Dark Advent (4 page)

5

Jason toweled himself dry after a long, cool shower. His skin, tanned enough that he didn’t feel like an albino, tingled to the touch, faintly sunburned. Just enough to feel good. It was Saturday, and he’d spent a good chunk of the afternoon out at one of the lakes, swimming alone and sunning on a mammoth beach towel. He’d tried his luck at a sandcastle, sculpting turrets with a wax-paper cup.
No architect or engineer in me,
he decided after toying with it for ten minutes or so and he figured that whatever inspector was in charge of sandcastles would come along and condemn his as blighted. He pushed it over into a wet, shifting lump with one foot.

Hitting the beach had seemed like the best way to salvage the day after he’d found that photo album in the linen closet and soured a day that had started out pleasantly enough. He’d dawdled around in bed until mid-morning, sunlight advancing across the bedroom from his window like a slow-motion guillotine blade. Always a good way to kick off a Saturday. He’d watched cartoons a little later, the good
ones, Bugs Bunny and the Roadrunner. But toward noon, when he’d decided to change his sheets and realized to get some clean ones he’d have to dig into a box still unopened since he’d moved back down from college, he’d found it. The album, in all its innocent guise.

He hadn’t forgotten about it, not totally, but as long as it was out of sight, it was out of mind. Just as well, too. Pain was no fun to rekindle.

It had been the end of New Student Week last August, when freshmen and transfers gawk in wonder at the size of the campus and the returnees bask in the irresponsible lull before classes. Jason found his way to the Student Union and stopped to check out the exhibits in some display cabinets along a corridor wall. One drew him like a magnet: a photography display based around the four seasons. Autumn seemed especially close to his heart—bundled cornstalks standing in a field, an alabaster farmhouse set amid a riot of brightly colored trees, denuded branches against a slate sky. Jason stared in awe and fascination. And envy.

“Autumn’s my favorite.” A girl’s voice, behind him.

“Yeah. Mine too.” He’d said it almost reflexively, still transfixed by the photos. He glanced back if only to be polite, and was confronted with slim tanned legs and cutoffs, and he knew that here was an even greater work of art.

“What hits you about them?” she asked.

“Ummm…it’s kind of hard to put it into words.” He felt the same kind of awkwardness you feel when you discover your fly at half-mast. “I guess every picture there is something that already pops into my head when I hear the word
autumn.
”
He shrugged amiably.
I’m an ass
and she knows it, might as well be stamped across my forehead, big red letters, A-S-S.

But she smiled, satisfaction sparkling in her eyes. “I took them, you know.”

They continued to talk, Jason grappling inwardly for the right
things to say, not wanting to blow it, because this was the first new human being he’d felt like talking to since his folks had died. And something must have clicked. She accepted his invitation to go grab a slice of Gutbuster at Garcia’s Pizza.

Her name was Lora Kiley, and she wasn’t beautiful. Instead, she harbored an inherent cuteness that would remain long after beauty would fade. She was petite, with a fluffy mane of dark hair, and she was a photojournalism major. Jason grew fascinated by her little mannerisms, like the way her head would tilt as she listened to him talk. And the way her eyes dropped shyly to the tabletop whenever they shared a laugh.

He found himself wondering if she liked children, if she could cook as well as he, if she was good in bed, if she was prone to commitment or to freedom.

He got answers to all of them, eventually.

Their day-to-day lives grew more and more entwined. He became her favorite model, and they spent many an afternoon taking pictures of each other in every conceivable pose. Jason always teased her about the amount of camera gear she insisted on lugging along during most of their outings, but it wasn’t long before he started pricing his own.

By late October she’d all but moved in with him. Jason loved to watch her around the apartment, studying, cooking, fiddling with stacks of pictures, sleeping. He daydreamed vignettes of their future together…as newlyweds, as parents-to-be, with Lora in various stages of pregnancy, as parents of a child whose sex he never decided.

In December, as winter hit the Midwest in full force, it came time to break between semesters. Lora had spent the past couple of weeks bouncing around the apartment, putting up a tiny Christmas tree and trailing lights and decorations and tinsel for a holiday she’d be spending someplace else. Christmas was coming, and he couldn’t care less.

“I’ve finally figured you out, Jay,” she said after returning from an evening final exam. “I’ve spent the last week half-pissed-off because you acted like I was some kind of loon over Christmas. I thought you were a closet Scrooge. But that’s not it at all, is it?”

He shrugged.

“I’m so sorry. Really. I just wasn’t thinking.”

He sighed, a wavering sound. “It’s the first time I haven’t had a family to spend Christmas with. I’ve been dreading this for a long time.”

She held him close, and tears leaked onto her sweater, tears he hadn’t cried since the previous July. “You’re spending Christmas with me and my family. It’s all clear. I called them from the Union after my test.”

And as holidays go, it wasn’t too bad at all. Not the same as before, of course, but when you can come out of a time like that with your guts intact and can look back and say you’d do it again, you’re not doing too badly.

They returned to school in mid-January, spending a couple of horny days getting rid of the frustrations that had built up under her parents’ roof, where it seemed like someone was always
around. In February, he nursed her through a virulent bout of stomach flu.
This must be love, the real thing,
Jason thought.
I don’t even mind holding her head while she barfs.

In March, as winter thawed its way into spring, Jason watched helplessly as all that chill seemed to channel its way straight into Lora. He couldn’t get her to talk much anymore, or worse yet, laugh. She jumped at sudden noises. She found excuses to spend late nights at the darkrooms. And finally, for reasons he never did figure out, she told him things were over. That things inside her were changing (he hated it when she got so vague) and it was best they not see each other. For a while, anyway.

Jason nodded grimly. Funny thing about those temporary breakups. They had a knack of turning permanent.

“Please don’t take this hard,” she said softly, touching his cheek in a now-rare moment of tenderness. “You’ll dig yourself into a hole and never climb out.”

Fuck it,
he wanted to shout.
I’ll dig my own grave if I want.

The next several days spanned into eons. Jason wrote letters and ripped them up. He picked up the phone a hundred times a day only to slam it back down. On his daily runs, he’d pass by her apartment building, staring at her windows that now seemed like dead eyes. He saw trucks and wished one would go out of control and smear him across the pavement for two or three blocks…
that
would really make her feel bad.

But Jason never saw her again. At first he held a faint glimmer of hope that she’d turn up at his door again. But that hope grew dimmer each day until it finally died altogether, a spark snuffed out by the wind.

And in the end, all she left him with were a few love notes and a lot of memories. And a bunch of damned pictures.

He couldn’t bring himself to throw them away, not yet at least. His only hope was that a day of sun and sand could dull the senses back to their former numbness. It had only been half-successful.

He finished drying after his shower, rubbed on some Hawaiian Tropic to keep his skin from tightening, dressed. And left in his car. The early evening sun came in at a low slant over the houses and cast long shadows of the trees. Driving…he enjoyed it almost as much as running, though in a different way. Running seemed at times a spiritual activity, a physical mantra for mind as well as body. But driving tapped into something more base. You hammer your foot to the floor and you crank your tunes, and sometimes you can simply encase yourself in your car and become part of it.

He drove until the sun began to melt into the horizon, then headed back into town. He parked in the lot behind the Night Life Lounge. It was nearly as dusky inside as out, with a light hue of smoke. A small crowd so far, no surprise. The place never filled up much before ten. He took a table for two and ordered a Vodka Collins.

Jason sipped the drink and appraised the others. Near the back sat a trio of young girls, definitely underaged. Across the room were blue collars, looking like holdovers from the day he’d been here with Kelly last week. He was halfway through his second Collins when one of the girls from the back passed by on the way toward the johns. He decided her hips were swaying a fraction wide for it to be her natural walk. She was a looker, though, with dark eyes and light hair that fell past her shoulders in big loose waves.

He sat awaiting the view when she returned, and it was every bit as nice as he had expected, but a couple steps past him she pulled the unexpected: she stopped and turned around. Jason arched his eyebrows slightly.

“Weren’t you out at the lake today?” she asked.

“Yeah. You too?”

“You were building sandcastles, right?”

He felt his cheeks flush. “Not for long.”

She offered him a coy grin. “You know, they say the first sign of alcoholism is drinking alone.”

Jason feigned surprise. “I always thought it was drinking in the morning.”

“Hmmm, I’m not sure.”

“Either way, I’m covered,” he continued. “I do both.”

She laughed, and her gaze dropped to the tabletop. Shades of Lora.

“Listen, if you’d like to spare me the fate of drinking alone…” He pointed at the other chair.

She looked at him, at her friends, then back to him. “I can trust you?”

“Absolutely. I gave up ax-murdering for Lent.”

She went to speak with her friends for a moment, then returned, drink in hand, and slid into the chair. “My name’s Lilly. Lilly Dannon.”

“Jason Hart.” He studied her face. Yeah, there
was
something familiar there, only on her it worked a lot better. “Are you Jeff Dannon’s sister?”

“He’s my big brother.”

“I thought there was a family resemblance. We went to school together.” He ran a quick file-check through his mind. Jeff Dannon…joined the Peace Corps to see the world…okay, no immediate threat over jailbait sisters.

“Now
I know who you are,” she said, looking as if some great truth had just been revealed. “There’s a picture of you hanging up in the drama department at school. You had the lead in
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.
”

Jason smiled, nodded. “That was me. R. P. McMurphy. Second only to Jack Nicholson.”

“Except your hair’s longer now,” she said, reaching out to flip a lock that lay against his collar. “You look like a British rock star.”

They ordered more drinks. He stuck with the Collins, she with frozen strawberry daiquiris. She ate the strawberry from her drink, playing an interesting cat-and-mouse game with it with her tongue, and the front of his pants grew uncomfortably tight.

“So what are you doing now?” she asked. “Are you working?”

“Only for the summer. I’ll be a senior up at U of I in another couple months. In marketing research.”

“Oh, someone with a future.” She sighed. “Well, I’m just hanging around this boring-ass town until I can leave. Can’t wait. There’s nothing to do but party with my friends.”

“We had the same complaint when I was in school.”

“I bet it’s a lot more exciting up there.”

“Just a wider selection of bars and parties.”

Lilly pushed at his arm. “Oh, you bullshitter.” She paused to sip from her glass. “You know what I’d like to do? Take a year or two and do just what
I
want. Maybe spend it skiing. You like skiing?”

“I’ve been a couple of times. But I don’t like spending hard-earned money to fall on my ass when I can stay home and do it for free.” He rattled the ice in his glass. “A whole year, huh? Are you rich or something?”

“Oh, my dad will pay for it. Daddy gets me what I want. Sometimes I have to cry a little, but he’ll break down. Like last winter when I got my license…in a week I had a new car.” Her expression was calm, straightforward, as if that new car had been the most natural thing in the world to find in the driveway.

“Must be nice.” Inside, a little voice was telling Jason,
Whatever you do,
don’t
let this little nymph find out you’ve got money.

“Doesn’t your
dad get you what
you
want?” Lilly clearly appeared mystified.

Jason smiled crookedly. “I guess in a way he does.” He let it go at that. He didn’t feel like explaining. Not to her.

They continued to talk, and when her friends came forward to inform her that they were leaving, Lilly opted to remain with Jason. Before too long, she complained that the smoke was hurting her eyes. The place
was
starting to fill up. He looked at the Budweiser clock across the room. Ten o’clock. You could set your watch by this bar.

“Where do you want to go?” he asked once they were in his car, a red Mustang that looked like a million others.

“I don’t care. Anyplace.”

He geared the car and headed for the old standby from his own teenage years, the country roads east of town. Over the years he and his friends must have littered them with a ton of empty beer cans. The night air was warm and thick, but the wind felt soothing as it whipped through the car, washing the smoky odor from their clothes and hair. Lilly hadn’t said much, and he looked over at her after a few minutes of silence. She was slumped down into the seat, arms crossed, head thrown back against the headrest, eyes closed.