The Taker-Taker 1 Read online

  “Do you have a passport?” she asks Luke.

  “At home, sure.”

  “Let’s go get it.”

  “What—we’re going to fly off to Paris, just like that?”

  “Why not? I’ll buy the tickets, pay for everything. Money is not a problem.”

  “I think we should get you to Canada, now, before the police put out a bulletin on you. We’re fifteen minutes from the border.”

  “Will you need your passport to cross the border? They’ve changed the regulations, haven’t they?” the girl asks, a note of panic in her voice.

  Luke tightens his grip again on the wheel. “I don’t know … I haven’t crossed the border in a while … Oh, okay, we’ll go to my house. But only for a minute.”

  The farmhouse stands in the middle of an open field, like a child too stupid to know to come in from the cold. His truck climbs and bucks over the churned mud, now frozen into peaks like cake frosting.

  They enter through the back door into a sad, shabby kitchen that hasn’t been changed in the past fifty years. Luke flips on the overhead light and notices it makes no appreciable difference in the level of light in the room. Used coffee mugs sit on the dinette table and crumbs crunch underfoot. He is disproportionately embarrassed by the disarray.

  “This was my parents’ house. I’ve been living here since they died,” he explains. “I didn’t like the idea of the farm going to a stranger, but I can’t run it like they did. Sold the livestock a few months ago. Have someone lined up to rent the fields, to plant next spring. Seems a waste to let them go fallow.”

  Lanny drifts around the kitchen, running a finger over the chipped Formica countertop, the back of a vinyl-cushioned kitchen chair. She stops at a drawing hanging from a magnet on the refrigerator, made by one of his daughters when she was in preschool. A princess on a pony; the pony is recognizable as some type of horselike creature but the princess is an approximation, with bushy blond hair and blue eyes, wearing a pink gown to go horseback riding. Except for the long gown, it could be Lanny.

  “Who drew this? Do you have children at home?”

  “Not anymore.”

  “Gone, with your wife?” she guesses. “No one taking care of the place for you?”

  He shrugs.

  “You don’t have any reason to stay,” she says, stating a fact.

  “I still have obligations,” he says, because that is how he’s used to thinking about his life. A farm he won’t be able to sell in this economy. He has his practice, mostly elderly as their children and grandchildren move out of town. His caseload shrinks every month.

  Luke goes up the stairs and to his bedroom, and finds his passport in the drawer of a bedside table. He moved into his parents’ old bedroom after his wife left him: the bedroom of his childhood had also been his marital bed and he wants no part of that anymore.

  He flips the passport open. Never used. He’s never had the time to travel, not since his residency, and even then it was only in the U.S. He’s never been to even one of the faraway places he used to dream about seeing when he was a teenager, spending long hours on the tractor, his daydreaming time. His empty passport makes him feel a little ashamed in front of somebody who has been to all these exotic places. His life was supposed to turn out differently.

  He finds Lanny in the dining room inspecting the family pictures, placed on a low bookcase. His mother had the photos out for as long as Luke could remember and he didn’t have the heart to put them away, but his mother was the only one who knew who these people were and how they were related to him. Old black-and-white photographs, with stern, long-gone Scandinavians staring back, strangers to one another. There’s one color picture in a thick wood frame, a photo of a woman and her two daughters nestled among the relatives as though they belong there.

  Luke turns off the lights and sets the thermostat very low, just enough to keep the pipes from freezing. He checks the locks on the doors, though he doesn’t know why he is being so careful. He plans to come right back after dropping this girl off over the border, but the touch of his hand on the light switch makes a lump rise in his throat. It feels like he is saying good-bye—which he hopes to do one day, for which he’s planned and pictured in his more sensible moments, maybe in the spring when he can think more clearly—but right now he’s just helping a girl in trouble, a girl with no one else to turn to. As for today, he’s coming right back.

  “Ready?” Luke asks, jingling the keys once more, but Lanny reaches into the bookcase and pulls out a small book, barely larger than her hand. The dust jacket is missing and the hard covers are worn at the corners, so that the cardboard is visible, like a bud among the fraying yellow fabric. It takes a minute before Luke recognizes the book: it had been his favorite as a boy and his mother must have kept it all these years. The Jade Pagoda, a classic child’s tale, like Kipling but not Kipling, a British expatriate’s story set in a faraway locale, a story with a Chinese prince and a European princess, or a Caucasian girl in any case, set with pen-and-ink illustrations done by the author’s own hand. Lanny flips through the pages.

  “Do you know the book?” he asks. “I used to love it … Well, you can see the use it got. The binding is just about shot. I don’t think it’s in print anymore.”

  She is holding it out to him now, open, pointing to one of the illustrations. And he’ll be damned if it isn’t her. She’s in a period dress and her hair is pinned up like a Gibson girl’s, but that is her heart-shaped face and her slightly haughty, bemused eyes. “I met Oliver, the author, when we both lived in Hong Kong. He was just a British civil servant then, and known as a drinker, begging the officers’ wives to pose for his ‘little project,’ as he called it. I was the only one who would do it; they all thought it was scandalous and some kind of ruse, just an excuse to get one of us alone with him in his apartment.”

  There’s a stirring in his diaphragm. He feels his heart leap possessively. The girl in the illustration stands before him in the flesh, and it is like the strangest kind of magic to have something he’s known only as incorporeal suddenly manifest itself before him. He is afraid, for a moment, that he might faint.

  In an instant, she is at his side, hurrying to the door. “I’m ready. Let’s go.”

  ELEVEN

  ST. ANDREW, 1816

  I’d gotten my heart’s one desire—for Jonathan to behold me as a woman and his lover—but nothing more. I lived in a state of uncertainty because I hadn’t been able to communicate with him since that thrilling, frightening afternoon.

  Winter had intervened.

  Winter was not to be denied in our part of Maine. We would endure blizzard after blizzard, snow piled waist deep within a day or two, negating any possibility of travel. All attention and energy was directed toward keeping warm and fed, and taking care of the livestock. Every common task outdoors required wading in snow, an exhausting prospect. By the time a path to the barn and pasture was cleared, a clearing chopped through the icy surface of the stream for both livestock and household use, and the cattle had gotten used to negotiating the snowdrifts in the field, and it looked as if life might return to normal (or, at least, routine), another storm would descend on the valley.

  I sat by the window and stared down the wagon trail, unsullied snow standing nearly two feet deep. I prayed fervently for the snow to settle and become compact enough for us to be able to travel on it, so that we could go to services on Sunday, my only opportunity to see Jonathan. I needed him to assuage my fears, to tell me he had not swived me only because he could not have Sophia but because he desired me. Perhaps because he loved me.

  Finally, after several weeks of being housebound, the snow had condensed to a passable depth and Father said we would go into town on Sunday. While any other time of year such news would be met with mere tolerance if not indifference, this time you would have thought Father had told us we were going to a ball. Maeve, Glynnis, and I spent the days in a tizzy, deciding what we would wear, how to scrub a stain out of a be
loved chemise, and which of us would fix the others’ hair. Even Nevin seemed anxious for Sunday to come so he could escape from our tiny cabin.

  My father and I deposited my sisters, brother, and mother at the Catholic church and then drove to the congregation hall. Father knew why I went to service with him, so he must have had an inkling of why I was more anxious than usual as we approached the hall. And after service, as the snow was too deep on the common for socializing, the congregation remained indoors, packing the aisles, hallways, and staircases. The air was loud with the bright chatter of people who had been confined with their families for too long and were anxious to speak to someone new.

  I squeezed through the crowds, searching for Jonathan. My ears caught snippets of my neighbors’ conversations—how dreary it had been, how boring, how sick everyone was of dried peas in molasses and salt pork—and they bounced off me like pellets of sleet. Through a narrow window, I caught sight of the churchyard and Sophia’s grave. The recently turned ground had settled and sunk, and the snow over the grave dipped a good inch or two lower than the rest of the cover, leaving an irregularity on the landscape.

  Finally, I saw Jonathan weaving through the crowd, too, looking as though he might be searching for me. We met at the foot of the staircase to the balcony, packed shoulder to shoulder with our neighbors, aware that we couldn’t speak freely. Someone was bound to overhear.

  “How charming you look today, Lanny,” Jonathan said, politely. A harmless statement, the casual eavesdropper might think, but the Jonathan of my childhood had never remarked on my appearance, any more than he would remark on the appearance of another boy.

  I couldn’t return the compliment; I could only blush.

  He leaned forward and whispered in my ear, “The past three weeks have been unbearable. Go out to your barn an hour before sundown tonight and I will contrive to meet you there.”

  Of course, under the circumstances I could ask him no questions nor seek any reassurances for my uncertain heart. And, to be honest, I don’t think anything he could have said would have kept me from going to him. I burned to be with him.

  That afternoon, my fears were assuaged. For an hour, I felt I was the epicenter of his world, all I could wish for. The whole of his being was in his every touch, from the way he fumbled with the tapes and ties that bound my clothing, to his fingers pulling gently through my hair and his kisses on my bare, goose-prickled shoulders. Afterward, we nestled together as we returned to our bodies and it was bliss to be encircled in his arms, to feel him pressed tight against me, as though he, too, wanted nothing to come between us. No happiness can compare to the happiness of getting what you have begged and prayed for. I was exactly where I’d longed to be, but now was aware of every second ticking by and how my family would be wondering after me.

  Reluctantly, I pried his arms from my waist. “I can’t stay. I must go back … though sometimes I wish there was somewhere else for me … a place I could go rather than home.”

  I had meant to say only that I wished I didn’t have to leave the sweet harbor of his company but this truth slipped out, a truth I’d kept smothered inside me. It felt shameful, a secret fear to which I should not admit, but the words had escaped and there was no taking them back. Jonathan looked at me quizzically. “Why is that, Lanny?”

  “Well, sometimes I feel—I have no place within my family.” I felt a fool having to explain it to Jonathan, perhaps the one person in the village who had never gone unloved or had ever felt undeserving of happiness. “Nevin’s the only son, so he’s invaluable to my parents. And he’ll inherit the farm one day. Then there are my sisters … well, they’re so pretty, everyone in town admires them for their prettiness. Their prospects are good. But me …” I couldn’t say, even to Jonathan, the heart of my secret fear—that my happiness mattered to no one, that I mattered to no one, not even to my father or mother.

  He pulled me down next to him in the hay and drew me into his arms, holding me fast as I tried to pull away, not from him but from my shame. “I can’t bear to hear you say these things, Lanny … well, you’re the one I choose to be with, aren’t you? The only one I seem to feel comfortable with, the only person I reveal myself to. I would spend all my time in your company, if I could. Father, Mother, my sisters, Benjamin … I’d give them up, all of them, for it to be just you, just the two of us, together forever.”

  I ate up his pretty tribute, of course; it cut through my shame and went straight to my head like a draft of strong whiskey. Don’t mistake what I am saying: at the time, he believed he loved me and I was sure of his sincerity. But now, with hard-earned wisdom, I understand how foolish we were to say such dangerous words to each other! We were arrogant and naive, thinking we knew what we felt then was love. Love can be a cheap emotion, lightly given, though it didn’t seem so to me at the time. Looking back, I know we were only filling in the holes in our souls, the way the tide rushes sand to fill in the crevices of a rocky shore. We—or maybe it was just I—bandaged our needs with what we declared was love. But, eventually, the tide draws out what it has swept in.

  It was impossible for Jonathan to give me what he’d claimed to wish for; he couldn’t give up his family or his responsibilities. He didn’t have to tell me that his parents would never let him settle for me as a wife. But that late afternoon, in that cold barn, I possessed Jonathan’s love, and having it, I was all the more ferocious to hold on to it. He’d declared his love for me, I was assured of mine for him, proof that we were meant to be together and that, of all the souls in God’s universe, we were bound to each other. Bound in love.

  We met that way only twice more over the next two months, a sorry record for lovers. On each occasion, we spoke very little (except for him to confess how he’d missed me), rushing to lovemaking, our haste owing to the fear that we would be discovered as well as due to the cold. We stripped each other as bare as we dared go, and used mouths and hands to knead, caress, and kiss. Each time, we coupled as though it would be the last time for either of us—perhaps we intuited an unhappy future, hovering at our elbow, counting down the seconds until it would wrap us in a dread embrace. Both times, we parted in haste, too, the scent of him slithering up from under my clothes, wetness between my legs and a burn on my cheeks that I hoped would be mistaken by my family for a nip from the cold.

  Each time we parted, however, doubt began to nibble at the back of my mind. I had Jonathan’s love—for now—but what did that mean? I knew Jonathan’s past better than anyone. Hadn’t he loved Sophia, too, and yet I had made him forget about her—or so it seemed. I could pretend that he would be true and faithful to me, choose to be willfully blind, as many women do, and hope that in time this would come to pass. My blindness was aided by a stubborn conviction that a bond of love was ordained by God, and no matter how inconvenient, how unlikely or painful, it could not be changed by man. I had to have faith that my love would triumph over any imperfection in Jonathan’s love for me; love, after all, is faith, and all faith is meant to be tested.

  Now I know only a fool looks for assurances in love. Love demands so much of us that in return we try to get a guarantee that it will last. We demand permanence, but who can make such promises? I should have been happy with the love—companionable, abiding—that Jonathan had had for me since childhood. That love was eternal. Instead, I tried to make his feelings for me into what they were not and, in trying, I ruined the beautiful eternal thing that I had.

  Sometimes the worst tidings come as an absence. A friend who does not visit at the usual time, and who quickly thereafter withdraws from the friendship. An awaited letter that does not arrive, followed at some distance by news of an untimely death. And, in my case that winter, the cessation of my monthly flowers. First, one month. Then a second.

  I prayed there might be another cause. I cursed Sophia’s spirit, sure that she was paying me back. Once bidden, however, Sophia’s spirit was not so easy to contain.

  Sophia began visiting me in my dreams. In some,
her face would merely appear in a crowd, jarring and accusatory, then disappear. In one recurring dream, I would be with Jonathan only to have him leave me abruptly, turning from me as though by silent command, ignoring my pleas that he stay. He’d then reappear with Sophia, the two walking hand in hand in the distance, Jonathan without even a thought for me. I’d always wake from these dreams feeling hurt and abandoned.

  The worst dream would throw me out of sleep like a bucking horse and I’d have to stifle my cries or risk waking my sisters. The other dreams might have been my guilty mind playing tricks, but this dream could be nothing else but a message from the dead girl herself. In this dream, I walk through an empty village, the wind rippling at my back as I travel down the main carriage trail. There’s not another person to be seen, no voice or sound of life, no chopping of wood or clanging of the blacksmith’s anvil. Soon, I’m in the woods, white with snow, following the half-frozen Allagash. I stop at a narrows in the river and see Sophia standing on the opposite shore. She is the Sophia who committed suicide, blue, her hair frozen in clumps, heavy wet clothing weighing on her. She is the forgotten lover, moldering in the grave, at whose expense I have made my happiness. Her dead eyes settle on me and then she points to the water. No words are spoken but I know what she is telling me: jump into the river and end your life and the life of your child.

  I dared not speak to anyone in my family about my condition, not even my sisters, with whom I was normally close. My mother commented once or twice that I seemed moody and preoccupied, though she jested that I must be suffering greatly from the monthly curse, to judge by my behavior. If only I could have spoken to her about my situation, but alas, my loyalties were to Jonathan; I could not reveal our relationship to my parents without consulting him first.