The Rebuilding Year (2 page)

It was several hours of cutting, raking and uprooting invasive buckthorn before he felt calm enough that he was ready to head home. If he was tired enough, the shower beckoned more than the barstool. He’d hung around the entrance to Smythe Hall when classes let out. Just in case. The Ryan guy had made it down the stairs okay, and headed for the bus stop. He’d been moving pretty crap, but he got a lot better when the blonde ran up and walked with him. The wonders of testosterone.

His grounds crew had called it quits an hour ago. He had five guys, all immigrants. Legal, he assumed, but it was the college’s problem to verify that. He just kept them on track. Truth be told, these guys worked harder than a lot of the native-born Americans he’d dealt with over the years. All was currently peaceful in his mini United Nations, since Manuel had left. Take out the one complaining hothead, and the others turned out to be a nice bunch. He expected some would leave as unpredictably as they arrived, but for now he had enough good hands to think about a serious run at the buckthorn bushes. He wandered toward his truck, plotting his assault.

A light in the gloom of the aspen grove caught his eye. It looked like a flame, maybe a lighter. He hadn’t spotted that location as a favorite for lighting up, but new students, new choices. He headed over to have a word.

He wasn’t a fanatic. The smell of cigarettes offended him, but everyone was entitled to their vices. Heaven knew he had his own. A little pot didn’t bother him either. He figured it was pretty harmless stuff. It was the open flame down there that worried him. The aspen leaves were falling early this year, and the ground was dry and carpeted. The last thing he needed was a fire.

As he neared the grove, the flame still wavered. Not a lighter, then. A soft voice was singing in a breathy whisper, something about the moon’s orb. He spotted the singer and paused, surprised.

He didn’t know the girl’s name, but he’d seen her around. She’d been a drab, mousy thing when she’d arrived on campus two years ago. Mid-brown hair, mid-brown eyes, bad skin and a slightly hunched posture that screamed,
kick me.
She was one of those who had bloomed in college. Her skin was now clear, her hair long and braided.

But she’d always seemed, if anything, too serious. She worked in the lab of one of the medical faculty, helping with some kind of research. Sometimes he saw her leaving work in the evenings. She always strode quickly down the well-lit paths to the dorms. She had never wandered the grounds with, of all things, a lighted candle.

“Excuse me, miss,” he said softly from a distance. He didn’t want to startle her into dropping the candle. The girl turned slowly to face him, her eyes shining in the flickering glow.

“The trees live, you know,” she said, with a smile.

“Um, yes, they do.”
What the hell?

“It breathes, all around us. It speaks, if we could only understand it.”

Okaaay.
He edged closer. “What’s your name?”

“Alice. I’m Alice. All of this is Alice too, in a way.” She smiled again, and made a wide gesture with the candle that set the flame flickering and spilled wax. A drop of hot wax landed on her hand, but she ignored it. “Isn’t it great?”

“Listen, Alice.” He kept his voice gentle. “I think we should blow out the candle now. This place is a bit dry to have a flame burning.”

“Is it?” She bent and puffed a breath onto the flame. It went out, leaving a small red glow at the tip of the wick. “Oh, that’s lovely too.” Her face was joyful and serene.

He wondered what she was on. He wondered where he could get some. “Come on, Alice,” he said, holding out a hand. “I think you should head back to your room. I bet it’s lovely there too.”

“It doesn’t sing like the woods.” But she stepped toward him obediently and put her hand in his. He slipped a finger across her wrist. Her pulse was strong, slow and even. Her skin was cool, not feverish. He didn’t smell booze, or pot.

“Come on.” He led her carefully up the slope. No way was he going to leave her to wander around the campus in her state. They were a small school, and the campus was probably safer than many, but if some man walked up to her and invited her home tonight, he’d bet she would find that lovely too. At least until morning.

“Which dorm are you in, Alice?”

“Where the moon shines down. Where the chestnuts grow.”

As far as he knew there were no chestnut trees on campus. Horse chestnuts, yes. Maybe it was poetic license. He headed in the right direction for undergraduate housing. Maybe when they got close she’d give him a clue.

They walked past the first tower, the freshman dorms. Then past the second block of midyear rooms. He was rethinking his strategy when she turned abruptly in on the path to Clarence Hall.

“This is my stop,” she said gaily. “Good night, sweet prince. Night’s candles are burnt out.” She pulled her hand out of his and gravely handed him the half-melted candle.

“Um?” said a voice from behind John.

He turned quickly, and found himself face-to-face with a sardonic young woman with dyed red hair.

“Oh good,” he said quickly. He didn’t want to give her time to start speculating. “Do you live here? Because this girl seems to think she does too. I found her wandering around the grounds with a candle. Whatever she’s on, I think she’d be better off safe in her rooms. Could you see that she gets there?”

The girl made a face, but then shrugged. “I suppose. I’ve seen her around. She’s on the third floor.” She went to the door and swiped her card through the reader. The door clicked and she pulled it open. “Come on, then.”

“Go on to bed,” John urged Alice gently.

Alice looked at him. “If the moon lasts, there’s always a tomorrow.”

“Whatever you took tonight, I think it’s a little strong for you,” John said. “I would stay away from it tomorrow. Go on in now.”

She gave him another radiant smile, but turned obediently and followed the redhead inside. John breathed a sigh of relief as the door closed. Not that she couldn’t just leave again, but the other girl didn’t seem the type to take any nonsense.

It was a lovely night, in fact. The air was soft and cool. The moon had risen, and where the electric lights dimmed, it was still bright enough to see the beds of flowers, and the waving stalks of plume grass. The shapes of his bushes and trees took on a bulk and a softness they lacked in the sunlight. Maybe Alice had things right. There was always a tomorrow. John headed for home.

Chapter Two

A couple of weeks later, Ryan dragged himself down the hall to his apartment and juggled the key in the lock. Anatomy lab had gone way past the normal hour. His dissection partner was going to drive him crazy. He could already tell. Better too slow than too sloppy, maybe. But if he heard Kaitlyn complain one more time that the real thing didn’t look like the book, he was going to pop her one. Real life never looked like the book. Real life was messy, and variable, and interesting.

And noisy. He stepped inside the apartment and sighed. It had seemed like a good idea. Share an apartment with a second-year med student, someone who was already established and could serve as a native guide to a guy whose undergraduate days were a decade back. And he was really too old for student housing. He’d met Jason for coffee, compared expectations, and signed the lease. It should have worked.

What he hadn’t realized was that Jason was a pussy-hound of the first order. And good-looking enough to be all too successful. In the two weeks since classes had started, he’d had no less than six different girls parading through the apartment. At least there were separate bedrooms. But it did bad things for Ryan’s nerves to walk into a half-naked woman in his bathroom when he needed to get to class in the morning. Especially when it wasn’t his own half-naked woman.

And Jason liked his sex loud. Ryan wasn’t a prude. But he had a hard time studying to the tune of
yes, yes, harder, do it to me
, that seemed to last for hours. Today’s girl was already moaning and squealing behind Jason’s closed door. No verbal directions yet, but Jason sounded like he was working up to it. Ryan cursed under his breath. His bed beckoned. He could stretch out, and review the names of the blood vessels of the foot. Except for
oh, Jason, oh, Jason, yes, Jason.

He shoved his keys back in his pocket, grabbed the damned cane back out of the corner, and headed out. He could study anatomy somewhere else. Maybe with a snack and a beer. Maybe two beers.

The town sprawled out away from the college on its edge. Exploration the last couple of weekends had shown Ryan that there were several bars. The two closest to campus were clearly student hangouts. The music was loud and bad, the patrons young and intoxicated, and the food mainly fried. The one called Sly’s had looked promising at first, but proved to be stodgy. He was too young for that one by at least a couple of decades. He’d made a note to move on to The Copper Stein for his next round.

The interior of The Copper Stein was somewhat dim, but the music was reassuring. It actually had a beat, and lyrics, but it wasn’t sixties rock. One end of the room had a short wooden bar with a brass rail, but most of the floor was filled with small tables. He went to the bar, requested a Harp’s, and then carried the bottle with him in search of study space. Unfortunately he didn’t seem to be the only one who had chosen this Thursday night to get out on the town. There were no empty tables.

He was heading back to the bar when a vaguely familiar voice said, “Hey, Ryan, you can park it here if you like.”

He glanced around. The face was immediately familiar, the strong chin, hollow cheekbones, prominent nose. His rescuer from day one. But damned if he could remember the guy’s name. Oh well. He held out his hand. “Hey, thanks again. That makes twice you’ve rescued me.”

“My pleasure this time,” the man’s deep voice said. “I hate drinking alone.”

Ryan eased himself into the chair and set his cane on the floor. “Me too.” He took a long pull on the beer.
When was the last time you didn’t drink alone?
He couldn’t remember. Back before, anyway. He sipped again, slowly.

“So how’s class? They working you hard?”

“Not yet.” The workload was heavy but not unmanageable. He just had to adjust from doing-things mode to studying-things mode. He hadn’t been a student in a long time.

“And how’s the head?”

He shrugged. “It’s fine. My dad always says I have a thick skull. Sometimes that’s a good thing.”

“Yeah, my dad said that too.” The other man raised a glass. Ryan realized he was drinking whiskey. “Must be a dad thing. Although I’ve never said it to my boy.”

“You have a son?” Lately, Ryan had realized that the only thing he regretted about his no-strings dating history was that no serious relationships meant no kids. No chance of kids. His brother Drew had two small boys, out in California.

“Yeah, one boy. He’s fourteen. And a girl, Torey, she’s twelve.”

“That’s nice.”

The man took a swallow of his drink, and then chased it with a sip of beer from a mug. “Would be nicer if they weren’t a thousand miles away. Nicer if they were actually going to visit within the next decade.”

Ryan realized that the man was a little drunk. “Divorced, huh?”

“Yeah.” The older man slumped down in his chair and stretched out his legs, long and lean in battered black jeans and old cowboy boots. “Let’s talk about something more pleasant. Like the Bubonic Plague.”

Ryan laughed. “
Yersinia pestis
. Still present, by the way, in the gopher population of the southwestern United States. Cases in cats, periodically, and in humans now and then. Hooray for modern antibiotics.”

“You’re kidding.” The other man sat up and looked startled.

“No, really. I studied up on that kind of stuff before my med-school interview. It’s out there. It’s just that with modern antibiotics, the bacterial diseases are less of a threat. It’s the viruses that get us now. Influenza, AIDS, stuff like that.”

“Okay,” the guy said. “That’s about all the optimism I can take for one night.”

“Sorry.” Ryan was enjoying talking to someone who wouldn’t think of the nineties as ancient history. Hell, he was just enjoying talking to someone. “Tell me about your job. What does a groundskeeper actually do?”

“Well my official title is Landscape Maintenance Architect,” the man drawled. “But that just means the same thing for more glory and less pay. Basically I keep the outdoor parts of the campus tidy, healthy and esthetically pleasing. Fortunately, my predecessor held the job badly for thirty years, and changed nothing. Which means I have lots of scope for improvements, and won’t run out of work. I bamboozled the hiring committee with my credentials, and they gave me a budget and a pretty free rein. It’s not half bad.”

Ryan wanted to ask about those credentials. Not many gardeners he knew used terms like
esthetically pleasing.
Then again, how many gardeners did he know? “They had a committee to hire a groundskeeper?” he asked.

“Oh please. They’re a college. They have a committee to decide what day to celebrate Christmas.”

Ryan snorted. “I’ve met people like that.”

“Plus this bunch has a bit of an inferiority complex, since they would like to be an Ivy League university, except that they don’t have the staff, the space or the reputation. The med school is their only professional program. They overcompensate everywhere they can. They’ve decided that since they have three hundred acres of campus, they will make it a showpiece. I’m not arguing.”