Please Remember This (22 page)

“I don’t think that’s necessarily true. I think it may have already happened.”

“You think Eveline Lanier is talking to me? Do you hear how crazy that sounds?”

“ ‘Talking’ probably isn’t quite the right verb.”

She wasn’t in the mood for a grammar lesson. “Why would this be happening to me? Why not to you? Why isn’t someone trying to contact you? You’re a nice guy. If I were a dead person, I’d be happy to talk to you.”

“I can’t explain any of this.” She probably wouldn’t want to hear that he believed Marie had had some communication with Nina Lane. “We can’t
even be sure that it happens. But I do have to wonder if our mother or father hasn’t tried to say something to Phil.”

“To
Phil?”
Tess was shaking her head. She obviously thought that he had lost his mind. “Phil’s going to be really receptive to communiqués from the other world.”

“I know. That’s what could be the tragedy. That they have reached out in some way, and he can’t hear.”

Why had he gotten started on this? Did he really think that a few yammerings from him were going to change the messages she had heard her whole life?

“I mean, really, Ned—” Her expression changed. It eased, it lightened. “How much sleep did you get last night?”

Sleep? Was that what she thought this was about? All his beliefs about a richness beyond the linear restrictions of time and behind the solidity of objects and atoms … were they to be labeled delusions caused by the lack of sleep?

Yes. This was the Midwest, this was Fleur-de-lis. And in the Midwest, in places like Fleur-de-lis, you got along with one another. That was the most important thing, everyone getting along, everyone agreeing, everyone being nice. So he shrugged and admitted that he had no idea how much he had slept last night—which was true—and he ate a piece of Mrs. Jackson’s carrot cake while Tess finished sorting the buttons. Together they then emptied each cake plate into its own little Ziploc bag, both of them pretending that everything was all right, that they were getting along, that they were agreeing.

Chapter 15

 

T
he buttons got publicity, the blue dishes got publicity. In fact, Phil’s publicity was so good that it was getting its own publicity.
Dynamic young attorney brings national attention to small Kansas town …

As a result, Ned started hearing from some people he hadn’t heard from in a long time, including a group that he had met while backpacking last year. Ryan Vandersee, Amanda Dean, Brigitta Muller, and three other guys had read about the excavation, and as they were all in the United States, they decided to come to Kansas for a week or so. The “or so” was very typical of the backpackers Ned had met. They generally didn’t plan beyond lunch.

As he struggled with the long, mud-slickened planks taken up from another section of the
Western Settler’s
deck, Ned tried to remember this particular group. Ryan’s personality he remembered, but nothing about his life. Was he American or Canadian? Ned couldn’t recall. He remembered Amanda talking about her stodgy middle-class upbringing in the middle of England, but that was it. And Brigitta … well, certainly his memories of Brigitta were the most detailed.

You had relationships on the road. You would link up with people, and during long waits at train stations, when you were leaning against your backpack, you’d end up talking about yourself. Some people would share things that they would not have told people back home. It was a false intimacy, one without accountability or responsibility. People who were backpacking didn’t want accountability or responsibility. They didn’t want to do anything that would keep them from being somewhere else in a week.

His relationship with Brigitta had been physically intimate as well. He had met her in Nepal and then traveled with her to India. They’d talked about meeting up again in Hong Kong, but she hadn’t appeared, and a month or so later he got word that people had been scared off by the prices in Hong Kong, for which he couldn’t blame them.

He let his mother and brother know that his friends were coming. “It’s no big deal,” he said to Phil. “They’ll have sleeping bags, and they can sleep at my place. They’re very self-reliant. They’ll expect to make their own meals.”

“Did you tell Mom that part about them making their own meals?”

“Oh, gosh, maybe I didn’t.” Ned tried to look disingenuous. “Why don’t you?”

“What a coward you are.”

“Absolutely,” Ned agreed.

The travelers arrived during the day. Phil brought them out to the site, but since none of them had heavy enough coats or boots to be outside for long, they waved, looked around a little, and returned to town.

They were already at his parents’ house for dinner by the time Ned got home to shower and change. He greeted them all with equal enthusiasm, hugging Amanda and Brigitta with the same warmth.

Although rooted in Kansas themselves, Matt and Carolyn loved talking to people who traveled, and the conversations were lively. Halfway through dinner the phone rang. Dr. Matt groaned and excused himself, but the call was for Ned. Nick Rewey, the site’s night watchman, was on the line. One of the generators had stopped. They had to get it going. If they didn’t, not only would the water table start rising again, but the water in the dewatering pumps would freeze and the pumps would burst.

“Do you want us to come?” Ryan asked.

“It’s too cold. I’ll meet you back at the house. Don’t wait up for me.”

Ned returned to his house after eleven. As he expected, the lights were off. His friends had been tired from traveling.

He opened the door quietly. Enough light from the porch fixture filtered through Great-uncle Bob’s fraying curtains that Ned could pick his way among the bodies lined up on the living room floor. In his bedroom, one of the bedside lamps had been left on.

There was a glow of blond hair on the pillow. It was Brigitta.

Ned sat down on the straight chair Great-uncle Bob had kept in the corner.

If Brigitta had unrolled her sleeping bag on top of the bed, that would have meant that she simply wanted to be comfortable. Bed or floor? Why not take the bed? But her sleeping bag was still neatly
rolled and attached to the base of her backpack. She was underneath the blanket and the sheet.

And no one else was in the room. No one else had stretched out a sleeping bag in the warm spot between the radiator and the bed.

This hadn’t been a choice between the bed or the floor, it had been a choice between Ned or not Ned.

She didn’t want anything that he couldn’t provide. She didn’t want a commitment; she didn’t want to settle in Kansas or have him leave with her. She would want to be someplace else next week. She simply wanted to sleep with him, to have sex with him.

Sex … He ran a hand across his face. He had been so cold … and it had been so long. He hardly remembered—no, he was remembering too well. An army of little fishhooks clawed inside his groin.

Wasn’t this exactly what he needed? Sex without strings, intimacy without commitment, relief without responsibility … everything that seemed impossible in Fleur-de-lis. In Fleur-de-lis, you were accountable for everything you did. Everything had consequences.

Brigitta’s hair shone in the lamplight. Her hair was lighter than Tess’s.

But didn’t he want a life with responsibility and accountability? He should never have come back to town if he didn’t.

He had to get out of here. He couldn’t sleep here. His resolve wasn’t that strong. Where should he go? The heat wasn’t on in the schoolhouse. It would be too cold there. He could go to Matt and Carolyn’s. Carolyn kept all the rooms made up.

He put his coat back on and checked his pockets for his gloves. He would walk. The wind was so
sharp that it made the fillings in your teeth hurt. He needed that.

What fun Ned’s friends seemed to be. Tess had met them when Phil had brought them by the Lanier Building for tea. They were bright and laughing, telling stories about how hot it was in Calcutta, about finding cyber-cafés in Nepal. They were so adventuresome. Tess couldn’t imagine being like that. She felt overly prim, overly cautious.

They would obviously be going to Matt and Carolyn’s for dinner. They would have fun. Dinner would be good too.

And if you want to go, all you have to do is ask Carolyn if you can come. She will be delighted. There’s no reason to feel like Cinderella, sitting in the ashes.

But Tess didn’t call Carolyn. Hadn’t she declared at Christmas that she was her own family? That she didn’t need to be included in every Ravenal family event? So she sorted through her inventory of place mats. She rearranged several of the displays. Even if it was the same merchandise, people looked at it differently if it was moved around. When the kids working the evening shift came on at six, she went home. She had prepared a small eggplant casserole last night, setting the oven to time-bake. It was important during the winter, when you were living alone, that you planned your dinner ahead of time so you could have something filling and warm.

And aren’t you just perfect? Don’t you do everything right?

She had been so pleased with herself at Christmas.
She had gotten the business of living alone exactly right. It had been a completely satisfying day. But she had done it once. That was enough. Any more and she’d start getting proud of herself for being so good at living alone. And then she would want everyone to know how good she was at it. She would want them to admire her for it. She would become Sierra.

So to show herself that she wasn’t so perfect after all, she completely wasted the evening. She set up the ironing board but didn’t iron anything. She examined the stains on a table topper she had just purchased, but she didn’t do anything about them. She looked through four catalogs, folded down the corners of some pages, but didn’t make up her mind about anything. She changed into her nightgown, but she wasn’t tired, so she put on a robe and spent twenty minutes clicking through all the television channels even though she knew from the newspaper that there was nothing she wanted to watch.

Then, surprisingly, someone knocked at her door. She glanced at her watch. It was after eleven. This was very strange. She lifted the batiste panel covering the window in the door and peered out.

It was Ned.

“I saw your lights,” he said as she opened the door.

Tess waited for the explanation.
I
saw your lights and wanted to be sure that everything was okay … I needed to use the phone … tell you that you left your headlights on … your basement door open … the cat out …

She didn’t have a cat, and for once, there was no explanation. She was keeping him on the doorstep in this freezing weather, waiting for something that
wasn’t coming. He wasn’t going to explain why he was here. He simply
was.

“Come in, come in,” she said quickly. “It’s so cold out. Do come in.”

She took his coat and as she hung it on a hook on the oak wall stand, she saw in its mirror that he was plucking at his sweater, tugging at the shoulders. He was doing that more and more these days. His body was changing, and his clothes didn’t fit him anymore.

She gestured for him to sit down. He hooked his elbows over the back of the sofa as if stretching out the muscles of his upper back. He was doing a lot of that too, stretching out his back and shoulders. She hadn’t realized that she had noticed, but apparently she had. Half embarrassed by her thoughts, she spoke quickly. “Your friends came into the Lanier Building this afternoon. They seemed to be a lot of fun.”

“They are.”

The way he was sitting and how closely his sweater fit made her aware of the rise and fall of his chest.

He was breathing. What was so remarkable about that? “They did make me feel a little old, as if I hadn’t done anything exciting.”

“I guess I can understand that,” he agreed. “But they’re standing on quicksand. The one thing they need from life is to keep moving.”

“That life probably wouldn’t suit me.” She still felt like a stick in the mud.

“Nor me.”

It was odd to be so aware of him physically. But wasn’t that good, a sign that she wasn’t completely gone over to convent life? “I suppose they also have a
more casual attitude about sex than do most people around here.”

Now that was really odd. She was not the type to introduce sex into a conversation.

Ned indeed looked surprised, but he answered evenly. “As a matter of fact, yes.”

Then suddenly things made sense to her. He was out roaming the streets because one of the women had made herself available to him, and he, for whatever reason, wasn’t accepting. And that was why Tess herself was reacting to him as she was. On a simple biochemical level, he was emitting pheromones, or whatever they were called, stirred up by someone else. She wondered who the stirrer was, the blond one or the brunette with an English accent. What were their names? Brigitta and Amanda?

He moved suddenly, standing up, obviously aware of her silence. “I need to get moving here. I want to see if Carolyn’s got the Luke Skywalker sheets on my old bed.”

She was the precise opposite of Brigitta-Amanda. That sexual encounter might not have enough commitment for Ned, but staying here with her—if he even wanted to do that—would involve extreme complications. People in town would make assumptions, they would speculate, they would gossip.

But I’m aware of you. You are making me feel alive.

Well, she’d just have to figure out some other way to feel alive. She got his coat off the hall stand, and rather than handing it to him, she held it out by the shoulders, raising it. He turned his back and, catching
the cuffs of his sweater in his hands, slipped his arms into the sleeves.

He turned to face her, to say good night, but the light in her living room was strong. It wasn’t soft and romantic like the lighting she had paid so much for at the Lanier Building. She did needlework here in the evenings, and she needed good light.

So he must have been able to see well enough to read her expression.

He stepped back. Tess could tell that he was surprised. He had not expected this. He must have been thinking about Brigitta-Amanda. He must have been thinking about whether he really would go off to the Luke Skywalker sheets or if he would go back to his own house. “Tess …”

He might have been surprised, but he wasn’t offended. The idea didn’t disgust him. She was glad of that. A dull flush rose up his throat.

What would she do if this were okay with him? It wouldn’t be—of course it wouldn’t. He understood the town. He knew what it would be like. He knew it all better than she did.

But, just pretending, what if he thought that none of that mattered? What would she do then? Because, after all, he did know the town better than she did, and if it made sense to him, then perhaps …

But he was shaking his head. It was the softest, smallest movement, but it was still
no.

She nodded, showing him that she agreed and that it was, of course, better not to say anything because it would be easier that way. They understood each other. That was all that mattered.
Don’t say anything.
We understand each other. Leave without speaking.

He spoke. “We are all wrong for each other.” And with that he left.

Tess stared at the blank slab of her front door. All wrong for each other? That wasn’t the reason they weren’t spending the night together. It was the town, not them. What was he talking about?

She had been written off by men before. She didn’t drink enough, she didn’t have money to lend, she was too much of a long shot sexually, but the guys thinking that had all been jerks and creeps. They hadn’t been Ned Ravenal. They hadn’t been men she liked and admired and was attracted to. So why did he, a man she did like, admire, and was attracted to, think she was so wrong for him?

For a while he had thought that she was perfect for his brother, because she was as much of an emotional zero as his brother. But surely he understood she wasn’t really like that. She had been raised to be the opposite of Nina Lane, and if anything would superficially resemble Phil Ravenal, it would be anything which was the opposite of Nina Lane. But what did that have to do with her being all wrong for Ned?