Praying for Sleep

something else—something he was about to do, something far graver than bad manners. He sat down beside her, his thigh pressing hard against hers, and as she cried, he set a small white animal skull in her lap and, very gently, began stroking her hair.
     
    Under clouds so fast and turbulent they seemed like special effects from a science-fiction movie, Portia L’Auberget inhaled the scents of decaying leaves and the musky lake. Several feet away her sister lifted the shovel and dropped a huge pile of gravel around the front wheels of the stranded car.
    The young woman flexed her hands. They stung and she supposed the skin was starting to blister from the wet gloves. Her muscles were on fire. Her head ached from the pounding rain.
    And she was troubled by something else, a vague thought—something other than the storm. At first she wondered if it might be the escape. Yet she’d never really believed that someone like Michael Hrubek could make it all the way to Ridgeton from the mental hospital, certainly not on a night like this.
    No, some nebulous memory kept rising up disturbingly then vanishing. It seemed that it had something to do with this portion of the yard. She was picturing . . . what was it? Plants? Had there been a garden here of some sort? Ah, yes. It was here. The old vegetable garden.
    Then she remembered Tom Wheeler.
    How old had they been? Twelve or thirteen probably, both of them. One fall afternoon—maybe November, like tonight—the skinny red-haired boy had shown up in the yard. Portia strolled outside and they sat on the back steps. She managed simultaneously to both ignore and converse with him, teasing mercilessly. Finally he suggested that they go to the state park. “Why?” she asked. “I dunno,” he responded. “Hang out, you know. Got the new Jefferson Airplane.” He nodded lethargically at an eight-track-tape player at his feet. She told him no, she didn’t want to, but a moment later she disappeared into the house and returned with a blanket.
    He started for the state park.
    “Uh-uh,” Portia announced. “This way.”
    And led him to the vegetable garden. Here she spread the blanket in partial view of the house and lay down, kicking off her Keds and stretching sumptuously. But somebody might see, he protested. Somebody could be watching right now! She placed his hand on her breast and he stopped worrying about voyeurs. Portia lay on her back, surrounded by slug-chewed pumpkins and short blond cornstalks. Tommy beside her, covering her hot mouth with his; she had to breathe for long stretches through her nose. She now recalled smelling this same scent of wet, late fall. Drowsy flies strafed them. Finally, confusing him by not protesting, she allowed his pale, freckled hand to pass the elastic barrier. He glanced at the windows of the house then jabbed with a shaking finger, leaving inside her a glow of pain and on her bare hip a large wet spot that matched the one spreading across the front of his dungarees.
    They lay awkwardly, side by side, for a few minutes then he suddenly whispered, “I think there’s somebody there.”
    Though he’d said that only to escape and he rose quickly and vanished down the driveway. Hearing the resonant guitar licks fade, Portia grew dizzy as she watched the thick clouds pass overhead and wondered about the mysteries of bodies. She spent a long time unsuccessfully trying to convince herself to feel bad that he’d fled.
    Portia now realized, with a twist in her belly, that it was not this memory of speedy Tommy Wheeler at all that was so troubling. It was Indian Leap.
    She had almost not accompanied her sister and brother-in-law on the picnic. She had no interest in the out-of-doors, no interest in state parks—especially the park to which she’d been dragged by teachers on tedious field trips and in which she later spent hours gazing at treetops, as she lay beneath boyfriends, or friends of boyfriends, or sometimes strangers.
    No, it was essentially a decision by default. She was fed up with the quiet anxiety of solo life in Manhattan: The dinners of turkey sandwiches and coleslaw. The companionship of rented movies. The tired come-ons in bars and at parties, delivered as if the men actually thought she hadn’t heard it all a thousand times before. Socializing with lean, ponytailed girlfriends who’d discard you in an instant if doing so moved them an inch closer to a Better Job or an Available Man.
    So, on that May 1, she’d