The Virgin of Small Plains

Chapter Twenty-nine

In the aftermath of the tornado, Abby sat in the dark, in a chair backed into a corner of her screened-in porch. She had a small bird on one shoulder, pressed up against her neck, and a shotgun on her lap. Her electricity was out. Her business was destroyed. One of her birds was dead, another was missing, and the third was still too terrified to be moved into its cage. Gracie had crawled into a tent of Abby’s hair, moved into its shelter, and would not be budged, on pain of biting. Abby could feel the little beak pressed against her skin, and Gracie’s feathers, soft and trembling.

“Baby, baby,” Abby whispered, over and over, as tears ran down her face.

The bird made tiny sounds, then went still, then made the little sounds again. They broke Abby’s heart. She felt horrible guilt every time she thought about how terrified and helpless her birds had been. She was heartsick imagining J.D. out in the countryside with no idea how to feed himself or protect himself from predators. If he was still alive, he was a target for hawks and eagles.

Just like her remaining pet, Abby was trembling, in fits of shakes and sobs that came and went like tornadoes inside of her. She wasn’t crying for her business. It was only wood and nails and glass she’d lost. Nurseries could be rebuilt, and that’s what insurance was for. Flowers would grow again. That’s what flowers did. She wasn’t crying for her business, and she wasn’t shaking from fear. People had warned her about the possibilities of looters, but she had scoffed at the idea of anyone who would come all the way out here to pick through shattered pieces of clay pots and slivers of rotten barn wood. Her sister and her friends had offered to stay with her, but she had shooed them back to their own homes to check for storm damage. Rex had said he’d post a deputy to discourage evildoers, but she had declined that offer, too.

“Mitch is in town,” he’d told her.

“I know. I saw him.”

“Me, too.”

“Did you…talk?”

“Said hello, that’s all,” Rex told her. “Did you?”

“No, I don’t think he even saw me.”

That was all they’d said about it; they had more pressing problems on their minds.

And now, sitting on her porch, Abby wasn’t afraid, and she wasn’t waiting for looters.

She was waiting in the darkness with a shotgun for Patrick.

He had come back to her house while she was gone. But not during the day. The sunglasses had still been on the kitchen table when she had arrived home and found her friends in her kitchen. The sunglasses were gone the next time she saw the table. She had figured out that he had to have come by between the time they all went into town and when they all rushed back after the tornado hit, probably to deliver the hay she had requested that morning, and maybe to check on her. She hadn’t heard from him.

Patrick hated her birds.

Patrick had said only that morning, “It’s them, or me, Abby.”

He had threatened to kill them, a threat she hadn’t taken as a joke even when he had said it.

And tornadoes, no matter how strange their paths of destruction, did not unlatch bird-proof locks from the inside.

When he finally showed up, he didn’t drive up to the house.

Abby heard the vehicle coming up the road, heard him park it on the verge, heard the door close quietly, and then barely heard his footsteps as he came up her driveway. He was trying not to wake her, she thought. He was trying to sneak up and into her house and then into her bed. He would think he had nothing to fear from her birds anymore-he had probably expected Gracie to fly away in a panic, too. But he would know that he needed to arrive in the way he had in the past-opening her front door so that the hinges didn’t squeak, removing his boots and tiptoeing past the cage as if he didn’t know how empty it was now.

Finally, she heard gravel under his feet, and knew he was close by.

“I’m out here,” she called to him. “On the porch.”

She knew she’d scared the hell out of him by doing that. He had probably jumped a foot from sheer surprise and guilt. If Patrick ever felt any guilt. Abby doubted it. How could any man do what he had done that night and also be a human being who felt the agonies of guilt, such as she was feeling for having ever allowed him into her life, her house, not to mention her bed and her body!

She saw the outline of a tall, broad-shouldered man in the darkness.

Quietly, she put both of her hands on the shotgun, moved it until it was pointed at the door, and slowly, carefully, almost silently, pulled the safety back. Her right index finger crooked around the trigger. She wasn’t actually going to shoot him, she was only going to scare the holy hell out of him and run him off her property.

The tall, dark figure stepped silently onto her porch steps.

He fumbled for the door handle, then slowly pulled it open, and stepped in.

Abby raised the gun until it was aimed at the figure’s chest.

“Hold it right there, Patrick!”

“Abby?” he asked, in a shocked tone.

When she heard his voice, she nearly pulled the trigger from shock, herself, and only just in time lowered her gun before she killed him. When the man took two more steps forward, Abby’s breath caught in her throat, and she went dead silent.

It wasn’t Patrick standing in front of her looking nervously at her gun.

“Mitch,” she said, and it wasn’t a question.

Mitch stood in front of Abby on the dark porch and said, “I didn’t expect to see you. I was-I was just-”

“Yeah, everybody drives down my road at two in the morning,” Abby said coldly.

“I heard you got hit by the tornado-”

“So you just showed up after seventeen years to, what? Help?”

She was shocked at how calmly she was able to talk to him, how frigid she could keep her tone, and how well she was managing not to shoot him, in lieu of Patrick. They both deserved it. But she was also furious at herself for rolling the number “seventeen” off her tongue so quickly, giving him the idea she knew or cared how long he had been gone.

“What the hell are you doing here, Mitch?”

He gestured toward her gun. “Taking my life in my hands?”

Abby said nothing, but she did put the safety back on.

“Were you really going to shoot your husband?”

“My what? Patrick’s not my husband,” she said scornfully. Let him think she had some other husband if he wanted to. “Where’d you get that idea, anyway?”

“I don’t know, I just-”

He lapsed into silence. Stubbornly, she vowed not to be the one to break it.

I never meant for this to happen was Mitch’s thought as he stood on the dark porch trying to figure out what to say next to Abby Reynolds, who didn’t appear inclined to speak to him.

He had thought he was only going to meander around on the country roads until he got tired enough to sleep again. But somehow the roads all seemed to direct him toward the north and east. He had turned onto the highway, where he was alone with the big tractor-trailer trucks ferrying goods between Kansas City and Wichita and beyond. Quickly tiring of that, he had taken one of the first turnoffs he came to, which had just happened to be the road with the small green arrow pointing down the lane.

Strictly coincidence, he was sure of it.

Then curiosity had gotten the best of him, and he had decided that he needed to know if Abby’s place really had been hit by the tornado he had seen. He decided he would drive by it in the dark, that was all, just drive past, check it out, and then drive home again. When he heard himself apply the word “home” to the ranch house, he quickly amended it.

But when he had pulled within sight of her property, there was something wrong.

Because he had seen it only twice before-driving past it-he couldn’t figure out at first what was wrong, or missing. And then, Jesus!, he realized her whole barn/greenhouse was down. There was…nothing…where a dark profile of a good-sized building should have been. His heart began to hammer with fear as he looked toward her house. Thank God, it was still standing. That was all he could think over the pounding of his pulse.

There were no lights on, but he saw one truck parked there.

Mitch remembered it as being the “other” truck he had seen that morning, which now seemed ages ago. One truck, the one that Patrick Shellenberger had torn out of the driveway in, was new, red. This one was battered, older, black. Abby’s truck?

Was she all right? Was she home when the twister hit?

Either Abby was asleep in that dark house-without Patrick, apparently-or she had gone to stay with somebody, or…

He couldn’t just drive by. He couldn’t do it. He had to know…something.

Mitch got out of his car as if invisible hands, ghost hands, were tugging at him.

They bade him leave his door ajar so he wouldn’t make a noise by slamming it, then pushed him along her gravel driveway, pointing him in the direction of her home.

This, he thought, remembering Patrick, is a good way to get myself shot.

Nevertheless, he kept walking, and the invisible hands kept tugging.

When her voice called out, “I’m out here. I’m on the porch,” Mitch felt shock and then relief. Abby! And it wasn’t just any relief-it was enormous, surprising, overwhelming relief. She was all right. She was alive. He realized he would have recognized that voice anywhere, even if he hadn’t already heard it once that day, even if he had never heard it again until the last day of his life on earth. He realized that if he had been lying on his deathbed and the telephone had rung, and he had picked it up and she had said, “Hi,” from that single syllable, he would have known her.

He didn’t want to think about what his feeling of relief might mean.

If he could, he was going to refuse to allow it to mean anything.

This, after all, was the disappointing woman who had married Patrick Shellenberger.

His own feelings just now meant nothing, Mitch informed himself. He moved to do her bidding-her shout had an implied order in it, come here! His strong emotional reaction, he told himself, meant only that he wasn’t an entirely hard-hearted bastard, after all. It suggested that even he could be glad that a fellow human being had survived a storm.

Yeah, Mitch mocked himself as he opened the porch door. Sure. That’s what it means, all right. And if you believe that, I’ve got a piece of real estate on a dry lake to sell you.

Abby had two clear thoughts as she looked up at the man who stood before her on her porch. One was, God, he’s gorgeous. The other was, I look like hell.

Mitch cleared his throat. “You said Patrick’s not your husband. Is somebody else?”

She almost laughed. “No. You’re married, aren’t you?”

“Divorced.”

“Oh.”

“I have a son.”

“I heard.”

“He’s six.”

“That’s nice.”

It was nice, she thought. And it made her throat close up with grief for her own loss of the children she had once dreamed she’d have with him.

“What about you?” he asked.

“What about me what?” she asked, purposely obtuse.

“Do you-” He seemed to have something stuck in his throat, too. He cleared his throat. “You have kids?”

Abby thought, This is ridiculous, and I’m not going to play.

She sat with the bird hidden on her shoulder and the shotgun not hidden on her lap, and recommenced being silent.

But, after a moment she relented and said, “No.”

After another moment, he shifted from one leg to the other, and turned his head to look toward where her barn used to be.

“I guess you got hit by the tornado.”

“I guess I did,” she said dryly.

He turned back around to look in her face. “Abby-”

“What?”

This time, he was the one who lapsed into silence.

“This is the part where you say you’re sorry,” she blurted, surprising herself and, judging by the expression on his face, him. “This is the part where you tell me why you left, Mitch.”

It had been a ferocious day, dramatic things had happened to her, somebody she trusted, sort of, had done a terrible thing to her. Her emotions were as raw as a fresh wound, and his appearance was pouring salt by the bucketfuls into it. The dam she’d try to place before her words broke loose and all hell with it. “What are you doing here, Mitch? Why are you in town, after all these years? And why…why in the hell… are you here, at my home, at two o’clock in the morning!”

It came out sounding anguished. It was anguished, as was the look he gave her.

Abby set the shotgun aside, and rose urgently to her feet.

“How could you?” she asked, helplessly. “Why did you?”

Hating herself, she started to cry in noisy, gulping sobs.

Mitch crossed the space between them in under a second, and reached for her.

Just before he kissed her, after he had wiped her tears with his hands, and stroked her wild, flyaway hair, and whispered, “I’m sorry, I’m so sorry, you’ll never know how sorry I am,” a million times, Abby said, just as urgently, “Wait!”

She pulled away from him.

Gently, she grasped the small creature on her shoulder. Holding him wrapped in her right hand, she brought him out from under her hair. Mitch’s eyes widened, but even in the darkness she saw a smile in them. Abby wrapped her other hand around Gracie so that the bird was safely cradled in a cocoon of her hands that did not allow the bird to bite anybody. Then she looked up into Mitch’s face, allowed him to wrap his arms around her again, bird and all, and let him bend his face down to kiss her, at last.

Mitch thought, This is a mistake, even as he kissed her with a passionate longing, with a passionate sorrow that he hadn’t allowed himself to know he still felt. Abby thought, Tornadoes can come and wipe you off the earth, people you love can disappear overnight, you never know what’s going to happen in the next moment, and if you don’t take this one, it will never come again.

“Wait!” she said, but only so she could put Gracie in a cage.

“I’m not a virgin anymore,” she whispered, as he backed her toward her house.

“Neither am I,” Mitch whispered back, as he followed her into her home.

Seventeen years before, they might have been deliberate, careful, gentle.

Seventeen years later, they were in a rush, for fear of whatever might still come between them. Neither of them was going to let that happen. This time, nothing was going to stop them. By the time they reached the edge of her bed, a powerfulness of emotion took them over, a furiousness. They pushed and pulled at each other as if they were angry-at life, at fate, at each other. They made love as if they were arguing, as if they were battling over who was to blame, and who would pay, and whether anything could ever make up for what they had lost, and whether terrible, soul-crushing debts could ever be paid in full.

He pulled her T-shirt up over her breasts. She worked her hands between their two bodies, until she could find his belt buckle. He ripped at the button and zipper on her shorts until he got them loose. She got his belt off, got the button and zipper of his jeans open, and pushed her hands up his bare skin under his shirt, onto his chest.

He rolled her roughly onto her back.

She grabbed the back of his head and pulled his face down to make him kiss her.

He pushed her legs apart with his knee. He pushed his hands down under her panties, down onto her thighs, between her legs.

He pushed into her, she pulled him into her.

They were violent with each other, and wild. Abby felt a great pressure build up in her chest and then it burst out in a great cry that felt as if it scraped the bottom of her soul. Her tears started flowing halfway through their passion and then wouldn’t stop, but just kept coming out of her in painful sobs. When she cried, he held her tighter, so tight it hurt her, but instead of fighting against the pain she welcomed it and let it hurt without telling him to stop. She heard him say her name over and over, but was afraid she was only imagining that he sounded as if he was pleading. When it was over, when they were panting and exhausted, they still clung together as if their sweat were adhesive. Finally, they relaxed their grip, and let each other go.

Mitch rolled over, onto his back, and stared at the ceiling.

Abby moved a few inches away from him, turning her face to the wall.

After a few minutes, she said, “Why did you leave?”

He didn’t answer.

Both of them thought, This was a huge mistake.

“I take the pill,” she told him, after their silence had gone on way too long.

It would be all right if you didn’t, Mitch almost said, shocking himself.

He didn’t say it. Instead he turned toward her in the bed and started to reach for her.

She stopped him. Pushing her hands against his bare chest, she worked herself up into a sitting position above him. “You have to go.”

“What?”

“People are coming early, to help me clean up and rebuild. You have to go.”

“You don’t want them to know I was here?”

“No,” Abby said, turning to face him. “I don’t want anyone ever to know.” She swallowed, ignored the renewed pain in her heart, made her voice go firm and confident, made herself remember the pain he had caused her. And still refused to explain. “It was just one time, Mitch. That’s all. We were just making up for something we didn’t get to do a long time ago. That’s all it was. There won’t be any more.”

He felt as if she had stabbed him.

“You’re right,” he told her, his struggle for words making it come out harsh.

“I know I am,” she said, her fight for control making it come out cold. “We’ll pretend we haven’t even talked to each other, okay?”

“Sure.” He rolled away from her, to start grabbing his clothes. “Fine.”

“Good,” she said, as she stared at his naked back, and fought her tears.

You’re not going to do it to me again, she thought. I won’t let you.

Mitch turned at her bedroom door to look back at her in the bed. He felt as if he’d been struck by lightning, blinded by its light so that everything looked dark now. It reminded him painfully of when he had taken his last look up at her bedroom window on the night everything had changed for them. All the light was going out. For a little while on this one night, the world had lit up again for him, and now it was all going out again. He couldn’t love her without hurting her in terrible ways, and so it was better to try not to love her at all. And, obviously, she didn’t care anything about him after all these years. In allowing him to make love to her-have sex with her-she had only been scratching an itch that had lingered from a long time ago.

He couldn’t figure out a way to say good-bye that didn’t diminish what had just happened between them, any more than it was already demeaned, so he didn’t say anything at all. He just walked out of her bedroom, and then out of her house.

Patrick stood in the shadows of the cottonwood tree outside Abby’s front fence line, and watched a tall man exit from her side door. It was four o’clock in the morning, and the sun wasn’t up yet. Patrick had arrived two hours earlier, had seen the unfamiliar and expensive car parked on her road. He had driven past, turned into the first cutoff, parked his truck out of sight, and walked back to wait and watch. Abby didn’t know anybody with a late-model Saab. Hell, she didn’t know anybody with a Saab. It wasn’t the kind of car that anybody in Small Plains drove, not because they didn’t want to, but because it would have been impossible to get repairs done locally.

The tall man had to get a lot closer before Patrick recognized him.

Mitch Newquist. In a way, Patrick wasn’t even surprised. He had heard that Mitch was back. He wasn’t even surprised that Abby had let him back in, only that it had happened so fast. Mitch couldn’t have been back more than a day or two, and he was already sleeping with her?

Patrick stood by the side of the road, fighting the urge to kill somebody.

He hadn’t felt this kind of cold/hot anger in years, not since his younger brother had told him, with a snide, satisfied, smirking air, that Sarah Francis wanted Mitch Newquist, instead of him. Patrick wasn’t going to let that happen again. There was too much at stake to lose it to a bastard who thought he could just waltz back into town and take over again.

When Abby walked into her kitchen at five A.M., Patrick was already there.

Startled to see him, and way beyond anything called “angry,” she said, in a hostile, shaking voice, “What are you doing here?”

He turned around quickly at the sound of her voice.

“You mad, Abs? You mean, what am I doing here now, instead of last night, when you could have used some help? I’m really sorry I didn’t come over. We had some storm damage on the ranch, and I was stuck taking care of that. I tried calling but our lines were down. I didn’t even know you’d had trouble, or I would have dropped everything and come over.” His face was a mix of expressions-apology, sympathy, surprise at the way she was speaking to him, and also something that looked like frustration. “Listen, I hate to mention something so petty when you’ve got a whole barn down in your backyard, but while we’re standing here-have you seen my sunglasses?”

“What?”

“My shades. Damn things cost fifty bucks. I don’t want to lose them.”

While Abby stared at him, Patrick bent down and peered under the kitchen table.

“I left them here yesterday when I-aha!” Patrick hurried over to her refrigerator, reached into the space between it and a counter, and pulled out his sunglasses. He stood up, put them on, turned to face her, and grinned. “How the hell did they get down there? I think your damned birds must have done it. They hid them on purpose, Abby. I told you, those birds hate me.”

She stared at his teasing grin.

“Abby? What’s the matter? You know I’m only kidding, right? I don’t really think your birds hid my shades.” When he grinned at her again, but she just kept staring at him, he said, “Are you okay?”

“My birds,” she whispered, and sank onto the floor, and burst into tears.

Patrick pushed his sunglasses up into his hair and hurried to comfort her. “What happened?”

“Lovey’s dead.”

“Dead?”

“In the storm. And J.D. flew away and hasn’t come back. And Gracie is traumatized. And I thought you did it, Patrick! I was positive…I was sure you left those glasses on the table this morning. I just knew you did. And they were there when I got home the first time this evening, but then they were gone the next time, and I thought that meant you’d come out here, and you hated my birds, and you took the opportunity to…”

“Hurt them?” He sounded horrified. “I may hate them, but I wouldn’t hurt them.”

“My sister and Cerule and Randie and Susan were here. I must have seen some sunglasses belonging to one of them and I thought they were yours. I was upset about…something else. I guess I wasn’t seeing things correctly.”

“What were you upset about?”

“Never mind,” she said, and began to sob again.

He let her cry in his arms, waiting a bit before he said, “Hey, you know who’s back in town? Your old boyfriend, Mitch Newquist. Have you seen him?”

Abby buried her face in his shoulder for a moment before whispering, “No.”

He tensed, but hid it by gently tightening his embrace of her. “You’d better marry me, Abs.”

She pulled away enough to look into his face. “Why?”

He nodded toward the devastation outside her house. “Because this is a lot for one person to handle. I know you can do it, but why should you have to? When things happen, don’t you want somebody here to help you? And you wouldn’t just be getting me, you’d get my whole family that already loves you.” One side of his mouth crooked up in a half grin. “Better than they like me.”

Patrick gently kissed her damp face. “You can’t stay single forever.”

“Why can’t I?”

“Because you’re not built for it, Abby.”

“I always thought you were.”

“That was before I fell for you.” He kissed her again, and as he did he smelled fresh soap on her, felt how damp she was from the shower, a shower taken sometime between four and five in the morning. “Poor Abs,” Patrick said as he stroked her hair. “I know you loved those birds.”

After Patrick left, Abby got into her truck and drove aimlessly around for a while, looking for a flash of red in the skies. She made posters with J.D.’s photo on them and tacked them up all over town. She begged Rex to tell his deputies to keep a watch out for the parrot, and she went door-to-door downtown to ask everybody she saw to do the same for her. On an impulse, she even stopped by the cemetery to touch the Virgin’s grave and ask her help in finding him, or at least to keep him safe from harm.

Finally, feeling stunned by loss and by the enormity of what she had done a few hours before, she drove back out to her property to join her employees as they began the work of cleaning up after the storm.