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“What are you waiting for?” he asked.
Stop looking at me like that!
I took a deep breath, knelt beside him and dipped my hand behind the elastic of his boxers, over the trail of dark hair beneath his navel that led to the center of my timidity, and I found him. I gripped it nervously, enclosing my small fingers about the girth and my eyes got bigger in my face and my heart beat more rapidly in my chest and I decided then that I was, without a doubt, in over my head. How am I going to fit that in my mouth? What if I do it wrong? I will definitely do it wrong. I felt like crying, ashamed I couldn’t get it together. I wanted to give him pleasure as he had given to me, but I was terrified of making a fool of myself. If he didn’t wish he’d taken Rachel with him before, he’s sure to now!
“Thais?” Atticus’ voice no longer held the playful undertone it had before—it was soft and consoling. The infuriating grin was gone from his face.
Without ever feeling his arm move as I sat there on my knees in a trance, I looked down to see his hand atop mine, pulling it out of his boxers—he’d never planned to let me go through with it, I realized.
Atticus sat up and turned on the sofa, setting his feet on the floor. He reached down and helped me up. I stood before him and he gazed up at me, taking my hands into his.
“Thais,” he said, “I don’t know what all happened to you while you were out there, surviving with your family, and you don’t have to tell me”—he tugged on my fingers so I’d look at him, and I did—“but I will never make you do something you don’t want to do. Never.” He tugged a little harder in emphasis. “You owe me nothing, and all I want from you is to know you’re safe and fed and always able to smile.” He smiled at me then.
He was breaking my heart. Not with pain, but with affection. Oh, Momma, you were wrong. Oh, I love you always, but you were so wrong when you said there were no good men left in the world! You were so wrong…
39
THAIS & (ATTICUS)
In the following days, Atticus and I really did forget about the outside world; we forgot about the devastation that went on all around us while we lived peacefully in a speck of forest amid an encompassing mass of violence that was the rest of the country. We and our tranquil place of residence was a pinhole of light in an endless sky of blackness.
“I think we should stay here,” I told him one afternoon as we brought back fish from the pond. “At least for a little while longer. A couple months.”
Atticus set the fishing poles against the side of the house, and the bucket of fish down on the ground.
“I don’t know,” he said, shaking his head. “It’s not a good idea to stay in one place for too long, especially if it’s only the two of us. Strength in numbers, remember?” He plucked his big knife from his boot and set it down on the porch railing.
“I know,” I said, “but I’m still not ready to leave.”
“We’ll see.”
I smiled and went inside to prepare our salads while Atticus cleaned the fish.
Fish and salads and rabbit and the occasional snake and squirrel kept the hunger pangs away. And frogs. Atticus mentioned once more about shooting a deer, but thought better of it seeing as how it was a lot of meat and we had no way of preserving it. He said he wanted to build an outdoor dehydrator, but didn’t have everything he needed to make it work properly.
“I could take the screens from the windows and try to dry the meat out on the roof,” he’d explained. “But it’s risky. There’s too much humidity in the air; the meat is more likely to spoil than dry. Not to mention the flies. Two soldiers in Lexington City died because of meat that wasn’t preserved properly. I’m not taking that kind of chance with you.”
Why does he always say “me”? He never says “us”. I didn’t want him to get sick from bad meat, either. I didn’t want him to starve to death or get dehydrated. I didn’t want him to get leprosy from eating an armadillo. You, you, you, Atticus—that’s what I have tosay about it.
“I think we’re doing fine with what we’ve been eating,” I told him. “We’re not starving. We don’t need anything bigger.”
“No,” Atticus said, “but there may come a time when the fish stop biting and the animals stop walking into my snares.”
“Or when the winter comes,” I said. “We’ll need a stock of food then for sure.”
(I don’t plan on us being here come the winter, Thais. I kept it to myself.)
“But for now, we have greens,” I added. “And blackberries and dandelions.”
“Yes, we do,” he said. “And you know a lot more about edible plants than I do. I think you should teach me.”
My face lit up.
I started that very day, grabbed his hand and practically dragged him into the forest. I told him about mushrooms first.
“Wild mushrooms scare the shit out of me.” Atticus shook his head, not happy about the idea of eating the one I held out to him. “Eating plants in the wild I’ve always been leery enough of that I’d almost rather starve to death than take the risk. But mushrooms”—he shook his head again, looking at the one in my hand as I urged him to take it—“I would rather starve to death.”
“Atticus,” I encouraged, “I would never tell you to eat anything I wasn’t one hundred percent sure was safe.”
