The Smoke Jumper (24 page)

The guest suite was about as far removed from the reality of her weekday life as it was possible to get. The bathroom was walled and floored in streaked cream marble, the lighting discreetly recessed, the tub the size of a small swimming pool. The Boston apartment that she shared with Linda and to which she gloomily flew back every Sunday evening was cold and cramped and drafty, which seemed to do nothing to deter the platoons of mice and cockroaches that tried to share it too.

Ed had first brought her to Grassland on their way to Montana the previous spring to meet his parents. And from the moment they landed at the airport, the culture shock had set in. Raoul, Ed’s father’s driver, was there to meet them with his dark suit and black necktie, ushering them with a diffident smile into the back of a Mercedes spacious enough to throw a party. Julia got the giggles - until they turned off the highway and, as if by magic, a pair of enormous crested wrought-iron gates whirred open and the car purred up a driveway that wound through parkland until there in front of them was this pillared palace and by then she’d stopped giggling and her jaw was just hanging loose. There were fountains and peacocks and a whole army of servants. She told him she’d had no idea she was dating Rhett Butler, for heavensakes, and Ed just laughed and kissed her and said frankly, my dear, he didn’t give a damn for any of it.

Since their sons had left home, Jim and Susan Tully had the entire west wing to themselves, with staff and guests housed in the east. There were at least four guest suites and when Ed, on that first visit, had led her along the cream-carpeted corridors to the best of them, Julia whispered that she’d better leave a trail of peas because otherwise she would never find her way out again. When he opened the door to the suite and she saw the yellow silk wallpaper and drapes and Chinese rugs and the views of rolling pasture from its tall windows, she was speechless.

Now she almost took it for granted. Grassland felt like her second home and she had grown fond of Lexington. The people had a kind of old-fashioned courtesy about them which, having grown up in the cutthroat bustle of a city, Julia found both curious and comforting. And the more she got to know Ed’s parents, the more she liked them. The accident had drawn the three of them close and Julia could tell that they adored her, especially his mother, who now treated her like the daughter she had always wanted.

Susan’s bravery over what had happened was almost as daunting as Ed’s. The shock and sorrow of seeing a favorite son blinded and burned were more than Julia could imagine, but Susan had kept her grief well hidden. Outwardly, from the start, she had been strong, practical and cheerful. Julia had drawn on this and tried to emulate it and, most of the time, succeeded. No one, not even the trauma therapist she had been seeing in Boston, knew what was going on inside her; of the terrible dreams she had, of the demons that came to visit her in the dark, dread hours of the night to squat on her chest as if they would flatten every ounce of breath from her lungs.

She had always thought she would be good at therapy, and perhaps if she had found someone whom she trusted more, she might have been. The therapist she had seen was a Dr Schroeder, a small, delicate man with soft white hands and unsettling beady black eyes. His slow nod, presumably intended to convey understanding or sympathy or to coax more revelations, had the opposite effect. Several times she had been on the brink of telling him something important, then seen the nod and the inscrutable avian stare and a gate would come crashing down. Finally, during one of their weekly sessions, he called her Gloria and that was it. To get her name wrong was perhaps excusable, but
Gloria
? She never went again.

The burden of guilt that she now carried sometimes seemed so heavy that during those bleak winter weeks, she feared her knees might buckle beneath it. Her mother’s attitude didn’t help; she belonged to the school of thought that considered cheery denial to be the appropriate way to handle such things. Whenever the two of them spoke, either on the phone or on Julia’s rare visits to New York, she always had some helpful homily to hand. It was just an accident. Nobody was to blame. It was time Julia moved on. Once she even said that there was no point in crying over spilled milk. Julia could barely believe her ears.
Spilled milk?

Her work at the institute was a dependable distraction. But at any time one of her pupils might say something or look at her in a particular way and suddenly she would see Skye’s face superimposed and hear her voice and Julia’s heart would lurch and start to race and she would have to struggle for breath. It was Linda who helped her through those wretched weekdays; who cooked for her and brought her cups of hot chocolate and came and sat on her bed and hugged her when she heard her crying in the middle of the night. Linda was the only one who seemed to understand about the guilt.

Ten days after the fire, while Ed was still in intensive therapy, Glen Nielsen had driven Julia, Katie, Scott and Laura over to Billings for Skye’s funeral. They made up more than half the congregation. All through the service, Skye’s stepfather kept looking at her and afterward, outside the church, he strode over and called her a murdering bitch and said she had a hell of a nerve showing up. He started to yell and two of his friends had to restrain him.

‘You didn’t even leave us a decent body to bury!’

They led him away. For many days afterward, Julia could barely speak.

In Boston, on her way to and from the institute, she had to pass a Catholic church and occasionally, after school, she would stop and go in and sit at the back. Usually the place was empty, though sometimes there were vagrants sheltering from the cold and perhaps a figure hunched in prayer among the pews or lighting candles of devotion. Julia thought of doing both these things herself. She even thought of seeking out the priest and asking if he would hear her confession. But then, what would she say?

Bless me, father, for I have sinned. I killed a beautiful young woman on a mountain and blinded my boyfriend. And, oh yeah, five search and rescue helicopter guys died as well
.

How many Hail Marys would it take to be absolved of such sins? she wondered. To seek forgiveness seemed almost obscene. For some sins there could be no forgiveness. And even if God, assuming there was one, forgave her, how could she forgive herself? What right did she have even to pray or to light a candle? Instead, she simply sat and stared from the darkness toward the pool of light around the altar and at the shining gold and blue and white figure of the Blessed Virgin with her puzzling smile and at Christ above, forlorn and crucified, blood dripping from his wounded flank and down his face from the crown of thorns. Julia stared and stared, hoping to feel something. Not forgiveness, not pity even, but perhaps some soft radiation of comfort. But she felt nothing.

The water in the bathtub was cooling now and she tilted back her head and wet her hair and quickly washed it. Then she hoisted herself out and wrapped herself in one of the Tullys’ thick towels and dried herself, thinking about Connor and wishing she’d stayed in Boston for the weekend or gone to see her mother in New York.

She had done her best to conceal how much she wanted to avoid him. Ed had only sensed it the last time Connor came to Kentucky when again she had made herself absent. He asked her why and she told him it was because she was ashamed of how she had behaved toward him on the day of the fire. It was the truth, but not the whole of it.

Secretly Julia was more ashamed of what she had felt for him last summer and of what, if she were to allow herself, she still felt for him. Even before the fire, these had seemed like a betrayal of Ed. Now they seemed little short of monstrous. Julia knew where her duty lay and so long as Connor was out of sight and many miles away she could bury her feelings for him and get on with looking after Ed.

But at the airport it had all come flooding back. The sight of him walking toward her, the way he’d looked at her with those pale blue eyes, the sound of his voice. She had hoped to God that he wouldn’t hug or kiss her and when he did and put his arms around her, she felt something break inside her and it was all she could do not to collapse and cling to him and cry on his shoulder. She managed to hold back the tears until she went off to get the car. In the parking lot she’d sat with her head bowed on the steering wheel, sobbing.

At least now she felt a little stronger. She dried her hair and dressed quickly in a pair of black velvet pants and the dark green cashmere sweater that Ed’s mother had given her at Christmas. Before the fire she had rarely bothered with make-up, but nowadays, without it, the sight of her face in the mirror scared her. She was all gaunt cheeks and cavernous eyes and with her short hair she felt she looked like a cancer victim or a survivor from a prison camp. As she was making herself up in the bathroom mirror, she heard Ed’s special little knock on the bedroom door, the one he used when he came to her room at night after everyone had gone to bed.

‘Milady?’

‘I’m in here.’

‘Milady’s presence is eagerly anticipated in the banqueting hall.’

‘I’m coming.’

He was practicing using his cane and she heard him tapping his way across the bedroom and saw him appear in the mirror behind her and stop in the bathroom doorway. He had nicked himself shaving and there was a dried trickle of blood on one cheek. She turned and went to him and he propped his stick against the wall and took hold of her and kissed the side of her neck.

‘You smell so good, I could eat you.’

She smiled and stood still while he slowly moved his hands up her body from the back of her thighs all the way to her shoulder blades and then under her arms to hold her breasts.

‘Just checking you’re suitably dressed,’ he said.

‘Uh-huh. And?’

‘Feels okay to me.’

She could feel him stiffening against her stomach. She reached behind her for a washcloth and dabbed the blood from his cheek.

‘Damn, did I cut myself?’

‘Just a little. There. All gone. Come on, let’s go down.’

‘What, now? Right here? Okay.’

‘Downstairs, smarty-pants. Have you had your shot?’

‘Yes, Mom.’

‘Have you told him yet?’

‘No. I thought we’d tell him after dinner.’

 

Being blind, so far anyhow, didn’t seem to have a lot to recommend it. But there was one thing that Ed had noticed: he was always as horny as a hound in a hot tub. He’d heard say that with loss of sight one’s other senses became heightened and this was all he could put it down to, unless one of the umpteen pills he now had to take had some wondrous side effect that nobody had dared mention. With all the work he was doing, learning how to live in his new benighted world, he often got very tired. But he was never too tired to make the trip each night to Julia’s room. He even joked with her that he didn’t need a cane to find his way there because the one he was born with was out there in front doing it for him.

It wasn’t as if his sex drive before he was blind had been stuck in first gear. Far from it. There had been scarcely a night when he and Julia hadn’t made love. But now that he could only feel her and smell her and taste her, he felt turbocharged, as if those particular veins were filled with some new high-octane fuel. Not that he considered himself a great lover. He knew that he was sometimes too eager and often too quick. But he liked to think he was generous and that what he lacked in finesse he more than made up for with diligence.

With his broken hip and all those weeks that he’d had to spend in the hospital and at the rehab center, it was a long time before he and Julia had been able to make love again. At the center he had been plagued with worry that she might not find him attractive anymore. He had mentioned this to one of the counselors and the guy tried to reassure him, saying it was common for newly blind males to feel this way, that losing one’s sight could have an emasculating effect. Far from reassuring him, this had made him even more worried and by the time he came back he’d managed to work himself up into a frenzy of selfdoubt.

But Julia had dispelled it. That first night back at Grassland, he had fumbled like a freshman on his first date but she held him and helped him and he could feel how much she wanted him and ever since it had been as good as ever, better even. Apart from his own heightened senses, the only change he noticed was in Julia. There was something in her lovemaking that hadn’t been there before, a kind of sad intensity into which she somehow seemed to disappear.

The others were all at the table when he and Julia came into the dining room. He heard the scraping of chairs and knew his father and Connor had stood up.

‘Sorry we’re late,’ he said. ‘It’s my fault. I nearly cut my head off shaving.’

‘Why don’t you use that electric shaver I got you?’ his mother said.

‘I like to live dangerously.’

There was a moment of silence. Julia steered him to his chair and took her place beside him.

‘Come on, let’s eat,’ his father said. ‘Connor here is about to die of starvation.’

He called for Annie, the Filipino cook who’d been with them since Ed was a child. They sat chatting while she brought in the first course. Ed sniffed the air. It had become a ritual that he always tried to guess what was being served.

‘Okay, Annie. Let’s see. Smoked salmon and—’

Annie laughed. ‘You’ll never get it.’

‘And . . . those old socks you threw out last week.’

She slapped his hand gently and put his plate in front of him.

‘Cucumber and mint surprise.’

‘Cucumber that smells like socks, that is a surprise.’

While they ate, Ed’s father asked Connor about his flight from Montana and then launched into a tedious monologue on the merits of various airlines. He asked Julia which airline she used from Boston and Julia replied politely. It was the first time she had spoken and Ed wondered why she was being so quiet. Probably bored half to death by the conversation. It was time to liven things up.