“SO,” SAID SAM, AS HE ran his fingers along the once-silver trim of the once-blue pickup. When some mud came away on his fingertips, he hastily produced a big gray handkerchief and wiped them off.
“I’m sorry,” said Miriam.
“For what?”
“For you having to see that.”
Sam shook his head as he tucked the soiled rag into his back pocket. “You and I have both seen worse.” He coughed awkwardly into his hand. “I’m sorry I mentioned the mirror.”
Miriam didn’t say anything as the rain kicked up again and the fat cold drops struck her face and rolled down her hair into her collar. She had indeed betrayed Jane; felt the shame of it keenly. Jane’s reaction, however, had been a bit much considering the nature of the crime and its nonexistent repercussions.
Maybe Jane really was up to something. Something beyond speaking with her father. Something against the rules. Something that could get her into a lot of trouble if Miriam knew about it and exposed her . . .
Miriam would never tell on Jane, of course. It was just an intriguing idea.
“Er,” said Sam, interrupting her thoughts, “want to go for a ride? In my truck, I mean. You could come along on my last delivery and then I could drop you back here. You wouldn’t be away more than an hour.”
Miriam looked back at the old farmhouse. Nancy stood in the doorway, watching them.
Miriam didn’t know what to do. She didn’t want to ask permission to go. She just wanted to go. For perhaps the first time since arriving in Hawkshead, Miriam couldn’t stand the thought of being indoors.
She yanked open the cab door. It was heavier than she thought and banged open with a horrifying clatter as she clambered inside awkwardly. Halfway through her scrambling, it occurred to her that her bottom was up in the air, and she slid all the way over, blushing terribly as she gathered her skirts and got them underneath her where they belonged.
“What are you waiting for?” she called to Sam. “Are we going or not?”
Sam glanced back to the house, then climbed in after. “Going,” he said, his smile all the sunshine she needed to make this feel like a picnic.
Miriam was glad the truck’s rumbling engine was so loud; they couldn’t really carry on much conversation as they bounced over the narrow, twisting roads canopied by the mossy dripping branches of old trees. Sam took one curve a little quickly, and Miriam slid across the seat into his side. She started to apologize until he put his arm around her and held her there. Miriam wondered if that had been his plan the whole time; his sly expression answered her question before she could ask it.
Bold as a sparrow, she kissed him on the cheek. It was warmer next to him, and more pleasant. She blushed as she settled back into her seat, but he seemed extremely pleased.
Miriam waited in the cab while Sam dropped off his final delivery. Her breath puffed in the cold air, fogging the windows, which was fine. She didn’t really want anyone seeing her, but once they got moving again, she rubbed herself a little porthole with her sleeve so she could see where they were going. It didn’t seem like they were headed back home, and indeed they were not.
She felt a flutter of nervousness when Sam turned off the road and headed overland toward a bit of woodland in the distance. She didn’t say anything, instead waiting for him to announce his intentions.
“There’s a nice spot just up ahead,” he said. “Pretty when it rains.”
From within, the wood was deeper and darker than it appeared from beyond its border. Sam maneuvered the truck between the trunks and then killed the motor. Suddenly, there was only blessed, terrifying silence broken only by the rain that struck the roof of the cab in staccato bursts.
“Are you still thinking about Jane?” asked Sam as the windows began to fog again and the temperature to drop.
Miriam shrugged. She was not interested in explaining. She was more interested in the way he seemed to be tightening his hold on her, drawing her into the warmth of his bulk. When he took her chin into his callused hand and angled her face up for a real kiss, a proper first kiss, it was easy to relax into that, too.
“Miriam,” he said. She liked to hear him say her name; it sounded good in his mouth. He said it again—“Miriam,” in a helpless, urgent way that made her body warm up in spite of the rapidly chilling air.
She wasn’t sure what he was asking for until his hands found the button at the top of her coat. Feeling strangely calm, Miriam nodded and let him undo it, and undo the buttons of her blouse, too. She blushed for him to see her modest undergarment and the gooseflesh above and below it, but he did not seem displeased with her appearance. In fact, when he pushed her gently down onto the cold leather of the seat, she felt something indicating his enthusiasm as they shifted.
The cab of a pickup truck was hardly the place she’d thought she’d be when first revealing herself to a lover, but, really, the fogged-over windows provided complete privacy. But as Sam pushed her skirt up above her knees, revealing two fuzzy thighs, she realized she ought to have come up with a plan for this sort of situation.
“You’re such a beautiful girl,” Sam said, gazing at her as she lay there, limbs akimbo, clothing mussed. “And so smart, so passionate.”
Miriam knew she was smart, but as for passionate or beautiful—that was an unconvincing compliment. Maybe passionate about her work . . .
His hands were roving more freely now.
“So sensitive,” he whispered, when she shivered, but that wasn’t it, not really.
Miriam was enjoying his attentions, but wasn’t entirely certain how to respond to them. Mostly she was just cold, and when it occurred to her how long she’d been gone, she couldn’t keep her mind on what he was doing to her body.
She cleared her throat like an impatient customer waiting to be noticed at a shop. “Sam,” she said, and he froze. “I’m not—I mean, rather, it’s not that I don’t—”
“Let’s stop,” he said, pulling away from her. “We don’t have to do anything right now.”
“It’s a little cold,” she admitted, as she buttoned herself back up. “And I’m worried about getting back.”
“Of course,” he said, starting up the truck—but before he threw it into gear, he smiled at her shyly. “Did you have fun, though? I did.”
“Yes!” said Miriam. It had been fun, even if the conditions hadn’t been ideal.
“Good. I’d got the sense you’d be all right,” he said. “Not all girls would be.”
Miriam had been considering what Nancy might say to a courtship, but something about Sam’s words gave her pause.
“All right with what?” she asked.
“You know,” he said, returning his hand to her now-covered thigh and squeezing it affectionately. “Enjoying ourselves together, when we have the time to get away. Appreciating what we can have with one another, not worrying about what we can’t.”
Miriam finally understood what he was saying. Sam wasn’t interested in pursuing her for anything beyond what brief connections they could manage for the moment.
Her uncertainty in the face of this realization must have shown upon her face, because Sam blushed and pulled his hand away.
“I wouldn’t want to treat you dishonestly.” He threw the pickup into reverse, backing out of the forest slowly. His tone, his expression, his body language were all chillier; he wasn’t making love to her now, he was being conscientious and precise. “I can’t offer you more.”
The idea of a casual arrangement didn’t offend her—they were young and barely knew one another beyond their mutual attraction—but just the same, it felt strange to hear that he’d already decided that this was all it could ever be.
“What did you expect?” he asked, pulling farther away.
She hadn’t intended for her silence to convey displeasure—she was just a bit confused and needed to think before she spoke.
“I’m not sure what I expected,” Miriam said, in order to say something. “I suppose I expected that if we were here, doing this, that you liked me as I liked you—which to me means giving you a chance.”
“I do like you, Miriam,” he said, increasingly matter-of-fact in a way that didn’t set her at ease. “But what else could this be, given who we are?”
Miriam realized that Sam wasn’t talking about the improbable match of a blacksmith’s boy with a diabolist’s niece. He was talking about something much more personal. Something Miriam couldn’t change—and wouldn’t, even if she had the chance.
All she wanted was to be who she was without it being worthy of comment.
“I see,” she said, her tone as icy as the landscape beyond the windshield as they rambled overland toward the road.
“Surely you’d want to settle down with, you know. One of your own kind,” said Sam, increasingly defensive.
“My own kind.” The bitterness in Miriam’s voice was not all due to Sam’s attitude. He was not the only one to have expressed anxiety over the idea of where Miriam belonged. “Who are my own kind, I wonder?”
“You know what I mean!”
Miriam shrugged; it was more that he didn’t understand what she meant.
“To be completely honest,” she said, “I haven’t contemplated settling down at all. There have been moments over the past few years when I’ve experienced some considerable doubt as to whether my own kind will survive the conflict that brought me to Hawkshead.”
“That’s nothing to do with me!” said Sam.
“I didn’t say it was.” Miriam once again used her sleeve to wipe the passenger’s side window free of steam. The rolling, gray-green hills beyond now looked dreary and waterlogged rather than romantic and intriguing; she wondered when they’d be back at the old farmhouse and she could get away from him. “I’m sorry you feel insulted, but you’ve insulted me too.”
“I was just being honest. I didn’t want you getting attached.”
Sam, too, had lost much of his glamour. His upper lip was beaded with moisture, though it wasn’t warm in the cab, and his frown made his full lips look petulant rather than kissable.
“My friends, they all said I was crazy for even talking to you,” he said. “I told them they were wrong, that you were a sweet girl. That you weren’t anything like other—I mean . . .” Sam had the decency to stammer as Miriam sat there, holding herself completely still, staring at him in disbelief. There was no other word for what she was experiencing—Sam clearly thought he was offering a defense of his words and deeds when in fact he was damning himself further. If only he would just stop talking! “Frank, he asked if you’d tried to haggle me down on the price of your mirror, and I said you wouldn’t do that. I defended you.”
Miriam was used to being considered different; she was different. After all, back in Germany they had decided there needed to be a word for what she was: Mischling. Mixed, a mutt, one who was neither this nor that—but even before that, she’d known she wasn’t Jewish to the Jews nor was she properly German to the Gentiles. As proud as she had always been of her family and their ways, the nature of who they were had meant she never fit in anywhere, not even at home.
Then things had changed, and it had become very important to know on some broader level who fit in and who did not. Miriam had suddenly become Jewish, whether she actually felt Jewish or otherwise. This in turn meant she’d started feeling a kinship with her father’s side of the family that she had never felt before—and she started to feel grateful to Gentiles who didn’t treat her with suspicion.
That gratitude had stuck with her even after escaping to England, but something changed for Miriam in that moment. To hear that the other boys in the village—Frank, by name, so probably also Rob and John—had not only also known she was Jewish, but, in spite of being friendly with her in the shops and on the streets, had secretly made jokes about her being miserly and whatever else. It broke something inside Miriam; put a crack in the wall that she’d built up around the shadowed place where she kept all her inconvenient feelings. The darkness she kept pressed down deep inside her seemed to well up from the wound and spoke for her.
“When will we be back? Nancy will be worrying, and I need to pay you for the mirror. It’ll be dark soon, and I know you’ll want to count it twice.”
“That’s not fair!”
“Then I apologize,” said Miriam, not bothering to conceal her insincerity.
The afternoon gloom was turning to evening gloom as they pulled up at the old farmhouse. The kitchen window was bright if not especially cheery in the twilight. Miriam felt as though years had passed and she was far, far older than she had been when she jumped into Sam’s cab a few hours before.
Miriam had her little coin purse ready. “How much for the mirror?”
“Just take it,” said Sam, taking the mirror out of his pocket and putting it down on the seat between them, not into her hand. Huffy as he might be, she would not yield.
“No, I’ll pay you for your work,” she said firmly, but after a long silence she accepted the package and replaced it with a few coins—more than she thought he would ask to be paid, just to be sure he couldn’t accuse her of cheating him—and climbed out of the truck.
She left the door hanging open behind her.
Nancy had clearly been waiting at the kitchen table; she jumped up at Miriam’s sudden intrusion.
“I didn’t intend to be gone so long,” said Miriam.
“Are you all right?” asked Nancy. There was so much worry and care in her voice, but it did little to warm Miriam’s heart.
“Yes. We just talked.” That was mostly true.
Nancy’s eyes filled with tears. “I knew you girls would grow up one day, but—”
“I was just upset,” said Miriam.
“Edith and I quarreled a good deal more than you and Jane ever do, you know. It’s hard, sometimes, being sisters.”
The word took Miriam aback. When they were small, Miriam and Jane had agreed that no matter what anyone else might say, they were sisters—no other term could possibly express the depth of their sentiments for one another.
It had been a long time since she’d thought of Jane that way.
Miriam shrugged. “We all say things when we’re upset.”
Nancy looked surprised at Miriam’s calm chilliness, but Miriam didn’t want to discuss the matter further. That would invite questions, and the fewer of those asked the better.
“Are you hungry?”
Miriam’s fingers clutched at the paper-wrapped mirror in her lap. She knew she ought to eat. Her tea was long gone . . . but she was eager to get upstairs.
“I’m just very tired,” she said.
“All right,” said Nancy.
Her adopted aunt stood and started to clear the table. Miriam waited a moment or two, then headed for the stairs.
“Miriam,” said Nancy.
“Yes?” She paused in the doorway.
“Like I said, I knew you girls would grow up one day,” she repeated, sounding nothing like the calm authority figure Miriam was used to. “It’s possible I didn’t prepare you properly for the choices you’ll have to make now that you’re a young lady. When you’re a child, time moves so slowly, and then as you grow up, you never know what will happen at any moment. Emotions run high, and decisions—”
“We didn’t,” said Miriam. She saw no reason to make Nancy worry even if it wasn’t any of her business.
Nancy looked like she might faint. Under other circumstances, it might have been amusing. “Oh! All right. I didn’t mean to pry.”
“Please don’t worry about me,” said Miriam, and then she told a lie, given what she was about to do: “There’s really no need.”
Nancy’s smile was sad. “I can promise you anything but that,” she said.