"I wish I could touch you," he said after a moment. "I think I'd like to hold your face between my hands and look protectively down at you. You'd have very cool skin and light bones against the palms of my hands."
"I'd love it. But I would also flush, and my skin would get hot and very red. It always used to. I wouldn't mind, though, if you didn't."
"I wouldn't mind."
"Big-hearted Morgan," Laura said softly. But she smiled still and sat up straight so that Michael could look at her.
Very suddenly, he said, "Touch me. Try to touch my hand."
"It won't work, Michael." Her voice was very low. "I'll try, if you want me to. I'll break my heart trying. But it won't work. The time for touching is past."
"Try," Michael said. "Please try. Think about it. Think about loving me and wanting to touch me. Think how your hand used to feel, and how you moved it, and what it was like to touch things with it. Stretch out your hand to me, Laura. It might as well be your hand. Big symbol."
"Michael—"
"Once. One try and never again."
He held out his hand, and she reached, without hesitation, to touch it. The sun was hot on the leaves, and the city was full of the noises of cars and children; and Michael and Laura, lovers, reached to hold hands as lovers. There was a point in space where their hands, thin as breath, met and seemed to become one hand, through which the sun shone and a leaf fell. For a little while they stared hopefully at it. Then each gradually lowered his eyes to look at the other eyes with a kind of guilt, but still hoping to see something there that did not look from their own eyes. They did not lower their hands or look away from each other.
"Nothing," Michael said. "I didn't think there'd be."
"I felt something," Laura said, unable to bear the sadness in his voice. "At least I think I did. I might be imagining it—"
"Don't lie to me. Even to please me. We haven't got the time to lie."
"All right," she said. "I didn't feel a thing. It didn't work. We can't ever touch each other. Does honesty make you feel better? It's just as painful as lies to me."
"Never mind, Laura." He let his hand drop to his side. "It doesn't matter."
"It does matter," she cried out. "That's why I can't help envying Sandra, even now. Whatever she took from you, she had at least that much warmth to give you, and I have nothing. Only company and nice words."
"Laura," Michael said. "Laura, Laura. Sandra saw things a little differently. To her, holding each other, sleeping together—that was a kind of taking too. We never made love. I don't know what it was we made, but it wasn't love, and it was always dead by morning."
He laughed. "I'll tell you something. Once I was very fond of a poem by Emily Dickinson or somebody. I only remember one line of it, but it goes, "The soul selects her own society.' I used to tell it to everybody. Once I quoted it to a friend of mine, and he said, 'Maybe, but the body gets thrown into bed with the goddamnedest people.' I remember him saying that."
He looked at her for a long while, saying nothing. Once he reached as if to try again to touch her, but he drew his hand back so swiftly that she wondered if she had imagined his moving it. Another leaf fell. It would be an early autumn, she thought.
"You are my own society," Michael was saying. "I looked for you when I was alive. I was careless about it, so as not to be hurt too much by not finding you, and I got tossed into the goddamnedest beds when I got too careless, but I looked for you, Laura. For a while I mistook Sandra for you. My apologies. It was dark, and I'm nearsighted. But it was never Sandra I loved. It was never Sandra's arm I slept in."
"Damn you," Laura said. "What kept you so long on the road?"
"My horse broke down, and I had to eat him. Poor beast. Love me?"
"Yes. Very much."
"I love you. Want to go for a walk? The city can dress itself and eat and go to work without us."
"No," she said. "Let's stay here a little longer. We have the time."
The raven came from behind them, and they turned when they heard the harsh flapping of his wings. He landed between them on the wall, caught his breath, and said, "I been looking all over for you, Morgan."
"I've been here," Michael said.
"I've been up and down the damn cemetery. Rebeck said you might be here."
"It's the trial," Laura said. "The trial's over."
"It's over." The raven looked down and scratched his beak in the spaces between the bricks, where the cement bulged.
"How did it go?" Michael asked calmly. "What happened to Sandra?"
"Crazy trial," the raven muttered without looking up. "Craziest damn trial I ever heard of."
"She won," Laura said. "She won, didn't she? They let her go free."
"Darling," Michael said, "you're not supposed to think of trials as being won or lost. The idea is—"
"They let her off," the raven said hoarsely. "Not guilty."
"Good for her. I didn't want anything bad to happen to Sandra. It would have been wrong to kill her."
"Morgan, you don't get the idea." The raven could not meet his eyes. "The way they figure, if she didn't kill you, you did. Suicide. Her lawyer said you tried to frame her. So they're sending a couple of guys out here to dig you up and move you someplace else. You being a Catholic and so on."
Laura made a small high-pitched sound and was still.
"Laura," Michael said. He turned from the raven to speak to her, but after her name he said nothing.
"It was a crazy trial," the raven said. "I told Rebeck, and he thought so too."
Chapter 12
"It was the paper did it," the raven said. "They found the other half of the paper."
"What paper?" Mr. Rebeck asked. The four of them were sitting on a small rise of ground from which they could look down on Michael Morgan's grave. The day had become very sunny after the fog burned off, but cool and crossed with breezes. It was the sort of day Mr. Rebeck had always loved.
"The paper the poison was in," Michael said quietly. "I remember now."
"Yeah," the raven said. "You see, they had that little part already, all rolled up like a cone, only it didn't have any fingerprints on it. So, the way the newspapers had it, her lawyer went messing around the house, trying to find the rest of the paper. Really shook the place down."
"Under my desk blotter." Michael seemed very calm. "I put it there for safekeeping. I was going to throw it away, but I must have been too drunk. When are they coming?"
"Don't know. Pretty soon now."
"I don't understand," Mr. Rebeck said. "Why was the paper so important?"
"It had a lot of numbers on it in his handwriting," the raven answered. "I didn't get all that about the numbers, but the handwriting was the big deal."
Michael was sitting cross-legged beside Laura, the way she had seen him for the first time. Frequently he turned his head to look at her, to smile. She sat quite still, eyes fixed on the long pebbly road down which the men would come. He did not speak directly to her, and she did not speak at all.
"The numbers had to do with dosage," he said. "The thing about this kind of poison is that if you take too little of it, it'll only give you an upset stomach, and if you take too much, you'll throw it up. Like an emetic. You have to know just how much to use. I looked it up in a library and wrote it down on the paper. Then, when I wanted something to keep the poison in, I tore the corner off the paper and put the rest of the paper under the blotter because I was in a hurry. And I put the poison in my own glass when Sandra and I drank together before we went to bed. I remember that now."
He raised his head suddenly. "I think I hear something. A car."
Laura looked at him then and started to say something, but it never came out. They sat without words listening for the hissing chatter of pebbles twisting under tires, for voices and the sound of an engine; waiting for a wide nose and a grinning silver mouth to come into sight where the road curved. Mr. Rebeck wanted to hold Laura's hand, or put his hand on Michael's shoulder, but he could not. He found a hole in one of his socks and worked his finger around in it, watching the tear grow bigger.