The Virgin of Small Plains (33 page)

“Hold it right there, Patrick!”

“Abby?” he asked, in a shocked tone.

When she heard his voice, she nearly pulled the trigger from shock, herself, and only just in time lowered her gun before she killed him. When the man took two more steps forward, Abby’s breath caught in her throat, and she went dead silent.

It wasn’t Patrick standing in front of her looking nervously at her gun.

“Mitch,” she said, and it wasn’t a question.

Mitch stood in front of Abby on the dark porch and said, “I didn’t expect to see you. I was—I was just—”

“Yeah, everybody drives down my road at two in the morning,” Abby said coldly.

“I heard you got hit by the tornado—”

“So you just showed up after seventeen years to, what? Help?”

She was shocked at how calmly she was able to talk to him, how frigid she could keep her tone, and how well she was managing not to shoot him, in lieu of Patrick. They both deserved it. But she was also furious at herself for rolling the number “seventeen” off her tongue so quickly, giving him the idea she knew or cared how long he had been gone.

“What the hell
are
you doing here, Mitch?”

He gestured toward her gun. “Taking my life in my hands?”

Abby said nothing, but she did put the safety back on.

“Were you really going to shoot your husband?”

“My
what
? Patrick’s not my husband,” she said scornfully. Let him think she had some
other
husband if he wanted to. “Where’d you get that idea, anyway?”

“I don’t know, I just—”

He lapsed into silence. Stubbornly, she vowed not to be the one to break it.

I never meant for this to happen
was Mitch’s thought as he stood on the dark porch trying to figure out what to say next to Abby Reynolds, who didn’t appear inclined to speak to him.

He had thought he was only going to meander around on the country roads until he got tired enough to sleep again. But somehow the roads all seemed to direct him toward the north and east. He had turned onto the highway, where he was alone with the big tractor-trailer trucks ferrying goods between Kansas City and Wichita and beyond. Quickly tiring of that, he had taken one of the first turnoffs he came to, which had just happened to be the road with the small green arrow pointing down the lane.

Strictly coincidence, he was sure of it.

Then curiosity had gotten the best of him, and he had decided that he needed to know if Abby’s place really had been hit by the tornado he had seen. He decided he would drive by it in the dark, that was all, just drive past, check it out, and then drive home again. When he heard himself apply the word “home” to the ranch house, he quickly amended it.

But when he had pulled within sight of her property, there was something wrong.

Because he had seen it only twice before—driving past it—he couldn’t figure out at first what was wrong, or missing. And then,
Jesus!,
he realized her whole barn/greenhouse was down. There was…nothing…where a dark profile of a good-sized building should have been. His heart began to hammer with fear as he looked toward her house. Thank God, it was still standing. That was all he could think over the pounding of his pulse.

There were no lights on, but he saw one truck parked there.

Mitch remembered it as being the “other” truck he had seen that morning, which now seemed ages ago. One truck, the one that Patrick Shellenberger had torn out of the driveway in, was new, red. This one was battered, older, black. Abby’s truck?

Was she all right? Was she home when the twister hit?

Either Abby was asleep in that dark house—without Patrick, apparently—or she had gone to stay with somebody, or…

He couldn’t just drive by. He couldn’t do it. He had to know…something.

Mitch got out of his car as if invisible hands, ghost hands, were tugging at him.

They bade him leave his door ajar so he wouldn’t make a noise by slamming it, then pushed him along her gravel driveway, pointing him in the direction of her home.

This,
he thought, remembering Patrick,
is a good way to get myself shot.

Nevertheless, he kept walking, and the invisible hands kept tugging.

When her voice called out, “I’m out here. I’m on the porch,” Mitch felt shock and then relief.
Abby!
And it wasn’t just any relief—it was enormous, surprising, overwhelming relief. She was all right. She was alive. He realized he would have recognized that voice anywhere, even if he hadn’t already heard it once that day, even if he had never heard it again until the last day of his life on earth. He realized that if he had been lying on his deathbed and the telephone had rung, and he had picked it up and she had said, “Hi,” from that single syllable, he would have known her.

He didn’t want to think about what his feeling of relief might mean.

If he could, he was going to refuse to allow it to mean anything.

This, after all, was the disappointing woman who had married Patrick Shellenberger.

His own feelings just now meant nothing, Mitch informed himself. He moved to do her bidding—her shout had an implied order in it,
come here!
His strong emotional reaction, he told himself, meant only that he wasn’t an entirely hard-hearted bastard, after all. It suggested that even
he
could be glad that a fellow human being had survived a storm.

Yeah,
Mitch mocked himself as he opened the porch door.
Sure. That’s what it means, all right. And if you believe that, I’ve got a piece of real estate on a dry lake to sell you.

Abby had two clear thoughts as she looked up at the man who stood before her on her porch. One was,
God, he’s gorgeous.
The other was,
I look like hell.

Mitch cleared his throat. “You said Patrick’s not your husband. Is somebody else?”

She almost laughed. “No. You’re married, aren’t you?”

“Divorced.”

“Oh.”

“I have a son.”

“I heard.”

“He’s six.”

“That’s nice.”

It
was
nice, she thought. And it made her throat close up with grief for her own loss of the children she had once dreamed she’d have with him.

“What about you?” he asked.

“What about me
what
?” she asked, purposely obtuse.

“Do you—” He seemed to have something stuck in his throat, too. He cleared his throat. “You have kids?”

Abby thought,
This is ridiculous, and I’m not going to play.

She sat with the bird hidden on her shoulder and the shotgun not hidden on her lap, and recommenced being silent.

But, after a moment she relented and said, “No.”

After another moment, he shifted from one leg to the other, and turned his head to look toward where her barn used to be.

“I guess you got hit by the tornado.”

“I guess I did,” she said dryly.

He turned back around to look in her face. “Abby—”

“What?”

This time, he was the one who lapsed into silence.

“This is the part where you say you’re sorry,” she blurted, surprising herself and, judging by the expression on his face, him. “This is the part where you tell me why you left, Mitch.”

It had been a ferocious day, dramatic things had happened to her, somebody she trusted, sort of, had done a terrible thing to her. Her emotions were as raw as a fresh wound, and his appearance was pouring salt by the bucketfuls into it. The dam she’d try to place before her words broke loose and all hell with it. “What are you doing here, Mitch? Why are you in town, after all these years? And why…why in the
hell…
are you here, at my
home,
at two o’clock in the
morning
!”

It came out sounding anguished. It
was
anguished, as was the look he gave her.

Abby set the shotgun aside, and rose urgently to her feet.

“How could you?” she asked, helplessly. “Why
did
you?”

Hating herself, she started to cry in noisy, gulping sobs.

Mitch crossed the space between them in under a second, and reached for her.

Just before he kissed her, after he had wiped her tears with his hands, and stroked her wild, flyaway hair, and whispered, “I’m sorry, I’m so sorry, you’ll never know how sorry I am,” a million times, Abby said, just as urgently, “Wait!”

She pulled away from him.

Gently, she grasped the small creature on her shoulder. Holding him wrapped in her right hand, she brought him out from under her hair. Mitch’s eyes widened, but even in the darkness she saw a smile in them. Abby wrapped her other hand around Gracie so that the bird was safely cradled in a cocoon of her hands that did not allow the bird to bite anybody. Then she looked up into Mitch’s face, allowed him to wrap his arms around her again, bird and all, and let him bend his face down to kiss her, at last.

Mitch thought,
This is a mistake,
even as he kissed her with a passionate longing, with a passionate sorrow that he hadn’t allowed himself to know he still felt. Abby thought,
Tornadoes can come and wipe you off the earth, people you love can disappear overnight, you never know what’s going to happen in the next moment, and if you don’t take this one, it will never come again.

“Wait!” she said, but only so she could put Gracie in a cage.

“I’m not a virgin anymore,” she whispered, as he backed her toward her house.

“Neither am I,” Mitch whispered back, as he followed her into her home.

Seventeen years before, they might have been deliberate, careful, gentle.

Seventeen years later, they were in a rush, for fear of whatever might still come between them. Neither of them was going to let that happen. This time, nothing was going to stop them. By the time they reached the edge of her bed, a powerfulness of emotion took them over, a furiousness. They pushed and pulled at each other as if they were angry—at life, at fate, at each other. They made love as if they were arguing, as if they were battling over who was to blame, and who would pay, and whether anything could ever make up for what they had lost, and whether terrible, soul-crushing debts could ever be paid in full.