Firefly (19 page)

"I'm sorry," she quickly apologized.

He stood at the bottom of the stairs and hung one hand over the banister.  Very slowly he raised his head and looked at her.  If her words hadn't brought enough of a blush to her cheeks, that steady gaze of his burned like a brand.

"I'll just bet you are," he said softly.

She froze, both mentally and physically, until he turned and strode toward the kitchen.  Then, embarrassed and afraid he would dismiss her from the job she had barely begun, Julie ran after him.

"I
am
sorry," she called, following him through the house. "I was angry and I said something I wouldn't have if I hadn't been so furious with you."

"You were furious?  What the hell for?"

"Because you were drunk again.  But now I--"

"Haven't I got a right to a drink or two now and then?  Even a doctor is entitled to a glass of whisky." 
A glass, maybe, but not a whole bottle,
and Morgan knew that as well as she.

"Yes, I agree, and after yesterday I should have realized that you'd be tired and want to sleep late."

She stopped in the arched entrance between the parlor and the kitchen.  Morgan, still barefoot, tossed a handful of kindling in the stove and struck a match on the top.  He moved too quickly and the tiny flame went out before he could touch it to the shavings and torn paper.  He swore again, using slightly less offensive terms but muttering them quite clearly.

Julie didn't protest, because she suspected he was trying to anger her further and she wasn't about to take his bait.

The second match flared and the kindling caught instantly.  After adding a few small sticks from the woodbox, Morgan straightened and spun to face the girl.

"After yesterday it's a wonder I got up at all."

"I know it must be terribly frustrating to spend so much time and effort on a man only to have him die, but surely after all this time you must be somewhat accustomed to it."

She knew she had once again said the most wrong thing possible.  His eyes told her, their green turning to black and the little spots of gold catching fire like the crackling tinder in the stove.

"I don't ever get accustomed to death, Miss Hollstrom.  The man who does doesn't deserve to practice medicine." He took a step toward her, his eyes rendering her immobile.  "It is because I can't get used to it that I opened that bottle of scotch last night, a bottle that I might add I got from Horace's bedroom.  He may have treated himself to more expensive liquor than I could afford, but he was no teetotaler, believe me."

He stood so close now that she could look up and see each individual black whisker on his chin.  His bare toes just touched the hem of her skirt.  Yet try as she would, and she did, she couldn't back away from him.  She knew he would only follow her.

"I do believe you," she whispered.

Just as abruptly as he had stormed toward her, he retreated, leaving her breathless and gasping.

He opened a cupboard and took down a small can of coffee. After lifting the coffee pot from the stove and feeling it full, he took it to the back door and tossed the contents into the yard.  Julie heard him jerk the pump handle up and down several times before the water splashed out. When he came in again, the pot was full and his feet and pant cuffs were wet.  He left dark footprints on the tile.

"If you'll just tell me where the key to the office is, I'll leave you to your breakfast," Julie said in as calm a voice as she could command at that moment.  She was having a very difficult time finding a direction to fix her gaze, for no matter where she looked at Del Morgan, she saw things she didn't want to see.

He didn't turn from his task of measuring coffee into the pot.

"It's in my coat pocket.  Upstairs in the bedroom, on the back of the chair."

"Thank you," she mumbled as she finally regained the use of her legs and left him.

If she had thought for half a second before scurrying out of the kitchen, she wouldn't have had the nerve to enter his bedroom, but now she was there and there was nothing to do but find the key and get out of his house.

The coat lay where he said it was, and in the semi-darkness Julie fumbled through each of the many pockets until she found the heavy key that belonged to the front door of Dr. Opper's house.  She dropped it into her own pocket and then put the coat back exactly the way she had found it.  It should have been hung up; it would be wrinkled when he put it on again.  But that wasn't any of her concern, she told herself sharply. She was, as she had said earlier, his nurse, not his wife.

She walked over to the toppled bottle and picked it up. If she had had a wet rag, she would have mopped up the sticky spill, but saving Morgan from injury on the bottle, which he might have tripped over in the dark, was enough.  She set it on the table beside his bed.

The photograph lay in a worn cardboard frame, and even as Julie reached for it, she knew she shouldn't.  Though her eyes had adjusted to the shadowy light and she removed the annoying spectacles, she could see very little, but even a little was enough.  More than enough.

No doubt he had stared at that picture while he drank last night.  It was a wedding portrait, the bride smiling radiantly in her satin dress and filmy veil.  Her hand, which displayed a new gold band, covered her husband's, which rested protectively on her shoulder.

Morgan hadn't changed much, she decided.  He looked just as tall and rangy, perhaps a bit heavier.  The moustache made him look older then than he did now without it, and Julie wondered why he had shaved it off.  Had Amy asked him to?

Julie might have hated another woman who looked like Amy Morgan, or at the very least been painfully envious.  Even in this small portrait, viewed in miserably inadequate light, the woman's beauty could not be missed.  Dark hair was swept up in a mass of curls that tumbled almost freely around her face. She had lovely hands, small with elegant fingers, and her eyes fairly sparkled on the paper.  Julie knew the smile that flickered on Amy's lips, restrained for the portrait, was as genuine and fresh as the roses that lay on her lap.  Red roses, even in the dull sepia tint of the photograph.

Julie carefully put the picture back where she had found it and turned to leave the room.  She had just reached the door when Morgan appeared at the head of the stairs.

"Did you find it?" he asked.

"Did I…?  Oh, the key.  Yes, I found it," she stammered, uncomfortably aware of the little lump in her throat.

"You were up here so long I thought maybe I had put it somewhere else and you couldn't find it."  He went back down the stairs but halfway to the bottom, he stopped suddenly and turned.  Julie, following, nearly ran into him.

Looking down at him was a thousand times more disturbing than looking up at him.  She tried to back away, tripped on the stair and her skirt, and sat down painfully and humiliatingly on the top step.  Morgan didn't move, not to prevent her fall or to help her to her feet again.

He stared blatantly at her face.

Aware of his scrutiny, Julie touched quivering fingertips to her cheeks and asked, "What's wrong?"

His eyes roved her features anxiously, but his voice carried no emotion.

"You've lost your glasses again, and you've been crying."

She turned a deeper crimson, but by then Morgan had rushed past her and couldn't see.

Julie scrambled to her feet and dashed down three or four of the stairs before she stopped, realizing she couldn't leave. If she went home without the glasses, there would be too many explanations, not only of how she'd lost the spectacles but of why she couldn't seem to stop crying.  Slowly, she remounted the stairs to the balcony-like corridor.

As she had done when she first entered the house, she waited in the doorway and watched him.  He must have felt her gaze, for he spun around almost instantly, and she saw he was holding both her forgotten spectacles and the portrait.

He threw the glasses at her.  She caught them easily, relieved that they were neither broken nor bent, but she did not put them on.

"I don't know which makes me more angry, that you lied to me or that you were spying on me."

"I wasn't spying," Julie protested.  "I didn't want you to fall on the bottle and get hurt, so I picked it up and--"

"And there was my wife's picture, so you thought you'd just look at it a while."

"She's very lovely."  Tears flooded the great round brown eyes.  "I'm sorry, really I am.  I didn't mean any harm."

He lifted the photograph and let it bring back the memory of that day.  No tears came to his eyes.

"That's what they said when that kid shot her.  'He didn't mean any harm.'"

Julie's knees melted, then solidified again as she grabbed the doorframe for support.  She doubted Morgan would have noticed if she fell.

"Please," she begged, trying to bring him out of his gloomy memories.  With the spectacles once more in her possession, she could have fled the house and gone home, but there remained still her tears to be explained.  And she could not have left Morgan alone.

He pulled a match from a hip pocket and struck it on the wall, chipping a piece of stucco in the process.  Without letting the picture out of his hand, he lit the lamp and set the chimney down over the low flame.  When he was certain it would hold, he turned it up, bathing the room in harsh light.

"You want to know about her, don't you, Julie."

"Yes," she admitted, too numb to think straight, then she stammered, "No, please, don't talk now.  I'm sorry, for everything.  For coming here, for looking at her picture, for lying about the glasses.  I'll leave, and I won't come back, and I--"

"Stop it, Julie."

His free hand gripped her shoulder firmly, though she wasn't aware of having approached him until that instant.  She must have walked toward him while she babbled her frantic apology, for Morgan hadn't moved from his place by the table and Julie now stood directly in front of him.

The tears continued to drip down her cheeks and a warm longing grew inside her.  She wanted to comfort him, to hold him in her arms and console him for the loss that left such pain in his eyes.  And she wanted to be held, too, to feel more than just his hand on her shoulder.  Other needs, other wants, could not be so clearly defined, but she felt them and recognized them just the same.  As forbidden as they were, she could not deny them.

Angrily, as though he had seen those shameful desires in her brimming eyes, Morgan shoved her away from him.  She fell back a step or two and buried her face in her hands as the silent tears changed to sobs.

"Damnit, Julie!" he shouted.  "I don't like living like this.  I want to go back to the way it was, back to forgetting, back to all the nothingness."  He looked about him for something to throw, not at her but just to feel the satisfaction of destroying something.  There was only the whisky bottle.

"Yesterday was our wedding anniversary," he went on. "Twelve years ago, on the first day of July, Miss Amalia St. Rogers and Dr. Delbert Morgan were united in holy matrimony. Cincinnati rocked with the celebration, and with the shock.  Adam St. Rogers was one of the most powerful and wealthy men in the city.  Still is.  Banker, industrialist, war hero, manipulator of politics and politicians throughout the state of Ohio.  And yet he let his only daughter marry me.  He gave her away proudly to the son of a Welsh coal miner."