Your Heart Belongs to Me. Dean Koontz

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СКАЧАТЬ began to think of making love to Samantha. Once the urge arose, it swelled into full-blooded desire.

      Hair toweled but damp, she returned to the kitchen, wearing turquoise slacks, a crisp white blouse, and white tennies.

      If she had been in the mood, she would have been barefoot, wearing only a silk robe.

      For weeks at a time, her libido matched his, and she wanted him frequently. He had noticed that her desire was greater during those periods when she was busiest with her writing and the least inclined to consider his proposal of marriage.

      A sudden spell of virtuous restraint was a sign that she was brooding about accepting the engagement ring, as though the prospect of matrimony required that sex be regarded as something too serious, perhaps too sacred, to be indulged in lightly.

      Ryan happily accepted each turn toward abstinence when it seemed to indicate that she was on the brink of making a commitment to him. At twenty-eight, she was six years younger than he was, and they had a life of lovemaking ahead.

      He poured a glass of iced tea for her, and then he went to take a shower. He started with water nearly as cold as the tea.

      In the westering sun, the strawberry trees shed elongated leaf shadows on the flagstone floor of the restaurant patio.

      Ryan and Samantha shared a caprese salad and lingered over their first glasses of wine, not in a hurry to order entrees.

      The smooth peeling bark of the trees was red, especially so in the condensed light of the slowly declining sun.

      “Teresa loved the flowers,” Sam said, referring to her sister.

      “What flowers?”

      “On these trees. They get panicles of little urn-shaped flowers in the late spring.”

      “White and pink,” Ryan remembered.

      “Teresa said they look like cascades of tiny bells, wind chimes hung out by fairies.”

      Six years previously, Teresa had suffered serious head trauma in a traffic accident. Eventually she had died.

      Samantha seldom mentioned her sister. When she spoke of Teresa, she tended to turn inward before much had been said, mummifying her memories in long windings of silence.

      Now, as she gazed into the overhanging tree, the expression in her eyes was reminiscent of that look of longing when, straddling her surfboard in the lineup, she studied far water for the first sign of a new set of swells.

      Ryan was comfortable with Sam’s occasional silences, which he suspected were always related to thoughts of her sister, even when she had not mentioned Teresa.

      They had been identical twins.

      To better understand Sam, Ryan had read about twins who had been separated by tragedy. Apparently the survivor’s grief was often mixed with unjustified guilt.

      Some said the intense bond between identicals, especially between sisters, could not be broken even by death. A few insisted they still felt the presence of the other, akin to how an amputee often feels sensations in his phantom leg.

      Samantha’s contemplative silence gave Ryan an opportunity to study and admire her with a forthrightness that was not possible when she was aware of his stare.

      Watching her, he was nailed motionless by admiration, unable to lift his wineglass, or at least disinterested in it, his eyes alone in motion, traveling the contours of her face and the graceful line of her throat.

      His life was a pursuit of perfection, of which perhaps the world held none.

      Sometimes he imagined that he came close to it when writing lines of code for software. An exquisite digital creation, however, was as cold as a mathematical equation. The most fastidious software architecture was an object of mere precision, not of perfection, for it could not evoke an intense emotional response.

      In Samantha Reach, he’d found a beauty so close to perfection that he could convince himself this was his quest fulfilled.

      Gazing into the tree but focused on something far beyond the red geometry of those branches, Sam said, “After the accident, she was in a coma for a month. When she came out of it … she wasn’t the same.”

      Ryan was kept silent by the smoothness of her skin. This was the first he had heard of Teresa’s coma. Yet the radiance of Sam’s face, in the caress of the late sun, rendered him incapable of comment.

      “She still had to be fed through a tube in her stomach.”

      The only leaf shadows that touched Samantha’s face were braided across her golden hair and brow, as though she wore the wreath of Nature’s approval.

      “The doctors said she was in a permanent vegetative state.”

      Her gaze lowered through the branches and fixed on a cruciform of sunlight that, shimmering on the table, was projected by a beam passing through her wineglass.

      “I never believed the doctors,” she said. “Teresa was still complete inside her body, trapped but still Teresa. I didn’t want them to take out the feeding tube.”

      She raised her eyes to meet his, and he had to make of this a conversation.

      “But they took it out anyway?” he asked.

      “And starved her to death. They said she wouldn’t feel anything. Supposedly the brain damage assured that she’d have no pain.”

      “But you think she suffered.”

      “I know she did. During the last day, the last night, I sat with her, holding her hand, and I could feel her looking at me even though she never opened her eyes.”

      He did not know what to say to that.

      Samantha picked up her glass of wine, causing the cross of light to morph into an arrow that briefly quivered like a compass needle seeking true north in Ryan’s eyes.

      “I’ve forgiven my mother for a lot of things, but I’ll never forgive her for what she did to Teresa.”

      As Samantha took a sip of wine, Ryan said, “But I thought … your mother was in the same accident.”

      “She was.”

      “I was under the impression she died in the crash, too. Rebecca. Was that her name?”

      “She is dead. To me. Rebecca’s buried in an apartment in Las Vegas. She walks and talks and breathes, but she’s dead all right.”

      Samantha’s father had abandoned the family before the twins were two. She had no memory of him.

      Feeling that Sam should hold fast to what little family she had, Ryan almost encouraged her to give her mother a chance to earn redemption. But he kept silent on the issue, because Sam had his sympathy and his understanding.

      His grandparents and hers—all long dead—were of the generation СКАЧАТЬ