"You
taste like the sun," she told him, "like you've got it all bottled up inside
you."
Mike
grinned, his teeth flashing whitely in the night, and pulled her closer.
"Solar paneling, baby," he said lascviciously. "Gives me energy for later."
"Oh,
it does, does it?" she wondered, and ran her hands over his face like a
blind woman.
They
were nearly blind, out here in the desert, past midnight, with only the
stars and half of a moon lighting the world. But though their features
were blurred in blue black Mike would see Alexa's eyes gleam or she would
catch the bright white of his mouth and they would believe they could see
everything worthwhile.
After
nearly three weeks, they threw the cautions of Rosa to the winds and met
like this, under layers of night, out a half mile from the cabins. It was
surreptitious, it was slightly dangerous, and it reeked of being caught.
Not that much could come of being 'caught,' but it was titillating to think
trouble lay on the horizon. In any case, they could not stop themselves.
Two weeks had been too long, nearly three was insane. Alexa told him later
when she had come out in the morning for her physical therapy bath and
found his message, she had nearly fallen to her knees and wept with relief.
Rosa had told her tales much in the same way she had told tales to Mike,
namely that he did not want to see her until she was ready, and since during
the first few days all she had been able to do was halfheartedly enter
a few discussion groups, surely she did not want Mike to think they had
come all this way for nothing. Alexa told this to Mike, and when they found
their stories converging, they realized they had been played expertly,
but they no longer cared. What mattered was that they now knew which rules
could be violated, and they broke the same one every night, out here, alone,
in the desert.
"D'you
think," Alexa wondered lazily, "that Rosa knew you'd come after me? And
when you did, that then it would be all right?"
"You
mean," followed Mike, "she never would've let us get back together if I
hadn't gone to find you?"
"Maybe."
"Yep."
Thus
justified, they kept the delicious treat of sneaking out to meet each other
to themselves. Mike stopped pestering Rosa about "when," and Alexa wiped
the message from the floorboards of her cabin. And Rosa never said a word.
"When
you showed up out here the other night," Mike told her for the twentieth
time, "I didn't know if you were real or part of my dream."
"I
don't know how I found you," she repeated back to him.
"It
was really dark. You could have gotten so lost."
"I
promise not to do it again."
"Don't
you dare," he said, and bumped his forehead into hers. It was the same
conversation, in slightly varying form, spoken like a religious ritual,
they had every night since their reunion. That night thad danced until
the soles of their feet hurt from the sand and the rocks beneath, and she
had pulled him very close to her.
"I
smell funny," he had said, breathily. "I've been sweating all day out here.
I must smell like an iguana."
She
had wrinkled her nose at him. "Iguana make love to you," she had whispered,
trying to keep a straight face, and failed. They had burst out laughing.
"Gorilla
my dreams," he had hiccuped, and fitted his arms around her waist, a matched
set, his arms, her body.
"I
like whatever you smell like," she had said. "I don't care."
"We
always were good with reconciliations," he had said, and their eyes met,
catching on the same memory at once, when he had stood outside a small
Boston nightclub in the pouring rain, waiting for her to get a note from
him, to see if she would come out. "Let's go back to my cabin."
She
had rested her hands lightly on his shoulders and pressed down. "I don't
want to wait," she had said, and without letting go of one another they
lowered themselves to the desert floor. He had thought to himself the ground
would be so uncomfortable but she never said a word about it, and despite
the sand and the dark and the insects they had made furtive, impatient
love, not the desperate, clinging sort of attacks they had gotten used
to over the past year or so, but not entirely the abandoned, noisy version
they had perfected prior to her sickness. It was expecting too much right
away; they were too frightened of what lay in the days ahead to give themselves
over to trusting the sheer pleasure of it. When they had finished, Mike
had propped himself up on one elbow and studied the profile of her by moonlight,
resting one hand flat on her stomach.
"I'm
sorry," she had said. "We shouldn't have rushed like that."
Mike
had shaken his head. "I don't know..." he trailed off, and traced her navel
with a finger absently. "There's a difference between doing it, and doing
it right. Something was missing."
"It's
us," she had said, choked. "We've lost whatever we had."
"Stop
it," he had hissed. "That's a lie. You know it. It's like a bicycle. We
fell off. We'll get the hang again."
Alexa
had stared at the sky.
The
next night he wanted her all over again, as if his body had no recollection
of the disappointment of the night before. In all of the technical ways,
the night before should have been perfect. They had gone through the motions
and should have felt satisfied. But even with the setting and the anticipation
and the reuniting...the joy was not in it. So he quashed his desires as
best as he could and when she had come to him the second time Mike had
taken her head in his hands and held it tightly, sitting down with her
and said something he never thought he would say to her: "we'll skip tonight,
honey. I just want to sit with you." And sit they had, joined always by
hands or legs, later stretched out along the length of one another, and
that second night they had slept, right there, on the desert bed, waking
up in time for sunrise.
The
desert made him patient, a quality Mike had never felt before. Or rather,
patient to a degree longer than a New York minute. He had always been able
to wait for ages on an an undercover sting, to catch a criminal, but that
was a different sort of patience. That was perseverance, that had been
drilled into him at the academy all those years ago. But waiting for something
that was rightfully his, or waiting for something he had right in his own
hands...Mike had never learned that. If one held on loosely, things got
away. Escaped. Now he knew differently. In his days without Alexa Mike
had peered under the rock of his own self, and wore his knowledge like
a cloak. He was better for having collected himself.
Alexa
noticed it. Several nights after she had come back to him, she had said,
"You make me calm, Mike." Her eyes had darted over him. "There's something
about you that's almost settled....what's that word...quiescent."
"Don't
worry about me," he had told her. "Let's concentrate on you."
The
basement hallucinations had not come back. He had gone through them all
once, and emerged on the other side, feeling no longer afraid to look back
on the memories. They did not make him cringe, they did not make him want
to shrivel up and go fetal any more. What had continued, oddly enough,
was that Ben Stone was visiting his dreams. Not the Ben Stone of today,
not the District Attorney Ben Stone, but the one from ten years back. He
had started talking to that man in his dreams much in the way he had spoken
with him from the basement. And he knew it was just his mind going over
so much garbage, he knew there was no mutual connection -- Stone was not
having dreams about Mike, he was certain -- and on wakening he remembered
very little. But when he thought of Stone now, it was less as a threat
than the way one might think of a troublesome relative. Stone was very
far away, he was never going to come and claim Alexa from Mike, and Mike
had nothing to fear in any way from him. And that realization had allowed
him to let go, to a point. Except for the dreaming, he never even thought
of Stone.
And,
he was certain, neither did Alexa.
So
there they were, blind in the desert but suffused with enough sun to glow
of their own accord, and it was a week since they had come back together.
With restraint, though a placid, easy sort of restraint, Mike had not initiated
anything beyond sitting and holding one another. The self-imposed celibacy
was easier than he thought it would be, and he made a point of assuring
himself he was not afraid of coming up empty again, as they had so recently.
He wanted to make sure he was afraid of nothing. It was not in any way
that he did not want her, but more that he was willing to be patient and
wait for her. He sensed he would know when the time was right. Until then,
Mike was surprised, he found the anticipation of waiting almost as good
as the real thing.
Almost.
After
she touched his face he took her hands in his and kissed the palms. Alexa
sat there, up on her knees, her hands small in his, and waited for him
to go on. When he did not, she was seized with a fit of trembling, and
wriggled from his grip.
"What's
wrong?" he frowned.
She
shook her head as if to clear it. "If I could put it in words I'd have
told you days ago." She paused. "Don't you want me?"
"Of
course."
Her
face tightened. "I'm not offering you a side order of potato salad," she
said. "You might try a little enthusiasm, even if you have to fake it."
And
he had a revelation. Taking her head in his hands, he kissed her forehead,
her cheeks, her nose, her chin. "I have never," he said, "wanted anyone
more than I do you right now." His words were calm, modulated, and absolutely
sincere. Tracing her outer ears, cool and firm like lilies, with his fingers
Mike kissed under her jaw, on both sides, then down the ridge of her neck,
to the soft spot where her collarbones joined. She arched toward him and
he was infused with delight at how she could just abandon herself to his
control. His hands drifted to her shoulders and on down to her breasts,
her waist, her hips, and when he finally lowered her to the desert floor
she was shivering. Mike positioned himself above her, kneeling over her
face, and she reached for his face and then the waistband of shorts, but
he batted her hands away. "No," he told her. "Tonight we only do you."
She
gasped slightly in surprise and met his gaze. Mike saw what he expected,
that she wouldn't protest this and on some future night the opposite would
be just as true, but he did not require her to reciprocate. He could visualize
a thin, taut rope stretched between his mind and his body, separating the
two, so that he could touch her this way and not become physically aroused
himself, and keeping that clear in his vision he lowered his face over
hers and began.
She
slept across his chest when he was done, worn and slick with sweat she
smiled in her unconsciousness, and Mike wrapped his arms around her to
protect against the cool night winds. He was not asleep, not nearly sleepy,
though satisfied with what had just gone before them. The stars stared
back down at him and Mike wished again on the space hardware, but just
a general, good wish, not for anything specific. For the past few hours
he had been able to forget the illness, their children, his job, everything
he had ever considered important. The only thing that had mattered had
been getting Alexa to shudder and make sounds of pleasure. He had been
able to narrow their world to such a small, fine point that he imagined
it was like what an artist must sense when he has finished a masterwork.
He gazed down over his chest, where Alexa had cashed out, watching her
head rise and fall with his breaths, her wispy hair blowing in the breeze,
and he took hold of a section and held it to his face, breathing her in.
Still holding on to her hair he thought, if she goes away from me I
will be finished. There won't be any more point. And one long, hopeless
stream of tears ran down his cheek.
Two
nights later she did not appear at all.
At
first, he had been concerned, because she was never late. In fact, as the
nights had gone on and they had cared less about what Rosa thought, Alexa
had been arriving earlier. She still let him keep the sunsets to himself,
as if sensing how important they were, but always appeared by eight or
nine.
They
had not spoken of much consequence. Time felt too valuable to be wasted
on words, and Mike had not told her about revisiting the basement, or Stone
in his mind, and she had not said anything about her own regimens, dreams,
or successes. As to her health, all he had to do was look at her to know
she was better off, and his hands told him she had put on some weight,
all of which were good signs. He began to know the idea of...if not exactly
hope, something close to it. Some days were better than others; when he
was with her he could imagine nothing ever changing, but when she was away
from him he could envision never seeing her again, either.
And
now...he was not seeing her, and it was nearly eleven. He felt the night
closing in on him and was afraid to leave, thinking if she came out by
herself later she would be so vulnerable. Mike stood and scanned the flatlands,
catching no sign of movement, no hint that anyone was out there but himself.
It was his only lingering fear: her aloneness. Her being without someone
who cared by her side. And when he did not know where she was, the distance
between them was a void he could almost taste. Mike waited until the moon
was high in the sky before he gave up waiting and headed back in at a half-jog,
thinking someone in the camp must have seen her, at some point.
As
he ran, Mike got more frantic. Thoughts of thick yellow pills and tubes
and clear plastic bags of poison jumped into his mind and he started to
feel a fear in his guts that he was already too late. He sped up and ran
flat out the last several hundred yards, stopping hard at his own cabin,
wheezing and trying to force the air back in his lungs. And then he saw
it: light in his window. She was there. For a moment Mike was unreasonably
furious, feeling toyed around with, but quickly he realized she must be
there for a reason, for some reason she could not make it to him, so she
had gone as far as she could. He raced up the steps and peered in the window.
Not an electric light, but the soft glow of candles peered back at him
like dewdrop eyes.
His
door opened and she stood before him. "Welcome home, Mike," said Alexa,
and his anger vanished. She was dressed like the first time he had seen
her, and he wondered how he had not noticed she had brought these clothes
with her: a fitted Armani suit, her long legs unsteady on wobbly heels
and pointed toes, her hair pulled back in a French twist. For a moment
he saw her sister, Amelia, then he blinked and knew it was merely Alexa
dressing up. She let him in and he followed, openmouthed, behind her.
"I
didn't mean to make you worry," she told him, backing up. "Did you wonder
where I was?"
Mike
didn't answer, just continued advancing on her. The part of the Amelia
outfit he had loved the most was the part that came to him last. He stared
at her skirt as she backed agains the chest of drawers and hoisted herself
up on them, dangling her legs over the edge.
"Bet
you didn't know I'd brought all this with me," she said, her voice a little
nervous, attempting to be sultry. "At first I thought I'd burn it."
The
idea crossed his mind to take every piece from her and toss each one into
the fireplace. It twisted him, this did, it brought back every strange
memory from the way they had met to the way they continued to meet, to
where he found out her duplicity and they arrested her sister. And his
heart began to thud in him, the thin rope between what he was thinking
and what he was feeling starting to snap.
"But
then," she continued, nattering along, watching him watch her, "I thought
you'd want one last showing." Her eyelashes fluttered and she half-smiled.
Mike
heard her but he made no comment. It was all he could do to concentrate
solely on her, catching the reflection of her back and the candles in the
chest of drawers' mirror, and slid his hands on her thighs, pushing the
skirt up higher. He knew they would be there. And there they were.
"Criminy,"
he said, staring at her garters. "Jesus."
"Tonight's
your turn," she told him, and batted his hands away.
They
were given official clearance by Rosa to share Mike's cabin a few days
later, and when she came to give them the momentous news they smirked at
each other and turned in Alexa's keys on the spot. She had already moved
all of her belongings back with his. "I only regret," said Mike, "that
now we won't feel so illicit."
"I
can get over it," she told him, and squeezed his shoulder.
Still,
that meant they were able to spend time eating meals together, and walking
around the camp together in the daylight. It meant Mike was able to see
Alexa in full, natural light, and the first time he did his heart caught
at how splendid she looked. He also caught her glancing up at him at odd
intervals, when she thought he wasn't paying any attention, quick, stolen
looks that made his chest tighten. Even after all of this time he knew
it: she was as obsessed with him as he was with her. He couldn't know if
she had not fallen ill that they would still feel the importance of every
day they had together, there was no way of second-guessing something like
that. He would have traded every charged sick day for a mediocre one well,
and yet there was no denying this had made them closer. She was his lover,
she was his wife, and she was his best friend. And Mike could ask for nothing
better in life.
"I
want to tell you something," he began as they strolled around the perimeter
of the camp, squeezing her hand.
"I
love you, too."
He
smiled slightly, nervously and took a breath. "I've had dreams," he said.
"About...?"
"The
basement." He blinked away, off at the afternoon sun. "Being down there.
I can remember it now."
She
stopped walking and gripped one of his hands between both of hers. "Oh,
Mike. After so much time. I had hoped you'd never remember anything."
He
shook his head. "I'm glad I did. I needed to get over it. Forgetting about
things isn't the best way to make them go away, you realize that, Alexa,
don't you?"
"It
works a lot of the time," she said in a small voice.
"Not
really." He shook his head. "That's not quite right."
"Some
things aren't worth remembering."
"Except
this was, I think," Mike told her. "You wondered how I got so calm. Rosa
had said on my first day I was very angry, and I denied it. But I believe
her now, when I came here I was pretty pissed off at just about everything.
And now...I'm not. Now I know. And now I'm not afraid of thinking about
it any more."
She
rested a hand flat on his cheek. "Do you want to tell me about it? About
the basement?"
"Yes,
I do."
Alexa
swallowed. "Then do I have to keep up my end of the trade, Mike?"
He
tried to scan his mind. What had they said in that Italian restaurant in
Boston? Christ, it was ten years ago. It came to him after a moment's thought...she
had asked about the basement during their dinner, and he had been unable
to speak of it. He had probed into her weeks away, and she had been unable
-- or unwilling -- to speak of it, too. So that had been the tradeoff:
the time they had spent apart should be left for dead, and should go undisturbed.
And for a long time, that was all right -- Mike had not caught on to the
fact of Ben Stone just then, and once he had the idea of discussing him
had turned Mike's stomach. So she did not ask about the basement, and he
had never been willing to confront the nightmare of that cold, dark room
long enough to talk about it with anyone. Anyone but, ironically enough,
Stone, that halfhearted recollection he had made in the DA's office before
going off to find Alexa. At the memory, a familar stabbing anger pierced
his chest a moment, then fizzled as if doused in water. He was going to
maintain, somehow. He wasn't going to let Ben Stone bother him any more.
But it was such a well-nursed grudge that letting go was like abandoning
a child. An ugly, unloved child, but as much a part of Mike as his hands.
Calm had come from confronting the basement; all he could hope for now
was peace in hearing Alexa's story. But she wasn't going to tell him, he
could hear it in her voice. And she did not want him to ask, she did not
want to have to refuse him this.
After
a long moment of silence her cool hand slipped around his neck and bushed
up the short hairs there. "Mike," she said, and he opened his eyes, unaware
he had shut them. "Mike."
"Yes,
Alexa."
"Are
you all right?"
There
was nothing to be gained here, nothing good, nothing evil, just...nothing.
He could learn nothing that was important by forcing her to tell him what
she did not want to. "I'm fine."
Alexa
peered up at him quizzically and Mike took her hand up in his again as
they resumed walking, pensive. He wished he had the words to explain what
he was feeling. He did want to know everything, or thought he wanted to
know everything because despite everything that had gone right here in
New Mexico he would never trust again that they would grow old together.
The first time she had gotten sick had been a fluke. Tired for weeks, sometimes
yellowed around her throat she had gone to a doctor to find out if it was
anemia. They had called him at the precinct and he had picked her up, his
car circling around to where she waited for him outside the clinic. She
had made him drive to an empty parking lot, and told him there. He had
never known anyone with cancer before, certainly no one with her brand
of it, and had not known how to react. But he had learned. Over the following
year Mike Logan had learned things he had never wanted to commit to memory.
Living with her and dying by inches with her he pinched himself every morning,
tried cold showers, once cut his hand purposefully with a straight razor,
trying to wake up from the nightmare. And then it had gotten all better.
She was well. They fled. They resettled. The second time, this time, he
lost all belief in God and right and sanity. Mike had no idea how much
time they would gain from this outing -- a year? Five? Ten? Might she live
to see her kids through college? But 'forever' had been banished from his
vocabulary. He knew she would go before he would, and he was fairly sure
it would be from this thing inside her. They might add time to the bomb's
clock, but ultimately, it would go off.
And
knowing this Mike desperately wanted to know everything. He wanted there
to be no unanswered questions, no issues that lacked confronting. He wanted
to settle accounts so they could live whatever time they had left without
recriminations, without causing one another to suffer. So he did want to
hear about Stone, in a convoluted way. He wanted to make the picture complete.
But this was the one thing she would always deny him.
So
let her have it. The voice came from inside of him, and oddly enough
it was his mother, whose voice he had not heard since that strange day
of voices in the desert. She had been quiet all this time, and never this
reasonable sounding. What's it gonna kill you to leave her alone about
this, Mikey? The same voice, familiarly wheedling, but gentle somehow.
You figgered it out for yourself, Mikey. So don't bother her with this.
Not every discussion gotta have words in it.
"Mike?"
Alexa blinked up at him again and he scanned her face, the open, familiar
features, and it seemed to him she had slid on some kind of invisible outer
layer, one which made her seem even more vulnerable than before. If he
pushed, right now, she would tell. After this, the opportunity would be
lost.
"Hmm?"
"What
I promised," she said. "I'll tell you whatever you want to know. Do you
want to know?"
So
what is it, Mikey? Gonna strip her down like an old car and look at the
parts?
A
stillness inside of him spread out like ice over a pond, and suddenly he
did not. He watched the chance fade, and let it go away from him. "Nothing
to tell," he said, and kissed the top of her head. "Hey, let's go get some
dinner, okay?"
A
slight smile twitched at the corners of her mouth and a glimmer of mischeviousness
returned to her eyes, and he felt indulgent. What did it matter if it felt
like she had gotten away with something again? Let her have it. So he did.
"Okay,"
she told him, and tugged him back to the main cabins. "I'm starving."