Page 47 of Edge of Ruin
I arranged her so that her head was cradled on my shoulder, her arm resting on my chest, her leg flung over mine. I stroked her back, and felt her heart beating under my hand, until she fell asleep.
So soft. I stared at the swirls of red hair tickling my nose, my chin. Her slender shoulder. I loved her scent, the soft moist bloom of warmth of her breath against my shoulder. I memorized the curve of her spine. If I concentrated on these details, and thought of nothing else, I could cling to this emotion that was vibrating inside me like a tightly strung instrument. Part of me wanted to shove it back down into the darkness, but the feeling sang on, a fragile, stubborn thread.
I clung to it, counting the rise and fall of her breaths. Keeping the rest of the universe at bay. Let there be nothing but her, and her breath. In. Out.
Late afternoon eased with the smoothness of a sigh into twilight. I barely noticed the change. I could lie there forever, feeling her heartbeat. Letting that strange feeling vibrate inside me. That faraway, mysterious melody.
Contentment? No. I rejected the word. I was familiar with contentment. I was contented with my house, my work. I counted myself lucky to spend my days with the smell of the earth and rain, the sun, the colors of flowers. That was contentment.
This feeling was new. It was a long, quiet hour before I dared to put a name to it.
It felt almost like happiness.
That scared me. There were pitfalls there, fatal traps. Behind that word were doors in my mind that had been locked for years. Like when Randy left, when I was eight. Deborah, who always insisted that I call her Deborah instead of Mom, told me that Randy had to go and find himself. “I gotta have space,” I remembered him saying, very loudly. I remembered also thinking that was really dumb. It was the Oregon desert. There was so much space, it gave me the willies.
But Randy evidently needed more. He took down his teepee, threw it in his truck, and drove away. I remembered standing there, bewildered, while Randy’s truck got smaller. I had wondered sometimes if Randy was my father, but Deborah had been somewhat vague on that point.
Then we’d stayed with Jim and Consuela in the Yakima Valley, until Deborah met Manuel. We moved into Manuel’s trailer in the peach orchards. Manuel taught me Spanish, how to fight, how to change the oil in a car. Then Manuel got in trouble because he didn’t have a green card. He had to go back to Mexico.
After a while, Deborah decided that she had to follow her heart and go to Mexico, too. Which had freaked me right the fuck out.
“You’ll stay with Tavia,” she told me.
“But why can’t I come?”
“Oh, it’s complicated, baby. But I’ll write you letters, and I’ll send for you real soon. You’ll love it with Aunt Tavia. Her commune has lots of kids, and a swimming hole, and a tree house and everything.”
So off I went, to Tavia’s commune, near Olympia. I got some letters, but they started coming less and less frequently. I was just starting to get used to the place when Tavia fell in love with Mick, a guy from Oakland, and decided to move down to California to be with him. But Mick didn’t want me to come. “The family thing is just not my scene,” Mick said firmly.
So off I went to Uncle Freddy’s place in southern Oregon. And in the meantime, Deborah broke up with Manuel, who was “too enmeshed in his culture,” the letter said. She had decided to go to India to study yoga with a guru, “to get her head straightened out and recover her sense of self.” Shortly after that, Tavia broke up with Mick, left Oakland, and moved to Los Angeles with a guy named Mike.
I had trouble keeping it all straight. But I had liked the benevolent Uncle Freddy. I had liked the garden, the farm, the mountains. I had almost begun to allow myself to think of the place as home when the bust went down.
That was the time I most hated to remember. I hadn’t thought of it in years.
I stared at the barbed-wire tattoo around Vivi’s slender wrist, tracing it, and suddenly realized that her eyes were open. She was studying me.
She scrambled on top of me, folding her arms over my chest and resting her chin on them. There were questions in her eyes. She wanted to talk.
It terrified me. Too much reality would chase away that feeling I liked so much. But even so, I wanted to know her. Her history, her dreams, her hopes, her plans.
No, on second thought, maybe I didn’t want to know her plans.
Chapter Fourteen
Vivi
I felt so relaxed, sprawled on top of Jack. My body just couldn’t get enough contact with him.
“So?” I prompted him. “Shouldn’t we talk?”
“Probably,” he said cautiously. “I’m not feeling very articulate.”
“Hmm.” I shifted, breasts brushing his chest, my crotch rubbing against his thigh. He hardened beneath me instantly. Already up for more. Wow. The man was tireless.
“You just wait a goddamn minute,” I said with a teasing smile. “We should talk before we make love again. This is too easy!”
“What’s wrong with easy?” He groped for a condom and ripped the package open. “We can talk if I’m inside you, can’t we? Nothing’s stopping us.”
