Tempted (9 page)

But it was too late—Tell was already in. His hat in his hand, his coat hanging off his shoulders. He looked barely fifteen.

Just another young boy forced into manhood.

The war will not end. Not ever.

“It’s okay,” Tell said, wiping a shaking hand across his mouth. “I’ll take care of my brother.” He walked around the foot of the bed and saw his brother’s body and didn’t even flinch. His lips went tight for a moment, but that was all. “I knew it was going to end like this,” he said. “Sooner or later someone was going to shoot him. I just never figured it would be himself.”

Annie lifted her hands to her face, but stopped when she saw the blood there. And on her dress. She touched her face, and her fingers came away slick and red.

Her breath began to pant in her chest, and he saw hysteria enter her blood-soaked features.
Time to go.

She began to paw at her dress. “I need…I need to change. I need—” Annie began to struggle away from him, as if she would stand. “I need to g...go,” she said. “I need to take a b...bath.” Her voice was shaking, the stammer she worked so hard to control back.

She kicked her skirts out, trying to get off the bed, and he stood and helped her to her feet. She took one shaky step and her legs buckled. Steven was there to lift her in his arms.

He swallowed down the panic in his chest, the weight of her against his body bringing back demons and ghosts and every kind of nightmare, but he took a deep breath.

Anne
, he thought.
Anne
.

And somehow, like that, the revulsion was replaced by his fear for her. His need to care for her. To see her safe. To keep her close.

He carried her past the crowd in the doorway and down the steps in front of everyone, who’d stopped all efforts at merriment at the sound of the gunshot. They all stood, stone-still, eyes riveted on the balcony.

“Jesus,” someone shouted. “She dead?”

Anne started to whimper. He glanced down and saw her staring back at all those people. Her glasses smudged with blood.

“Look away,” he told her, but she couldn’t hear. “Annie, please…” It was no use. He looked down at all those gape-faced idiots. “Look away!” he yelled at everyone. “For God’s sake!”

The piano player began to play again, something quick and cheerful, but the merry tune was totally discordant with the moment, and everyone ignored him.

He walked out the back door into the cool mountain air. Cats purred around his ankles as if to enquire what was wrong, but he shook them loose, heading toward Market Street. Anne was shaking now, like a leaf in a high wind.

“I got you,” he said, over and over again, though he could not be sure she heard him. He wanted to take her to his hotel room, where he could pull the rope and the boy would be there with hot water.

“I’m in shock,” she said, her teeth chattering. “This is shock. I’m certain. My h...heart rate is too h...high. And I can’t feel my fingers. I’m thirsty. My mouth is d..dry.” She was still yelling. And he began to worry about her ears. He knew men in the war who’d bled from the ears and never heard again. He couldn’t tell if her ear was bleeding because she was covered in Sam’s blood.

She needed a doctor.

“I can walk,” she said.

“You can’t.”

“I don’t want you to touch me…”

“Annie.”

“Put me down!” she screamed.

He set her down on the boardwalk, the small thump of her shoes against the wood oddly loud. The wind whistling down Market Street was loud.

Her breath was loud. He held her elbows and she jerked away from his hands and nearly fell to the ground.

“Please,” he begged. “Let me help you.”

“You can’t touch me, remember? You can’t bear to touch me. I’m going home. I just want to go home.”

She took a step away from him, rigid and shaking, covered in blood. Deaf and yelling into the night.

Annie, my Annie.

Her second step was wobbly. Her third, her knees buckled and he grabbed her. Pulling her and her stubborn heart into his arms again.

“Be quiet, Anne,” he said. “Be quiet, I’m taking you home.”

She was too weak to hurt him. Too weak to walk on her own. Too weak to protest. The strongest person he knew, and she’d used up all her strength.

I will give you mine
, he thought.

Against his better judgment, instead of walking her to his hotel, he turned left on Market Street and carried her back to her house. And the doctor, in whatever shape he was in.

She curled up on herself in his arms, and he had the sensation that despite the fact that he was carrying her, touching her more than he’d touched another person in years, she didn’t feel it.

Or if she did, she took no comfort from it.

And that, he knew, was his fault.

The front door was open—she’d been in such a rush she hadn’t locked it—and he stepped into the dark and hushed foyer of her home.

“Where is your room?” he yelled so she could hear him.

“Exam room,” she said, pointing at a closed door to her right. “There.”

He pushed open the door with his foot and set her down on the edge of the table. She was so small. Shaking so hard. Moonlight fell through the window, giving them just enough light to see by. He imagined it was better this way—she should not see what she looked like.

His coat was still in Delilah’s room. He couldn’t offer it to her to keep her warm. He pulled a blanket off the back of a chair and threw it over her shoulders.

“Tell me what to do, Anne,” he said, but she didn’t hear him. There was water in a basin on another table in the corner, and he grabbed the basin and the towel beside it and brought it to her. He dipped the towel in the water and brushed it over her face, trying to clear up the blood. She flinched away.

“I’ll do it,” she said. He handed her the towel.

“I’ll put on water for a hot bath.” She didn't respond and she wasn't looking at him. Her eyes were on her hands and the blood she was struggling to get off of them.

“Anne!” he cried again, stepping front of her. Still she didn't look up. He touched her hand and she flinched, staring up at him with wide, panicked eyes.

God, his heart was breaking.

“I'm putting on water for a bath,” he yelled, and finally she nodded.

He left the room and ran to the back of the house. He stirred the coals in the kitchen stove and added more kindling from the box beside it. A pail full of water sat at the back of the stove.

The door leading to a set of rooms off the kitchen opened and a woman appeared. Holding a rifle. The miner’s wife with the baby, he thought. Anne hadn’t mentioned she was a Negro woman.

“Who are you?” she asked, in the manner of a woman used to both holding a rifle and asking that kind of question.

Dear God
, he thought,
I have had enough of violence
.

“My name is Steven. Anne needs help.” At the mention of Anne, the rifle was lowered and the woman stepped further into the kitchen.

“What happened?”

“A man shot himself. She was…right next to him.” The woman made a strangled sound of dismay, but her face was totally composed. It made him think he’d imagined things. “She’s fine. But she needs a bath. A hot bath.”

“I’ll fetch the tub,” she said, and vanished through a different door.

Steven crouched back down in front of the fire, feeding more wood to the growing flames.

There was a crash and a muffled scream and he jumped to his feet, running back to the exam room. Annie was standing in front of the mirror, frantically shaking out her hair. Pins littered the floor.

“Anne,” he cried, but she didn’t hear him. “Anne!”

Great bloody ribbons of hair fell across her face and down her back, and the sounds she was making—panic and fear—it tore his heart in half.

“Anne,” he said, and touched her shoulder, but she screamed and shied away from him.

“It’s in my hair!” she cried, shaking it out. “I looked in the mirror and it’s in my hair—”

He knew what she was saying. He knew what was in her hair.

“Anne.” She was backing herself into the corner, and he followed her, trying to pull her slowly into his arms, but she resisted, slapping at his hands. “Anne!” he said louder, and finally she looked up at him, a wild thing with her hair like that. With her eyes like that.

“I will help you,” he said clearly. “I will get it out.”

After a moment she nodded and he slowly put his hands to her hair, pulling out, one by one, bits of bone from Sam Garrity’s skull.

“I shouldn’t have let you go in there,” he said, knowing she couldn’t hear him. “I’m so sorry, Anne. I’m so sorry.”

“What’s going on here?” a man’s voice asked from the doorway, and there was the flick of a match and the lamp was lit on the small table.

“Jesus, Anne.” It was the doctor, unkempt and sweaty, his eyes still cloudy from his drugged stupor. “What happened?”

Steven had put aside his anger. Over and over again. Through the war. Through Andersonville. Through his grief and mourning for his family. Over and over again he’d put his rage aside.

But looking at that man, who, through his addiction and incompetence, nearly got Annie killed—he couldn’t do it anymore. Rage roared through him, pushed him into madness.

He dropped Annie’s hair and turned on the man, pushing him out of the doorway and shoving him into the far wall of the hallway.

“I’ll tell you what happened,” he said, wrapping his hand around Madison’s throat. The doctor’s eyes blazed. “She nearly died tonight. Sam Garrity blew his head off inches from her face.”

Madison jerked, but Steven squeezed, feeling the pound of the doctor’s veins under his fingers and loving it. Relishing it.

“She’s screaming because she has bits of Sam’s skull in her hair. Bits of his brain. She’s screaming because she can’t hear. Maybe she’ll never hear. Where were you, good doctor?” Steven whispered. The desire for violence blew him wide open and he wished he had a knife to slip between the man's ribs. To slice off his toes. His fingers. “What were you doing while she walked into a brothel, into the room of a madman and the prostitute he’d beaten?” The doctor was nearly limp under his grip, his face pale, his lips blue, and Steven smashed the man’s head into the wall. “Where. Were. You?”

“Stop!” The miner’s wife was at the far end of the hallway, the wash tub in her hands. She was small and slim, but her voice was not. Her eyes were not. “Stop it. Anne needs us. All of us.”

Steven dropped his grip on the doctor’s throat, and the man slumped against the wall. Sucking in breath, his hands against his neck.

The woman gave them a scornful look and stepped to the door. She would have gone in but Steven stopped her. His hand up to block her way. “It’s… she’s in a wild state, and the blood—”

“It’s okay,” she said. The miner’s wife with the hands that did not shake.

It wasn’t, he thought, but he was glad to hear her say it. Something about her confidence shored up his.

“I need to examine her,” Dr. Madison said, his voice rough from Steven’s strangulation.

“Are you sober? Because you will not lay one finger on her if you are not.”

“I…I am sober.”

“I would kill you for this,” Steven said, his rage yet unappeased.

“I would welcome it,” Madison said, his eyes on the floor. He swept a hand over his hair as if trying to put himself to rights, and then he stepped into the exam room.

There was no shelf large enough for this anger. No secret hiding place strong enough to hold it. He just had to feel it. He had to close his fists and grit his teeth and feel it all.

And it hurt. In his bones. The tips of his hair. All of it hurt.

Slowly he turned and went back to the kitchen to tend the fire and the water while others tended Anne.

A
nne sat in her second tub of water, her arms around her legs. Her hair cold and slick against her back.

Her ears ached, sound returning and then disappearing with big pops like she was climbing a mountain.

Elizabeth, the miner’s wife, put a stack of towels on the edge of the exam table.

“Anne,” she said. Elizabeth's robe was flannel and too big for her. Anne wondered if it was her husband's. If she wore it to feel closer to him. “The water must be growing cold.”

It was.

“Would you like another bucket of hot water?”

She shook her head.

“You have been very kind,” Anne said, the words—the politeness—coming by rote. She was suddenly very glad for her mother’s insistence on manners. Those hours of lessons on deportment and social graces. How handy they were now. They gave her words to say. Reasonable sentiments when she feared that left to her own devices she might just open her mouth and jabber like an idiot. “But you should go.” Anne even managed to smile. Mother really would be so proud. Undoubtedly far more proud of Anne now than she’d ever been while she was alive. “Your daughter will soon wake and you'll not have had any sleep.”

Elizabeth gave her a look that indicated she saw right through her fine manners.

“Let me help you out of the bath,” she said. “And then I’ll go.”

Anne nodded. Because she was cold now, and stiff, and it would be hard enough to get out of the tub on her own and she was not about to call in Dr. Madison for help.

Or Steven.

If he was still here.

Elizabeth grabbed a towel from the stack and Anne stood up carefully, the water lapping at her knees. The towel Elizabeth wrapped around her was warm. She gasped at the pleasure, her chilled skin soaking up the heat.

“Steven warmed it by the fire,” Elizabeth said. “As well as your robe. He also has a fire set in your room.”

Oh, what a luxury. She hadn’t used the fireplace in her room—not once.

“He’s still here?”

“Yes,” Elizabeth said. “He and the doctor are pacing outside, growling at each other. Well, Steven is growling. The doctor looks sick.”

Yes. Annie imagined he would.

She took a deep breath and tied her wrapper tighter around her waist. It felt good, the warm wrapper, the tight belt. Like it was going to keep her together when she felt in danger of shaking apart. The cold water had seeped right into her bones. She’d stayed in too long.