In the end the other two had left the knife and run away, and Gabriel had slit the calf s throat and watched it die, horrified and fascinated at the same time by a power he’d never understood and now held in his hands—life and death, instinct and choice. Doing what you had to do, whether you wanted to do it or not. Who he was now had begun there in Aunt Sarah’s pasture, her orchards, her house—at the small high school where he’d learned that standing tough in
the courage of his convictions could make him very, very lonely.
Still made him very, very lonely.
He lifted his head, deliberately ending today’s entry in his pitiless introspective diary. Back in Alice’s house the room smelled of sweet rainy air and teenage girls, of powder and perfume and innocence; the sheets on the bed beside him held the scent of fabric softener and sunshine—and, somehow, of family love, faith and forgiveness. His family...
He crumpled night air like a tangible substance into his empty fists, feeling suddenly trapped in an emotion he’d prefer to ignore, feeling like an invader. Feeling the need to fill his lungs with air that didn’t taste of hope, to clear his head of tangled memories he didn’t know how to sort out.
When he thought about what he’d become, he didn’t thank Aunt Sarah for it, didn’t thank Alice Meyers for reminding him of who he’d been. Of who he’d wanted to be. Because after nearly twenty years, his faith still haunted him, sometimes, in the night
.
A sudden scraping outside the window sent him crouching for cover, reaching for something to use as a weapon. Carefully, he raised his head over the windowsill, peering into the grayness that night vision made of the dark.
The yard behind Alice’s house was deep, narrow and fenced. Toward the center of it, three slim maples raised their branches skyward, and there was a quartet of smaller trees at the back of the yard he couldn’t see well enough to identify. A long picnic table sat below the window, and the stray illumination from a neighbor’s floodlight allowed him to distinguish a hammock slung between two of the maples. A bulky bi-level wooden structure stood in shadow off to one side. Gabriel thought he detected rings, ladders, tire swings, a fire pole and a sandbox attached to it. Childhood lying in wait, beckoning all comers. A stage of life the only child of missionaries knew next to nothing about.
A figure moved into his line of vision, and he eased himself higher at the window, eyes no longer straining to find enemies. As he’d known he would, he recognized her even before he saw her.
Alice.
Not a shallow beauty sheltered from life’s rigors, he knew. Her battle scars though faded, were evident. Beautiful because life had made her that way, because after she’d tried dodging its blows, she’d turned around and roared back at it. Simple beauty earned through
experience with life’s contradictions.
His mouth pulled tight over his teeth in a grin full of sudden self-derision. Man, he’d been out there too long. He was beginning to sound like a soldier facing his last battle, as poetic as a Colombian drug merchant waxing rhapsodic over arts and flowers in the same breath he used to sentence his opposition to death. Only he was neither. He was just...
A man looking for the “more” life had promised him as a child.
He watched Alice climb onto the lower floor of the play structure and stretch her arms to catch the third rung of the horizontal ladder jutting out from the upper floor. Hesitating, she hung suspended for a moment, then threw her feet forward, swung out an arm and caught the next rung, struggled to cross the next two and dropped to the ground, puffing, rubbing her hands.
“Oh, jeez.”
He smiled, listening to her gasp as she talked to herself, knowing he shouldn’t eavesdrop, doing it, anyway.
“I’m out of shape.” She straightened. “Come on, kid,” she urged herself breathlessly. “Try it again, one more time, you can do it.” She sank against a wooden upright, holding her sides. “Oh, hell, what am I trying to prove? That I’m as good as I used to be on the jungle gym? Thirty-five years old I ought to be able to choose my battles better than that, don’t you think? Ah, shoot.”
Almost as though she were trying to get it done before she could think better of it, Alice threw herself onto the platform again and jumped for the bars, using momentum to swing herself, hand by hand, most of the way to the other end. On the last bar, her hands slipped and she dropped to the ground, air whistling painfully between her teeth as she looked at her palms.
“Aaauugh, that hurts! Alice, you jerk. That was stupid. What did you do that for? Now you’re going to have dry cracked blisters on your hands for the wedding, and won’t that be just peachy for anybody who has to dance with you?” She shook her hands hard, trying to get rid of the sting. “Don’t you ever think ahead, dummy? When do you plan to learn anything? When will you—”
Gabriel’s laughter carried easily through the night silence.
She stiffened. “Who is it? Who’s there?”
“Just me.” God, laughing felt good. Had he ever known that? Maybe once... He leaned against the window, touching the screen with his nose. “Sorry, didn’t mean to scare you.”
“You didn’t.” She drew herself up. “I was just being careful.”
Honesty came back to her, laughing, out of the night. “Liar.”
“Well—” she lifted her shoulders in a grand shrug “—like I said, careful. Isn’t that why you lie?”
She flung the question at him casually, without thought or expectation, and the unaimed dart struck home.
I have to trust you. Why did you lie to me?
He’d had to ask Scully that once. Scully had given him the same reply Gabriel himself now considered stock:
Lying’s what I do.
“Did you go to sleep?”
Her voice came from just outside the window now, and Gabriel, startled, felt his heart jump. “No. I’m still here.” He breathed quietly, glad she couldn’t see his face. “What are you doing out there?”
“Getting away from you.” It surprised her to hear herself say it The night was full of honesty. “I’m sorry. I wish I didn’t mean that the way it sounds. Oh, God.” Alice covered her face with her hands, and Gabriel grinned in spite of himself. “There it is again. I’m sorry. I don’t know what’s gotten into my tongue tonight. It’s probably my sisters. I get around them, and suddenly there it is, full-frontal bluntness and no brain censors left to blip it out.”
His laughter was almost painful by now, held down out of respect for the hour, but full throated, using muscles he’d forgotten he had. “Where did you come from?” he gasped finally. “Who sent you out to find me this morning?”
“Your guardian angel, apparently.” She grinned when he choked on a new wave of laughter, liking the sound. Laughter was a restorative, a joiner, a gift too many people threw away. “No, really, it was my family’s fault. They wanted me to come to brunch—on a
Monday,
mind—with them and my sister’s fiance’s family. Phil has five elder brothers, two of whom are single. I couldn’t bear the thought of another meal where the undercurrent went something like nudge-
nudge, wink-wink, what-do-you-think-of-Alice-and-what’s-his-name?-wouldn’t-they-make-a-cute-couple?-why-don’t-we-fix-’em-up? So I told them I had a couple of job interviews to get to and couldn’t possibly make it. Aren’t you glad?”
“I’m beginning to wonder.” Gabriel’s chuckle subsided slowly. “Did you have job interviews? Is that what I kept you from?”
“Sort of.” Alice slid onto the top of the picnic table and crossed her legs. “Actually,
a couple of the local Urgent Care facilities are looking for barrista slash coffee shop managers and I’d be good at that, so…” She shrugged.
“T
hen
I thought
maybe
I’d go fill out computer apps at Target and Meijer before I went
over to a fast food place and
to
see if they’d like to send me to Hamburger College or something.” She paused thoughtfully. “Got offered a job with an ophthalmologist, but he wanted me to lose twenty pounds because his office was too
narrow
to work four girls comfortably if they wore anything larger than a size eight. I told him I was perfectly comfortable as a non-anorexic size ten and turned down the job. Thought about trying some business courses at night school, but...” As though all at once realizing how much she’d told him about herself without learning anything in return, she turned her face up to him suddenly. “Well, that’s me. What about you? Who are you, really?”
‘‘I’m—” he began and stopped, stumped. He had nothing to give her. He was a liar, a thief, a spy. Judas with thirty pieces of silver rattling around in his pocket
.
He was Gabriel, like the archangel, one of God’s avenging forces. He was Lucas, as in Luke, as in the Gospel according to. He was an actor without a script, a lump of clay waiting for the sculptor. An expanse of empty road going nowhere. A man looking for a way
out
of
a very deep ditch
, whose mind had lately begun to take some dangerous trips down some very dark alleys. “What you see...” he offered lamely.
Alice slapped at an insect on her arm, staring up at the bedroom screen, glad there was an entire house between them so she couldn’t reach out unconsciously and touch him. He needed, she’d give. For better or worse, that’s what she did. “It’s dark,” she said softly. “I can’t see very
much.”
“Not much to see.”
“I don’t believe you.”
A chuckle, harsh and guttural, burst from Gabriel. “It’s true.”
Her voice was like a cool breeze in the desert, soft and intense. Brief. “So you want to think. Where were you born?”
“Port Moresby. New Guinea.” A name, a place among all the other places he couldn’t quite remember.
“Really?” She was surprised. Shouldn’t be, but was. “Were you there long? Is that where your family’s from? What was it like? When I was a kid I always wanted to go there, emigrate to Australia, New Zealand—you know, wagon trains and pioneers on the last great frontiers.”
Her eagerness overwhelmed him; there was a thirst in it he didn’t think he could satisfy. It had been a long time since he’d told anyone anything that resembled the truth about himself. Didn’t know if he should now, but he wanted to, anyway. What the hell. The truth was only a simplified version of the lie he lived, and it wasn’t often that he could afford to indulge his conscience with candor.
He turned from the window, pressing his back into the cool, painted wall, and stared into the grayness of the room where his eyes couldn’t trick him into seeing her. Wanting her. “It was hot. I don’t remember it. We moved before I was three. Pulau Ambon. Bintulu. Bangkok. Da Nang,
Quang Ngai.” He didn’t mean to sound bitter. He hadn’t known he was. “My family’s actually from Iowa. Friends—Quakers. Missionaries.”
Darkness placed a seal around them, bound them in an acute awareness of mood and emotion shared only by strangers stranded in the same storm, feeling their way toward one another out of necessity. Alice tipped her face to the sky, letting Gabriel’s loneliness wash over and mingle with her own before it cascaded away. “My mother sent her engagement ring to the missions.” She shared carefully, not yet knowing where to tread. Talking about families wasn’t the same as talking about the weather. “I think she’s always wanted to be a missionary. Meeting my dad and having kids sort of sidetracked her for a few years, but maybe now that she won’t have to think about Grace being alone anymore...” She shrugged and let the “maybe” hang. “Where’s your family now?”
“Don’t know for sure. Haven’t heard from them in about ten years. Different hemispheres, different lives, different beliefs… You fight, grow apart, lose contact. Forget.…” Thinking about his estrangement from his parents made him restless as it always did; made him remember how uncomfortable he was with some of his adopted attitudes and beliefs. He elbowed himself away from the wall. “You know how it is
—
family’s tough to live with sometimes. Strangers are easier.”