Dorothea Dreams (Heirloom Books) by Suzy McKee Charnas Read Free Book Online Page A

gossip; in any event she had run him to earth here. A letter from her, via Nigeria, had caught up with him today.
    She wanted to take care of him, in their parents’ old place. Dark Devon green, streaming rain on window-glass, watery light, and brittle, clever conversation. Christ.
    He loved the high places of the world, and this place of Dorothea’s was a glorious one — a plateau eight thousand feet up, covered in low, thick brush, with a grand stage of a sky full of cloud processions in the afternoons. He would not be here long enough see the full flood of summer tourists let alone the winter ski-crowd, so he enjoyed a comfortable sparseness of human figures in this vast landscape.
    Stop dodging about, you pathetic nit. There was only one figure, Dorothea, jaunty in slacks and boots with her dogs at her side, mistress of her slice of this country. She would keep running out after him to clap a hat on his head, as if he had time to develop skin-cancer from the sun! Give her up for Margaret?
    He had written, of course — one was not a beast — “Dear Maggot, not to worry; the ailing badger has found a warm, dry lair.”
    And so on, as if they were still children together. Well, it was as a child — an imaginative tyrant — that he had loved his sister, not as the prissy, moralistic, high-minded woman she became.
    Having refused her plea for his return, ought he not at least to dwell on her in his thoughts as she once was, indeed honor all that was good in his past by ruminating on it? Not for the first time it occurred to him that much of his strenuous traveling had been done to avoid just that sort of reflection.
    Sitting here on the white wrought-iron chair in Dorothea’s patio, he was traveling still, in a way. He could feel the shrinkage inward. (How could that be, since there must be tumors growing inside and the sensation should be of swelling, of crowded space?) He had grown skillful at gauging just how much strength he had. His periods of feebleness were not steady and unrelenting yet, thank God, but they were bad enough when they came. The body was heading for death and taking him with it.
    He caressed the bony back of his neck with his palm.
    Not a bad body. He had given it a hell of a time, after all. Frozen and starved and roasted and soaked and desiccated, scraped raw with blowing sand, chewed up by insects, half-poisoned with villainous water and flyblown food, it was a wonder the poor beast had lasted this long.
    And five-star feeds in France, let’s not forget that; wines with more pedigree than his whole family put together; endless Oriental feasts; and the comforts of fine hotels. To offset abstinence in some places, he had allowed himself indulgence in others — for instance, with a brilliant blonde economist in Brussels, an old connection often reaffirmed over the years, to whom he had considered going with his horrible news before his impetus toward Dorothea had become clear. With a doctor’s widow in Wales, although he had known her in the Biblical sense well before her bereavement. Homely as he was, he had not done badly in that department.
    Abstinence and indulgence had probably done the carcass in. Drove it round the bend with too much right-hand, too much left. Now here it was bending the knee to its own tyrant cells run amok. His initial rage at this treachery was long since spent. He had torn up the reams of bitter outpourings that had at first relieved those feelings and had begun to develop a mood of rumination, judgment, a weighing and sorting and searching for patterns.
    But I don’t care about my past, he objected. How could the already-lived past compete with the excitement of exploring Dorothea’s dreams?
    He sipped lemonade and read the latest account. A man sits by a window, hearing the mob below, and he writes and writes and shakes with terror…
    That evening he had an attack of the horrors, brought on by nothing more evocative than feeding the dogs and letting them out for