A Maidens Grave

lips.
    “It’s not her blood,” the medic said.
    “It’s Bear’s?” Potter asked.
    Melanie was laughing as she nodded. The smile remained on her face but he noticed that her eyes were hollow. The medic gave her a pill, which she took, then she drank down two glasses of water. The young man said, “I’ll leave you alone for a few minutes.”
    As he left, Frances stepped inside. The two women exchanged fast, abrupt signs. Frances said, “She’s asking about the other girls. I’m giving her a rundown.”
    Melanie turned back to Potter and was staring at him. He met her gaze. The young woman was still unnerved but—despite the bandages and blood—as beautiful as he’d expected. Incredible blue-gray eyes.
    He lifted his hands to sign to her what Frances had just taught him and his usually prodigious memory failed him completely. He shook his head at his lapse. Melanie cocked her head.
    Potter held up a finger. Wait. He lifted his hands again and froze once more. Then Frances gestured and he remembered. “I’m Arthur Potter,” he signed. “It’s a pleasure to meet you.”
    “No, you are Charles Michel de l’Epée,” Frances translated Melanie’s signing.
    “I’m not that old.” He was speaking now, smiling. “Officer Whiting here said he was born in the eighteenth century. How are you feeling?”
    She understood without a translation. Melanie waved at her clothes and gave a mock frown then signed. Frances translated, “My skirt and blouse have had it. Couldn’t you have gotten us out just a little earlier?”
    “The movie-of-the-week people expect cliffhanger endings.”
    And as with Handy he felt overwhelmed; there were athousand things to ask her. None of which found their way from his mind to his voicebox.
    He stepped even closer to her. Neither moved for a moment.
    Potter thought of another sentence in ASL—words that Frances had taught him earlier in the evening. “You’re very brave,” he signed.
    Melanie looked pleased at this. Frances watched her sign but then the officer frowned and shook her head. Melanie repeated her words. To Potter, Frances said, “I don’t understand what she means. What she said was, ‘If you hadn’t been with me I couldn’t have done it.’ ”
    But he understood.
    He heard a chug of engine and turned to see a harvester. As he watched the ungainly vehicle he believed for a moment it was driving hordes of insects before it. Then he realized he was watching husks and dust thrown skyward by the thresher blades.
    “They’ll do that all night,” Frances translated.
    Potter looked at Melanie.
    She continued, “Moisture’s critical. When conditions’re right they run like nobody’s business. They have to.”
    “How do you know that?”
    “She says she’s a farm girl.”
    She looked straight into his eyes. He tried to believe that Marian had gazed at him thus so he could root this sensation in sentiment or nostalgia and have done with it. But he couldn’t. The look, like the feeling it engendered, like this young woman herself, was an original.
    Potter recalled the final phrase that Frances had taught him. He hesitated then impulsively signed the words. As he did it seemed to him that he felt the hand shapes with absolute clarity, as if only his hands could express what he wanted to say.
    “I want to see you again,” Potter signed. “Maybe tomorrow?”
    She paused for an endless moment then nodded yes, smiled.
    She reached out suddenly toward him and closed her hands on his arm. He pressed a bandaged hand against her shoulder. They stood in this ambiguous embrace for amoment then he lifted his fingers to her hair and touched the back of her head. She lowered her head and he his lips, nearly touching them to the thick blond plait. But suddenly he smelled the musky scent of her scalp, her sweat, latent perfume, blood. The smells of lovers coupling. And he could not kiss her.
    How young she is! And as he thought that, in one instant, his desire to embrace her vanished and his old man’s fantasy—never articulated, hardly formed—blew away like the chaff shot from the thresher he’d been staring at.
    He knew he had to leave.
    Knew he’d never see her again.
    He stepped back suddenly and she looked at him, momentarily perplexed.
    “I have to go talk to the U.S. attorney,” he said abruptly.
    Melanie nodded and offered her hand. He mistook it for a signing gesture. He stared down, waiting. Then she extended it further and took his fingers