Vanishing Act

15

Felker awoke to the sound of a bird making its first quiet call, somewhere far off. He was alone in the bed, and there was no sound inside the house. He rolled to the side of the bed to look down at the floor and saw that her clothes weren’t there.

He listened again, then sat up, swung his legs to the floor, and walked to the closet, where he had hung his backpack. It was still there, and the money was still inside. He found his clothes on the chair, where he would have put them. He was fighting the possibility that it hadn’t happened. He went to the window and looked out into the gray light, but there were only the empty fields and a few acres of woods about a quarter mile off. He looked down at the bed, but her side showed no sign that anyone had slept on it. He bent down and put his face into the pillow. He could smell Jane’s hair, a very light scent of flowers, but sweat too, a sweet, musky smell that made her real again and brought back the feel of her in the dark.

"What are you doing?" It was her voice.

He turned and straightened. "I was trying to identify the perfume."

"I’ll have to ask Jimmy. It’s his shampoo."

Felker shrugged. "There’s more to Jimmy than meets the eye." He looked around him. "I guess there would have to be."

He followed her into the kitchen. She was wearing a man’s red plaid wool shirt that hung down over her jeans, and her hair was pulled back into a tight ponytail. "Where have you been?"

"I went out to get some eggs for breakfast," she said. She pointed to a basket on the counter beside the door.

"You walked to the store already? What’s open at this hour?"

She laughed. "This is a farm. You just go out and lift up a couple of chickens." She started to slip out of the big hunting shirt, and glanced at him. She could see he was staring at the way her breasts stood out under her T-shirt. She raised an eyebrow.

"Come on." He took her hand and led her into the bedroom.

"I thought you’d be hungry," she said. Her voice was low and tense, almost a whisper. "I brought breakfast."

"This is more important," he said. "If I die today, I won’t care if I had two more eggs."

Then his hands moved up under her T-shirt and were on her breasts, and then he was slipping the T-shirt up over her head, and he tossed it somewhere, and the jeans were coming down over her hips, and he seemed to be everywhere at once, touching her and kissing her in a way that made her ache until she kissed him back.

She had needed to hear him say he wanted to, so she could be sure that it wasn’t just something people did because they had been to bed together once, and knew that if they let that cold-light-of-dawn feeling go on for any longer it would go on forever. Then she forgot all of that because none of it mattered at all. It hadn’t happened. What was going on now was what she would have imagined while she was out walking in the dark morning, if she had let the longing take the form of a wish. He must have been thinking of it too, because there was nothing tentative, no hesitation. What they thought, they seemed to think at the same time, and the impulses were already movements before they knew. They drew together to let their lips meet in slow, moist, leisurely kisses that neither of them started or stopped because it hadn’t been an intention, just an attraction they hadn’t resisted. Their bodies had learned to know each other in the course of the long night, while the things they said to each other were still the words of strangers. She accepted it because there was no other choice, and she began to let herself feel glad instead of ashamed that this had happened.

Later they ate breakfast. It was better with the sun up and light bouncing around the bright white kitchen, with the smells of fried eggs and hot coffee and the busy chirping of sparrows outside the window. "Want to have a picnic?" asked Jane.

"I’d like that," he answered.

Just as they were packing their lunch, they heard the first drops popping on the roof. It rained for three days. The cornfield outside turned to a rich, muddy soup and the grass in the fields turned an impossible emerald-green.

On the fourth day the rain stopped, and on the sixth they woke up to find that the world had changed again. It was the first week of May now, and the small half-inch buds that had been folded tightly on the branches of the trees exploded into luminous light-green leaves.

The letter came on the seventh day. Jane began to clean the house.