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THIRTY-FIVE
Ididn’t get much chance to dwell on the fight—or on that surprising flash of violence I’d seen in Liam’s eyes—because fifteen minutes after Liam left Mara showed up for her work-study assignment. Most college freshmen would have taken my failure to show up at my office as an opportunity to take the afternoon off, but not Mara.
“I was sure you’d want to get some more work done on the Dahlia LaMotte papers. They are so very fascinating.”
Normally I would agree, but the last thing I wanted to do that afternoon was catalog the romantic fantasies of a reclusive spinster—especially with Mara, who had a way of zeroing in on the most erotic passages of LaMotte’s fiction. I hadn’t really intended for Mara to read the more salacious material in the handwritten manuscripts; I’d only asked her to make a record of how many pages LaMotte wrote each day. I wanted to see if LaMotte wrote more as the book progressed, if she was sometimes blocked, and how much time she took off between books. But it was impossible to keep Mara from reading the material and she often picked the raciest scenes to read aloud, asking for embarrassing explanations of sexual terms. Whenever she came across a word she didn’t know she would come sit beside me—quiteclose—and point to the word. I wondered sometimes if she wasn’t deliberately trying to make me uncomfortable, or if she might even be trying to make a sexual advance. It made for some long, awkward afternoons, but on this afternoon she did make an interesting discovery.
“I’ve noticed,” she said, looking up from the yellow legal pad on which she kept her page tallies, “that there’s a correlation between Miss LaMotte’s output and the sex scenes in the book.”
“Really?” I asked, intrigued—and impressed at her use of the wordcorrelation.
“Yes, look…”
Mara came over to where I was sitting on the floor and knelt beside me. She put the yellow legal pad in my lap and reached across me, her arm brushing against my shoulder. “I’ve put asterisks wherever a romantic interaction occurs, one for a meaningful glance, two for a kiss, and three for actual intercourse…”
“I think I get the idea. What exactly is the correlation you see?”
“Well, look at the page tallies. In between the meaningful glance and the kissing scenes Miss LaMotte writes an average of ten to fifteen pages a day. For every book, see, I’ve cataloged them all this way.” She flipped the pages of the notepad and I saw scores of asterisks dotting the pages. So many kisses, I thought, trying to remember the last time Liam had kissed me. Would it be thelasttime? “Then between the first kiss and the intercourse, she writes an average of twenty to thirty pages a day, the number escalating sometimes to as many as sixty pages a day as she gets closer to the intercourse scene.”
“Really?” I asked, distracted from my memories of Liam’s kisses by Mara’s discovery. I picked up the pad and shifted my weight so that Mara wasn’t quite so close. “Thatisinteresting.”
“What’s really interesting is that after the intercourse scene the page tallies decrease again. Sometimes she doesn’t even write anything for a few days. It’s as if she’s worn out.”
I flipped through the pages, each one representing one of Dahlia LaMotte’s novels. Mara was right. There was a definite pattern. It was as if Dahlia LaMotte became increasingly excitedas the sexual tension between her characters mounted and then suffered a sort of sympathetic postcoital slump after they finally made love.
“Mara, that’s a really important discovery. Thank you very much.”
Mara smiled a rare smile and her cheeks glowed pink. She looked almost pretty. The poor girl, I thought, she gets so little encouragement, I really should make more of an effort with her…invite her over with some of the other students for dinner sometime…But not tonight, I thought, yawning. I just wanted to crawl into bed and go to sleep tonight.
“I want to go through these and think about what you’ve found,” I said, getting to my feet. “Why don’t we call it a day?”
Mara looked disappointed but then brightened. “Can we work again tomorrow?” she asked.
“Sure,” I said, even though tomorrow wasn’t one of our scheduled days. I might as well throw myself into my work to distract myself from replaying in my head the fight I’d had with Liam.
After Mara left I made myself a cup of soup and took it upstairs to my bedroom to eat in bed. The house felt hollow and empty without Liam there. I went into his study and looked out the window across the street to the inn to see if there was a light on in his old room. There wasn’t. Had he gone somewhere else? Or taken a different room? Or was he there and sleeping soundly, undisturbed by our fight?
Before I left the room I noticed that he’d piled the gray riverstones into a small pillar—as if he’d been fashioning a grave cairn. They looked so eerie like that I unpiled them. I carried one of the stones into my bedroom, its cool, round weight somehow soothing in my palm.
As tired as I was I still couldn’t sleep that night. Even the racy Dahlia LaMotte manuscript ofThe Viking Raiderfailed to distract me. I’d come to the part where the heroine is finallyto be ransomed back to her royal fiancé. Her Viking captor unlocks her room one last time the night before she is to leave and sweeps in…
…like a storm at sea come to capsize my resolve. “Will your young lord do this to you?” he growled, sinking his bristly face to my breasts and licking my nipples until they hardened, “or this?” grasping my hips and grinding his manhood against me, but then pulling back, teasing me as I thrust upward, hungry to feel the length of him inside me at last. Always he had held back this one last intimacy between us, preserving my maidenhood for my intended. But I no longer cared what my husband might think on our wedding night. I wrapped my legs around his hips and pulled him to me, begging him to come inside me. “Ah lass,” he moaned as he finally entered me. “You have conquered me. It is I who am your captive.”
And even though I knew full well that by the logic of these books the Viking and the Irish lass would end up together by the last page my eyes filled with tears when he gave her the key to her cell as a final parting gift and she read the note tied to it with a scarlet ribbon.
“I give ye the key to your freedom, lass, but can ye give me back the key to my heart?”
When I turned out the lights Liam’s side of the bed—how had we ended up with sides so quickly?—yawned like an icy crevasse I might fall into if I relaxed a muscle. I lay tensed, replaying our argument over and over, trying to come up with some other way I could make it come out differently, but instead I kept coming up with the same interlocking loops. I’d doubted that we were right together and told Nicky that we might be a mistake, and then I ended up in Frank’s office letting him put his hand down my shirt. I could try to explain that I was only trying to discover what was making me so tired and thin, but then mightn’t the reason I couldn’t sleep and I was losing weight be that I had made a mistake? Maybe Liam and Ihadmoved too fast. What did I really know about him? Therewas always a piece of himself that he kept to himself—I’d thought at first it was the sadness over Jeannie’s death, or the part of him that wrote poetry, but when he’d drawn his arm back today I’d thought he was going to hit me. Had I sensed that potential for violence all along? Was I looking for a way out of the relationship? Wasthatwas the reason I’d gone to Frank with the idea about the vampires, because really, I could have looked down my own shirt to check for fang marks.
I kicked at the sheets, which had become as tangled as my thoughts, and they fell to the floor and lay in the moonlight like snowdrifts. Was it still snowing? I wondered. I got up and walked to the window. No. The snow had stopped and the moon had come out, turning the snow-covered trees into gaunt skeletons, their shadows thrown across the clean white expanse of the backyard, reaching toward the house.
One of those shadows detached itself from the edge of the woods and scuttled across the lawn. The shadow-crab. I ran downstairs, threw a coat over my nightgown, and pulled on shearling boots over my bare feet. The fishing creel that Soheila had given me was in the kitchen, hanging from a hook by the back door.
I opened the door slowly, watching for any movement in the shadows. It might be lurking by the door, trying to find a way in to do away with Ralph. It could be hiding in the wedge-shaped shadow of the door that widened across the kitchen floor as I opened it. I waved the wicker creel over the darkened wedge and, when I was sure that I hadn’t let anything in, stepped out into the moonlit night, closing the door behind me.
The backyard was covered with a pure expanse of virgin snow, frozen on top with an icy crust that sparkled in the moonlight—everywhere but in the shadows. There were the shadows of the trees at the edge of the lawn, one thrown by the birdbath in the middle of the yard, a long oblong shadow in the lee of an old stone wall a few feet from the kitchen door, and a delicate tangle of shadows cast by an old lilac bush at theedge of the wall. I studied each shadow carefully, comparing it to the object that made it for any suspicious lumps or movement. There was nothing.
Then a wind moved through the yard, sifting loose snow across the icy crust and stirring the branches. One of the shadow branches cast by the old lilac seemed to swell. I stepped toward it, stepping across the shadow of the stone wall, and felt something brush against my ankle.
