The Witching Hour

  Silence, then:

  "I was hungry," she whispered.

  He shook himself all over. He cracked open a fresh beer. The delicious malty aroma filled the car.

  "And now you don't like me very much, do you?" he asked.

  She didn't respond. She was just staring at the traffic.

  He was dazed by the headlights looming at him. Thank God they were turning off the main highway onto the narrow road that led into Tiburon.

  "I like you a lot," she answered finally. Voice low, purring, husky.

  "I'm glad," he said. "I was really afraid ... I'm just glad. I don't know why I said all those things ... "

  "I asked you what you saw," she said simply.

  He laughed, taking a deep drink of the beer.

  "We're almost home," she said. "Would you slow down on the beer? It's a doctor asking."

  He took another deep drink. Again the kitchen, the smell of roast in the oven, the open red wine, the two glasses.

  ... it seems brutal but there is absolutely no reason for me to subject myself to her dying, and if you choose to stay around and watch a woman die of cancer, well, then you have to ask why you want to subject yourself to that kind of thing, why you love that sort of suffering, what's wrong with you that ...

  Don't hand me that crap, not me!

  Something more to it, much more. And all you have to do to see it is to keep thinking about it. Gave you everything you ever wanted, Rowan. You know you were always the thing holding us together. I would have left a long time ago if it wasn't for you. Did Ellie ever tell you that? She lied to me. She said she could have children. She knew it was a lie. I would have packed it in if it hadn't been for you.

  They made a right turn, west, he figured, into a dark wooded street that climbed a hill and then descended. Flash of the great clear dark sky again, full of distant uninteresting stars, and across the black midnight bay, the great lovely spectacle of Sausalito tumbling down the hills to its crowded little harbor. She didn't have to tell him they were almost there.

  "Let me ask you something, Dr. Mayfair."

  "Yes?"

  "Are you ... are you afraid of hurting me?"

  "Why do you ask that?"

  "I just got the strangest idea, that you were trying ... just now when I held your hand ... you were trying to throw me a warning."

  She didn't answer. He knew he'd shaken her with the statement.

  They drove down and onto the shoreline street. Small lawns, pitched roofs barely visible above high fences, Monterey cypress trees cruelly twisted by the relentless western winds. An enclave of millionaire dwellings. He almost never saw such wonderful modern houses.

  He could smell the water even more keenly than he had on the Golden Gate.

  She pulled into a paved drive, and killed the motor. The lights flooded a great double redwood gate. Then went out. Of the house beyond, he could see nothing but darkness against a paler sky.

  "I want something from you," she said. She sat there quietly staring forward. Her hair swung down to veil her profile as she bowed her head.

  "Well, I owe you one," he answered without hesitation. He took another deep foamy drink of the beer. "What do you want?" he asked. "That I go in there and I lay my hands on the kitchen floor and tell you what happened when he died, what actually killed him?"

  Another jolt. Silence in the dark cockpit of the car. He found himself sharply aware of her nearness, of the sweet clean fragrance of her skin. She turned to face him. The street lamp threw its light in yellow patches through the branches of the tree. First he thought her eyes were lowered, almost closed. Then he realized they were open and looking at him.

  "Yes, that's what I want," she said. "That is the sort of thing I want."

  "That's fine," he answered. "Bad luck for it to happen during an argument like that. You must have blamed yourself."

  Her knee grazed his. Chills again.

  "What makes you think so?"

  "You can't bear the thought of hurting anyone," he said.

  "That's naive."

  "I may be crazy, Doctor"--he laughed--"but naive I ain't. The Currys never raised any naive children." He drank the rest of the can of beer in a long swallow. He found himself staring at the pale line of the light on her chin, her soft curling hair. Her lower lip looked full and soft and delicious to kiss ...

  "Then it's something else," she said. "Call it innocence if you like."

  He scoffed at that without answering. If only she knew what was in his mind just now as he looked at her mouth, her sweet full mouth.

  "And the answer to that question is yes," she said. She got out of the car.

  He opened the door and stood up. "What the hell question is that?" he asked. He blushed.

  She pulled his suitcase out of the back. "Oh, you know," she said.

  "I do not!"

  She shrugged as she started towards the gate. "You wanted to know if I would go to bed with you. The answer's yes, as I just told you."

  He caught up with her as she went through the gate. A broad cement path led to the black teakwood double doors.

  "Well, I wonder why the hell we even bother to talk," he said. He took the suitcase from her as she fumbled for the key.

  She looked a little confused again. She gestured for him to go inside. As she took the sack of beer from him, he scarcely noticed.

  The house was infinitely more beautiful than he had imagined. Countless old houses he'd known and explored. But this sort of house, this carefully crafted modern masterpiece, was something unfamiliar to him.

  What he saw now was a great expanse of broad plank floor, flowing from dining room to living room to game room without division. Glass walls opened on a broad apron of wooden decking to the south and to the west and to the north, a deep roofless porch softly illuminated from above by an occasional dim floodlamp. Beyond, the bay was simply black and invisible. And the small twinkling lights of Sausalito to the west were delicate and intimate compared to the distant splendid southern view of the crowded and violently colored skyline of San Francisco.

  The fog was only a thin slash of mist now against the brilliance of the night, thinning and vanishing even as he gazed at it.

  He might have looked at the view forever, but the house struck him as similarly miraculous. Letting out a long sigh, he ran his hand along the tongue and groove wall, admiring the same fine inlay of the lofty ceiling beyond its heavy beams which rose steeply to a central point. All wood, beautifully grained wood, pegged and fitted and polished and preserved exquisitely. Wood framed the massive glass doors. Wood furnishings stood here and there, with dim flashes of glass or leather, chair and table legs reflected in the sheen of the floor.

  In the eastern corner of the house stood the kitchen he had seen in the early flashing vision--a large alcove of dark wooden cabinets and countertops, and shining copper pots strung from overhead hooks. A kitchen to be looked at as well as worked in. Only a deep stone fireplace, with a high broad hearth--the kind of hearth you could sit on--separated this kitchen from the other rooms.

  "I didn't think you'd like it," she said.

  "Oh, but it's wonderful." He sighed. "It's made like a ship. I've never seen a new house so finely made."

  "Can you feel it moving? It's made to move, with the water."

  He walked slowly across the thick carpet of the living room. And only then saw a curving iron stairs behind the fireplace. A soft amber light fell from an open doorway above. He thought of bedrooms at once, of rooms as open as these, of lying in the dark with her and the glimmer of city lights. His face grew hot again.

  He glanced at her. Had she caught this thought, the way she claimed to have caught his earlier question? Hell, any woman could have picked up on that.

  She stood in the kitchen before an open refrigerator door, and for the first time in the clear white light he really saw her face. Her skin had almost an Asian smoothness, only it was too purely blond to be Asian. The skin was so tight that it made two dimpl
es in her cheeks now when she smiled at him.

  He moved towards her, keenly aware of her physical presence again, of the way the light was glancing off her hands, and the glamorous way her hair moved. When women wear their hair that way, so full and short, just sweeping the collar as it sways, it becomes a vital part of every gesture, he figured. You think of them and you think of their pretty hair.

  But as she shut the refrigerator door, as the clear white light went out, he realized that through the northern glass wall of the house, far to his left and very near the front door, he could see a mammoth white cabin cruiser at anchor. A weak floodlamp illuminated its immense prow, its numerous portholes, and the dark windows of its wheelhouse.

  It seemed monstrously large, an altogether impossible thing--like a whale beached on the site--grotesquely close to the soft furnishings and scattered rugs that surrounded him. A near panic rose in him. A curious dread, as though he had known a terror on the night of his rescue that was part of what he'd forgotten.

  Nothing to do but go to it. Nothing to do but lay his hands on the deck. He found himself moving towards the glass doors; then he stopped, confused, and watched as she pulled backed the latch and slid the heavy glass door open.

  A gust of cold salty wind struck him. He heard the creaking of the huge boat; and the weak lunar light of the flood seemed grim and distinctly unpleasant to him. Seaworthy, they had said. He could believe it when he looked at this craft. Explorers had crossed the oceans of the world in boats much smaller than that. Again, it appeared grotesque to him, frighteningly out of scale.

  He stepped out on the pier, his collar blowing against his cheek, and moved towards the edge. The water was perfectly black down below, and he could smell it, smell the dank odor of inevitable dead things of the sea.

  Far across the bay he could just glimpse the Sausalito lights, but the penetrating cold came between him and anything picturesque just now, and he realized that all he so hated in this western clime was coalesced in this moment. Never the rugged winter, nor the burning summer; only this eternal chill, this eternal inhospitable harshness.

  He was so glad that he would soon be home, so glad that the August heat would be there waiting for him, like a warm blanket. Garden District streets, trees swaying in a warm and inoffensive wind--

  But this was the boat, and this was the moment. Now to get on this thing with its portholes and its slippery-looking decks, rocking gently now against the black rubber tires nailed to the long side of the pier. He didn't like it very much, that was for certain. And he was damned glad he had on his gloves.

  His life on boats had been limited exclusively to large ones--old river ferries in his boyhood, and the big powerful tourist cruisers that carried hundreds back and forth across San Francisco Bay. When he looked at a boat like this all he thought about was the possibility of falling off.

  He moved down the side of the thing until he had reached the back, behind the big hulking wheelhouse, and then he grabbed hold of the railing, leapt up on the side--startled for an instant by the fact that the boat dipped under his weight--and swung himself over as fast as possible onto the back deck.

  She came right behind him.

  He hated this, the ground moving under him! Christ, how could people stand boats! But the craft seemed stable enough now. The rails around him were high enough to give a feeling of safety. There was even a little shelter from the wind.

  He peered for a moment through the glass door of the wheelhouse. Glimmer of dials, gadgets. Might as well have been the cockpit of a jet plane. Maybe a stairs in there to the cabins below deck.

  Well, that was of no concern to him. It was the deck itself that mattered, for he had been out here when he was rescued.

  The wind off the water was a roar in his ears. He turned and looked at her. Her face was perfectly dark against the distant lights. She took her hand out of the pocket of her coat and pointed to the boards right before her.

  "Right here," she said.

  "When I opened my eyes? When I breathed for the first time?"

  She nodded.

  He knelt down. The movement of the boat felt slow now and subtle, the only sound a faint creaking that seemed to come from no specific place. He took off his gloves, stuffed them into his pockets, and flexed his hands.

  Then he laid them on the boards. Cold; wet. The flash came as always out of nowhere, severing him from the now. But it wasn't his rescue he saw, only bits and snatches of other people in the very midst of conversation and movement, Dr. Mayfair, then the hated dead man again, and with them a pretty older woman, much loved, a woman named Ellie--but this layer gave way to another, and another, and the voices were noise.

  He fell forward on his knees. He was getting dizzy, but he refused to stop touching the boards. He was groping like a blind man. "For Michael," he said. "For Michael!"

  And suddenly his anger over all the misery of the long wasted summer rose in him. "For Michael!" he said, while inwardly he pushed the power, he demanded that it sharpen and focus and reach for the images he wanted.

  "God, give me the moment when I first breathed," he whispered. But it was like shuffling through volumes to find one simple line. Graham, Ellie, voices rising and crashing against each other. He refused to find words in his head for what he saw; he rejected it. "Give me the moment." He lay out flat with the roughened deck under his cheek.

  Quite suddenly the moment seemed to burst around him, as if the wood beneath him had caught flame. Colder than this, a more violent wind. The boat was tossing. She was bending over him; and he saw himself lying there, a dead man with a white wet face; she was pounding on his chest. "Wake up, damn you, wake up!"

  His eyes opened. Yes, what I saw, her, Rowan, yes. I'm alive, I'm here! Rowan, many things ... The pain in his chest had been unbearable. He could not even feel life in his hands and legs. Was that his hand, going up, grabbing her hand?

  Must explain, the whole thing before ...

  Before what? He tried to cling to it, go deeper into it. Before what? But there was nothing there but her pale oval face the way he'd seen it that night, hair squashed beneath the watch cap.

  Suddenly, in the now, he was pounding his fist on the deck.

  "Give me your hand," he shouted.

  She knelt down beside him. "Think, think of what happened at that moment when I first breathed."

  But he knew already that was no good. He only saw what she saw. Himself, a dead man coming to life. A dead wet thing tossing on the deck under the blows she repeatedly applied to his chest, and then the silver slit between his lids as he opened his eyes.

  For a long time he lay still, his breath coming unevenly. He knew he was miserably cold again, though nothing as cold as that terrible night, and that she was standing there, patiently waiting. He would have cried, but he was just too tired for that, too defeated. It was as if the images slammed him around when they came. He wanted just stillness. His hands were rolled into fists. He wasn't moving.

  But there was something there, something he'd discovered, some little thing he hadn't known. It was about her, that in those first few seconds he'd known who she was, he'd known about her. He'd known her name was Rowan.

  But how could such a conclusion be trusted? God, his soul ached from the effort. He lay defeated, angry, feeling foolish and yet belligerent. He would have cried maybe if she hadn't been there.

  "Try it again," she said now.

  "It's no good, it's another language. I don't know how to use it."

  "Try," she said.

  And he did. But he got nothing this time but the others. Flashes of sunny days, rushes of Ellie and then Graham, and others, lots of others, rays of light that would have taken him in this direction or that, the wheelhouse door banging in the wind, a tall man coming up from below, no shirt on, and Rowan. Yes, Rowan, Rowan, Rowan, Rowan there with every figure he had seen, always Rowan, and sometimes a happy Rowan. Nobody had ever been on this boat that Rowan wasn't there, too.

  He rose
to his knees, more confused by the second effort than the first. The knowledge of having known her on that night was only an illusion, a thin layer of her profound impression on this boat, merely mingling with the other layers through which he'd reached. Knew her maybe because he held her hand, knew her maybe because before he'd been brought back he'd known how it would be done. He would never know for sure.

  But the point was he didn't know her now, and he still couldn't remember! And she was just a very patient and understanding woman, and he ought to thank her and go.

  He sat up. "Damn it all," he whispered. He pulled on his gloves. He took out his handkerchief and blew his nose and then he pulled his collar up against the wind, but what good did that do with a khaki jacket?

  "Come on inside," she said. She took his hand as if he were a little child. It was surprising to him how much he appreciated it. Once they were over the side of the damned wobbly slippery boat and he stood on the pier, he felt better.

  "Thanks, Doctor," he said. "It was worth a try, and you let me try, and for that, I can't say thanks enough."

  She slipped her arm around him. Her face was very close to his face. "Maybe it will work another time." Sense of knowing her, that below deck was a little cabin in which she often slept with his picture pasted to the mirror. Was he blushing again?

  "Come inside," she said again, tugging him along.

  The shelter of the house felt good. But he was too sad and tired now to think much about it. He wanted to rest. But he didn't dare. Have to get to the airport, he thought, have to gather up the suitcase and get out there, then sleep in a plastic chair. This had been one road to discovery and now it was cut, and so he was going to take the other road as fast as he could.

  Glancing back at the boat, he thought that he wanted to tell them again that he hadn't discarded the purpose, it was just that he couldn't remember. He didn't even know if the doorway was a literal doorway. And the number, there had been a number, hadn't there? A very significant number. He leaned against the glass door, pressed his head to the glass.

  "I don't want you to go," she whispered.

  "No, I don't want to go either," he said, "but I have to. You see, they really do expect something of me. And they told me what it was, and I have to do what I can, and I know that going back is part of it."