Spires of Spirit (16 page)

“They could all do that, Joan,” said Wheat softly. Her voice was pitched just loud enough to carry clearly, no more. “I'm sorry I upset them, though.”

“They'll get over it.” Joan found herself staring at Wheat, or rather, at the nimbus surrounding her. With chagrin, she saw that Wheat had, once again, noticed her stare, and she cleared her throat and shrugged her shoulders against the constraints of the brown blazer for what seemed the millionth time that morning. “You'll have to excuse me.” She rubbed her forehead. “I'm not quite myself today.”

Wheat looked concerned. “I'm sorry to hear that.”

Whenever Wheat said anything, Joan noted, she seemed to mean it. While, on another's lips, the phrase
I'm sorry
might have been no more than a thoughtless courtesy, it seemed for Wheat to be an expression of sincere sympathy.

Wheat was like that. Even Joan had to admit that she had been a joy to have in the office these last two months. She was someone who honestly wished people a good morning and a good night, someone who had brought flowers to the receptionist after she had been sick, someone whose laughter sparkled in the air like a spray of water on a hot summer day. Joan wondered if that was what Wheat had meant when she had talked about love.

“Was all that true?” she asked abruptly.

“About love?” said Wheat as though she had picked up Joan's train of thought. “It was.”

“Do you belong to some kind of religious sect? No offense, Wheat. I'm just curious. You don't have to tell me, of course: as your employer, I have no business asking.”

“I have no particular affiliation, Joan.” Calm, very calm. Much more calm than Joan felt. Much more calm, in fact, than Joan could have imagined feeling under any circumstances.

She fought with herself, with the fields and the daisies, and the nagging thought about what it would have been like to go wading that morning. Wheat knew. Joan was convinced that Wheat knew.

But she only rubbed her forehead again. “You've done well, Wheat. I certainly have nothing to complain about. But I'd like to ask you not to talk with the other counselors about what you do. It seems to upset them. You've obviously got a very personal method. Please, don't force it on anyone.”

“Free will, Joan,” Wheat said quietly.

“I'm glad you agree. OK, have a good day.”

Wheat rose. Now she looked puzzled. “Joan . . .”

Joan had already made an effort to convey the appearance of starting on her paperwork, but she looked up.

“Did you understand anything of what I said back there?”

More than anything right now, Joan wanted to bury herself in figures, reports, percentages. Over the years of intermittent odd days, she had found that only dry numbers and sterile paperwork could hold at bay the urges that threatened to make her run out into the fields and roll among the blossoms. But she looked at Wheat and tried to be patient. “Wheat,” she said, “you're a nice person, and you've got a nice way of looking at the world. Please be careful.”

“I don't understand.”

“Nice people get hurt.”

“You think I'm naive?” There was no annoyance in Wheat's tone. It was a question, no more.

Joan only looked at her.

“I'm sorry,” said Wheat, and again she sounded as though she meant it. “I didn't realize that you . . .” Her voice trailed off, and she reached for the door handle.

Unthinkingly, Joan asked the obvious question. “That I what?”

“That . . . ah . . . that you didn't . . . know.”

“Didn't know? Didn't know what?” Joan looked up, straight into Wheat's eyes, straight into a reflection, a gleam, that was at once completely alien and utterly familiar. The oddness reasserted itself violently then, and she gripped the edge of her desk as if that were all that would keep her from bolting for the door. “What . . . what are you trying to say?”

The sadness was back in Wheat's eyes. “It's all right, Joan. Don't worry about it.”

She left, closing the door behind her. Joan let her go.

***

Joan kept her eye on Wheat after that, ostensibly on the basis of her concern for office morale. But when she was honest with herself, she acknowledged that Wheat's words held a vaguely compelling mystery.

I didn't realize that you didn't know.

Didn't know . . . what? Didn't know about love? What did love have to do with it? This was a business, for God's sake, not a hippie commune!

She tried to dismiss the subject, but it was not that easy. There was that nimbus, for one thing. And, for another, the familiarity she had glimpsed in the young woman's eyes. Maybe they were just side effects of the temporary and intermittent madness of the odd days, but if that were the case, then why had Wheat's words at the staff meeting corresponded with them with such disturbing exactness?

Who the hell was this woman who was working at Buckland Employment Agency?

She said nothing to Wheat, to be sure, but once or twice she pulled the woman's employee records and pored over them in her office. Joan was used to people fitting patterns, herself included. But Wheat did not fit. Anywhere. Given her background, she should have been a nice, quiet, Catholic girl who went to church on Sunday and who spent Saturday afternoons reading romantic novels. Certainly there was no intimation of someone who would take solitary camping trips in the middle of winter, create stained glass windows in her spare time . . . and give as an emergency contact a man—Hadden Morrison—whom she was neither related to nor cohabiting with.

I didn't realize that you didn't know.

“Right,” Joan muttered as, once again, she closed Wheat's folder and slid it back into the files. “I don't know.” And after a moment's consideration of her own chronic attacks of madness, she added: “And I don't think I want to, either.”

A little less than a month later, the odd days struck once again, and, once again, desperately fighting herself, Joan drove carefully to work, parked, and hid in her office with the blinds drawn. Fortunately, there was no staff meeting that morning. Then, too, she had numbers to work with: budgets, salaries, commissions. All very banal, all demanding concentrated thought that would eventually do away with the . . . problem . . .entirely.

Or so it had been in the past. This time, near noon, her face dripping with sweat squeezed out by strain and tension, she realized that her usual tactics were not working. She was losing: the fact that she was separated from the sight of the fields outside by a fraction of an inch of opaque metal was all that was saving her from making a fool of herself.

Trembling, she got up and stumbled down the hall to the ladies' room, averting her eyes as she passed by the office windows. In the sterile, tiled whiteness of the lavatory, away from upsetting visions, she washed her face with cold water and redid her makeup, forcing herself to concentrate in what she knew was a vain attempt to banish the madness.

She did not know how she was going to get through the rest of the day. Going home was out of the question: she would have to cross the parking lot to her car, and she would lose control the moment she stepped outside. But her work was suffering severely—her work was, in fact, nonexistent—and it was pointless to try to continue.

Glancing at her watch, she realized that a half hour had gone by. She could not spend the entire day in the bathroom. She had to decide what to do.

The door opened and Wheat entered quietly. “I saw you leave the office,” she said. “Are you not well?”

It was just the sort of thing that Wheat would notice, and just the sort of compassionate thing that she would do; but Joan had backed up against the wall, for once more there was an aura around Wheat, a nimbus of shimmering silver. “No,” she managed. “I'm . . . I'm not well.”

“Can I get you something?”

“No. There's nothing.”

Gently, Wheat approached and peered into Joan's face. “How often do you have these . . . attacks?”

Joan shrugged. She did not want to discuss her bouts of insanity with anyone, particularly with someone who seemed to be so uncomfortably connected with them.

But Wheat, whether connected or not, held to her quiet and her compassion. Love? Yes . . . yes, it had to be love. “I think you'd best go home and lie down.”

The honest words forced Joan to be honest herself. “I . . . I can't make it,” she admitted. She was on the verge of tears: she was sure now that Wheat knew of her weakness, and, frightening as that was, it was made doubly so by her suspicion that Wheat understood more about these days than she did herself.

“Close your eyes,” said Wheat.

Wheat's tone was gentle, but her command could not be questioned. Joan felt Wheat's hand rest on her head for a moment—Oh, the temerity of it!—and felt something . . . change.

The oddness suddenly vanished.

All thoughts of temerity or touching fled in the rush of relief, but Joan was still weak and shaking, and Wheat guided her back to her office, helped her collect her things, and, despite the stares of the counselors and the openmouthed astonishment of Sandra, calmly escorted her through the outer office, down the hall, and out to her car.

“You need to go home,” she said. “Lie down. Get some sleep. We'll see you in the morning.”

Joan fumbled with her keys, dropping them several times before she got the door open. When she looked up, she saw care and concern in Wheat's eyes. Care and concern . . . and light.

Starlight. She knew it was starlight.

“Can you make it, Joan?”

“I don't know.” Admitting again . . . cursing herself for her weakness.

“Do you want me to drive?”

Joan looked at the car. She could hardly insert a key into a lock. How, then, could she expect to drive? “I suppose you'd better.”

“All right, then.” Wheat helped her into the passenger seat.

And as the young woman closed the door and rounded the car to take the wheel, Joan watched her. Along with the nimbus, the familiarity was back again, and suddenly it did not seem at all strange that Wheat's employee records did not make sense. Why should they? Nothing else did.

***

Aside from telling Wheat where to turn, Joan spent the trip to her apartment in silence, slumped in her seat, watching the scenery pass. She had always driven herself to work and back, had never had the leisure merely to observe; and now, as they passed the small pond, she found to her surprise that although she could sense earth and sky and water with the same unnatural clarity of her odd days, she was more in control, able at last to stop fighting insane urges and appreciate what she was seeing. Yes, it was all beautiful, all just as it should be, but . . .

. . . but . . .

. . . but . . .
what had Wheat done?

She glanced at the young woman. The shimmer about her was strong and, somehow, reassuring.

Wheat parked and helped her up the stairs and into her apartment. Joan paused only long enough to remove her shoes before she collapsed into the bed. Wheat found a light blanket and covered her.

“Sleep,” said the young woman. “I'll be in the other room if you need anything.” She drew the blinds.

Joan hitched herself up on one elbow. “I appreciate it.” Her speech was slurred with strain and fatigue. “I feel . . . strange.”

“Sleep now.”

Joan settled down and closed her eyes with a sigh.

“May I use your phone?”

“Uhhh . . . sure . . .” Sleep was pulling Joan along a dark tunnel, and in the distance she could see a faint gleaming. “Yeah,” she murmured, half to Wheat, half to the current. “Go ahead.”

She heard Wheat leave the room, heard the faint sounds of a number being punched in on the phone. “Hadden? Hi. It's about Joan. I . . . I don't know what to do.” A pause. “You don't, either? Oh, dear . . .”

Well, that made three of them, Joan decided as she let the current take her . . . and then she was floating on a deep, quiet sea, the light of a thousand stars above her. Something was flickering on the far borders of her memory, something to do with Wheat . . . and with others. The memory was up in the stars, but it would not come.

The waves laved her gently, the stars shone down. She gave up on the memory and was content just to drift, to float, to feel the movement of the waves as they buoyed her up.

And when she awoke just at twilight, the dream of floating stayed with her, bringing with it a sense of lightness and well-being. Rubbing feeling back into an arm that had gone to sleep, she tottered to the window and opened the blinds. The mountains were edged with the warm glow of sunset, and Venus glittered brightly above the rooftop of the apartment building across the street.

Peaceful. Very peaceful. The world seemed hushed, quiet, and for the moment there was no traffic to break the silence. Leaning her head against the window frame, Joan shut her eyes, feeling the tranquillity.

A rustle from the living room told her that Wheat was still there. “Bless her,” she murmured, opening her eyes. Venus glittered again. “Maybe she's right.”

She went to the bathroom and removed her smudged makeup, splashed her face with water, dried off. She felt good, better than she had in a long time. In the mirror her gray eyes were calm, her ash-blond hair tousled and artless.

Putting up her hands, she rubbed her face for a moment, then slid her fingers back through her hair. Her ears were tingling, as though she had slept oddly, which, she realized, was probably the case. Everything seemed to be happening oddly these days.

She found Wheat curled up in the overstuffed chair in the living room, a magazine in her lap. She was not reading it, though. Her eyes were on the window, and, in fact, she seemed to be looking past it, maybe even past twinkling Venus and the first stars.

“Wheat?”

The cornflower-blue eyes flicked to her. Joan saw the light in them. It was stronger now, closer to recognition. Wheat smiled. “Feeling better?”

“Much. I wanted to thank you for putting up with me.”

“No problem. That's what I'm here for.” Wheat smiled.

Joan smiled also. She had never before asked of an employee such a favor as she had asked of Wheat that day. It was unprofessional. It was simply not done. But Wheat was different, Wheat did not fit categories, and Joan was not at all disturbed by the fact that she had ignored her own rules. Love? Well . . . maybe. It obviously worked for Wheat. It made a charming person of her, a joy, a delight, someone who could bring comfort, seemingly, through the touch of a hand. Joan was willing to go as far as to admit that much.