Captain Quad (18 page)

While Will fixed drinks, Kelly browsed through his collection of albums, all neatly sleeved in plastic and arranged in alphabetical order. Of all the differences between them, Will's taste in music brought the disparity in their ages—Will was thirty-four, Kelly twenty-four—most sharply into focus. Hendrix, Cream, Led Zeppelin, Springsteen, all of it reeking of the late sixties and early seventies.

"Are you an acid head, Will Chatam?" Kelly said as he handed her a gin fizz.

Will plunked onto the couch with a can of beer and loosened his tie. He'd dressed to the nines for the occasion, and although he looked dapper, Kelly thought he looked a little awkward, too. He was more at home in jeans and checked flannel work shirts.

"Yup," he said, taking a slug of brew. "Just dropped a hundred mics of the world's finest. Should be seein' colors any minute now."

He smiled, and Kelly felt suddenly light-headed. When Will smiled at her like that, not the shy little grin he sometimes gave her but this wide beaming smile, Kelly felt her heart do a funky little flip-flop in her chest. Their eyes held for what seemed like a long time, passing a knowledge between them that Will understood, but which to Kelly was still an unsettling mystery. Then Will got up and selected an album.

They didn't sleep together that night either.

But it was close.

TWENTY

Until deep in November, a month marked by unseasonably wintry weather, Peter spent his days reading the books Sam had brought him and his nights trying to leave his body. For the first long while his desire mixed destructively with his growing frustration, until it seemed he would never feel that freedom again.

Then, one late night, triggered again by the nightmare, it happened. It had been snowing that night, nasty dry pellets that fell almost horizontally, borne along by a snarling north wind. Through what he assumed to be a process of association, Peter found himself back in his mother's apartment—but this time he didn't hang around. One glance at her snoring carcass stirred that old and deathless rage in him, and he got out of there before it could destroy his ride.

That night had been a rip, slicing like a swallow through the air, slaloming between power poles and stitching spirals around the smokestacks, buzzing the near-frozen surface of the lake like a startled pintail. Cranking up to hyperdrive in that psychedelic corridor of light, the landscape below reduced to a ravaged blur, slowing above cities with no names only to return at the same breakneck pace.

The books suggested that separation was most easily accomplished from a state of light trance, and for hours each day Peter strove to achieve this state, attempting to shut down the headlong race of his mind. This proved to be no mean feat. But gradually he developed a knack, and by the end of that six-week stretch he was batting over five hundred.

With his increasing ability to leave his body came an equally growing intolerance for the hospital and its tiresome routines—and in this arena, Dr. Lowe irked him most. Despite Peter's initially polite requests that he be left out of the doctor's teaching rounds, Lowe flat out ignored him, until finally Peter was forced into one of his towering rages, sedated, which effectively canceled his ability to leave his body, assessed again by a psychiatrist, and beaten once more into submission. In no other situation in Peter's life was this admixture of need—Lowe was the only physician in the area with so great a knowledge of the special needs of the quadriplegic—and resentment so potent. It made him wish there were something, anything, he could do to strike back.

Quite by accident, the opportunity—or perhaps more correctly, the ammunition—presented itself one snow-blown evening in November. He and Sam had been yakking about Peter's newfound ability, and Sam suggested that he try it with Sam in the room, to find out if Sam could sense or perhaps even see Peter's astral form, as their mother apparently had. Keen to experiment, Peter had psyched himself into a trance and escaped his broken body, that Scotch tape sensation of separation exciting him to a level that bordered on the sexual. He had woven tight loops around Sam, who sat by the bedside staring intently at Peter's face, waved his insubstantial arms, and made a shimmering lasso of his soulstring. But Sam had sensed none of it.

Unwilling to waste the experience, Peter had slipped through the window and commenced an exhilarating glide down the face of the building, his intention being to skim away from the wall at a point just inches above the snow-crusted ground and then carve a tight loop back through his window.

But something he spotted through a sixth-story window stalled him in mid-trajectory. He eased in through that window, settled atop a file-cluttered cabinet, and watched his nemesis, Dr. Lowe.

"Sonofabitch!" Lowe muttered savagely. Hunched over his desk in the muted light of his office, the perspiring physician fumbled a key ring with trembling fingers, trying to seat a stubby brass key into the slot of a locked desk drawer. The keys fell to the tiles with a cheerful little jangle, and Lowe rapped his forehead on
the desk lunging forward to retrieve them.

In his brother's room, Sam cocked his head quizzically as Peter's mouth widened in a satisfied smirk.

Keys in hand, Lowe tried again, this time succeeding. After angling the desk lamp to illuminate the open belly of the drawer, he rummaged near the back for a moment and came up clutching a black leather pouch. He unzipped the pouch and withdrew a small glass vial, half filled with liquid. His pupils were huge, his lips dry as he smacked them, and sweat stood out on his balding pate in coalescing gems. From a separate pocket in the pouch he took a sterile syringe, an alcohol swab, a rubber tourniquet—

Then Peter was back in his body, just like that, the transition too fast to be noticed.

"Peter!" Sam was shouting. "Peter, wake up!"

"Whoa!" Peter barked, surprised by a lancet of anger at his brother's intrusion. "What's up?"

"Sorry," Sam said, removing his hands from Peter's unfeeling shoulders. "You just had this. . . freaky grin on your face and I guess I got scared."

"No problem," Peter assured him, his anger already abating. "Did you see, feel, or smell me?"

"No," Sam replied, slouching down in his chair. Peter was grinning again. "Nothing at all."

TWENTY-ONE

To some of the staff who knew Peter Gardner and from time to time came in contact with him, his recent grinning cheerfulness seemed a sign that an important corner had finally been turned: he had at long last come to terms with his lot in life, had realized how futile were his depressions and fits of anger, and had seen, perhaps with the force of revelation, how rewarding his life still could be. To others, Peter's emotional about-face was the tip of a much darker iceberg, a harbinger of impending mental collapse.

In the opinion of the nurse who sponge-bathed him now, on this frosty, late November evening, the latter seemed by far the more likely. His buoyant good cheer—and that smile—struck her as decidedly odd, considering the state he was in and would remain in for the balance of his vegetative life. When he asked her to reach into the cupboard of his nightstand and take out the bottle of cologne, this opinion was solidly confirmed.

"It's near the back, I think. Old Spice."

The nurse, whose name was Jannet Wade and whose ambition it was to transfer to the neonatal intensive care nursery just as soon as a spot became available, rooted through a hodgepodge of dusty mementos until her hand closed around a half-full bottle of cologne.

Seeing it there, held aloft in the prim nurse's hand, induced a dark undertow of memory in Peter that threatened to drag him under, and he came close to telling her to put it away again. Old Spice had been Kelly's favorite—in his mind he could feel her splashing it on him and then nuzzling that perky little nose of hers into his neck, could hear her cooing "Mmm, that's nice. Wanna get lucky, sailor?"—and she had given him this bottle. "No reason," she'd said when he asked her why she had bought him a gift with Christmas still months away and his birthday long past. "I just like the stink of it." It was the only thing he had left that Kelly had given him—

"What should I do with this?"

"What?" Peter said, jerked back to the present.

"I said, what should I do with this?"

He smiled endearingly. "Would you mind splashing some on me?"

The nurse's hazel eyes flickered to their corners and back again, checking the door, and Peter realized that even after all this time the "dangerous pervert" alert was still out on him, God damn that farting bitch Shawna Blane.

"I promise I won't bite," Peter said. "Or spit, or try to get you to stroke the old trouser snake." He grinned. "Okay?"

Jannet returned his grin, but it was forced. Flustered, she uncorked the bottle—

And suddenly that undertow of memory recurred, its intensity trebled by that sweet, unmistakable odor. Peter's grin flipped over in sadness, tears welling as the nurse splashed a tiny puddle of Old Spice into her palm.

"Where?" she asked, her discomfort heightened by the turn in Peter's mood.

"My neck," Peter replied, fighting tears with the full force of his will.

He closed his eyes as her warm hand brushed his skin, ashamed at the thrill her touch gave him, overwhelmed by the bright weight of memory. Choked with emotion, he asked her to leave. He did not open his eyes.

"Do you want the light left on?" Jannet asked after replacing the cologne in the nightstand.

Peter shook his head.

She left him in darkness, her heels tapping out a receding tattoo in the twilight.

Tonight, Kelly thought as she clutched dress after dress to her body and then judged her reflection in the mirror. If Will will, I will. The man was nice, as Marti had promised. . . but, brother, was he slow. It had been two months since their heart-to-heart talk on the island, two months of gradually upping their dating frequency from two nights a week to four, two months of necking and heavy petting and a growing, unfulfilled ache in her loins. Still, until recently, she couldn't have said with any real certainty that she was a hundred percent ready to do it. The part of her that hadn't felt a man's touch—several parts, really, and Kelly chuckled evilly at this thought—in over a year was way beyond ready, had been for months. But another part, a quiet, hurt, introspective part, was glad of Will Chatam's down-south slowness. She knew he wanted her—the tender urgency of his kisses told her that—but he made her feel as if she were the important thing, not what he could get from her. His sweetness was almost unreal.

Now, though, she felt that even the mousy, frightened part of her was ready.

Boy, am I ready.

She shooed Fang off the bed—the cat just loved to get crazy in all of those groovy dry-cleaning bags—flung a matronly looking tweed-thing onto the heap, and plucked up her last-chance-for-romance outfit, a years-old cotton one-piece, maroon, cut too low in the front and slashed tartily up the thigh. She held it to her naked torso, did a half-pirouette before the mirror. . .

And was swamped by her own backswell of memory.

Peter had bought her this dress for her birthday: October 14, 1982. Seven years ago.

Clad only in panties, Kelly pulled the dress on, disturbed by how the brush of the fabric across her nipples excited her. She was big-bosomed, hardly an attribute for a gym teacher, and Peter had always been after her to "cut 'em loose." She had modeled the dress for him like this, with no bra, and the lovemaking that night had been—

Kelly stomped the thought dead. She unzipped the dress and let it puddle at her feet, vowing that in the morning she would stuff it into the Neighborhood Services bag she kept on the back porch, stuff it down deep, where all of these memories should be. . . Then she picked it up again, smoothed it out—and decided to wear it. With no bra. And if that didn't put lead in Will Chatam's pencil, then she would by God enter a convent.

Kelly slipped out of her panties and hurried into the shower.

He was in a light trance, a state he achieved more easily each time he tried. All he had to do was shut out any background noise—both actual and the sometimes hectoring whine of his thoughts—picture a blank white screen. . . and drift.

He drifted.

But the reason he was trying to leave his body tonight kept stealing into his mind and giving it weight, killing its buoyancy. Earlier that afternoon one of the candy stripers had come in to his room with the library cart, and although Peter had been in no mood for company, he'd allowed her to hold up some old copies of Northern Life for him to scan. In one of them, a yellowed issue from last June, he'd come across a squib in the local news section that had knocked him for a loop. It was a bulletin from his old high school, announcing the appointment of a new teacher, a hometown girl and a graduate of that very institution. There was an accompanying photograph, a grainy black-and-white culled from the Queen's University yearbook, and Peter had had two thoughts almost simultaneously before asking the candy striper to leave.

Oh, Jesus, she's back.

And: She hasn't changed a bit. . . not a bit. . .

The last time Peter had heard any news of Kelly was four years ago, when he bumped into her mom in the gift shop downstairs. Mrs. Wheeler was in a wheelchair then, too, with both feet in casts, recovering from bunion surgery. And she'd seemed only too willing to fill Peter in on Kelly's progress.

"Oh, she's doing famously down there in Kingston," Irene told him, amicably enough. . . but Peter had sensed her unease. "We're so proud of her."

"What are her plans for after graduation?" Peter had asked, partly out of curiosity, but mostly just for something to say. In those days he'd still had a pretty big mad-on for Kelly.

"She intends to stay in the south," Irene said immediately, almost defensively, Peter thought. "She's very determined about that. She's going to find a good school and teach down there."

But Peter had never believed it.

Blank, he commanded himself now, repeating the word like a mantra.

Blank. . . blank. . . blank!