From: BEWalton17@aol.com Message-ID: <15c68e81.36718baa@aol.com> Date: Fri, 11 Dec 1998 16:16:26 EST Subject: QL: The Enemy (Chapter 6) PART TWO: RUTHIE There is a fatality, a feeling so irresistable and inevitable that it has the force of doom, which almost invariably compels human beings to linger around and haunt, ghostlike, the spot where some great and marked event has given the color to their lifetime; and still the more irresistably, the darker the tinge that saddens it. Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter CHAPTER SIX Sam had finally fallen asleep in the dinette section of the kitchen, with his head resting on the formica table. He didn't know how long after Al had left he'd found his way in here, and he didn't think he'd intended to go to sleep, but weariness had overcome him, and he had simply slipped away, an open Potok making a suitable and familiar pillow. "Learning by osmosis," they'd called it in college. He dreamed incoherently, bleak images of flames and smoke, of Nate's eyes, of Al's voice, of Ruthie's tears. He saw himself pull Nate out of the path of a car, only to turn and find that Al had filled his space. He heard Ruthie's scream, and saw her sinking into the ground, one clawed hand reaching out to him. He saw Nate looking out from behind a wall of flame, his eyes somehow ancient and knowing. He saw those eyes blink shut. He awoke to a light touch on the back of his neck, and a kiss under his right eye. He looked up to find Ruthie standing beside him, a tired, bemused look on her face. A red digital clock on the wall behind her informed him that it was six-fifty-seven a.m. "Sleep okay?" she asked. "I didn't want to wake you." She smiled at him. "You're a very nice man, Sid. What do you bother with me for?" "I think it's because I love you," Sam said. "Are you feeling any better this morning?" She shook her head, and set about making breakfast with no elaboration. "I'm really very sorry about yesterday. I should've controlled that." "Yesterday was yesterday." Sam stood up and stretched his back. "You know, Nate was very worried about you." "I didn't mean to scare him." "He's going to need to know that you're going to be alright. Are you up to that?" She nodded. "Maybe it *would* be best for him," she said. "What would?" "To live with his father. Maybe Albert's a better parent than I am." Her tone was reasonable, not frantic, and not sympathy- starved. She seemed to be seriously considering the option for the first time. And, if Al and Ziggy were right, that was dangerous. "Don't be silly," he said. "I'm not. There's no rule that says a mother is better parent." Sam didn't know how to argue with his own argument, which he still considered valid, so he just squeezed her hand, and said, "That's not what this is about." "I scared Nate. Albert comforted him." "Ruthie, you had a bad day. That's all. You had a shock." "Maybe." She opened a cupboard under the counter, and started fishing for a pan. "Let me help you with breakfast," Sam offered. "Don't you think you ought to be getting ready for work?" Mundane details, remember? Like when you work and where you work? "Oh, yeah." He started out of the kitchen, meaning to sneak into Sid's office and find a map before he went upstairs to change. "Sid?" "What?" "You could do two things for me," she said. He smiled. "One?" "Get Nathan out of bed. Albert kept him up too late last night." Sam nodded. "Okay. Two?" "Kiss me good morning? I know I don't look like much right now, but I could really use a kiss." "You look great right now," he said, without moving toward her. It was true; Ruthie was one of those women who could look great in sack cloth and ashes, after forty days of sleep deprivation. Al seemed to find a lot of them. "Sid?" "What?" "Kiss me?" He went to her, meaning to place a chaste kiss on her forehead (speaking with Al about Ruthie had made Sam more, not less, self- conscious about his attraction to her), but she rose to her toes at the last minute and caught him full on the mouth. He had no chance to resist. It wasn't what he had expected at all. He had often kissed women who were in love with other men; the difference was that usually they thought he *was* the man they were in love with. Here, with Ruthie, there was a distance, one that she couldn't bridge (although he sensed that she was honestly trying), and one that Sid Weiss *had* to be aware of. She kissed him deeply and firmly, but there was something practiced, almost rehearsed about the motion of her mouth. Something anonymous, despite her effort. Sam thought again that Sid was a very patient man, and that he must love Ruthie a great deal. "Mama?" Ruthie pulled back, and Sam turned to see Nate standing in the kitchen doorway, wearing faded pajamas with a Return of the Jedi logo and a picture of Luke Skywalker battling various interstellar villains while Princess Leia looked on. Sam thought Nate was a couple of years too young to really be a Star Wars fan, but someone was certainly encouraging good taste. "Good morning, honey," Ruthie said. "I'm getting breakfast. Bacon and eggs. Do you like the sound of that?" Nate yawned and nodded. "Are you better, Mama?" Ruthie managed a warm smile. She squatted down. "I'll be even better if my favorite guy gives me a big hug." Nate shuffled over to her, the plastic soles of his pajama feet scratching along the floor, and put his arms around her. It was a lackluster hug (Nate was apparently not a morning person), but it seemed to cheer Ruthie. She stood and ruffled his hair. "Sid can help you get ready for school while I make the eggs, okay?" "_Ich ken_," Nate muttered, going to the table and laying his head down on it. Ruthie nodded and rolled her eyes. "Yes, I'm sure you can. But since you need to be ready sometime before tomorrow afternoon, I think Sid ought to help you out. _Iz goot?_" "Uh-huh." Nate was starting to doze. Ruthie turned to Sam. "Can you take him upstairs and get him ready?" Sam nodded and lifted Nate. "Come on, Nate. It's time for school." The child turned to him, to allow easier carriage, then settled back to sleep. Sam carried him down the hall and up the stairs. The bathroom was to the left of the stairs, above the dinette. Sam put Nate down when he reached the upstairs hall. The boy trudged in on his own, and pulled open what Sam had first thought was a cupboard under the sink. What came out of the cupboard was a set of child-size stairs that led up to the first of the two wash basins, and put the toothbrush rack and towel bar in easy reach. Sam smiled, and installed himself in front of the second basin. Sid's plaintive face looked out of the mirror at him, dark shadows standing out clearly under his large and baleful brown eyes (puppy dog eyes, Katie would have called them). There was no stubble on his cheeks -- except for obvious injuries, the auras seemed to stay in whatever condition the Leapee had been in when Sam arrived -- but that didn't mean Sam was off the hook. He raised a hand to his face to feel for telltale roughness. Shaving was one of the most difficult parts of a Leap, logistically; Sam had been raised not to skip a day once his beard had started growing, but never seeing his face made the habit challenging. At least he was a man this time, so he didn't have to lock the door and hide while he performed his blind man's rites, stretching his skin, and following the blades with his fingertips. He'd gotten good at it over the years, but, judging from his mirror images, it looked pretty silly -- especially on a woman or, even worse, a child. Sid's razor, an electric one whose brand name was long rubbed off, was sitting against the back of the sink counter. Sam plugged it in and began. It wasn't until he glanced at the mirror involuntarily that he noticed Nate mimicking his movements at the other basin. He had turned on the water at the same time Sam had, but there was nothing unusual in that; they were both, after all, going about the same waking-up routine. But when Sam turned his head and pulled at his right cheek, and Nate made the exact same gesture, it was plainly not co-incidental. Sam smiled; Nate smiled. Sam stuck his tongue out at the mirror; Nate did the same. Sam dropped a surreptitious wink; Nate's left eyelid fell jauntily over his eye. Sam plucked him off his stairs and turned him upside down, causing him to giggle shrilly. "Monkey," he said. "I'm not a monkey." "Yes you are." "Am not!" Sam righted him, and set him on the floor. "Did you wash behind your ears?" Nate offered his clean neck for inspection. "Your hands?" They also passed muster. "Then maybe we better get you dressed for breakfast." "I'll do it." Al was standing at the bathroom door, wearing a salmon-striped bathrobe that Sam was pretty sure he still had, and a pair of beat up slippers. "You can get ready for work. I'll take care of Nate." "Ruthie's making breakfast," Sam said. "Do you want her to put on enough for you?" Al shook his head. "No. I'll get dressed first. You guys have to go." He picked Nate up like a sack, and tucked him under one arm, swinging him casually out the door. "Come on, monkey." "I'm not a monkey!" Nate insisted. "Yeah, so what are you? Are you a turtle?" "No." "Maybe an alligator?" "Uh-uh." "Oh, I know. You're a bear. Does he look like a bear to you, Sid?" "Definitely." "I'm not a bear." "He's not a bear, Sid." "Well, what could he be?" "I'm a *boy*!" "Of course!" Al said, slapping his forehead and putting Nate down on the hall floor. "I knew I was missing one. A little boy." "I'm not little." "Mm-hmm." Al shooed Nate around the corner toward his room. Sam watched them go. After awhile, he finished shaving. *** Half an hour later, clothes on, hair combed, and stomachs full, they were on the road. After locating the school, which was in Skokie, and finding a route that would take them there, Sam had tucked the city map and Sid's seating charts into a tattered old briefcase he'd found under the desk. A faded sticker of Donald Duck was affixed to the top, with an equally faded crayon message, written in blocky capitals: "To Mr. Weiss love Cindy Ginzberg." The crayon had spilled over the boundary of the sticker, but Sid had made no attempt to remove it. Sam was beginning to regret not having a chance to meet him. The route to the school took them east, toward the sun and Lake Michigan. The latter could be seen in occasional glimmers in the distance. The former was hidden behind a bank of heavy clouds. "Hey, Sid, guess what?" "What?" "Nothing." "Okay... " Nate laughed, quite pleased with himself. He looked out the window at the suburban neighborhood they were passing through. "How come we're going this way?" Because it looked like the most direct way, at least on the map. "What do you mean?" "You usually take the 'spressway." The expressway. Sam, who had grown up on country roads, had never even thought to look for one. He shrugged. "I thought this would be a nice change of pace." Nate nodded. "I like it better than the 'spressway. There's more trees and stuff." "You like to climb trees?" "Mm-hmm. And just to look at 'em, you know?" he added matter- of-factly. "I think they're pretty." He scrunched his face at a few winter-bald trees. "Only not so much in November. But it's better than the 'spressway." Sam smiled. He found that he liked Nate a great deal, not just as a cute kid, or as a friend's son, but as an intelligent, interesting, and good person in his own right. He hoped that after this Leap succeeded, he would have a chance to see him grow up. *If* the Leap succeeded, he corrected himself. So far, he'd done nothing that could conceivably change history. "I think so, too," Sam said. His mind was six months and a thousand miles away. He knew what he had to do, but he didn't know where to start. He had a feeling that Al didn't know, either. And he had a feeling that whatever it was would not happen in Sid's class. And what if it happened while he was gone? There was nothing he could do about that, but he didn't think that Whoever or Whatever was Leaping him through time would send him if there was no path to open. He would just have to wait, and see what would present itself when he got home. "I don't really like the winter," Nate said thoughtfully. "Everything's dead. I don't like dead things." "Not everything," Sam said. "A lot of it's just hibernating." "It *looks* dead." "I guess it does. But don't you like the snow?" "There's no snow." "There will be. Don't you like having snowball fights and things like that?" "I guess so." Nate bit his lip. "I liked the snow fort we made in the back yard last year. Can we do that again?" "I don't think they've got snow down at your Pop's." "Oh, yeah." Nate sighed deeply. "What are you thinking about?" Sam asked. "Just stuff." "What kind of stuff?" "I wish Mama and Pop lived together." Nate looked up, painfully aware of his error in etiquette. "You could live with us too, Sid," he added quickly. "It's okay, Nate. I know you miss them being together." "They yelled a lot." Sam felt a large knot of pity rise in him. "I know they did," he said. "That's probably why they got the divorce." Nate shook his head. "No. That was mostly 'cause of Beth." Sam's head jerked around suddenly. Surely Al hadn't casually discussed his first marriage with his five-year-old son? That was too big a hurt to put on a child's shoulders. "Do you know who Beth was?" "Uh-huh. I heard Mama say her name once when they were fighting. I asked Pop who she was yesterday. He said she was the first lady he married, and he loved her a lot. More than Mama and me." Sam looked at Nate from the corner of his eye. He was chewing his lip pensively, and Sam thought he believed what he said. It wasn't true, of course; Al might have loved Beth more than Ruthie (although Sam had contrary suspicions in the matter; maybe it was just because he was here now, but Al's undying loyalty to Beth had always seemed rather *convenient* as a way to avoid making a commitment to anyone else), but Nate was a separate issue altogether. "Did he say that?" "No," Nate said simply. "I figured it out by myself." He turned back to the window, and the subject was dropped. *** Ruthie watched through the picture window in the living room as they pulled away. One knee was planted on the modular sofa; a cup of coffee was cooling in the opposite hand. She would dump it down the sink later, probably. She hated coffee, and only drank it because it seemed proper for breakfast. There was something about living out here in the hinterlands that made such things important to her. She didn't know if it meant that she was putting on suburban airs or that she'd just developed a new value, and she didn't pursue the question too closely. It was one of many such questions. Like the question that's showering in the main bathroom right now. How are you going to deal with that question, Ruthie? She had no answer. For as long as she'd known him, the question, What am I going to do about Albert? had been as mysterious and unanswerable as, What is the meaning of life? He had achieved a strange status in her life -- he was more than her friend, or her ex-husband, or her lover, or Nate's father; he was a force of nature, and the thought of challenging him always seemed as absurd as trying to change the course of a tornado. Not that she never did it, of course. She knew he considered her hard-headed and stubborn, more likely to clash with him than any of the other women in his life. What he didn't know was what an act of sheer will it was for her to cross him. She'd divorced him for mental cruelty -- ostensibly referring to his sleep habits and his tendency to flirt (and more) with every woman in his vicinity -- but the truth was, she was the one who'd been cruel to herself. His affair with one of her students may have been the flashpoint, but it had, in the end analysis, only provided an excuse. She'd spent most of their marriage in a state of exhaustion, trying to maintain her own mind against the constant buffeting of Albert's personality, and the divorce was a last ditch effort to break free of it. Now that he was gone, she felt strangely empty and unchallenged, but that consuming, insidious terror of losing herself in him was gone. Did it once occur to you that the reason you go along with him most of the time is that you agree with him? That you actually *like* him as much as you always loved him? That you found each other because you were kindred spirits in the first place? Or doesn't that make you feel like enough of a martyr? Ruthie rejected this. No one was *that* kindred. Maybe she *had* agreed with him a lot, but that begged the question, didn't it? The fact of the matter was, her relationship with Albert had become too huge a force in her life, had shaped her in ways she didn't understand. She didn't know where she ended when she was with him, and that scared her. The faint sound of the running shower stopped, and a moment later, Ruthie heard the bathroom door open. Footsteps thudded down the hall to the corner guest room, then a door closed. Ruthie took a deep breath, and went to the kitchen to dump her coffee before starting the day. Somewhere between the time Sid took Nate upstairs and the time they'd left, Ruthie had decided that the best way to handle the day would be to treat it like any other. Oh, there were things that would need to be discussed, of course, but she needed to get her feet firmly planted in her own life before she could even think about that. Sid had been right, of course; yesterday had been yesterday. She had handled it badly, but it wasn't the end of the discussion. Nate was her son, and she wasn't going to let Albert waltz him out of her life without a fight, no matter how tight she had to wind herself up to get the courage. She watched the cold coffee swirl down the drain, and went into her studio to start work. The studio was the most pleasant room in the house, crowded with green plants (the better to breathe with, my dear) and drenched in sunlight. She had designed it herself, back in Boston, when she'd been married to Albert. They'd planned to build a house there in a few years. Ruthie had wanted to come back to Chicago even then, but Albert had wanted to distance himself as much as possible from the past. The compromise they'd arrived at was that Ruthie could design anything she liked for the house, decorate it any way she saw fit, and spend as much money as she wanted (it was mostly her money, anyway, but they'd been saving it carefully) -- as long as it was not in or near Chicago. That, of course, had never come to pass. The house she'd bought here in Northbrook wasn't new, but she had spent a great deal of time remodeling it to make it her own, especially here in her work area. She didn't really need to paint anymore (her income was secure in real estate investments and high interest accounts; no one had needed to teach her that art wasn't the world's most stable business), but she enjoyed it. She kept her portrait prices up to keep the workload down, but she didn't make them astronomical, and she had a habit of doing freebies more often than commissioned work. Her agent had long since despaired of her, and she had handled her own career since. Papa Burkholtz would have been happy with this development, she thought; he'd always hated the pushy agents who'd sold her work before. There were paintings that were neither commissioned works or freebies, of course. These were the paintings that demanded to come, that flowed out of her like blood from an open wound. She'd done a series of paintings of the old neighborhood in the early sixties; these had been shown at a local gallery in a "new faces" show. They'd launched her career and given her the financial foundation that she'd built everything else on. She still didn't understand why people had wanted them so badly. They were just personal things -- paintings about Albert and the other boys at St. Joe's, or about her mother, or her nightmares -- but five of them had sold for over a thousand dollars each at a recent auction. Even the original selling price of one hundred and thirty to two hundred and ten dollars had seemed outrageous to Ruthie; she'd laughed when the gallery owner had told her, sure that he was joking, since most of the other artists' work had gone for less than fifty dollars. The paintings (dubbed "The River Ward Series" and numbered by date in the gallery catalogs) had just been something she'd had inside her, not something she'd really felt like she'd worked on. There weren't many paintings like that anymore. Maybe there were, but Ruthie didn't want to reach too far inside herself to find them. The last time her life had seemed completely real to her was in the Wards, and she couldn't just keep painting them. Now, the only fully real part of her life was Nate, and no one seemed to want paintings about *good* real things, so those paintings remained either in her head or on her own crowded walls. Today's project was a simple commission for a law office downtown -- "Just paint something sober and comforting," the senior partner had told her in all seriousness. "And no people. Our clients might associate them with people they don't like." Ruthie had asked if a few abstracts in somber colors would be acceptable, and the partner had said that would be just fine. Upstairs, there was a thump, followed by a loud curse. Ruthie ignored it studiously. Like any other day.