Please Remember This (23 page)

Over the course of the next week, Tess started to wonder if Ned was avoiding her. It was a little hard to tell, especially since she was, in fact, seeing him more than ever. With his friends in town, he came to the Lanier Building every morning, but he didn’t say anything to her that couldn’t be said in front of everyone. Then, after his friends left, he didn’t show up unless he was with Phil … which, of course, was
exactly what it had been like before, but she still felt like he was avoiding her.

Yet wasn’t he the one person in this town whom she could be completely honest with? The one person she could say anything to? She would go talk to him. It wouldn’t be like trying to talk to Phil. You could talk to Ned. Within fifteen minutes of deciding to talk to him, she got the opportunity. It was late in the afternoon. Phil had come in, and while waiting for his coffee, he pulled out his little leather card holder and was, as always, looking at his list. Tess saw him wince.

“Did you forget something?” she asked.

“Yes, because I didn’t write it down.” He didn’t sound happy with himself. “You’d think that a person wouldn’t forget a washtub full of rolling pins sloshing around in the back of his car, but I did.” He pushed back the sleeve of his coat to look at his watch. He grimaced, the look of a man who needed to be in two places at once.

“Does the washtub go out to the limestone cave?” Tess asked. “If you’ve got time to bring it to my house and put it in my car, I can take it. I was just getting ready to leave for the day.”

“That would be great.” Phil could accept a favor without making a fuss about it. “But if you don’t mind, let’s just trade cars. I have the Jeep. It’s had water sloshed on it before. Ned’ll unload for you. He’ll be out at the cave for another hour or so.”

That was what she had been hoping for.

Tess had not been out to the cave before, and Phil warned her that the turnoff was unmarked, but she found it easily. The dirt road was obviously heavily
traveled; the mud had frozen into tire-tracked ruts. A newish-looking electrical line swooped between widely spaced poles. About a quarter mile down this road, a chain-link gate was propped open. A short distance beyond that was a low limestone bluff, topped by now leafless trees. Chiseled into the bluff was a rectangular entry about ten feet high. Its gate was also open.

Tess stopped the Jeep, rather pleased with herself for having negotiated it over the bumpy lane. She opened the door and stepped out, calling Ned’s name.

A moment later he emerged from the darkness. He had on heavy rubberized gloves that reached over his forearms, but despite the cold, he wasn’t wearing a coat. The front of his flannel shirt was damp. “Tess!” He was surprised to see her.

“I have your rolling pins.” She explained about Phil’s forgetfulness.

“I was wondering where he was. If you pop the latch on the rear door, I’ll unload.”

“Do you want me to drive in?” Apparently that was what he had done with his truck.

“No, it’s only this one thing.” The washtub must have been heavy, but Ned lifted it easily and started carrying it into the cave. Tess followed him.

A narrow tunnel opened into an arching underground canyon, its walls chiseled slabs where the limestone blocks had been cut during mining operations. A single electric wire was held in place by little black brackets drilled into the limestone, and bare electric bulbs provided irregular splotches of light. Ned’s truck was pulled in as far as it could go. The
rest of the space was taken up by a dozen thousand-gallon galvanized livestock watering tanks, each with a clipboard hooked to the edge. A portable electric pump was making a whooshing noise as it churned water through a black hose and into one of the tanks.

It was surprisingly warm in the cave. Tess unbuttoned her coat. Ned made a note on one of the clipboards and then began to unload the artifacts from the tub into the tank, easing them one at a time into the water.

“Do you want some help?” Tess offered.

“No. No sense in us both getting wet.”

She walked between two of the tanks. She could see a break in the wall, a rough unlit passage. “How far back does this go?”

“Quite a ways. My grandfather and I used to climb it. We never got to the end. It starts to slant downward too sharply. Even Grandfather said we shouldn’t go down, and he’d go anywhere. I haven’t been back there in years. There are plenty of other interesting caves around.”

Tess couldn’t help shuddering. “You like crawling through places like that?”

“It’s great,” he said simply. “At least it was when I was a kid. But it’s not your cup of tea, is it?”

Tess was suddenly suspicious. Was this why she was all wrong for him? Because she didn’t like caves? She wanted to protest that she had never had the opportunity to crawl through a dark, spider-filled, rock-lined underground passage, but that would not have been the whole truth. She was delighted that she had never had such an opportunity. “I am more comfortable aboveground.”

“I would have guessed that.”

Was that a criticism? His voice was very even; it didn’t sound like he was criticizing her. And why on earth should she mind being criticized for this? Her sense of self-worth was not rooted in her spelunking abilities.

Ned had finished unloading the rolling pins. He dumped the rest of the water into the tank, slapping the bottom of the washtub. It rang with a hollow echo.

She had waited long enough. “When you were at my house the other day, why did you say that we were all wrong for each other?”

The light was behind him. His face was shadowed, and she couldn’t read his expression. But she could hear him exhale. “I believe in mud. I don’t think you do.”

Tess didn’t understand. “What do you mean, believe in mud? What’s there to believe in? I believe it exists. I believe this water tank exists.” She was starting to feel annoyed by his answer. “I am a big believer in the reality of the physical world. In fact, I probably believe in the physical world more than you do.” She wasn’t the one running around hearing dead people’s voices.

“I’m not talking epistemology. I know you’re an empiricist,” he said. Clearly, he understood himself. “That’s a whole different problem. What I mean is that I believe that mud is good metaphorically. I believe that exciting things happen unpredictably, that creativity comes out of mess and disorder. I’m suspicious of anything that is perfect.”

Nina Lane had been the messiest of children. That
was one thing Tess’s grandparents had told her about her mother. “I am fastidious,” Tess acknowledged. “But you’re no slob. Look at this.” She gestured at one of his clipboards; his recordkeeping was immaculate.

“I’m not talking about physical order. I’m talking about the sources of creativity, about—”

Creativity? Did he find her insufficiently creative? Was that what was wrong with her? Well, if so, then good riddance. If he wanted Nina Lane, he would have to go somewhere else. “I’m not an exceptionally creative person,” she said, almost with a snap. “I have a good eye, I have a good sense of design, but I’m not her, and no amount of primal ooze is going to make me as creative as her.”

“Her?” He was puzzled. “Who are—” He broke off, understanding. “Tess, I didn’t mean it that way.” His tone was apologetic. “I wasn’t thinking about your being Nina Lane’s daughter. Please believe me, that’s not a part of it.”

“Apparently you would like me better if I were.” She must be sounding like a whining child. She must be sounding hurt.

Well, she
was
hurt. It might make no sense for her to feel hurt at his rejection, but she was.

He ran a hand over his face. “Liking you is not the issue here. My feelings aren’t what’s at question. It’s that I would make us both miserable. I would try to change you. I know I would. It’s stupid and unfair, but I have this notion of you that I would try to force on you, and we’d both be miserable.”

“Notion of me?” Tess really didn’t know what he was talking about. Perhaps it was this business of being underground. She couldn’t think down here. “I
don’t understand.” Her voice sounded thin and cross.

“I don’t understand either.” He tossed his gloves into the washtub and picked the tub up by one of its handles. “Most of the time I think you are about the most extraordinary person I have ever met. Why would anyone want anything about you to be different? And then I can’t help myself—I start feeling like something’s missing.”

“Something’s
missing?
In me?”

Tess knew that she must have sounded offended, because right away he started to apologize. But she wasn’t offended. She was horrified.

The flat glare from one of the bare bulbs shone on him. His jeans were worn pale at the knees and pulled taut by his newly muscled thighs. The winter sun, glittering off the snow, had given him color in his face. “I didn’t mean it that way,” he rushed to say. “It’s just a way of saying that we aren’t right for each other, that we experience life differently, that we hear different cues, that we—”

She shook her head; she wasn’t listening. Whatever he thought he was talking about, she knew what he meant. Or at least should have meant. “You’re talking about love, being able to love.”

“No, I’m not,” he protested instantly. Now he was horrified. He’d never intended for them to be talking about love. “I guess I do need to talk about epistemology and—” He stopped. “I don’t know. Maybe love’s part of it. Maybe being able to hear what I’m talking about is connected to love. I don’t know about you, truly I don’t, and believe me, I’m not talking about you now, but Phil. He is very, very loyal,
but he may not know how to love. And maybe if you can’t love, you can’t hear.”

Hear what?
Tess wanted to grab him by the front of his damp shirt and shake him until he explained it to her. But that would do no good. She knew—and he did too—that he could explain and explain until even he was sick of explaining, and she wasn’t going to understand. That was the problem. That was why she was all wrong for him … because of something she didn’t understand.

There was nothing to say. He walked her back out to the Jeep, opening the door, telling her the best spot to turn around. He was gentle, and his voice was quiet.

She understood gentle, she understood quiet. But that wasn’t enough.