The Stranger (12 page)

Perhaps she owed Christo nothing; after all, she did not love him; it was he who loved her. Perhaps she should let them go, and let Jethro control what happened.

But love was too precious. Even if it was not hers, and would never be hers, how could she be part of its ending? She did not love Christo, but it counted that he loved her.

The television van was almost upon her.

She flung herself out from behind the piled snow and the little holly tree … directly under the wheels of the van.

“She jumped!” said the van driver constantly. “I swear it. The girl jumped right in front of me.”

“I slipped,” Nicoletta explained. It was not easy to talk because of the pain. The broken leg was so very broken. Pieces of bone stuck out of her flesh like long white splinters. “Snow,” she explained. “Ice. No sand on the road yet. It’s my fault. I should have been more careful.”

Whatever spell Christo had cast to coax a network to send a crew, had dried up. The people who had been eager to film whatever this kid thought he’d seen, especially since it was near the disappearing point of the two hunters, were now interested in nothing but getting through a terrible day. The van driver was desperate to be sure everybody understood it was not his fault. He said this to Nicoletta’s parents and to the doctors and the admitting secretary in the emergency room and to Christo.

Christo had questions of his own to ask Nicoletta, but being severely hurt provided its own camouflage. She need only close her eyes, rest her long lashes on her pale cheeks, and whisper. “I’m tired, Christo, visit me tomorrow.” And he had to leave. No options.

The cast was big and white and old-fashioned. No vinyl and metal athletic brace for a break this bad; solid heavy-duty plaster and bandage was like a rock attached to her leg. She had always rather hoped to be wearing a cast one day, and attract lots of sympathetic attention, and have to use crutches.

But now she faced a new nightmare.

How will I go back to Jethro? thought Nicoletta. I can’t get through the woods with this. I can’t use crutches in the snow.

Not only had she stopped Christo and the TV crew from looking for Jethro, she had stopped herself.

People asked what she had been doing, anyway, on some remote road at the crack of dawn? There was only one acceptable excuse and she used it. “I’ve taken up jogging, you know. I’ve been running every morning.”

Her parents had not known this, but then, they didn’t get up before dawn and could not say she hadn’t been.

Jamie was too jealous of the attention Nicoletta was getting to ask difficult questions. Jamie kept looking around for cute interns instead.

When Nicoletta woke up in the afternoon, she was alone in a quiet hospital room with pastel walls. The other bed was empty. There was something eerie about the flat white sheets and the untouched, neatly folded, cotton blanket on the other bed. It was waiting for its next victim.

The door was closed. She had no sense of noise or action or even human beings around her. She might have been alone at the bottom of the cave, she was so alone in the bare, pale room.

Her leg hurt.

Her head ached.

I’ll never even be able to tell Jethro what I did for him, she thought, in a burst of self-pity. I’ll hobble around by myself and nobody will care.

The door was flung open, banging heavily into the pastel plaster wall.

The Madrigals burst into the room, singing as they came. It was so corny. They were singing an old European hiking song: “And as we go, we love to sing, our knapsacks on our backs. Foll-der-oolllll, foll-der-eeeeee, our knapsacks on our backs.”

She was so glad to see them that it made her cry. It was hokey, but it was beautiful. It was friendship.

“Now, now,” said Ms. Quincy, “we won’t stay long, it’s too exhausting for somebody as badly hurt as you are. We just wanted you to be sure you know that you’re among friends.”

Nicoletta looked up, thinking, Ms. Quincy had a lot of nerve, when she’d kicked Nicoletta away from those friends. But out loud she said, “Hi, everybody. I’m glad to see you.”

They all kissed her, and Christo’s kiss was no different from anybody else’s. She wanted to catch his hand, and see if he was all right. Ask what he was thinking. But she didn’t really want to know.

Rachel had brought colored pens so everybody could sign the cast. Rachel herself wrote,
“I love you, Nickie! Get well soon!”

This meant everybody could write,
I love you, Nickie,
and they did. David and Jeff, whom she hardly knew, wrote,
“I love you, Nickie, get well soon.”
Cathy did, Lindsay did, even Anne-Louise.
“Love you, Nickie!”

Christo was last. She had to do something. She was out of action, but he might return to the cave anyway. She had to exert some sort of pull on him.

“Why were you there?” he breathed. “What were you doing? It was awfully far from home to be jogging.”

“I knew you were coming, Christo,” she murmured. “I wanted to watch you in action. I wanted to be part of it.” She squeezed his hand. “Promise me you won’t do anything unless I’m along to watch you, Christo?”

Everything about him softened. The love he had for her surfaced so visibly that the girl Madrigals were touched and the boy Madrigals were embarrassed. Nicoletta blushed, but not from love. Because he believed her. Because love, among all the other things it was, was gullible. Everybody had written, “Love you, Nickie,” but he wrote on her cast, “
I love you more. Christo.”

The Madrigals left, singing again, this time a burbling Renaissance song that imitated brooks and flutes. It was a lullabye, and Nicoletta slept, deep and long.

She dreamed that she was falling.

Falling in dreadfully icy cold, wind whipping through her hair and freezing her lungs. She dreamed that her hand was reaching for something to catch. Anything! A branch, a rock, a ladder, a rope—

—but found only sand.

The flat of her palm slid across the grit, finding nothing to hold, nothing at all, and the black forever hole below her opened its mouth.

In her sleep she screamed silently, because everything in that terrible world was dark and silent, and in one last desperate try she tightened her grip.

She found a hand. It held her. It saved her. She woke. It was Jethro’s hand. He had come. He was safe. He had not been hurt, and nobody had hurt him. He was here in a pastel hospital room.

He leaned over her bed and found her lips. He kissed her as lightly as air and whispered, “Nicoletta.
Oh, Nicoletta.
I love you.”

Even when used by strangers like David and Jeff, or people at whom she was angry like Ms. Quincy, those three words remained beautiful. But from the lips of the boy she loved, those three words were the most beautiful on earth. “I love you, too,” she whispered. A rare smile illuminated his face, momentarily safe from its terrible burdens. They held hands, and his was graveled and rasping, and hers was soft and silken.

J
ETHRO YELLED AT NICOLETTA
, albeit softly. “You could have been killed!”

“I know that now, but there wasn’t time to think of that then.”

“What were you thinking of?” he demanded.

“You.”

The quiet of the hospital room deepened, and the pale colors of the walls intensified. Her hand in his felt warmer and his hand in hers felt gentler. “I can’t stay long,” he said.

“Why not? Stay forever.”

He smiled sadly. He understood what forever meant. She had no grasp.

“Then I’ll talk fast. Jethro, I have ideas.” Her eyes burned with excitement. “The thing is,” she said, “to bury them. Right?”

“To bury them?” repeated Jethro.

“The ancient souls! They didn’t get buried. That’s the problem, right? So we have to bury them. We’ll blast the cave! We’ll dynamite them up! Or else we’ll flood the cave! Or else we’ll bring torches. We’ll get toy wooden boats to count as their ships and set fire to those!”

He did not respond.

“Jethro! Don’t you think those ideas are terrific?”

He said instead, “Who do you think you will have if you have me?”

Now she was the one to repeat words that meant nothing to her. “Who will I have if I have you?”

“Nicoletta,” he said. “What if you have me … as a thing?”

She did not want to think about that.

“You screamed the first time I touched you. Because I am part of the cave. It’s in me now. I don’t even know why I came here, I could get caught in my other shape. There’s no way out of my other being, Nicoletta.” His sentences, normally so hard to come by, tumbled and fell on top of each other, like hunters in caves. “You told me yourself what your friend Christo wanted to do to me. Shoot me. Or exhibit me.”

“Well, I won’t let him.”

“How many times do you plan to step in front of trucks?”

After the fact, Nicoletta was aware of what she had done. She certainly did not want death. That was what this was all about! She wanted life, and she wanted it for both of them. Life and love, hope and joy. No. She did not plan to step in front of any more trucks. “Jethro, there has to be a way out for us.”

His eyes looked into a deep distance she could not follow. Did not want to follow. Did not want to think about. “Think of rescue,” she said urgently. “We have to work on this, Jethro.” She gripped him with both her hands. “What’s the point of love if we can’t be together?”

His chest rose and fell. She wanted his shirt off, so she could touch his skin and rest her cheek against that beating heart.

His lips moved silently, but she could not read the words. Was he repeating that lovely word
rescue?
Was he imagining that it really could be done? That there really was a way out?

He said, “Love always has a point. Even if it stays within. Or is hidden. Or is helpless.”

Nicoletta was angry with him. That was stupid. Who would want a helpless love? Who would want a hidden love?

“Okay,” she said, “if you don’t want to try anything drastic, what we’ll do is tell my parents. We’ll explain. They’re wonderful people. We’ll—“

“And think of what could go wrong,” he interrupted. “What if your father fell into the cave? Or your mother? Or your little sister? To be lost forever instead?”

She wanted to joke. My little sister wouldn’t be such a loss. But he knew nothing of jokes. “You don’t even want to try dynamite?” she said.

“How would you get it?”

“My father bought some to blow up stumps in the backyard. But he never got around to it. It’s just there in the garage.”

He shook his head. The silence she had first found fascinating annoyed Nicoletta now. “We have to work out a strategy!” she said sharply. “We need to make plans.”

But he said nothing, keeping his thoughts. Her hospital room darkened, more infected by his bleak hopelessness than her eager love.

A nurse bustled into the room. She was the sort of woman who called her patients “we.” “How are we feeling, dear?” she said, thrusting a thermometer into Nicoletta’s mouth so that answers were not possible. “Let’s take our blood pressure,” she said. She pumped the cuff up so tightly on Nicoletta’s arm that Nicoletta had to hold her breath to keep from crying. She did not want to be a sissy in front of Jethro. She stayed in control by trying to read her blood pressure upside down, watching the mercury bounce on the tiny dial. She failed. “What is it?” she asked the nurse.

“Fine,” said the nurse. “Keep the thermometer in your mouth.”

“But what were the numbers?” mumbled Nicoletta. She hated medical people who kept your own bodily facts to themselves.

Reluctantly, as if answering might start a riot, the nurse said, “One-ten over seventy.”

Nicoletta, who had studied blood pressure in biology last year, was delighted. “I’m in great health then,” she said happily. The thermometer fell out of her mouth and onto the sheets. The nurse picked it up grumpily. Then she placed two cool fingers on Nicoletta’s wrist.

Nicoletta looked at Jethro to share amusement at an old-fashioned nurse. Jethro was not there. A thing, a dark and dripping thing, like a statue leaking its own stone, was propped against the wall. Crusted as if with old pus, it could have been a corpse left to dry.

A scream rose in Nicoletta’s throat. Horror as deep as the cave possessed her. He had changed right there, right in this room. In public, in front of people, he had become a monster. She could not look at him, she could not bear it that beautiful Jethro had turned into this.

“My goodness!” exclaimed the nurse. “Your pulse just skyrocketed. Whatever are you thinking about?”

I cannot scream, she thought. People will come. The nurse just has to leave quietly with her little chart and her little cart. I cannot scream.

She screamed.

The nurse followed Nicoletta’s eyes and saw a monster.

In the split second before the nurse, too, screamed in horror, Nicoletta saw Jethro’s eyes hidden beneath the oozing grit of his curse. Shame and hurt filled his eyes like tears. Fear followed, swallowing any other emotions.

Jethro was terrified.

Oh, Jethro! she thought. Your life isn’t a life, it’s a nightmare. Your body isn’t a body, it’s a trap.

Jethro vanished from the room before the nurse could finish reacting. Nicoletta heard his steps, lugging himself out of the room, down the hall, trying to escape.

There was nothing left of him there but a gritty handprint on a pastel wall.

The nurse was made of stronger stuff than Nicoletta had thought. She caught her scream and ran out of the room after Jethro, shouting for security.

No, thought Nicoletta, let him get away! Please let him get away!

She needed to run interference, needed to make excuses, think up lies, anything! Her leg lay on the mattress, heavy and white and unmoving. She literally could not get off the bed.

“Okay, okay,” said a grumpy voice in the hallway outside Nicoletta’s door, “We’ve phoned for security. Somebody will be up in a few minutes. Now what was the intruder doing?”

There was a pause. Nicoletta recognized it. The nurse had no idea what to say without sounding ridiculous or hysterical. “He was—he was just standing there,” said the nurse lamely.