anybody else in the world like Dr. Wilkes (even though they’d kissed, she couldn’t quite call him Tyler yet), so even people lucky enough to be in love with
someone
weren’t in love with
him.
Which meant they couldn’t be as happy as
she
was. Poor people!

She sat up suddenly, bubbling over with energy—and the woodchuck shot straight up in the air. In a scrambling rush, toenails skittering on the slippery rock, he vanished. “Oh, excuse me—!” But then she had to laugh because he looked so funny. And he’d come back another day.

She got up from the hammock and stored her journal away. She’d brought two biscuits, an apple, and a carrot for her hospital’s newest residents: five baby rabbits. They could feed themselves now, thank goodness; giving them infant cereal every three hours yesterday and the day before had worn her out. Eppy had rescued them from her two oldest daughters, who’d found the nest in an empty lot and couldn’t resist poking and playing with the babies until the mother rabbit disappeared and never came back.

Carrie kept them in an old bird cage when she was here, and in a box with a window screen and a rock on top when she was absent. Four inches long, that’s how big they should be, she reckoned, before she could let them go. Sitting down on the dry moss, she reached through the bird cage door and lifted the littlest baby out carefully—jumping escapes were easy for them but a nuisance for her when she had to track them down and put them back. Holding the squirmy brownish ball on the flat of her palm, she judged him to be about three and a half inches from his twitching pink nose to his white cottontail.
Not much longer now,
she told him, stroking between his petal-soft ears with her fingertip.
Sylvilagus floridanus
was his Latin name. In about two more days, she’d set him free. Not here, though—in the meadow by the bridge at the bottom of the mountain, because the hedgerows there would be much better for foraging than here in the dark woods.

Back you go.
But she kept her hand in the cage so she could pet the others.
Oh, you like my biscuits, do you? Well, I made them just for you
—
don’t tell Artemis.
She was surprised to hear herself laugh—even thinking about her stepfather couldn’t spoil her happiness today.

Would Dr. Wilkes like to see the rabbits before she let them go? she wondered. Maybe. But he was so busy, it wasn’t likely he’d be coming up the mountain for a visit in time. Well—what if she took them to him? To his house some evening, when he was through with his work. Would he like that? She stared off into space, imagining it. He’d invite her into his kitchen and make her a cup of tea, like he had that night after Shadow died. They’d sit at the table and he’d talk to her, say things to make her laugh, and she’d write him a note telling him all about the rabbits. Maybe he’d walk her to the foot of the mountain when it started to get dark, and they could set the babies free together.

Carrie hugged herself, letting the wild delight surge through her again. She could remember, just barely, feeling this way as a child when something wonderful would happen—Christmas morning, or the time her father had said she could keep the calico kitten. Sheer happiness, absolute perfection. Now, for the first time in years, she thought of a song her mother used to sing. How did it go? It wasn’t a hymn but it sounded like one, the tune slow and stately and almost sad, which made the joyful message all the sweeter.

“Sing out, oh my heart, all the love deep inside, like a lark raise your voice to the sky. Let delight fill you up till a drop overfills you, set the joy in you free and let it fly.”

How her mother had loved to sing. And she’d had the prettiest voice, bright and clear and full of laughter. Not rusty like Carrie’s. She cleared her throat and tried again. “Sing out, oh my heart, all the love deep inside …”

She stopped, caught her breath. The skin on the back of her neck went prickly hot, then cold.
Oh God.
Someone was here. But she couldn’t move, couldn’t make herself turn her head to see who it was.
Please, please, please, don’t let it be him,
she pleaded in terror.

“Carrie? My God—Carrie?”

Dr. Wilkes! Clumsy with panic, she scrambled to her feet and whirled around to face him. He moved slowly but steadily toward her across the clearing, shock in his eyes, one hand stretched out in a baffled, questioning gesture.
Oh God, help me!
she thought, in a daze of fear and shame. The rock shelf was at her back. She slid sideways, step for step with him, stealing toward the corner so she could run. He must’ve seen her plan in her face, for at the moment she reached the edge he lunged for her. She cried out, even though his grip on her arm wasn’t painful. He said something—she hardly knew what, but she heard in his voice that he was bewildered, not angry. The message that she was safe almost penetrated the fog of fright blanketing her mind. But she squirmed and twisted and tried to run again, and this time he caught her hard by her elbows and didn’t let go.

“Talk to me, Carrie.
Talk
to me, explain this to me. Hold still—damn it—I’m not letting you go.”

She finally stopped struggling. But after that, for the life of her, all she could do was shake her head.

It made him mad. “Damnation, Carrie, I
heard
you. What the hell is going on?”

She started to cry. If she kept on shaking her head, there was no telling what he might do. So at last she said something—“Dr Wilkes!”—in a hopeless, desperate whisper. The first words she’d spoken to a human being in five years.

His fingers softened on her arms. “Tell me,” he said soberly. “Trust me.”

She nodded,
I do.

“I know you’re afraid of something.”

She shook her head violently; without thinking, she fumbled in her pocket for her notebook.

“No, talk to me, tell me why you’ve been pretending. Who else knows you can speak? How long has it been going on, Carrie?”

She couldn’t tell him anything, of course. She wriggled out of his grip and took a step back.

“No, by God, you’re not running away this time.” He caught her wrist and held it too tight. Now he
was
angry, and she wanted to die. “You’re going to stand there and explain it to me, all of it.”

“No, I’m not.” She barely murmured the words, meant nothing defiant by them, but her answer made him even angrier. “Don’t be mad,” she whispered. “I couldn’t stand it.”

“Don’t be mad?” His voice made her quail. “What should I be, happy for you? Thrilled because apparently you’ve been playing a nasty little game with the people who care about you?” He gave her wrist a rough shake. “Just tell me why. Did you want us to feel sorry for you? Was it some twisted way to get attention, make people—”