Sunshine and Shadow Read online

  Sunshine and Shadow

  By

  Sharon and Tom Curtis

  Contents

  Author's Note

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  "Why do you do this to me?" she whispered.

  He could hear her breath quicken, but as his hands came around her she pulled away, turning toward him with passion-brightened eyes that raised the heat in his body tike a tide.

  "I've brought you a present." Her words seemed random, whimsically sincere, and they made him smile. Her cape fell in a black halo around her as she knelt by her cloth bag. He watched curiously as she drew out a dark object. It was a bird's nest.

  "This one is special. It blew inside my open window while I was sleeping. At the time, I thought it had great significance, that it meant a wonderful thing was going to happen to me."

  He started to go to her, but she shook her head. She looked frightened. "Alan, you have to understand. It can't be. For us, it's like the birds. We nest with our own kind. I know—I think I know—that you want something less. But what you want is impossible."

  He wanted to be able to let her go, but his need was more potent than anything he had ever known. And it must nave been that hers was also, because the strength seemed to leave her suddenly and she covered her face briefly with her hands.

  "Touch me," she whispered. "Do it. Quickly."

  SUNSHINE AND SHADOW

  A Bantam Book October 1986

  All rights reserved.

  Copyright © 1986 by Thomas Dale Curtis and Sharon Curtis.

  Cover art copyright © 1986 by Franco Accornera.

  ISBN 0-553-25047-7

  Published simultaneously in the United States and Canada

  Author's Note

  Dear Reader,

  Sunshine and Shadow is the story of a desperate forbidden love between an Amish girl and an outsider, who can be together only if one of them will sacrifice everything.

  We approached the idea of an Amish setting with delight. Not long ago, most of us were as the Amish are now. America was a nation of farmers. The fascination many of us feel for things Amish may come not from how foreign and apart from us they seem, but from how familiar. They are living our heritage, prospering in a history that is rapidly vanishing beyond their horse-tilled acreage.

  Though Sharon's ancestry is not Amish, it is markedly similar. Her grandparents were Swiss Lutheran farmers, much like the Amish in their European background and German dialect. Like the Amish they were frugal, independent, great storytellers and great teasers, and patient with everything but conceit, affectation, and cows who sent them flying with a well-aimed hoof at milking time if their hands were cold. It was Sharon's grandmother who first hefted her up into the secret universe of a haymow, who showed her where to find lady's slippers in the woods. Among her grandmother's favorite stories are the ones about her country school days.

  My own grandfather, James Eddie Curtis, was a farmer, poet, bluegrass musician, and storyteller from the hills of southeastern Kentucky. I have saved and cherished his letters to me. In 1974 he wrote:

  I brought down one of the old comfort quilts your great grandmother made in 1924. It needed four blocks replaced. I put in new ones, hand stitched, then cross-stitched the rail fence pattern on each seam with heavy silk thread…

  The letter and the quilt still exist, imparting a lingering warmth, both painstakingly created by hand, both intended to give love long after the giver has gone.

  Our title, Sunshine and Shadow, was inspired by a famous quilt pattern, one much used by Amish women. With its exquisite blend of light and dark colors, the "sunshine and shadow" pattern is meant to capture symbolically the rich joys and deep tragedies of life, to remind us that the dark moments will pass and the peace and sunshine will return, and that each cycle has within it the power to enhance the meaning of its opposite. For us, this simple yet subtle concept held the essence of the love story in our book about two people who are at once torn from each other and pulled closer through their differences.

  The more we learned about the Amish, the more our admiration for them increased, but I can date to a single moment the instant I fell in love with their culture. On a visit to a one-room Amish schoolhouse, I found a tiny kapp, what we might call a bonnet, lying on a desk where it had been left by a small girl at day's end. It was weightless, fragile, and so finely made that I could see my hand through it—revealing the care of the maker for the wearer.

  That evening we took a ride in a buggy pulled by a pair of fine Morgan horses. We had already chosen the title for our book at that time, and so you can imagine our pleasant surprise when, at the end of the journey, the driver pulled back on the reins and spoke to his horses in a quiet voice; "Whoa, Sunshine… Whoa, Shadow…"

  Love,

  Tom and Sharon Curtis

  Chapter 1

  He liked the monster. Some monsters had it. Some didn't. This one did. Take the Creature from the Black Lagoon, for instance, or the Rancor monster in Return of the Jedi. They had real charisma. If a monster had that "certain something," movie audiences were perfectly cheerful about watching him consume half the cast.

  Alan Wilde looked at his monster, realized that it was going to become the central ingredient of an instant horror-film classic, and leaned back against the woven wire fence, sparing a warm thought for his Creature Design supervisor.

  It was one of the few warm thoughts that had crossed Alan Wilde's mind in days.

  The weather here didn't lend itself to warm thoughts. Here. Wisconsin. What addled chain of logic had led him to the conclusion that he wanted to make this movie in Wisconsin? It was hard to remember that the location was close to perfect for his purposes. His staff had hyped him on Greyling. They'd given him material from the Wisconsin Film Advisory Board glorifying this restored historical village, a kind of midwestern Williamsburg. They were renting the full five hundred acres, including the original coach house, reborn into a modern hotel, for the two months before it was open to tourists. His investors were happy; the rent was cheap.

  Probably it hadn't been logic at all, only a flare of self-deceptive arrogance. If Francis Ford Coppola could make a movie in Oklahoma, then Alan Wilde could make a movie in Wisconsin. Bad thinking. Very dangerous.

  Wilde glanced around the high meadow, marred as it was by the more than fifty members of his crew, shapeless in unfamiliar woolens: the sound man, the mixer, props people, special effects, electricians, grips, the assistants to the assistants—the men and women who became extensions of the visions of his mind, the will of his muscles. The trailers and the tons of heavy equipment were becoming slimy with condensation in the cold, clammy air. The actors had had to work with mouthfuls of ice chips to keep their breaths from misting. The theatrical blood had frozen so often, they'd begun to use vodka instead of water as its base. Appropriately ghoulish.

  This was the last day in April. The date on today's call sheet proclaimed it openly, but the mercury in the outdoor thermometers registered so low that it might as well have been the day after Christmas. I
t was supposed to warm up over the weekend.

  Wilde had never been fond of spring. It was messy and unreliable, overrated—like success. Back in L.A., bodies were baking in the sun. Flowers were blooming on the hillsides. God help him, he was even beginning to miss the smog. It had to be more wholesome than this interminable chill.

  Time crept, as it had so often for him lately, inching frame by frame as though he were running in slow motion to a Vangelis score. He had damned few destinations left to run to. He had the palacelike home in Beverly Hills with Japanese parchment screens and koa wood, and the pool he never had time to swim in. He had the obscenely expensive imported car that spent most of its time in the repair shop waiting for a vital piece of its imported guts to make its way through the intricacies of international mail. He had the Oscar that haunted him, the ghost of hungrier days. And he had the women who came and went like honeybees in his life, their presence leaving little impression on the curious silence in his spirit.

  He ran a desultory finger along the fence wire, registering the abrasive filings of rust through his leather glove, and it occurred to him that he would never use his own character in a movie—the rich, cynical movie director. Yes, bored and cynical. Why did that sound like a law firm? Too obvious; too corny. Trite. What happened to people who turned into living clichés?

  His script supervisor, Joan, was walking by, her runny nose bent toward her clipboard, her magnificent red hair turning to strings in the wind. He stopped her with a touch.

  "How're you doing?" she asked.

  "Coming to the conclusion that I'm bored and cynical," he said.

  She slipped her hand under the lamb suede collar of his jacket, dragged down his head to tease her tongue slowly along the edge of his ear, and whispered a cure for his boredom. His body kept its chill, even though she was cute and trying so hard to please him. He took her chin lightly between his fingers and smiled, a smile that he knew hadn't reached his eyes when she pulled back, gazing at him, manufacturing a shiver that had nothing to do with the weather. She left him after a playful shake of her head.

  It was unprofessional as hell to flirt with an employee on the set. People were staring at him, his reputation a cage around him. Each bar of that cage was forged from a half-truth, yet still the whole was as strong as iron. His genius, his promiscuity, his frigid emotions had become industry legends. And inside there was only a human being who was wondering how to stop discarding himself.

  Max, his director of photography, came puffing up, his balding head stuffed into an Irish tweed cap. He was nursing a cold, and his handkerchief blew out from the side of his face like a white banner of surrender into the chafing wind.

  "I don't like the light." Max glared up at the absent sun as if he wanted to replace it with a tungsten bulb. "What d'you think?"

  They'd been fighting all day about the light. Wilde said, "I think that I'm bored and cynical."

  "Yeah? Well, I think that I'm Ferrante and Teicher." Still looking upward he added, "Damn clouds."

  Wilde took his D.P's shoulders in a friendly grip.

  "You want me to help you with the clouds, Max?" He redirected his gaze from Max's crimson nose to the stratosphere. "Clouds!" he commanded. "Clear the sun!"

  By odd coincidence one actually did, and a ray of sunlight shot down to the meadow at a long angle. Laughter ruffled through the crew. If they thought they were supposed to, they would have laughed at his reading of the back of a cereal box, and he knew it. But the laughter improved his mood anyway.

  "Don't let it go to your head." Max grinned as he blew his nose. "You happy with the way that reflector's placed now?" He indicated it with the flexing of one shoulder.

  Wilde grinned back, remembering the days when the perfect placing of a reflector would have been enough to make him happy. When had the cyclone of creative decisions ceased to excite him? He glanced north, following the line of wire fence as it rushed along the meadow's lip. Two crows perched there. If the crow on the right flies first, I'll like the placement of the reflector. If the crow on the left flies first, I'll have it moved. The breeze sprayed a fan of yellow grass against the fence, and the crow on the right launched itself into the wind.

  "The reflector is fine." Wilde pushed off from the fence. Scratch the self-doubt, he told himself. No one would believe it was in character.

  He walked across the meadow, dispensing directions, settling back into his role of Godfather and Khan in the same way that an actor settles into a monster costume.

  The actor in this particular monster costume was one of his closest friends. Dash Davis—not his real name, of course—was a veteran of TV westerns, and "oh, yeah, that guy" face to millions who couldn't have matched it with a name. A cluster of wardrobe and makeup people had just finished twenty minutes' worth of work attaching the monster mask to Dash's head. One of them must have told Dash that the director was making his way through the busy crew, because as Wilde approached, the monster began to lumber toward him, hideous claws uplifted menacingly.

  "Wanna kiss?" asked the monster, voice muffled by thick foam rubber.

  Wilde dropped a courtier's kiss on one gory paw. "Fangs become you."

  "Hell, this is the best I've looked in years. Will I play in Peoria?"

  "You'll scare the hell out of Peoria."

  Rick Lessa's self-satisfied smile lengthened as he stood back admiring his creation, one hand hooked in a belt loop, the other running lazily through his punk haircut. He'd created the monster—and was something of a monster himself. "And Alan will do big box office scaring the kiddies until they hide under their seats."

  The remark irritated Wilde on several levels, but the directorial persona never betrayed irritation on a set. The actors were temperamental, the highly creative members of the technical crew were temperamental, the writers were temperamental. The more frantic the atmosphere became, the more calm Alan Wilde grew; the more patience he exuded. His pictures came in on time add on budget, even sometimes under budget.

  "I'm looking for a PG-13, so the kiddies will have to sit this one out." He said to Dash, "What's it like in there? Can you see? Can you breathe?"

  "Poorly. Very poorly. But I'm warm."

  "Warm? The rest of us have forgotten what that feels like. Let's shoot this thing and go home before someone tries to wrestle you for that costume. If you're finished, Rick?"

  In a series of complex and beautifully dovetailed movements, the crew prepared to roll film. It would be a minor piece of footage, an extreme long shot of one well-mangled victim and the monster, rattling around, barely visible inside a wall of foliage. Meaningless without the sorcery of editing and score. Simple, except that in making a film, the simplest act was elaborate.

  Wilde relaxed into the security of his professional anxieties. Was the special-effects foreman overdoing the artificial haze? Were the reflectors anchored well enough or was one of them about to take off like a sail into the wind? Was Dash getting enough oxygen in there?

  He watched a young technician with a battery pack and blow drier feed cool air full force into the monster's mouth. The cameraman focused on the horseshoe meadow of golden grasses where the victim lay. The monster went to lurk in the dense growth of trees.

  Joan joined him and whispered, "I like the set. It looks very natural."

  "It better, after the money we've sunk into it… Two weeks of planting to make a pasture look natural…" Sound was up to speed. Film rolling. Quiet on the set. Clap board. Technicians busy making notations. "Okay. Action."

  Moments passed. The corpse lay. The monster, unseen, began to touch branches eerily. The camera panned and the assistant racked focus.

  Okay. Enough of this. Very nice, and all in one take. Let's get Dash out of that armor and call it a day. He was about to call out, "Cut. Print that."

  All at once the monster burst from the trees, his grotesque form vaulting forward like a bounding elephant. He was followed immediately by a sprite of a girl in a long dress who was doing her lev
el best to crack him over the head with a gnarled branch.

  "What in the…" Alan heard his own shock. A babble rose from the crew, echoing his confusion.

  "Hey, is this some kind of a gag?"

  "What's going on? Where's Security?"

  "Where in the hell did she come from? Is this in the script?"

  "No." Alan took a swift step. "This is a total—" Total blank. Although distance obscured her features, it was clear that this was no gag. Every motion of the girl's body radiated terror. She thought she was fighting off a monster. Crazy. Yet riveting. Vintage "Saturday Night Live." Her full mauve skirts danced and caught in the high grass as she tore after Dash. The black triangle of a shawl was slipping from her slight shoulders. A wisp of a bonnet wanted to tumble from her dusky hair.

  "Do you know what she is? Amish!" Joan, speaking quickly, had grabbed his arm. "You know, Amish. This area is full of them…"

  "Oh, my God, she's knocked out his eye!" Rick Lessa, his lips turning white, his breath appearing in short, angry-looking clumps of vapor, was standing straight as a rod. "Five days, I worked on that eye. I'll kill her."

  Watching Rick take off at a run, Alan decided he really might be about to have a murder on his set. He was running after Rick when it occurred to him suddenly, surprisingly, that he was laughing, sweet, irresistible, genuine laughter.

  Spring roared like a lion. The forest path bellowed the joy of the ripening season. The bracing air nipped at Susan Peachey. Her body seemed to be bursting with strange excitement. Exhilaration. Following the wooded trail, the children seemed to float behind her like dancing leaves. Their footsteps were nearly silent on the loamy earth, their cries filled with delight as they discovered each herald of the reawakening world. Robins had returned. Hepatica, bellwort, and wild geraniums were tucked like smiles in forest corners. Pussy willows grew like soft silver kittens on arching boughs.