The Virgin of Small Plains

  They took their drive the next night.

  “I brought you something else,” Rex said, before he started the car.

  “What?” Sarah looked beautiful in the darkness, just as he had fantasized she would. He prayed that he looked better in the dark, too.

  He reached into a little paper sack at his side, brought something up out of it, and handed it to her. “Here. So your hair won’t blow in your face and drive you crazy.”

  “A scrunchie? What color is it?”

  She held it up, but it was impossible to tell its color in the darkness.

  “Red.”

  “Good.” She raised her arms, smoothed her hair into a ponytail, and slipped the elasticized band around it. Then she sighed, a nice long ahhh that suggested it felt really good to get her hair held back like that. She turned and smiled at him. “I don’t know how in the world you thought of this, but thanks.”

  He wanted to reach over and touch it, but restrained himself.

  They drove and drove for two and a half hours, from a quarter to two in the morning until he dropped her off at a quarter after four, while it was still dark even in the east, where the sun would be coming up.

  But instead of driving away with his heart soaring, Rex drove away with his heart aching.

  She had loved the drive. She had talked and laughed, joked, and even made teasing affectionate fun of him now and then. But what she had talked about was another boy. Sarah was in love with somebody else.

  “He’s sooo good looking!” she exclaimed. “Don’t you think so?”

  “I don’t really think about guys that way.”

  “Well, he is. And he’s so nice—”

  “Nice?”

  “Oh, yeah, really nice, and smart. Does he ever talk about me?”

  “Um, I think he mentioned you—”

  “Really? Oh, God, what did he say?”

  “I guess he thinks you’re pretty cool.”

  Again, she sighed, but even more happily this time.

  It bugged him that she sounded just like any ordinary, average teenage girl he had ever known. But it killed him much more to hear her saying the same damned things he’d heard most of those same girls say to him at one time or another over the course of his lifetime. Ol’ Rex, the Cute Girl’s Best Bud, never the boyfriend. Good ol’ Rex, always the bridesmaid, never the bride. He was used to swallowing his pride and his own desire. He was accustomed to being the confidant, the good sport. He was used to telling himself it didn’t matter if a million girls didn’t want him, because all a man really needed was one true love, and even he was surely going to get to have that someday. Of course, Mitch always laughed, and claimed that the trouble with Rex was that he wanted the girls who didn’t want him, and ignored the ones who did. And, okay, maybe that had been true once, or twice, but it wasn’t the point. He wasn’t a handsome guy, not like some of his friends were, and he was the one that other guys’ girls always sought out to tell their secrets to, instead of wanting him as much as he wanted some of them. It always hurt to be placed so far down on the Choice List, but this time it ripped at him like he was a goddamned fish being filleted.

  The only comfort to Rex was that it wasn’t Patrick that Sarah loved.

  No, there was one other comfort…when Patrick came home from college, Rex would make sure he knew that Sarah cared only for Mitch.

  He felt so hurt, so disappointed and ego-flayed that he didn’t go out to see her for three long weeks. Let Nadine Newquist supply her with what she needed, he thought bitterly. He’d practically gone broke buying her stuff anyway. She had never paid him back for any of it. Not that he had minded at the time, figuring that she couldn’t possibly have much money to spend. But now it pissed him off and made him feel used. Hell, he couldn’t afford to be her errand boy any longer. He wasn’t gonna do it anymore. And why should he, when it wasn’t even him she wanted to see?

  He hadn’t asked her if Mitch ever went out to see her. Maybe he didn’t want to know. It would be awful if he found out that not only did Mitch own her heart, but that his best friend was also cheating on Abby, his other best friend. And then what would Rex do? He didn’t think he trusted himself not to be so pissed and jealous that he wouldn’t spill the whole thing to Abs.

  Rex didn’t spend much time with Mitch during those three weeks, either.

  He made excuses about ranch work and homework, he joked about needing to fill out college applications for Harvard and Yale, he hinted there was a new girl in another town that maybe he was driving off to see.

  Mitch didn’t seem to sense anything was wrong, except to begin to look annoyed and say, “Where the hell you been, man?”

  Abby was starting to give him funny, appraising glances, and starting to sidle up to Rex and whisper, “What’s her name, hmm?”

  When he finally did drive out, just to make sure Sarah was okay (he told himself), she wasn’t there. Not only was she not present at the house, but it was locked up tight the way the Newquists liked everything to be, down to a shiny new padlock on the storm cellar door. When Rex tried to look in through the windows of the house, he didn’t see any sign that Sarah had ever been there.

  He never saw her again, not until he saw her in the blizzard five months later.

  Chapter Twenty-nine

  In the aftermath of the tornado, Abby sat in the dark, in a chair backed into a corner of her screened-in porch. She had a small bird on one shoulder, pressed up against her neck, and a shotgun on her lap. Her electricity was out. Her business was destroyed. One of her birds was dead, another was missing, and the third was still too terrified to be moved into its cage. Gracie had crawled into a tent of Abby’s hair, moved into its shelter, and would not be budged, on pain of biting. Abby could feel the little beak pressed against her skin, and Gracie’s feathers, soft and trembling.

  “Baby, baby,” Abby whispered, over and over, as tears ran down her face.

  The bird made tiny sounds, then went still, then made the little sounds again. They broke Abby’s heart. She felt horrible guilt every time she thought about how terrified and helpless her birds had been. She was heartsick imagining J.D. out in the countryside with no idea how to feed himself or protect himself from predators. If he was still alive, he was a target for hawks and eagles.

  Just like her remaining pet, Abby was trembling, in fits of shakes and sobs that came and went like tornadoes inside of her. She wasn’t crying for her business. It was only wood and nails and glass she’d lost. Nurseries could be rebuilt, and that’s what insurance was for. Flowers would grow again. That’s what flowers did. She wasn’t crying for her business, and she wasn’t shaking from fear. People had warned her about the possibilities of looters, but she had scoffed at the idea of anyone who would come all the way out here to pick through shattered pieces of clay pots and slivers of rotten barn wood. Her sister and her friends had offered to stay with her, but she had shooed them back to their own homes to check for storm damage. Rex had said he’d post a deputy to discourage evildoers, but she had declined that offer, too.

  “Mitch is in town,” he’d told her.

  “I know. I saw him.”

  “Me, too.”

  “Did you…talk?”

  “Said hello, that’s all,” Rex told her. “Did you?”

  “No, I don’t think he even saw me.”

  That was all they’d said about it; they had more pressing problems on their minds.

  And now, sitting on her porch, Abby wasn’t afraid, and she wasn’t waiting for looters.

  She was waiting in the darkness with a shotgun for Patrick.

  He had come back to her house while she was gone. But not during the day. The sunglasses had still been on the kitchen table when she had arrived home and found her friends in her kitchen. The sunglasses were gone the next time she saw the table. She had figured out that he had to have come by between the time they all went into town and when they all rushed back after the tornado hit, probably to deliver the hay she had
requested that morning, and maybe to check on her. She hadn’t heard from him.

  Patrick hated her birds.

  Patrick had said only that morning, “It’s them, or me, Abby.”

  He had threatened to kill them, a threat she hadn’t taken as a joke even when he had said it.

  And tornadoes, no matter how strange their paths of destruction, did not unlatch bird-proof locks from the inside.

  When he finally showed up, he didn’t drive up to the house.

  Abby heard the vehicle coming up the road, heard him park it on the verge, heard the door close quietly, and then barely heard his footsteps as he came up her driveway. He was trying not to wake her, she thought. He was trying to sneak up and into her house and then into her bed. He would think he had nothing to fear from her birds anymore—he had probably expected Gracie to fly away in a panic, too. But he would know that he needed to arrive in the way he had in the past—opening her front door so that the hinges didn’t squeak, removing his boots and tiptoeing past the cage as if he didn’t know how empty it was now.

  Finally, she heard gravel under his feet, and knew he was close by.

  “I’m out here,” she called to him. “On the porch.”

  She knew she’d scared the hell out of him by doing that. He had probably jumped a foot from sheer surprise and guilt. If Patrick ever felt any guilt. Abby doubted it. How could any man do what he had done that night and also be a human being who felt the agonies of guilt, such as she was feeling for having ever allowed him into her life, her house, not to mention her bed and her body!

  She saw the outline of a tall, broad-shouldered man in the darkness.

  Quietly, she put both of her hands on the shotgun, moved it until it was pointed at the door, and slowly, carefully, almost silently, pulled the safety back. Her right index finger crooked around the trigger. She wasn’t actually going to shoot him, she was only going to scare the holy hell out of him and run him off her property.

  The tall, dark figure stepped silently onto her porch steps.

  He fumbled for the door handle, then slowly pulled it open, and stepped in.

  Abby raised the gun until it was aimed at the figure’s chest.

  “Hold it right there, Patrick!”

  “Abby?” he asked, in a shocked tone.

  When she heard his voice, she nearly pulled the trigger from shock, herself, and only just in time lowered her gun before she killed him. When the man took two more steps forward, Abby’s breath caught in her throat, and she went dead silent.

  It wasn’t Patrick standing in front of her looking nervously at her gun.

  “Mitch,” she said, and it wasn’t a question.

  Mitch stood in front of Abby on the dark porch and said, “I didn’t expect to see you. I was—I was just—”

  “Yeah, everybody drives down my road at two in the morning,” Abby said coldly.

  “I heard you got hit by the tornado—”

  “So you just showed up after seventeen years to, what? Help?”

  She was shocked at how calmly she was able to talk to him, how frigid she could keep her tone, and how well she was managing not to shoot him, in lieu of Patrick. They both deserved it. But she was also furious at herself for rolling the number “seventeen” off her tongue so quickly, giving him the idea she knew or cared how long he had been gone.

  “What the hell are you doing here, Mitch?”

  He gestured toward her gun. “Taking my life in my hands?”

  Abby said nothing, but she did put the safety back on.

  “Were you really going to shoot your husband?”

  “My what? Patrick’s not my husband,” she said scornfully. Let him think she had some other husband if he wanted to. “Where’d you get that idea, anyway?”

  “I don’t know, I just—”

  He lapsed into silence. Stubbornly, she vowed not to be the one to break it.

  I never meant for this to happen was Mitch’s thought as he stood on the dark porch trying to figure out what to say next to Abby Reynolds, who didn’t appear inclined to speak to him.

  He had thought he was only going to meander around on the country roads until he got tired enough to sleep again. But somehow the roads all seemed to direct him toward the north and east. He had turned onto the highway, where he was alone with the big tractor-trailer trucks ferrying goods between Kansas City and Wichita and beyond. Quickly tiring of that, he had taken one of the first turnoffs he came to, which had just happened to be the road with the small green arrow pointing down the lane.

  Strictly coincidence, he was sure of it.

  Then curiosity had gotten the best of him, and he had decided that he needed to know if Abby’s place really had been hit by the tornado he had seen. He decided he would drive by it in the dark, that was all, just drive past, check it out, and then drive home again. When he heard himself apply the word “home” to the ranch house, he quickly amended it.

  But when he had pulled within sight of her property, there was something wrong.

  Because he had seen it only twice before—driving past it—he couldn’t figure out at first what was wrong, or missing. And then, Jesus!, he realized her whole barn/greenhouse was down. There was…nothing…where a dark profile of a good-sized building should have been. His heart began to hammer with fear as he looked toward her house. Thank God, it was still standing. That was all he could think over the pounding of his pulse.

  There were no lights on, but he saw one truck parked there.

  Mitch remembered it as being the “other” truck he had seen that morning, which now seemed ages ago. One truck, the one that Patrick Shellenberger had torn out of the driveway in, was new, red. This one was battered, older, black. Abby’s truck?

  Was she all right? Was she home when the twister hit?

  Either Abby was asleep in that dark house—without Patrick, apparently—or she had gone to stay with somebody, or…

  He couldn’t just drive by. He couldn’t do it. He had to know…something.

  Mitch got out of his car as if invisible hands, ghost hands, were tugging at him.

  They bade him leave his door ajar so he wouldn’t make a noise by slamming it, then pushed him along her gravel driveway, pointing him in the direction of her home.

  This, he thought, remembering Patrick, is a good way to get myself shot.

  Nevertheless, he kept walking, and the invisible hands kept tugging.

  When her voice called out, “I’m out here. I’m on the porch,” Mitch felt shock and then relief. Abby! And it wasn’t just any relief—it was enormous, surprising, overwhelming relief. She was all right. She was alive. He realized he would have recognized that voice anywhere, even if he hadn’t already heard it once that day, even if he had never heard it again until the last day of his life on earth. He realized that if he had been lying on his deathbed and the telephone had rung, and he had picked it up and she had said, “Hi,” from that single syllable, he would have known her.

  He didn’t want to think about what his feeling of relief might mean.

  If he could, he was going to refuse to allow it to mean anything.

  This, after all, was the disappointing woman who had married Patrick Shellenberger.

  His own feelings just now meant nothing, Mitch informed himself. He moved to do her bidding—her shout had an implied order in it, come here! His strong emotional reaction, he told himself, meant only that he wasn’t an entirely hard-hearted bastard, after all. It suggested that even he could be glad that a fellow human being had survived a storm.

  Yeah, Mitch mocked himself as he opened the porch door. Sure. That’s what it means, all right. And if you believe that, I’ve got a piece of real estate on a dry lake to sell you.

  Abby had two clear thoughts as she looked up at the man who stood before her on her porch. One was, God, he’s gorgeous. The other was, I look like hell.

  Mitch cleared his throat. “You said Patrick’s not your husband. Is somebody else?”

  She
almost laughed. “No. You’re married, aren’t you?”

  “Divorced.”

  “Oh.”

  “I have a son.”

  “I heard.”

  “He’s six.”

  “That’s nice.”

  It was nice, she thought. And it made her throat close up with grief for her own loss of the children she had once dreamed she’d have with him.

  “What about you?” he asked.

  “What about me what?” she asked, purposely obtuse.

  “Do you—” He seemed to have something stuck in his throat, too. He cleared his throat. “You have kids?”

  Abby thought, This is ridiculous, and I’m not going to play.

  She sat with the bird hidden on her shoulder and the shotgun not hidden on her lap, and recommenced being silent.

  But, after a moment she relented and said, “No.”

  After another moment, he shifted from one leg to the other, and turned his head to look toward where her barn used to be.

  “I guess you got hit by the tornado.”

  “I guess I did,” she said dryly.

  He turned back around to look in her face. “Abby—”

  “What?”

  This time, he was the one who lapsed into silence.

  “This is the part where you say you’re sorry,” she blurted, surprising herself and, judging by the expression on his face, him. “This is the part where you tell me why you left, Mitch.”

  It had been a ferocious day, dramatic things had happened to her, somebody she trusted, sort of, had done a terrible thing to her. Her emotions were as raw as a fresh wound, and his appearance was pouring salt by the bucketfuls into it. The dam she’d try to place before her words broke loose and all hell with it. “What are you doing here, Mitch? Why are you in town, after all these years? And why…why in the hell… are you here, at my home, at two o’clock in the morning!”

  It came out sounding anguished. It was anguished, as was the look he gave her.