The Hum and the Shiver

24

Bronwyn opened her eyes and smiled.

She stretched on the bed, feeling the sheets slide against her body. There was no pain now, just stiffness from muscles not yet restored to full strength. She sat up with a yawn and swung her legs over the side of the bed. She went to the dresser and dug out an overlarge T-shirt. She pulled it on and suddenly realized she had not even thought of grabbing her cane.

She looked down at her leg. It was still considerably thinner than its mate, but that pasty hospital color was gone. The pink scars remained, but they no longer itched. She wiggled her toes and felt no numbness or tingling.

“You,” she said to her leg, “are getting shaved today. Yes, you are.”

She looked at herself in the mirror over her dresser. Something had changed in her face as well; the hard set of her eyes, the way her jaw cut a sharp line when she clenched her teeth, seemed to be gone. She looked younger than when she’d joined the army, she thought suddenly. Her sleep-tousled hair only added to the effect.

She pulled on some shorts and went into the bathroom. Later, following her shower, she sat on her bed combing her wet hair when there was a soft knock at the door. “Y’all decent?” a male voice said.

It was not her father or either of her brothers, so she quickly pulled on cut-offs and a tank top. “No, but now I’m dressed. Come on in.”

Terry-Joe Gitterman opened the door. He wore jeans and a black T-shirt, and looked handsome as the sunrise. He smiled when he saw her. “You look like a million bucks.”

“That’s a lot of deer,” she said, and winked. She put her comb aside and sat back on the bed, deliberately crossing her newly shorn bad leg over her good. “What do you think? Not bad for two weeks, is it?”

“Not bad at all,” he said appreciatively, and propped his mandolin case against the wall. “Hope you don’t mind me stopping by unannounced like this. Your daddy said it was okay to come on back.”

“Heck, yeah. What brings you by this early?”

He tapped his mandolin case. “I figure you’re doing pretty well with your playing now, so I thought we might jam out a little. If you feel up to it. I just want to hear you cut loose.”

Bronwyn’s eyes playfully narrowed. “Did Bliss Overbay send you to check on me?”

“She might’ve suggested it. But I wasn’t hard to convince. What do you say?”

She grinned. “I say skin that song iron.”

In a few moments she’d retrieved Magda and held the instrument ready against her chest. Terry-Joe sat on her desk chair, his own instrument across his lap. His foot eagerly tapped the floor. “What do you feel like playing today?”

“Hm. You know ‘The White Cockade’?”

He nodded. They decided on a key, and he said, “You lead us off.”

Bronwyn tapped her finger on the mandolin’s body four times, then began to play.

After the first verse, Terry-Joe said, “Now sing.”

“Oh, I can’t really sing,” she said with a shy smile.

“Sure you can.”

She cleared her throat and began the verse.

Terry-Joe leaned closer to harmonize on the chorus. She could feel his breath, warm and alive, on her cheek.

He looked up, and their eyes met. She stopped playing. He continued, his shoulder muscles moving beneath his shirt. He gazed at her with unabashed desire. “You’re the most beautiful girl I personally know,” he said finally.

“You should get out more,” she said, but her voice was a little raspy. She remembered that first day when she’d found him working on her wheelchair and later pressed against him as he held the door. The urge to press against him anew swelled in her.

Now he stopped playing. He looked down as he said, “Tell you the truth about something, Bronwyn. My brother may brag about his money and his wheels, but you’re the only thing of Dwayne’s I ever wanted.”

“I’m not like his truck. He didn’t hold the pink slip on me.”

Still avoiding her gaze, he shrugged and said, “To him, you were.”

“I’m not anymore.”

Now he looked at her, and the heat in his eyes matched her own. “He’d kill me if he knew I was even thinking about this.”

“Thinking about what?”

He leaned closer and their lips met.

She wasn’t clear as to how exactly they got from that point to lying on the bed, their instruments safely on the floor. But there she was, on her back, Terry-Joe still kissing her as his hands roamed over her. His lips moved to her neck, then her cleavage, and she put up no resistance when his hands slid beneath her shirt and closed over her breasts. He was tentative, but as gentle with her as he’d been that first day with Magda and she felt everything that she’d denied herself since the attack flare back to life.

She whipped off the tank top and arched her back. His lips found her nipples, and she made a sound she couldn’t hear over the blood roaring in her ears. Then he took off his own shirt, and she reciprocated, tonguing and biting his hard chest and tiny pink nipples.

She could not remember when another’s skin against her own had felt so good. He was hot to the touch, and his muscles were well defined and not bulky like Dwayne’s. He caressed her thighs and rear through her shorts while nuzzling her breasts, then her heaving belly. He kissed her navel, and when his lips moved beneath it and she felt his tongue along the top of her shorts, she was sure she screamed. He unsnapped her shorts and slid them down her thighs, leaving her clad only in her panties. He kissed along the lace edge of them, and she was infinitely glad she’d shaved and trimmed that morning. But then he was lifting the elastic and probing with his tongue, and suddenly nothing else mattered.

Until the voice in her head said, He’s seventeen, and he’s never been out of the valley.

She rose suddenly on her elbows and gasped, “Wait!”

He looked up. She had her good leg draped across his back, and quickly lowered it. “What?” he asked breathlessly. “Did I do something wrong?”

“Good God, no,” she said, and scrambled away to sit on the edge of the bed. She quickly found her tank top and pulled up her shorts. “Believe me, you’ve got my motor racing like no one has in longer than I can remember, and that includes your no-account brother.”

He looked confused. A red flush of arousal covered his shoulders and neck. “Then what’s wrong?”

She trembled with the intensity of her feelings. It felt as if the last set of switches had been thrown, bringing some huge, powerful engine roaring to life. It had nothing really to do with sex, although she was certainly turned on. It was more an awareness of the world, as if she now saw in vivid color what had previously been pastel. Last night she had asserted her independence from Tufa expectations; now she broke free from the things that once ruled her in the past.

She reached over and touched his cheek, unable to repress a smile. “Nothing’s wrong, baby. Whoever taught you did a fine job, because you sure know how to treat a girl. But…” And here she had to choke back a laugh at the absurdity, because she didn’t want Terry-Joe to misinterpret it. “We’re coming at this from two completely different directions, and they won’t ever really meet up.”

He took her hand and kissed her fingertips. “I think they will. Somewhere below the waist, maybe?”

Now she did laugh. She kissed him quick and soft. “Terry-Joe, I know you want to make love to me because you like me, or maybe even think you’re in love with me, and not to get back at your brother, which is the thing that would motivate most boys your age.” She saw his face fall at the use of the word “boy.”

She continued, “But if I did it, it’d just be because… well, it’s been a while since I wanted to, and now I do. Not for any other real reason. I like you, Terry-Joe, but if we went all the way, it’d mess that up.”

He frowned. “So if we did it, you wouldn’t like me anymore?”

“I wouldn’t feel any different. You might, though, and that could lead to all sorts of mischief. Best we leave it where it is.”

“But I was doing it the right way, wasn’t I?”

She laughed again, and kissed him a final time. “You were sure enough doing it right. I’m so fired up, you could light a joint off me.”

He smiled and reached for his own shirt. “Well, I reckon I can’t be too upset, then.”

She watched him pull the shirt down over his torso, recalling its touch beneath her fingertips. The morning sun through the window glinted off its sweaty contours. She had a brief twinge that perhaps she was making a mistake, that letting him have her might be good for them both. But she knew which parts of her body were talking, and it wasn’t her head or heart. “You’re really not mad?” she asked.

Now he kissed her, on the cheek. “If I leave you better than I found you, how can I be mad?”

She giggled. “You sure enough did that.”

Bronwyn walked Terry-Joe to the front door and watched him amble down the hill to his bike. The buzz as it started echoed off the hills, and when he spun out and headed down the drive toward the road, its whine reminded Bronwyn of a sad, long wail. Yet he waved and grinned as he disappeared.

She leaned on the door until Chloe said behind her, “You’re letting the flies in.”

She closed the screen door and turned around. Chloe wore overalls and carried the big gloves she used for gardening. Her hair was tucked beneath one of Deacon’s baseball caps, this one sporting a bass in midleap. “I heard you two playing, then you stopped. What happened?”

Brownyn nodded toward the boys’ bedrooms. “Anyone else home?”

Chloe shook her head. “Kell and Aiden went fishing, your dad’s out in the fields.”

Bronwyn sat heavily at the kitchen table. “Terry-Joe and I almost… made out. All the way.” She looked at her thumb as it moved back and forth across the wood.

Chloe said nothing for a long moment, then leaned against the counter and crossed her arms. “Why didn’t you?”

Bronwyn shrugged. “I don’t know, it just felt wrong.”

Chloe sat opposite her, deliberately keeping the table between them. “’Cause of Dwayne?”

“No, because of me. And Terry-Joe. I could’ve… well… had a good time with him, and let it go as that. But he’d have fallen in love. It was three-quarters there in his eyes already.”

“Was a time,” Chloe said evenly, “when that wouldn’t have mattered.”

“Yeah, well, that time’s past.”

“And he’s a Tufa. Not pure as us, but close. And what’s there’s true. That’s the only reason I made your daddy put up with Dwayne for so long.”

Bronwyn frowned; then her eyes opened wide. She recalled Mandalay’s words, the promise they tried to exact from her, and jumped to her feet. “You gotta be kidding me,” she rasped. “You mean you pimped me out to Dwayne Gitterman?”

Chloe laughed bitterly. “Don’t be so dramatic. You found Dwayne all on your own, and we couldn’t have pried you off him with a crowbar. But your daddy would’ve sung his dyin’ dirge a long time ago if I’d let him. He knew exactly what Dwayne was about.”

“Did you?”

“Bronwyn, you ain’t the only woman in this family. Everything you feel, I’ve felt. Everything that you wanted, I’ve wanted. You think I don’t know the appeal of someone like Dwayne? You think I didn’t have someone like that when I was younger? I’ve been everywhere you have, girl. On my knees, on my back. And nobody had to force me there, I enjoyed it.” Her eyes grew shiny and her words harsh. “I laughed at your daddy back then, wanting me to settle down and raise a family. I laughed at the First Daughters telling me he was the right man for me. How could any man so goddamned dull compete with the boys who’d take you off into the woods and show you the hum and the shiver?”

Bronwyn could hardly breathe. Who was this woman? “Holy shit, Mom,” was all she could say.

“And here you are. It’s like looking in a mirror some days, Bronwyn, and seeing myself twenty-five years ago. And you know what? I hate it. I don’t want to know about the boys you chase, and especially the ones you catch. I don’t want to imagine you with them, and you know why? Because when I’m lying awake at night staring at the ceiling, it makes me jealous. I’ll never feel that way again, and some days it feels like I’ve already died.”

She stood, went to the sink, and twisted the cold water tap. The running water covered any other sounds she made.

Bronwyn stood and put her hand on her mother’s shoulder. “Mom, I—”

“Go away, Bronwyn,” Chloe said.

Bronwyn felt the breath tight in her chest. “I don’t want you to die, Mom.”

Chloe said nothing.

Bronwyn’s vision grew misty. “You still have to teach me your song.”

Still nothing.

“All right. I’ll be around when you’re ready.” She turned and went back down the hall to her room.

When she heard the door close, Chloe splashed cold water on her face and turned off the tap. Her eye fell on two pictures hanging on the wall beside the front door. One showed Bronwyn in her uniform, fresh out of basic, stern and straight and with her natural fire tamped down by military brainwashing. The other showed Bronwyn and Kell, with baby Aiden in Kell’s lap. Bronwyn had her older brother in a headlock and he was trying to resist and keep his smile at the same time. It showed their dynamic perfectly, which is why Chloe loved it.

She also hated it. Those three children represented the loss of her freedom and tied her to a man she dearly loved but who seldom excited her to a frenzy anymore. She felt a jolt deep inside at the memory of a young dark-haired brute of a man, her own Dwayne Gitterman, so handsome and masculine that just the rumble of his voice saying her name could make her knees wobble. But he was long gone, and she was no longer that girl. How had she allowed that to happen?

And now the threat of death hung over her. Signs that could be ignored individually, together hinted at an undeniable fate, and it took all her strength to pretend she wasn’t scared.

She took off the baseball cap and shook her hair free. This was not the way to think, not the song she needed to sing. Deacon was the best thing that ever happened to her, and none of her children had asked to be born to her. They all deserved better than a mother who despised their existence. Especially Bronwyn, her baby girl, who’d endured such unimaginable torments. She suddenly realized that perhaps Bronwyn’s selfishness as a child hadn’t been an anomaly after all; maybe she actually had gotten it from Chloe. Only a selfish, bitter woman would’ve said the things she’d just told her daughter.

She closed her eyes. There was no time for bitterness, or selfishness. It was time for her to be strong, to be a true First Daughter.

She went to find her autoharp.