Godspeed

Chapter 17

We bid our visitors good night.

Schuyler and Penn returned to the kitchen to finish the last of the washing up, and as the doctor held the door for me, I begged a moment longer, standing in the open doorway.

He seemed highly nervous about my being there. Finally, he tugged me inside gently by the sleeve, then closed the door behind me.

I frowned, deeply, and he sighed. “Must you look at me that way? Like a kitten who has had his stolen ball of wool yarn taken from his grasping paws?”

“I’m sorry, sir. It’s just that it has been such a long time since I’ve felt the air so crisp on a night such as this.” I wandered a few steps forward, objecting no longer.

A moment later, I heard him sigh again. “Come on, then. This way.”

My eyes lit up as he led me toward the back of the apartment: toward the balcony.

I had wanted to take in the view from that balcony many times before, but was told that my health was not yet stable enough to risk it; the fact that he was willing to consider it now told me that I must be making some actual progress.

It was a beautiful night, chillier than one might expect for this time of year, and the cold both thrilled and surprised me. It reminded me that I could still feel, all on my own, something of the world around me, though I felt so removed from it most of the time.

He saw me shiver and shook his head. “I should take you back inside.”

“Please, just a few moments more.”

He rolled large blue eyes heavenward and slowly removed his waistcoat. He draped it over my shoulders and instantly I was overwhelmed. It was warm from the heat of his body and smelled of the familiar, only barely detectable scent of his cologne. It was dizzying, it was maddening, and just as the man who wore it, too perfect to be believed.

He leaned over the railing of the balcony so far, I was certain that he was going to fall. He seemed completely oblivious to the danger and at the same time, everything about his posture dared gravity itself to try to overpower the strength of his will to defy it.

He glanced back at me over his shoulder, the edge of his lip curling upward slightly on one side. "You look as if you're about to see catastrophe unfold right before your wide, innocent eyes." He scoffed as I visibly relaxed the moment he returned to a safer distance from the edge.

"It's not the obvious dangers in this life you must beware of. It's the ones that you cannot imagine that cause the most mortal harm."

I couldn’t help but wonder what mortal harm had befallen him, when he least suspected it. Quickly I changed the subject though, to try to prolong the exchange. “Schuyler seems, at times, so unhappy. It concerns me.”

“Schuyler will never be happy,” he observed. “His priorities in life are skewed, offset from balance. A man must know what it is that he is seeking from life if he is ever meant to find it.”

“If he is offset from balance, sir, should you not, as his oldest friend, be able to help set him right? To show him the way down a more sure-footed path?”

He nearly laughed at the thought, but held back from fully doing so, as he ever did. True laughter was not something that was a part of who he was, and I had to ask myself now if it ever, once, had been.

“He would find that idea insulting at worst and amusing at best,” he replied. “You see, he has taken it upon himself to keep these wandering feet of mine upon the ‘straight and narrow’. I am loath to tell him that he can spend the rest of his days in the attempt, but they are still surely meant to stray from the course he’d have me trod like a dutiful workhorse.”