He said, “It was a bad shock for a twenty-one-year-old kid to learn that life wasn't going to give him a chance to be a real pure hero, but it was even worse to learn that his own country could force him to do the wrong thing. After we left, the Cong and Khmer Rouge slaughtered three or four million in Cambodia and Vietnam, and another half million died trying to escape to the sea in pathetic, flimsy little boats. And… and in a way I can't quite convey, I feel those deaths are on my hands, on all our hands, and I feel the weight of them, sometimes so heavy I don't think I can hold up under it.”
“You're being too hard on yourself.”
“No. Never too hard.”
“One man can't carry the world on his shoulders,” she said.
But Benny would not allow that weight to be lifted from him, not even a fraction of it. “That's why I'm past-focused, I guess. I've learned that the worlds I have to live in — the present world and the world to come — aren't clean, never will be, and give us no choices between black and white. But there's always at least the illusion that things were a lot different in the past.”
Rachael had always admired his sense of responsibility and his unwavering honesty, but now she saw that those qualities ran far deeper in him than she had realized — perhaps too deep. Even virtues like responsibility and honesty could become obsessions. But, oh, what lovely obsessions compared with those of other men she had known.
At last he looked at her, met her gaze, and his eyes were full of a sorrow — almost a melancholy — that she had never seen in them before. But other emotions were evident in his eyes as well, a special warmth and tenderness, great affection, love.
He said, “Last night and this morning… after we made love… Well, for the first time since before the war, I saw an important choice that was strictly black and white, no grays whatsoever, and in that choice there's a sort of… a sort of salvation that I thought I'd never find.”
“What choice?” she asked.
“Whether to spend my life with you — or not,” he said. “To spend it with you is the right choice, entirely right, no ambiguities. And to let you slip away is wrong, all wrong; I've no doubt about that.”
For weeks, maybe months, Rachael had known she was in love with Benny. But she had reined in her emotions, had not spoken of the depth of her feelings for him, and had not permitted herself to think of a long-term commitment. Her childhood and adolescence had been colored by loneliness and shaped by the terrible perception that she was unloved, and those bleak years had engendered in her a craving for affection. That craving, that need to be wanted and loved, was what had made her such easy prey for Eric Leben and had led her into a bad marriage. Eric's obsession with youth in general and with her youth in particular had seemed like love to Rachael, for she had desperately wanted it to be love. She had spent the next seven years learning and accepting the grim and hurtful truth — that love had nothing to do with it. Now she was cautious, wary of being hurt again.
“I love you, Rachael.”
Heart pounding, wanting to believe that she could be loved by a man as good and sweet as Benny, but afraid to believe it, she tried to look away from his eyes because the longer she stared into them the closer she came to losing the control and cool detachment with which she armored herself. But she could not look away. She tried not to say anything that would make her vulnerable, but with a curious mixture of dismay, delight, and wild exhilaration, she said, “Is this what I think it is?”
“What do you think it is?”
“A proposal.”
“Hardly the time or place for a proposal, is it?” he said.
“Hardly.”
“Yet… that's what it is. I wish the circumstances were more romantic.”
“Well…”
“Champagne, candlelight, violins.”
She smiled.
“But,” he said, “when Baresco was holding that revolver on us, and when we were being chased down Palm Canyon Drive last night, the thing that scared me most wasn't that I might be killed… but that I might be killed before I'd let you know how I felt about you. So I'm letting you know. I want to be with you always, Rachael, always.”
More easily than she would have believed possible, the words came to her own lips. “I want to spend my life with you, too, Benny.”
He put a hand to her face.
She leaned forward and kissed him lightly.
“I love you,” he said.
“God, I love you.”
“If we get through this alive, you'll marry me?”
“Yes,” she said, seized by a sudden chill. “But damn it, Benny, why'd you have to bring the if part into it?”
“Forget I said it.”
But she could not forget. Earlier in the day, in the motel room in Palm Springs, just after they had made love the second time, she'd experienced a presentiment of death that had shaken her and had filled her with the need to move, as if a deadly weight would fall on them if they stayed in the same place any longer. That uncanny feeling returned. The mountain scenery, which had been fresh and alluring, acquired a somber and threatening aspect that chilled her even though she knew it was entirely a subjective change. The trees seemed to stretch into mutant shapes, their limbs bonier, their shadows darker.
“Let's go,” she said.
He nodded, apparently understanding her thoughts and perceiving the same change of mood that she felt.
He started the car, pulled onto the road. When they had rounded the next bend, they saw another sign: lake arrowhead—15 miles.
Eric looked over the other tools in the garage, seeking another instrument for his arsenal. He saw nothing useful.
He returned to the house. In the kitchen, he put the ax on the table and pulled open a few drawers until he located a set of knives. He chose two — a butcher's knife and a smaller, pointier blade.
With an ax and two knives, he was prepared for both arm's-length combat and close-in fighting. He still wished he had a gun, but at least he was no longer defenseless. If someone came looking for him, he would be able to take care of himself. He would do them serious damage before they brought him down, a prospect that gave him some satisfaction and that, somewhat to his surprise, brought a sudden grin to his face.
The mice, the mice, the biting, frenzied mice…
Damn. He shook his head.
The mice, mice, mice, maniacal, clawing, spitting…
That crazy thought, like a fragment of a demented nursery rhyme, spun through his mind again, frightening him, and when he tried to focus on it, tried to understand it, his thoughts grew muddy once more, and he simply could not grasp the meaning of the mice.
The mice, mice, bloody-eyed, bashing against cage walls…
When he continued to strain for the elusive memory of the mice, a throbbing white pain filled his head from crown to temples and burned across the bridge of his nose, but when he stopped trying to remember and attempted, instead, to put the mice out of his mind, the pain grew even worse, a sledgehammer striking rhythmically behind his eyes. He had to grit his teeth to endure it, broke out in a sweat, and with the sweat came anger duller than the pain but growing even as the pain grew, unfocused anger at first but not for long. He said, “Rachael, Rachael,” and clenched the butcher's knife. “Rachael…”
19
SHARP AND THE STONE
On arriving at the hospital in Palm Springs, Anson Sharp had done easily what Jerry Peake had been unable to do with mighty striving. In ten minutes, he turned Nurse Alma Dunn's stonefaced implacability to dust, and he shattered Dr. Werfell's authoritarian calm, reducing both of them to nervous, uncertain, respectful, cooperative citizens. Theirs was grudging cooperation, but it was cooperation nonetheless, and Peake was deeply impressed. Though Sarah Kiel was still under the influence of the sedatives that she had taken in the middle of the night, Werfell agreed to wake her by whatever means necessary.