Captain Quad (24 page)

And yet. . .

What if he got some practice?

What then?

Outside, the winter wind pounded the double thickness of the glass. The air in the room was cold enough to raise gooseflesh.

Peter closed his eyes and reached for the trance. It came easily, and he slipped out of his body like a blade whispering out of a sheath. Avoiding his body—he still couldn't bear the sight of it—he scanned the room for a likely-looking test subject.

There was a small cactus on the windowsill, looking oddly out of place against Jack Frost's handiwork, and Peter drifted over to it. After some hesitation he wrapped his hand around the green plastic pot—

And cursed. Nothing happened. He didn't feel it, and the plant didn't move.

He tried again, fury swirling up in him as his memory cross-patched to the first time he attempted to override the chasm in his spine and move his limbs.

Nothing.

Come on, you Christless fuck—MOVE!

Peter swung a substanceless arm through the crimson glare of his rage, and the cactus toppled to the floor. It did not smash against the wall as he'd hoped, but it did move. He looked down and saw it lying half out of its pot on the tiles, a dry scatter of earth and tiny Styrofoam pellets surrounding it. In the moonlight the pellets glowed like insectile eyes.

There, Peter thought in dark, solitary satisfaction.

There.

It was the anger. The rage. That was his battery; that was his power plant. All he had to do was sustain it.

Somehow he didn't think that would be difficult.

He settled into his body without thinking, content with his night of discovery. Then his eye caught the blizzard outside and he thought of Kelly.

Is she alone on this nasty night? he wondered. Thinking of me?

He closed his eyes and reached again for the trance. . . but now it eluded him.

Unperturbed, he closed his eyes and waited.

TWENTY-SIX

December came on with a battering cruelness that matched the climate in Kelly's heart. The advances winter had already made were dwarfed by a quick-fire succession of some of the worst wind and snowstorms the north had endured in a century. Even those who read and heeded the almanac were ill prepared for the fury of this the first winter of the approaching decade. At midnight on the evening of Tracy Giroux's regrettable accident in the gym, Kelly sat alone before the big north-facing window of her home and watched the first of the blizzards come.

Tracy had needed surgery to set her arm. It had taken three hours, two metal plates, and eleven stainless-steel screws. The tragic but predictable verdict was that she would be out of gymnastics for the season and quite possibly forever. Kelly, weeping and wringing her hands, had waited with Tracy's parents in the emergency room at the General Hospital. Mr. and Mrs. Giroux, a pleasant couple from the valley, had done their best to console her, assuring her that it had been an accident and that she shouldn't blame herself. But it had done little good. Kelly wept for Tracy Giroux—for the hard fact that she would be out of gymnastics, the one thing in her life that had given her direction; for the loss of trust that would inevitably follow this incident; and for the suddenly doubled probability that Tracy would drift back to drugs. A lot had been lost in a moment's inattention. But she wept for herself, too—for the sweet dreams that had snapped with Peter's spine. An old voice rose up in her in the stark fluorescent glare of the waiting room: Six years, it yammered, six years and still he's got a stranglehold on your heart.

Kelly bit her lip to quell its quivering, and gazed into the worsening squall. From the rocky point on which her house stood, the lake narrowed back to the starless horizon like a runway into oblivion. It was out of this dark hiatus that the wind and the snow came pelting. Normally Kelly enjoyed the time she spent at home alone, especially during storms. There was something about nature's tempests that always made her feel humble. . . and yet somehow eternal.

But tonight it only made her feel cold. She had banked a birchwood fire and bundled herself in a comforter, but it made little difference. The cold was lodged inside her.

Oh, Will, she thought unhappily.

And deeper, more sadly: Peter. . .

The wind harped through the latticework skirt of the porch, blew hellish baritone in the downspouts, rattled the limbs of the trees. In its force, the familiar creaks of the house became stealthy creepings. . . and for the first time in her adult life, Kelly felt afraid in that elemental way that is the exclusive province of children. Afraid of the storm and the night. Afraid of being alone. Afraid of the goblin-green eyes of the bogeyman. Something very peculiar had taken place in her bedroom the night before, in that maroon hinterland between sleep and wakefulness, something which had shattered the house of cards that had been her life since Peter. Maybe Will was right: maybe this was the cost of caring so deeply. Nothing was forever. When that kind of love got destroyed, where did you go from there?

A low black shape detached itself from the shadows of the porch and blurred toward her from the opposite side of the glass. Kelly flinched—and then Fang was sitting on the sill, peering mournfully in at her. Still wrapped in her comforter, Kelly shuffled to the door and let him in. He'd been off on one of his all-day romps, and what he wanted right now was food. Trailing him out to the kitchen, Kelly felt the familiar, almost seductive pull of routine.

Get busy, a familiar voice counseled her. It was a simple doctrine that had seen her through the last six years, forming a three-syllable backbeat to a life that had lost its engine yet somehow managed to keep running.

When the shit hits the fan, kiddo, when it seems that life has passed you by, just get busy and keep busy. It's the only way to heal.

Her mother's words, spoken with the flat conviction of a veteran. As a child Kelly had watched her mother live by this creed, hunched over the ironing board or the sink, furiously pressing or scrubbing, and had judged it a poor way to cope. But she had been young then, young and unspoiled, her world still a wellspring of alternatives. Now, with her head in a mess and her heart in a jar, there seemed no way out but to return to that droning existence. Just unplug her brain and keep busy.

No, she promised herself as she crossed the kitchen to the fridge, trying not to trip over Fang. Not this time. No more hiding, You can't deal with your feelings for Peter by burying them. Because no matter how deep you dig, the soil is too thin. It won't hold.

"What do I do?" Kelly said in a pleading whisper.

Face him, the answer came back. Confront him.

She fed the cat and returned to her post by the window, not much comforted by her resolve. Eventually she fell asleep there.

Outside, the storm raged on.

The trance was there, like a memory just out of reach, and for a time he groped for it futilely. Then he relaxed and let it come. In his mind's eye, he saw himself riding the black December wind, a questing Horseman of the Apocalypse, lofting up, up, and away. Within seconds, he felt himself vibrating like a struck bell. . . and then he was free.

He thought again of Kelly.

And in the twinkling of an eye he was there.

She sat asleep in an easy chair by the picture window, her legs tucked under her and her body wrapped in a blanket. A big black tomcat lay curled at the foot of the chair, snoozing soundly. There had been a fire going in the fireplace, but it had burned itself down to embers and the occasional sputtering flame. Rafting above her on the air, Peter watched the pale ember-light creep along the curves of Kelly's face, which was also pale, and beautiful. The stranger was not here tonight, and although Peter had lived through him the night before, he was glad of the interloper's absence. Some nameless instinct assured him that even greater ecstasies lay near at hand.

He commenced a slow orbit about the chair on which Kelly slept, allowing the vertigo these revolutions induced to calm him. With this motion came a clarity of thought, of awareness, which eclipsed the enhanced lucidity that had previously attended this state. He could feel himself. . . condensing, becoming a ring of pure thought. Describing ever-tightening loops, he enclosed Kelly's head in a scintillating band of blue light.

Jolted from its sleep, the cat sprang to its feet and backed away from the chair, its spine arched into scruffy spikes. It spat fearsomely and then bolted for the basement staircase.

Like a garrote sinking into vulnerable flesh, Peter slipped into Kelly's dreams.

And found himself there.

They were walking in Bell Park, their bare feet cold in the damp sand that fringed Ramsey Lake. The moon was out, high and nearly full, and the sky was plastered with stars. Hand in hand they strolled through the silvery moonlight, thinking secret thoughts of each other. It was the night he had first told her that he loved her, that he meant to marry her and be with her forever. It had all come out in one shy, awkward lump, but Kelly had never doubted his sincerity. For a time she had nurtured this night as a cherished memory; but as the years dragged past its coming in her dreams became a torment.

The images were vivid, as all of her dreams were vivid. . . and yet, as they reached the slatted bench where Peter had poured out his heart to her, the dreamscape took on a fresh clarity. Now she could actually feel his hand in hers, its film of nervous sweat in spite of the coolness of the night, the accelerating pulsebeat in his grip. There was sand between her toes, gritty and cool, and the grass they'd strolled onto was dew-drenched. Peter's dream-figure seemed to solidify, as if some essential sap had been magically siphoned back into it. He was suddenly gorgeously real, not just an image dredged up from muddy memory but whole and solid and real. His face beamed in the moonlight.

"Kelly," he began in his tentative way. "Kelly, I still love you." He smiled. "And I know how we can be together forever."

(no Peter that's wrong that's not what you said)

His grip tightened on her hand, hard enough to hurt.

"Forever, Kelly."

Kelly awoke with a start, cold in spite of the comforter, Peter's words a haunting echo in her ears. Her gaze darted around the room, disoriented, her mind stumbling back to the present with a grudging slowness. Tears leaked from her eyes.

It had seemed so real. . .

The similarities to the last time Kelly had come to visit him were almost too much to bear. It had been winter then, too, a day much like this one, filled with gusting winds and billowing snow and the despairing sense that she might never feel the sun's warmth again; it was there, a high, heatless blank in the sky, but it seemed dead and somehow-traitorous. It was four o'clock in the afternoon, the first day of a bitter December.

Turn around, the voice of reason counseled her as she made her way up the ice-scabbed walk to the entrance. There's nothing for you here.

Kelly hesitated, heedless of the slashing winter air. It was true. There was nothing for her here. She wasn't eighteen anymore. That part of her life was over, as irretrievable as the snowflakes that melted on her face. What did she mean to say to him, anyway? Hi, Peter, I dream about you? I dream that you still love me and that you want me back? I dream that you're whole again, better than whole. . . and sometimes (like last night) I can feel you inside me. . . ?

An elderly couple brushed past her on the walkway, hatted heads bent forward, collars clutched snugly against the wind. The woman glanced back at her, the way a pedestrian will glance back at a doom-cryer stationed grimly with his placard on a street corner.

She thinks I'm nuts, Kelly thought. And maybe she was. After all this time, she was probably the last person Peter wanted to see.

But they had been in love once, and she allowed this truth to fortify her. They had shared that unique species of intimacy which seemed never to come along again after that first trembling time. She remembered that love and cherished it. . . and if she couldn't have it again, she should at least be able to approach the person she'd shared it with, talk to him openly and, if need be, beg him to release her heart.

She completed her trek up the walkway, feeling the cold and yet itchy with a nervous sweat. What will he say? her mind kept demanding. What will he look like? Oh, God, I hope he's glad to see me. . .

She strode into the lobby and its welcome breath of heat. Crossing the puddled tiles, she caught a departing elevator and punched the button for the ninth floor.

"Time for your bath."

Peter's neck muscles tightened, flexing beneath the skin like snakes in the act of swallowing; years of hefting his head off the pillow had left them thick and inordinately powerful. He had been paging through one of the books Sam had left him when the voice of the nurse startled him. Now his face darkened in irritation.

"I don't want a bath," he said flatly. Parked halfway into his room was the crane-operated sling they used to haul him into the tub room. It reminded him of some robotic, baby-bearing stork. "I had one last month."

Unperturbed, the nurse tried a compromise. "A sponge bath, then."

Peter debated. If he kicked up a fuss they'd drag him in to the tub room anyway, and he was getting pretty rank. A sponge bath would take only half the time of a baggage run to the tub, and then he could get back to what he'd been doing.

"Deal," he said gamely, flashing an ear-to-ear smile. The nurse responded in kind, but Peter saw her gaze twitch to his teeth and then away, repelled. He had let his teeth go. What the hell. They couldn't force him to eat if he decided he didn't want to, and they couldn't make him accept that fucking toothbrush. Having someone brush his teeth made him feel like a tarnished booby prize in a neglected collection of trophies.

The nurse went into the bathroom. Almost immediately Peter heard the sound of running water filling a stainless-steel basin.

His mind returned to the events of the past two nights. Discovering that Kelly still loved him had come as a gratifying shock. The feeling between them had never died. Stricken by circumstance, it had merely crawled into the shade to hide. And despite the best efforts of each of them to kill it, their love had endured there in the dark, beneath the damp dead leaves of a half-dozen autumns, like some secret mushroom that flowers only when exposed to the light.