A THORNE REMAINING

By Jo Anzalone

PART SIX:

"Allie? Are you all right? Let me in, darling, please."

Allison remained in her exhausted sleep, not hearing. When Terry heard Addie's footsteps finally walk away, he got up, reluctantly sliding his hand from hers and unlocked the door.  As much as he liked being alone with her, Allie was  likely to need more  substantial help than he could  offer in getting herself  back into her chair.

Then he sat beside her again, unable completely to keep himself from stroking her hair. A few moments later she turned her head, blinking her eyes open. "Terry?"  For a minute there he'd seemed utterly real to her. She sighed.

No, she'd been dreaming.  He was dead. He would never be coming back to his room, never sit at his desk again, never hear the sound of his stream.  She would never meet him, never even know what he had looked like. She closed her eyes. How could he be dead?  It just didn't...fit.

Twisting her upper torso, she half-sat, scooching herself back against the bed then reaching down to straighten her legs. Damn! How was she going to get up? And she'd gone and locked the door, had even locked the French doors before going into dinner.  She leaned her head back against the bed.

"Oh, Terry," she whispered. "How could you go and get yourself killed? Didn't you know I was waiting for you? Didn't you know you were supposed to come...home?"

He sat not more than six inches away to her left. "I did come home, Allie. Just not like I thought I would."

Adelaide tapped at the door again, trying the knob. Ah, Allie had unlocked it.  Good! Cautiously she opened the door peering in.  Allison sat on the floor by the bed.  "Allie! Did you fall?"

"I'm all right, Addie," Allie replied. "Just need a hand in getting up."

Terry had retreated over near his desk, watching quietly.

"Well, it's a good thing you unlocked the door first," Addie murmured, bringing the chair close and helping Allie into it.

"Unlocked the door?"

"How do you think I got in, darling? You had to have unlocked it, right?"

"I...," she didn't finish. She had no idea how the door had gotten unlocked.

"Anyway," Addie continued, "I saved your dinner. You think you could eat some now?"

"Maybe just a cup of tea?" Allison replied, her appetite still gone.

Adelaide went back to the kitchen and Allie rolled over to the French doors. It was dark now. That seemed right. Everything felt dark now.  "I never found you, Terry. Nothing you'd written. No picture. If only there had been...
something...anything...you'd left for me to find. Something that would tell me more of what you're like...had been like," she amended.  "How can I miss you so when I never found you?"

Addie knocked again, popping her head into the room. "Allie, darling, come on out a bit. Sit with me in the living room to drink your tea, all right? Please?"

She really wanted only to stay in his room, to be near his things, but she let herself be talked into going with her sister. Terry stayed behind, thinking about what she'd said. "Something that would tell me more of what you're

like," he repeated.  What did he have that might do that for her?  Perhaps the journal he'd kept when he was a teenager? No one had ever read that before. He'd never wanted anyone else's eyes to see it.  It was just the ramblings of a not-quite-yet-grown boy, thoughts he jotted down about life, about this place, about his dreams for the future.

But it was locked with other things in the bottom drawer of his desk. She'd never find the key, taped as it was under the second drawer. He thought about it for a long time. Would it be too much? Would it frighten her if he made the key...available? He suddenly wanted that she should know him, know him in a way no one else ever had.  Glancing quickly at the closed bedroom door, he thought there was still probably time. He pulled out the second drawer, reaching his hand beneath it, feeling for the key. Once he had it in his hand, doubt filled him again.  If he left it atop his desk, what would she think?  As he pondered this, the door opened and Allie wheeled into the room.

Oh, no! He couldn't have her seeing a key floating in mid-air. As she turned to close the door, he set it quickly on the desk, moving to stand with his back to the French doors. Then he rolled his eyes. He'd left the second drawer wide open. Too late. There was no time to shut it now.

She'd been looking absently toward the bed as she continued on into the center of the room. Gradually her head turned in the direction of his desk.  No, she didn't really feel like reading tonight. Then she saw the drawer. Her breaths came more rapidly and she paused, her hands curled around the arms of her chair.

He watched her anxiously. Her eyes were very wide, very blue as she stared at the desk. But, somehow, she didn't look...afraid.

She licked her lips then sucked in a long, deep breath. "Terry?" she whispered. "Are you here?"

Her whole focus was on the desk and she moved slowly toward it, stopping, then putting her right hand part-way out. "Where are you?"

"I'm over here," he said, "by the doors to the porch."

She couldn't hear him.  Her fingers moved feebly through the empty air near the desk chair. "How do I find you?"

 
She was steadily becoming filled with an absolute conviction that he was in the room. She'd felt something a bit like it down by the stream today, as if he'd been there, too. But this was stronger. "Terry?" she almost moaned. "Don't leave...don't go away."

"I won't," he promised.

She closed her eyes, trying to adjust to this new awareness of a thing so completely improbable. He had come home. She knew it.  He had been killed and he had come home.  "You came back," she said softly.

"I did," he smiled. "I came back to find you."

Tears stung her eyes. "I don't know if I can do it, Terry.  If I can be alive in a world where you're not. How can you be here and I can't see you, can't hear you? Why didn't you come back like you were supposed to?"  The tears dripped down her cheeks.

"Something went wrong, Allie, terribly wrong. I meant to come home, but something...slipped."

Allison swallowed hard.  Addie, of course, would say she'd just been dreaming it all. Perhaps she had. But then she saw the key.  He'd put the key to the locked drawer out for her!  She almost laughed with the joy of the reality of it.  He must have been doing it when she came back, startling him.  "You are here, aren't you?" she smiled, brushing away the tears with her hand and reached out to pick up the key. "You want me to unlock the drawer?"

"Yes," he said, "you'll find something of me there."

She pushed in the second drawer, leaning down to fit the key into the small lock of the one below. Slowly she pulled it open. Ledgers, record books, several notebooks. She lifted out the small one in the front. It was battered a bit, as though it had been carried outdoors many times, one corner was completely missing, another curled.  A single word was written on the cover. "Me."  Oh, God...she'd found him!  She hugged the notebook to her chest a moment before opening it. It was what she'd wanted, something from him, about him.  "Thank you," she murmured.

"You're welcome," he grinned, pleased at her response to it. "Don't expect great literature, though."

She lay the notebook in her lap, opening its cover slowly.  He'd written his name on the title page and she studied his handwriting, fairly neatly slanted but with enough sloppiness to indicate it had been written by someone not yet completely formed.  For her, though, King Solomon's mines could not have offered a treasure of more value.

Her mind ranged back over the day. "You pushed me out of the mud, didn't you?" she asked. "And unlocked the door?"

"Yeah," he grinned. "Seems I can do little stuff like that."

"And," a smile creased her face widely, "it WAS you who left the French doors open!"

"Guilty as charged. I'm kinda new at this ghost business."

"If only...I knew where you are," she sighed.

He sat down on the window seat to the right of the French doors. The cushion sank in a bit. She saw it and a thrill went through her from top to bottom. Turning her chair, she moved toward the seat. She was looking at the empty air above the seat, trying and failing utterly to find some trace, some dim outline of his form. Her hand came up again, trembling, reaching. He stood, moving away.

"Don't," he said. "Not yet. I don't know what would happen."

She pulled back, suddenly shy, aware that if she'd been able to see him, she would not have reached out like that. Blushing slightly, she rolled back toward the desk, opening his notebook. If she couldn't see him, couldn't touch him, maybe she could find him in the pages of his journal.

"January 2nd," he'd written, "Monday. Have just hiked to the top of the hill and am waiting for the sun to set. Mum's cooking biscuits. The wind's right and I can smell them even up here. Still miss Skipper a lot. Was such a good dog. Seems strange not to have him sprawled out beside me up here. Sky's going all orange now, bits of yellow streaking here and there. Backs of the tors are all lit up, glowing with the light. Makes me wish I could paint better. No time to write much today. Got biscuits calling me."

She ran her fingers over his words, touching them tenderly. That one short paragraph written years ago, as simple as it was, told her much about him. In her imagination she saw a boy of about 14 sitting cross-legged atop the rounded green hill behind the house, missing his dog, smelling his mother's baking biscuits. It was something very...real. She looked back at the window seat even though the indentation was no longer there. "Sorry about Skipper," she said.

"He was a good ol' mutt," Terry explained. "Half collie, half retriever. Had him since I was four."

She turned back to her reading as he watched. She read of his longer hikes alone into the park itself, of how he'd almost fallen climbing one of the tors and never told anyone about it, of the wallaby he'd tried to catch, following it until he'd gotten lost, of how he'd felt when his Grandfather died. As she read, he became steadily more real to her, how he thought, what he found funny, what he didn't. It grew late and she put the journal carefully back in its drawer, not locking it, but placing the key in the dish with his coins.

Yawning, she eyed the bed. "Ooo," Terry said, "guess you want to get ready for the night, eh?" He moved to leave then thought that she would need to know he'd gone so she would feel comfortable getting into her nightgown. Deliberately, he opened the right-hand French door so she would see it, then closed it behind himself, going around to the front part of the porch to sit on the swing.

She watched the door, loving that she knew at that moment where he was and that he had been considerate enough of her privacy to depart. After she'd changed, Addie tapped at the door and came in. "Just wanted to say good-night, darling. I'm sorry about Mr. Thorne. Too bad we never got to meet him. I expect he was probably a very nice man."

"Yes," Allie replied, glancing at the French doors. "I expect he was."