Heaven's Rending Ch. 05

Tomberlin? Tracy Tomberlin? He'd heard the name before. Where? Something . . .

"How's your drink?" she asked from the kitchen. "Cold enough for you?"

"Yes, Ma'am, it sure is. Got a little kick to it, too." He heard her laugh, then the oven door opening and closing. The room filled with the smell of baked bread, and his head was swimming - if not from the bread, then the rum.

"You know, Alan," she said - now poking her head around the kitchen wall - "if you call me Ma'am one more time you're going to get to do the dishes tonight!" She was smiling at him, and the warmth of her smile disarmed him completely.

"Yes, Ma'am."

"Oh, pooh!" She laughed again and disappeared back into the kitchen.

Burnett took another much longer pull at his drink, and the warmth rushed through him like lava. He felt muscles in his shoulder loosening up and he leaned back on the sofa and closed his eyes for a moment. He felt himself drifting . . . drifting . . .

He felt the dream coming on again . . .

. . . a river, a snake, a fish . . . a red fish . . .

"Alan! Alan! Wake up! Are you asleep?"

Burnett bolted upright and shook the cobwebs from his mind. "God, I'm sorry. I . . ."

"I, uh, listen Alan, if you're too tired, we can do this some other time . . ."

He looked up at her. She was hurt, it was written all over her face.

"Tracy. It's not what you think." He stood and put his hands on her shoulder, then looked in her eyes. There were tears there waiting to fall, tears he saw that had been held back for too many years.

"I . . . don't be silly, Alan . . ." He watched a tear crest like a wave and fall down her cheek, and he took a finger and caught it.

"I want you to know one thing, Tracy. I feel so at ease here, at ease like I haven't felt for - well - I can't remember the last time I felt like this. . ."

She put her finger to his lips and quieted him with a simple"Sh-h-h-h," then stood on her toes and kissed him. It was a tentative kiss, a first kiss full of shyness and quiet grace, then she stepped back and returned to her kitchen.

Burnett tried to calm himself, tried to quell the surprising fire in his groin, and he stood there in her little living room holding her shadow to his soul with all his strength. Soon she emerged carrying plates loaded with steaks and potatoes; salad was already on the table, as were two glasses of deep red wine. He walked over and pulled her chair our for her, then sat across from her. A covey of little purple candles bathed the room in flickering light, and he marveled at the simple beauty of the gesture. She watched him, apparently wanting him to take the first bite, so he cut into the steak and took the meat into his mouth.

The flavors were subtle - lime, butter, salt and pepper, maybe the faintest hint of garlic - the taste was sublime and he knew by the way she reacted as she watched his face that words weren't really necessary, but . . .

"Oh my lucky stars . . . Oh! That's so good . . ." He watched her smile - and only then did she take a bite. They ate silently for a while, though she was clearly enjoying the moment of this small triumph, then she took her wine glass and held it up to him. Burnett held his glass to hers . . .

"To friendships old and new . . ." she said, ". . . may they bring joy to your heart whenever you think of them."

"To friendships old and new," Burnett said, and they clinked glasses in the glowing candlelight. "Particularly the new."

She smiled, yet Burnett sensed she was holding something back. Something important. A troubled frown crossed her face like storm clouds.

"What is it? What is it, Tracy?"

"I think . . . I think you knew my husband, Alan. Everett. He was . . ."

Burnett felt the blood drain from his face, saw her reaction before he could catch himself.

Of course! That was why the name was so familiar!

So long ago!

Everett Tomberlin. Killed on duty . . . what was it . . . ten, no, twelve years ago. Wife pregnant, miscarried a few weeks later, tried to kill herself a few month after that.

And here she was. His eyes went to her wrists, and he could just make out the faint remains of the scars there. She watched him, followed his eyes as they sought the truth, yet she remained solidly quiet. She hid nothing, for quite obviously she had nothing to hide from this man. From this man - of all men.

He knew. Knew what she had been through. Knew the burden she carried.

Alan Burnett leaned back in his chair and felt the cares of the world come crashing home.

******************************

He saw her again in the parking lot from time to time. She said little as they passed, for indeed there was little that needed to be said. Burnett had simply felt too awkward that night, too conflicted by his desire for the woman and his understanding of her past, and that conflict had been written all over his face. When he had walked into his barren apartment later that night he had cleaned up for bed. As he had brushed his teeth and stared at himself in the little mirror above the sink, he looked at his eyes staring back and for the first time in his life he questioned his humanity, his inability to fathom the contours of human frailty. And accept what he found there.

But as he had so many times before, he blinked, closed his eyes and walked off to bed, to sleep, to the certainty that with a new day there would come other problems to bury the unpleasantries he ran across from time to time.

******************************

The following weekend he was taking groceries up the stairs to his apartment when Tracy opened her door and leaned out. Burnett made eye contact with her as he stepped onto the second floor landing.

"Alan?" she called out from the floor above, " I've got an extra hamburger cooking. What about it?"

Burnett thought about his empty apartment for a split second, the prospect of another movie to watch after another frozen dinner, and he looked at Tracy standing there, leaning out her doorway, the smells hitting him and a million memories yet to be made called out to him, pleaded with him, to simply say yes.

And he did.

******************************

The last dish washed, Burnett and Tracy sat on the sofa. He sat back and she leaned into him as if it was the most natural thing in the world, then she took his hand in hers and caressed his fingers. She seemed ageless in that moment, ageless in that the weight of her humanity had been stripped away for this brief interlude, and nothing remained but the essence of her soul. She seemed beautiful - beautiful yet fragile - in a way he had never seen or known in another human being. She was ancient and new, touched, yet somehow chaste. She radiated a knowing resolve to carry on, yet he could see her knowledge of the depths of despair as it danced in the darkness around her . . . Hers was a dance, Burnett knew, known only to those who've held death in their hands - and let it go. No one, Burnett knew, can even begin to understand those depths until they've known them in their bones.

And as such - within that ageless moment that so often defines simple choice- he held her, and within the shadow of a sigh - time stopped as it does for lovers.

He held her precious form within the careful glow of the fading day that seemed to hold time on the far side of the night, and he held her, felt her soul melt into his, held her as the sunlight hesitating in the air seemed to slow, then stop. He turned within this arc of time and held his face to hers; her smell was electric and he felt himself breathing in deeply, he felt himself consciously wanting to know her every scent as revealed within the contours of her body. He kissed her face, felt the tension fall away from her as the wave of his acceptance washed over her, just as he surely as he felt the sun giving away to night. As suddenly, he felt hot sand under his feet, the crashing of distant surf filling this time within time with cool, salt-hewn breezes. He walked on far distant shores within himself, and he was sure she would follow . . .

She looked up at him; he felt the warmth of her eyes lingering on his mouth - and his lips moved to hers. Her hands moved to cup his face, and within this chalice of soul he opened his mouth and drank the essence of that most ancient music. He felt her hand moving up lis leg and he smiled inside at the sound of the surf crashing, the water hissing in retreat, his belt buckle tugged and zipper parting, a start as cool skin encircled his warmth and began to gently caress the seeds of memory until all that remained was the unfettered knowledge of pending release.

She took him first with her hands, and she kneaded the soft flowing warmth to the threshold of release, then she willed the coming to subside. With her fingernails, she resumed her dance around the circle of his crown until he felt himself trembling - and she willed him to subside again. She kissed him, she bit his face gently, she stroked him again, gently at first but then with more insistence, and he felt himself turning rigid in a way he had never known and yet felt so familiar, so right. Stars danced in his mind, pressure - was it starlight? - built again under the relentless urging of her all-knowing fingers, and he felt a gentle pulse of liquid ooze from the tip of his cock. She spread this taste of things to come around the tip of his cock with her finger, tracing little eddies around the ridges of his mind with her oh-so-sharp nails, then she began again. She worked his shaft with frantic abandon now, and he felt her hair dancing on his skin as her mouth waited above. He tensed again, went rigid as the core of his being turned to fire, and he drifted into the oceanic warmth of his release.

He felt the warmth of her mouth engulf him, felt the waves of release flood into her waiting mouth, and as the tides ebbed he drifted in the afterglow of her dance. She continued to hold him in her mouth, slowly swirling her tongue around and across the hyper-sensitized plains of his release, then she tickled his sack with her fingernails. It was as if she was strumming a tune on his guitar, and the resonant chords in their turn vibrated to her command. She continued to lick and kiss him until he was hard again, then she raised her body over his and mounted him, the fiery warmth of her passion surprising him with it's intensity. With her hands on his shoulders, she pulsed and contracted, her head whipping back - thrusting forward - twisting right - dancing left - as she rode him. He felt the walls of her womb holding him, willing him to give her new life, and in this ever lasting night he came to her.

They lay on sun-kissed sands, tall grass bent to the will of soft sea-breezes, and as rose-hued petals opened to receive the gift of life, deep within this desperate moment new life came to this world.

Such is the circle of life.

We can not question the why or the how, we can only bow to the majesty of what is.

****************************

Burnett sat in the Assistant Chief's office a month later, watching the old man as he went over the paperwork in his hands once again, wondering if he was doing the right thing once again, questioning his sanity for the millionth time and coming up blank.

At his first meeting with the A/C a year ago, the old man had told him the C.I.A. was looking for cops with street smarts and four years of college. The pool of available talent from the armed services was drying up, the old man said, and they were looking to recruit from within well-respected departments around the country. The A/C had joined the D.I.A. after leaving Nam with one leg rent by shrapnel, then mysteriously joined the department - as Assistant Chief, no less - without ever having been a police officer. He worked with the detective bureau, and was rumored to be working on a new counter-terrorism division. Nobody questioned the A/C, Burnett thought as he watched the old man scrawling notes in the margin of the paper in his hands; in fact as far as he knew most people stopped breathing when the old man walked into a room. He routinely made the highest pistol score in the department's annual combat competition, and he could still crank out a mile in a respectable seven minutes.

Burnett hadn't known what to make of the A/Cs first overtures; they were in the beginning vague, tenuous explorations that seemed both preparatory and non-committal, but soon they had taken on a more deliberate, interrogative tenor that had frankly unsettled Burnett. Maybe that was the point, for not long after he was flown to a briefing with other prospective applicants and issued a battery of tests and reasoning appraisals. Background checks followed, then family and next door neighbors from homes long forgotten were interviewed. The A/C was going over these findings now, and he shook his head from time to time, nodded knowingly once in a while, then finally put the paper face down on his desk and turned to face Burnett.

"Well, Alan, the long version is this: you're almost too old, your - uh - marital instability is a concern, and you're about ten pounds heavier than they'd like. On the other hand, you know history - getting that Masters' sure helped, by the way - and not too many cops have a working knowledge of both French and German. You're not currently encumbered, and your evaluations are consistently among the best in the department, and shit, even the shrinks think you're about as emotionally mature as a cop can be." This, Burnett knew, was probably the old man's one attempt at humor for the year, so he smiled and intimated understanding by tossing off a brief chuckle.

"Short version is this, son. They want you. They want you to report to Yorktown in September. And now here's the good part. You're not going to resign from the department right off the bat; instead you'll be on extended leave. Retirement will still accrue, and if you decide to bail out you can come back to work with no questions asked, no loss of seniority or rank. If you make it, if they take you on, well, that's it. We've arranged to have your retirement rolled over into the Agency's, so you won't take a hit on that front. But this life here . . . well . . . that'll soon become ancient history. Five years from now you won't even recognize yourself."

The silence in the room was only broken by the gusting rain that lashed the window. The old man leaned back in his chair and with his hands folded across his lap he simply looked at Burnett. There was no curiosity on the man's face, no wry amused look, no anticipation whatsoever. While Burnett had thought about this moment for weeks now, the arrival of Tracy Tomberlin in his life had certainly complicated matters, yet he knew if he hesitated now the entire matter would be over and done with. And the hell of it was that before Tracy had entered his life he was looking forward to the change. He was glad now that this new wrinkle in his life was still unknown by anyone in the department. He simply did not know what to tell Tracy, let alone how he might tell her.

That more than anything else guided him as he sat in the A/Cs office. He knew he couldn't spend the rest of his life driving around in a patrol car shaking doors on deep nights or checking police reports for spelling errors until he dropped from old age. Tracy or no, he knew in his bones that his days as a cop were numbered.

"I accept, sir. What do I do from here?"

"I'll take care of the next step, son. I'll have some paperwork for you to sign off on in a few days."

"Yes sir."

"And son, about Mrs Tomberlin, put an end to it now - before things get too serious."

Burnett looked back at the A/C, then blinked rapidly as he stood and turned to leave.

He could have sworn he heard the old man laughing as the door closed behind him.

********************************

Burnett was alone in his apartment later that afternoon. He sat hunched forward on his little sofa, his hands together on his knees as he nursed a beer, slowly turning the bottle round and round as he thought about the choices he'd made that day. Tracy wasn't home yet, probably wouldn't be for another hour or so, but he knew it was going to be bad.

They'd both fallen pretty hard for one another. He felt as attached to her as he had to Diane, which was to say he felt as strongly for her as he ever had for anyone. He loved her in his way, and even though she told him she loved him, Burnett wasn't the type to go by words alone any more. He felt loved by Tracy, really loved, and that counted for so much more than words ever could in his book. But he had made the hard choice today, a choice he would need to share with her before they could move on - either together or apart - but now he felt as if he'd betrayed both Tracy and himself in the A/Cs office earlier.

Was he running away?

He heard her knock on the door and he walked over and opened it, and he kissed her when he saw her face, kissed her and then all the cares of the world fell from his shoulders when he felt her lips on his. He kissed her, and he knew she was meant to be. He kissed her, and he realized the enormity of the mistake he'd made.

But there was something else.

She smiled at him as he pulled back, and he looked down to see a bottle of champagne in her hand.

"It's for you," Tracy said.

"For me?"

"I won't be drinking. Well, not for at least the next nine months or so."

He looked at her, saw his reflection in her eyes, saw the bewildered expression spread across her face, the eyes tearing, and the mirror of his soul shattered into a million pieces. He was falling, falling, falling into the depths of night, and only the broken shards of his soul lit the corridor of time he found himself falling in . . . little pinpricks of memory that danced in his mind's eye as he stood in silence, watching tears fall down the face of the woman he would have presumed to love.

She turned from him, walked away from him, and left him twisting in the afterglow of a million broken dreams.