She was there again, sitting alone on the gray stone bench, with only the moon for company. He had seen her in the small neighborhood park located at the end of a quiet cul-de-sac every night for the past week, felt himself drawn to her without knowing why. Perhaps it was the golden color of her hair, or simply the knowledge that she looked as lost and alone as he felt.
Tonight, she was crying. Silent tears washed down her cheeks as she stared at the swings silhouetted in the darkness. He noticed she made no move to wipe the tears away, only sat there in the dark, looking forlorn.
Before he quite realized what he was doing, he found himself walking toward her.
She looked up, startled, as he sat down beside her. He saw the sudden panic that flared in the depths of her dark brown eyes as she started to rise.
He placed a restraining hand on her arm. "Don't go," he said quietly.
She stared at him, her heart pounding wildly.
"Please," he said.
She shivered at the sound of his voice. It was deep and sexy and inexplicably sad. "Who are you?" She stared at his hand, alarmed by the strength of his grip. "What do you want?"
"I mean you no harm."
"Then let me go."
He held her a moment longer, then released his hold on her arm. "Stay a while," he urged.
"Why?" She glanced around, reassured by the presence of other people nearby. "What do you want from me?"
He shook his head. "Nothing. I saw you crying, and... you reminded me of someone I knew a long time ago."
She made a soft sound of disdain. "That's the oldest line in the book."
"So it is," he agreed with a wry grin. "It was old even when I was young."
She sniffed, wiping the tears from her eyes so she could see him more clearly. "You don't look so old to me."
"I'm older than you think," he replied ruefully. "Tell me, why do you weep?"
"Weep?" She laughed softly. In all her 23 years, she'd never heard anyone use that word except in books.
"You're crying," he said persistently. "Why?"
"Why do you care? You don't even know me."
He shrugged, bewildered by his attraction to this strange woman. And yet there was something about her that drew him, some indefinable essence that reminded him of Sara Jayne.
"I've seen you sitting here every night for the past week," he said with a shrug.
"Oh?"
He nodded. "I like to walk through the park in the evening," he said, his gaze lingering on the pulse throbbing in her throat.
"Don't you know it's not safe to wander around after dark in L.A.?"
"Don't you?"
"Maybe I'm hoping some pervert will come along and do me in," she retorted.
"Do you in?" He frowned at her as he sought to comprehend her meaning. Language, too, had changed drastically in the last half-century.
"Kill me," she said bluntly.
"You're not serious?"
She shrugged. "Maybe I am. Maybe I'm tired of living."
"You're so young," he muttered. "How could you possibly be tired of living?"
"Maybe because I've got nothing to live for."
She stared at the concrete path beneath her feet, wishing she had never been born. Everyone she had ever loved was dead. Why hadn't she died, too? What was there to live for now? A rainy night, a drunk driver, and she had lost her parents, her husband, her baby daughter.
"What's your name?" he asked. But he knew, knew what it would be even before she spoke.
"Sarah. What's yours?"
He hesitated a moment. "Gabriel."
"Well, Gabriel, it was nice to meet you, but I think I'll be going now."
"Will you be here tomorrow night?"
"I don't think so."
He watched her walk away, felt the pain and the despair that engulfed her, the all-encompassing sense of loneliness.
"Sarah, wait."
With an impatient sigh, she turned around, waiting for him to catch up with her. He was a tall man, with long black hair and dark gray eyes. He had the look of a foreigner, she thought, though she had detected no accent in his voice. Spanish, or maybe Italian, she decided, but she didn't really care.
"What do you want now?" she asked.
"Let me walk you home."
"Listen, Gabriel, I guess you're trying to be nice, but I'm really not in the mood for company, so why don't you just go away and leave me alone?"
"Very well," Gabriel said. Taking her hand, he bowed over it. "I'm sorry to have troubled you."
Sarah stared after him as he walked away, bewildered by his old-world courtliness. She took a few steps, then turned back, intending to apologize for her rudeness, but it was too late. He was gone.
She glanced around, wondering how he had disappeared so quickly, and then, with a sigh, she walked home, back to the quiet four-bedroom house that had once symbolized everything she held dear; a house that was empty now, as empty as her life.
Inside, she sat in the front room, sitting in the dark as she had every night since she got home from the hospital. She couldn't make herself sleep in the king-size bed she had shared with David, couldn't make herself go into the nursery. She didn't answer the phone, didn't open the mail, didn't turn on the television. She slept during the day so she wouldn't have to remember how full her life had once been.
Before the accident, each new day had been brimming with promise. On weekday mornings, she had spent a quiet half-hour with David before he went to work, packing his lunch, eating breakfast, kissing him good-bye. Shortly thereafter, Natalie would wake up, eager to be held. She'd been such a happy, contented baby, always smiling, her chubby fingers reaching out to grasp at life, eager to explore...
Sarah shook her head, willing the images away, not wanting to remember, unable to forget. She closed her eyes and the memory of a tiny white coffin resting amid three larger ones rose up to haunt her.
The tears came then, and she huddled in a corner of the sofa, steeped in misery, wishing the stranger she'd met in the park had been the depraved killer she had read about in the paper a few days before the accident. The woman in the story had claimed that a monster with red eyes had attacked her in an alley and bitten her in the neck. "Just like Dracula," she had claimed.
Sarah frowned. Perhaps, subconsciously, she'd been hoping to run into the blood-sucker when she started walking in the park at night.
Just before sleep claimed her, she found herself thinking of the strange man in the park. There had been a world of sadness in the depths of his dark gray eyes, but she had been too caught up in her own misery to spare a thought for his.
Now, on the brink of sleep, she wondered if he, too, had lost a loved one. If he, too, had been wandering in the dark, searching for oblivion.
She dreamed of him that night, odd, fragmented dreams that made no sense upon awaking, but then, dreams never made sense in the cold light of day.
For a little while, she stared up at the ceiling, trying to remember what the dreams had been about, but all she could remember was the sound of his voice, lost and alone, whispering her name, and the sadness in his eyes, a sorrow that went beyond grief, beyond pain. An endless eternity of sadness, she thought.
Sarah glanced at the window, saw that it was almost dawn, and drew the covers up over her head, shutting out the light, turning her back on the memories that crowded in on her.
She went back to the park that night. Sitting on the hard stone bench, she stared at the swings, wondering why she did this to herself. On one level, she told herself she didn't want to remember, yet she came here every night and stared at the swing, remembering the sound of Natalie's laughter as her grandmother pushed her in the swing, higher and higher...
She knew he was there even before he appeared beside the bench. Looking up at him, she refused to admit that she had come to the park that night hoping to see him again.
"Good evening," Gabriel said. He gestured at the bench. "May I?"
She shrugged. "It's a free country."
He was wearing black again. Black T-shirt, black jeans, black cowboy boots. Somehow, she couldn't imagine him in any other color. He was dark and mysterious, like the night, she thought fancifully, and black suited him very well.
"How are you this evening, Sarah?" he asked, and his voice was warm and thick, like sun-baked honey.
"I'm all right."
Gabriel shook his head. "I don't think so."
"You don't know anything about me," she snapped.
"I know you're grieving."
"How do you know that?"
"I can feel your pain, Sarah, your sorrow."
"That's impossible."
"Is it? You've lost loved ones who were very dear to you. A husband, a child."
She stared at him, her dark brown eyes mirroring her confusion, her anxiety. "How can you possibly know that?"
He smiled faintly. "I have a talent for reading minds."
"I don't believe in that kind of thing."
"You lost your parents, too, and you feel guilty because they died and you didn't. You come here in the evening because your house is empty, and the nighttime hours are too long and too lonely."
He had frightened her now. He could see it in the sudden tensing of her shoulders, in the way she held herself, rigid and poised for flight.
"How can you know that?" she demanded, her anger overriding her fear.
"I told you, I have the ability to divine your thoughts."
"What am I thinking now?"
"You're wishing a policeman would come by."
Sarah laughed softly. "Not likely at this time of night. They're all at Winchell's having donuts and coffee."
He laughed with her, the first time he had laughed in years, and it felt good.
The smile transformed his face, and for the first time Sarah realized that he was quite a handsome man. Feeling as though she were being disloyal to David, she quickly put the thought from her mind.
"I'd better go," she said.
"I mean you no harm, Sarah."
"I know, but... I'm not... I can't..." She stood up, her arms crossed over her breasts. "Good night."
He watched her walk away, and then he dissolved into a dark mist and followed her home. He stood in the shadows outside her house until he was sure she was safely inside. Only then did he turn away, hoping desperately that he would see her again.
She went to the park the next night, and the next, and the next, not knowing what it was about this strange man that drew her back to him night after night. She only knew that he seemed familiar somehow, that his very presence soothed her in some indefinable way.
Their relationship was a strange one. They sat side by side, rarely speaking, yet each drawing comfort from the other's presence.
After two weeks, Gabriel had decided their nightly encounters were destined to go on that way indefinitely, with the two of them meeting and not speaking; more than strangers, less than friends. And yet, for him, for now, it was enough. Meeting Sarah each evening gave purpose to his life, gave him something to look forward to.
And then she showed up late one night, her face whiter than new-fallen snow, her eyes shadowed and red, her whole demeanor one of abject despair.
Gabriel rose to his feet as she walked toward him, alarmed by her appearance. "Sarah, what is it?"
She stared up at him, her arms hanging limply at her sides. "It's July first," she said, her voice ragged.
Gabriel nodded, not comprehending.
"It would have been our fourth anniversary." Tears welled in her eyes and cascaded down her cheeks. "Natalie would have been two."
"Sarah..."
"Why?" She screamed the word at him. "Why did it happen?" Sobs shook her body as she pummeled his chest with her fists. "Why didn't we stay home that night? Why didn't I die, too?"
She hit him again and again, needing to vent her anger, to unleash the rage she had kept carefully bottled up for the past six months. And all the while she asked the same question over and over again: Why, why, why?
He had no answer, only stood there while her tightly clenched fists pounded against his chest and tears streamed down her cheeks, until she collapsed against him, like a puppet whose strings had been cut.
Murmuring her name, he swept her into his arms and cradled her against his chest, holding her effortlessly.
And still the tears came, with no sign of letting up.
Gabriel glanced around. There weren't many people wandering through the park at this time of night - a couple of kids pawing each other in the shadows, a vagrant snoring beneath a tree - yet Gabriel felt the need to get her inside, away from prying eyes.
Settling her more firmly in his arms, he started walking.
It took several minutes for Sarah to realize they were leaving the park. "Where are you going?"
"I'm taking you home."
"No! I can't go back there." She couldn't face that dark, empty house, couldn't face the memories that were waiting to engulf her. She shuddered, as though overcome with a chill. "Not tonight."
"All right."
She went limp in his arms, trusting him without knowing why, or maybe simply too emotionally wrung out to care what happened to her.
She closed her eyes, her cheek resting against his chest. Cool air feathered over her face as he walked along, his footsteps light and even, as if he were floating instead of walking. She seemed to hear his voice inside her mind, urging her to relax, to rest, assuring her that everything would be all right. And she believed him. It felt good to have someone taking care of her again, even if that someone was a stranger.
He'd gone only a few blocks when he felt the tension drain out of her and knew she'd fallen asleep.
It was a long walk to the mansion, but he carried her easily, using the power of his mind to cloak their presence as a police car drove by.
The door of the mansion opened at his bidding, then closed behind him. He carried her up the long, winding staircase and down the hall to the bedroom at the end of the spacious corridor.
She stirred as he bent over the bed to draw back the covers, her eyelids fluttering open, her brown eyes wide and bewildered as she looked up at him.
"Where are we?"
"You didn't want to go to your house, so I brought you to mine."
She knew a moment of gut-wrenching fear. For some reason, it had been easy to trust him out in the open, but here, in this unfamiliar room, she felt trapped, defenseless.
"No," she said, her voice too high, "I can't stay here."
His dark gaze held hers. "Go to sleep, Sarah," he said quietly. "You've nothing to fear."
And once again, she believed him without knowing why. She felt suddenly weightless, limp. Her eyelids fluttered down. She sighed once, and then she was asleep.
Gabriel stood at the foot of the bed, watching her for a long while. He seemed to have a habit of picking up orphans and strays, he thought ruefully, but there was something about this girl that called to him. Perhaps it was merely that her hair was the same color as Sara Jayne's had been. Or perhaps it was because this Sarah, too, was alone in the world. Whatever the reason, he felt an irresistible urge to comfort her.
Shortly before dawn, he drove to the all-night market and bought a variety of foodstuffs - an assortment of breakfast cereal, fruit, milk, instant coffee, tea, bread, butter, jelly, eggs, cheese. A jar of bubble bath that smelled like wildflowers, a bar of scented soap. A bottle of dark red wine.
Food had changed, too, he thought as he dumped a package of meat into the wobbly shopping cart. Bread came already sliced and neatly wrapped in plastic. Milk came in various-sized containers, though he couldn't remember seeing any cows in the vicinity. Not only that, but there were now all kinds of milk: low fat, no fat, whole, raw, homogenized. In his youth, there had been but one kind of milk, the kind that came straight out of the cow, unless one preferred the milk of goats.
He tried to remember what eating three meals a day had been like as he drove home; tried to remember the taste of bread, of butter, of eggs and cheese, as he carried the brown paper bags into the kitchen and began to put things away. But he had no recollection of tastes or textures, save for the vague memory of forcing himself to eat a meal Sara Jayne had prepared for him a century ago, and all he really remembered of that experience was going outside to vomit it back up.
He grinned wryly as he opened the refrigerator. He had lived in this place for three months and this was the first time he had used the refrigerator to hold anything other than an occasional bottle of wine.
The sun was climbing over the horizon when he made his way down the short flight of stairs that led to what had once been a wine cellar.
Opening the door, he stepped inside, then bolted the door behind him, wondering if she would still be there when he woke that evening.
