She was giving him a hiding!
He fought on.
“She was bitten.” He paused. “A snake.”
And that pause, somehow, changed it all.
While Michael turned to look at the deepening dark, the girl crossed from cocksure to stoic in a few short seconds; she stepped closer, and now she was next to him, facing the same way. Near enough so their arms touched.
“I’d rip a snake apart before I let it get to you as well.”
* * *
—
After that, they were inseparable.
They watched those much-repeated sitcoms of previous years—his Bewitched and her I Dream of Jeannie. They crouched at the river or walked the highway out of town, watching the world grow seemingly bigger. They cleane
d the surgery and listened to each other’s heartbeats with Weinrauch’s stethoscope. They checked each other’s blood pressure till their arms were ready to explode. In the back shed, he sketched her hands, her ankles, her feet. He balked when it came to her face.
“Oh, come on, Michael…” She laughed and plunged her hand down into his chest. “Can’t you get me right?”
And he could.
He could find the smoke in her eyes.
Her mocking, dauntless smile.
Even on paper she looked ready to speak. “Let’s see how good you are—paint with your other hand.”
At the highway farmhouse one afternoon, she took him in. She put a box of schoolbooks against her bedroom door, and held his hand and helped him with everything: the buttons, the clips, the descent to the floor. “Come here,” she said, and there was the carpet and heat of shoulders and backs and tailbones. There was sun at the window, and books, and half-written essays everywhere. There was breath—her breath—and falling, just like that. And embarrassment. A head turned sideways, and brought back.
“Look at me. Michael, look at me.”
And he looked.
This girl, her hair and smoke.
She said, “You know—” The sweat between each breast. “I never even said I was sorry.”
Michael looked over.
His arm had gone dead, beneath her.
“For what?”
She smiled. “About the dog, and”—she was almost crying—“for crushing that spaceship thing in the waiting room that morning.”
And Michael Dunbar could have left his arm down there forever; he was stunned and stilled, astounded. “You remember that?”
“Of course,” she said, and now she spoke upwards, at the ceiling. “Don’t you see?” Half of her in shadow, but the sun was on her legs. “I loved you already then.”
Just past the dry riverbed, Clay shook hands with Michael Dunbar in the dark, and their hearts were in their ears. The country was cooling down. For a moment he imagined the river, erupting, just for some noise, a distraction. Something to talk about.
Where was the Goddamn water?!
Earlier, when they’d seen each other, their faces searched, then down. Only when they were meters apart did they look for more than a second.