Shadow Woman

3

The bus labored up Delaware Avenue out of Buffalo, building its momentum slowly after each stop, then coasting to the next one, until Jane saw her corner. She stood up, and the driver pulled over to let her out under a streetlamp. She walked along the uneven sidewalks across the south end of Deganawida in the dark, her canvas bag over her shoulder, her feet feeling without effort the places where the concrete slabs were pushed up by the big old trees, as Jane had learned to do when she was little.

She walked along Erie Street, unconsciously noting what was going on behind the lighted panes of glass without staring at them. She probably knew the occupants of every third house in the little city. Her parents had known more of them, and her grandparents still more, because they could have told her who was related to whom for generations back.

Jane felt so good about having these sidewalks under her feet, so glad to breathe the air in a place that made sense to her, that she allowed herself to think about what it would be like never to leave again. For the first time in two weeks, when her mind was drawn to Carey McKinnon she did not goad it away from him. He was going to ask her again if she would marry him. That would be in six months, and that was not much time to get ready. It occurred to her that if she had been someone else, getting ready would probably have meant worrying about trivia: dresses and china patterns. But what Jane Whitefield was going to have to worry about was how to make the bride invisible.

Jane let her eyes settle on her house as soon as she had turned onto her block. There were no lights, no curtains that had been moved since she had left, no cars parked on the block that she had not seen before. The reading lamp near the corner window in Jake Reinert’s house next door was on, and she took a couple of steps along the sidewalk in front of his house until she could see a slice of light under the blind of the porch window. She saw the book on his lap and his thick, pink, callused right hand tilting it up a little as he read, to keep the lower segment of his bifocals on it.

He and her father had been raised side by side in these two old houses on this quiet street, and by now he seemed to be able to sense subtle changes in the atmosphere—a footfall on the porch next door would bring him to the window. She had even seen him stop what he was doing to stare if he heard the engine of a car going by that he didn’t recognize. She had her house wired with a very good burglar alarm, but she had met people who made a living fooling better ones than that. She went to her car in the garage and took her house key out of the lining of the rear seat, then walked back to her front door, unlocked it, and slipped inside quickly to punch her alarm code into the glowing keypad before it could go off.

She stood in the doorway and studied the signs. The air in the house was stale, so no window had been broken. Before she had left the house she had vacuumed the carpet, leaving a pattern and the pile pushed upward. The carpet had no indentations from heavy feet. She walked to the table beside the couch and lifted the telephone off the cradle. The dial tone was clear and distinct, so nobody had disconnected the phone line to isolate the alarm system. She was home.

She set the telephone back on its cradle as the bell rang, vibrating her fingertips. “Hello,” she said into it.

“Hi, it’s me.” His voice had a smile in it, as though his throat were tight. “Welcome home.”

“Hi, Carey,” she said. She blocked the little laugh of pleasure that almost escaped. Then she wondered why she had to and remembered that she didn’t have to anymore. She was home, and this was Carey. “How did you arrange this?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“You’re so full of—”

“Wait,” said Carey. “I’m getting a psychic image. Take about five minutes to unpack that black bag you’ve got over your shoulder, take a shower—and I wouldn’t mention anything so indelicate if I weren’t a board-certified physician—but I sense you have to pee. Then the archetypal little black dress. And matching underwear: you might get into an accident, and the gang in the emergency room is very critical. Nothing too flashy, but not the jeans-and-sneakers ensemble you’ve got on now.”

“Jake saw me come home and called you.”

“Old people are so prompt. I guess it’s because their dance cards aren’t quite as full as they once were. You didn’t eat dinner on the plane, did you?”

“I wasn’t on a plane.”

“The broomstick, then. Whatever.”

“I haven’t eaten. But what brings on this sudden manic outpouring? Did a rich hypochondriac move into town while I was gone?”

“No,” said Carey. “But I’m hungry, and I keep seeing these ‘Lost Dog’ posters near the hospital cafeteria.”

“Suspicion is a sign of a devious mind,” she said. “I mean a big sign, not like all the other signs.”

“I knew I could develop a quality that would appeal to you. So get ready. I’m on my way.”

“I’ll be listening for the sirens.”

She dressed in a few minutes and left her front door open while she walked up on Jake’s porch and rang the bell.

He opened it and smiled at her. “Hello, Janie. I’ll bet you came for your mail.” He stepped backward to let her in and pointed to the pile of mail in the shoebox on the coffee table.

She lifted the shoebox, shook it beside her ear, and listened. “Six bills.” She shook it again. “Only three checks, all small.” She frowned. “And my subscription is about to run out.”

His sharp old blue eyes focused on her. “You’re dressed like a girl for once,” he said. “To what do we owe this honor?”

“You called him, so don’t pretend you didn’t. And it’ll be on your conscience if I’m sweet-talked into doing anything.”

“None too soon, either,” said Jake. “If you’re going to have anything to live down, you’d better get started on it.”

She looked at him slyly. “Tell me something. When did he ask you to call him?”

“Some time ago. And I won’t apologize. Judging from that get-up, the attention isn’t unwelcome.”

“How long ago?”

“I guess it was the day after you left. He came over here with that look they get when they’re telling you that whatever they’re going to do to you might be a little uncomfortable. I was sorely relieved when I found out it was something that was none of my business, so I jumped at it with enthusiasm.”

“I thought you weren’t going to apologize.”

“I’m explaining.” They both heard Carey’s car pull up in front of her house.

“I accept your explanation.” She turned toward the open door. “But don’t let it clear your conscience, because you didn’t apologize.”

He sat down in his chair and picked up his book. “Tell him he owes me a favor. I know you won’t admit you do. And close that door. There’s a draft on my hind legs.”

Carey was standing beside the passenger door when Jane stepped out onto the porch. She held up her hand, hurried to her own door, tossed the mail on the couch, set the alarm, and locked the door, all the time thinking about the first glimpse of him. He was wearing a dark gray suit that must be new, and it was one she might have picked for him. His long legs and arms seemed comfortable in it, somehow, and the fabric along the lapels looked so soft and smooth her fingertips wanted to touch it. The color made the thin sandy hair that never seemed to stay where he thought he was supposed to put it look almost golden under the streetlamp.

As she came down the steps she gave him a little smile. “You’re not trying to impress me, are you?”

“Not me.” He opened the door for her. “The only reason I’m bringing you along is I’m trying to make the car look good. I’m trying to sell it, and I notice they always use young women in the commercials.”

“No flies on you,” she said. “You’re what Jake calls a ‘go-ahead young man.’ ”

He drove slowly and carefully up the street. She liked that. It was something that only people who had been raised in places like Deganawida seemed to have the sensitivity to do. If people had to look up from what they were doing to see if someone was running over the kids or grandma they didn’t forget whose car it was, or who was in it. Whoever it was forfeited part of his claim to being solid and respectable. In Deganawida that respectability meant that people would strain to put a benevolent interpretation on anything they saw, and a third party who asked prying questions would be enveloped in a fog of laudatory generalities that applied to everyone and no one.

As Carey drove along River Road to the south he said, “I missed you.”

“I missed you too,” said Jane. She looked out across the half mile of moving river at Grand Island. When she and Jake’s girls were children there were still lots of places over there where they could walk across a swampy field and fight their way through impenetrable thickets to streams full of perch and sunfish. The lights of the Holiday Inn across the water were in the spot where there used to be pilings from the old ferryboat landing and a vast empty field of dry weeds like hay. Sometimes they would search the pebbly shore with sticks and find big, heavy pieces of rust-encrusted iron that did not suggest any known use but had probably come from old-time lumber boats.

Carey drove east out of Buffalo on Main Street into the open suburbs, until they came to a sprawling restaurant built around a coach stop from the early 1800s, along the road that was laid over the Seneca trail. There were big stone fireplaces where resin-soaked pine logs flared and crackled, fed a steady stream of fresh oxygen by the air-conditioning. The walls were lined with buggy whips and harnesses and Currier & Ives prints, and when the food came, the roast beef was served with Yorkshire pudding.

They sat at a table beside the front window. Jane smiled as she surveyed the dining room. “I forgot this place existed.”

“Me too,” he said. “I picked it because it’s a good place to talk.”

“You picked it because it reminds you of your house.” Jane had seen an old Holland Land Company map that Ellicott, the company agent, had used for the sale of Seneca land in 1801. Clearly marked in its place was “McKinnon house.” “What do you want to talk about—horses?”

Carey was quiet and serious. “Last time, you told me about your trip. Are you going to tell me this time?”

“I think I did what I wanted to do.” Her eyes scanned the empty tables around her to be sure none of the waiters had drifted too near. “But it wasn’t smooth.”

“You mean somebody’s looking for you?”

“Maybe, but not hard, and not for long. It had nothing to do with me.” She scanned the restaurant again, and when her eyes returned to him, she smiled. “Sounds brave, doesn’t it?”

“I’m awed, as usual,” he said.

“Don’t be. Twenty-four hours ago I was as scared as anybody alive. I could almost taste the strawberries.”

He cocked his head. “What strawberries?”

She looked down and shook her head. “It’s just an old expression.” She paused. “Really old. It means you came so close that you could already taste the wild strawberries that grow by the path to the other world.”

He looked down too, and then up again to fix his eyes on hers. “Want to tell me what brought that on?”

“I made a mistake—took a chance to buy some extra time for my rabbit. I ended up in a high place, looking down, the way you do in a bad dream.” She patted his hand. “Since I didn’t fall, I guess you could say nothing actually happened. What did you do while I was gone?”

“Surgery every morning at seven except Friday. Office visits from one to five. Hospital rounds five to seven.”

“And then?”

“I thought about how to talk to you. You’re not that easy. You have a long history of standing up and walking around whenever anybody says anything, so I decided to take you to a restaurant.”

“Big talk, huh? Serious stuff?”

“Yes. You told me what happened on your trip in December. You said that I should think about what I’d heard. If I asked you again after I’d thought about it, you would say yes.”

Jane said, “No, I told you I loved you. I told you that if you asked me again after one year, I would say yes. And if you do, I will.”

Carey’s long, strong fingers moved up his forehead and pushed back the shock of hair that had begun to creep down. “I’m a very quick thinker. I’ve been thinking about it for six months. No. Let me start again,” he said. “You and I have known each other for almost fourteen years. We were sophomores that night at Uris Library when Sally introduced us.”

“Right,” she said. “You were doing sickening drawings of invertebrates. Compound eyes and mandibles.”

“So whatever fundamental judgments we needed to make about each other have been made. That was what this was about, wasn’t it? You told me something that I hadn’t known about you. You wanted to be sure I didn’t assume I could ignore it and then start mulling it over after it was too late.”

“That’s part of it,” she said. “We have to be friends, because we are. We don’t have to get married. That brings on a whole new set of rules and agreements that are very rigid and binding, and nobody should do it who has any doubts.”

“Are we still talking about the same thing?”

“I’m not talking about one thing,” she said. “I’m talking about everything at once, because that’s what marriage is. You take all of the complexity of your life—Who is this person? Do I approve? Where do I want to live? Who are my relatives? What time do I get up? What do I wear? What work do I do?—and compress all of it into just one question: Do I get married or not? That was why I picked a year.”

“You made your decision in a day.”

“I’m very introspective, and I spend a lot of time alone.”

He shook his head and chuckled sadly. “I want it on the record that I haven’t seen any other women since we talked about this.”

“Come on, Carey,” she said. “You’re so dour and businesslike. It’s not like you. This is about being alive and happy. We’re old buddies. We know way too much about each other to start making speeches. I’m glad to hear you’re not molesting the nurses … anymore. But that’s just my possessiveness. I’m not checking compliance with an agreement.”

“You started it. In December.”

“I had no choice,” she said. “That was disclosure.”

“It seems to be what’s standing in the way now.”

She sighed. “You are a person who spends his life taking patients who are probably going to die and fixing them up. It’s an obsession. It’s what you have instead of a religion. I told you because not telling you would have made everything else a lie. I had just come home from a trip where I had killed some people. I am, technically and legally, a murderer. That’s not a small thing. It puts you in danger too—again, technically and legally. But also philosophically. Emotionally. I did something that is against everything you believe and everything you know.”

“How do you feel about it now?” He lowered his voice. “Are you sorry? Afraid? Proud?”

Her eyes turned on him in a glare, then turned away again. “It’s something to be avoided.”

“Do better than that.”

“It was the most horrible experience of my life. If the same circumstances came up tomorrow—no, right now, tonight—I know I would do it again. It would be much harder because I would know what it was going to look like. It also taught me some other things I had avoided knowing.”

“Like what?”

“All these years I was telling myself that what I was doing was unambiguous. I was taking people who were in the worst kind of trouble and making them disappear. That made sense. Whoever was in danger of dying didn’t, so nobody did. But I should have admitted to myself that one day I wasn’t going to run fast enough, or I would take a wrong turn. Until it happened I didn’t realize that what I was doing wasn’t just saving people. I was choosing a side. There aren’t any good guys in a fight to the death. So now I know, and you know.”

“Yes,” said Carey. “I know. I’ve thought about it every day for six months. My reaction is another surprise. I find it doesn’t matter to me. It’s another life, another time—like a war. What does matter is this: Is it over? Do you plan to stop making people disappear?”

“Done,” said Jane.

“What?”

“I mean, Okay. I’ll stop doing what I’ve been doing.”

“It’s that easy?”

“Answering quickly doesn’t mean it’s easy. It just means I didn’t wait until now to decide. When I said I would marry you, that was part of the bargain.” Jane shrugged. “I was a guide because it was the right thing for me to do in that time and place. If you’re waiting for me to apologize for it, you’ll wait forever. It’s just not something you do if you’re somebody’s wife.”

The waiter brought the check on its little silver tray and Carey set a credit card on top of it, then went through the ceremony of adding the tip and signing it. The waiters and busboys were all very solicitous and friendly, because Carey and Jane were the only patrons who had not left, and they meant to sweep away all obstacles to their swift departure so the shift would end.

The car was waiting at the door. As soon as they were inside and the car was in motion, Carey said, “I love you. I’ve done all the thinking I need to do. I want you to marry me now, not six months from now.” He stopped at the edge of the highway and looked at her, but there was no answer.

“Drive for a while,” she said. He turned left and went east, out into the country. She sat in silence and looked out the window at the dark landscape. There were woods now, and farmhouses.

“Are you thinking about it?” he asked.

“I’m thinking,” she said. “I’m thinking about how to tell you everything that’s in my mind.” She drew in a breath and seemed to try to begin, then let the breath out. “There!” she said. “Pull over up there by that orchard.”

“Where?”

“Beside the fence.”

The car slowed, and then the tires ground on gravel, and the car stopped. “Oh, even better,” she said. “Pull into that drive up there.”

“What are we doing?”

“Just do it.” She cajoled, “I want to show you something. I promise you’ll like it.”

He slowly drove the car through the opening in the fence and up a dirt road into the orchard. The road was pink with blooms that had spilled from the apple trees on both sides. He bumped along deeper into the orchard as Jane stared eagerly out the windshield. “Okay, stop,” she said, opened the door, and stepped out.

She walked to the far edge of the orchard and sidestepped a few paces down a little slope, then stopped. She slipped off her shoes and walked down the hill a short distance, paused at the edge of a thick patch of ankle-high wild plants with round, serrated leaves that covered the lower slope, then turned and looked up at Carey McKinnon. “Come down,” she said. “I knew I could find some.”

He cautiously stepped toward her, looking down to be sure of his footing. When he looked up she was bent over, fiddling with something under the hem of her skirt. Then she pulled off her stockings and handed them to him. “Put these in your pocket for me, will you?” She walked barefoot among the thick, soft plants, then bent over and ran her hands into them, touching here and there in the dark.

Carey stepped closer and she held out her hand. In the palm were a dozen little round shapes no bigger than a half inch across. “What’s that?”

“Dessert,” she said. “Wild strawberries.”

She popped one onto her tongue and squeezed it against the roof of her mouth, then chewed it. “They’re perfect.” She held out her hand again and poured the little strawberries into Carey’s palm.

He tasted one and smiled. “They’re good. Soft, sweet.” But she was already bent over, running her hands quickly among the fuzzy leaves of the little plants.

Carey knelt on the weeds with her and picked strawberries until they had a double handful. Carey gave them to her and then spread his new coat in the weeds and they sat on it, feeling the warm June air and the intense darkness of the new moon and eating strawberries.

They turned to each other and kissed, then slowly and gradually the kisses grew longer and deeper and they leaned back to lie on the coat, the tall weeds now sheltering them on both sides like a nest. Carey’s hand began to move along her body—breast, waist, hip—and the clothes Jane had chosen didn’t need to be tugged up and pulled down tonight. In the darkness they seemed to melt away, and she hoped, knew he had asked her to wear them with this moment in mind. Or maybe his asking and her compliance and this moment were part of the same event, one long act of asking and complying, her wanting him to ask, even turn his eyes in some direction so she could offer before he even formed the desire. The kisses were long and hungry now, and the hands—the long, gentle fingers and the wide, smooth palms moving everywhere, touching and outlining her shape in the darkness, the skin feeling itself traced and caressed so she could see herself with her eyes closed, the smaller, graceful shape and the curves she had somehow forgotten were her until now, when he saw them, touched them, pulled her against him. The embrace defined them both, his body all tense, hard muscles, the skin tickly with hair, but the boundary between them gone.

There was only the smell of the strawberries and the taste of them on her tongue, the warm, dark motionless air that might never change at all, and this heartbeat and this indrawn breath. But there was time because the feelings were growing, moving down to her belly and thighs, too many breaths until it grew into a longing, an ache, and he knew it. Then she was relieved, so much better, happy, actually happy, out of time now entirely, because if this feeling went on forever it would not be enough, but it went on, and she heard her own breaths coming quicker, and her voice coming out with them, and it was going to go on until she was obliterated, burned up like a moth flying into a blast furnace. And in this moment of wanting and having, that seemed just fine to her … better, best. And then time came back because this could not go on, was about to pass, not gasping for breath, but filled with it, and then so light and cool, shivering almost and the word delicious coming into her mind and passing away again because contentment was too lazy and pleased to hold on to it.

They lay naked on the hillside in the little space of flattened weeds, smelling the strawberries again. She opened her eyes to extend the depth of her gaze far up into the night sky.

For the first time in ages, she heard his voice. “Were the strawberries what you wanted to show me?”

“Sort of,” she laughed. “It’s kind of a multidimensional experience. In the old days, they used to court in strawberry patches.”

“I’ll bet it wasn’t quite the same.”

“I’ll bet it was,” she said. “See, they would slip out of their longhouses at night and meet in a place like this.”

“I mean they didn’t make love.”

“Of course they did.” She laughed. “That was what they were doing out here in the middle of the night. Maybe right here.”

“I can see why strawberries grow on the way to heaven.” He ran his hand along her hip, smoothing it gently. “Ripe and sweet and perfect and rare.”

She sat up and looked at him with a tiny hint of a wish. “Just the opposite. The reason they were so precious was that they weren’t rare at all. They grew from one end of Iroquois country to the other. No matter what, they came up every May and ripened every June. They were easy—always there, always as many as you wanted, and always just as good as the first one you ever put on your tongue.”

He sat up and looked at her closely, his eyes blue-gray and shining. “That was what you wanted me to know.”

“You’re getting better,” she said. “You have a shot at ‘Most Improved Naked Man.’ ”

“I’d like to think I was already smart enough to appreciate you, and never let myself forget how special you are, even after a few years of getting our strawberries in supermarkets like other people.” His hand moved gently from her shoulder down her side to her hip, thigh, knee, shin, foot. “But I’m glad you took me on the field trip.”

“Me too.”

He said quietly, “It’s not like you to waste all this wisdom on the first naked man you meet in a strawberry patch. To make it worthwhile, you’d almost have to marry me.”

“Yes,” she said. “I will.”