Cast a Pale Shadow

chapter Seventeen

After a cordial dinner with Augusta and her housemates, Dr. Fitapaldi met with Trissa in the small, but charming second floor solarium. Her face felt puffy with sleep and her eyes still bleary from the time she had spent crying since he had last seen her. Still, she managed a welcoming smile, and when he stood and extended a hand to her, she tamed all but the slightest tremble in her grasp as he drew her in for a comforting hug.

When they settled in two armchairs on either side of a tea table Augusta had loaded with cake, sliced fruit, and chocolate mints, Fitapaldi took up the snifter of brandy Augusta had brought him and Trissa sipped a cup of tea.

"What must I do, Doctor?"

"It will be a long road. And I must admit, though it may seem cold to call it so, that your father's murder is an intrusive complication."

"It was never my father's way to make things easier for me. I could not expect him to change even in death."

"Then you do not blame Cole?"

She leaned forward to set her cup emphatically on the table. "Even if he did it, it would be a matter for rejoicing, not blame. Do you think me heartless?"

"Never heartless. Not after the heart you have shown me since I arrived. Your feelings toward your father are understandable."

"When I heard he was dead, it made me so lightheaded I fainted. I think it was the sudden lifting of the fear I've carried with me for so long. These tears of mine that never seem to dry -- not one of them is for my father. Not one."

"You mourn the loss of Nicholas. That's the source of your tears."

"Yes, but he's not gone so far away. Sometimes I think I see him just beyond the shadows in his eyes. And when he held me..." She hugged herself with the memory.

"He is there, Trissa. Cole and Nicholas are the same. What he must do is somehow find peace with that truth, to find a way to live with all his memories. You can help him do that."

"How? All I know how to do is to love him."

"In the end, that love will mean more than anything I or anybody can do. I would like to stay and help for a while, if you will consent. I don't know that Cole will agree. He has avoided my help in the past."

"It would give me such hope if you stayed. But...but I have no money to pay you."

"What help I can give would be small reparation for the damage my profession has done Cole." He grinned and swirled the brandy in the glass before taking one last sip. "Officially, let us say I am on vacation. Augusta has already graciously offered to provide for my accommodations."



*****



If Cole didn't know better, he could blame his throbbing headache on his injuries. It did seem to have its root behind his ear where, since the removal of the cervical collar, he could see the bruise was blackest. From there, it radiated across the back of his skull reaching down his spine to clutch at his stomach.

And yet, when the nurse arrived to ask with chirpy enthusiasm, "How are we doing this morning, Mr. Brewer? Any pain?" he had said no and sent her on her way without wielding her pain-deadening magic wand. He wanted nothing deadened. He wanted no surrendering of control to drugs, or sleep, or anything else. He welcomed the pain.

Better than breathing to let you know you're alive, he'd told the girl. Better than breathing and as familiar as an old pair of sneakers. He did not need a beating to introduce him to pain. It was an old friend, an old foul-weather friend who'd come creeping back when he'd awakened in the gray light of morning, alone.

Of course, he preferred to be alone, always had. He reminded himself of that when the girl wasn't there to smile her sad smile, to gaze at him with what might have been love, for all he knew of it, shining in her round, blue eyes, to brush her lips against his with a good morning, I love you, Nicholas kiss. It was best, he thought sternly, that the girl was not here, for Nicholas was not either, and there was no one at all to love. The party was over, all the guests gone home. Once again, Cole was left to sweep out the debris.

By ten o'clock, when she had not come and had not called and the pain had begun clanging the Anvil Chorus on his skull, he remembered how connections were such a nuisance and better cut cleanly and without delay. There would be a difficult week or two as he scraped away the barnacles Nicholas always let collect, but soon, he would be clear of all of it, the girl and everything.

He couldn't think how this might hurt her, better this small hurt now. She was young. She would heal. Or would she? Fitapaldi's words rasped against the clatter in his brain, "You are kindred spirits, it seems. Her background is different only in degree from yours."

No, he did not want to hear that. He did not want to know that. He danced on a thin wire strung high above the abyss. He had balance for no one else. There was no one else.

"Brewer." The name barked out by the huge and surly looking doctor who filled the doorway, served as greeting and address. Unable to see his nametag, Cole was forced to simply nod and frown in return, which the doctor took as permission to enter.

"A hand grenade. I've been thinking of it all night and a hand grenade is the precisely right description for you. A hand grenade in that spit of time between the removal of the pin and the throwing and the blast. That's the borrowed time I figure you've got."

"As long as that? Whole lives can be lived in that instant," Cole said sullenly. This was the part he hated most, sorting out and disposing of the friends Nicholas had accumulated. Most times, he could avoid them all together, just leave town without a trace. But he was trapped this time. He had to be able to walk out.

"You should know. You're either incredibly lucky or the fates are trying to prove by you that only the good die young. Just do us a favor and see that Trissa is well out of the way when you really do blow." He was close enough now so that Cole could read his tag, Dr. Bryant Edmonds.

Without invitation, he sat in the chair by the window. His expression was more smirk than smile. "I assume, since she's been hanging around here, all love-struck and pining, that you have given your little wife the service we discussed at our last meeting."

The doctor's snide tone left no doubt that his comment was intended to be as crude as it sounded. Cole's distaste for the man was sudden and intense, like a kick in the teeth. Still, he curbed the impulse to lash back. The girl was nothing to him.

God, his head ached too much to be sparring like this. "Assume what you want. Though why the hell it is any of your business, I have a hard time knowing."

"It isn't," said a soft but assertive voice.

"Trissa," said Cole, and his pain seemed to fizzle away like beer foam in a salted glass.

"Good morning, Nicholas," she said as she gave him that kiss he'd expected. Better than he'd expected, actually. He hadn't imagined that her freshly washed hair would have the scent of roses as it fell forward to brush his cheek. Or that the tip of her tongue would tease the corners of his lips for a brief, sweet instant. Or that she would stop on her way up from his lips to kiss the tip of his nose and the very spot behind his ear where it hurt the most. She confused him mightily. She made it very hard to think of her as debris or nuisance.

The doctor cleared his throat impatiently, and when Cole looked up, his smirk had turned to scowl. "Excuse the intrusion, Mr. and Mrs. Brewer."

Trissa perched on the edge of the bed and fluttered her lashes at Cole saucily, then tossed her hair over her shoulder to glance back at the doctor. "Oh, Dr. Edmonds, I thought you'd gone."

"Shortly. I do have a bit of news, though perhaps you'd want to wait to hear it from Dr. Cummings."

The teasing smile melted from her face instantly. "What is it?"

"Good news, I guess. I was telling Brewer how lucky he was to have such a thick skull and a cast iron gut. The last tests came back. They're letting him go tomorrow."

Trissa yielded to the light push of Cole's fingertips on her forearm and slid off the bed away from him. It might have been the subtle but unmistakable distancing of himself away from her that tempered the enthusiasm of her response. "Thank you for telling us. I'm very pleased."

Edmonds studied her with a wry half-smile, his arms folded across his chest. "From the way the police have been hanging around here, it should be just in time for the arrest. I may be forced to admit, Brewer, that I was wrong when I assessed your various abilities. One of them, anyway. Fighting may be a strong suit after all. As to the other, well, some women settle for less than others, I suppose."

"Come out in the hall! I want a word with you, Doctor!" Trissa snapped and wheeled to stalk out. Edmonds chuckled and ambled after her. Cole could only hear the hissing anger of her whisper but not the words as she gave him the piece of her mind that nettled her. He could imagine her jabbing her tiny finger into his massive chest as she made her point.

His low rumble of a voice was clearly audible, however. "I never trusted Brewer. You're best rid of him. He's a killer." There was a slight pause in which neither spoke. "Unless, of course, that's what you wanted out of him all along. Tell me, what's the going rate for patricide? And what does he accept for legal tender?" There was a resounding crack which could only have been her palm connecting with his cheek.

Cole heaved himself painfully out of the bed to go to her aid, but she was in the door before he'd managed two steps. Her face was beet red with fury and her fists were tight, white-knuckled balls. "Ooh! What an arrogant, insufferable bastard!" She jammed a fist to her mouth as if to stifle a pending scream.

Awkwardly, Cole put an arm around her shoulder and patted her. "Really, I'm not worth the trouble. For all we know, he may be right. About me, I mean."

"No," she said adamantly. "Don't say that. Don't even think it. I talked to the police this morning. They don't have anything. It seems they suspect me as much as they do you. So for all his arrogance, Edmonds shares his perceptions with the cops." She shivered, then seemed to force the tension out of herself. "But, I don't want to worry about that now. I came here to get reacquainted with my multifaceted husband."

"Multifaceted? That's a rather benign term, don't you think? Did Fitapaldi give you that one? It sounds like him."

"No," she said, "I thought of it myself. Anyway, it fits." She stepped away from him, shrugged off her sweater and tossed it across the foot of the bed. "Wait here a second. I have a present for you. I left it out in the hall." She disappeared for a moment and returned with a package wrapped in brown paper and tied with twine.

"A present?"

"Sit down and I'll give it to you." She guided him to a chair and held his elbow as he eased himself into it. "It's not brand new. I mean, Jack found it for me. I told him what I had in mind, and he got this. I hope you like it."

He untied the string and folded back the paper slowly, prolonging the anticipation. He could not remember the last time anybody had given him a present. When the package lay open in his lap, he stroked his hand over the smooth, dark jacket of the book inside. "Ansel Adams."

"It's what he does with the light, the way the light shines through. I see that in your pictures. The ones at the lake. And the still lifes."

"My Camera in Yosemite Valley. You flatter me. Thank you. It's the nicest gift anybody ever gave me."

She smiled, then watched him as he turned the pages of the book. He glanced up now and again, enjoying her pleasure as much as the book, sorry he had pushed her away from him earlier, sorry he had caused her even that momentary pain. But, he reminded himself and forced his eyes down again, that must be his purpose with her, to push her away. He mustn't let himself get sidetracked from that.

"Nicholas," she said softly after a while. "You won't remember this, but not so long ago, you made me promise something. I want the same promise from you now."

"Don't, Trissa."

"It's not a very big promise, and I don't think the keeping of it will be too great a chore."

"I can't."

"All you have to say is that you promise you will never leave me. It's not so much to ask, is it?"

He looked past her to a spot on the wall, a chip in the green paint, trying to focus on it to shutter out the flashed afterimage of her sincere, eager hope. "The one you wish to bind with a promise like that is already gone. The promise is broken before it is made."

"No, the one I wish to bind is right here before me," she slipped to her knees on the floor by his chair.

"Trissa, please don't..."

"He's the one who took the pictures as magic with light as the ones in this book. He is you, Nicholas. You, Cole. One and the same."

"There will be no promises. I'm no good at promises."

"We'll see," she sighed, unknowingly echoing his words from yesterday. "Anyway, I have the law on my side. This morning, they cautioned me not to leave town. I suspect they'll expect the same from you. I will have you under house arrest."



*****



For the first few days of his return to the home he did not remember, Cole slept in the old cook's room off the kitchen. Augusta had thoughtfully made it up for him, thinking the stairs would be difficult for him to manage for a while. Cole was grateful for it. It had a narrow bed he was expected to share with no one, unlike the one he knew he'd find when wellness forced him back to his own room. It was close to the kitchen, the center of most of the activity in the house, and easy to escape to when the pressure of remembering faces and names became too much for him.

No one thought it strange when he slipped off for naps. They encouraged him to take it easy, take his time. No one knew that he seldom slept at all. Trissa, Fitapaldi, and Augusta had laid the groundwork for his forgetfulness by magnifying the extent of his head injuries. If he lost his train of thought in mid-sentence, or mistook May for Beverly, or forgot Maurice's name all together, they blamed it on the beating, patted him on the shoulder, and prompted him patiently.

Nobody seemed worried that they might harbor a homicidal maniac in their midst. They simply refused to believe that possibility. No one knew that that was one of the worries that kept him awake at night.

Trissa, more than Fitapaldi, seemed to be in charge of his recuperation and therapy. Though Fitapaldi would walk with him each evening in the garden and talk about the old days as if they were old chums and not psycho and head shrink. But Trissa was the one who sat and talked with him hour upon hour, kissing and touching him as if he were Nicholas and nothing had changed. She would bring down his portfolio of photographs and use them like flashcards, drilling him on memories. After three or four times through she began marking them with tiny pencil scratches on the back corners. He saw later that the marks were N's or C's according to his response.

When he tired of the game or had nothing to say, she would read to him, newspapers and folktales. The newspapers included not only the current one but others she had somehow collected from days that were gaps in his memory, of plane crashes and elections, of the Viet Nam War and the War on Poverty and the roller coaster stock market, of overthrown governments, baseball games, celebrity marriages, divorces, and deaths.

"Ladd? Alan Ladd died?"

She nodded solemnly, "Of undisclosed cause, January twenty-ninth. I saw him in Shane on the Late Show once. Was he a favorite of yours?"

"I liked him well enough. He had a struggle growing up, I heard. Like me. In This Gun for Hire, he acted madness better than most of us can live it."

The folktales she chose at random, letting the thick, old book from Augusta's library fall open in her lap where it might and delving into it backwards and forwards from the page she'd found. Why folktales, he never asked. It was enough to listen to the lilting cadence of the words in her sweet, soft voice, to laugh with her at the humorous ones like Lazy Jack or The Pig-Headed Wife, to hear her sigh at the romantic ones like Beauty and the Beast, to see secret tears sneak from her eyes when the stories told of estranged fathers and daughters, or lost loves never found again.

"I know it's silly. I'll read something else tomorrow, something more manly. Ernest Hemingway? Ian Fleming? Non-fiction maybe?"

He took the book from her lap and leafed through it. "Actually, I'd prefer Finn MacCoul and the Fenians of Erin, followed by The Giant Who Had No Heart in His Body, if we have time." He closed the book and winked at her, not knowing that it recalled Nicholas to her so sharply that she had to look away for a moment. "Trissa, you could read the telephone book and I would enjoy it. I like the sound of your voice."

"Do you? Finn MacCoul it is then. By special request. Good night, Nicholas I mean, Cole." She kissed him as she always did before they parted for the night, then left him behind in dizzy shambles to lie awake all night, or if he slept, to dream of her in ways that went beyond kisses. It couldn't be that he was falling in love with her. That was something that Cole just could not do.