Losing Penny (24 page)

“You’re the professor, you’re the one who
makes up the tests and the rules,
you
should know all the
answers.”

“Maybe this time I don’t.”

“So you’re going to leave before you can find
out? Did you even read your book?”

“This is not about the book.” Drake stood
abruptly, and the poultice fell to the floor with a splat.

Penny picked it up. She’d save it. A potato
poultice was also good for bloodshot eyes, and she expected to be
crying as soon as Drake slammed out the door.

The cowards fled at the Vikings approach. A
few men, those without women and children, pursued, but most
returned to their charred homes, hoping to find their loved ones
unharmed.

From
Hans and the Sunstone

Paulson’s Pond lay
between two small rolling hills. Bright green and dotted with
yellow buttercups, the hills sloped gently to the pond. Water
lilies, cat tails, and pussy willows grew along the water edge
where frogs and ducks laid their eggs.

A couple of young mothers and their children
picnicked on the lawn. A small wooden pier extended over the water,
and two boys sat at the edge, their feet dangling over the murky
pond. An older gentleman was helping a young boy with a fishing
rod. Drake fought back a tidal wave of memories as he sat down on
the grass. Fighting would be counterproductive. He should welcome
the memories, after all they were what brought him here.

He had spent the day reading Penny’s rewrite,
and as much as he hated to admit it, the story haunted him. Reason
told him that he needed to be working on his class syllabus, but he
couldn’t get the Vikings out of his head, so he’d returned to his
industrial poems. He missed the poetry he’d written with Blair. If
he were honest, he’d admit that he missed the poetry more than he
missed Blair.

And then, as if thinking about her summoned
her, he overheard Blair singing about Winnie the Pooh’s Hundred
Acre Wood. Sitting up and looking past an enormous maple tree, he
spotted Blair and a young girl.

A large cat looked down on them from a branch
of a pine tree, and the girl noticed and called to it. The cat
flicked its tail at the wispy, blond girl. If not for her Lucky
Charms T-shirt, cutoff jeans, and sparkly pink flip-flops, Drake
would have thought her a fairy.

“It won’t come when you call,” Blair told
her. “It’s not a domestic cat.”

“What does that mean?”

“It doesn’t belong to anybody. It’s wild and
it catches its own food.”

“Does it live alone?”

“It lives with other wild cats. They’re
called feral.”

“Oh, look at the baby ducks!” the girl
squealed as a mother duck and her young paraded by. “Will the cat
try to eat the baby ducks?”

“I think it probably prefers rodents.” Blair
cried out in pain and Drake sat up.

“What’s wrong?” the girl asked.

Blair sat down hard on the grass and pulled
her ankle close to inspect it. A bee clung to her skin. “That was
uncalled for,” Blair told the bee as she flicked off its tiny,
lifeless body. She looked at the welt already forming and pinched
it. “I think I’ll feel better if I just sit here for a minute and
try to get this bee’s stinger out of me,” Blair said to the child.
“You can feed the ducks without me. Just make sure to stay where we
can see each other.”

The girl hesitated a minute. “Can I help
you?”

Blair shook her head as she tried to scrape
out the stinger with her fingernail.

The girl gave her lonely look, and then with
bread in hand, she walked closer to the water. The ducks recognized
an instant food source and began to waddle in her direction. “Feed
the birds and what do you get?” Missy quoted a line from the movie
Mary Poppins
, “Fat birds!”

Blair took a noisy bite out of her carrot
then placed the bitten off end on her bee sting.

“Is that helping?” Drake sat down next her,
his knees poking into the air.

“Drake, what are you doing here?”

He shrugged without a comment.

Blair squinted at him, her gaze lingering on
his swollen lip and bruised eye. “What happened to you?”

He chuckled and touched his eye. “I’ve taken
up boxing.”

“Seriously?”

“Is that so surprising?”

“It’s just so not you.”

“Are you eating a carrot? That’s so not
you
.”

“I’m changing, Drake,” she said somewhat
sheepishly and with a laugh.

“I liked you the way you were.”

She leaned back and looked into his face.
“And I liked you too. I still like you.”

He cleared his throat. “Did you like my
poems?”

Her face blanched.

“The ones we worked on together?” he
pressed.

“Why?”

“I’m working on a collection of poems. I’ve
been offered a contract with a small university press.”

“That’s wonderful! Congratulations!”

Drake nodded. “It’s supposed to be an
environmental love song. I remembered coming here with you, and I
came back to try and recapture…but I can’t do it.” He sat quietly
for a moment. “It’s odd to see you here now.”

His thoughts turned to warm August nights
when they had set up a telescope on the hill overlooking the pond.
They had watched meteor showers in the sky and saw the reflections
of falling stars in the pond. Despite the astounding beauty of the
nights, inevitably they would eventually become engrossed in each
other.

“A
Leaves of Grass
sort of thing?”
Blair asked.

Drake picked a buttercup and began to pluck
off the petals, “I can only hope.”

“I’m sure it’ll be great.”

The girl let out a squeal as a goose pecked
her shirt.

“Missy, stay away from the geese,” Blair
called. “They’re mean!”

Missy dropped her piece of bread, and the
aggressive goose swallowed it in a gulp. “Shoo!” Missy said, her
voice shrill.

“Is she with you?” Drake asked.

Blair nodded smiling. “Isn’t she cute?”

Drake considered the child. His unwillingness
to discuss children was one of the many reasons for ending their
romance.

“Did you steal her?” he asked.

Blair shook her head. “Not yet. She’s a
friend’s niece.”

Meeting her familiar intense blue eyes, he
wanted to ask if Missy was Rawling’s niece and he wanted to ask
about Aruba. Instead he asked, “So, how are you?”

“I’m good, thanks,” Blair said. “Well, except
I was just stung by a bee.” She showed him her ankle, and he
touched the angry red spot.

“Did you get the stinger out?”

Blair shook her head, and studied her
ankle.

“You’ve got to do it, Blair.”

“I know.”

She gritted her teeth, pinched her ankle
tightly, and was rewarded with the tiny bee weapon. “Got it,” she
said. “I’ve been trying to write too. I’m writing a play about the
history of Rose Arbor.”

Drake snorted.

“It’s much worse than it sounds,” she said.
“For example, did you know that Paulson’s Pond is actually the
oldest recorded farm in the district? You might think that’s
interesting, but it’s not. The Paulsons raised pigs. During the
Alaskan gold rush, did the Paulsons seek gold? No, they salted pork
and sold it to the gold seekers. Pig farmers just aren’t all that
interesting.”

“There were more than pig farmers.”

“Oh, of course. There were fishermen,
loggers, and the occasional seamstresses, but I can’t write about
them, because this is a family play.” Drake knew that in Seattle’s
early days, seamstress was a pseudonym for prostitute.

“Are those your poems?” Blair asked, nodding
to the notebook in his hand.

He’d forgotten he’d still had his Viking
book. “This? No.”

“Well then, what is it?”

He shook his head, wanting to hide the book,
but he reconsidered. “You know, I should let you read this. You’re
the one who started it.”

She sat up straight. “Did you write about the
Vikings?”

He sighed and nodded. “And a friend took it
and…
elaborated.”

“And you let him?”

“Her,” Drake interjected. “And I didn’t let
her, she just did it. She added goats, sea serpents, and distressed
damsels.”

Blair didn’t say anything, but her small
smile grew.

“What?” Drake asked.

“Nothing,” Blair said, still smiling.

“Will you read it?”

“Of course.” She held out her hand.

“Not this one. I want you to read the
elaborated version.” He trusted her. She’d give him an honest
opinion.

“What about your poetry?”

“My what?”

She nudged him with her elbow. “Your
poetry.”

“Oh, yeah. That.” He hunched his shoulders in
defeat.

Blair suddenly let out a sharp cry and stood
up. Ducks floated by, the elderly gentleman cast the boy’s fishing
line into the water, and the boys who had been sitting on the dock
were now lying on the grass—but Missy was gone.

Blair’s hands flew to her face, “Missy!” she
called. She stood and ran toward the water’s edge, favoring her
ankle. Drake followed.

“Missy!” Drake called, cupping his hands
around his mouth for volume.

The pond was too shallow for Missy to be lost
in its depths, so Missy had to be in the woods.

“Missy!” Blair called again. Finding an
opening in the underbrush, she ducked into the shade of the thick,
pine forest and Drake trailed after her. Missy stood in a patch of
sunlight that filtered through the trees. She ran toward them when
she caught sight of Blair. Drake stayed back, watching the
reunion.

“Missy, oh thank you for not being lost!”
Blair said, holding the girl tight.

“I wasn’t lost,” Missy said, her face buried
against Blair’s T-shirt. “I knew right where I was.”

“I didn’t know where you were, and I was
supposed to!”

Blair hobbled forward and grabbed Missy in a
tight hug. Drake was puzzled by Blair’s tears and deep attachment
to Missy, because he didn’t think Blair had known Missy for very
long. But, obviously long enough to form a strong attachment. Or
was it because Missy was somehow related to Rawlings? Blair wasn’t
like that. She wasn’t political. She didn’t cultivate relationships
for ulterior motives.

Drake knew Blair loved children. She liked
the little ones that attended the library’s story hour as well as
the pimply gangly ones that she used to teach at the high school.
She wanted dozens of babies of her own. Watching Blair with Missy,
Drake realized that he could never have made Blair happy, because
they wanted too many different things. They worked well together,
but they never could have really loved each other in the way that
the other needed to be loved. They both had different
agendas—agendas that could never be twisted to fit together. His
eyes were opened to a huge piece of Blair that he had refused to
see in all their years together. He moved under the canopy of
trees. “Thank God you found her,” he said.

“I wasn’t lost,” Missy said again. “Someone
took me.”

Missy nodded toward an old man picking
huckleberries. In the dim forest, standing in a bright splotch of
sun, the man had a surreal glow. He wore faded brown trousers
hitched with a leather belt, a soft off white button down shirt,
and a straw hat. Around his shoulders he had a wide strip of muslin
draped and tied to fashion a carryall for the berries. He had
deeply weathered skin and a thick braid of gray hair running down
his back. His appearance wasn’t attractive, but Drake found him
fascinating.

“
He
didn’t take me,” Missy said. “He
saved me. A
naked
man grabbed me.”

Blair closed her eyes. Two tears eked out and
ran down her cheek. She pulled Missy closer and the girl wiggled
free. “I’m okay, Blair, really. This man flashed a bright light and
the other man let me go.”

Blair stepped forward and squeezed the man’s
hand in gratitude. “Thank you so much,” she said. “Did you see
him?”

The man didn’t answer, but he looked
grave.

Drake peered into the woods; the army of
pines and cedars seemed endless. A path wandered up over a hill. He
heard the tumble of a creek, a buzz of insects, but he couldn’t see
or hear anyone.

Missy considered the elderly man. “How did
you do that?”

“Do what, child?” he asked.

“Make the light flash like that?”

The man pulled a small mirror out of his
pocket and turned it so that it caught a bright ray of sun, which
he shot into Missy’s eyes. Missy squinted and then laughed. “Can I
try?”

The man helped Missy catch a ray of sun in
the mirror, and they turned it toward Blair. Blair closed her eyes
against the glare. “Drake,” she turned to him and laid her hand on
his arm. “Go and see if you can find that man.”

Drake sighed, looked around, and then grabbed
a big stick. Then reason overcame bravado. He wasn’t a knight in
shining armor, and he never would be. He was at heart a spoiled,
lazy, literature professor. “And then what am I supposed to do?” he
asked. “I’m not a vigilante, Blair.”

“He’s going to get away. He might try and
take other children.” Blair’s eyes pleaded with him to be bigger,
braver, and stronger than he was—than he ever could be. He felt her
disappointment in his gut, but he couldn’t change who he had always
been.

Drake dropped the stick. “I’ll go and talk to
the others at the pond to see if they saw anything and warn them.
Missy, what did the man looked like?”

“You saw him, Blair. He had Tobias.”

“You met him earlier?” Drake asked.

Blair nodded. “He was wearing clothes
then.”

She gave him the man’s description, and Drake
ducked through the trees looking for people to warn. Fortunately,
the only person still at the lake was the old man busy with a
fishing pole. Drake wondered what had happened to the others, but
was grateful his errand was short and easily accomplished.