In those dreaded moments, in the middle of the black night, he was most frightened. Not because of the dreams that he had learned to live with but because of the fear that he could never break away from the past of his life, even with her help, even with her body next to him, even away from everything on this mountain in the middle of the Shenandoah.
“I love you,” Rita would say then as though she could read his thoughts and he would let himself be comforted; he would hold her as a child will hold its mother, with trust and yearning.
Because all words lied, he never spoke to her of what he felt for her now except to say her name. She would understand that after a time.
They would work now in the heat of the day. Sometimes they would walk together in the woods, along unmarked trails shared with bears and deer, with possums and badgers and the other creatures who had come alive after the long winter and had survived it.
At evening, they would build a fire inside the old cabin, in the stone hearth, and they would eat together simply and talk.
She never tired of him. She would wake first and see him sleeping next to her. She would trace the scars on his body but when she would ask him where the scars had come from, he would not say.
She pried at his secrets but he would not reveal them.
“Nothing I did was so important or so secret,” he said once to her. “It’s just that it’s an old life and I don’t want to go back to it. Like Crohan talking about the life in Russia. He is frightened to talk about it.”
“But he tells me.”
“But not me. I can’t do it. I can’t mix you up in my mind with what it was in the past. Just bury it, Rita.”
“I want all of you.”
And so that he would not have to speak to her anymore, he would hold her instead and kiss her and touch her in places she opened to him. “Rita,” he would say. And it would be enough.
“I bought food and they told me at the grocery.”
She looked frightened. Her face was pale. Devereaux paused in his work as she threaded her way up the slightly sloping ground to the place by the cabin where he was splitting wood.
He put down the metal splitter and took the bags from her arms and led her inside the cabin. He put the bags of food on the kitchen table and turned to her. His face was red from the sun, his gray eyes did not appear as icy fields anymore to her; he wore a checkered shirt and his hands had become rough again with the hard work.
“Who told you?”
“Mrs. Gibbons in the grocery. She said a couple of men were asking about you.”
“What kind of men?”
“Foreign men. That’s what she said.”
“Men in suits?”
“Yes. Suits. Two days ago. Who is it?”
“What else did she tell you?”
“That’s all. Just two men in suits, asking where you lived.”
“Did she tell them?”
“She lies to them. Said you lived west of town, on the other side of the river.”
“You can’t lie to them,” Devereaux said.
She held his arm. Her face was white, as though a sudden illness had struck her. “My God. That’s what I thought all the way coming back here. I was so scared I had the boy put the bags in the trunk just to have company in the parking lot. I drove like hell getting out of town. I didn’t care if I was stopped. I just wanted to get back here. I’m so scared.”
“Yes.”
She looked at him and saw that the flatness had come back to his eyes in that moment, that the arctic grayness had not gone away but had just been altered for a time in her company.
I’ll be back in three months after I finish the book.
But it had been a lie, just a convenient lie for Mac. She never intended to be back.
And he had never intended to return either. They would run away from their worlds together for as long as they could; they would have no pasts, no tomorrows, make no promises, tell each other no lies.
She heard the ugly metal snap. She turned.
He had opened the shotgun. He filled the double barrels with two shells and closed it. He reached for the pistol and spun the chamber. He shoved the pistol in his belt. He took extra shells for the shotgun and put them in his shirt pocket.
“Who are they?”
“I don’t know.”
“What can we do?”
“Nothing. Not until they come.”
“My God, Dev, let’s get out of here.”
“You don’t lie to them, you don’t run from them.”
“But this is America. This is Virginia.”
“Sometimes they have to step outside the rules. They draw up the rules after all. I’m outside the service now; so are you. Maybe that’s the reason.”
“But they can’t do this.”
He started at her. “They can do anything they want unless you’re ready to stop them.”
“What are we going to do?”
“It didn’t work out, did it?” he said.
“Don’t say that. Please.”
“Get out, Rita. Get back to D.C. Just go like hell and—”
“No, goddamn it. You don’t get me in this thing and then tell me to take off like a movie heroine. Besides, I’m afraid. I don’t want to be alone. Not now. Not ever.”
He looked out the window. “I suppose we did it too easy. Maybe we should have waited.”
“Dev. I love you no matter what,” she said. “No matter what.” Her voice was stubborn but on the verge of breaking and they both knew it.
They went out into the sunlight and there was nothing to see all the way down to the hairpin turnaround where a car could go back if it had wandered onto the trail by mistake. But at the foot of the mountain where the trail led to the asphalt highway, there was a gray car that had not been there before.
He took her hand and led her across the clearing to the edge of the woods. They plunged quietly into the woods for about a hundred feet, to a natural culvert formed by the passing of an old melting creek from the mountaintop. He helped her down into the culvert. Mud clung to them. He held the shotgun against the rim of the culvert.
She did not speak.
They waited a long time.
The two men had edged along the roadway up the mountain.
He saw them and Rita nearly gasped but held her mouth with her right hand. She felt sick and cold.
She realized it must be the way he felt all of the time, but mostly at night, when the dreams came to him, and he was naked in sleep, too weak to fight against them.
One man whispered loudly to the other and the other nodded.
Bulgarians, Devereaux thought.
He turned to Rita. She was staring at him. She knew what it was as well as he. For a moment, they could only gaze at each other, in silence, wanting to say one true thing to each other which would wipe all this away, which would make the fact of the two men stalking the trail not a fact at all. He quietly pulled back both hammers of the shotgun.
The two men in suits passed fifty feet from them, at the edge of the woods, outlined in the clearing by the bright sun.
Devereaux held the shotgun level at the edge of the culvert like a soldier in a trench. The two men were apart from each other by about ten feet if faced from the house. But at this angle, they were together. Close enough for a shotgun in any case, Devereaux decided.
The shotgun kicked against his shoulder and the boom tore into the silence of the forest.