Jane looked up at the second-floor window beside the big maple tree. The bedroom light was off, but she had seen a glow in the casement windows at the front, and now she could see that the kitchen lights were on. She stepped to the back door and reached for the knob, but it swung open and Carey took a stride toward her and gathered her into his long arms, holding her gently and rocking her a little. It felt warm and safe and restful.
After a long time she said, “I guess you do remember me.”
He kept her in his arms. “Sure. You’re the reason I never felt the urge to get a cat. I already have something sleek and beautiful that never comes when I call it, just drops in when it feels like it and goes away again.”
She burrowed deeper into his arms, then leaned back and lifted her face to kiss him. The kiss was soft and leisurely and perfect. “Can I come in?”
They walked through the little entry into the big old kitchen, where Jane could hear the watery chugging of the dishwasher. She stepped into the dining room and ran her hand along the smooth surface of the table.
“Checking for dust?” he asked.
“No,” she said. “I don’t need any dust right now, thanks. This feels more like one of those occasions for champagne, and I can’t remember if we have any.”
“Of course we do,” he said. “I’ve always kept some in case somebody spills something on the carpet.” He pulled a bottle from the refrigerator and peeled off the foil.
“Champagne doesn’t do that. You’re thinking of club soda.”
“Oh?” He popped the cork. “This isn’t any good, then.” He stared at it sadly. “Might as well drink it or something.”
Jane reached into the cupboard for a pair of tulip glasses. “I think we have to. Otherwise, when we put a note in the bottle, it’ll get wet.”
They sipped their champagne and walked into the living room. She turned and faced him. “Have you seen these nice clothes I bought?”
“Very fetching, as my grandmother would have said.”
She began unbuttoning the blouse with her left hand, then glanced at him. “Have you been sufficiently fetched?”
“More than enough,” he said. “I wouldn’t need to see them again for a long time.”
“Good.” The blouse slipped off her shoulders. She undid the clasp of her slacks and stepped out of them, and Carey’s arms enveloped her again. There was the gentle touch of his fingers that gave her chills, then the warm, firm feeling of the palms of his hands, smoothing her skin, defining the shape of her body, always moving as though he needed to touch her everywhere at once. She needed it too, as she had needed to take off her clothes in the first minutes after she saw him.
It wasn’t just because she felt she couldn’t wait, but because part of it was showing him that this was what she wanted. And she wanted to see and feel his joy at knowing that she did. Her own hands were nimbly, urgently undoing buttons and buckle and slipping off his clothes. They made love where they had stopped in the living room, then went upstairs to their bedroom and lay in the dark on the cool, clean sheets with the warm summer breeze pushing in the curtains to direct itself across their bodies. After that they lingered over each moment, letting the night reach its dark, unchanging no-time, pretending that night was permanent and they could stay like this forever. Hours later, Jane caught sight of the glowing red digits of the clock on the nightstand, and wasted a second hoping she had read them wrong.
She said, “It’s nearly three A.M.,” but his lips pressed against her mouth to silence her, then stayed. His hand moved gently along her throat, and already her feelings were building again.
When she was able to look at the clock again, she heard the first tentative chirps of a sparrow in a tree across the back yard. She turned away from it to look beside her at Carey, and she could see that he had fallen asleep. She very softly placed her hands under his heavy forearm and held it while she slipped out from under it, then set it down on the bed where she had been.
She kept her eyes on him as she walked quietly toward the door. She let herself adore his long legs and his big feet and the peaceful little-boy look his face acquired when he was dreaming. I had this, she thought. If I die now, at least I recognized and accepted the best thing that life offered to me.
She looked down to be sure her bare foot touched the two pieces of hardwood floor closest to the hinge of the door, where it never creaked, then slipped down the long second-floor hallway to the best of the spare bedrooms. She showered in the bathroom there, then put on an old sweatshirt and jeans and went downstairs to start making her husband’s breakfast.
When Jane had let Carey sleep as long as she dared, she went back up to the bedroom and kissed his cheek. He didn’t move. She kissed his neck, then kept her lips pressed to his cheek and watched his eyelids. “Hypocrite,” she said. “You’re awake already.”
“I’m playing dead,” he said. “Waiting to see just how far you’re willing to go.”
She stood up. “Mother was right. Men are too dumb to do anything but keep going until you tell them to stop.” She dropped her pillow on his head. “The good ones, anyway.”
He swung his feet to the floor and stood up. She pretended not to look at his long, lean body, and ached to hear him say she had made a mistake, that it was Saturday. He said, “I smell something good.”
“That’s right. I want you to have time to taste it and wake up before you go to the hospital and try to cut something out of somebody.”
“Very responsible of you,” he said.
She put her arms around him and held him. He stood still, facing away. He said, “I was afraid I’d wake up and you would be gone.”
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m home now, and I’m going to be the wife of your dreams.”
He turned, his face intrigued. “Oh?”
She nodded. “It’s because you didn’t say anything about my hair. You hate it, but you didn’t say it. That means you’re too smart to just throw away.”
She went downstairs and waited for him, then sat at the table with him and pretended to eat so she could be close to him. After a few minutes, he asked quietly, “Are you going to tell me what happened?”
“Yes,” she said. “But there’s too much to tell now. It’s over and I’m home.”
“Why didn’t you call again?”
Here it was, so soon. No, this wasn’t soon. It seemed abrupt, because it was something that she should have said in the first seconds, and hadn’t. “Things turned out to be much … stranger than I expected. There wasn’t anything I could have said that would have made you less worried.”
He stared at her for a second, then went back to his breakfast. She could sense what he wasn’t saying. She put her hand on his. “I love you,” she said. But that was just what people said when there was nothing else to say—like a dog nuzzling up to lick his face. “You know why I went. Somebody needed help. I felt I had to help her.”
“Just like Richard Dahlman,” Carey said. “That wasn’t what you were going to say, because we both know it. I understand. I made you promise never to do this again, and then, when it was somebody I cared about, I asked you to save him.”
Jane shook her head. “You’re wrong. We have to get this story straight right now, or it will be between us forever. You didn’t make me promise. I just promised. It wasn’t hard. I wasn’t giving up something. It was just part of being married to you, and I made it to myself before you ever thought of it—before you knew that there was going to be a need to ask for it.”
“It doesn’t matter,” he said. “What matters is what you want now. Today.”
Jane took a deep, painful breath, and kept the tears out of her voice. “I want more than anything to stay here with you. I want to call Joy at your office and have her cancel your surgery and your afternoon appointments and maybe never let you out of my sight again. We’re thirty-four years old, and we might have forty or fifty years left. I want every day of that so much that I don’t want to let any of them slip by when I don’t reach out and touch you at night before I close my eyes.”
“But this girl came along, and you heard her story, and off you went.”
“The promises we made to ourselves about the nice life we were going to have were in place. They just had to be forgotten until I had done what was required to keep my self-respect.”
“That’s what we said when we decided to help Richard Dahlman.”
“I guess it is. They’re both proof that when you make rules about what’s going to happen in the future, the
