Morris has grown so accustomed to this ritual that he reminds her to place a wee saucer of food on the sill if she forgets to do so; its absence makes him uncomfortable, like viewing a crooked picture on a wall. Candice, until she turned fifteen, would occasionally place a pretty feather, a handful of forget-me-nots, or an unusual stone upon that sill. (Now she has matured beyond such superstitions and chooses to ignore the saucer’s existence. She doesn’t dare deride it, though, beyond rolling her eyes.) Andy—straight A, encyclopedia-loving Andy — regards the saucer on the sill as something sound, something necessary. He justifies this feeling by telling himself that even the astronauts and technicians at NASA respect certain superstitions, especially after the flight of Apollo 13.
But the white hart is a magic too unusual for Karen; it’s an oddity far beyond the realm of her world. Despite the strangeness of her birthmarks, despite the way she views electricity and automation, despite her eclectic religious upbringing, she cannot accept the appearance of the white hart. It has to be a hallucination; things like that don’t happen in the real world. It isn’t magic; it’s ... imaginary.
Yet listening to Moey Thorpe talk about the connection he sees between belly dancing at the Footstop and the appearance of the white hart, she can’t deny that the hart appeared. Here this man sits before her admitting that he saw her hallucination. Ergo, it cannot have been a hallucination. That majestic white beast did materialize on the rocky banks of Lynn Canyon.
Ice feathers brush against Karen’s skin. Her life, she feels, will never be the same again.
Chapter Four
Egret Van Gorder can’t think properly. From the puckish tip of his upturned nose, which exists just below whey-coloured hair and two eyes as blue as God’s heaven, down to his sneaker-clad feet, fever grips him. Every inch of his lean, hard body effuses fever — in his sharp replies, in his constant activity, in his Tommy Hilfiger clothes and the snap of his torso as he powers off the board into a one-and-a-half pike. They all speak of fever. Pussy fever.
He has it bad. No amount of jerking off, no amount of partying or diving practice, can drive this wild, raging need from under his skin. As desperate as a junkie looking for a fix, he needs to plunge himself into the warm, wriggling wetness of a woman. This makes him intensely aggressive on the trampoline, makes him drive too fast in his dad’s car, makes him steal the Man’s custom-built Virago 1100 and take it for a spin around the block in the pouring rain.
Egret Van Gorder can’t be held responsible for his state; he is, after all, a teenager, and therefore a slave to his hormones. A virgin teenager, to be exact.
Not that Egret isn’t attractive. Sure, his fingers have slid into the mysterious salty depths of more than one gasping girl. His lips have closed around sweet, firm nipples while his pelvis has ground the attached, fully-clothed hips into the bleachers at Mahon Stadium. But he has yet to submerge his submarine into the waters of fair Atlantis.
He is certain that out of the 239 guys in Sutherland Secondary School, he is the only male virgin left. And the real bitch of that is his age; because of his intense training schedule, he is in a special half-time program at school. This decelerated learning plan makes him a couple of years older than his classmates, and so here he is, a fucking nineteen-year-old virgin.
Once, he could have had Lucy Ng. He was that close to breaking down. Instead, Lucy’s robust lips nearly ripped his dick from its roots during a vodka-laced blow job, and he actually enjoyed the ordeal, despite the alarming bruises that appeared the day after.
Why did he relish such brutish treatment?
Because while Lucy was trying to suck his intestines out through his cock, he had visions of another pair of lips doing the same thing. Lips that belonged to a slim, aloof creature with green eyes. Lips attached to a body that held a second set of lips nestled beneath a mound of red hair between smooth white legs. Lips that belonged to Candice Morton.
To those fleshy lower lips and those lips alone he vowed to lose his virginity.
With a complete absence of thought that is, in many respects, akin to the fever that grips young Egret, Karen sits at her kitchen table and stares blindly at a magazine. Since Moey Thorpe left her at noon, she hasn’t turned a page. It is now 3:15.
On rainy days such as these when nary a customer appears, Karen works in her shop creating Footstop merchandise. If she feels uninspired, she flips through magazines instead, combing the pages for ideas on new products. Today even that is beyond her.
She has a hundred other tasks crying out for her attention: as a volunteer for the North Shore Neighbourhood House, she has pamphlets to deliver; as a canvasser for the Canadian Cancer Society, she has doors to knock on and donations to collect; as a mother to a budding inventor, she has a list of peculiar hardware items to shop for. But again she is incapable of turning her attention to any of these tasks.
Instead, she tries to recall her conversation with Moey, but she can’t. All she can remember is his burnt-toast-brown eyes fixed so intently upon her, his pulse pounding so visibly in his thick neck. And that one phrase he used, which keeps tolling like a bell over and over in her mind: When I die, I don’t want to regret how I’ve lived, and I know if I don’t do this, that’s how I’ll die. Full of regret.
Her birthmarks still tingle at his words.
A thousand questions now whirl in her mind. Why does he want to dance for tips only at the Footstop? Why not at a Middle Eastern restaurant? Okay, okay, so he believes that the white hart wants him to dance here, at the teahouse, but still ... what makes a kick boxer want to belly-dance, anyway? And how on earth is she going to explain this to Morris?
“I shouldn’t have said yes,” she murmurs. “Why did I say yes?”
The front doorbell rings, jolting her out of her daze. Wondering irritably who it can be — only Jehovah’s Witnesses use the front door — she fumbles for her crutches and struggles out of the chair. The doorbell peals again as she lurches along the hall.
“Coming!” she shouts. “Hold your horses!”
Squeak, lurch, swing; squeak, lurch, swing — breathless and red-cheeked, she makes it to the end of the hall and fumbles with the door handle, crutches lodged under her armpits.
A rain-soaked teenager with startling blue eyes stands on the doorstep, hunched in an Adidas sweatshirt. Like all boys his age, he wears no coat and towers several inches above her.
“Uh, could I speak to Candice?”
“She’s not back from school yet. She usually isn’t home until four.”
“Oh.” He shuffles a bit.
A swirl of cold wind shoves the door from Karen’s hand, thumps it against the wall, and splatters her with raindrops. She shivers and gropes for the door again. “Well, I’ll tell her you came by .?”
“Egret. No, don’t bother. I’ll hang around till four.”
“Out here? You’ll catch pneumonia. Come inside and wait.”
“It’s no problem if I wait out here, Mrs. Morton —”
“Mrs. Morton is my husband’s mother,” she says reflexively. “My name is Karen.” He grins. “Karen.”
“Come in, come in, it’s freezing out here. Shoot the bolt across when you shut the door.”
She pivots and starts down the hall. A pause, then the door thuds closed at her back. The deadbolt snicks into its slot. Footsteps follow her as she staggers down the hall towards the kitchen.
“How did you bust your foot, Mrs. — uh...Karen?”
“I fell in the canyon. Trying to catch my cat.”
“Off a cliff?”
“Nothing