Gisèle Marie Baxter
Several hours later, Natalie is at the lab, going over an evidence file Schanke has hurriedly put together for her and dropped off in exchange for a takeout souvlaki with extra onions. He consumes this while sitting on a gurney; she drinks thick takeout cappuccino with three packets of sugar. There are twenty-eight security camera photographs of Dennis Matheson entering the lobby of Barbara's building in the month before her final hospitalization, and there are hospital records of his frequent messages about her treatment, first outlining the numerous alternatives available, and then insisting she needed relief from her pain. According to Barbara's personal doctor, she had a living will rejecting heroic measures but also a marked tendency to refuse painkillers if they robbed her of lucidity. The drugs that killed Barbara were never drawn from supplies; they were obtained some other way. As disturbing as all of this is a series of long-range photographs which arrived at Natalie's apartment with the day's mail in a plain envelope with no return address, but which lay unnoticed while she tried to recover from the night. All are of her: arriving at the hospital during Barbara's final stay, arriving at the funeral, arriving at CERK and the Raven on various occasions. When she took them in to the division, Schanke immediately started a series of phone calls resulting in this update of the slowly building file he and Nick had been putting together. Natalie rubs her eyes and picks up her cappuccino again. She is wearing jeans and a heavy turtlenecked sweater under her lab coat and is still cold.
"Question," says Schanke, and at her enquiring glance, he proceeds: "Why?"
"I don't know," Natalie says honestly.
"Did you see much of this Matheson after your little group grew up?" Schanke wonders.
"No. I guess life gets complicated after you grow up; we lived in the same city almost all our lives and yet in recent years I didn't even see much of Barbara. She never talked about Dennis. I know he used to get after her about staying up all night painting and, well, listening to Nightwatch after it started up." Something occurs to Natalie in saying this, and she feels an uneasy chill she has to mask. She clears her throat. "Dennis always had a lot of problems; relationships were hard for him. Barbara was about the worst person for him to fall in love with. She was like Browning's Duchess: she loved everyone. She was a free spirit. Exclusivity was only an issue to her if she was cohabitating."
"Do you think he killed her?"
"As in each man kills the thing he loves?"
"Or do you think he just thought he was easing her pain?"
"No. I think he killed her."
"Too much listening to that Nightcrawler show, if you ask me." Schanke points his plastic fork at Natalie emphatically.
Natalie laughs. "Barbara listened to it. And she loved life more than anyone I know." More than I do, she thinks.
"Well, there's no accounting for taste. I can't sit through those PBS dramas with Myra without falling asleep."
"But at least you're sitting there."
Schanke frowns and inspects his takeout container, then scoops out more rice. Mouth full, he opines, "I don't get obsession. Life's too short. You just get comfortable with someone and try to keep the spark in it."
"Well, you'd be a nice guy to be comfortable with," Natalie says softly, and she crosses the room to Schanke and kisses him on the mouth despite his garlic breath.
"I'm so sorry about all this happening to you," Schanke says, and puts aside his container to put his arms around her, and she is so shocked by the unconscious depth of what he's said, the sheer simple truth of it, that she returns the embrace with unmeant strength, and her eyes glisten as she tilts her head back from his shoulder to kiss him again, and he is so surprised at the spontaneity of her gesture that he kisses her back a little more enthusiastically than he had meant. It is a moment. In another moment, she has drawn away and they stare at each other in horrified apology for a second, then sadly. She starts to ache again, all her joints, her jaws and teeth, her eyes.
"Happens to the best of us," Schanke adds. "We latch onto someone when we need it most." He slides off the gurney and chucks the empty container into a large plastic refuse bin.
"Satisfactory?" she asks in a tiny version of her real voice.
"You bet," he replies. "Extra onions -- mmm."
At this point Nick arrives, in fresh clothes, hair neatly brushed back. He and Schanke trade some professional banter as the latter gracefully departs, then he faces Natalie with an awkward curiosity.
"I guess I was a little surprised you'd come in to work, but Schanke told me about the photographs," he says. "How do you feel?"
"I just feel weird!" she blurts out, folding her arms against another bout of shivering. "Surely I'm not going to go through eternity feeling weird."
"I'm not here to reproach you," Nick says quietly. "I can't criticize you for doing something I've done."
"Right, but eight hundred years ago."
"And you're supposed to be above it simply because we're closing in on the next millennium and you're a doctor?"
She turns away and goes to lean against a wall. "Yes," she whispers. "Oh, yes; I feel I've set everything back several centuries. And then again, what does it matter." She sighs and forces a smile: "Did you notice when I left?"
"No. We do get exhausted, and then we sleep very deeply."
She can't look at him, and yet she is aware of his hesitant presence in every pore.
"Why did you call me last night?" Nick asks from his distance.
Natalie closes her eyes. Nick crosses the room to her and puts his hands on her shoulders; automatically, she stiffens, and while she doesn't wrench away she feels suddenly as if the room is closing in and she has trouble breathing its recycled florescent air.
"I don't know," she murmurs. "It was an impulse."
"But if you hadn't -- "
"I'd be where you are now."
"And is that what you want?"
She does not answer this, but she sighs again, eyes still closed, and says, "So much has happened in my life since you came into it. And I'm the light of reason to you, your grail, mortality: is that it? Is this all the price of my keeping your secret? Or is this fate teaching me to use my instincts? And can instinct drag you in two directions at once: I wanted to go to LaCroix, God help me, I did. But I had to call you too." With an effort, she turns herself around and rests her back on the tiled wall, and rests her hands lightly on Nick's forearms as her shoulders relax a little under his hands, and she looks up at him with her sad eyes. "So tell me some more about this hunter business."
Nick shrugs. "It's as LaCroix says. You will always be able to sense vampires and you may feel compelled to destroy them."
"May? He seemed pretty certain I would."
"He still thinks you may come across. And there is that chance."
"I can feel him, you know. Can you sense me?"
"Yes, faintly. LaCroix claims he felt you leaving. Your link to him is very strong."
Natalie does not respond to this, either. "Dennis killed Barbara deliberately," she says. "I don't know why. Oddly enough, I think finally he envied her LaCroix, and this is ironic, since they never met, and while I think Barbara could have figured him out, she would have forgiven him everything and still retained her mortality."
"But you never know."
"No, I guess you never do."
"Well, we're going to bring in Matheson," Nick tells her. "Cohen agreed Schanke and I have enough. I guess we can't decide what to charge him with till we question him again, but I think you might stay somewhere safe. He seems very concerned about what you know."
"I'll be safe," Natalie says, without certainty. "I'm going in to CERK at some point tonight, if you need to contact me to give any sort of statement." At Nick's questioning glance, she adds, with a hint of her old wryness, "It's not a contest. There's what drew me to him; there's what drew me to you. Both are real, and who knows what will happen -- I have to go with instinct now; it's all I can trust. But at any rate, I guess Lucien LaCroix and I have a lot to talk about."
Nick swallows. "How do you feel about him?" he wonders, as levelly as he can.
The wryness increases. "I don't know -- I guess in a way," and she almost laughs, "the word for what I feel is sympathy."
*****
Natalie is watching the late news and brushing her hair out in her bedroom prior to driving over to CERK when she hears a frantic knocking at the door. Jolted into an unusual alertness, she freezes, and the knocking is repeated, and she hears a muffled male voice repeating her name. Dennis. She picks up the phone and quickly calls the division, murmurs her address and his presence and a plea to contact Detectives Knight and Schanke, hangs up and runs to the door, which she opens a crack, leaving the chain lock in place.
Dennis Matheson stands in the hallway, hands in the pockets of his overcoat, which is open despite the time of year over a loose white t-shirt and jeans. His hair is uncombed and falls in his face; his spectacles are on the end of his nose, which is red from crying in a face otherwise as bleached as his shirt.
"Dennis, what's wrong?" she demands. "What do you want?" And she realizes this is on about the level of hello Toronto, and am I on the air, neither of which she managed to say in that situation, but then she chose that situation.
"The police are at my place," he tells her. "I got out through the back. They think I killed Barbara."
Natalie loosens the chain. "Do you want to come in?"
"No. We have to go somewhere," he says, and he is holding a gun.
She has been threatened with a lot, including guns, before and it is nothing that repetition makes any easier. Dennis pushes open her door, indicates she should collect her coat and purse, then seizes her arm and propels her out of the building to a clear, brutally cold night; she gasps at the contrast. They locate her car, and Dennis shoves the barrel of the gun into her ribs as she searches her purse for the keys; her heart stops for a moment as a streetlight catches the little silver cross. An image of a large photograph of her getting out of this car, taken with a telephoto lens, flashes behind her eyes. When she is in the driver's seat Dennis settles the gun at the base of her skull and his surgeon's hand is very steady.
"You're going to drive to that radio station," he directs.
At this moment, Natalie realizes that she is going to die. Alternatives race through her mind: smash the car, pretend it won't start, beg. Her hands freeze on the wheel until a prod of cold metal through her hair makes her start the engine. As it warms up, she asks why. She looks straight ahead.
"Old time's sake," says Dennis.
Natalie drives to the building downtown housing CERK, never varying speed, never looking to either side, mechanically obeying traffic rules. She parks across the street. The security guard looks up in horror at the entrance of a disheveled young man pushing the barrel of a revolver against the jaw of a terrified woman he has locked in his free arm. Natalie clings to the arm to keep it from choking her; she cannot even scream when Dennis shoves her into the elevator. She lunges at the panel to hit the wrong floor button; Dennis roughly shoves her against the mirrored wall and hits the right one. She sinks to the floor and realizes when she draws her hand away from her face that her nose is bleeding; panicking, she tries to stop the blood flow before the elevator doors slide open. When they do, Dennis Matheson yanks her up and wrenches her out then puts her back in the headlock, though he holds the gun away from her now, aiming it generally ahead, warningly.
"How long does it take to learn that trust can be absolute?" The voice enters her in a warm rush that makes her feel faint; for a moment her eyes close and she is limp. "Let's talk about trust, and about betrayal, and about disappointment, gentle listeners. Our world finds regret so hard to admit, so embarrassing to our shallow sensibilities. But away from your desk and the demands of daily life, lying awake, what do you regret? Who do you blame?"
She can faintly hear Dennis Matheson order the engineer onto the elevator and away, then the voice stops abruptly and she is pushed into the broadcast booth. LaCroix rises, and his eyes widen perceptibly at the sight of fresh blood on her face, but he makes no other reaction. Dennis pushes her away, and she catches the edge of the console table and stays there, between Dennis and LaCroix, who faces this newcomer calmly despite the gun now shakily aimed at him.
And Dennis recognizes the tall pale stranger from the hospital parking lot. "So you're this Nightcrawler guy."
"I'd thought you might have recognized the voice when we met before," LaCroix says evenly. "I take it I'm not what you expected."
Natalie looks at Dennis. "You thought of someone like us."
"Maybe I did." Dennis Matheson's mouth twists, and he glances around with sardonic curiosity. "Think of it, Natalie; here we are again, in a radio station in the middle of the night. You were the only long-haired punk amongst us; don't think Nathan and I didn't know about those Joni Mitchell records."
"Dennis, why did you bring me here?"
Dennis is starting to hyperventilate and has to shout to overcome it: "Because I don't want them to arrest me! I didn't kill her." His mouth twists again, and he shoves his spectacles and hair back impatiently. "I only killed pain like no one should ever suffer."
"You killed your own pain," Natalie fires back.
"How the hell should you know what my pain or her pain was like?"
Natalie cannot answer this.
"How the hell should you know what I went through, what Barbara went through, for all those years?" he goes on, voice still so loud it echoes in the room. "I loved her like no one should ever love anyone," he adds, voice falling, eyes wide and moving suspiciously from one to the other. "Like no one should love Barbara. She knew things; she saw through solid objects like marriage contracts and declarations of undying devotion. She saw artists in old winos playing the harmonica on Yonge outside strip joints; she saw innocence in kids whose parents had beat and abused them from the cradle. She never criticized anyone. She was afraid of nothing." Now he stares straight at LaCroix. "And she knew what you are. And I didn't believe her. I hated you because she stayed up to listen to you and laughed with you on the telephone, and then I hated you and Natalie for owning a part of Barbara's trust and love I couldn't have, but especially I hated you because you could have saved her."
"At a very great price," LaCroix says quietly.
Natalie is crying so hard the room blurs; there is a faint sense of light, nothing else. "You bastard, you killed her," she manages through her weeping. She leans forward on the console to try to quell the wracking sobs and her hands grip the microphone and somehow the information registers, so incongruously it seems absurd, that it is attached to a long metal pole that extends through the table.
"What the hell do you know about it?" Dennis Matheson roars.
What happens next happens in the blur the room has become. Dennis is moving towards her very fast, the light glints on the barrel of the gun, and Natalie falls back against the console, then the vibration that is always with her grows almost unbearably strong; her hands are on the microphone stand and with a reflexive calculation she wrenches it out of its stand and realizes its length and weight and spins around and drives it with all of a strength she has only discovered into a precisely calculated area of LaCroix's chest just as he moves to attack Dennis. She drives him against the wall and holds the impromptu stake in place as blood forms on his shirt front until his eyes turn from flaming green to red-rimmed pale blue and his fangs recede and he stares at her staring back at him in awe, and she whispers, "LaCroix -- forgive me." Then she tugs out the metal pole and watches him drop.
When she turns to Dennis she can see her transformation in his eyes, and she can see the outlines and forms in the room through a completely different sense of light. Dennis grips the revolver in both hands and fires it at her repeatedly; she has no idea if the bullets are anywhere near her though one shatters the window between the broadcast booth and the production studio, and she flies back into the studio, through the glass, hitting the floor. In her moment of impact dizziness he vaults into the studio, seizes the bloody end of the pole and wrenches it from her, then lunges at her, but her hands are on his coat collar, and as he shoves her back against the curtained window they are losing gravity; she sees the floor of the studio and beyond into the broadcast booth, where LaCroix lies against one wall, eyes closed, one hand clenched against the wound on his chest. There is more glass, then a shock of cold air, and a rapid descent into a snowbank.
Dennis Matheson is sprawled over her, unconscious; his spectacles have skidded away across the icy sidewalk. Natalie realizes she is bleeding from one side; when she opens her eyes for the moment she has the strength to do so, she realizes light and form are as she remembers from the rest of her life. She can hear sirens growing louder as they approach, and before she surrenders to the spreading numbness, she is faintly aware that the vibration is still present.
*****
Natalie realizes suddenly that she is conscious; she is in a hospital bed connected to tubes and is so weak opening her eyes halfway requires tremendous volition. The room is dark, though she can see daylight around the edges of the curtains and blinds. And Nick is sitting in a chair near the bed, holding her hand. She forces her lips into enough movement to whisper his name.
"Don't talk, Nat," he says gently. "Sleep as much as you can."
"But you -- " she manages in a voice only he could hear.
"No one will disturb me," he assures her. "I'll stay here all day, and all night, and we'll both be fine." And he smiles tenderly at her.
Her fingers move briefly against his, then she sleeps again, and he rests his head on the back of the chair and closes his own eyes.
By evening, she is still unconscious, and Nick watches her solemnly. He has released her hand, and finally taken off and hung up his overcoat, and is reading when he is not watching her. Towards eight o'clock, he is aware of the door being carefully opened and of LaCroix standing in the doorway, blocking the florescent light from the hall. Nick looks up, mildly surprised, though LaCroix looks none the worse for wear, perhaps paler than usual. Snow is melting on his leather overcoat.
"Visiting hours are about to end," LaCroix observes.
"I have a dispensation," Nick explains.
Arching an eyebrow at this comment, LaCroix lets himself in and eases the door shut behind him.
"I can still sense her faintly," he says.
Natalie's lips part briefly and she seems to wince but she quickly resumes the composure of unconsciousness. As Nick regards him cautiously, LaCroix quietly approaches the bedside and delicately slides a fingertip down the side of her face, along her jaw and down her throat. The punctures have completely healed. But her breathing is regular, so is her heartbeat, so is her pulse. There is only that whispered vibration.
"They shouldn't really have healed that quickly," Nick points out.
"True hunters retain the scars," LaCroix counters. He remains on the side of the bed opposite Nick and puts his hands in his overcoat pockets. "You realize she would make an extraordinary vampire. For the best of us it's never a matter of wanting to die or fearing death, of despairing: it is an overwhelming desire to live. And her will to live is enormous. I suppose that drew her to Barbara, and, for that matter, made you such a fascinating challenge. I would like to think she'll come across eventually."
"I will never forgive you that," Nick says levelly.
LaCroix shrugs. "Add it to the list, then." He notices the book resting page down over an arm of Nick's chair and asks, "What are you reading?"
Nick picks up the orange-spined paperback and flips through it carelessly. "Actually, Nat gave me this. Angela Carter's The Bloody Chamber: they're sort of erotic feminist revisions of fairy and folk tales -- baroque stuff, lots of sex and mayhem, you'd probably quite like them. And they're very well written; I know you're not into pulp fiction. There's even a vampire story, "The Lady of the House of Love," which makes me think of Janette, for some reason. But what you said sort of reminded me of the Bluebeard story in here: the girl is rescued by her mother but retains the scar he put on her forehead and thinks of it as an emblem of shame at some sort of betrayal, in spite of it all. Whatever Natalie's discovery, she betrayed no one, and she feels no guilt."
LaCroix almost smiles, then briefly and very solemnly rests a hand on Natalie's head, smoothing her hair back. Again there is a slight movement at the corners of her eyes and around her mouth. He reaches into a deep side pocket and withdraws a small package, wrapped in dull silver tissue and tied with a broad silk ribbon in deepest purple; this he places on the bedside table.
"A small gift," he explains. "Something for remembrance."
"She may remember nothing."
LaCroix ignores this. "Shall we make an agreement, Nicholas: I will not interfere with her, or with you, so long as you permit her to come freely to me should she yet come across."
"We don't need an agreement," Nick says calmly. "Natalie will make her own decisions."
LaCroix does smile at this, sardonically. "Well, I must go. I suppose having been rendered unconscious by this madman with my own microphone stand requires some recuperation. Does this mean I'll have to provide another statement? Oh well. And since Natalie is a doctor, I'll assume her fortunate miscalculation of anatomy was deliberate. So, for what it's worth, I completely forgive her."
Nick watches him leave, and for once feels no hatred or resentment: we have all made choices that condemn us, after all, he reflects.
*****
The following day, Natalie is awake and alert, eats heartily, receives various visitors. She brushes her hair out vigorously, then ties it back with a broad velvet band, and puts on the burgundy dressing gown Grace fetched from her apartment while checking up on the cat. When Nick arrives in the evening on his way to work, she is leafing through magazines Myra Schanke brought. He smiles warmly, kisses her lightly on the mouth, and places a jar of gold and blue irises on one of the few surfaces left.
"So what's it like being famous?" Nick wonders, dropping into a chair.
Natalie glances around the room: "Let's see if I can remember where all of this came from." And there is a big pink-and-white mixed arrangement from the division, a pot of yellow tulips from the lab, a spray of orchids from her old friend Whittaker at the Institute, a nosegay of champagne rosebuds and baby's breath in a china mug from Grace, red carnations from CERK, coral and ochre gerbera accompanied by a tiny golden-plush teddy bear in a lab coat and medical garb from the Schankes, and a perfect crimson rose in a plain smoked-glass tube. "That's from Janette."
"Janette rarely makes such gestures," Nick comments.
"Then I should press it or dry it," Natalie returns. "Yours are wonderful."
"Freshly cut," Nick explains. "I ran right over with them and one of the nurses found me an empty coffee jar to put them in."
"And Myra brought me stuff to read, though this Car and Driver was probably supposed to get all the way home with her."
"I'll take it in to my partner," Nick offers, and rolls it up to shove it into an overcoat pocket, from which he removes the silver-tissue-wrapped box. His expression sobers briefly, then he regards her gently. "Nat, do you remember my being here when you were asleep?"
She frowns, then hesitates, then says very softly, "I was sometimes aware of things but I'm not sure how much of it was dreaming."
He hands her the little package. "Someone left this for you. I thought I'd wait till tonight to give it to you because I wasn't sure how you'd react. Ah, forgive me if I was out of line...."
"I'll think about it, though you are kind of cute when you're overprotective." She turns the box over and over in her hands and contemplates it curiously. "There's no tag. Who's it from?" She shakes it near one ear. "Do I dare to open it?"
"I have no idea what it is," Nick tells her. "But it's from LaCroix."
Natalie blinks and swallows, but makes no other visible reaction, even though her heart is pounding so loudly she feels no other noise exists outside her body. The wrapping and ribbon are lovely; she removes them carefully, and finds inside a little black velvet box with a hinged lid which she eases up, revealing, on a black silk lining, a tiny cast-silver medallion, barely the size of a fingernail yet exquisite in detail: it represents an owl. Natalie draws in a sharp breath; she feels as if she is looking at something through a microscope or a very long tunnel or though vast stretches of time itself, rather as she did when she bought the pin that had fallen into Mr. Kleinzeit's dusty, apparently disorganized collection. Finally, she whispers, "It's beautiful," and looks up suddenly at Nick, who takes the proffered box and examines the medallion under her anxious gaze.
It was owned by archaeologists, he remembers, and he sees it in his memory, on the summer night of the gala, a string quartet in the portico, Janette resplendent in black and cream organdie silk, while he and LaCroix ventured upstairs to be shown the collection in its velvet-lined glass-fronted cases. Even among the coins and brooches and rings and medals, insignia of empires and languages long since dead, the little owl stood out in its perfect detail. And now here it is: a harbinger of what?
"I didn't even know he owned this," Nick says aloud.
"You've seen it before?"
"Mmm. At a turn of the century gala in Paris. It's at least 1500 years old, perfectly preserved: an astonishing piece."
"And why?"
Nick hardly dares to conjecture on a real reason, so he only says what he was told: "For remembrance."
"An owl for wisdom," Natalie murmurs. "I'm not sure whose."
*****
Natalie returns to work a week later and resumes her old pattern of night shifts. After leaving the hospital, she arrived to a clean apartment, Sidney at the door poised to make mewing slaloms around her legs, curtains open on a crisp bright late-January day. Her mail was neatly organized on a hall table. She spent the days catching up on sleep, mostly, though she did try to contact Dennis in the hospital, only to be told he was refusing visitors but had promised he would write. This makes her uneasy, somehow.
The day she returns to work, she wears a bright fitted cranberry velveteen riding jacket over a black cotton poet's blouse and a striped gypsy skirt Barbara used to covet. Her hair is pale and fluffy and partly tamed by a little crocheted cap given to her by Barbara. The costume is perhaps not strictly professional, her makeup uncharacteristic yet mysterious in its blurry fragility. Nevertheless, she greets her coworkers warmly, takes care of what she must in the Coroner's Building, then late in the evening drives over to the division with some evidence and reports. In one pocket is a letter that arrived at her apartment that afternoon.
She finds Nick checking out something on a computer terminal and Schanke looking over his shoulder.
"Hey you guys," she says brightly.
They are delighted to see her, and if there is a trace of awkwardness in the glance she and Schanke exchange once released from their embrace, both hide it well. Nick takes in her pallor and apparent hollowness, the luminosity of her warm brown eyes, but he takes in the heartmelting beauty of her smile again, and has otherwise no awareness of her. He tilts a questioning eyebrow discreetly at her, and perhaps she shrugs but she also nods.
"So you're back among the living," Schanke says, more innocently than he can know. "Or at least back at the old grind."
"Not waving, now drowning, just treading water," Natalie observes. "Oh, the cat absconded with your bear and put it in his treasure pile."
"I won't tell Jenny," Schanke promises. "I'm sorry about Dennis," he adds after a more perceptible, genuinely awkward pause.
"So am I," Natalie returns. "I guess we each had our way of not coping. But the more I think back, the less surprised I am."
While Schanke goes to track down some files and pick up a fax, Natalie signals to Nick to follow her into an empty interview room. Once inside, she pulls a thin blue airmail envelope out of her pocket and shows it to him. He immediately recognizes the Paris postmark and French stamp, though not the tiny cramped handwriting.
"Remember how everyone suggested I need a holiday?" Natalie asks, and her smile has something secret and triumphant about it, though her eyes are almost sombre. "Well, it looks as if one has been offered to me."
At this point he notices she is wearing the owl on a long fine silver chain, and she does so unselfconsciously. She removes a page from the envelope, unfolds it, and starts to read aloud: "Dear Dr. Lambert: My husband and I are renting a house in Paris, near the Close Payen, a detached two-story prerevolutionary house with exquisite landscaped gardens. It is beautifully furnished, well situated, and while far too large for a household of two, nevertheless mostly habitable with minimal assistance from an external staff. However, we are obliged to spend three weeks this summer at a writers' colony in Florence. Our landlord has insisted we get someone to occupy and manage the house in our absence, and has provided us with your name. He says your references are impeccable, and made quite clear even by telephone (he currently lives abroad) that no alternate we could suggest would meet as quickly with his approval. If you are at all interested, please let us know as soon as possible. We will then provide any further information you might need. Yours sincerely, Cecilia Brentwood." Natalie creases the paper crisply and stuffs it back in the envelope, adding, "Andrew and Cecilia Brentwood are English writers: he's a poet; she does short stories, mostly."
She faces Nick straightforwardly, and for a moment he feels he is watching her through a long tunnel.
"So are you going to do it?" he wonders, keeping (as she is) the conversation on the human level.
"I don't know," Natalie replies softly. She hands him a photograph clipped from a magazine and attached to the letter. "This is the house."
And so it is. He swallows to mask his reaction, then looks up at her very seriously. "I know this house," he says. "Your pendant came from it." And then he smiles. "It's a beautiful house, actually; I wouldn't mind a vacation there myself. Natalie: you know what I'm afraid of, but I can't make this decision for you. Let me just say this: if you do go, you will never want to leave, and I mean that in all honesty. You will want to stay there forever."
"I don't want to lose you, Nick," she says suddenly, but in an odd whisper and as if from far away. He takes her face in his hands and she instinctively closes her eyes; he kisses her lightly on the forehead and on the mouth, tells her, "You'll never lose me," then returns to his work.
*****
When Natalie goes home at the end of her shift, it is the paling predawn hour, just bright enough to roam around her apartment in the twilit glow. Sidney pads after her into the kitchen, to be diverted with breakfast while she slowly pulls off the night's garments, dropping them wherever her passing takes her, then puts on the heavy robe spread out on her duvet. She sits in a chair near the window and draws aside the curtain; she sets a cup of tea on the windowsill. The day will be overcast and damply chilly with a threat of more snow. When the sky is bright enough, she withdraws a pad of notepaper and a pen from the basket near the chair. She looks again at the blue envelope, then props it on the windowsill next to her teacup. Uncapping her pen, she checks the inkwell and shakes it to settle the air bubbles. The owl pendant is cool against her breast bone. She begins to write: "Dear Mrs. Brentwood -- Thank you for your very kind offer...."
The End
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About the author: G.M. Baxter makes her living teaching university-level literature and composition courses on a contractual basis; in her spare time she writes fiction, watches movies and designs stuff (she knits and is learning to sew). She currently lives in Vancouver, and still likes the music she put in LaCroix's CD collection, though she's not sure about Wagnerian opera.
Copyright 1995-2004 by Gisèle Baxter; all rights to original narrative, characters and characterizations reserved. Do not reproduce without permission. Last updated 2 August 2003 by G.M. Baxter.