The Virgin of Small Plains

  Abby set the shotgun aside, and rose urgently to her feet.

  “How could you?” she asked, helplessly. “Why did you?”

  Hating herself, she started to cry in noisy, gulping sobs.

  Mitch crossed the space between them in under a second, and reached for her.

  Just before he kissed her, after he had wiped her tears with his hands, and stroked her wild, flyaway hair, and whispered, “I’m sorry, I’m so sorry, you’ll never know how sorry I am,” a million times, Abby said, just as urgently, “Wait!”

  She pulled away from him.

  Gently, she grasped the small creature on her shoulder. Holding him wrapped in her right hand, she brought him out from under her hair. Mitch’s eyes widened, but even in the darkness she saw a smile in them. Abby wrapped her other hand around Gracie so that the bird was safely cradled in a cocoon of her hands that did not allow the bird to bite anybody. Then she looked up into Mitch’s face, allowed him to wrap his arms around her again, bird and all, and let him bend his face down to kiss her, at last.

  Mitch thought, This is a mistake, even as he kissed her with a passionate longing, with a passionate sorrow that he hadn’t allowed himself to know he still felt. Abby thought, Tornadoes can come and wipe you off the earth, people you love can disappear overnight, you never know what’s going to happen in the next moment, and if you don’t take this one, it will never come again.

  “Wait!” she said, but only so she could put Gracie in a cage.

  “I’m not a virgin anymore,” she whispered, as he backed her toward her house.

  “Neither am I,” Mitch whispered back, as he followed her into her home.

  Seventeen years before, they might have been deliberate, careful, gentle.

  Seventeen years later, they were in a rush, for fear of whatever might still come between them. Neither of them was going to let that happen. This time, nothing was going to stop them. By the time they reached the edge of her bed, a powerfulness of emotion took them over, a furiousness. They pushed and pulled at each other as if they were angry—at life, at fate, at each other. They made love as if they were arguing, as if they were battling over who was to blame, and who would pay, and whether anything could ever make up for what they had lost, and whether terrible, soul-crushing debts could ever be paid in full.

  He pulled her T-shirt up over her breasts. She worked her hands between their two bodies, until she could find his belt buckle. He ripped at the button and zipper on her shorts until he got them loose. She got his belt off, got the button and zipper of his jeans open, and pushed her hands up his bare skin under his shirt, onto his chest.

  He rolled her roughly onto her back.

  She grabbed the back of his head and pulled his face down to make him kiss her.

  He pushed her legs apart with his knee. He pushed his hands down under her panties, down onto her thighs, between her legs.

  He pushed into her, she pulled him into her.

  They were violent with each other, and wild. Abby felt a great pressure build up in her chest and then it burst out in a great cry that felt as if it scraped the bottom of her soul. Her tears started flowing halfway through their passion and then wouldn’t stop, but just kept coming out of her in painful sobs. When she cried, he held her tighter, so tight it hurt her, but instead of fighting against the pain she welcomed it and let it hurt without telling him to stop. She heard him say her name over and over, but was afraid she was only imagining that he sounded as if he was pleading. When it was over, when they were panting and exhausted, they still clung together as if their sweat were adhesive. Finally, they relaxed their grip, and let each other go.

  Mitch rolled over, onto his back, and stared at the ceiling.

  Abby moved a few inches away from him, turning her face to the wall.

  After a few minutes, she said, “Why did you leave?”

  He didn’t answer.

  Both of them thought, This was a huge mistake.

  “I take the pill,” she told him, after their silence had gone on way too long.

  It would be all right if you didn’t, Mitch almost said, shocking himself.

  He didn’t say it. Instead he turned toward her in the bed and started to reach for her.

  She stopped him. Pushing her hands against his bare chest, she worked herself up into a sitting position above him. “You have to go.”

  “What?”

  “People are coming early, to help me clean up and rebuild. You have to go.”

  “You don’t want them to know I was here?”

  “No,” Abby said, turning to face him. “I don’t want anyone ever to know.” She swallowed, ignored the renewed pain in her heart, made her voice go firm and confident, made herself remember the pain he had caused her. And still refused to explain. “It was just one time, Mitch. That’s all. We were just making up for something we didn’t get to do a long time ago. That’s all it was. There won’t be any more.”

  He felt as if she had stabbed him.

  “You’re right,” he told her, his struggle for words making it come out harsh.

  “I know I am,” she said, her fight for control making it come out cold. “We’ll pretend we haven’t even talked to each other, okay?”

  “Sure.” He rolled away from her, to start grabbing his clothes. “Fine.”

  “Good,” she said, as she stared at his naked back, and fought her tears.

  You’re not going to do it to me again, she thought. I won’t let you.

  Mitch turned at her bedroom door to look back at her in the bed. He felt as if he’d been struck by lightning, blinded by its light so that everything looked dark now. It reminded him painfully of when he had taken his last look up at her bedroom window on the night everything had changed for them. All the light was going out. For a little while on this one night, the world had lit up again for him, and now it was all going out again. He couldn’t love her without hurting her in terrible ways, and so it was better to try not to love her at all. And, obviously, she didn’t care anything about him after all these years. In allowing him to make love to her—have sex with her—she had only been scratching an itch that had lingered from a long time ago.

  He couldn’t figure out a way to say good-bye that didn’t diminish what had just happened between them, any more than it was already demeaned, so he didn’t say anything at all. He just walked out of her bedroom, and then out of her house.

  Patrick stood in the shadows of the cottonwood tree outside Abby’s front fence line, and watched a tall man exit from her side door. It was four o’clock in the morning, and the sun wasn’t up yet. Patrick had arrived two hours earlier, had seen the unfamiliar and expensive car parked on her road. He had driven past, turned into the first cutoff, parked his truck out of sight, and walked back to wait and watch. Abby didn’t know anybody with a late-model Saab. Hell, she didn’t know anybody with a Saab. It wasn’t the kind of car that anybody in Small Plains drove, not because they didn’t want to, but because it would have been impossible to get repairs done locally.

  The tall man had to get a lot closer before Patrick recognized him.

  Mitch Newquist. In a way, Patrick wasn’t even surprised. He had heard that Mitch was back. He wasn’t even surprised that Abby had let him back in, only that it had happened so fast. Mitch couldn’t have been back more than a day or two, and he was already sleeping with her?

  Patrick stood by the side of the road, fighting the urge to kill somebody.

  He hadn’t felt this kind of cold/hot anger in years, not since his younger brother had told him, with a snide, satisfied, smirking air, that Sarah Francis wanted Mitch Newquist, instead of him. Patrick wasn’t going to let that happen again. There was too much at stake to lose it to a bastard who thought he could just waltz back into town and take over again.

  When Abby walked into her kitchen at five A.M., Patrick was already there.

  Startled to see him, and way beyond anything called “angry,” she said, in a hostile, shaking voi
ce, “What are you doing here?”

  He turned around quickly at the sound of her voice.

  “You mad, Abs? You mean, what am I doing here now, instead of last night, when you could have used some help? I’m really sorry I didn’t come over. We had some storm damage on the ranch, and I was stuck taking care of that. I tried calling but our lines were down. I didn’t even know you’d had trouble, or I would have dropped everything and come over.” His face was a mix of expressions—apology, sympathy, surprise at the way she was speaking to him, and also something that looked like frustration. “Listen, I hate to mention something so petty when you’ve got a whole barn down in your backyard, but while we’re standing here—have you seen my sunglasses?”

  “What?”

  “My shades. Damn things cost fifty bucks. I don’t want to lose them.”

  While Abby stared at him, Patrick bent down and peered under the kitchen table.

  “I left them here yesterday when I—aha!” Patrick hurried over to her refrigerator, reached into the space between it and a counter, and pulled out his sunglasses. He stood up, put them on, turned to face her, and grinned. “How the hell did they get down there? I think your damned birds must have done it. They hid them on purpose, Abby. I told you, those birds hate me.”

  She stared at his teasing grin.

  “Abby? What’s the matter? You know I’m only kidding, right? I don’t really think your birds hid my shades.” When he grinned at her again, but she just kept staring at him, he said, “Are you okay?”

  “My birds,” she whispered, and sank onto the floor, and burst into tears.

  Patrick pushed his sunglasses up into his hair and hurried to comfort her. “What happened?”

  “Lovey’s dead.”

  “Dead?”

  “In the storm. And J.D. flew away and hasn’t come back. And Gracie is traumatized. And I thought you did it, Patrick! I was positive…I was sure you left those glasses on the table this morning. I just knew you did. And they were there when I got home the first time this evening, but then they were gone the next time, and I thought that meant you’d come out here, and you hated my birds, and you took the opportunity to…”

  “Hurt them?” He sounded horrified. “I may hate them, but I wouldn’t hurt them.”

  “My sister and Cerule and Randie and Susan were here. I must have seen some sunglasses belonging to one of them and I thought they were yours. I was upset about…something else. I guess I wasn’t seeing things correctly.”

  “What were you upset about?”

  “Never mind,” she said, and began to sob again.

  He let her cry in his arms, waiting a bit before he said, “Hey, you know who’s back in town? Your old boyfriend, Mitch Newquist. Have you seen him?”

  Abby buried her face in his shoulder for a moment before whispering, “No.”

  He tensed, but hid it by gently tightening his embrace of her. “You’d better marry me, Abs.”

  She pulled away enough to look into his face. “Why?”

  He nodded toward the devastation outside her house. “Because this is a lot for one person to handle. I know you can do it, but why should you have to? When things happen, don’t you want somebody here to help you? And you wouldn’t just be getting me, you’d get my whole family that already loves you.” One side of his mouth crooked up in a half grin. “Better than they like me.”

  Patrick gently kissed her damp face. “You can’t stay single forever.”

  “Why can’t I?”

  “Because you’re not built for it, Abby.”

  “I always thought you were.”

  “That was before I fell for you.” He kissed her again, and as he did he smelled fresh soap on her, felt how damp she was from the shower, a shower taken sometime between four and five in the morning. “Poor Abs,” Patrick said as he stroked her hair. “I know you loved those birds.”

  After Patrick left, Abby got into her truck and drove aimlessly around for a while, looking for a flash of red in the skies. She made posters with J.D.’s photo on them and tacked them up all over town. She begged Rex to tell his deputies to keep a watch out for the parrot, and she went door-to-door downtown to ask everybody she saw to do the same for her. On an impulse, she even stopped by the cemetery to touch the Virgin’s grave and ask her help in finding him, or at least to keep him safe from harm.

  Finally, feeling stunned by loss and by the enormity of what she had done a few hours before, she drove back out to her property to join her employees as they began the work of cleaning up after the storm.

  Chapter Thirty

  Mitch spent the day distracting himself in every way he could think of to take his mind off Abby. He finished cleaning the ranch house and drove to another town to do more shopping that would make it possible to stay awhile. He spent the hours planning what he was going to do next, and considering the consequences of those plans. He drove into Small Plains only once, toward the close of the business day, to conduct some business of his own, parking on backstreets, wearing his baseball cap, lying low, avoiding eye contact on the streets.

  Everywhere he went, people were sweeping up after the storm.

  Storm…

  He heard the word in his brain, and felt a wry, unhappy laugh rising inside of him at the sound of it. He’d been inside of a storm, all right. He’d been swept up in a tornado of sex and memory, naked regret and short-lived ecstasy. Now he felt tossed out of it onto the hard, prickly ground. He felt bruised and used. It was, he decided, as the rueful, bitter feelings rose higher, an altogether appropriate way to feel as he worked up to the moment when he would walk back into his parents’ home for the first time in seventeen years.

  And then he thought, as he had many times over the preceding years, “Nobody loves a martyr. You lost. Get over it.” And then he thought, with a certain hard, delicious energy that wiped out everything else, “Get even.”

  It felt like history repeating itself.

  Early that evening, as twilight turned the prairie lavender, Mitch used his old keys to let himself into the big house at the top of the long driveway. He stepped inside, without knocking or ringing the bell, because…the hell with it, I’m his son, I won’t fucking knock first. Then, just like the last time, he closed the front door behind him and before he could take another step, there was the judge emerging from his office.

  “Hello, Dad.”

  “My God! Mitch!”

  His father looked him up and down, while Mitch stared back. He had expected to feel shocked at how his father had shrunk over time, but now he found it had not happened. The old man was still taller than he was. The hair was thinner, but not much, and still more brown than gray. His father had the same ramrod-straight posture that had always intimidated some defense attorneys in his courtroom. Reading glasses were perched halfway down his nose, as he stared over the tops of them. Mitch realized he had been picturing his father as aged, as if he were ninety-three, instead of merely sixty-seven, which was relatively young as such things went these days.

  It wasn’t true that Mitch had never seen his parents since he left. They had come to his college graduation. But they had not attended his wedding, because Mitch had not invited them. They had not seen his son, their only grandchild, though Mitch’s former wife had softened and sneaked some photos to them. He’d been furious at her for doing that, but then she had never really understood the depth of his feelings of betrayal and abandonment. Mitch had always had the feeling that she’d secretly believed he must have done something to deserve it, that there must be another side to the story, because he wasn’t always easy for her to live with, and because surely no parents would ever treat their son like that. But then, as Mitch had reminded her more than once, she had never met his parents. If she had, she might have understood how rigid and unforgiving they could be. Although—what was there for them to forgive? That was the question that Mitch always came back to, the point he kept trying to make to his wife—that he hadn’t done anything wrong an
d yet they had behaved as if he had committed some kind of awful crime, as if they were ashamed of him, as if they were doing him a favor by spiriting him away from everything he knew and loved. They had never visited any of the places he had lived in Kansas City. He wasn’t sure his father knew what he did for a living. There had come a point at which they had all stopped trying.

  After his wife sent the photos of their grandchild, there was no response.

  That, at last, had convinced her that maybe he was telling the truth.

  “I’m here,” Mitch said evenly. “You may as well invite me in.”

  The judge shook his head, as if chasing away cobwebs.

  “Why are you here?”

  “I came to see Mother’s grave.”

  “A little late, aren’t you?”

  Mitch felt his face twitch with anger before he could control it.

  “There’s coffee,” his father said, abruptly. He turned his back and led the way into the kitchen as if expecting Mitch to follow after him.

  After a moment of inner debate in which he seriously considered stalking out and slamming the door, Mitch took a step forward and then kept going into the kitchen.

  “House looks mostly the same,” Mitch observed, over a cup of the atrocious instant coffee that his father still seemed to prefer. “So do you.”

  “Yes. It was your mother who changed.”

  Mitch’s hackles started to rise, he started to snap out something argumentative, but then he realized his father had said it in a neutral tone and that he was only talking about her illness. If the old man so much as hinted it was Mitch’s fault, that she had got sick because of him, Mitch was going to tell him to go to hell. But so far, everything was diplomatic, safe. Instead of cursing his father, Mitch reached for a sugar bowl in a futile attempt to improve the coffee. When he had left home, he wasn’t a coffee drinker. Now he was. Now he was many things that were different from the way he’d been before. Being a coffee addict was probably one of the more benign of them, he thought.