Elsinore Canyon (15 page)

It was cold under the trees, and she had run out of the house in practically nothing. The one time she could actually use her cloak. She limped back out to the road, back to the drive of the main house. Ugh, she couldn’t do it. She turned down towards the topiary garden. It was a scraggly mess, perfect, it suited her mood. The strawberry patch lay ahead. She could go down to the beach. What was that in front of Polly’s cottage, a scarecrow? Oh no. Something else. Something she had been avoiding, but it was too late now. He had seen her and he was walking forward, towards her. Huge, unpayable spiritual debts lay ahead.

Down in the cottage, Phil flipped his classic Hirade over and stared at its back. Nothing was coming out. His technique was fine, his instrument was blameless. He cradled it in his elbows again. He could play someone else’s tune if he couldn’t find one of his own. Old-fashioned sheet music, there was a ton of it on the shelf. Find something to go with his mood. Flamenco. He picked a song and propped a few sheets on a stand. He had heard this one sung, in Spanish, but he knew the meaning.
To feel your warm curve—to give my soul to you—to talk of God.
A dancer, sitting on a chair, would be drawn irresistibly to her feet, out to the center of the floor, where she would cast her eyes down and bang her heels against the beats of his guitar. Face and tongue still, body speaking, delivering the heaven of ecstatic abandon through her body down to the earth. He would call; she would answer. Music to stir her heart; a torrent of submission from her feet.

He wandered off the sheet music. To start with a touch, a place on earth, then fly upward, and dissolve. To accept the loss that defines your life. To feel the spirit of love, to shed tears under its perfect power and beauty, but never to taste—oh hell, he was starving. He wanted Dana. It might even be nice to blow something up.

What could he do? How was he to know anything? This mad phase of hers was so bedeviling that for the first time in their relationship he feared crowding her, but he was the one who had gone absent after that god-awful scene with his father and the Hamlets. Was that what had happened to her, during those weeks when he was in Anchorage? Did she still love him? Did she want him to get lost? Did she regret what they had done, was she ashamed? He thought about her constantly—he thought about her body. He’d been going in circles for weeks, and now he was not only back on the same territory as Dana, he was next door. No sooner had he come back than he was summoned for that interrogation. Had actions been set in motion as a result? Was Dana trapped, was she quietly dying for a word of explanation? The Christopher she had given him hung around his neck. He pulled it out and held it against his palm: the haloed stranger carrying a child on his shoulders, embedded in a tiny pewter surfboard. It had weight, it was physical evidence. He set his guitar down and slammed out the cottage door. He started purposefully for the main house.

They walked towards each other stiffly.

“Phil.”

“Dana! Were you coming to…?”

“I was running away.” She tried to pull on one shoe, but it hurt too much. She flung the stupid things on the ground.

“Baby, baby—” Three strides and he was in front of her. “I haven’t seen you in a while. How have you been?” He worked his fingertips around her wrists.

“How should I be?” she said miserably. “Where have you been?”

“My dad sent me away. I tried calling you a few times, you know that. Dana, if you need me now, here I am.”

His fingers were brushing up her bare arms and his face was bending over hers. That hair of his, brown on top and sun-bleached on the ends like gold tassels. Whatever she had meant to say, it was gone. Her arms dangled at her sides and her head fell back. He was on her, around her, destroying her, his arms, his hands, his hard chest, the taste of his lips, the feel of his eyelashes on her cheek and his downy whiskers and warm, tan face on her mouth and chin and neck. He squeezed her and she felt him getting hot and hard. She knew what was going on with her body, too. By the time he touched her, she’d be dripping.

He swept her legs out from under her, she was four feet up, enough to make her dizzy. She clung to him as he ran up the cottage steps. His strength! They were crossing the floor to his room—

“Wait, Phil. Stop!”

He loosened his grip.

“I can’t do it. Here, put me down. Let me kiss you.”

Her desire was racing lightning-quick, blood shooting through her veins and her nerves exploding like a thousand tiny pleasure-blisters, but Phil was actually going slowly, lowering her legs so that her feet touched down light as a feather. She was used to his body now and he could make her want things. To lie expectantly and lift a knee, arch her back, throw her elbows over her head—“I can’t do it right now, Phil.”

“What’s wrong?” he breathed.

“The time. Not you, not us. Phil.” Her palm passed over the back of his head while he gripped her other hand in his, and they poured their forgiveness for every sin they could ever commit against each other into their passionate kiss.

“I can’t take anything more from you,” Dana said as they pulled gently apart.

“You’re not taking.”

“No, you don’t know. These awful thoughts knocking at my skull. I’m always afraid of them, they’re always in my head when I’m trying to think of you.”

“Dana, are you all right?”

“I can’t lie to you. You’d see through it anyway. I’m not all here, Phil. I’m hiding things from you. Hiding is lying.”

“Dana, if they’ve made you…talk about us…”

“Lord, no,” she said. “I wouldn’t breathe your name to them, not even to trick them. Have they tried to make you, Phil?”

He shook his head, very slightly, very slowly, “No.” Then he asked her, “What could you possibly have to hide? From me?”

That she was so full of poison she didn’t deserve to love him. That she fantasized about sinking knives into people, that she was a creature of hatred, including of things he loved. That so monstrous and consuming were her vengeful thoughts that they were corroding the Phil-shaped space inside her and implanting their loathsome selves. “I can’t tell you right now. Phil, I’ll—we’ll talk later. I need to get back to the house. I’ve got guests, and I ran away in a fit.”

A thought struck Phil. “Dana, about us. You don’t think I’d ever…I mean, you’re not worried about getting pregnant or anything, are you?”

She froze. Her eyes slowly filled with an uncomprehending anger. “Pregnant?”

Phil almost dared feel a stab of joy. “Or, did you want to? Or not want to, ever?”

Dana backed away from him robotically. “I forgot.”

“What?”

She peered upward boldly, into corners. “I forgot about you, Polly.”

“My father?”

“Your father.”

“He’s at the main house. Isn’t he?”

“Part of him,” Dana said bitingly. “His eyes and ears are here.” She shouted out at the air. “Where else, Polly? Have you got my bedroom wired?”

“Dana.” Phil took a ginger step towards her. “Dana, baby,
I’m
here.”

Dana ran to the center of the room and shouted into the air. “Polly! You know what I’m here for? You know what we girls do!” She turned and shouted at each wall. “They were going to put monitors on our uteruses so we’d use them properly. Only I have a better idea. Hear me out! Since the do-goody life-lovers claim to be so concerned about the dear little babies, then all men should get
their
tubes tied!” A full-length portrait of Polly, Phil, and Laurie hung on the wall. She ran to it and jabbed her finger at Polly’s crotch. “All boys shall now report to a government-certified doctor by their eighteenth birthday for a mandatory vasectomy. Before the chop, they can make a deposit in a government sperm bank so if they ever want kids, they can go to the bank and make a withdrawal—which will be placed only into the uterus of a willing female. There! No more rape babies, no casual sex babies, no broken condom babies, no AIDS babies, no temptations to abortion. What pro-lifey uterus cop could refuse?” She turned to Phil. “How about it?”

“Why are you saying these things to me?” he said, horror-struck.

Dana took another step back from him and looked out the door. She spoke dazedly. “I’m not. Phil, can you keep away from me for a while?”

“Not if you need m—”

“Just a little while. I do need you—I need you to be here, and be
Phil
when I’ve finished working through these things.”

“Dana, how could I not be part of them?”

“You are, you have been, Phil. You’ve comforted me more than anyone.” She took a deep breath. “But I don’t want you to see this part. I have dark feelings, and I don’t want them in you. I’m going to get through this as fast as I can, I’ve made up my mind since I saw you, I’m going to get clean of everything so we can be back together. Can you trust me, Phil?”

He looked at her through soft, yearning eyes. “Are you sure there isn’t any problem about what we’ve done?”

“No. It’s perfect. Keep that, just as it is.”

“You make it sound like a memory. Something we’ll never do again.”

“No, I’m talking about a precious flame, that only you can keep alive, so I can come back to it. I just feel so full of wrong, Phil, I don’t want to infect us. Keep what we have. Keep it safe for me.”

He took her hand, kissed her palm, and placed it on his chest. “It’s locked in my heart, and you’ve got the key.”

She pulled back, her hand drifting away but still held out to him, and walked away, through the room, and out the door without taking her eyes off him.

In fear and pain, Phil watched her go. Dana was falling apart in some weird, scary way he couldn’t begin to understand. But one certainty was lodged in the depth of his aching heart: he had betrayed her.

Dr. Claudia glared at a monitor in Polly’s office. The sound was fuzzy, but she had understood enough. The pregnancy thing again, and now universal vasectomies. She swatted the volume off. “She’s a lovesick teenager all right. And a few other things.”

Polly shifted his weight nervously. “So, you agree I was right.”

“Pah. Yeah, as rain.”

Polly followed her around his office. “But I was right about her problem. Let me devise a solution—”

“I don’t care. I don’t care about Dana’s problems anymore. I have my own.”

Polly made a run around his desk and blocked her. “Then what do you want me to do?”

Dr. Claudia marveled: the man literally appeared to have pinwheels in his eyes. She pushed him aside and stalked out and down the hall towards an elevator. Polly trotted at her heels. “Claudia?”

“My
problems,” she said as she punched the call button. The elevator door slid open—she suddenly thought better of alienating him. Crazy tool. She relaxed her face and waved him into the booth. The doors slid shut and she pressed him in an urgent, confiding tone. “It’s more than her puppy love thing with Phil. She’s nursing some grudge. Some plot—and heaven only knows how dangerous it might be. What kind of irresponsible lies she’ll tell, the damage she can do. I told you before, it’s the very thing I’m worried about.” They got off the elevator and went down the hall towards her office.

“Did you want me to keep watching her?”