The Ebbing Tide (37 page)

“Alec was a gambler, you see. That was something he and Owen had in common. But they got Nils to go with them — and take his boat. Father told Nils he was a fool to go, and take a chance on losing his boat if a gale came up while they were out there. But Nils went.”

“Why?” said Dennis suddenly. “What did he want out of it?”

“I don't know. I think he couldn't refuse Owen, and maybe he thought he ought to go along with them because they were so irresponsible.”

Now she could see the wild-rose dawn, born in unbelievable stillness after that long and horrible day of wind and lashing rain and surf; and she could hear Nils' boat beating her weary way home. . . . “They didn't lose the boat, but she was a heart-broken sight. They lost the traps, and they didn't make any money, and Alec was so sea-sick out there that he looked like a scarecrow.” He had come up the beach, hollow-eyed, white, unshaven; he'd smiled, and opened his arms to her. And they'd got married without any money.

“There was always something happening around where Owen was,” she reflected. “But he always came out untouched. Maybe he began to think he was charmed.”

“But no one else was charmed,” he suggested. “The others had bad luck, didn't they? Nils lost you to Alec —”

“And I lost Alec,” she said steadily. She heard the words and was amazed that she could speak like this. “That's another time Owen was charmed. He was drunk, and he upset the peapod. They all went overboard . . . but it was Alec who was drowned.”

Dennis said, “You stood it alone though, didn't you? You're not the one to ask for pity.”

She was grateful for his cool impersonality. If he'd turned sympathetic, she would have hated him. “I was carrying Ellen then. Alec didn't even know about it — I'd meant to tell him when he came home that night. Instead, it was Stevie who came — to tell me that Alec was dead. You see how it was? I couldn't grieve, except deep inside, and I didn't dare do that, I thought it would hurt the baby.”

“Owen told me about it,” Dennis said. “I think he's carried the scar on his conscience all these years. . . . He told me that you never cried.”

“I did — once or twice. But I knew if I really let go, I'd go out of my mind.”

He tapped his pipe against the hearth, and began to fill it, his fingers leisurely. “Then, after a long time, you married Nils. And you've been really, richly happy with him, haven't you?”

“It was like coming home,” she said simply. “I think Nils and I are part of each other, as —” she hesitated, the color rising in her face as “— I didn't believe two persons could be, even myself and Alec.”

Now she knew she was talked out. She leaned back and let waves of quiet wash over her; if only she could sink beneath them, and not feel her nerves grow taut again! There was no reason for tautness, nothing but her imagination. What an impossible, conceited fool she'd been all these weeks!

But it was beginning; now that she. was not speaking, she found herself watching Dennis, his hand lying on the arm of the chair, the other hand holding the pipe bowl. The long line of his jaw, the poise of his head, the fire making bronze highlights across his hair.

She stood up suddenly. “I'm going to make some fresh coffee and bring it in.”

“All right.” He glanced up at her, but didn't offer to help, and she was glad. She went out into the kitchen, and Priscilla, who had been asleep, came out to help her, purring extravagantly and winding around her ankles. Joanna looked at her watch and compared it with the kitchen clock. Helmi was taking her own good time driving home from the library in Port George. But perhaps she had some work to do after the library closed. Perhaps she'd come in any time now.

T
HE COFFEE TOOK
an indecently short time to perk. She arranged a tray, with some filled cookies she found in the cake-box, and took it in. Dennis had replenished the fire, the mingled fragrances of birch logs and steaming coffee made a subtle and delicious blend. He'd cleared off a low end table and set it before the sofa.

She gave him a quick, brilliant smile. “Thank you!” Now she was uncertain again, and it maddened her, because all the while they had been talking she had felt so free and contented with him. “Both cream and sugar for you —”

“Yes, please.” He sat down beside her on the sofa. Priscilla climbed into his lap and lay along his thigh, cupping her white fore-paws over his knee; she looked at the fire with gem-like eyes.

Joanna felt curiously light-headed as she poured the coffee. Her desperation was slightly intoxicating, coming on the heels of the afternoon's shock and then the heady pleasure of relaxation.
This is the way it's always going to be
, she thought.
I'll never he rid of him, he's bought a place on the Island and he's going to stay there. Am I to be afraid the rest of my life? Shall I always have to run? Why can't I face it down, the way I've been willing to face down everything else? I've never been a coward
. . . . Her desperation increased, and so did her light-headedness. She felt as if she were swinging on the brink of an abyss, but oddly enough she was not afraid; only slightly breathless with daring, with the realization that if she took the right step she would know something that was inexpressibly important to know. And once she knew it, she would be safe. She would no longer be haunted, no longer afraid.

Dennis said, “The coffee is excellent.”

“I'm glad,” she answered. But what if the right step were the wrong one, what if she were not set free afterward. . . . What if there should be an abyss waiting for her? But if she ran away now, she'd never know, and within the next few minutes her freedom might lie, and she would be herself again, Joanna Bennett Sorensen, unclouded, unshadowed —

Her decision was made, and she would not revoke it. And now that it
was
made, she would not fight her consciousness of Dennis. It was as valid a substance as the fire's heat and glow, and she welcomed its growing force, for it brought the answer nearer.

Dennis set his cup down on the tray. “I think you're feeling better,” he said gravely. “Back there in the hospital, you didn't look well. And when we first came into the house here, I was worried about you. But I think your nerves have loosened up this evening.”

“I do feel better.” She met his eyes in the half-light; she was through with avoiding his glance, with making up little tasks to keep a silence from coming between them. “It's because you're such a good listener, and you let me run on. I —” But it was growing hard to look at him so steadily, her face felt hot and she could sense a little pulse beating in the hollow of her throat. But I won't look away first, she promised herself with the old stubbornness.

“I can't ever thank you for everything,” she went on. “Ever since you came to the Island you've been doing things for me — for us, and I — well, I know this sounds silly, but I don't know how I'll ever get along without you!”

There were pulses beating all over her now. The rhythm was deafening.
Get up and move around, you fool
, she thought, and in the next breath she knew she didn't want to move around. She didn't want to move away from Dennis now, she didn't even want to look away.

“I don't know,” said Dennis soberly, “how I'll ever get along without
you
.” He put his arms around her shoulders and pulled her gently toward him. She let herself flow on the tide of instinct; as naturally as a flower her mouth lifted toward his, and he kissed her. It was a quiet gesture, no more than a brushing of his lips over hers, with perhaps a faint, pleasant pressure. The tide lifted her as if she had been a chip in the foam, and she leaned against his shoulder quiescently. For a long moment he looked down at her, his face gone impassive, her own lifted and waiting, no veil of pretense between them. Then she felt him sigh, his arm tightened around her swiftly, and his other arm caught her around the waist; for an instant she won dered at the warm hard compulsion of his hand against her back, and then the impression was gone under the impact of his second kiss. It was neither quiet nor faint; it shocked her with its passion, but it was a shock of ardor toward which her senses rose eagerly and hungrily. After the first moment she was surprised neither at herself or him, there was no room for surprise, or doubt, or guilt.

After a few moments he let her go, enough so that he could hold her back from him and stare at her face in the uncertain firelight. She looked back, smiling faintly, her mouth burning, her eyes heavy, a singing in her ears. The ruddy glow highlighted one side of his face, the way his hair grew at the temples, the line of the cheekbone; feel ing as though she moved weightless through a dream, she lifted her hand and touched his cheek. He turned his head with a quick, famished gesture and pressed his lips into her palm, and shut his eyes.

Somewhere, as if it were quite outside of her immediate consciousness, there was an odd response to his gesture; the dreamlike sensation increased, and she knew a faint bewilderment, as though she had dreamed this dream before. His mouth against her palm, her fingers cupping his face. . . . Her head felt unclear. She slid her hand away from his mouth, around his neck, and found the back of his neck.

“Joanna,” he muttered. “We mustn't —” but while he was saying it he was drawing her tightly against him, and her hand was imperative on the back of his head, pulling him down, until with a small, despairing, yet triumphant sound he buried his face against her throat, and she felt his mouth there at the warm beating hollow.

He always loved that little place
, she thought, and the words left a track of cold across her senses. Bit by bit the warm flood was receding; his face lay against her throat, her hand curved over the back of his head, but her eyes stared past him at the flickering red light on the ceiling and they were no longer heavy and bemused with long-denied hunger, but wide with a trembling, fluid brightness.
He always loved that little place
. . . . She could not escape from the words, and because of them she was terrified, she felt the woe and confusion of a lost child, and she began to weep, without sound.

He must have felt the warm splash of a tear against his face, and then another, for he lifted his head, and said, “Joanna, what is it? My darling, tell me —”

She couldn't answer. For seeing him now, she
knew
; and she couldn't tell him. She cried harder with an anguished intensity that. shook her whole body. He still held her, but not with passion, and his tenderness only increased her torment. “Joanna, please,” he begged her. He was shaken, he was afraid for her, and she wanted to comfort him and to help him comfort her, but she could only put her face against his shoulder; there was no end to the tears.

“Joanna,” he said against her hair. “Tell me. You can talk to me — you've always talked to me. I'm Dennis, remember?”

She lifted her head then. “No, you're not. You're Alec. You've always been Alec!” She stared at him from drenched eyes. “Don't you
see
? Oh, please understand!” She began to shake violently.

For a long moment he looked down at her; his face changed subtly, until it was no longer the lover's face, but the friend's. There was a shadow across it, like grief or exhaustion or illness, and she saw it with pity that was made remote by her own tragedy. Her breath still caught sobbingly, and she remembered Laurie on the hospital steps.

But that was in another life, another year. Now she didn't know where she was in Time.

“I think I'm beginning to understand,” Dennis said at last.

“Am I insane?” she asked him, pleadingly. “What's happened to me?”

“Nothing very terrible,” he said. His mouth had a quirk to it she had never seen before. One arm still loosely held around her shoulders, he leaned his head against the back of the sofa and shut his eyes. “Something rather natural, Joanna. Tell me —” His voice was tired, but as calm as it had ever been. “When did you first begin to think that you might be in love with me?”

Now that the storm was passed, she felt weak but lucid. Their past relationship was crystal-clear in her mind. “I think it was the day when we met at the stile up by the cemetery. We were looking at the apple blossoms —”

“I remember looking at you that day with my heart in my eyes,” he said with mild irony.

“I know,” she murmured. “There was a change in me, too. I couldn't understand it.”

“Did you and Alec sit on the stile, too?”

She began to tremble as the pattern cleared. “It was just that same sort of day, with the apple blossoms and the song sparrows, when he — when we found out we loved each other.” The trembling increased, and the next words had to be forced out, because she had never said them, even to herself. “And when he was buried, the apple blossoms were drifting down. The earth was so ugly and raw, and the apple blossoms kept drifting against it, and a song sparrow kept singing all through the — the service. . . . I thought I was going insane.”

“Did you ever tell anyone these things?”

She shook her head. “How could I?”

“Joanna.” He had the familiar look now, kind and good. “How else do I make you think of Alec?”

“You're built somewhat like him, the same coloring. . . .” She felt exhausted but she made herself go on. Somewhere in her brain she knew this was perhaps the hardest thing Dennis had ever done; for each question he put to her, each answer she gave him, must have stabbed him deeply. “I guess I've always had little flashes of recognition, without knowing what they meant. The night we went for a walk in the moonlight, and found the blackberry blossoms; I know now why I was so upset. Alec loved them, he was always putting them in my hair. . . .”

She shook her head. “Dennis, I don't know what to say. How could I have been so confused? I only knew that I —” She blushed painfully, and groped for words. “For a long time I felt so — so
peculiar
about you that I didn't want to be near you, and yet I did; and I was so afraid of what it might mean that I felt as if I —” She stopped helplessly, her eyes appealing to him to understand.