The look she gave me skinned my heart alive. “Yes,” she said. “Make it three years ago. Push it back so that it’s three years ago. Or if you can’t do that, call me ‘miss.’ Or if you can’t do that, just look the other way.”
All of a sudden I’d gotten in the back seat with her before I even knew it was coming on myself.
I said the things you say when it hits you like that. Or the things you say, they said themselves.
“I love you. I’ve loved you for three weeks and two days now. I’ve loved you ever since you first got into the car in back of me. I didn’t know it until just now.”
I took time off and took my lips away from hers and said, “I’m sorry, it won’t happen again. I’m quitting tomorrow.”
She said only five words. And five were all she needed to say. It told me the whole thing. “Don’t do that to me.”
We didn’t say anything more about it from then on, ever again. About being in love, or loving one another. We didn’t have to say anything about it after that. We were it.
Three days later, when we were out there again, I said: “Look, I haven’t got anything.”
“That’s what I want, your nothing.”
“Are you sure?”
“I’m sure. I’m only waiting for you.”
“Where? Where do you want it to be?”
She looked out at that line again over my shoulder. “What’s over there? Over that way?”
“Havana, I think. Not straight out, but down that way a little.”
“I don’t care what it’s called. It looks so open, so free. So clean. No one can get you back again, with all that deep water in between—”
“Havana, then?”
“Havana, then.”
“There’s a cruise ship from New York standing in right now. It goes on to there next. I’ll find out when it pulls out. I’m afraid to take a chance on a plane; you have to wait for reservations. And they have a habit of phoning you to confirm or cancel the flight. It might get to him by mistake. The ferry’s risky too. It’s slow, and he has that cabin cruiser down in the bay.”
“Don’t take too long. Hurry, hurry. There’s death at our shoulders all the time. Every minute, every second. Even when we sit here like this. Don’t look at me, don’t breathe, don’t think — until we’ve done it.”
I thought of that coiled rattlesnake, Jordan, and the lethal buzz I still expected to hear, even when I had him in the seat behind me. She was right; there was a lot of death around. Around us all the time.
“It may be soon. I’ve noticed it since Wednesday already. The ship, I mean. They don’t stay in longer than three or four days at each stop. In case I don’t get a chance to tell you tomorrow afternoon, how will I be able to—?”
I could feel her whole form quiver against me. “Don’t come near me! Be careful. I’m so frightened, Scotty.”
“Can you see my window, the window of my quarters, from where your room is in the main house?”
“Yes. And I’ve often watched it before I knew what this was coming on. It was like a little postage stamp of light across the grounds.”
“I’ll blink my lights then. Watch for them. When you’re up there dressing for dinner, around seven. Count the number of times they go out. That’ll give you the hour it sails. If it leaves before the next afternoon’s drive. If they don’t go out at all, that means it doesn’t leave for another twenty-four hours. Then watch for them the following night.”
“Take me back now. It’s way overtime. And he already said to me the other day, ‘You go out more in the car than you used to.’ It hasn’t clicked yet, but it will sooner or later; it’s bound to.”
I took him in the morning. And that’s when I did it. I used up the slack I had waiting around for him and went over there to the place where they sold the tickets. It was due to sail at midnight that very night, they told me. I told them I just wanted space from here to Havana. I wouldn’t have got it, but they’d dropped off a few people just now in Miami. I took two cabins, one for her and one for me; don’t ask me why. If we’d wanted just a cheap affair we could have stayed right here and gambled with our lives and had one. We wanted more than that, and wading through a lot of muddy water didn’t seem to me to be the quickest way to get to it.
I didn’t see her in the afternoon, didn’t have a chance to tell her. He kept me down there with him the whole time. I don’t know if it was purposely done or not. His face didn’t show anything. It might have been just a coincidence. And then again I remembered what she’d told me he’d said, about her using the car more often than she’d used to, and wondered. All he said was, “Stick around.” So I stuck, afraid that if I made a move while his back was turned I’d give the whole thing away; and the hours piled up and rusted away into sundown.
I brought him back with me at six — fast, like a bullet, like he liked to be carried anywhere — and we streaked by that grove, our place, where we had stopped so often, at such speed that it was just like a quick snapshot on our right, there and then gone again.
But a funny thing happened. At the exact moment we did so Jordan broke a sour sort of chuckle in his throat. Jordan was always with him, of course; when I speak of “him” I meant it in the plural; he never moved a foot without him.
They hadn’t been saying a word just ahead; there hadn’t been anything to lead up to it. It seemed to come by itself, just as we were passing that place.
“What’re you snickering about?” Roman asked him.
“I was just thinking,” I heard him say. “That’s a good place for lovers back there.”
Roman didn’t answer; let it go. I could feel that funny needling feeling you get when a whiff of cold air plays over the back of your neck. I curbed an impulse to raise my eyes to the mirror. I had a hunch if I let them go up to it I’d find Jordan’s already there, waiting to meet mine. Maybe I was wrong, and since I didn’t try it, I have no way of telling. But if it was a coincidence again, it was a very fine-drawn one: that he should laugh at that one particular place along the whole length of the road from Miami out to Hermosa Drive. To me it was as if the rattles had given a flickering stir behind me just then, a preliminary to motion.
It was dark when we got out. I took the car in as soon as they’d left it and went up to my room. The next two hours were the toughest I’d ever lived through. I paced back and forth there in my quarters, watching the time, stopping every other lap to look out the window. Away off in the dark, looking much farther away than they did by daylight, for some reason, I could see the short string of lighted beads, stretched out across the upper surface of the main house, that were the windows of his room and of hers, forming a continuous line. I couldn’t signal while his lights were still on, for if I could see over there, he could see over here.
I wondered if they were having a row or something tonight. Seven came and passed, and by seven on other nights, they were usually down at the table already. Then I thought maybe he’d gone down but had forgotten to turn out his room lights behind him. But if he had, she would have stepped in and done it for him, to clear the way for me, I figured, so it couldn’t be that.
I nearly went nuts. Sure, we had five hours yet, but she didn’t know that; I had to get word to her. She might think it wasn’t leaving until the next day, go to bed or something soon after dinner; she’d told me she did that as often as she could. In the dark, at least, she didn’t have to see him; I suppose that was it.
Then, suddenly, at about seven-twenty, during one of my turnarounds between laps, half the lighted beads were gone. When I got back to the window only her lights were left. I jerked myself over to the switch, reached for it with my thumb, held off for a minute, and then started to shuttle it up and down. Twelve times I blinked it, starting with “on” and ending up with “on” again.