“Come here.”
I held up my hand. She came to me and took my hand and then I pulled her down on top of me. Her hair fell in my face.
“I’m sorry,” she said, in a voice so low I could barely hear her. “I’m sorry.”
“Stop saying that.”
“But I am.”
“It’s okay.”
“No,” she said. “No.”
“It’s going to be all right. I promise.”
“Tell me the truth, Alex. How bad did they hurt you?”
“I’m fine.”
“Tell me the truth, God damn it.”
“Okay,” I said. “Everything hurts. Inside and out. Absolutely everything.”
“Everything?”
“Yes.”
“Then I’ll try not to make it any worse.”
She took her clothes off, shivering and suddenly covered with a million goose bumps. She started to take mine off, but didn’t get far. We made do and we went slow. It felt good and bad at the same time.
Afterward, as she lay next to me, she touched the bandages over my eyebrow, and on the back of my head.
“You should sleep,” she said.
“I will. Are you gonna stay?”
“Yes,” she said, getting up. “I’ll be right back.”
I was out before she could keep her promise.
I woke up alone. It took me a second to remember where I was and how I had gotten there. It took me yet one more second to remember how much my head hurt. It was the first night I had slept all the way through since leaving the hospital.
I picked my watch off the bedside table. It was almost noon. I said her name once, then again a little louder. She didn’t answer. But I knew she had spent the night here in the bed with me. There was another pillow next to mine, and I could smell her scent, her hair, the soap she used. I figured at this hour she was already downstairs.
It was quiet. Something about that fact bothered me, until I realized what was missing. There were no snowmobiles outside, no constant buzzing all over the place, the sound I was accustomed to waking up to every winter morning.
I got out of bed slowly, like my head was a bomb that could go off at any second. I went into the bathroom. When I was done washing my face, I took a good hard look in the mirror. Maybe I looked a little better, I thought. Maybe one notch below Quasimodo now. But I still had the full array of bruises and the red streaks in my eyes that made me look possessed.
She came back, I thought. She came back to this face. I can officially believe in miracles now.
I went down the hallway, passing the other upstairs bedrooms- the master bedroom with the portraits of Natalie’s grandparents, the bedroom with the canopy bed and the frilly white bedspread. Everything had a slightly sad and dusty smell to it. I didn’t know how she could spend so much time here in this big empty house.
The grandfather clock was ticking at the top of the stairs. Aside from that there was no other sound.
“Natalie!”
No answer.
I went down the stairs, the old floorboards creaking with each step. The dining room table was completely taken over by moving boxes. All the china had been carefully packed away. All the curios and souvenirs of a family’s long life in this house. The living room was just as empty. Or maybe it had been called the “parlor,” once upon a time. There was a sofa, two matching chairs, a coffee table, and more boxes.
I parted the curtains and looked out the front window. Her Jeep was parked in front of the house. There was no garage to park it in.
“Natalie!”
Still no answer.
Then I noticed the old barn outside, across the snow-covered field, with an open side door fluttering in the wind. I found my boots. I swore as I bent over to pull them on to my feet. When I stood up straight, the blood was pounding in my ears. I was so dizzy I had to lean against the wall. I needed some more drugs, or hell, maybe an early beer or two, but first I had to find out where Natalie was.
I grabbed my coat and went out the front door. The sun was shining, but it was cold and the wind was kicking up so much sparkling glitter, it was like it was snowing all over again. I didn’t see any tracks, but I tromped all the way through the deep snow to the side of the barn. The door was still swinging in the wind, but I saw that it was just barely open, stopped by the packed snow on the ground. I pulled it hard until I could squeeze through.
“Natalie!”
My voice reverberated through the high rafters. It took my eyes a while to adjust to the dim light, after the brilliant snow outside, but when they did, I saw the vast emptiness of that old barn, with the light shining through in thin slits here and there. A swirl of powder hung in the air as the snow worked its way through the cracks. It collected in a light layer on the floor, covering the ancient wood and the hay dust. There were a few farm tools hanging on the walls-a hoe and a pickax and some other metal contraptions I couldn’t have named to save my life. Everything was rusted to the point of disintegration, and an old leather horse collar was eaten away to almost nothing. If someone had told me this barn had been used in the last fifty years, it would have been a surprise to me.
I pushed the door open again and made my way back across the field to the house. I was starting to get genuinely worried. When I was inside, I knocked the snow off my boots and called her name again.
Nothing.
Then I saw the door. It was in the corner, behind the old wood stove. I tried it, and it opened to a set of stairs.
“Natalie, are you down there?”
I didn’t hear anything, but it looked like there was a light on, so I went down, holding on to the wooden rails. There was a strong smell in the air, a cellar smell, of moisture and rot and mildew.
It was dark, the way cellars used to be before they started building them with high windows. The stairs led to a small room filled with stacks of wooden crates and an old metal bicycle with long wooden fenders. The room led to another room, and then to another, the light growing stronger and stronger.
“Natalie, where are you?”
I went through one more room, this one with piles of old magazines on one wall, and on the other wall a set of shelves filled with mason jars. There was a door. It was half closed, the light streaming out onto the floor.
“Natalie?”
I pushed the door open.
She was sitting on the floor, surrounded by more boxes.
“Natalie, didn’t you hear me calling you?”
She didn’t answer me. She held an old photograph in her hands, its edges curled with age.
“What’s the matter?” I said. I winced as I bent down beside her.
She didn’t say anything. A single tear ran down her right cheek.
“What is it?” I said. “What are you looking at?”
She didn’t show it to me, but I could see just enough of it to make out three men. The photo was in color, but it had that washed-out look to it, the way color photos looked in the sixties. I was guessing the older man was her grandfather, and one of the other two men was maybe her father. She had come down to pack up all these boxes of old photographs, and had stopped to look at this picture of the grandfather she loved and the father she had hardly known. And that this had gotten to her, in the same way it would have gotten to me or to anyone else.
I was wrong.
