"Given any more thought to living in Maine?"
His face turned sad, and he reached up. She grabbed his hands and hauled him to his feet.
"Oh, momma." He groaned again, arching his back and shoulders. "You weigh too much for some of those positions."
"Nah, you're just getting flabby. Need more exercise." She leered a suggestion as to what kind of exercise she meant, and then prodded the question again. "Maine?"
He kissed her on the nose. "Can't, sweetheart. My people are here. The air smells right. I've tried leaving, and my feet just won't stay away. This is the dirt they know."
And there it was again, hanging between them. She hated that answer and understood it all too well. Could she tear her own roots out of the Maine coast, the sea and stone and spruce and cold and fog that birthed her? Trade her Spring and the silver lakes, the laughing streams, for this dry land?
Could she tear her heart in half and leave him?
Besides, there was the House. It didn't trust men.
She settled herself on the end of the bed, patting the tangled sheets beside her until he sat. Would Grandmother Loon give her the words to say? So appropriate, her spirit animal, the mad red eye, the maniacal laughter in the night, the need for solitude, the bird so much more at home in water than on land or even in the air.
Enough light flowed in now from the sunrise that she could focus on his eyes. "Can we find a way? I love you. I need you. Bodies, brains, I don't know which, but we go together. You understand about me, you understand about the spirits of the water and the land. You talk to them yourself. You even understand about the House. Can't we find a way?"
And the House even understood that some of its Women liked men. She wouldn't be the first. He couldn't live there, the place would start to pick on him, but he could stay in the village, spend nights . . .
Trouble clouded his eyes. He met her look, but part of him was elsewhere. "I love you. I need you. Yes, I understand about you and the spirits. But I understand because I am tied to different spirits, a different land, a different magic. I think we're playing out the story of the Stone Warrior and the Moon Girl. We never should have met."
That story ended badly. They could see each other across the desert nights, see each other forever and always, but they could never touch. Again, Caroline felt the chill of tears in the dry air.
Every time, it comes down to that. Each of us belongs to our own land. I do not belong here. He does not belong in Stonefort. I never should have come here. Even the pines smell wrong.
Grandmother Loon does not live in this land. I don't know what his spirit animal might be. He's never mentioned it, and that's not the kind of thing you ask, not even of a lover. But I bet it doesn't live in Maine.
Aunt Alice's voice came back to her, a Jeffers poem read aloud and reread long ago, as Caroline felt talons sink into her chest:
"Give your heart to the hawks."
Chapter Sixteen
She ran away. She's skipped two classes now. No answer on the phone, no answer to my emails. She's gone. The clock struck twelve and the coach turned back into a pumpkin.
Gary rubbed his eyes and then twisted away from his desk to refocus out the dorm window. Light mist dulled the sky and faded the distant trees into ghosts against early evening gray. Gray world, gray mood, both turning darker. She hadn't lost any glass slippers when she ran away. He'd looked.
A dull ache throbbed in his temples, matching his heartache, and he didn't know if it was eyestrain or the tug of war between different versions of the truth. On the one side, his father and his dad pulled at him, two different people he respected, both holding the same opinion and scared half out of their wits. For him. On the other side, things he knew and couldn't prove, things he saw and they didn't, or discounted. He was scared, for different reasons. Scared for a different person.
She's probably got three other lairs scattered around this town. I've got mine, why wouldn't she? Cheap-ass slum apartments or places like that abandoned hotel that Dad found — a door she can lock behind her, a dry bed and canned food and a change of clothes. And a gun.
Or she could be in Massachusetts by now. Hell, she could be in California. Running. Hiding. Dropping back into the streets, the death spiral. And this time she won't be able to climb out. You only get that kind of chance once.
She'd elbowed her way into his life, made the world vibrate around her like some frenetic strobe light that left the world dull when he looked away. He could still smell Jane's shampoo and perfume on his pillow when he tried to sleep.
He caught himself chewing at a thumbnail and stared at his hands, remembering her ragged nails, the tension, the jittering energy of something fast and fierce determined to live past constant fear. Technicolor Girl blazing sharp-edged through a soft-focus monochrome world. She seemed so alive.
Yeah, she's dangerous. Dad and Ben have made that clear. I don't give a damn. I love her. And she had good reasons for what she did.
He'd studied words, studied numbers, studied photos, studied copies of smears of loops and whorls — light smears against dark backgrounds and dark against light, smears found at a murder scene and smears taken in an office and filed away against future need. Studied
