The Danger of Being Me (21 page)

Now she leaned forward, propping her forearms on her knees.  I saw her profile beside me, softened by the velvet afternoon light, tear-streaked and unbreakable and a little bit breathtaking.  She coughed out another of those loud, startling laughs, and shook her head.  "Christ," she spat, running her fingers roughly through her hair.  "I sound like such a spoiled fucking bitch."

"The hell you do," I said.  The sound of disgust in my voice made her cast me a sidelong glance, and now she did wipe at the tears which had already mostly dried.  I shook my head.  "It could have been a watch, or a stuffed animal, or a fuckin–"  I almost said
cornicello
, but thought better of it.  "It could have been any fuckin thing at all."

Amber digested that for a long moment.  "So I'm not mourning the thing," she said finally, her lips wrinkling into a little grin, "but what the thing represents?"

I smiled at the explanation.  "Something like that."

She laughed softly.  The sound was neither loud nor startling this time.  "Very Aristotelian."

I turned on the bench to face Amber.  I felt a brief urge to take her face in my hands, and nearly laughed at myself for the thought.  After another few seconds, she sat up to face me, and now her own face did wind up only a foot from mine.  I breathed, and my lungs were flooded by this girl's intoxicating bouquet of spearmint and lime.  It made me tipsy, and I marveled that it wasn't a perfume or a shampoo or some designer fucking shower gel.

It was her.  Just her.  And I felt myself smiling.  "You are not spoiled," I told her.  "And you're not a bitch."

She flashed a faint smirk.  "Unless I have to be."

I nodded, said nothing.  She watched my eyes for a couple of seconds that unspooled like a moment in a dream.  Then her eyes flicked downward, toward my mouth, and I felt certain that we were going to kiss right here on the bleachers of Lockey Hall while her Porsche lay drowned at the bottom of the deep-end.  The thought was so absurd that I laughed at it, startling myself with the sound, and of course that shattered the moment.

Amber smiled, and touched her forehead lightly to mine.  Her gentle russet curls brushed against my cheeks, and I shivered.  "That's twice you've seen me cry."

"Sorry."  It was all I could manage.  But at least it didn't feel lame.  Not this time.  Not even a little.

"I'm not," she told me.  Her eyes were closed, and she sighed like she had finally been able to shed a terrific burden.  "That's twice you've helped me stop."

CHAPTER FOUR

1.

On Saturday night, I picked up Amber in the Wagoneer.

A middle-age woman opened the door of the dramatic Queen Anne in Brookshire.  She had tied her dark hair back with a sheer scarf into an unkempt ponytail that looked freshly washed and hastily bundled.  She wore a pink hooded t-shirt, white capri's, and Keds without socks.  Dizzy déjà vu flooded through me.  I scarcely recognized the woman who had taken me apart and put me back together again on an operating table so long ago.

She caught me staring, and flashed a beauteous smile like a vision of the future, setting me to rights in an instant.  "Michael," she said, her voice airy and contemplative and somehow nothing at all like the voice of a cardiothoracic surgeon.  "You're paler than I expected."

"My Irish genes," I answered by way of apology.

Her smile broadened, and she backed into the foyer.  "How's the film going?"

"Slowly but surely."  I followed her in and closed the door.  "It's tedious work."

"Amber says it looks really excellent."  She glanced back as she led me through the living room toward the kitchen.  "Her exact words were
excellent fuckin film
."  I felt strangely flushed, and understood where Amber had acquired her talent for profanity.  The Chandler women had a gift for making vulgarity sound damn-near poetic.

We reached the kitchen, and I shrugged with a small grin.  That seemed to delight her, and she laughed as she reached for the refrigerator.  "Talented
and
modest?"  She stood back with bottle of Evian, drank, pointed at me.  "I think I'm going to have to keep an eye on you."

I flashed an awkward grin, tried to respond, failed, and was saved from the silence when Amber bellowed from upstairs: "Mom!"  I heard her banging down the steps, and her voice spilled out of the hallway seconds before she appeared.  "Quit interrogating my friends!"

Amber emerged from the bathroom hallway and crossed the kitchen to the island that partitioned the space from the dining room.  She climbed onto a swiveling chair, and I stepped to the countertop.  "She wasn't interrogating me," I assured her.  Her mother flashed a smile.

"Don't let this one fool you," Amber said with a hint of warning.  "She watches
Law & Order
.  She'll convince you you were D. B. Cooper before the night's out."

"You give me far too much credit, hun," her mother said.  She drank from her bottle again, and threw me a wink.  I felt that scarlet flush creep out of my collar again, and turned to Amber.  She had straightened her hair and swept it forward so that it crossed her forehead and made hers look very unlike her mother.  Except that they had the same dimples, the same philtrum, the same high cheek bones, the same caramel eyes.  And that smile.

Amber's mother glanced from her daughter to me and back, then turned back to the fridge.  "Are you guys hungry?  You want something before you go out?"

"We were going to stop and get something before we headed over to the movie theater," I told her.

"There's leftover eggplant parm in here," Amber's mother said, looking into the refrigerator.

Amber swiveled in her seat.  "You know the only thing that makes eggplant parm better?"

"No," I admitted, grinning.  "What?"

"A night in the fridge," Amber said, standing and crossing to the fridge herself.  I nodded.  It was true.

That was how Amber tricked me into having dinner with her parents for the first time.  Her mother reheated the ceramic dish of eggplant parmigiana, and Amber pulled cans of Pepsi out of a cardboard twelve-pack.

By the time the food was ready, her father had returned home.  He changed out of his $900 suit into a Mickey Morandini jersey t-shirt, jeans, and socks.  My terror at sharing a meal with an assistant district attorney of the city of Philadelphia blinked out around the time he started talking about his autograph collection.

We ate off paper plates around the kitchen island, and talked about the tragic trade of Ryne Sandberg, and the glorious heartbreak of Mitch Williams's final pitch to Joe Carter, and the improbable convergence of a Jeff Juden grandslam and a Gregg Jeffries cycle.  Amber had seen Terry Mulholland's no-hitter with her father.  His own father had seen Jim Bunning's perfect game with his father and had the framed ticket to prove it.

At no point did the conversation approach crime, punishment, or cardiothoracic surgery.

Nearly an hour later, with the refuse of dinner piled in the recycling bin near the garage door, Amber's mother excused herself, and her father walked us to the door.  In the foyer, he fell back a step, and as Amber reached for the doorknob, I heard him say simply: "Michael."

I turned back to find him two paces away, arms folded over his chest.  I felt him appraising me like a witness on the stand, and I knew that he was trying to determine if I was testifying for the prosecution or the defense.  I waited while he made his decision, my hands at my sides.

"Dad," Amber said in a put-upon tone. "Really?"

"Really," he said.  His eyes were gentle enough, clear blue unlike his wife or his daughter.  I couldn't shake the irrational sensation that he was staring all the way down into my core where the shadows shifted through darkness.  "Because sometimes people look at you and all they see are the things you have.  The things you accomplish."

I felt a brief, dazzling flash of rage, and drew in a sharp breath.  Amber's father watched me, and though nothing in his face changed, his tone shifted.  "Sometimes they can't bother to look under the hood at the engine to see how the machinery runs.  And that's a damn shame, because there's really only one reason I ever do anything at all."

I thought of two brothers buying a beat-up Porsche and working on it for a decade in a garage in Sylvan Springs.  I thought of the baseball games that Amber's father had taken her to, and the games that his father had taken him to, and his father's father before that.  But mostly I thought of the photograph in the hall, of Amber and her mother and her Nonna outside of Veterans Stadium, all wearing Phillies jerseys as the effigy of Connie Mack stood behind them like a neverblinking sentinel.

I never decided to speak out loud, but I heard myself say the most important word I would ever say: "Family."

The assistant district attorney's mouth twitched, just once, just barely, but it was all I needed.  He took a step toward me.  "Don't you let anything happen to her."

I realized how threatening that step could have been in another circumstance.  I looked into this man's clear blue eyes and offered my hand.  "Sir," I said, for the first time finding exactly the words in the moment I needed them, "if anything happens to your daughter, I promise I will personally shoot me and bury me in your backyard."

Now he actually smiled.  He nodded as he took my hand and gave it a shake.  "That's what I like to hear."

We saw the seven-twenty showing of
Avalon Rising
.

The movie was over by ten-thirty.  As we passed by the arcade alcove in the lobby, Amber took my hand, lacing her fingers between mine.  I was already arranging the phrases of my movie review in my head as we stepped out into the frigid darkness and crossed to the far end of the parking lot.  Amber approached the driver's side of the Wagoneer, turned to face me, leaned back against the door as.  "That movie's going to win the Oscar," she told me.

"I don't doubt it," I said.  It was almost certainly true.  I dug into my pocket for the keys.  My fingers were numb from the cold, and I fumbled the keyring out of my jacket, dropping it to the asphalt at Amber's feet.  I laughed.

I ducked to the ground, grabbed up the keys with a trembling hand.  When I stood again, Amber's face was inches from mine.  She caught my eyes; her breath hitched, and a sudden hunger flashed across her caramel eyes as they flicked downward, toward my mouth.

She licked at her lips.  I felt my heartbeat quicken inside my throat, and then she reached for me, grasped the sides of my Keller Vale baseball windbreaker, dragged me in.  She watched my eyes as she closed the space between us with a frantic urgency that sent my mind racing.

I stepped forward, my body suddenly flush against hers.  My hands came up to either side of her shoulders, bracing against the window behind her.  She tilted her face up to meet mine, her eyes fluttering closed.

My first kiss. Late, perhaps, and worth the wait.  So worth the wait.  My left hand fell to her hip, my right hand resting on the side of her throat. She led; I followed. She teased, and I was lost in an overheating cyclotron as her lips searched mine, feeling, testing, tasting, giving in to the reckless gyrofrequency of her impulses.

She tasted like spearmint and lime, and the electric flavor set my blood on fire.  Amber crushed her mouth to mine, stealing my breath.  Her lips parted, and her tongue found mine. Vivid heat-lightning flashed in my brain.

I pinned her to the car door with my body. My fingers tightened on her hip as I savored the sweetness of her breath. She groaned into my mouth, smiled against my lips, her fingertips playing across my cheeks as we spoke to each other in a common tongue of wordless French.

My left hand found her shoulder, traced the curve of her neck.  My fingers slid by her ear and wound into her hair.  I held her as we engaged in a full-scale entanglement of tongues.  She panted into my mouth, needing, taking, memorizing, and I answered her with equal passion.

She held my face even as she eased back.  I followed, leaning in to press my mouth to hers, then again.  She smiled, bent forward to kiss my top lip again.  I eased in to set another on her warm mouth, then stood back.

Amber laughed softly, kindly, breathlessly.  "That was your first time," she sighed, laying her head back.

I grinned, and felt that scarlet flush creeping out of my collar and up the back of my neck. "Was it obvious?"

She shook her head.  Her lips spread into a dreamy, delighted smile as she looked me in the eyes. "There's no mistaking the taste of that much excitement."

I laughed once, and loosened my grip on her hip.  She took my right hand from the side of her throat with her own right, and pressed her lips to my open palm.  Then she reached her face to mine, pecked me on the lips.

I took half-a-step back, freeing her.  She reached for my face, rubbed at the bit of skin just below my bottom lip with the pad of her thumb, flashed her beauteous smile.    Then she headed around the front end of the Jeep and climbed into the passenger's side.  I piled into the driver's seat, started the SUV, and looked at Amber.

She blew out a long breath as she glanced out through the windshield, looking like she'd just sprinted a mile.  Her cheeks were flushed and I felt my own face radiating.  In the unflattering glare of the overhead parking lights, an enigmatic smile played across her swollen lips.

I'd never seen that smile before.  I was sure she wasn't aware of it, and I felt a warmth in my chest at the sight.  It was a smile I could chase after for the rest of eternity.

I opened my mouth to say something, but before I could ruin the moment, Amber spoke.  She looked out the windshield, smiling that intricate little grin without knowing it.  She told me, "take me to the Morris."

2.

John Michael Osbourne raged through the overhead stereo about a man who was turned to steel in the great magnetic field as we crossed the repurposed warehouse.

We found Ethan hunkered over the table at the front of the building, next to the massive storefront window that looked out on Route 119 and the 24-hour gas-station across the street.  Phil stood along the side of the table with his back to the window, a cue-stick propped up in front of him as he watched Ethan.  I stepped up to the table.