The Last Time They Met_ A Novel - Anita Shreve [116]
“I can’t,” she whispers, pushing at Thomas.
Reluctantly, Thomas lets her go. She jigs her skirt and sweater down. They hear footsteps on the stairs, and Thomas kicks the door shut.
“What is it?” he asks.
She sits on the bed and, trying to erase the image, takes in the details of the room: the wooden desk, the piles of papers, the pens scattered on its surface. A dress shirt and a pair of trousers are crumpled in a corner. White curtains make a diamond of the window and seem too pretty for a boy’s room. A bookcase is in the corner. “Oh God,” she says quietly, and she covers her face with her hands.
“Linda, what is it?” Thomas asks, crouching in front of her, alarm in his voice.
She shakes her head back and forth.
“This?” he asks, clearly bewildered. “That?” he asks, pointing to the wall.
Footsteps pass once again by the door.
______
In the mirror over the dresser she can see the two of them: Thomas now sitting on the bed, his hair hastily finger-combed, his back slightly hunched. Herself, standing by the bookcase, arms crossed, her eyes pink-rimmed from the cold, her hair flattened from her hat.
On the desk next to the bookcase are pages of writing. She looks a bit closer. “Is that a poem you’re working on?” she asks.
Thomas looks absently at the desk, and then stands, realizing that he’s left his work exposed. He moves to the desk and picks up the pages.
“Is it something you can read to me?” she asks.
“No,” he says.
“Are you sure?”
He shuffles the papers in his hand. “I’m sure.”
“Let me see.”
He hands her the first page. “It’s just a draft,” he says.
She turns the page around and reads what he has written there. It’s a poem about a dive off a pier, a girl in the water in her slip. About moving lights in the background and the taunts of boys.
She reads the poem through and then reads it again.
“Water’s silk,” she says. “It felt like silk.”
______
There is hell to pay when they go downstairs: a mother who is frosty; a father who’s had an earful from his wife. The father drifts into a room from which Linda can hear a television; the mother, a woman with a mission, calls a cab with chains. Linda puts her boots back on and stands, dismissed, with Thomas in the vestibule, waiting for the cab.
“In the duffel bag?” he says. “It’s drugs.”
______
The next day, in the car in back of the cottage, Thomas slides Linda’s blouse and jacket off her shoulder and kisses the bony knob there.
“I love this part of you best of all,” he says.
“Really? Why?” It seems, in light of all the parts he has recently got to know, sort of beside the point.
“It’s you,” he says. “It’s all you.”
“Isn’t that a song title?” she asks.
They have on sunglasses. Beyond them, the world is all aglitter. On their way to the beach cottage, they passed the Giant Coaster, St. Ann’s Church, and the diner, all of which were encased in ice. The sun made a sheen against walls that were too bright for the naked eye; it made the branches of the trees seem to have come from Paradise.
“A different kind of Heaven than we imagined,” she says.
“What?”
“It’s a wonderland,” she says, admiring.
Thomas has retrieved his car. He has, along with most of the rest of the other holdouts in town, finally had chains put on his tires. There is still February to go, and March, and who knows what freak storms April might bring?
“They cost me twenty bucks,” he said earlier. “Worth it, though. Otherwise, I couldn’t have picked you up.”
He kisses her. Though they are parked — daringly — in their usual spot, Thomas argues that the cop isn’t likely to start his rounds so early in the afternoon.
“Why are you doing it?” Linda asks.
He knows precisely what she is referring to. “Donny T. asked me to,” he says.
“That