The Scent of Rain and Lightning

38

September 3, 1986

LAURIE STEPPED ONTO the second-floor landing and lifted her fingers from the banister. She looked back and saw that she had dripped rainwater all the way up. Ooops, she thought, feeling tipsy and reckless, and then: It’ll dry. She felt excited from the run into the house through the heavy rain and by the feeling now of being trapped inside with her handsome brother-in-law.

Chase stepped out of a guest bedroom carrying dry clothes in his hands. He had wrapped them in towels to try to keep the moisture off them from his own wet body and clothing.

“You going to be okay here tonight by yourself?” he asked her.

“I’ll be fine,” she said, a little dreamily. “Just fine, Chase.”

He tilted his head and smiled at her. “I think Laurie’s drunk. Is Laurie drunk?”

“She might be.” She giggled. “Are you?”

“Nah. That business with Billy sobered me up, darn it.”

“He’s a jerk.”

“Yeah. Seriously, what if your power goes out?”

“Seriously, it’s night. I’ll be asleep. And I have candles.”

He waggled his eyebrows at her flirtatiously. “I could keep you company.”

“You could go on and get out of here before your dad comes and gets you.”

They both laughed. She loved flirting with Chase and leading him on, and anybody could see that he loved flirting right back at her and being led, but that’s as far as it would ever go, she had figured out, because for all his wild ways, there were certain things Chase would never do. Fooling around-really fooling around-with a wife of one of his brothers was high on that list of taboos for him. Sometimes Laurie thought that Chase, unlikely as it seemed, was the most like her father-in-law of all the Linder siblings, and that his playboy appearance was a cover for a rigid set of principles: you did your work, you respected your elders, and you didn’t mess around where you could cause a mess. Hugh-Jay was more forgiving than that. And it wasn’t Chase who had flunked out of K-State, after all, it was Bobby. Everybody in Rose had expected Chase to be the Linder brother who lived up to his name and pursued Laurie, but he never did, and she had figured out it was because he sensed early on that Hugh-Jay wanted her.

“Sleep tight,” he said, and took the stairs two at a time.

“’Night, Chase,” Laurie sang out, and laughed, because he was hurrying as if he were afraid of her. For a moment she considered calling him back and making it difficult for him to leave, but she was just sober enough to recognize that for the bad idea it was-he wouldn’t weaken, and she’d be mortified.

Also, as much as they annoyed her, she liked being a Linder.

She liked being given a trip to that fancy hotel in Colorado, for instance.

Even before she heard the back door slam behind Chase, she was undoing her wet clothing, unzipping her shorts, pulling her T-shirt over her head, unhooking her bra, and letting it all fall to the floor as she danced in circles toward the bath in the master bedroom.

She stepped into the shower and let the water cascade over her. It was dangerous, people said, to bathe during an electrical storm, but Laurie wasn’t concerned about that. Her life seemed to have come equipped with its own lightning rod that deflected bad luck away from her.

When she got out, she didn’t dry off.

She’d dripped up the stairs, she would drip down the stairs.

It felt wonderful to have the whole house to herself.

At the top of the stairs she suddenly realized she was standing in a completely dark house. She flicked a light switch and nothing happened. While she had been in the shower-where she’d opened the shades to get the illumination of the lightning and lit a candle instead of turning on the lights-the power had gone out.

She felt an urge to walk naked through the dark house where nobody could see her from inside or outside. She took a step toward the stairs and then another few steps and found it lovely and pleasurable to be moving without clothing, feeling the touch of her thighs against each other, her own bare arms brushing against her body.

She looked down at herself, and approved of what she saw.

How many boys and men had wished they could look at and touch what she was seeing and touching? From the time she was a child she’d been aware of the attention of men and that it was edged with something that gave her little thrills in deep places. She crooked her right arm, raised it toward her mouth and licked it, tasting honey. So this was what men tasted on her skin, she thought with amused pride, something sweet and sexy, making her a perfect pastry.

She laughed at that as she started down the steps.

The drinking she’d done made her thoughts scattered, and now they focused briefly on her other-pathetic-brother-in-law. Bobby only made her laugh. Did he think she didn’t catch him looking at her with moon eyes?

She wondered if Hugh-Jay noticed his brothers’ attentions to her.

She hoped he did, because jealousy might make him more eager to please her, and anyway, she was so mad at him that she didn’t care what he thought when she flirted with other men.

How could he? How could her own husband accuse her of stealing?

It wasn’t stealing; it was balancing the scales. Making things more fair.

She was taking money from the accounts of the Colorado ranch, but just a little.

“I have a right,” she said out loud in the dark house as she stepped onto its first floor. The Linders were stingy, in her view; if they weren’t so stingy, she wouldn’t have to pad her own bank account with such pitiful little amounts of… change, really, just a few dollars here and there to buy herself something nice, or to make Jody look pretty so people would admire her daughter. Besides, she was doing the work that Hugh-Jay was supposed to be doing but had no aptitude for, and so therefore what she was taking was only a salary, the one they were too cheap to give her.

“They owe me.”

TWO MILES AWAY, on the front porch of an abandoned farmhouse where he had sat and watched the rain for hours, Hugh-Jay finally made up his mind about what he was going to have to do.

He’d gone to the farmhouse after seeing his mother and daughter in Rose. Upon leaving them, he had mentally kicked himself for turning right-in front of his mother’s car-instead of turning left so she would believe he was heading for the highway to Colorado. It didn’t matter, he tried to convince himself. She would assume that he had errands to run before he left town; she would never suspect that he wasn’t going at all.

So he had made his right turn and kept driving out of Rose.

Five or so miles east he signaled and turned into a road leading to a farm that had failed a few months before and hadn’t been sold yet. Hugh-Jay was depressed to see that prairie dog towns had already popped up in several places. Eventually they’d join into one huge underground mammal city with upright furry sentinels spaced outside atop their holes. He might have found them cute if he didn’t know the destruction they wreaked on farm and ranch land. His sympathy was for the farmer who had gone bust and whose belongings had been auctioned as his family looked on.

Agriculture was hard, Hugh-Jay thought as he parked beside the empty farmhouse.

But not as hard as marriage was turning out to be.

He got out of his truck and slowly walked up to the front porch.

The wooden slats creaked under his boots.

He put a hand on a post and felt the rough surface of peeling paint, inhaled the smell of dirt rising from the humidity beneath the broken steps.

People he knew had lived here. There’d been small children playing on this porch and in the yard, filling the air with their laughter and the crying that accompanied skinned knees, bumped heads, and hurt feelings. He’d have sworn he could still hear one of them yell, “Mom!” It made his own heart hurt to think that if he didn’t find a way to fix the rift in his marriage, it might be his house that would be haunted by the sounds of a family that didn’t live there anymore.

Hugh-Jay had sat down on the porch swing and pushed off with one boot.

He had a bad decision to make and felt paralyzed by it.

His dad wanted him to check out the honesty of the Colorado ranch manager, but Hugh-Jay knew that it didn’t need checking. There was nothing wrong with the man’s honesty, or ethics, or morals, or whatever else you wanted to call it when a person either did or didn’t take money that didn’t belong to him.

The ranch manager didn’t even know there was anything amiss.

When the manager sent his bills, everything was in order.

It was only when it left Hugh-Jay’s own house that holes appeared in it.

Because he hated office work, he had asked Laurie to help him, and she gradually took over responsibility for the accounting that he was supposed to do. They’d both been surprised-and pleased-to discover she had an aptitude for it, and even though she complained about doing it, Hugh-Jay thought she took pride in being better at it than he was. He’d been proud of her, too, and relieved to let go of a job he knew he’d botch. He’d looked forward to telling his father that he and Laurie were a team now. He hadn’t anticipated that she’d find a way to siphon a few dollars here and there for herself.

That came as an awful shock.

Hugh-Jay had felt sick to his stomach ever since he realized the truth.

He’d raised the subject, ever so delicately-he thought-two days ago, and Laurie had gone through the roof, accusing him of “calling me a thief!” He knew their fight was part of the reason he’d gone off so furiously on those strangers who threw the cigarette out of their car on the highway, and also why he’d overreacted to his brother’s return visit that morning to Laurie. He couldn’t bring himself to yell at her, so he took it out on other people.

She was still furious at him, and letting him know it.

It was why he had surprised her at lunch. He’d wanted to make peace with her, show her he still loved her, but he didn’t want her building up a head of angry steam before he got there.

It hadn’t worked so well, he thought, with wry, grim recall.

He’d be lucky, at this rate, if she didn’t kick him out of their bedroom.

Hugh-Jay knew he could go out to the Colorado ranch and lay the blame there, but there was no way he could blame an innocent man. That left him two choices, because his father wasn’t going to be satisfied-or let it go-until the problem was solved and the thief revealed. There was just enough money missing, and the disguising of it was just suspicious enough that Hugh-Jay knew he couldn’t pass it off as his own bad arithmetic. That left him the choice of telling the truth, which meant that Hugh Senior would never forgive his daughter-in-law or think of her the same way again. His mother would never forgive her, either, and they didn’t like her very much to begin with. And if he took that way out, Laurie would never forgive him. The whole thing could just spiral forever.

He had one other choice: he could take the blame himself.

If he did that, his father would never trust him again.

Hugh Senior drew lines in the dirt, and honesty was one of them.

As the day pulled to a close around him and rain started to fall, and prairie dogs popped out of their holes to check the weather one last time, he stopped the movement of the porch swing, bent over and put his head in his hands.

He felt anguished. Lose his wife’s affection, or lose his father’s respect?

“It’s such a little bit of money!” Laurie had cried out to him. “Who cares? Why are you making such a big deal of it?”

And it was, just a little bit, really, compared to all that the ranch owned, earned, spent.

But in his father’s eyes, stealing a dime was as bad as stealing a dollar.

It was a big deal to Hugh Senior, a mark of character or lack of it, maybe not as bad as cutting fences, but still, a sign of… badness. He might forgive a starving woman for doing it, but he would never forgive a woman who had all the food she could eat, and pretty clothes, and the house she’d always wanted.

Hugh-Jay remained there as the rain got heavier and night settled in.

Near midnight, when the roads were flooding, he gave in to what he had to do and then worked up the courage to do it. If he had to choose between the respect of his parents or the love of his wife, he would choose his wife so that he could keep their little family together.

He prayed that his parents would find it in their hearts to forgive him.

Hugh-Jay ran through the pouring rain to his truck.

He was going to tell Laurie that he would take the blame, if she would promise never to do anything like that again. And then he would face his father and tell the necessary lie, and the old man was never going to forgive him, but he could spend the rest of his life, if need be, trying to regain his father’s trust again. His decision killed him, because he respected his father above all other men, but his love for his baby daughter wouldn’t let him brand her mother a thief.

Hugh-Jay drove back into town, barely aware of the pummeling rain.

SHORTLY AFTER Hugh-Jay drove past the Rose Motel and turned the corner toward home, Chase opened the motel door that his brother Bobby had left propped open with a pen to keep it from locking. When he walked into the dark room, he saw Bobby seated by the window, drinking beer, and staring out at the rain.

“What took you so long?” Bobby asked him in a surly tone.

“What are you talking about? It didn’t take long. Long enough to grab some dry clothes, is all. Here, I brought some for you. I can’t believe you’re sitting there sopping wet like that.”

Chase tossed dry jeans and a shirt at his brother, who parried them with his left hand so they fell to the floor.

Chase started getting out of his own wet clothing.

“I saw Hugh-Jay drive by a few minutes ago,” Bobby told him.

“Couldn’t have. He’s in Colorado by now.”

“No, he’s not. It was his truck, plain as thunder.”

As if on cue, thunder actually rolled at that moment, so loud they had to wait before they could hear each other speak.

“You sure?”

“Hell, yes, I’m sure. I think I’d know that truck!”

“Did you tell Dad?”

“Why would I? If Hugh-Jay didn’t get on the road, it’s not like Dad can do anything about it now.”

“I guess not. And it’s not like he doesn’t have a home to sleep in.”

Bobby took a long drink from the lip of a beer bottle. “Laurie okay?”

“Fine, why wouldn’t she be? A little drunk. How drunk are you?”

“Shut up.”

Chase was glad to do that and went right to bed to prove it, leaving his younger brother still at the window, morosely looking at the rain until he fell asleep in the chair. A crack of lightning woke them both up a few minutes later, along with waking up their father two doors down.

ON THE STAIRCASE, Laurie let the tips of her fingers slide along the wall so that her arms were spread out as if she were about to take off and fly. When she reached the first floor, she wandered into the dining room, touching things, letting her hands slide up and down the curved tops of the walnut chairs, clicking her fingernails over the spines of the books on the living room bookshelves. She lay down on her back on one of the sofas and stared out the window at the rain coming down, spreading her legs as if for a man, imagining making love in this storm, in this room, on this couch, in the darkness lit by lightning.

She got up and went to a window, naked and invisible to the world.

Finally, she walked lightly through the foyer, past the mirrored, walnut tallboy against the wall, stopping for a long admiring look at herself, turning to the right and the left and then all the way around to see herself from every angle, trying to view her body as men saw her, voluptuous and lush, a special woman to stroke and please and pamper and adore. She sighed with the contentment of the moment. Then she walked on and pushed through the swinging door into the kitchen and went to the sink to get a drink of water, running her fingers under the water first, then drinking slowly, breathing between every sip. The thunder was crashing all around, blocking out every other sound, and intermittent lightning illuminated patches of the world outside her windows.

She felt safe inside the great vault of a house, and protected by the storm.

And yet, what she wanted to do in that instant was leave. Not forever. Just for this moment, this wild moment when she felt the thunder in her bones. She wanted to run outside, naked, into the rain and lightning and let it pour on her and flash around her and scare her, and she wanted to keep running until she was out of Rose, out of her marriage, out of her life, away from her child, just for a little while.

“Or, maybe I’d never come back,” she dared herself, putting the glass down.

She thought she heard noises on the kitchen porch, muffled by the storm.

At the sink, she tensed, listening, but didn’t run to put on clothes.

Then she heard the kitchen door open behind her, heard the rushing sound of the noise of the storm coming in, heard it cut off when the door closed.

She gripped the edge of the sink and closed her eyes.

The storm was so loud she couldn’t hear the stocking-clad footsteps coming toward her, so the first she knew of his presence at her back was when his hands came around and cupped her breasts.

She gasped and leaned back into him.

“I thought you’d be with Belle,” she murmured as Meryl’s hands moved down, and she gasped again. “Why aren’t you with Belle?”

“Because I can’t be until we’re married,” her husband’s best friend said as he turned her to face him. “Because it practically killed me not to screw her tonight when she begged for it. Because you called me, you little troublemaker, and told me he’d be gone tonight. Because it could be a long time before we get a chance like this again.”

“What?” she mocked him. “Not because you love me?”

“No,” he said, leaning down to kiss her. “Because I want you, and you want me.”

She always had wanted him in this way and this way only, in those years when Meryl Tapper was still slim, and athletic, good-looking and sexy. They’d been Homecoming King and Queen together when he was a junior and she was only a freshman, but she’d never had her eye on Meryl for anything but fun, and he’d never had his eyes on her for anything but that, either. They had their hooks set for bigger prizes-the Linders, Belle and Hugh-Jay, and even managed to convince themselves, sometimes, they loved them.

“Did you park in back?”

“I left my truck at my office and walked over.”

He was in his socks, which were wet clear through.

“Walked?” she laughed. “You really wanted this.”

“So much I barely could walk,” he said, making them both laugh at his dirty joke.

She gave him a teasing look. “What are you waiting for?”

Without taking off his own clothes, just unzipping his jeans, Meryl lifted her and took her once with her back against the sink, the metal rim cutting into her until her skin broke and she bled and complained to him. Then he led her upstairs-moving so fast they knocked over a chair, and laughed about that, too. On the second floor, she stepped ahead of him, pulling him to the small guest room at the end of the hall, where they always went, because they didn’t want to leave any clues in the master bedroom for Hugh-Jay to find, not that he’d ever in a million years suspect what they did now and then, they assured themselves whenever they did it.

“Do you feel guilty?” she asked him as he pushed into her again.

Hugh-Jay never talked during sex; he treated it like a sacred ritual, making love to her in reverent silence as if she were a virgin every time. It irritated and bored her so much that she did everything she could to get it over with quickly. Sex was supposed to be fun, it wasn’t supposed to be church.

“No, I don’t feel guilty, do you?” he asked. “It’s not as if we don’t care about them.”

“I know. Want to meet me out of town somewhere?”

“What?” Right in the middle of things, he laughed, which she loved. She loved the fact that they didn’t take it seriously. Her back felt raw and bruised and it stung where he had rammed her into the edge of the sink, but the pain pleased her, as if it were a badge of sexual merit, like hickeys and whisker burns used to be when they were kids in high school. The evidence of their mating had changed, but the cause remained the same, and she also loved that and wanted to show it off by wearing hip-hugger jeans or a bikini.

“Where?” he asked.

“The Broadmain Hotel. In Colorado.”

Meryl laughed again. “You mean the Broadmoor?”

“Yes! Annabelle is giving me five days there.”

She’d inched it up from three days.

“On your own? Without Hugh-Jay?”

“Uh-huh. You could come, too. They’d never know.”

“Why would she do that?”

Laurie grinned. “Because she loves me best.”

“Everybody does,” he said, and pushed in deep enough to make her squeal.

Even now, when Meryl was an attorney with the potential for making okay money, she still felt she’d made the right and practical choice in marrying Hugh-Jay. Maybe she could have had it all by marrying Meryl, but the “all” that Meryl could offer wasn’t anywhere near as much as being a Linder could do for her-and for her children’s future, she thought with righteous virtue. And marrying her wasn’t anywhere near as helpful to Meryl as marrying the Linders’ only daughter might be. He would be their attorney, the ranches’ main attorney, recommended to all their friends; his future was made, as was hers…

Provided Hugh-Jay overlooked that little money thing…

“Think about it,” she murmured, meaning the trip.

“Are you kidding? That’s probably all I’ll be thinking about now.”

She laughed, and made excited noises to encourage him, which made him groan and work harder. He imprisoned her wrists above her head, slamming them hard against the backboard of the bed, which startled and thrilled her. She played as if she were trying to get away by twisting and turning beneath him, and that turned him on more. He told her she was the most beautiful, sexy woman in the world and no other woman would ever be as good in bed as she was, and he would always want her, and that she would always know this was what he was thinking of whenever he looked at her, wherever they were, in church, at their in-laws’ house, across a supper table, even when he was standing at the altar of his own wedding, and when she heard that, she let him do whatever he wanted to do to her.

It was just for fun, no harm intended, no feelings to be hurt.