were lean but well-muscled.
She said, “Thought you’d be asleep by now.”
“Want to be, need to be, but I can’t shut my mind off” Looking down at
him, she said, “Viola Moreno says there’s a deep sadness in you.”
“Been busy, haven’t you?”
She took a small swallow of Corona. One left. She sat down on the edge
of the bed. “Do your grandparents still have the farm with the
windmill?”
“They’re dead.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Grandma died five years ago, Grandpa eight months later-as if he really
didn’t want to go on without her. They had good, full lives. But I
miss them.”
“You have anybody?”
“Two cousins in Akron,” he said.
“You stay in touch?”
“Haven’t seen them in twenty years.”
She drank the last of the Corona. She put the empty bottle on the
nightstand.
For a few minutes neither of them spoke. The silence was not awkward.
Indeed, it was comfortable.
She got up and went around to the other side of the bed. She pulled
back the covers, stretched out beside him, and put her head on the other
two pillows.
Apparently, he was not surprised. Neither was she.
After a while, they held hands, lying side by side, staring at the
ceiling.
She said, “Must’ve been hard, losing your parents when you were just
ten.”
“Real bad.”
“What happened to them?”
He hesitated. “A traffic accident.”
“And you went to live with your grandparents?”
“Yeah. The first year was the hardest. I was. . . in bad shape. I
spent a lot of time in the windmill. It was my special place, where I
went to play. . . to be alone.”
“I wish we’d been kids together,” she said.
“Why?”
She thought of Norby, the boy she had pulled from the sarcophagus under
the DC-10’s overturned seats. “So I could’ve known you before your
parents died, what you were like then, untouched.”
Another stretch of time passed in silence.
When he spoke, his voice was so low that Holly could barely hear it
above the thumping of her own heart: “Viola has a sadness in her, too.
She looks like the happiest lady in the world, but she lost her husband
in Vietnam, never got over it. Father Geary, the priest I told you
about, he looks like every devout parish rector from every old
sentimental Catholic movie ever made in the thirties and forties, but
when I met him he was weary and unsure of his calling. And you. . .
well, you’re pretty and amusing, and you have an air of efficiency about
you, but I’d never have guessed that you could be as relentless as you
are. You give the impression of a woman who moves easy through life,
interested in life and in her work, but never moving against a current,
always with it, easy. Yet you’re really like a bulldog when you get
your teeth in something.”
Staring at the dapple of light and shadow on the ceiling, holding his
strong hand, Holly considered his statement for a while. Finally she
said, “What’s your point?”
“People are always more. . . complex than you figure.”
“Is that just an observation. . . or a warning?”
He seemed surprised by her question. “Warning?”
“Maybe you’re warning me that you’re not what you seem to be.”
After another long pause, he said, “Maybe.”
She matched his silence. Then she said, “I guess I don’t care.”
He turned toward her. She moved against him with a shyness that she had
not felt in many years. His first kiss was gentle, and more
intoxicating than three bottles or three cases of Corona.
Holly realized she’d been deceiving herself She had needed the beer not
to soothe her nerves, not to insure an uninterrupted night of sleep, but
to give her the courage to seduce him-or to be seduced. She had sensed
that he was abysmally lonely, and she had told him so. Now she
understood that her loneliness had exceeded his, and that only the
smallest part of her desolation of spirit had resulted from her
disenchantment with journalism; most of it was simply the result of
being alone, for the most part, all of her adult life.