Time After Time (41 page)

The feeling went away when
her parents called and she spoke to Susy, who was tired and cranky
and getting more homesick by the minute.

The feeling came right
back when she heard the crazy
brr-r-ring
of her hand-cranked
doorbell.

She opened the door, and
there was Jack, tucked behind a huge bouquet of rich pink roses. No
box, no tissue; just big cupped blooms with a heavenly
fragrance.

"Bourbons, Netta tells
me," Jack said, handing them over in a smiling, awkward gesture.
"Watch for thorns. I don't usually go rummaging through our garden.
But these looked especially fine this year."

Touched by the hominess in
his gesture, Liz said, "Maybe it was our wet spring."

"Netta says it was the
deer we had last year," Jack said as he came inside. "It ate the
rosebuds as fast as they formed. Netta has this theory that the
plants finished up the year with energy left over."

"You had a
deer
on your property?
In the middle of Newport? I don't believe it," Liz said flatly. But
even as she said it, she was flashing back to the first time she
saw the grounds at East Gate through the barbed-wire fence:
a
deer park,
she
had mused,
only without the deer.
She'd been closer to the truth than she
knew.

Hands in his pockets, Jack
strolled into the kitchen after her, seeming to take pleasure in
her pleasure at arranging the roses in a simple glass vase. "Oh, we
had a deer, all right," he said, smiling at the recollection. "A
beautiful young doe, all legs and ears. We figure it swam across
the Bay from Jamestown or even Little Compton. It must've wandered
straight up Bellevue Avenue early one morning; I doubt that it
could've come up from the harbor through your dense
neighborhood.

"Anyway, for three weeks
we more or less stayed inside and walked around on tiptoe, praying
it would leave and give us back our lives, yet hoping it would
stay."

"In Newport?" Liz asked
incredulously. "How could it possibly?"

"I know, I know," Jack
said, sighing. "For three weeks I listened with the deer's ears to
the summer noise of this city: to the the groundskeepers' machines
— which never seem to stop — and to the garbage trucks, recycle
trucks, fire trucks, rescue wagons, Harley-Davisons, planes buzzing
the harbor, helicopters delivering VIP's; to the Fourth of July
fireworks, the marauding drunks, the noisy parties, the loud music,
the police sirens, the dogs barking nonstop at all of it — it was
stressful to
me,
a rational human being; I can't imagine what it must've
sounded like to a lost and disoriented wild animal."

Jack seemed to want to
talk about the experience. In an oddly emotional voice, he said,
"We all had trouble sleeping at night. We jumped at every loud
noise, putting ourselves in the deer's place, wondering which
corner of the property she was cowering in as she waited for each
dawn; waited for peace and quiet."

Moved and distressed by
his story, Liz said, "I never read about a deer in the
paper."

Jack shook his head. "None
of us said a word; we didn't want kids — or worse, some drunken
yahoos — chasing her down."

"Couldn't you get someone
to tranquilize her? To relocate her?"

"No. We called everywhere;
no one was set up for it. Maybe by now they are. We were told to
open our gates and leave her alone, that eventually she would make
her way."

"And did she?" whispered
Liz, almost afraid to ask.

Jack said pensively, "One
day she was gone. We never heard anything more." He shrugged off
his seriousness and added, "I've convinced myself that either she's
happily munching rosebuds on one of the bigger estates to the
south, or she got so fed up with the summer scene here that she
swam back to wherever she came from."

He went up to Liz's long
kitchen windows, with their old wobbly-glassed panes, and stared
out at the deer park — his deer park — that no longer had a deer in
it. "I wonder," he said softly, "where she is now."

Liz jerked her head up.
Something about his voice, something about the very question,
reminded her ....

Of
Christopher
,
wondering about Ophelia. It shouldn't have surprised Liz,
this dizzying sense of déjà vu that she seemed to experience almost
daily now. The forces at play were far, far beyond the reckoning of
a simple mortal like her. Did the doe have a significance that Liz
couldn't understand? Or was this just another tale of a wild
creature caught in a hostile world?

Liz said softly, "I've
lived in Newport all my life. I think that if I ever saw a deer in
my backyard, I'd feel truly blessed."

"Yeah, it was like that. I
have to admit, the doe did seem at ease here, as if she'd found a
sanctuary. I don't suppose there are many more beautiful
experiences than watching a deer graze peacefully in a patch of
sunlight."

Jack gave Liz a
self-conscious smile and said, "Funny what a void she left in our
lives. Of course, it was nice to be able to have guests on the
veranda again and not feel guilty if someone laughed out loud; but
...." His voice trailed off in a sigh.

"Maybe she'll come back,"
Liz said, profoundly hopeful.

"I still scan the thicket
for her when I'm in my bathroom shaving," Jack confessed. "It's
automatic. She was here for less than three weeks, and I've looked
for her every day for a year. Go figure."

"Gosh," Liz said lightly.
"I wish
I
could
make an impression like that."

Jack's laugh was rueful.
"Oh, lady. If only you knew."

He walked back to where
she stood holding the vase of roses, took the flowers from her and
placed them back on the counter, and cradled her face between his
hands.

"The fact is, every
morning before I scan the thicket looking for the doe, I scan the
fence between us looking for you. When I see you puttering in your
garden, or taking out the trash, my heart does this funny little
tap dance of joy." He kissed her softly on her lips. "I don't
remember my heart ever tap-dancing before," he said. "Not even for
the doe."

Liz's heart was doing a
little jig of its own as she smiled and said, "Ah, now
you're
making an
impression on
me."

"Darling, I sincerely hope
so," he said, kissing her again, and then again, a little longer
... and then again.

His small, nibbling tastes
turned to hard, devouring kisses that left Liz feeling wonderfully,
wantonly in love. He slid his hands around her hips and pulled her
toward him; her arms were around his neck, pulling him close. This
is what she needed, this is what she wanted: the solid, warm,
electric feel of him tight against her body. Yesterday's reticence
was long gone. Tonight she wanted to be with him, under him, around
him; tonight she wanted simply to be part of him.

She dragged her mouth away
from his. "Upstairs ...," she whispered. "Do you ... want ...
upstairs?"

"Do I," he said in a shaky
voice. "Let me think ...."

His droll response made
Liz laugh, a low, sexy sound that was filled with confidence: a
lover's laugh.

They went upstairs to the
tiny bedroom tucked under the house's eave, and there they
undressed each other with a kind of gleeful abandon, making up for
all the hesitant twists and turns of the night before. Liz lay down
on the bed first, expecting Jack to be right behind her.

He had one knee on the bed
when he said, "Hold on," and got back out. "While I still have a
smidgeon of reason left in my brain, I should—"

He plucked his pants from
the pile of clothing on the floor and began groping for the back
pocket.

"Hold on, yourself," said
Liz. She reached lazily over to the small worktable that served as
a nightstand and pulled open the top drawer: it was filled with an
almost comical variety of condoms, from understated skin-toned
latex to a perky glow-in-the-dark number guaranteed to scare the
dickens out of anyone who wasn't a party to the
proceedings.

"I didn't know what kind
you liked," Liz said with an innocent smile.

Jack surprised her by
putting his hands on his hips and whistling. "Wow. That's quite a
commitment," he said in an odd voice.

God, she hadn't thought of
it that way! She blushed and said, "You're under no obligation to
stick around for them all. They were a joke."

They were also her own
secret way of saying,
I love you so much
that I'm going along with your farcical idea that you're saving me
from pregnancy. I love you so much that I'm terrified to tell you
the truth.

Jack sat down on the bed
next to her and smoothed her hair away from her face in a gesture
that was as tender as it was unexpected.

"I'm sticking around," he
said seriously. "But I'm not so sure about the condoms. For now,
yes. But — you have to feel this, too, Liz, I know you do — they're
a barrier between us. Between us and ... well, all that could be.
Have you thought about it? Am I being wildly presumptuous? Am I
jumping the gun?"

For one split second, Liz
saw, or thought she saw, the image of Christopher Eastman hovering
next to them with a "See? Told you!" look on his face.

Liz blinked away the
vision and focused on Jack with a squinty look of concentration.
"You're saying ...?" But who could tell what he was saying? The
words
baby
and
marriage
weren't part of his vocabulary.
Was
that what he was talking about?
What else
could
he be talking about?

Her wildest fantasy had
suddenly become her wildest nightmare.

"I — I don't understand,"
she said, in an effort to stall further talk about
babies.

Jack smiled a sad,
tight-lipped smile. "I was right, then. Too soon. Okay."

She began to protest
weakly — at that moment she was both the happiest and the saddest
that she'd ever been — but he said, "Shhh ... never mind. It can
wait."

He slid his hand from her
shoulder, along her arm, into the dip of her waist, and out again
at her hip. "Something about you," he said, still struggling to
express his thoughts. "The way you look, the way you are with Susy
— with all kids, really. Something about you ... fills me with such
... longing
."

"Shhh," she said to Jack,
mimicking his own suggestion. She shook her head and forced back a
glistening of tears behind a tremulous smile. "Not
today."

There
was
something about her, she knew;
but it wasn't the something Jack thought he saw in her. She was no
goddess of fertility, no empress for his empire. She had no
qualifications at all to be his wife. All she could ever be was an
inspired lover to him.

In an unbearably ironic
gesture of homage, Jack bent over just then and kissed the small
scar that remained from the emergency C-section she'd undergone
when Susy was born. It was too much for Liz: blinking back tears
was as impossible as forcing rainwater back up the downspout of her
house.

Tell him,
someone hiding deep inside her begged.
Tell him now.

"Jack—"

Her breath came in shallow
useless pants from the effort to unburden herself.

"Make love to me," she
whispered as she felt his hand slip between her thighs. "Make love
to me now."

****

He stayed all night. In
the morning they had coffee in the kitchen and wondered about where
the deer went, and whether Susy should take swimming lessons, and
whatever became of the stolen letters; and then Jack walked back to
East Gate to shower and change in time to catch the early tide
needed to launch a deep-water boat.

After he left, Liz
lingered over Cheerios. Her time with Jack had seemed so
wonderfully normal. They were behaving just like any other couple
in the early stages of a love affair: laughing, teasing, finding
excuses to touch one another, slipping easily into everyday
intimacies. She'd brushed Snowball's hairs from his navy shirt;
he'd blown his nose on a paper towel and complained about being
allergic to cats. She'd made his coffee strong, the way she knew he
liked it; he'd remembered which drawer held the can opener for
Toby's food.

Little by little, step by
step, they were building a relationship. They came from different
worlds and moved in different circles, but to Liz those
considerations were minor details now. The truly big obstacle — not
counting the ghost who kept popping in and out of her life — was
the fact that Liz was misrepresenting herself.

Jack had been sending
strong, almost urgent signals to her about a possible future
together, and Liz had chosen to ignore them. It was too ironic for
words: Ophelia had refused to tell Christopher Eastman that she was
pregnant; and Liz was refusing to tell Jack Eastman that she
couldn't
get
pregnant. Each woman wanted to be loved for
herself.