Untitled.FR11 (21 page)

hospital came to her. Religion was not in her repertoire, hadn’t been since childhood. But a miracle had happened. Of that there could be no question. She’d heard, always with skepticism, of people who managed to heal themselves with vision therapy, imaging the light, defying the odds, making cancerous growths vanish by sheer dint of will. It was quite something else to witness such a thing. Elation, disbelief, immediate acceptance, a smug unspoken satisfaction that medicine had been fooled—these had gone through her mind in those first moments. It gave her the hope, washed her in fact through with hope, that a comparable store of power lay buried inside herself. That hope surprised her. What, she wondered, did she have that needed healing? Then her nightmare came rushing back, and she knew.

Katt met her in the driveway—a first, her coming out of the house. Conner bobbled behind. “Hi!” he announced, happiness splitting his face. “Hi back,” she said, as she handed him the bag of groceries. She traded discreet hugs with Katt, then retrieved her overnight bag.

Katt looked less haggard, less spent, than Sherry had seen her in weeks. It wasn’t a trick of the daylight. It carried on inside—not so much that she was more animated, but rather as if a thin stream of light had broken through the unrelieved gloom. She was still subdued, but some odd adjustment appeared to be in process.

Sherry became the hub of dinner preparation. I'iie boy held back at first, but she easily coaxed him into helping out. Some talk, light joking, humming from Conner that he tried to stop but kept coming

back to—and in no time, the pan slipped into the oven. Over dinner, they traded brief summaries of the day, Sherry going into poor Bernie Hedges and his moon-eyes and how she’d finally dashed his hopes.

“That wasn’t very nice,” Conner said.

“Conner?” his mother warned.

“You’re right, it wasn’t,” Sherry said, “but I' should have done it long ago. Frees him up to look elsewhere, so in the long run, it’s a kindness.”

He hadn’t been convinced. She could tell. But there were some things that took mulling before they settled in. And that was all right. Other matters engaged them before long, and then out came the Ben & Jerry’s, a deep and rich double chocolate delight. Conner had brought home a video and Sherry sat beside Katt on the couch, paying no heed to the mayhem on the tube, but holding Katt’s hand and gazing over at Conner getting off on the movie, but mostly at the simple sadness of her friend’s profile. She felt warm and good, wrapped in comfort there beside her.

When Conner announced he was going to bed, kissed his mom, gave Sherry a hug, and dashed upstairs, the two women blended together on the couch. “Come here,” Sherry said, fighting a resistance in Katt, a knotted muscle softening under her touch. “I’ve missed you,” she told her as they embraced.

“I’ve missed you too.” Soft lamentation.

She kissed the warm smooth stretch of Katt’s neck as her right hand curved along Katt’s jawline, fingertips at and under shortfalls of brown hair. “How are you holding out?”

“Fine,” her friend said.

“Liar,” Sherry teased, and there was a litde laugh. Still, they shared the gravity of things. No hurry. She would coax it out of her in time. Felt good here. Solid and comfordng. Her condo served its function, but there was a starkness, a linearity there that had insulated her from the world. Here, Katt’s warmth, even cloaked in her grief and sadness, enveloped them both, opened Sherry up, made her vulnerable. It felt as if her whole past became visible and available, the deep shaft of things buried or forgotten now open to come forth and tease or torment her again. Deep down, there was fear and hurt and anger; but closer to the surface now, and overwhelming in its warmth and goodness, was love. Sherry loved this woman. It was a simple natural fact, nothing forced, nothing delusional about it. “Come upstairs?” she suggested.

Katt’s voice held injury. “Isn’t it a litde—”

“No, it’s time.” And it was. Time for whatever was in store for them, a night spent in the same bed, embrace or beyond, the accretive healing of two souls sharing the same night-space, breath to breath, skin to skin.

As one, they rose.

Ordinarily, when Conner went to bed, Katt would light a candle and sit in the living room, blinds shut, going in deep to her guilt. Sometimes she tried to kill the flurry of scripting that went on in her head,

but more often than not she let the regret take hold, replaying these last few months, making different choices that veered her away from being a killer and an abusive mother and a liar. How, she wondered (but found no answer), could she feel such depths of love for her son and yet have done what she did? Chalk it up to stress, residues of Marcus. An easy answer, even in many ways the right answer. But it didn’t wash. There was no justification for it. It had happened, and she had chosen to do it, and all that existed at her center was an unshaped consciousness surrounded by snippets of musts and oughts and shoulds, scripts and stories that vied with one another and left her foundering in confusion.

Tonight, though, buoyed up into light sorrow by having Sherry in the house—and the prospect of lying next to her all night brought even more comfort—Katt felt the fretful round of recrimination lift, content with simply being and not peppering herself with the buckshot of morality.

They walked easily in tandem up the stairs, Sherry an angel of warmth and aroma. In the bedroom, its door being drawn soundlessly closed, almost as if she didn’t want her son to know they were there, she felt Sherry’s hand at her waist, suggesting her about and into an embrace. Too much haste. Too tight and clingy. She accepted the kiss, felt herself melt below. Not yet. She broke off. “Hey, hey,” she said softly. “Let’s just hold one another. Under the covers, okay? I’d like that.”

Sherry nodded. “All right.” She kissed Katt’s hands and Katt broke away. Sherry’s disappointment, small as it was, edged her kindness. But Katt felt that sex was still far off, that cuddling was as intimate as she wanted to be tonight. She undressed at her closet, tossing her clothes into the brown laundry basket. Beside Katt’s more prosaic dress suits, Sherry’s silken green robe hung like a daring notion. Katt watched her remove her dress, her bra, the red lace bikini briefs hugging her hips. Sherry smiled, sauntered over in an easy flow, cocked her head in sympathy with the sorrow she rightly read in Katt’s eyes, took her hands, brushed their knuckles against her nipples, then wrapped her arms around Katt as she moved in for a full body embrace. She felt as comforting as a blanket of sun, breasts touching, softening inward as Katt returned her hug.

They lay down then, cool sheets quickly warming about them. It felt as if their bodies had blended to the full, a comfort akin to a mother’s hug. But Sherry somehow came closer, kissed her gently, then more ardently, sliding her left leg up over Katt’s right. Her private hair teased at Katt’s, barely there, brilliant red curls twining into her brown ones. “I love you,” she whispered at Katt’s ear and it made her weep. “It’s all right,” she said, kissing her earlobe, the soft skin at the hinge of her jaw.

“You’re so good to me,” Katt protested, feeling as if she deserved condemnation, not love.

“Everything’s all right,” Sherry said. She comforted her, unhurriedly, even as she pressed and rhythmed herself against Katt’s clitoral hood. It felt good and Katt could feel the heat rising and sense the dampness and the breath changing in her bed-mate—so that when Sherry seized up and came, it

was no surprise at all, but a giving and a taking all in one. What surprised her was the sudden love-clutch below, the orgasm that crept up inside her when she hadn’t been paying heed. It flared at her clitoris, fiery, quick as a flicked match head, then spread deep and down and out through her entire body, shaking her, shaking tears out of her, her cheeks damp, kissing Sherry, making herface damp too. Her lover, all turned on, was gasping endearments in her ear. But she couldn’t process them, couldn’t focus to hear them, and that was all right. It was only the soothe that mattered, the clear loving intent, the rhythms of her words, the low ragged harshness of her voice.

Katt wiped her tears on the pillowcase, then laughed, hugging Sherry anew. She touched her toasty thigh, softer than babyskin. Sherry lay back, easing open. Katt’s hand moved in to touch the moistness, to further moisten it—an index finger, then the next finger, together a penile heft sliding deep, probing, caressing. She remembered what she had found, what her jealousy had tempted her to set loose. Incredibly, that temptation still existed— but attenuated, deflated, a faint echo of what it had been.

She uncurved her hand between Sherry’s thighs so that her fingers sank in another inch, touched the os, entrance to the cervix. Her lover mmm’ed in pleasure, squirming on the bed. Katt placed her left palm on Sherry’s tummy, her fingertips easing into the thick soft forest of pubic hair and deepening downward, the flesh-botde of the uterus now clarifying in her mind’s eye. She gave it light, she gave it love. Static interfered. Thoughts of her husband came between her will and the cure, his penis once tracking the same lovepath she now fingered. Jealousy, territoriality, a remaining twinge of revenge— these welled up to blur her focus.

Katt closed her eyes, raising her level of intent and trying for a bead on the tiny growth she’d found. But her Marcus-thoughts amplified, her guilt over Conner coming in to join them. She’d hurt her son. No measure of kindness toward him in the years ahead, no amount of motherly love, would ever counterbalance the enormity of what she’d done. Fine, fine, she told herself. Get past it, go through it, it’s a tired drone. Conner vanished and there popped into her head again good old Marcus. She sent out love through her fingertips, moving the right ones through Sherry’s wet warmth, palpating with the left. Marcus stood impassively beside the bed in a room that was and was not this room, a recrimination that this time failed. It was right to have sent him over. That stunned her. Now before her, despite her current bout of suffering, lay an opening out to fresh air and sunlight; with Marcus there had been only a sealed coffin, lightless, airless, confining, eternal.

Did he deserve to die? No. But she deserved to live, and if that was selfish, then so be it. As parallel as one contrived to align one’s life with a spouse, that illusion merely covered the essential fact of aloneness. Our birth brought separation—and in that separation, ever after, we lived and we died. How convenient, she thought. How nice a justification. She gave it credence and she didn’t. He was dead—and that was right and it was wrong, right wrong right wrong, like a punchdrunk fighter being drubbed in an unending loop of pain and punishment.

Outside her window, the geese fluttered up and honked by. Sherry’s moans grew more intense as her fumbling hand found Katt’s left breast, thumbing the nipple hard, making more difficult the concentration Katt needed. Too dark in here.. She ought to have lit a candle. Babble babble, her mind, her body. She loved her lover’s cervix, but it fell short of being sufficient, the healing somehow elusive.

Another time she’d be stronger, she’d get the growth and rein in its stampede, tame the renegade cells or sheer them away. How she might do that occurred to her later at the lip of sleep, not to return to remembrance until fresh coffee steamed Sherry’s love-aroma from her upper lip into her nostrils the next afternoon. For now, she gave up the attempt and merged into complete sensuality, slick fingers finding and come-hithering Sherry’s G-spot, her other hand snaking down through the thick red thatch, furrowing labia apart, rhythming the moist nub she found there, bending at last to taste its elemental goodness. Love was good. She hadn’t known such love in a long time: healing, delivered from the heart, its ebb and flow moon-whole. The sadness, though it hung about, softened in the blessing of Sherry’s unconditional acceptance of Katt, just as she was, even if Katt’s just-as-she-was remained in essence unknown. Guilt eased back into her when she wasn’t looking, taking up its steady vigil over her; but it remained in abeyance, a deep yet mild ache that granted her some respite from its goad.

Katt fingered and kissed scar tissue, tracing letters across her lover’s back.

Mine, she thought. All mine.

Tuesday, August thirty-first. A full moon tonight at Lyra’s cabin. Katt caught Sherry at her office, two rings and she answered, her voice softening as soon as Katt said hello. “I’m taking you somewhere special tonight.”

“Where?” asked Sherry.

“You’ll find out.”

“Oh, c’mon, c’mon, I want to know.”

“Nope,” Katt said. “My lips are sealed.”

And they went on in that vein like schoolgirls for an-amused few minutes. Katt told Sherry to meet her for soup and salad at Alfalfa’s, six o’clock sharp, and hung up. A call to Healing Pathways (Lyra overjoyed to hear happiness in Katt’s voice) had confirmed that the cabin was free and that they would not be disturbed. Although Katt was still bothered by the secrets she held inside, the communion she and her lover had shared all night—sleeping, waking, half awake and then nicely roused into a new tussle—had turned a corner on sorrow, had left guilt foundering in the dust. Five took forever to arrive. But when it did, Katt logged out of her workstation, gathered her papers, and bounded down the stairs to the parking lot.

She had no idea how such an unlikely phenomenon as an energy vortex could grant her such powers—could, with the help of the full moon’s rays, redouble them. Thank God no faith, naive or otherwise, had been required. It had gone on its subtle way inside her in the face of manifest doubt and skepticism. And soon, with her new love naked beneath the skylight, a fire raging in the fireplace, she would be able at last to confront the cancerous threat, reverse it, undo it, restore the body’s true harmony—giving Sherry no clue as to what she was about, but couching it in intimacy and eventually turning it into that. Indeed, it was that. Her power as she delivered it was—had always been—a gift of love; reversing it had run counter to love.

By five twenty she was home. Conner had made himself a bowl of popcorn, looking a little guilty at being caught snacking so near dinnertime. “Hi,” Katt said, leaning to kiss her son’s cheek. “How’s every little thing?”