Nerve Damage

HarperCollins Publishers, Inc.

Chapter One

Sometimes the dead live on in your dreams. Delia was very much alive now, sitting on a terrace wall high above a tropical bay, bare legs dangling. She'd never looked better—her tanned skin firm and glowing; her eyes, light brown with flecks of gold, narrowing in the way they did when she was about to say something funny. Her mouth opened—sunlight glinting on her lip gloss—and Delia did speak, but too soft to hear. That was maddening. Then came the realization from a nondreaming brain region that this glittering bay lay somewhere on the Venezuelan coast, and all that tropical sunshine went dim. Venezuela: the word alone was still destabilizing.

A vein throbbed just under the skin of Delia's temple, a prominent blue vein shaped like a bolt of lightning. The weather changed at once, a cold breeze springing up and ruffling her hair. Things were going bad. Roy reached over to smooth out the ruffles, but the hair he felt was not Delia's; finer, and straight instead of curly.

He opened his eyes. Wintry light, frost on the window, posters of ski racers on the walls: Jen's room.

"I always hated when men did that," Jen said, her voice still husky with sleep.

Roy turned his head. The eyes that watched him—pale blue, not brown—were very pretty in their own way. "Did what?" he said.

"Touched my hair."

He withdrew his hand. Blond hair, not brown; that special brown, also flecked with gold.

"But with you it's okay." Jen waited, maybe for him to say or do something. Roy couldn't think of anything. Their faces were a foot apart. Jen was very good-looking, her skin a little roughened from the weather, but that only made Roy like it more. What was left of the dream broke into tiny pieces and vanished.

"You feeling all right?" Jen said.

"Fine."

Under the covers she moved her leg against his. "I had some news yesterday. Out of the blue."

"Good news?" said Roy.

"I think so—it's a job offer."

"What job?"

"Like what I'm doing now," Jen said. She ran the ski school at Mount Ethan, twenty minutes from her condo. "But on a much bigger scale, and it pays twice the money."

"Where?" Roy said, thinking Stowe, close by, or maybe Killington, a little farther.

Jen looked away. "Keystone," she said.

"That's in Colorado?"

She nodded. Then her eyes were meeting his again, maybe trying to see inside, to read him.

"Well," Roy said. And came very close to following that with Why don't we get married? Why not? They'd been like this for two years, somewhere between dating and living together. Was there a reason not to take the next step? No lack of comfort between them, no lack of affection, sexual heat. An age difference, yes—he was almost forty-seven, Jen was thirty-four—plus she wanted kids and he no longer did, but so what? Roy found himself smiling at her.

"Well what?" she said.

And was just about to speak the words—why don't we get married?—when the thought came that blurting it out right now might not be the way to go. He could do better than that. And wouldn't a more formal presentation—at Pescatore, say, Friday night—be better? So, for now, he just said, "Congratulations."

"Congratulations?"

"On this job offer."

"Oh," Jen said. "Thanks. I'll have to think about it, of course. Colorado's far away."

"I understand," Roy said, realizing from that last remark about the distance that on Friday she was going to say yes. Two days away. He felt pretty crafty.

Jen got up and went into the bathroom. The moment he heard the shower, Roy picked up the phone and reserved Pescatore's best table for seven-thirty Friday night. As he hung up, a memory dropped into place: his only other proposal of marriage. Nighttime, in the tiny bedroom of the Foggy Bottom apartment, the first place that had ever been his own, a blue light from a passing squad car down on H Street flashing on Delia's face. That time he'd just blurted it out.

Roy lived in a converted barn halfway up the east side of the Ethan Valley, originally a vacation place he and Delia bought cheap. No money back then—Delia was still new at the Hobbes Institute, a think tank specializing in third-world economic problems, and Roy's work hadn't started to sell. A falling-down barn, complete with bat colony and a hippie squatter: Delia's face lit up at first sight. They fixed it up themselves, meaning Roy did the fixing while Delia made impossible suggestions, kind of like a princess in a fairy tale. That side of her—this was not long after Delia got her PhD in economics from Georgetown—was something she showed only to him. As for the actual renovation, Roy didn't need any help. He'd always been good with his hands. Other sculptors he knew had learned welding for their art; he was the only one who'd gone the other way, working every summer through high school and college at King's Machining and Metal Work up in the little Maine town he came from.

Right now—a few hours after leaving Jen's—he was stuck in the middle of a kind of broken arch made mostly of old car radiators welded at the corners, each one turned at a slightly different angle in a way that was reminding him of stop-motion photography, an effect he hadn't intended and wasn't sure he liked. Also, he was eighteen feet off the ground—near the top of the ladder, getting close to the roof of the barn, oxygen and acetylene tanks strapped to his back in a converted scuba pack contraption—and the arching part had barely begun. Roy stood there, one hand on the ladder, one on the torch, waiting for an idea. He could feel shapes forming here and there in his mind, but they refused to come out of the shadows, be visible, let him get his hands on them. Way down below, the phone began to ring.

Excerpted from Nerve Damageby Peter Abrahams Copyright ©2007 by Peter Abrahams. Excerpted by permission.
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