Across the Spectrum (29 page)

He paled and set the papers on the counter, backing out of
the kitchen.

Beth took the Grants Pass email hoax, intending to put it
back in her bedroom, where Tyler had had no business snooping in the first
place. She had made it perfectly clear that her room was off limits, yet where
else had he gotten it? It was the only copy.

She stopped at the doorway, thinking for a moment, and then
went back into the kitchen to light the fire.

∞

But once he’d read it, he wouldn’t let it go. He was worse
than Christos. “We can be saved!”

“You go ahead if you like,” she said. “I’m fine here.”

“I can’t leave you here. You’re, um, you’ll die.” He was
shaking his head, stubborn, desperate. “Please!”

She laughed in his face. “You were going to tell me I’m old.
I
know
I’m old, and I know I’m going to die. And therefore, I’m not
going anywhere.”

“We can take a boat—there’s plenty of boats left in the
harbor.”

“And petrol?” She sneered at his naiveté. “Do you know how
many people already left the island? You don’t think they left a lot of petrol
lying around? That’s why Christos sailed, you idiot American. And now he sleeps
with the sharks.”

He bristled. “You don’t know that for sure. And yes, I am
American—what of it? Why shouldn’t I want to go home?”

She waved at the harbor. “I am not stopping you.”

∞

That night, she heard him sobbing in his bedroom, long
after she’d gone to her own. “Mom . . . oh, Mom . . .
”

So that was it: he missed his mommy. And he’d fixated on
Beth, in some sort of perverse mother-complex way. She snorted to herself.
“More like a grandmother.”

But the next morning he was at her again. She had to shout
at him again to get him to stop. He stormed out without eating breakfast, and
spent the day somewhere else. Down at the water, if she was any judge.

He returned at twilight, calm, not mentioning where he’d
been. She offered him a glass of gin, and they sat on the veranda, drinking
together.

After two drinks, he said, “I found a boat. I think it could
make it across the ocean. And it’s got a full tank of gas. So I know I could
find more.”

“I’m not leaving,” she said, without turning her head. The
sun glimmered red on the water as it sank. “I hate America. And I forbade you
to speak of this.” She set her glass down, got up, and went inside.

She walked all the way to her bedroom, then through it into
her small private bath. Of course she didn’t use it as a bathroom any more—the
septic tank was overfull, and there was nobody to call to come clean it out—but
it had other uses. She opened the medicine cabinet, first looking, then
rummaging, then yanking everything out. But they weren’t there.

He’d not only stolen the email from her bedroom. He’d also
raided her stash of narcotics, carefully hoarded from James’s final illness.

Beth stood before the ransacked medicine cabinet, shaking
with anger. She had to make him leave. He was not like Christos—he was worse,
far worse. Bad enough that he would harangue her, try to control her. But that
he should steal from her—that he should steal
drugs
from her—a man who
had already gone to prison for drugs—oh, this was not good. A man whose life
she’d saved.

“Not good,” she whispered.

She felt a prickle on the back of her neck and wheeled
around. He was standing in the doorway of the small bathroom. She hadn’t even
heard him come in.

He was pale, and shaking. Now that she knew, she recognized
the signs easily. He must have taken several pills, and then two—at least
two—glasses of gin on top of that. “Beth,” he started, taking a step towards
her. The name was a bit slurred, the consonants softer than they should be.

“Get out of here,” she said.

He took another step, and now he was right in front of her.
He reached up and took her shoulders in his hands, hard, and shook her. It
hurt. She pushed back against his chest, trying to twist out of his grip, but
he was decades younger than she, and very strong. “We . . . have . . .
to . . . go,” he said, staring at her even as he rattled her
thin bones. His eyes were too liquid, too glossy. “I’ll
make
you go.”

She pushed harder, and he abruptly let go, staggering back
and bumping into the wall behind him. He didn’t seem to notice. “You’re drunk,”
she said. “Go and lie down. We’ll talk about this in the morning.”

He looked at her, wary. “You mean it? We’ll talk about it?”

She shrugged, resisting the urge to rub her throbbing
shoulders. “You are in no condition to talk now.”

He kept staring at her, then turned and went to his own
bedroom. She stood in the bathroom a long time, shaking, listening as he fell
onto his bed. He was snoring within a few minutes. Only then did she pull her
shirt open and examine the bruises, peering into the mirror. He’d crushed her
shoulders so hard she could almost see the imprint of his fingerprints.

Beth re-buttoned her shirt and left the bathroom. She knew
what she had to do.

∞

She stood over his bed as he snored. He looked so helpless
and frail, lying there. Almost innocent. Though she’d never had children,
sometimes she could understand the appeal. Having someone to love, someone to
take care of . . . Of course, she’d had James for that.

Tyler was somebody’s son. His mother and father had loved
him and raised him, and had let him go, had watched as he had flown the nest.
He’d flown far—all the way across the world, where he’d gotten in trouble and
caught up in the terrible things that humanity had done to itself. Maybe he’d
deserved better. Maybe not. Who knew anymore?

But it was too late now. There was no better to be had, and
if he was going to refuse to understand that, there was nothing she could do
about it.

She raised the knife, leaning over him to reach the far side
of his neck. In book 8 of
The Caged Sword
series,
A Clutch of Posies
,
Marleena finds she must murder the Lord of Terror, using only a dull kitchen
knife. In her fear and hesitation, she botches the job at first, and he awakens
and threatens her, but in a stroke of luck, as he is leaping onto her, the
knife nicks his jugular and he dies. Then all the Sisters are freed, and the
land rejoices.

Tyler’s white, exposed neck was surprisingly tough at first,
despite Beth’s knife being as sharp as it could be. She remembered slaughtering
the goats, and pushed harder. When she thought of it as butchering meat, it
came easily. She even knew to step back so as not to get soaked with his blood.

The covers, of course—that was another story. Tyler’s blood
spurted at first, another rush with every beat of his heart. Impossible to
believe there could be so much; but the goats had been even worse. Soon it
ebbed out more slowly, flowing down his body as he twitched, gurgled, and stilled.
It spread across the white cotton coverlet, pooling and sinking in, threading
fanlike out along the folds of the fabric. Beth watched it for a long time,
unmoving, and finally turned to go.

She shut the door of the guest bedroom behind her, turning the
latch that would keep it fast. The corpse would smell at first, but she knew
that in this hot, dry climate, it would soon desiccate, even mummify. In any
event, she could put a towel under the door if she had to. She wouldn’t need
that room any time soon.

She walked down the hall to the kitchen, washed the knife,
and laid it on the counter to dry. Then, she went to her bookshelf and pulled
down the final book in her series:
Alone at Heart
.

Night fell as Elizabeth Barnett sat on the veranda with a
tumbler of warm gin, the book unopened beside her, and waited for her world to
finish ending.

I like “Climbing to the Moon” because in writing it I enjoyed
using verb tenses, riskily, as a means of moving through time in a complex,
non-linear way, even of seeing time for a moment not as a forward movement but
as a whole—or as a dream.

∞ ∞ ∞

Little Aby will help her build the fire, running down from
the dunes, his curly head like a thistledown-puff against the long gold light
in the west. “Let’s get the fire laid before it gets dark, Aby!” she’ll say,
and the child, eager to do grown-up work, to be her partner, to build the
beautiful, dangerous fire against the fall of night, will say, “I’ll get the
wood!” and be off like an erratic, fuzzy-feathered arrow. He will search,
stoop, and gather, rush back dropping bits of driftwood, dump his tiny load,
and be off again. She will gather methodically. There are plenty of useful
pieces of driftwood near the big, half-buried, half-burned log she has chosen
as backlog and windbreak. Once she has her woodpile, she will begin to lean
sticks up against the charred monster, over the hollow where she has arranged a
tight-crumpled sheet of newspaper and bits of fine kindling. It won’t be a big blaze.
Huge, flaring bonfires that roar and volley out sparks are frightening to Aby,
and to her too. It will be a small, bright, clear fire in this vast, clear,
bright evening.

Aby will come up breathless with a “very big log”—a branch
three feet long at least, and so heavy he has to drag it. She will praise the
wood and the woodsman. Kneeling, putting her bare arm round his thin shoulders,
she’ll say, “Aby, love, look,” and they’ll look into the west.

“That’s where the sun was,” Aby will say, pointing to the
center source of the immense, pale-pink rays of light that fan out, barely
visible, in the far air suffused with gold above the sea.

“And that’s the shadow of the earth.” She will look up at
the blue dimness that has risen from the mountains in the east to the top of
the sky, just over them.

“Yeah!” says Aby, delighted with it all, and wriggles free.
“Look, there’s a even bigger log!” And he’s off.

“When you come back we’ll light the fire,” she calls,
feeling for the matches in her pocket. She sits down on the warm sand to watch
the great rosy shafts of light shorten down and down into the darkening
horizon. The breakers are quiet and regular, six or seven lines of them. Their
huge noise all up and down the beach masks all lesser sounds except the rare cries
of gulls flying late. No one else has a fire on the beach tonight. No one is
walking down by the waterline.

When she first hears the drumming she thinks it is a
helicopter, a Coast Guard patrol, and looks south for the black dot in the air;
but her eye catches the movement nearer, down by the breakers, as she hears the
drum-drum-drum of hooves on hard sand. The horse is at full gallop, the rider
leans lightly forward, riding bareback—Beautiful! the double silhouette black
against shining sand, the wild rhythm, the courage to ride at a gallop
bareback! On to the north they go, fading into the dusk and the faint mist that
hovers over the meeting of the water and the land. Oh, what a sight! She wishes
he would come back, the centaur galloping between sea and sand, between
daylight and the dark. And soon from the north comes the drum-drum-drum more
felt than heard, and horse and rider take shape in the low mist, cantering now,
lightly, easily. They slow and turn a little, and dropping into a walk come up
across the sand to her. They halt. The horse raises his head and shakes it. He
wears only a rope bridle with a single rein. “I saw you lighting the fire,” the
rider says.

She stands up; she puts her hand out to the horse, a dark
bay with a blaze that gleams white in the twilight. She strokes the soft nose
and reaches up to scratch under the sweaty forelock and around the roots of the
big, delicate, flicking ears. The rider smiles. He vaults down from the horse’s
back. Like a cowboy, he simply drops the rein, and the horse nickers once and
stands quiet. Oh, she knows this cowboy, this centaur, this bareback rider.
“Where have you been riding?” she asks, and he answers, “Along the seacoast of
Bohemia,” smiling.

The fire has just caught. She adds a stout, barky branch
which flares up at once. They sit down, one on each side, each seeing the
other’s face across the quivering flames, which seem to darken the twilight and
draw it in around them.

“No,” she says, “not Bohemia. Hungary. You’ve been riding
with the Magyars again.”

“All across the steppes,” he says in his laughing voice,
soft and resonant. “With the warrior hordes. Coming to loot the West.”

“And the women follow along behind with the children and the
colts and the tents and the beds . . .”

“They light the fires. And the men turn around and come back
to the fires.”

“And my man comes around to my side of the fire,” she says,
and he does: a quiet movement, a warmth along her side, a warm arm round her
shoulders. She turns to him and comes into his arms. The dark head bends to
her: a long kiss, longer, deeper. Firelight webs rainbows in her lashes. The
sand is warm and soft, a dark bed, an endless bed, its rumpled sheets the
breakers glimmering.

Sleepy, she looks straight up into the shadow of the world
and sees Vega, the star always at the top of the summer night. The linchpin,
the keystone, the white thumbtack that holds the whole sky up. Oh, hello, she
murmurs to the star. The spangle of the Milky Way is not yet visible, only the
four stars of the Swan burning faint in the turquoise-cobalt sky.

The sand is still warm from the long day’s sunlight, but not
really soft. After a while you always remember, when you lie on it, that sand
is stone. She sits up and gazes into the fire, then builds it up, adding a
couple of long branches that can be shoved in farther as they burn, keeping it
steady. Twigs flare up bright for a moment. Looking down the beach, now nearly
dark, a faint blur of mist still hovering over the breakers, she imagines how
the fire must look from down there at the waterline: a warm star, flickering,
earthy. She wants to see it. She gets up, stretches, and walks slowly down to
the wet sand. She does not look back till her bare feet feel the cold of the
water. Then she turns and gazes at the fire up under the dunes.