The Touch Page 3

  “Of course you can! And if you won’t, I will!”

  “That’s okay!” he said quickly. “I’ll handle it.” God knew what Sylvia might say to Ginny on the phone. “Just didn’t think you’d want to go to a party thrown by someone you consider a tramp.”

  “But don’t you want to go?” she said with arched eyebrows. “As I remember, you came to her defense pretty quick when I made the remark.”

  “That’s because I don’t believe everything I hear.”

  “Everybody knows about her. And look at the way she dresses, the way she vamps around—”

  “Vamps?”

  “—and those wild parties where there’s always a fight or something. And she’s got to be into cocaine.”

  “I wouldn’t know about that.” Alan couldn’t be sure, but he didn’t think Sylvia was into anything stronger than champagne. He hoped not.

  “You like her, don’t you?” It sounded like a question but it wasn’t. “Sure you don’t have something going with her?”

  “I can’t hide it any longer, Ginny!” Alan shouted. “We’ve been lovers since the day Lou introduced us!”

  Ginny yawned. “Figured as much.”

  Alan looked away. It was nice to know Ginny had that kind of faith in him. Did he deserve it?

  Yes, he decided. Definitely. In all their years of marriage he’d never cheated on her. Never even come close despite a good number of opportunities. But Sylvia…God, he was attracted to her. She was beautiful, but it was more than that. Beneath all her glittery posing there was a person he feared he could love if he let his feelings have their way.

  Yet although he’d shared no more than a handshake with the woman, he couldn’t help but look on his feelings toward her as a kind of betrayal of Ginny. It was unfounded, but it plagued him. You can’t help the way you feel, he always told himself; you’re only responsible for what you do with those feelings.

  “I still don’t see why you always insist on defending her, though,” Ginny was saying.

  “Jeffy makes up for a multitude of sins, what ever they are.”

  “That strange little boy she took in?”

  “Yeah. Only she didn’t just take him in—she adopted him. That’s a lifelong commitment. She gets a big drawing account of goodwill with me for that.”

  “Well, what ever,” Ginny said, skittering away from the subject of adoption and suddenly becoming bubbly. “At least it will be an experience to see that house.”

  He tried to think of some way out of the party, but saw it was useless. Ginny was off and running.

  “Wait’ll I tell Josie and Terri! They’ll die! They’ll be green! Positively green!” She threw her arms around his neck. “This is perfect! Absolutely perfect!”

  She kissed him. He kissed her back. And soon he was pulling her robe open and she was unbuttoning his shirt, and then they were together on the bed and into the positions and rhythms they’d found comfortable and pleasurable over the years of their marriage.

  When it was over, Alan lay beside Ginny, content and sated but a little disturbed by the knowledge that a couple of times during their lovemaking he’d found his mind wandering to Sylvia Nash. That had never happened before and he didn’t like it. It was like cheating. He knew all about fantasies during sex, but that was for other people, not him.

  “Nice.”

  “That it was,” Ginny said as she rolled away from him. “Mind if I turn on the TV? I want to see who’s on Leno tonight.”

  “Go ahead.”

  He went downstairs and got a Foster’s from the refrigerator. The cold beer felt good going down. He finished it off as he wandered through the first floor, shutting off lights and locking windows. A lot of wasted space. The two-story brick colonial was too big for just the two of them, but Ginny had refused to settle for anything smaller.

  Finally he got back to the bed where a stack of journals waited on his night table. He found it harder and harder to stay current with the new developments in all the fields his practice touched on. But he kept plugging, reading a little every night, no matter how tired he was. Still, he sensed the cutting edge of medicine slipping a little further away each year. He felt like an overboard sailor, swimming for his life, and yet seeing the lights of his ship steadily fading farther and farther away into the night.

  Ginny had fallen asleep with the TV on. Alan turned it off with the remote button and retrieved the latest issue of Chest from the night table. But he let it lie unopened on his lap.

  His mind was not on medicine but on how it used to be between Ginny and him. He could still see her as she’d looked back in his residency days when they’d met, her tan skin made darker by the white of her nurse’s uniform, and how his throat had almost closed when she first spoke to him. That memory segued into others of the early years of their marriage and how they would snuggle together and whisper after making love. Those days were gone, it seemed. Was this the way marriage went after ten years?

  He pushed it from his mind and picked up the journal. Maybe it was just as well tonight. He had a lot of reading to catch up on.

  He twisted left and right, trying to find a comfortable position.

  2

  Ba Thuy Nguyen

  Ba was used to Phemus’s barking. The old dog had been skittish of late, baying at the slightest thing, waking the Missus and the Boy at all hours of the night. So Ba had taken him to his own quarters over the garage where the howls would not disturb the house hold.

  And where Ba could judge their import.

  He had ignored the intermittent baying for the past hour as he concentrated on the pile of Immigration and Naturalization forms before him. He had met the residency requirement, and had decided he wanted to become an American citizen. Eventually he would have to take a test on the history and government of his new country, but first there were forms to fill out. Many forms. Tonight he was concentrating on form N400, the most important. The Missus had written out some of the entries for him on a separate sheet of paper and he was laboriously copying the English characters into the blanks. Later he would practice signing his name in English, another requirement for naturalization.

  Phemus’s barking suddenly changed—louder, and carrying a different note. A note much like when Dr. Bulmer had stopped by earlier.

  Ba slipped from his chair and padded to where the dog stood with both front paws on the windowsill and howled again at the night.

  He had learned over the years that Phemus was not to be underestimated. True, he was a pest at times, raising alarms at each passing rabbit or vagrant cat, but Ba had come to appreciate the old dog’s keen ears and nose, and his remaining eye seemed to have compensated for its brother’s loss by becoming twice as sharp. Ba had attuned himself to Phemus’s alarms, and this particular pitch and tone, especially with the dog’s fur on end at his nape and his low back, usually meant a human trespasser.

  Ba crouched at the window with the dog and scanned the yard. He saw nothing. Phemus licked his face and barked again.

  As Ba stood and pulled on his overalls, he wondered if it might be the same fellow he had chased away three nights ago. That had been easy: He had merely spoken from behind a bush and then stepped into view. The would-be thief had been so startled that he had tripped over his own feet in his haste to get away. Ba imagined that most of these sneak thieves were anxious to avoid any confrontation. They wanted to break in silently, take anything of value they could carry in their sack, then slink off unseen into the night.

  But Ba also knew that he could not count on that. Among the jackals might hide a few wolves with ready fangs. Even these were not hard to handle as long as one was prepared for them.

  He knelt before his dresser and pulled open the bottom drawer. Beneath the neatly folded pairs of work pants lay a fully loaded U.S. Army .45 automatic pistol and a standard issue bayonet. Touching them loosed a flood of memories of home, and of how both had stood him well in the long sail from his village across the South China Sea. Fighting th
e winds and currents had been hard enough, but there had been the added danger of the pirates who preyed on the boats, boarding them repeatedly, robbing the refugees, raping the women, killing any who resisted. Ba remembered his gut-wrenching fear the first time they swarmed aboard his tiny boat: fear that there were too many of them, that they would overpower him and he would fail Nhung Thi and his friends. But he had met their attack with his own, fighting with a ferocity he had never dreamed he possessed, using every combat skill he knew and inventing new ones. The Americans had taught him well how to fight, and more than one unsuspecting pirate became food for the sharks that took to following Ba’s boat.

  And just as he had protected his wife, friends, and fellow villagers then, Ba would protect the Missus and the Boy now. They were all he had in the world. Nhung Thi was dead, his village was long gone, his friends either dead or scattered all over America. He owed the Missus a huge debt. She had aided him and his ailing Nhung Thi when life had looked the blackest. Ba would never forget that. She still thought she was taking care of Ba, but he knew it was the other way around. For years now he had watched over her. Nothing would harm her or the Boy as long as he drew breath.

  Ba picked up the bayonet and withdrew it from its scabbard. The blade was dark and dull except for the gentle curve of bright steel where he kept it honed to a fine edge. This old and silent friend would do, just in case. Not the gun. After all, the purpose of going out into the yard was to keep the Missus and the Boy from being disturbed.

  He pulled on a dark sweater, slipped the naked blade through a loop in his overalls, and reached for the doorknob. Phemus was there in a flash, his nose to the door crack, growling.

  Ba knelt down beside the animal.

  “You’d die for her too, wouldn’t you, dog?” he said in his village dialect.

  He remembered the day the Missus had found Phemus. Remembered as if it were yesterday. He had been driving her back from the city and had taken a local route to avoid a tie-up on the Long Island Expressway. Suddenly the Missus had called to him to stop. As he pulled into the curb he saw why: A group of four boys in their early teens was chasing a limping, emaciated dog down the sidewalk, pelting it with rocks as it fled before them. Suddenly it stumbled and they were upon it, shouting as they surrounded it and kicked it repeatedly.

  Before Ba knew it, the Missus was out of the car and running toward the group. She reached them just as one of the boys raised a heavy stone high over his head, ready to smash it down on the weak, exhausted creature. The Missus charged in and hurled him aside with a violent shove. The boy lost his balance and fell, but immediately leaped up at her, his fists raised, rage in his face. But Ba was approaching then. He looked at the boy and wished him death for even so much as considering the idea of striking the Missus. The boy must have read something of that wish in Ba’s face, for he spun and ran. His friends quickly followed on his heels.

  The Missus hovered over the panting dog and gently stroked the ridges of his heaving ribs. She picked him up and turned toward the car. Ba offered to take the dog for her but she told him to drive directly to the vet’s.

  In his mind’s eye he could still see her in the rearview mirror, sitting in the back seat with the dog on her lap, unmindful of the blood that oozed onto her expensive dress and the velvet upholstery. The dog had the strength to lick her hand once and she had smiled. On the way to the veterinary clinic, she had told him of people who moved away and simply abandoned their pets, leaving a faithful animal sitting at the back door of an empty house, waiting for days to be let in. Finally, when hunger and thirst got to be too much, the creature would take to the streets, ill equipped to fend for itself after a lifetime as a house pet.

  At the vet’s they learned that the dog had a broken rear leg, three broken ribs, and a left eye that had been punctured by a stick.

  Better to kill a dog and eat it rather than treat it so, Ba had thought.

  The dog’s bones healed, but the eye was permanently damaged. The Missus named him Polyphemus—a name Ba did not understand—and he had been a member of the house hold now for five years.

  “Not tonight,” Ba told the dog as it tried to follow him out the door. “You’ve too gentle a heart. It might betray you.”

  He closed the door on Phemus’s whines and barks and made his way down to the garage and out the side door to the grounds. A half moon was rising over the water. Ba kept to the shadows of the ground-brushing willows along the rim of the property until he could duck across a small area of lawn to the foundation plantings around the house. Quickly and quietly, he made his way through the shrubbery.

  He found them on the west side. They already had a casement window pried open and one of the pair was supporting the other as he climbed in.

  Ba spoke from behind a rhododendron.

  “The Missus does not want you here. Leave!”

  The one up at the window dropped down and faced the spot where Ba was hiding. Ba recognized him then as the one he had frightened away the other night.

  “It’s the gook again!” the shorter one said. Two knives suddenly gleamed in the moonlight.

  “Get him!”

  3

  Sylvia Nash

  “Ba?”

  Where is he? Sylvia wondered as she scanned the backyard from her work area off the hot house that served as her arboretum. Ba almost invariably started off each day watering the trees in the hot house. But the trays under the pots were dry and he was nowhere in sight.

  Strains from Vivaldi, left on the stereo since last night, filled the air. Sylvia put down the chopsticks she had been using to loosen the soil around the ezo spruce bonsai before her and brushed her hands. The ishi-zuki was ready for transplanting and she needed someone to help her. The tree’s new Fukuroshiki pot was layered with stone and soil and waiting for the tree. All that was missing was Ba.

  Normally she would de-pot and transplant a tree by herself, laying it on its side, pruning the longer, heavier roots, then replacing it in its pot after freshening the soil. But the ishi-zuki was special. She had spent too many years working, watching, and waiting while she trained the roots of this little tree to grow over and around the rock upon which it sat. She might jeopardize all that by trying to transplant it without assistance. If the stone fell free of the roots, she’d never forgive herself.

  “Gladys?” she called. “Have you seen Ba?”

  “Not this morning, ma’am,” the maid answered from the kitchen.

  “Come on, Mess,” she said to the cat curled up in the sun by the door. “Let’s go find Ba.”

  The cat raised its head and looked at her for a moment through slit eyes, then went back to dozing. Mess didn’t like to move much. She had grown fat and lazy since the day Sylvia found her as a kitten and brought her home. Someone had bundled her and her four siblings into a trash can bag and dumped them in the middle of the road in front of Toad Hall. Mess, the only survivor after the bag had been run over by a number of cars, had truly been a mess when Sylvia had freed her—shaking, terrified, splattered with the blood of her brothers and sisters. To this day she would not go near the road.

  Sylvia picked up her cup of coffee and walked out to the back. The forsythia were in full bloom, splashing buttercup yellow here and there around the awakening yard. Beyond the greening lawn was a narrow strip of sand; and beyond that the Long Island Sound lapped high at the dock. Far on the other side lay Connecticut’s south shore. A breeze blew the briny smell of the water across the yard and sighed through the willows that ringed the property. That sound—the wind in the willows—and the sight of this old, three-storied house looking as if it had been transplanted whole from a Georgia riverbank had left her no choice but to buy the place and name it Toad Hall.

  As she neared Jeffy’s fenced-in play area, she saw two mallards standing before him, quacking softly. He used to feed the ducks, laughing like a little madman as they chased the bits of stale bread he threw to them. This pair probably thought he was the same old Jeffy. B
ut he wasn’t. He ignored them.

  The ducks flew off at her approach. She thought she saw Jeffy’s lips moving and she rushed over to him. But she heard nothing. He was still squatting in the grass, still rocking back and forth, totally absorbed in the bright yellow of the dandelion he had found in the grass.

  “How’s it going, Jeffy?”

  The child continued to stare into the flower as if he had found the secrets of the universe there.

  Sylvia pulled a box of Nerds from her smock pocket and squatted beside him. She had found Nerds the most suitable for her purposes because they released their flavor instantaneously and were not filling. She pinched one of the tiny candies at the tip of her thumb and forefinger and held it ready.

  “Jeffy!” she said, pronouncing his name in a crisp, sharp tone. “Jeffy!”

  His head turned a degree or two in her direction. At the first increment of motion, her hand darted out with an accuracy born of years of experience and pressed the Nerd between his lips. As he bit into it, she called his name again in an attempt to induce him to turn a few more degrees her way.

  “Jeffy! Jeffy!”

  But he turned away again, back to the dandelion. Another half-dozen repetitions of his name elicited no response.

  “Maybe you don’t like Nerds anymore, huh?”

  But she knew it wasn’t the candy. Jeffy was slipping away. After doing so well for years with the operant techniques, he had become resistant to the therapy since sometime around the first of the year. Worse than that, he was regressing, slipping deeper and deeper into his autism. She didn’t know what was wrong. She provided a structured environment and continued working with him every day…

  Sylvia swallowed hard past the constriction in her throat. She felt so helpless! If only…

  She resisted the urge to hurl the candy into the Sound and scream out her frustration. Instead, she tucked the Nerds back into her pocket. She would try a full-length operant session with him this afternoon. She straightened up and gently ruffled the golden hair of the child she loved so much.