Cast a Pale Shadow(13)

She broke the kiss. "We're free, Nicholas! Now they'll never get us back." The wind whipped the words from her, and they splintered in echoes down the ravine. She stiffened her fingers and slipped them free of his, and they parted.

"Doreen! Doreen?" He realized with the jolt of awakening that he had spoken her name out loud. His heart still thumping in his ears, he pulled himself upright and blinked away the remnants of his dream. God, Doreen! He shuddered with the memory. Why had he dreamed of her after all this time? The sky lightened outside and the hall bustled with early morning activity. He thought a walk and maybe a smoke in the parking lot would dispel his foreboding.

No one could blame him for what happened to Doreen. No one could have stopped her. No one. Nicholas paused in the doorway to look once more at Trissa. No, it would be nothing like Doreen this time. He would not let things get beyond his control. He was older now. But was he wiser?

Over the months he had learned to adjust his gait to the altered state of his foot since the loss of his frostbitten toes, but when he was weary or too absorbed in his thoughts, his limp became pronounced. Tonight, it was aggravated by stiffness from his hours slumped in the chair so that his walk down the hall made a clump and drag sound he was, at first, unaware came from him. When he realized it did, his spirits sagged further.

A cigarette and the walk would not be enough. He was faced with a decision that would require a half a pack, a quart of strong coffee, and some serious pacing. His determination to be with Trissa when she awoke evaporated as the memory of Doreen gnawed at him.

"Crazy is not wrong, only different." Doreen often told him. "They lock us away because we scare the bejeebers out of them," she would declare as she picked at a lock with a hairpin. Doreen had the skill of Houdini, if not the speed. And Nicholas was confident that with practice that would develop. She was only seventeen. "The locks take the place of the inhibitions that keep them bound but that we lack. Open sesame!" The tumbler would turn and the door would fly open and they would be off, hand in hand, down the stairs and free.

Nicholas did not remember his beginnings at Edgewater. It seemed his conscious life had begun the day Doreen found him there. "I can get you out of here, Nicholas. Come with me." She took his hand and they escaped that day for the first time. Lying in the aromatic cedar woods, with glimpses of sparkling, blue Lake Michigan winking at them occasionally through the trees, they discussed life and death and craziness.

"How old are you, Nicholas?"

"Fifteen, I think." Or newborn with your touch, he could have said. Age had no real meaning for him.

"Never follow a statement of fact with a doubt," she said, "Even if you have one. Don't give them the satisfaction. If you think you are fifteen, then you are, no matter how long you have actually lived. Me, I prefer to think I'm seventy-one. A reversal of digits does no one any harm. And it's an age no one else aspires to, I imagine. Unless you're already seventy, that is."

"But why so old?"

"Wisdom. It comes with age. Wisdom is the most important thing in life. Except death. And being seventy-one puts me closer to both of them."

Her dark eyes snapped and sparkled at him. Was it honesty or mockery he saw in their depths?

"Does the word make you nervous?"

"What word?" he asked, dragging his own eyes away from the hypnotic depths of hers, casting them up through the trees, anywhere but down at her.

"Death."

"No. Why should it?"

"Exactly."

There was silence except for the whisper of the wind.

"Fifteen is very young. Wouldn't you rather be eighteen? Or eighty-one?"

"I don't know." Her questions seemed like traps to him, nonsense delivered with such puzzling fervor, that he wished he had the answers she wanted. "I'm having a hard enough time dealing with fifteen, I suppose."

"Oh well," she shrugged, "I was just wondering." She sat up and studied him earnestly. "Have you ever had sex, Nicholas?"

"Yes," he said, his voice sharp and tight. If this was the acid of memory he felt rising in him, he preferred forgetfulness.

"I mean," the look in her eyes made him think she understood the volumes behind his one clipped syllable, "not forced? I should have asked have you ever made love?"

"No."

"You're not afraid to, are you?"

"We can't. Not here."

"Why not? We're crazy. We can do anything we want, and who's to blame us?" Her eyes no longer laughed at him as she drew him closer and taught him to kiss in a way that left him breathless. "It's almost like death if you do it right."

"Kissing?" His voice embarrassed him by cracking on the word.

"No, sex. Petit mort, they call it. Little death. That's why I'm not afraid of it. Death, I mean."

"I don't understand."

"I'll try to show you. But it doesn't always happen. Not with me, anyway. It requires a special magic. We might have it, we might not."

They didn't find it that time, the first, or any of the other times when they escaped the confines of Edgewater to seek the edge of the world. He learned much later that, for all her boldly aggressive passion and pretended knowledge, that first time had been hers as well, not forced. Before Edgewater there had been another place for her, a place with locks not so easily breached, a place where the screams of an eight year old girl -- "emotionally disturbed" she confided in Nicholas, "It's the polite term for crazy" -- were dismissed as tantrums and no one cared to learn their cause. She remembered only the sound of the man's key grating in the lock, the smell of him, Vitalis and old cigarettes, the smothering weight of him, and the pain.

Yet, Doreen had still believed there could be magic. She read to Nicholas about it from books with well-thumbed pages where the hero's eyes smoldered and his experienced touch set passion's blaze in the damsel's most secret places.

Though Nicholas listened attentively and was willing to learn, he found himself as confused by what was said on those pages as what was left unsaid. The hero, always the suave, tender expert, knew what to do and when to do it. While Nicholas, the fumbling, not-quite innocent, had known only mechanics and obedience and to do what he was told or suffer the consequences and to feel the bitter shame that his debasement brought unwanted pleasure along with the pain. He had never known magic, only conclusion and release.

"Slow down. It's not a race," whispered the ever-patient Doreen. "There's supposed to be a certain grace to it once you get the rhythm. You have to learn control. Romance, think romance."

But how could she expect grace from a fifteen year old? How could he achieve control when every hormone in his body screamed against it? How could he think romance when he had the instincts of a rutting animal?

"It's all right. It will take time. To surrender to the magic, you have to get over the past. Who was it that forced you? Who were you with?"

He couldn't tell her. He shouldn't remember. He refused to remember. It was a memory that only came in nightmares. My father. My sister. She'd hate him if she knew. Doreen would feel only disgust and loathing if he told. And he couldn't bear it, for the sad thing was he loved her.

"Love?" Her laugh was like crystal shattering when he made the mistake of saying the word. "You're hallucinating. It happens when you're crazy."

In the end, her patience failed her. She must have despaired of finding her little death with him and escaped to find the real death she may have wanted all along. The winter had closed in on Edgewater, snow and wind buffeting the woods and fields around that gothic bastion, whipping Lake Michigan into icy fury, locking them in more effectively than any bars or keys. And Doreen chafed against her restraints and went a little bit madder. "Danger. It's danger that we need, just a taste, just the edge. The tower! If we could get into the tower!"

The tower was bolted and chained, and he didn't believe she could ever break those locks. He refused to go with her. He was afraid they'd be caught.

They didn't let anyone see her when they took her away, but he had seen. He was the one who saw her first, far below the open tower window, crushed and broken, red and blue against the blinding white of the snow.

Lighting another cigarette with the ember of its dying forerunner, Nicholas sank onto a cold concrete bench in the outdoor smoking area. He wondered if Trissa was awake yet. He'd seen the breakfast carts wheeled off the elevators thirty minutes ago and already some empty trays carried back to them to wait their return to the kitchen.

He had probably lost his opportunity to be with her, to offer a warm hand of reassurance when her eyes opened to another morning on this earth. It was a morning she hadn't wanted to see, wouldn't have seen if he hadn't bought it for her. He wondered if she would thank him for that. Or curse him. Why couldn't just the rescue be enough to free him from Doreen's ghost? But it wouldn't be. He had known that all along. There was still more rescuing to be done. The damsel was still in distress. Since Doreen, he had made himself recognize the signs.