Once Is Not Enough (65 page)

There was no traffic. She’d make Westhampton by one. Perhaps she should have phoned Hugh . . . But then he might have asked her to wait until tomorrow, and she had to talk it out now. She cut off the Expressway and pulled into a garage. The attendant filled the gas tank and gave her directions for Westhampton. The gas took all of her money, and she gave the attendant her last quarter as a tip. But the tank was filled, the road was good, and soon she’d see Hugh. Somehow she felt talking it out with him would make everything come out right.

It was one-fifteen when she pulled up to the house. She rang the bell . . . it had a hollow sound . . . an empty sound. Oh, Lord . . . was this one of his nights with his widow? She got into her car. She would sit and wait. She stared out at the dunes. They seemed so far away and so high and unfriendly tonight. But that was silly . . . they were just globs of sand. Hugh often slept out there. Of course! Maybe he was out there now! She got out of the car and started for the beach.

It was hard going. Wild grass grew in crazy patches. Several times she tripped over pieces of driftwood. Sand filled her sandals, but she ploughed on. She was physically exhausted by the time she reached the dunes. She stood on the top of the highest hill and looked down the stretch of beach. No sign of life anywhere. Even the ocean seemed abnormally calm. The waves seemed to whisper a hushed apology as they lapped against the sand. Perhaps Hugh was on another dune, farther down the beach. . . .

She stood and shouted his name. There was no answer . . . just the empty sound of her voice. Not even a gull called out. Where were all the gulls at night? They were always swooping around and screeching at one another during the day. She flopped on the ground and let some of the cool sand sift through her fingers. Where
did
sea gulls go at night? She looked back toward the house. It was dark and lonely-looking. The calm night, the bright stars, and the sighs of the waves seemed much friendlier than the empty house.

She rolled her sweater into a ball and cushioned it under her head. Then she lay back and stared at the sky. It seemed to come closer and blanket her. Suddenly she felt as if
it
was the world and earth was merely the floor. What
was
up there? Other planets? Other worlds? She looked back toward the house. Maybe Hugh was spending the night at the lady’s place.

She could go back to her car, and sleep there until he came back. But she wasn’t sleepy and it was so peaceful on the dune. All those stars. The Wise Men had looked at these same stars the night Jesus was born. Galileo had looked at them . . . and when Columbus was looking for his new route to India he had also relied on them. How many people had made love under them? How many children had made wishes on them and
prayed to the God they imagined sitting above them as she had when she was a child. God’s lights. Her mother had told her that! It suddenly came to her—God’s lights. Her mother! Until this second her mother had always been just a misty memory. A quiet lady always “resting.” Always beautiful when she was up and about . . . great brown eyes staring adoringly at her father . . . never at her. In fact she couldn’t recall ever looking into those eyes herself . . . “
Yes! Once!
. . . It came to her now. The memory of snuggling in her mother’s arms and seeing those great brown eyes looking tenderly at her. She had had a bad dream and cried out. The nurse came immediately. But this time her mother had come too. And it was one of the rare times that her mother rather than the nurse comforted her. And when she had shown fear of being alone in the darkness because the bad dream might return . . . her mother had held her close and told her nothing bad could happen in the night. That sometimes the light made things look bad, but the night was soft and comforting. They had sat before the window and looked at the stars together and her mother had said, “They are God’s little beacon lights . . . to remind you that He is always watching you . . . always there to help you . . . to love you.”

She thought about it now as she watched the stars. That was really a beautiful story to tell to a frightened little girl. What had her mother been like? Suddenly she wished she had been older and could have comforted her. Her mother loved Mike . . but he had other girls. God, how she must have suffered. She remembered how she had felt that day Tom stayed at the beach with his wife. Tears came to her eyes. Her poor, poor mother. In love with Mike . . . left alone with a little girl while he was in California. Probably in Bungalow Five with a girl of his own. Suddenly, lying there, it was as if she saw herself split into two beings. She was Mike’s girl in Bungalow Five . . . and she was her young helpless mother . . . alone too much . . . sobbing too much . . . She called out, “Mother . . . you shouldn’t have done it. The girl with him suffered too. At least you knew he would always come back to you. And you had me. Why did you leave me? Didn’t you love me?” Her voice rang out in the night . . . and the stars stared back. But suddenly
they no longer seemed warm and friendly. They looked hard and cold . . . as if they resented this intrusion into their privacy. They were aloof and secure . . . so sure they would always be there. Laughing at this little speck of humanity on the beach. And they weren’t God’s beacon lights . . . they were worlds and suns and meteorites. And now there was even space junk floating around in that velvety darkness. She saw a star streak across . . . then another . . . the moon looked so low. Like a mother dominating the heavens with the stars as her children. It was sad to know that the moon wasn’t silver and bright. That it was just a wasteland . . . scarred . . . pitted . . . smaller than earth . . . an ash in the sky. Man had landed on it and revealed its mystery and taken away all of the romance.

She still felt alert and colors were still strong. The sky was black but she saw shades of blue and purple in its blackness.

She glanced toward Hugh’s house. The moon hung over it, its brilliant light illuminating the dark windows. Maybe he had taken the widow to New York tonight.

She opened her bag and groped for her cigarettes. Her hand came across an envelope. She took it out. A plain white crumpled bulky envelope. The envelope Keith had stuck into her bag just as she was leaving. She ripped it open. It contained a small plastic pill bottle with two sugar cubes. There was also a note. She flicked on her cigarette lighter.
“DEAR HEIRESS: I LOVE YOU. I CAN’T TAKE YOU TO MARBELLA OR THE SOUTH OF FRANCE. BUT IF YOU’LL BE MY GIRL I CAN TAKE YOU ON TRIPS OUT OF THIS WORLD. FOR STARTERS—HERE’S TWO ON ME. LOVE, KEITH
.”

She opened the bottle and held the sugar cubes in her hand. She started to toss them away, but something held her back. Why not take one? If she did, all of her depression would evaporate. She’d be able to reach up and touch the stars. She put the cubes back into the bottle and dropped it back into her bag. No, taking acid wasn’t going to solve things. The problem would still be there when the “trip” was over. But what was the solution? Try to conform? Try to learn to love David? Learn backgammon? Have lunch every day? Buy clothes? No! She didn’t want a life that had no highs. Even the lows were worthwhile if you knew there would be highs.
And not an acid high. A real high. Like seeing Mike stride toward her that day in the airport at Rome, hearing Tom say he could never be without her. . . .

But they were both gone. Tom and Mike. . . .

She took out the bottle again. What would happen if she took
both
of them? Maybe she’d go on a trip that would last forever. Maybe she’d never come back.

She shivered. A wind had come up from nowhere. For some reason it chilled her. Sand began to spray against her face. She stood up and brushed the sand from her clothes. The wind was really blowing now. She put on her sweater. And then as suddenly as it had come, the wind stopped. And there was a curious silence—like the silence she had once heard in California right before a minor earth tremor. When the crickets had stopped and even the leaves made no sound. She looked toward the ocean. It was like glass, and the moon hung over it casting a bright path over the dark water. But that was impossible! Just a moment ago the moon had been behind her, hanging over Hugh’s house. She turned and looked back. Of course. There it was . . . A pale friendly light over the dark strip of beach-front houses. Then she looked back at the ocean . . . and there
it
was! Clear and bright . . . another moon!

She was hallucinating! It was that sugar cube Keith had given her at the party. She jumped up and turned her back on the “new moon.” She began to run, but it was like one of those dreadful nightmares where you ran but remained in one spot. It was happening to her. Her feet were moving, her breath was coming fast, but she remained on top of that dune . . . trapped between two moons.

She turned and looked back. The new moon had disappeared. The ocean was black and lonely. The stars seemed more distant than ever. She was frightened now. She started running. This time her feet moved. She stumbled and slipped in the darkness. Oh, God, acid was really dangerous. It had almost made her jump out of a window. Now it had made her see another moon. This must be what they call re-hallucinating. Or had she taken another sugar cube? Or both of them! Oh, God . . . had she? She looked back. She could see her bag on the dune where
she had dropped it. She could see it because it was illuminated by moonlight. Moonlight from the
other
moon! It was back!

Maybe she
had
taken the sugar cubes. But she was positive she had put them back. Or had she? It didn’t matter. She was hallucinating, seeing two moons . . . Anything could happen. It might drag her out to the ocean. If she could think she could jump out of a window and float upward, then there was no telling what would happen. Oh, God, she’d never take anything again. She’d marry David and have children. A child of her own to love. Maybe she’d never feel for David what she felt for Mike. No . . . what she felt for Tom. But at least she’d be marrying someone Mike approved of. And she would have a little boy who would look just like Mike. And a girl too. And she’d love them and be a good mother. She would! Only, please, God. Just let her make it back to that house.

Why did the house seem so far away? She was off the dune now. In a valley, climbing another. . . .

It was still there. She turned and saw it hover over the ocean. Suddenly it streaked across the sky, returned and spun around, pirouetting—as if it were doing an eerie ballet just for her. It shot into the heavens until it looked no larger than a star, until she was positive it was a star. Then it returned to its normal size, throwing its glow into a perfect lane across the water.

She stared at it for a moment. This was no hallucination. This was real! Because when you hallucinate you don’t know it. Like going out of the window. She had thought she was dreaming. But maybe
this
was a dream too. Maybe she wasn’t on the beach. Maybe she was home in bed. Maybe she wasn’t at the Pierre. Maybe that had all been part of a dream too. Maybe she was still with Tom, and Mike wasn’t dead. Maybe the happy shots caused all this to be one long horrible nightmare. And when she woke up she’d be at Bungalow Five and Tom would be there and she would leave him and rush to meet Mike and make things up. Or maybe they hadn’t had the fight, maybe the fight was part of the nightmare—then she wouldn’t have to leave Tom. But maybe she had never met Tom. Maybe she was still in Switzerland, and she was getting well, and she was coming home to Mike and he hadn’t met Dee, and none of
this had happened . . . But then maybe there never was a Franco, and there had never been a motorcycle accident. Maybe she had never been born—because she couldn’t tell just when the nightmare began.

But it hadn’t all been a nightmare. Some of it had been marvelous. Going to Miss Haddon’s had even been all right because there had been wonderful weekends to look forward to, the Saturdays when she’d rush into his arms. And even the Clinique hadn’t been all bad because there were his visits, and most of all the expectation and the dream of getting well, especially the month before she came home, when she knew she would be with him. . . .

At least there had been that month of dreams, and sometimes dreams were better than reality. You couldn’t call a month of wonderful dreams a nightmare. And the month had culminated in a moment of fantastic reality that afternoon when she found him at the airport waiting. She didn’t know about Dee then. So for a few hours he belonged to her, as he had in Rome until Melba came on the scene. There had been happy moments once. Just as her mother had probably been happy—once—and then had to face it, accept the fact that everything was gone, a special kind of happiness comes only once . . .

“No!” she cried out. “Once is not enough! Oh, Mother, how did you ever live through it as long as you did!”

She stood very still. She had shouted at the ghostly light. And all the while she stood rooted in one spot. She stared at it as it hung over the ocean. It looked exactly like the other moon. Only this one didn’t have any dark areas.

And then a new thought struck her. Maybe there was a logical explanation for all this. Maybe this was one of those UFO’s that occasionally crop up in the news. Well, if it was, she certainly couldn’t be the only person in Westhampton who was seeing it. She looked toward all the dark houses. Wasn’t anyone in town awake? Wherever Hugh was, couldn’t he see it? All those nights he spent on the dunes, nothing like this had ever happened to him. She had to come along
one
night . . . And look at the mess she was in!

She stood there bathed in that strange light, alone on the
beach. Somehow she felt that if she stood very still it wouldn’t see her. But that was ridiculous. Whatever it was, it couldn’t possibly see her—it was thousands of miles away.

Maybe she should try to remember everything. How large it was, how many miles away it seemed, what direction it was traveling. Maybe she should report it. Oh, sure—that’s all she’d need!

But it was there, hanging in front of her. She began to shout. “WAKE UP, SOMEONE! DOESN’T ANYONE IN WEST-HAMPTON KNOW YOU’VE SUDDENLY GOT TWO MOONS!”