Firebird (The Flint Hills Novels) (28 page)

* * *

Ethan and Katie Anne slept together in the same bed that first night, and Katie Anne lay awake for a long while, hoping he would move closer to her, reach out for her, touch her. The memories of their lovemaking surged into her thoughts; she saw their bodies together, naked and beautiful, she saw the way he had looked, the way he had felt, the way she had stroked him, their ferociousness, their exquisite tenderness, their deep moans and whimpers and cries, and finally their laughter. For the first time since the accident, she became aroused, and in the night, thinking he was asleep, she nestled behind him. He had come to bed very late and had crawled into bed and turned his back to her. Only now did she dare move close to him. She slid her arm around him, and as soon as she touched him she felt him grow tense. His shoulder was hard like a wall. She slid her hand over his stomach, and as she moved it lower, he stopped her.

"No, don't."

"Are you ever going to touch me again?" she whispered.

He firmly took her hand and moved it away.

"We have to talk about it, Ethan."

"I don't know what good talking will do. What's done is done."

"I'm sorry for what I did."

He lay still for a long while, and then he rolled over to face her and said, "It's broken between us. We'll never be able to put it back together again."

"Don't say that."

"You know it's true."

"I can't bear the thought. It sends me into a panic."

"We don't need to talk about it now."

"Are you saying you want a divorce?"

"I'm saying we don't have a future."

"I know what I did was wrong. It was awful."

"Tell me, that pregnancy test, was it really positive?"

She hesitated, and then she said, "I faked it."

"But you left it out for me to see."

"Because I knew you'd trust me."

"Well, I don't trust you anymore. I never will again."

She lay there with her heart beating wildly. In the darkness, everything whirled around her. It was like a nightmare she had frequently experienced as a little girl, and it sometimes came back to haunt her while she was awake. Sensations, something deep and voluminous pressing down onto her, making it so she couldn't breathe, and still everything spun around her.

Finally he said, "An annulment might be the best way to handle it. Given the situation. No one else needs to know. You can tell people what you want."

She was crying when she said, "But I love you. I love you more than I ever did before, if that's possible. I'll never get over you."

He wanted to say,
Yes you will
or
You'll find someone else,
or any such meaningless platitude, but the words wouldn't come. He lay there blocking his feelings with a stern and bitter mind.

Then he took his pillow and started for the living room.

"Ethan?" she said. "You won't do anything right away, will you?"

"Why shouldn't I?"

"Because if you do, people will think you're leaving me because of the way I look now."

He paused before saying, "There was another occasion when I worried too much about what people here in Chase County would think of me because of a decision I was ready to make. Well, I made the wrong decision. And I'll pay for it for the rest of my life."

"But I don't want people to think that. It's unfair to you."

"Maybe. But I've been an asshole, and I didn't get killed or maimed in a fire. So I suppose I can tolerate a bit of folks thinking poorly of me."

"What will we do with Eliana?"

"We'll cross that bridge when we come to it. Get some rest now."

The bed felt terribly empty without him. The tears flowed, drowning her eyes, emptying her heart. She wrapped herself in a blanket of thoughts, trying to imagine she was not abandoned, flung out on this terrifying open prairie in the darkness, alone. She saw herself in a place of warmth and confinement, with high close walls, buttressed by centuries. She saw in her mind places she had never seen with her eyes, and these places soothed her and calmed her terrified heart.

* * *

The remainder of Ethan's night was plagued by dreams, as it often was. Sad dreams. Catastrophic dreams. Dreams of heavy structures caving in all around him, lumber alive with flames, ceilings crashing down, raining fire. Bodies underneath his feet. He kept turning them over, looking for someone he knew, but they were all strangers. Sometimes he was looking for his father, sometimes Annette, sometimes Katie Anne. They were all there in that wreckage but he couldn't find them, and it seemed as if he was forever searching.

The next morning, Ethan found Katie Anne in the kitchen frying bacon. She turned to him and said brightly, "I told you Jer didn't need to stay over. I can manage fine." A little later when Eliana appeared on the steps in her nightgown, Katie Anne ushered her off to the bathroom, and while the little girl was in the tub she went through her room, picking up the trail of underwear and socks that had been scattered there over the past week. While Ethan was dressing he could hear laughter coming from the bathroom, and he wondered what on earth they could be laughing about.

As he was leaving for the office, he found Jer sitting on the front porch, drinking his coffee and smoking a cigarette.

"You're not having breakfast with us?" Jer asked.

"Got an early morning appointment."

"Well, all I can say is, I told you so."

"What? Because she's making pancakes and picking up socks?"

Jer looked at his friend. He saw how much Ethan had changed over the past months. The boyish bonhomie that had so endeared him to men and women alike seemed to have faded. There was a cynical turn to his mouth now.

"I think you need to give the girl some credit," Jer said. "I'll be the first one to admit, I never thought Katie Anne had it in her to pull out of something like this the way she's done. She used to whine about a chipped nail, and now she's hobblin' up and down the stairs with a face that any kid would die for on Halloween without a word of complaint. And she sure seems to take a liking to Eliana."

"That's all put on," Ethan said.

"I don't think so."

"Sure it is. Katie Anne's a first-class performer. Underneath that good heart is a very cunning lady who'd fight tooth and nail to get what she wants."

"You used to love her."

"I thought I did."

"Give her a chance."

"You know, pal, I'm getting tired of people sticking their nose in my business. Especially when that business is private."

"You always cared so much about doing the right thing by folks," Jer said. "I respected you for it. Respected you more than just about anybody I know. I guess I'm looking for that man to make his way back home."

"Then let me tell you what I think is right. Annette has cousins out in western Kansas. They didn't have much in common, but she said they were good folks. A good family. I'm going to find them and see if they'll take Eliana. And once I'm sure that little girl is safe and happy, I'm going to get my marriage annulled."

"On what grounds?"

"I have good reason."

"You want to share it with me?"

"Nope."

"Okay, and then you're gonna live out here all alone with your horses and your cattle and your land."

"That's right," Ethan said, and he got into his truck and drove away.

* * *

After breakfast, Katie Anne offered to braid Eliana's hair.

"I used to practice on my Barbie dolls," Katie Anne confessed. "I had dolls with all kinds of hair. Long, short, frizzy, everything. Once I cut the hair on one of them and I cried for days afterward because I couldn't braid it."

When the braid was finished, Eliana looked at it in the mirror and smiled. "This is the way my mama used to do it."

"You look very much like your mother right now," said Katie Anne softly. The little girl turned around; she wore a very solemn face.

"I thought you'd hate me," Eliana said quietly.

"Why would...?" she began, and then she caught herself. She took a deep breath. "I don't hate you at all. On the contrary, I..." She paused and sat down on the bed. "Eliana, you should know this. Ethan loved your mommy. That's who he wanted to marry."

"Really?"

"You didn't know that?"

"No," she answered quietly, shaking her head. "My mommy cried a lot the month before she died. She was very sad."

"I don't think he's ever going to forget your mommy. That's how much he loved her."

"Do you love him?"

Katie Anne took a deep breath and looked up at the unicorn poster that now hung over the child's bed. "I can't remember when I didn't love him." She got up and placed the hairbrush on the dresser. "I'm glad those basketball posters are gone."

"So am I."

"This room is still a little bare."

"All my toys and things are still in Paris."

"I'll talk to Ethan about that."

* * *

Jer stayed around that morning to help Katie Anne move the contents of her dresser and closet to the first-floor bedroom. When they were done, Katie Anne lay down to rest, and Jer took Eliana in his truck to check on his herd. She was real proud of her braid, Jer told Katie Anne later in the day. He could tell by the way she held up her head.

That Katie Anne had taken the initiative and moved herself downstairs to the guest bedroom was viewed by Ethan as a concession, and so he quietly proceeded with the legal work to annul their marriage. If Katie Anne Mackey and Ethan Brown had ever once connected, those channels were now down. Crumbled, smashed debris swept away in an ocean of freak and yet not so extraordinary events. The kind of events that happen every day across the world to some people, that others read about in their evening standard and forget the instant they lay down their paper and rise from their chair. The fortunate and the unfortunate. Thus is divided the world. Ethan Brown refused himself such meditations; Katie Anne did not. And so they lived in a certain harmony for a while—Ethan shutting his eyes to misery, Katie Anne taking in everything with eyes open wide.

Chapter 29

In the evening, once Eliana was in bed, Katie Anne would go off to her room. She didn't seem to want to be alone with Ethan, didn't show any interest in watching a movie or one of her favorite crime shows on the giant screen he had installed in their family room. And although there was no doubt in his mind that she was still very much in love with him—he saw it in the little gestures, how she smiled when he walked into a room or how her eyes lit up when he paid her a compliment; nevertheless, she seemed to have found a way to look through the heartbreak. She walked through the house like a woman with a precious secret.

One evening, Ethan knocked on her door. She was sitting in bed reading, and she laid down the book as he came in.

"Thought I'd check to see if you needed anything," he said.

"No. Nothing. Thanks."

He stood awkwardly in the middle of the room. She didn't seem eager to draw him into conversation. Simply looked at him steadily and calmly.

"What are you reading?"

She held up the book to show him. "Metamorphosis."

"Kafka?"

She smiled at his surprise. "One of the other patients loaned it to me. She warned me that if I was looking for a happy ending, this wasn't the book to read. But she told me she was fascinated by the way it portrays the psychology of a man who thinks of himself as repulsive and a burden to his family."

She said it earnestly, without a trace of self-pity.

"You're not a burden."

It was hollow reply, and they both knew it; he couldn't help but notice the irony, how she was the one going for the truth and he was afraid to look.

"And my nurse brought me Madame Bovary and The Count of Monte Cristo. So here I am, nose deep in the classics. Can you believe it?"

Ethan had never known Katie Anne to read a book. Her mother had occasionally passed along a new thriller or romance novel that she thought her daughter might enjoy, but Katie Anne was always out and on the go, could never sit still, so the books seemed to lie around the house, swept from one table to another, until her mother finally took them back, unread.