"But if you and I can settle some things, it could all work out fine. I'll meet you in the alley. If you are not there by five, I'm coming after you. Do you understand?"
"Yes, sir."
Trissa watched him leave, wishing him dead. Then she took herself to the nurse's office and threw up. Afterwards, she couldn't relinquish her grip on the cold porcelain. She didn't trust her legs to hold her up without that support. Mrs. Rowan, the health aid on duty, offered to call for a ride. Trissa had to dig in her purse for Augusta's number. She was too rattled to remember it.
*****
Augusta's voice held brittle cheer when she called Nicholas with the message. Trissa had come home sick from school, but not to worry, a little stomach upset was all. She had sent her off to bed with tea and Saltine crackers. Nicholas hung up the phone and repeated the words to himself. They had sounded politely false, like an excuse used to turn down an invitation to a dull party. When Ben came in a few minutes later to work on the books, he asked him if he could leave for the day. It was no problem, Wednesdays were slow, and it was just an hour to closing.
He smoked three cigarettes on the way home, letting the smoke drift heavily through the car, hoping the soft haze would dull his worry. Over the past two weeks, his constant yearning for Trissa played like a screeching melody on the taut bowstrings of his restraint. It was a tune that was both sweetened and sharpened by her presence.
Every morning, "I love you, Trissa" was his first waking thought, never voiced, while the soft, creamy shell of her ear was cuddled so close to his lips that she would have heard him, however faint the words. She seemed to regard his arms as extra pillows, seeking him out to nestle in them, no matter how far he edged to his side of the bed. If she woke before him, as she often did, she would wake him with a kiss that gave him pain to feel and know that it was all he could allow. He'd have to crash away from her, muttering a grumpy good morning, and shuffling off to the bathroom where he drew his bath as numbingly cold as he could stand it.
In his dreams, he held her and loved her as if the shadows of her past were long forgotten. But in his waking, reasoned thoughts, he knew that they were not, and he feared that he would damage their tenuous hold on the moment if he went too far, too fast. He must count on time to heal her.
Time, his old enemy. And more so now than ever. Augusta's phone call had set the clock ticking loudly, knocking at his brain like a visitor that would not be denied entry. A little stomach upset, she said. Why must he torment himself with the suspicion that she was hiding something more?
Augusta greeted him at the back door, and he knew his suspicions were true. She stepped out of the kitchen where Ruth chopped onions at the sink to talk to him privately.
"Nicholas, I'm so glad you came home. She wouldn't let me tell you anything more than I did. But I'm afraid there is something terribly wrong." Augusta reached out and grasped his hand urgently.
"Did you call a doctor?"
"It's not like that. I mean, I don't think a doctor could help."
"But she was sick?"
"Anxiety, I think. I checked on her a bit ago, and it's clear she's been crying, probably ever since I left her." Her hand fluttered to her forehead to flick at a wiry strand of hair. "Oh, Nicholas, I'm so worried. She looks as if the world might end, and she might welcome it."
Panic welled in him like a seeping wound. An image of Trissa's face as she knelt on the railroad tracks harrowed him. "And you left her alone?" He pushed past her into the kitchen and bolted up the stairs.
"She wouldn't let me stay," Augusta called after him. "I'm sorry."
Trissa had locked the room, as she almost never did. She had told him once that real families had no need of locks. Nicholas fumbled in his pocket for his keys, cursing the delay. From inside, he heard the bath water running.
"Trissa! Trissa, answer me!" But there was no answer. When at last, he got the bent, old