He leaned out of the window, smiling.
"Want a lift?"
Consolata ran across the road and darted around to the passenger door. By the time she got there it was open. She climbed in, and for some reason-a feminine desire to scold or annihilate twenty-four hours of desperation; to pretend, at least, that the suffering he had caused her required an apology, an explanation to win her forgiveness-some instinct like that preserved her and she did not let her hand slip into his crotch as it wanted to.
He was silent, of course. But it was not the silence of the Friday noon pickups. Then the unspeaking was lush with promise. Easy. Vocal. This silence was barren, a muteness lined with acid. And then she noticed the smell. Not unpleasant, not at all, but not his. Consolata froze; then, not daring to look at his face, she glanced sideways at his feet. He was wearing not the black high-tops but cowboy boots, convincing her that a stranger sat behind the steering wheel, inhabiting the body of him, but not him.
She thought to scream, to throw herself out onto the road. She would fight him if he touched her. She had no time to imagine other options, because they were approaching the dirt road that led to the Convent. She was just about to fling open the door, when the stranger braked and slowed to a standstill. He leaned over, brushing her breasts with his arm, and lifted the door handle. She stepped down quickly and turned to see.
He touched the brim of his Stetson, smiling. "Anytime," he said.
"Anytime at all."
She backed away, staring at the exact face of him, repelled by but locked into his eyes, chaste and wide with hatred. The incident does not halt the fig tree meetings. He comes the next Friday wearing the right shoes and exuding the right smell, and they argue a little.
"What did he do?"
"Nothing. He didn't even ask me where I was going. Just drove me back."
"Good thing he did."
"Why?"
"Did us both a favor."
"No, he didn't. He was…"
"What?"
"I don't know."
"What'd he say to you?"
"He said, 'Want a lift?' and then he said, 'Anytime.' Like he'd do it again. I could tell he doesn't like me."
"Probably not. Why should he? You want him to? Like you?"
"No. Oh, no, but."
"But what?"
Consolata sits up straight and looks steadily toward the back of the fire-ruined house. Something brown and furry scurries into what is left of a charred rain barrel.
"You talk to him about me?" she asks.
"Never told him a thing about you."
"Then how did he know I was coming to find you?"
"Maybe he didn't. Maybe he just didn't think you should be walking to town like that."
"He didn't turn the truck around. He was driving north. That's why I thought it was you."
"Look," he says. He squats on his haunches, tossing pebbles. "We have to have a signal. I can't always show up on Fridays. Let's think of something, so you'll know."
They thought of nothing that would work. In the end she told him she would wait the Fridays, but only for an hour. He said, If I'm not on time, I'm not coming at all.
The regularity of their meetings, before his twin showed up, had smoothed her hunger to a blunt blade. Now irregularity knifed it. Even so, twice more he carried her off to the place where fig trees insisted on life. She did not know it then, but the second time was the last.
It is the end of October. He walls a portion of the fire-ruined house with a horse blanket, and they lie on an army-issue bedroll. The pale sky above them is ringed with a darkness coming, which they could not have seen had they looked. So the falling snow that lights her hair and cools his wet back surprises them. Later they speak of their situation. Blocked by weather and circumstance, they talk, mostly, about Where. He mentions a town ninety miles north but corrects himself quickly, because no motel or hotel would take them. She suggests the Convent because of the hiding places in it everywhere. He snorts his displeasure.
"Listen," she whispers. "There is a small room in the cellar. No. Wait, just listen. I will fix it, make it beautiful. With candles. It's cool and dark in the summer, warm as coffee in winter. We'll have a lamp to see each other with, but nobody can see us. We can shout as loud as we want and nobody can hear. Pears are down there and walls of wine. The bottles sleep on their sides, and each one has a name, like Veuve Clicquot or MTdoc, and a number: 1-9-1-5 or 1-9-2-6, like prisoners waiting to be freed. Do it," she urges him. "Please do it. Come to my house."
While he considers, her mind races ahead with plans. Plans to cram rosemary into the pillow slips; rinse linen sheets in hot water steeped in cinnamon. They will slake their thirst with the prisoner wine, she tells him. He laughs a low, satisfied laugh and she bites his lip which, in retrospect, was her big mistake.
Consolata did all of it and more. The cellar room sparkled in the light of an eight-holder candelabra from Holland and reeked of ancient herbs. Seckel pears crowded a white bowl. None of which pleased him for he never arrived. Never felt the slide of old linen on his skin, or picked flakes of stick cinnamon from her hair. The two wineglasses she rescued from straw-filled crates and polished to abnormal clarity collected dust particles, then, by November, just before Thanksgiving, an industrious spider moved in.
Penny and Clarissa had washed their hair and sat by the stove, finger-combing it dry. Every now and then one of them would lean and shake a shiny black panel of it closer to the heat. Softly singing forbidden Algonquian lullabies, they watched Consolata just as they always did: her days of excitement, of manic energy; her slow change to nail-biting distraction. They liked her because she was stolen, as they had been, and felt sorry for her too. They regarded her behavior as serious instruction about the limits and possibilities of love and imprisonment, and took the lesson with them for the balance of their lives. Now, however, their instant future claimed priority. Bags packed, plans set, they needed only money.
"Where do you keep the money, Consolata? Please, Consolata. Wednesday they take us to the Correctional. Just a little, Consolata. In the pantry, yes? Well, where? There was one dollar and twenty cents from Monday alone."
Consolata ignored them. "Stop pestering me."
"We helped you, Consolata. Now you must help us. It's not stealing-we worked hard here. Please? Think how hard we worked." Their voices chanting, soothing, they swayed their hair and looked at her with the glorious eyes of maidens in peril.
The knock on the kitchen door was not loud, but its confidence was unmistakable. Three taps. No more. The girls stilled their hair in their hands. Consolata rose from her chair as if summoned by the sheriff or an angel. In a way it was both, in the shape of a young woman, exhausted, breathing hard but ramrod straight. "That's some walk," she said. "Please. Let me sit."
Penny and Clarissa disappeared like smoke.
The young woman took the chair Penny had vacated.
"Can I get you something?" asked Consolata.
"Water, would you?"
"Not tea? You look froze."
"Yes. But water first. Then some tea."
Consolat a poured water from a pitcher and bent to check the stove fire.
"What's that smell?" asked the visitor. "Sage?"
Consolata nodded. The woman covered her lips with her fingers.
"Does it bother you?"
"It'll pass. Thank you." She drank the water slowly until the glass was empty.
Consolata knew, or thought she did, but asked anyway. "What is it you want?"