“But now,” he went on, as though he’d not heard her, “she just reports on other people’s lives. Or does she even do
“At least I have a stack of magazines to show for it. What do you have?” Regretting it instantly — her voice had shrilled into a tone from a playground spat.
“Isn’t that what you came all this way to find out? Hee hee.”
“Maybe we should just move along to it now that we’ve gotten the mutual disdain for each other’s compromises out of the way.”
He rose from the ground and brushed the dust from the seat of his pants, ancient khakis that might once have been worn deep in the Amazon or in the shadow of the Sphinx. His tank top was faded into the same indeterminate shade and hung from shoulders whose collarbones were clearly defined. He was bamboo-thin and burned by more suns than she’d cared to see, his hide cured but not quite leathery. It seemed to have constricted over every muscle, every tendon.
Austin’s face had been like an artist’s once, brimming with sensitivity and curiosity. The bones of cheek and jaw were still there, unfatted, but his face now wore its stripes of crease and crinkle. The years hadn’t all been good ones. His hair remained on the darker side of auburn but hung now past his shoulders, with a single streak of silver flowing from just over his right ear. From the same spot on the left, a fat braid, half grown out and starting to mat together.
She wanted to be furious with him. Didn’t he think part of her had ever wanted to have been the mad one, the impractical one, the one who’d refused normal obligations to leave room for finding answers to questions that most people only asked in their dreams? Austin wasn’t the only one who’d wanted to drink nectar.
But she couldn’t be furious, not when she saw how his clothes hung from him when he stood. In his gauntness she sensed the awful solitude of those years since they’d parted. Gabrielle could see him waking up in places that weren’t home and never could be, no romance of adventure to it, only momentum. Maybe he’d made room in his life for the arcane forms of magick, but this had left none for its everyday counterparts. She would’ve bet her life on it: He’d had no one with whom to subdivide a Sunday newspaper. Or sniff the air after a cleansing spring shower. He’d had no one to leave him sweet notes to find on mornings he’d slept late.
She stepped forward, and so did he. The hug was awkward and stiff. When her cheek brushed against his hard bare shoulder its skin was hot, like a tiny sun.
“Don’t send me away from here feeling like the last eleven years of my life were a mistake,” she said. “You could probably do it if you wanted to, but if you did, that’s something I would never forgive you for. Don’t do that to me.”
Austin drawing back, peering at her — nobody just got up one morning and decided he wanted his eyes to look like that. It had to be earned. Had to accrue. She didn’t want him to say anything to make it better. There was nothing he could say that wouldn’t be trite. Nothing that wouldn’t be at least half a lie.
For all the years had done to him, and all she imagined he’d done to himself, when he touched her it was easy to forget she was another man’s wife. Austin needed no magick for that.
And when she heard an old, familiar sound in the distance she was grateful for the way out of the moment it provided.
Smiling now. “Do you know how many years it’s been since I’ve heard a train whistle?”
“No.” Turning it back on her then: “Do you?”
She brushed his cheek with the back of her fingers, knowing they must be thinking different versions of the same thing: that this had all begun with a train.
“Besides the almost-nonexistent rent, that was part of the appeal of this place: I could hear that whistle every day,” he said. “The railroad runs past about a mile away. What we’re hearing now, it’s coming through Miracle. There’s an intersection at one end of the town.”
“How long have you been in this awful place?”
“Nine, ten months. Not long after Miracle started living up to its name last year.”
“Kind of short-lived, wasn’t it?”
“That depends on where you look.”
They waited for the train in the dust and heat. She’d begun to sweat, too aware now of her clothing. Her slacks, her jacket, were all wrong. She was nowhere that labels mattered. They watched the train pass in the distance, engines and boxcars, flatcars and tankers. Listened to the steel rhythm of the wheels. In their clatter lived something soothing, that lulled and rocked until it faded away, leaving a stillness as immense as the heat.
Austin gestured toward the shack. “And now I guess I owe you a wonder or two…?”
She realized now that she’d come not out of expectation, but concern, the only person in the world with a chance of convincing him he needed help. Austin was still young, relatively. He could have many years ahead. Productive years. Fulfilling years. Sane years.
His shack had the suggestion of a porch, scarcely a yard in depth. The boards bowed gently under their weight. He pushed open the door; it squealed on hinges free of rust but thirsty for oil. Past the threshold it was as stifling as she’d expected, and as spare. He kept it touchingly tidy, though, with crates for furniture, clothing and books in their places, along with a few items that had traveled with him, and the tools of obsession that he’d begun to collect even before she’d left him. Mattress on the floor in one corner, cast iron wood stove in another. Lantern and candles; intricate patterns smeared onto the walls and even though they were dry they still drew flies. Best not to think about that.
Eccentric and poverty-stricken, but nothing earth-shaking.
Although there was one more door.
“Ready?” he said. She told him she was.
Austin pushed the door open and took her by the hand. She let herself be drawn in after him, another room of bare rude walls and exposed nailheads and mouse droppings and little windows whose square panes had grown cloudy enough to distort their view of the desert beyond. She looked up at the only thing here to see.
