Keith Davidson slid the toe of one shoe over the cliff's edge. "One small step," he muttered, "one small step and it's over." He brushed this thinning blond hair away from his eyes as his gaze drifted from the toe of his shoe to the narrow path leading down to the beach. Beyond the ocean breakers, the storm-shrouded sun splashed streaks of orange and pink as it sank into the gray horizon.
"It's not as if I were leaving anyone behind. All my fine dreams of becoming another Leakey, my hopes for home and family, all gone, there isn't even Mom to care for now. Sarah won't even notice and I've made Heather detest me. My life is meaningless, fifty years of waste."
The dean will be irked, Keith thought. He'll have to get someone to take over my classes. Still, it isn't as if I were deserting in mid-semester. The finals are graded and stacked on my desk. If only I hadn't been such a fool. If I hadn't rejected Heather ... little Heather ... she was such an infuriating, stubborn, adorable little monster.
Keith remembered a time when he'd lain sprawled on the backyard hammock enjoying the peace and quiet of a clear, late spring day.
#
"I absolutely won't study one bit this weekend," Keith vowed as he stared dreamily at the woods beyond the gazebo. "If I don't know enough to pass the finals now, there's no sense in ruining the weekend. And after the finals, I've got to really plunge into my doctoral thesis. I'm just going to lie here and ignore the world for two blissful days."
"Keith!" his mother called as she rounded the side of the house, violently waving her weeding fork. "Keith, you must do something about the MacKenzie girl. She's been into my Asphodelus Narcissus again."
"Are you sure it was she? She's really a good little kid and she promised faithfully not to touch them."
"I'm certain! I saw her going off with an armful. Obviously, her promises aren't worth much."
"Well," Keith rose reluctantly, "she's only four. Maybe she forgot."
Keith's mother gave a half-offended sniff and smiled as he headed for Quincy Lane and the MacKenzie house next door.
"I'm so sorry, Keith," said Martha MacKenzie. "Usually, she's so good about her promises. I've never known her to break one before."
Heather, both arms filled with yellow daffodils, looked up with a shocked and offended expression. "I didn't," she declared.
Keith squatted down to the little girl's eye level and said, "Are you saying those flowers you're holding didn't come from my mother's garden?"
Heather shook her golden head decisively, "No, pretties come from next door."
"Didn't you promise last Monday not to pick any more of the flowers?"
Heather solemnly nodded her head.
"Then you broke your promise, didn't you?"
"No! I didn't pick those flowers, these are different flowers."
Every morning for the rest of that spring and summer, Keith took Heather on the rounds of his mother's gardens. "You will not pick this flower. You will not pick this flower."
God help me, he thought, if I miss one because she won't.
It seemed natural at the time to virtually become the father Heather had never known. Then, in one shocking moment, everything was different. It was as if the changes in her came all in a blinding flash. Oh, he'd seen it happening, but never really connected it to himself -- not until that day twelve years later.
#
It was one of the hottest days of summer. Waves of heat shimmered in the air. Even lying on the hammock in the shade of its supporting trees helped little. Keith woke from a half-doze. Sitting up on the side of the net swing, he took off his sweat soaked, short-sleeved shirt. He folded the shirt into a long strip and toweled off his back and chest. Tossing the rumpled garment aside, Keith lay back onto the swing.
He turned his head toward the house as the side gate screeched, reminding him of another chore undone. Around the corner of the house came Heather. Her sweaty shorts and halter top clung to her. Sweat glistened on her long legs and ran from her neck into the cleavage of her bra. Her long, thick blond hair was pulled back into a French braid. Heather stopped. Putting her hands on her hips, she laughed.
"Lazy beast," she said, "I spend the morning mowing the lawn while you lie there doing nothing. I bet you heard me and never once stirred to offer help."
Waving a languid arm at the high grass of the yard, Keith said, "Feel free to continue exercising over here since you feel so energetic."
"Worm!" she said as she grasped the edge of the netting and dumped him onto the ground.
"You'll pay for that, you little monster," Keith said in mock rage as he got up and grabbed for her.
Heather laughed and dodged, running for the wisteria covered gazebo and the trees behind it. "Are you sure you have the strength," she taunted from the side of the gazebo.
Halfway into the cool, green wood she let him catch her. "You deserve to be spanked, you impudent infant." Keith panted. Heather looked up at him with a slow smile. He felt her hands slide up his bare chest and loop around his neck. Her breasts against his chest stirred feelings which stunned him. As her body came closer to his and her lips covered his own, he felt his maleness expand and fire race through his blood, flooding his mind.
Heather relaxed her knees, bringing him down with her to the leaf and moss covered ground. His hands moved over her warm, soft body. His lips caressed her mouth, neck, and her round, firm breasts. Both of them were panting with excitement as he pulled slightly away to look at her. Then, Keith felt Heather's hands fumbling with the belt of this pants. It was as if he'd had a tub of ice water dumped over him as he realized what he was doing.
With a strangled, "No!" Keith sat up. Taking Heather's hands from his trousers, he began to rebuckle the belt.
"What's wrong?" Heather asked.
"This is. We mustn't." Keith scrambled to his feet and looked down at her as Heather slowly sat up.
"Why not?" she cried out. "You want to. I want to. There has to be a first time and I want it to be you. I want it always and only to be you. We were born for each other."
"Good God, Heather, you're only sixteen! And beyond that, I'm old enough to be your father."
"But you're not my father," she replied, rising to her feet. Coming up to him, her sapphire blue eyes burned holes into his soul. She put her hands on his chest, softly saying, "You're not my father, Keith. He went away before I was born. It was never as a father that I wanted you. Even as a baby I knew you were special. You were my friend then. Now I want to be your best friend, your companion, soul mate and lover. I want to be your wife as I was born to be."
"We can't. You're too young. We can't . . . not now."
#
It was almost three years later. Keith and Heather walked side by side for the last time in the almost empty park. Barren brown trees stretched their branches in stark contrast to the pearl gray and charcoal March sky. Keith's mood reflected the dismal weather. Out of the corner of his eye, Keith could see Heather's worried frown as he tucked his chin near his chest and glared at the ground. Keith could almost feel her thinking at him. She knew something was very wrong. That much was obvious, but how to tell her?
"We can't walk in circles forever, Keith," Heather remarked. "Much as I enjoy outings with you, don't you think it's about time I hear what the trouble is?"
Keith drew in a deep breath and raised his chin. Letting out a long sigh, he looked into the barren canopy of branches. "The trouble is, I should be happy telling you what I have done." Keith stopped walking. With his gloved hands shoved deep into his coat pockets, he added, "There's really no way to say this except to flat out say it." He turned and looked Heather in the eyes. "While I was on sabbatical to Yale, the last six months, I met Sarah Foster. She's one of the university secretaries. I don't know why I'm so attracted to her. Maybe it's her gypsy looks, the raven black of her hair and eyes, her sleek, cat-like movements, so unlike anyone I've ever known before. You'd expect cat-like grace from a long-limbed woman, but Sarah -- she's more like a helpless waif, what my grandmother used to call a pocket Venus. She needs me and I want to take care of her. I love her, Heather. Just before returning home, I proposed to Sarah. She's coming to California in two weeks and we'll be married on the fifteenth of April."
Keith stood there expecting to be slapped or scolded. At the very least, he expected some comment. But Heather only looked at him, her face as gray and impassive as granite. Then she turned and walked quietly away, but not before he'd seen tears brim in her eyes. His own eyes flooded and his chest tightened as if trying to tear itself apart. He wanted to call her back, but her couldn't. He had committed himself to Sarah.
Heather -- beautiful, gentle Heather never said good-bye. Martha told Keith later that Heather had gone to live with Martha's parents in Connecticut and attend college there. Then Martha met that army colonel and strangers moved in next door.
Keith's marriage soon proved difficult. He spent the next five years trying to make it work. But everything was too back to front. Finally, it was over.
#
M. V. PARRISH, MARRIAGE COUNSELOR, the large, black letters imperiously declared from the frosted glass door. Keith had a sudden childish urge to make awful faces at the door as he used to do at the principal's office that horrible year in the fourth grade. With difficulty, Keith restrained himself. A part of him looked at the other part and marveled at this strange being who shared the same body with him. All very interesting, he thought, but hardly productive.
Keith opened the door and walked into the air conditioned reception room. Sarah was already there, seated on a beige, plastic-upholstered chair. She looked up and, without a word, looked back at her long, slender hands with their sharp, blood-red claws. He went to a chair on the opposite side of the room as the receptionist spoke into her intercom. "Mr. Parrish, Doctor Davidson has just arrived." The box squawked and the receptionist answered, "Yes, sir." Turning to each, she said, "You can both go in now."
Keith rose, opened the inner office door for Sarah and entered after her. Closing the door behind him, Keith guardedly appraised the dapper Mr. Parrish as that gentleman rose from his seat with a slight bow in Sarah's direction. She sat in the right hand easy chair before the desk.
I feel as if I were taking part in a 1930's English farce, Keith thought. This whole situation is ludicrous.
As if she'd heard his thought, Sarah said, "Coming here is a waste of time. Our marriage, such as it ever was, is all over bar the shouting. I don't see why the judge didn't just give us the divorce instead of insisting on this -- this . . . I'm not sure what to call it."
"An exercise in futility," Keith agreed. "There is certainly no common ground left between us on which to base any reconciliation. I doubt there ever was."
"You must have had something going for you when you first met," Mr. Parrish replied.
Keith shrugged. "She seemed so interested in my work at first. One season on a dig changed that. She hated everything and never stopped telling me how much she hated it."
"Of course I did," Sarah retorted. "Any normal woman would. It was absolute hell. All right if you're a jock or insane, but no place for anyone else. It was primitive beyond words: living in a tent, no proper sanitary facilities, snakes, scorpions, no stores, restaurants or any other comfort or convenience. It was stupid. I saw grown men and women digging with toothbrushes.
"I thought things would get better between us," Keith volunteered, "when we returned to the city and I gave up field archaeology for a teaching position at the university. But still nothing was right. I thought we'd settle down, have some kids and a nice, quiet, happy home-life. It never happened."
Sarah had taken a flat, gold-tone case from her purse. Keith watched in distaste as she took a long draw on the cigarette. Gazing over Mr. Parrish's shoulder at the city beyond the window, she said, "Quiet isn't the word for it. Dead is more like it." She let out the smoke, deliberately blowing it in Keith's direction. "I was expected to be a regular hausfrau -- cook, clean, have babies, never get out and go anywhere or do anything. I never wanted any part of that."
"I never forced you to stay at home," Keith protested as he waved the smoke away with one hand. "I never made any objection at all when you got your job."
"You think I wanted to go back to work? In a pig's eye! I went back to work in sheer self-defense, out of boredom. I'm good at my job and it is important to making things run smoothly in any organization. But you acted like it was some kind of makeshift, short-term amusement, until I ballooned up with the first kid. Then I was to be consigned to lifelong house arrest."
"You're exaggerating things all out of proportion!"
"Am I?" Turning to Mr. Parrish, she said, "I ask you to consider an average week in the life of the living-dead. Morning arrives and the alarm goes off, if you were allowed to sleep that long. You're feeling heavy, sluggish and barely able to crack open your eyes, yet your husband wants you to get all excited and have sex. All you want is a shower and a cup of coffee.
"Finally, you drag yourself out of bed and get ready for work, with him acting like a martyr going to the lions. That afternoon, you get off work, come home, fix dinner. You're feeling loving and ready for friendly exercise. He comes home and hardly grunts at you. He eats dinner and, after reading his paper and maybe a couple of chapters of a book, goes to bed. Mind you, he has no thought of sex, he just wants to go to sleep. There you are, all ready, willing and able, and he might as well be a corpse.
"The weekend comes. You want to get out, see people, have some fun, maybe a friendly roll in the hay. He spends the weekend correcting papers. Maybe, if you're really lucky, he might take you out to dinner. God forbid you should actually want to go out to a party and have some fun."
"When we met," retorted Keith, "you never smoked or drank. We used to have really good conversations. You were warm, loving, intelligent. Now you smoke like a chimney and drink yourself senseless every weekend."
"Conversations!" Sarah spat out. "Do you really call those conversations? You went blithering on about bones and chip marks, and God knows what all, until my face felt stiff from smiling. I agreed with everything you said, hardly knowing and not caring what you were talking about."
Keith stared at her, stunned. Have I been living with a stranger all this time? he wondered. Was the woman I knew never there? "Then why did you marry me?" he asked.
Sarah shrugged. "I wanted someone to take care of me. I was tired of working hard and just scraping by. I was tired of being a nobody from nowhere, with nothing but more of the same ahead of me. I thought being the wife of a doctor of science would give me status. But it wasn't like that at all. It was grubby, lonely, and frustrating, with everyone talking down to me or over my head. After a while, your friends ignored me entirely. When I made friends of my own, you hated them and wouldn't let me entertain or anything."
Mr. Parrish cleared his throat and said, "It looks to me that your main problem is opposing bio-rhythms. You, Doctor, are a day person while your wife is a night person. With a little compromise on both sides, you can overcome this blockage in your marriage."
He's right, of course, Keith thought. But it goes deeper than that --- deeper than her smoking and drinking like a rebellious adolescent. Deeper than the pain I felt when I found out she'd been deliberately preventing children. Well, in retrospect that's probably for the better. Sarah would never make a good mother. She's too busy being a child herself. Funny, I didn't see that sooner.
The divorce was vicious. And his mother's death, shortly after, left Keith searching for a hole. He burrowed into his work and pulled it in after him. Then came September.
The empty hall echoed with Keith's steps as he headed toward his office. His mind intent on getting ready for another year of teaching, he glared at the concrete slabs rather than watching where he was going. He stumbled into a young woman, knocking her briefcase to the floor. "I'm so sorry," he said as he stooped to pick up the brown leather case.
"That's quite all right, Professor," said a soft voice.
Still half-crouched, Keith looked up at the sound of the well-remembered voice. "Heather," he whispered. Coming to his feet with the briefcase in hand, Keith stared at Heather in disbelief. "Heather, how . . . where . . . ." After twelve years, here was Heather, rising out of the mists of lost yesterdays.
"Yes, Professor," Heather answered, accepting her briefcase from him. "I earned my doctorate in history and was hired to replace Professor Standers who retired last June. You have been well, I hope."
"Yes," he answered, intimidated by the distance Heather imposed between them.
"I heard your mother died recently, Professor. I was sorry to hear she'd been ill for so long."
"Yes, she slipped away in her sleep last May. She'd really been dead for the last five years. It was just the body that finally let go."
#
The crashing of the surf had become an enraged roar; the sun gone, the moon dimly lit the beach in grays and black. The sands shimmered under him as Keith leaned closer to the edge. Polite conversation, he thought, that's all there is between us now - very formal and very polite. Two old friends meet again after all those years - we're just strangers - ghost's from each other's past.
Keith took a deep breath and one last look before hurling himself into oblivion. There on the moonlit sands walked a shadow. Keith pulled back. You can't plummet down on someone, he told himself. Decidedly not the done thing. Wait a bit until she leaves. The shadow came away from the cliff bottom and walked toward the sea. The young woman, as Keith could now make out, paused halfway between the cliff and the surf. Something about her walk and posture -- with a shock, Keith realized it was Heather. She stood there unmoving for maybe three minutes, then, taking the strap of her purse off her shoulder, Heather let it drop to the ground. Her coat soon followed as she slipped off her shoes. Heather began walking into the storm tossed sea.
"No!" screamed Keith. But the wind took his voice and threw it away behind him. He ran along the cliff edge to the path and raced down the steep, perilously narrow slope. Reaching the beach Keith bolted for the water where Heather's beautiful golden hair disappeared as she struck out swimming into the frigid, heaving water.
Tossing off coat, suit jacket, scarf, Keith rushed after her. At the tide mark, he pulled off his shoes and ran into the furious sea. Blindly, Keith struck out toward where he'd last seen Heather, while calling her name. The waves lifted him up and threw him back toward the beach. They towered above and came hammering down, pushing Keith into the rocky depths. Frantically, Keith fought his way to the surface and shouted Heather's name.
"Keith?" He heard her dimly to his left. Striking out for the sound, Keith called, "Heather, where are you?" The moonlight revealed her pale face on the dark, turbulent water. Waves pounded them, tearing them apart while each struggled to reach the other. The cold numbed Keith's body; his arms and legs grew leaden -- so tired. Then Heather was beside him. Somehow, she got them back to the beach.
Keith lay on the sand, gulping air and holding tightly onto Heather. Her warm lips brushed his face. She kissed first one cheek then the other, his eyes, forehead, nose, and finally settled firmly on his mouth. The old fire rose in Keith's veins. He forgot the cold, the sea, the approaching storm. There were only Heather and the storm within him.
#
Hours later, the storm outside passed and the late morning sun lit Keith's bedroom. He opened his eyes to see the red Cape Cod vase glowing in the sunshine with its usual assortment of yellow daffodils greeting the new day. Keith could hardly believe Heather's warm softness lying next to him under the covers. He reach tentatively, fearing to touch, as if a spell would be broken and he'd be alone again.
Heather stirred under his caress, woke and smiled up at him. She snuggled closer and, as their bodies met, Keith grasped Heather tightly to his chest and kissed her long and hard. Remembering the horror, he loosened his grip and cried, "Why, Heather? How could you try to end your life? It's only just begun."
"No," she replied, "it ended twelve years ago. These last months, being so near you, yet not near at all, have been torture. Loving you, wanting you, needing you, but not able to touch you. . . . I hoped you'd reach out to me while knowing you never would. Then, last night, with the last of this semester's obligations satisfied, it all fell apart. I knew I couldn't go on alone."
"Neither of us will ever be alone again, will we, Heather? We belong together. We were born to be best friends, soul mates, and lovers always."
Heather snuggled close and whispered in his ear, "Yes, my love. Whatever comes, we'll face it together."