Dreams for Stones (24 page)

“Did that make you angry?”

Angela’s quiet voice snapped him back from
the African veldt. Back from the heat and the buzzing of insects
and the tall, crisp, yellow grass. But the rhino came back with
him.

“No. Well, maybe.”

“What else?” Angela said.

He frowned. What else what? Oh, he supposed
she was still asking why he knew his way wasn’t working. He shook
his head, giving her what he hoped was a rueful look.

She stared back at him. “How long have you
known about the tenure decision?”

“Month, six weeks maybe.”

She cocked her head, waiting, and suddenly
he was ten years old again, called on the carpet for racing one of
the horses and not rubbing it down afterward.

He had no idea what more she expected him to
say. Wasn’t it obvious? Denial of tenure was a huge blow to the
ego. Couldn’t they simply explore that for a time instead of her
dismissing it with barely a sniff?

“If you need job counseling, I can suggest
someone for you to see.”

It was a clear challenge. One he didn’t know
how to meet, because he wasn’t yet ready to tell her why he was
really here. He was like a diver standing on the cliff watching the
march of waves so he could time his dive when there would be deep
rather than shallow water beneath him. But right now he couldn’t
make sense of the wave patterns, had no idea whether to walk away
or simply fling himself into space and hope for the best.

“Alan, you know why you’re here. But we
can’t get started until you share that with me.”

He inventoried the part of the office
visible over Angela’s shoulder. An aquarium sat below a framed
print. He focused on the print, a Vasarely. Meg had always argued
Vasarely’s paintings were merely form and color masquerading as
art, but he found the mathematical precision and color choices
satisfying. And right now the print, art or not, was an anchor.

There
was
one other thing he could
tell Angela. She probably heard it all the time anyway.

“I had a relationship end.” There, that
should do it. No tenure and unlucky in love. At least an hour’s
worth of talk there.

After a pause, Angela spoke. “Was the
relationship important to you?”

His ear began to itch. He scratched it,
trying to figure out how to get out of answering. He didn’t know
why he’d mentioned Kathy anyway. Well not mentioned her exactly,
but mentioned that he’d had a relationship. He didn’t want to talk
about anything more than the tenure decision this first time. Once
Angela helped him with that, he could figure out how to handle the
other issues himself.

But she wasn’t making it easy for him,
asking questions followed by long silences. Silences were meant to
be shared with someone you knew well. Like Meg.

The urge to bolt overwhelmed him, and it
took all his self-control to remain seated. He shifted in the
chair, but realizing that made him appear nervous, stopped moving
and refocused on the print. The colors smeared together. He
blinked, trying to recapture the crispness of Vasarely’s
design.

“Alan?”

He glanced at Angela, then away, speaking
quickly. “You know, it’s funny. If you tell someone standing in
front of a boulder not to think about a pebble, what happens? They
forget the boulder and all they can think about is the pebble.” Not
that he expected her to make a bit of sense out of that. It was
simply a piece of misdirection. It might even get them to the end
of this hour. Then he could leave and not come back.

“So, what’s your pebble, Alan?”

He shrugged. “Tenure. Ended relationship.
Take your pick.”

She made a sharp movement with her head,
obviously dismissing his response. He’d clenched his hands so
tightly they’d begun to ache. He pulled them apart and placed them
on his knees.

This talk thing wasn’t working any better
than he thought it would. They’d exchanged less than a hundred
words, most of them his. Wasn’t she supposed to do part of the
work? If all she was going to do was sit there, he might as well
pick out a tree and talk to it.

“Your pebble, Alan.” Her voice was firm,
inflexible.

His pebble. Meg.

Suddenly he could bear it no longer. The
guilt, the sleepless nights, the long, dreary days. Trying not to
remember. Trying not to feel. It wasn’t working. Had never worked.
Time. It was supposed to get easier, better with the passage of
time. But it hadn’t. Instead it had become more and more difficult.
But letting it out. Putting it into words. No, he couldn’t.

The images and pain he’d tried to hold at
bay swept in and over him. Like the water had Meg that day. “I let
her. . . Meg. My wife. She died.” He didn’t realize he’d spoken
aloud until Angela responded.

“How did she die?”

He sat breathing hard, as if he’d run up a
steep hill and couldn’t quite catch his breath. In between breaths,
words pushed their way out, in spite of his efforts to stop them.
“Alaska. We were visiting Alaska. Meg wanted to take a picture. She
climbed down to the beach. She was walking back to the car when. .
. sh-she, her legs got trapped. Then. . . t-tide came in.” His
voice jerked to a stop, and he sat, shivering, focusing on the
Vasarely, but no longer able to see it. Seeing instead a wide
expanse of water, the same blue as the sky, edged with its smooth
curve of silvery-gray glacial silt. Looking nothing like something
that could kill you. So beautiful it made you cry.

“You stayed with her?”

The calm tone of Angela’s question erased
the vision, but not the pain, a roaring black hole of anguish.
“They wouldn’t let me help.”

“Who wouldn’t let you help?”

“The rescue team.” He tried to wrench his
thoughts back from their dark spiral. He had to pretend this was
just a story. Not something real. But it was too late for that.

“I have a sense you think it was in some way
your fault Meg died,” Angela said.

“They told me it wasn’t.” Mostly they’d left
him alone while they waited for the tide to go back out so they
could recover Meg’s body. But every once in a while one of them
would come and squat beside him, offering a cup of coffee, a
sandwich, a few words.

“And do you believe that?”

“I should have known how dangerous the tidal
flat was.”

“How would you have known?” Angela’s voice,
a soft thread of sound, was his only lifeline in the deadly swirl
of memory.

“It was my idea to go to Alaska. I did all
the reading, planned what we’d do. I was responsible.”
For
keeping Meg safe.

Alaska hadn’t even been her first choice.
They’d flipped a coin. Alaska this time, for him. Next time, the
Caribbean for Meg. He scrubbed his hand across his eyes.

“Do you think Meg blamed you for not
knowing?”

“She’s dead.” The words were harsh and too
loud. In their wake, he sat panting, struggling to find his
equilibrium in a world that tipped and spun around him.

“So you have to do the blaming for her.”
Angela’s voice was soft, but her words sliced into him. “Did you
commit yourself to a life sentence?”

A blazing pain started in the back of his
neck and spread to his forehead. He couldn’t answer. Could barely
manage to keep breathing.

Angela waited a moment and then said, “Did
you cry afterward?”

What kind of question was that? Unable to
speak, he shook his head no, his gaze focused on the Vasarely.

There was a long beat of silence before
Angela spoke again.

“Alan, before our next meeting I want you to
take a look. See if the dangers of Alaskan tidal flats are widely
known.”

“What good will that do?”

“Facts and feelings interconnect, and
sometimes facts are the easiest place to start the untangling.”

Alan hadn’t told Angela the complete truth about crying. There had
been that one time on the trip he’d taken to Puerto Rico with his
dad six months after Meg’s death.

It happened the last day, after they’d spent
four days driving around the island, checking out horses kept in
everything from sheds to fancy stables. They had bought four mares
in foal and a yearling that had the makings of the stallion needed
to establish a breeding program at TapDancer.

Then to celebrate their success, they spent
the last day on the beach at Bouqueron, swimming and talking about
the horses and his dad’s plans for the ranch.

In the early evening, they drove to La
Parguera for dinner. Afterward they took a small boat out to the
phosphorescent bay, something the horse agent had arranged for
them.

They putted along, a half mile out from the
nearly invisible shore as the sky darkened and the stars appeared
one by one. The waters were choppy, and a stiff breeze blew spray
into their faces.

When they entered the bay, the waves
smoothed out, the breeze turned soft, and the wake began to glow.
Looking over the side, Alan saw the glittering tracks of large fish
darting away from the boat.

In the middle of the bay, their guide cut
the engine, and they drifted in the darkness watching the flashes
of light in the black water. His dad stayed in the boat, but Alan
slipped over the side into the water. He swam with slow, easy
strokes, his body outlined with a pale halo of light. He stopped to
tread water and lifted his hand. The water flowed down his arm in a
sparkling stream, as though he were dipping up thousands of tiny
diamonds.

For a moment, he could almost hear Meg’s
delighted laughter and see the sparkles caught in her hair.

Ocean water had mixed with sudden,
unexpected tears.

When Grace told Kathy she and Delia had been to the ranch to see
Alan—that in fact Alan had come to see Delia in the hospital, but
Frank had forgotten to mention it—Kathy had to steady her breathing
before she could speak. “Oh. And how is he?”

She and Grace were sitting on the
Garibaldis’ back steps watching Delia play with a friend in the
warmth of the summer day.

“He’s always been quiet,
verdad
? But
it’s a different quiet now. He seems. . . subdued. Sad.” Grace
sounded thoughtful.

Kathy, knowing the reason for that sadness,
felt like crying. She blinked, trying to focus her eyes on the
simple scene of Delia and her friend teeter-tottering.

“What happened between you two?” Grace said,
speaking quietly.

Kathy knew it wouldn’t do any good to say
there’d been nothing between her and Alan. “The usual, I
suppose.”

“I have no idea what you consider usual,
querida
,” Grace chided gently.

“How about inequality? He wanted friendship.
I wanted more.”

“Oh, Kathy. I’m so sorry. I thought—”

“Yeah, me too. Guess we were both
wrong.”

“And what about Charles? Do you think you
might be serious about him?”

Kathy pulled her lip in and chewed on it. “I
don’t know. I think he wants to be more than friends. But I’m not
ready yet.” The irony of that hit her, almost making her laugh. But
if she started laughing, she might not be able to stop it from
progressing into sobbing.

Grace patted her arm. “
Mira
, Kathy,
if you like, I’ll have a small dinner party. Ease the way for you
and Alan to be friends again.”

“Thanks, but no. I don’t think he’d want
that.” And it would be unbearable for her as well. Too much between
them was broken.

“I think he misses you. He asked how you
were doing.”

A sudden flare of hope pulsed through Kathy.
“Did you tell him I was seeing someone else?”

Grace shook her head. “I didn’t know what to
say. I just told him you were fine.”

Yeah. Fine. That was her, all right.

One night, shortly after that conversation with Grace, Kathy awoke
from a dream so vivid, it took her a moment to realize she was in
her bed in Denver and not in Emily’s house in Cincinnati.

In the dream, Emily had led her out of the
kitchen and down the hall to a small study. A wing chair
upholstered in faded rose brocade sat in one corner with a floor
lamp leaning over it like a curious stork. Across from the chair
and lamp sat an old-fashioned maple desk.

As Kathy glanced around the room, two
paintings caught and held her gaze. One was of a sunset, glowing
through the black tracery of fence and winter-bare trees. The
second was an old-fashioned portrait of a young boy in a
high-backed chair. A German shepherd sat at the boy’s side.

Emily’s sunset and Bobby and Brad. Kathy
recognized them as surely as she recognized herself.

Eventually she drifted back to sleep, but
when she awakened the next morning, it was with an emphatic
statement ringing in her mind.
My name is Bobby
. She
stretched and sat up. Then, remembering the dream and the picture
of Bobby and Brad, she picked up one of the index cards she kept
handy. On it she wrote:
My name is Bobby
. Then she added a
description of her dream.

A dream about Emily and Bobby was hardly a
surprise given she’d been re-reading the diaries. What was odd
though, was how coherent it had been. Not the weird jumble of
people, images, and events that were her usual dream-fare.

That evening, as Kathy helped Mrs. Costello
do the dishes after dinner, the phrase from the morning kept
running through her mind.
My name is Bobby. My name is
Bobby
. Accompanying the words was an urge to write.

It was the first time she’d felt like
writing since Delia’s illness and the break with Alan. Amanda, with
her ’orses and vintage dresses, had faded so completely Kathy had
given no thought to the story in weeks.

When Mrs. C went off to watch television,
Kathy got a notebook and pen from upstairs and returned to the
kitchen. She opened the notebook to a fresh page and sat quietly
for a moment, before beginning to write.