The Virgin of Small Plains

Chapter Twenty-eight

September, 1986

On Rex’s third trip out to see the girl, Sarah Francis, she invited him into the house.

Once in, he didn’t know what to do with himself. She made it easier by calling to him to come into the kitchen and offering him a can of beer that she pulled from the refrigerator. He was still underage, but then so was she.

“Did Pat get some beer for you?” he asked her, attempting to hide his resentment.

His brother was also too young to buy beer legally, but those sorts of things never seemed to operate in Patrick’s world the way they did in most people’s.

She nodded. “He left me enough to party for a year, but I can’t drink, and nobody ever comes to see me anyway.” She glanced over, looking surprised, and smiled a little. “Except you.”

“Why can’t you drink?”

She shrugged, but didn’t answer him.

Rex and his friends usually had to struggle to a) find somebody old enough who was also willing to take the chance of getting booze for them, or b) find somebody with a fake ID to do it, and even then there wasn’t anybody local who’d sell it to them if there was a whiff of suspicion that they were the ones who wanted it. Usually it required trips out of town to stock up on cases they could hide where parents would never find them. Pat, on the other hand, seemed to have never-ending supplies of anything he desired, especially girls and alcohol, and he was never inclined to share with his younger brother unless there were serious bribes involved. Once, out of desperation before a field party, Mitch had paid Pat a hundred dollars on top of the price of the keg of beer he obtained for them.

Rex didn’t know much about alcoholism, but he guessed that considering the family that Sarah came from, that might have something to do with her reluctance to drink alcohol. He decided to be tactful for once in his life and not push her about it.

“What can you do out here?” he asked her.

He pulled up a kitchen chair and sat down in it with his cold, sweating beer. He could hardly believe he was there with her, and with a beer in his hand on top of it. He sat back and just enjoyed being able to look at her without having to come up with some kind of excuse for staring.

She wore the same T-shirt he’d seen her in before, a plain orange cotton one, and again he would have sworn she wasn’t wearing anything underneath it. Her shorts were different this time-black ones instead of white. But her legs were just as long and tan, her feet just as bare, her face just as beautiful, her hair just as long and black. It was hot in the house-there was air conditioning, but she didn’t have it on-and she kept lifting her hair up off the back of her neck in an irritated kind of way and draping it over one shoulder. Then when it fell back on her neck again, she’d lift it up again. Rex wanted to go over and lift it for her, hold it on top of her head for her like an Egyptian slave, fan her until she sighed with pleasure, bend over and kiss that sweet, sweaty place on the back of her neck…

“What?” he asked, having missed whatever it was she had said to him.

She smiled a little, as if she could read his mind, and then she leaned against the kitchen counter. “I said, I don’t do anything out here. Thank God there’s a TV, and I’ve got some magazines and music. Hey, do you think you could get some books for me?”

He sat up straighter. “Sure!”

Then he slouched again, feeling foolish for being so eager.

“I like romances,” she said, “and mysteries.” She added wistfully, “I wish I could go someplace. I get so bored!”

“Don’t you get lonely all by yourself out here?”

She shrugged, but he thought he saw her eyes glisten and her lower lip tremble a little before she heaved a big sigh and said, fervently, “I’d give anything to get out of here for a few hours.”

“You don’t ever leave? Like, never?”

Solemnly she shook her head so that her hair swung again and she lifted it again. “Nope. I haven’t left this place at all in a whole month.”

“How long you gonna have to stay here?”

She turned, and shaded her eyes and looked out into the sunshine. “A while. ’Til I have enough to make it out there.”

“Have enough what? Money? How are you going to do that?”

She turned her head quickly, and looked flustered. “I just meant…I just meant, since I don’t have any expenses, I’m not spending anything. So I get to save a lot. That’s what I meant.”

He didn’t understand much about it, and didn’t quite have the courage to ask the questions that were piling up inside his head. She couldn’t just stay here forever avoiding her family, could she? Was she waiting until she could get a way out of here, find a job, get some transportation, a job someplace else? But how was any of that going to happen if she never left this house?

“I could take you someplace,” he blurted.

“No you can’t. I can’t go anyplace they might see me.”

He would have asked who “they” were, but he was sure he already knew: her family.

“I don’t mean a place, exactly,” Rex said. “I just mean, I could take you for a drive.”

“A drive?” She looked at him as if he’d spoken a foreign word she didn’t comprehend. “You mean, like-”

He grinned. “Like a drive. In my truck. Just drive around, you know?”

“Drive around…where?”

“I don’t know, out of town, maybe, where nobody knows you.”

“No.” She shook her head violently. “No, no. I can’t. I can’t be seen.”

“I don’t mean in the daytime. At night. And not early in the night, either. I mean, like, really late?” He laughed a little, because it sounded like fun. “We could do it, like, after midnight. And we could just drive around with the windows open so you could feel the breeze and, I don’t know, just get out of here for a little while.”

When she looked at him then, he saw a hopeful, mischievous glint in her eyes.

“It would have to be really late,” she said slowly.

He liked that idea. In fact, he loved that idea. “Sure!”

In an instant, a whole fantasy ran through Rex’s mind. He saw himself making an excuse to his parents to be somewhere else that night, hiding his car, maybe even sleeping in it until it was time to pick her up. He imagined himself driving to pick her up under a romantic full moon. No, on second thought, that would reveal too much. It should be dark and cloudy. He saw her waiting eagerly for him to arrive, running out of the house to hop into the car with him. He could feel how the bench seat on his truck would sink down a little with her weight, though just a little. He could sense the presence of her body next to him, smell the clean soapy fragrance that trailed behind her when she moved. He could see her eyes shining in the dark cab of the truck, see her teeth when she grinned like a conspirator at him, see her eyes widen when she looked at him in that dim light and realized that he was sexier than she had ever realized, that he was more mature than his older brother…

“I don’t know,” she said, looking suddenly doubtful and frightened.

He didn’t want to frighten her. He didn’t want to make her unhappy at all, about anything, ever.

“Okay,” he said, temporarily giving up. “Whatever you think.”

She looked both disappointed and grateful that he was dropping it. But he wasn’t, not really. Rex figured this was an argument he was bound to win eventually, because nobody sane, not even somebody with a good reason for hiding, could possibly stand being cooped up in one place for very long. Eventually she was going to go so stir-crazy that she’d practically beg him to take her for that drive.

He was surprised how long she held out.

It took another three weeks of irregular visits-and magazines and beauty stuff and feminine products and groceries-before she finally greeted him at the door one night with, “I can’t take this anymore! You’ve got to get me out of here. Let’s go for that drive you talked about! Do you promise me that nobody I know will see us? Do you swear?”

As if I have control over her universe, he thought, pleased that she was giving him that much power. He felt so turned on that he could barely walk into the house to put down the sack of goodies he had brought to her.

They took their drive the next night.

“I brought you something else,” Rex said, before he started the car.

“What?” Sarah looked beautiful in the darkness, just as he had fantasized she would. He prayed that he looked better in the dark, too.

He reached into a little paper sack at his side, brought something up out of it, and handed it to her. “Here. So your hair won’t blow in your face and drive you crazy.”

“A scrunchie? What color is it?”

She held it up, but it was impossible to tell its color in the darkness.

“Red.”

“Good.” She raised her arms, smoothed her hair into a ponytail, and slipped the elasticized band around it. Then she sighed, a nice long ahhh that suggested it felt really good to get her hair held back like that. She turned and smiled at him. “I don’t know how in the world you thought of this, but thanks.”

He wanted to reach over and touch it, but restrained himself.

They drove and drove for two and a half hours, from a quarter to two in the morning until he dropped her off at a quarter after four, while it was still dark even in the east, where the sun would be coming up.

But instead of driving away with his heart soaring, Rex drove away with his heart aching.

She had loved the drive. She had talked and laughed, joked, and even made teasing affectionate fun of him now and then. But what she had talked about was another boy. Sarah was in love with somebody else.

“He’s sooo good looking!” she exclaimed. “Don’t you think so?”

“I don’t really think about guys that way.”

“Well, he is. And he’s so nice-”

“Nice?”

“Oh, yeah, really nice, and smart. Does he ever talk about me?”

“Um, I think he mentioned you-”

“Really? Oh, God, what did he say?”

“I guess he thinks you’re pretty cool.”

Again, she sighed, but even more happily this time.

It bugged him that she sounded just like any ordinary, average teenage girl he had ever known. But it killed him much more to hear her saying the same damned things he’d heard most of those same girls say to him at one time or another over the course of his lifetime. Ol’ Rex, the Cute Girl’s Best Bud, never the boyfriend. Good ol’ Rex, always the bridesmaid, never the bride. He was used to swallowing his pride and his own desire. He was accustomed to being the confidant, the good sport. He was used to telling himself it didn’t matter if a million girls didn’t want him, because all a man really needed was one true love, and even he was surely going to get to have that someday. Of course, Mitch always laughed, and claimed that the trouble with Rex was that he wanted the girls who didn’t want him, and ignored the ones who did. And, okay, maybe that had been true once, or twice, but it wasn’t the point. He wasn’t a handsome guy, not like some of his friends were, and he was the one that other guys’ girls always sought out to tell their secrets to, instead of wanting him as much as he wanted some of them. It always hurt to be placed so far down on the Choice List, but this time it ripped at him like he was a goddamned fish being filleted.

The only comfort to Rex was that it wasn’t Patrick that Sarah loved.

No, there was one other comfort…when Patrick came home from college, Rex would make sure he knew that Sarah cared only for Mitch.

He felt so hurt, so disappointed and ego-flayed that he didn’t go out to see her for three long weeks. Let Nadine Newquist supply her with what she needed, he thought bitterly. He’d practically gone broke buying her stuff anyway. She had never paid him back for any of it. Not that he had minded at the time, figuring that she couldn’t possibly have much money to spend. But now it pissed him off and made him feel used. Hell, he couldn’t afford to be her errand boy any longer. He wasn’t gonna do it anymore. And why should he, when it wasn’t even him she wanted to see?

He hadn’t asked her if Mitch ever went out to see her. Maybe he didn’t want to know. It would be awful if he found out that not only did Mitch own her heart, but that his best friend was also cheating on Abby, his other best friend. And then what would Rex do? He didn’t think he trusted himself not to be so pissed and jealous that he wouldn’t spill the whole thing to Abs.

Rex didn’t spend much time with Mitch during those three weeks, either.

He made excuses about ranch work and homework, he joked about needing to fill out college applications for Harvard and Yale, he hinted there was a new girl in another town that maybe he was driving off to see.

Mitch didn’t seem to sense anything was wrong, except to begin to look annoyed and say, “Where the hell you been, man?”

Abby was starting to give him funny, appraising glances, and starting to sidle up to Rex and whisper, “What’s her name, hmm?”

When he finally did drive out, just to make sure Sarah was okay (he told himself), she wasn’t there. Not only was she not present at the house, but it was locked up tight the way the Newquists liked everything to be, down to a shiny new padlock on the storm cellar door. When Rex tried to look in through the windows of the house, he didn’t see any sign that Sarah had ever been there.

He never saw her again, not until he saw her in the blizzard five months later.