Waking Hours (31 page)

The nursery was ten minutes from the country club. When Tommy arrived on his motorcycle, he found Dani on a bench by the driving range.

“They wouldn’t let you wait inside?” he asked.

“I walked out of my meeting to make a point,” she told him. “It would have been too embarrassing to slouch back in and say, ‘Excuse me, um . . . I’m locked out of my car.’ ”

He walked to where she’d parked, bent over, and cupped his hands to the passenger side window to look inside the car, where he saw the keys, still in the ignition.

“At least they’re right where you need ’em,” he said. “If you rode a motorcycle, this wouldn’t happen. You want me to call my friend Ray?”

“I just want a ride home,” Dani said. “I have a spare set of keys. I can get my sister to give me a ride to my car in the morning.”

It occurred to Tommy that she could have called her sister now. Maybe she had and her sister wasn’t home . . . or maybe he’d been the first person she thought of. That had to be good. He handed her his helmet.

“Put this on,” he said. “I only have one.”

“You want me to ride on that?” she said, pointing at the motorcycle.

“Unless you want me to go to my house and get a car,” he said.

“No,” she said. “This will be . . . fine.”

“Good thing you’re wearing pants,” he said.

“No wheelies,” she said, pulling the helmet on and climbing onto the back of the bike. He showed her where to put her feet.

“Hold on tight,” he shouted above the engine noise. “If your hands get cold, just put them in my jacket pockets. I promise I’ll take it easy.”

Her hands were cold in a matter of seconds. He knew they would be. When she put her hands into his jacket pockets and held on as they leaned gently into a turn, he went with the illusion that she had her arms around him for other reasons. They’d gone less than a mile when he felt something cold sting his face, and then again. It was raining.

“Hold on,” Tommy shouted, speeding up to outrun the rain, but it was no use. It seemed as if the sky opened up all at once. He slowed to a stop beneath an overpass.

Dani dismounted and stepped back as Tommy turned the engine off and lifted the motorcycle back onto the kickstand. He helped her remove the helmet. Her hair was dripping. His was too.

“Well, that was refreshing,” he said. “You all right?”

“Am I all right?” she said. “Do I look all right?”

“You look wet and cold,” he said, taking his jacket off and wrapping it around her shoulders. “Take it. I’m good. Hang on.” He opened a saddlebag and found his Gore-Tex rain shell.

“There,” he said as he put it on. “I think we’re going to be here for a while.”

“Looks like,” she said. The rain was hard and steady, but they were dry beneath the bridge.

“Let’s get out of the wind,” he said. “Come on.”

He spied a rock ledge, higher up beneath the overpass. She followed and took his hand when he turned to give her a pull. They sat side by side. When she shivered, he put his arm around her and moved closer to share his body warmth.

“These boots are ruined,” she said.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “This rain will probably stop.”

“Ya think?”

“That was stupid,” he admitted, realizing that something had changed. He could still say idiotic things to her, but he no longer feared losing her good opinion. She might even be starting to like him.

“I’m also starving,” she said. “I didn’t eat anything at the country club because it would have given Davis Fish the upper hand.”

“Wait here,” he said. He ran to the motorcycle, opened a saddlebag and reached inside it, then ran back, clambering up the incline.

“Here,” he said. She held out her hands. He gave her a ProteinPlus PowerBar, a Rice Krispy Treat, half a bag of Pepperidge Farm Goldfish Crackers, a box of Mike and Ike candies, and a bottle of Gatorade. “Sorry if the menu is a bit limited. I just throw stuff in there when I’m traveling and empty it out every few years.”

“This,” she pronounced, ripping open the PowerBar, “is a feast.” She chased the power bar with the Rice Krispy Treat, followed by the Goldfish, then washed it all down with the Gatorade. She split the Mike and Ikes with Tommy.

“I can’t believe I just ate the contents of a motorcycle saddlebag,” she said. “Which one’s Mike and which one’s Ike?”

“It’s a mystery,” Tommy said.

“An ambiguity you can live with?”

“Yup.”

“What’s another?”

“What’s another?” Tommy thought a moment. “Why you love somebody.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Not why in general, but why one particular person and not some other person.”

“They’ve done studies—” Dani began.

“Stop,” Tommy said. “It doesn’t matter what the studies say. You mentioned you’re reading
Moby Dick—
did you get to the part where they slice the whale up and boil it down in the try-works?”

“I didn’t know you’d read it,” Dani said. “Parts of it are hard to get through.”

“Three times,” Tommy said. “You can chop a whale up into a million wafer-thin slices and boil it down to the purest essence, and you still don’t understand the mystery of what makes it a whale. So don’t slice love down into a million pieces and reduce it to science. It’s bigger than that.”

“Point taken,” Dani said. “Can I ask you something?”

“Anything,” Tommy said. “You’re my boss. Remember?”

She shivered.

“Are you cold?” he asked her. Another stupid question.

She couldn’t stop shivering.

He crab-walked up the embankment to move behind her, then slid down so that she was sitting between his legs. He put his arms around her and squeezed her with his legs. She nestled in. The rain fell even harder than before.

“That better?” he asked.

“Much.”

“What did you want to ask me?”

“Well,” she said. “It’s none of my business, but I wondered if you were in love with Cassandra Morton.”

“You heard about that, huh?”

“Heard about it?” she said. “It was in all the trashy celebrity magazines for months. Not that I read trashy celebrity magazines.”

“I was kidding.”

“Never mind,” she said. “I know you don’t talk about that. Which I admire. I’m not big on men who kiss and tell. Or women, for that matter.”

“Can I hire you as my therapist?” he asked. “For one dollar? Which you already owe me as your assistant, so let’s just call it even.”

“I normally charge twice that,” she said, leaning her head back to look at him, “but sure. Though usually when I see a patient, I’m not sitting under a bridge in the rain with the client’s arms around me.”

“This isn’t how Freud did it?”

“Not usually.”

“Okay,” Tommy said. “So what I’m telling you is confidential, patient to doctor. The answer is yes, I was in love with her. At first. It’s pretty heady to be with a woman the whole world thinks is glamorous and wonderful and perfect, and everywhere you go people take your picture and stare at you. It’s annoying too, but it’s heady. You think of who you’re with and realize she loves you and she chose you out of the literally millions of guys she has to choose from. But it’s also confusing, because you can’t be sure what’s making you feel what. Cass is a really loving person.”

“But . . . ?”

“But nothing. She was all those things. That part was real.”

“But . . . ?”

“You wanna hear something really weird?” he said. “I went fishing with some buddies, up in Canada, in lieu of a bachelor party, and I was sitting in the boat and I thought,
If she’s the one for me, show me a sign
. It’s not like I was praying. I just thought those words.
If she’s the one for me, show me a sign
. Split second later, I caught the biggest northern pike I’ve ever seen. I thought at first it was a muskie. Twenty-one pounds. Big as my leg. And I’m thinking,
Is this a sign, or is this just a fish?
”

“Which was it?”

“It was just a fish,” Tommy said. “I’m thinking you don’t believe in signs.”

“In premonitions?” Dani said. “No. Or put it this way—I think I probably have a thousand premonitions a day, projecting my thoughts into a variety of possible futures. When one comes true, I don’t slap my forehead and say, ‘Oh my gosh—I had a premonition about that!’ What about the other 999 that didn’t come true? Don’t those deserve equal weight? Were you superstitious when you played football? They say a lot of athletes are.”

“I never sat down during a game, but that wasn’t a superstition.”

“What was it?”

“If you sit down on the bench without looking, the guy next to you might set his Gatorade cup on the bench and make you sit on it. Football humor.”

“You had no superstitions? None whatsoever?”

“Maybe a couple,” Tommy allowed. Not washing his socks during the season, keeping a raw egg in his locker, never eating anything red before a game, never leaving a hat on the bed in his hotel room . . . Just a few. “And you don’t have any?”

“I try not to,” Dani said. “Which isn’t to say there aren’t a lot of things in the universe that are beyond our understanding. I guess I just think, if there isn’t an explanation, don’t make one up just because the ambiguity makes you uncomfortable. Just embrace the ambiguity. And wait. Then again . . .”

“What?”

“You were saying,” she reminded him. “The fish was just a fish?”

“There’s more to Cassandra Morton than anybody knows. Don’t get me wrong—the whole America’s sweetheart thing wasn’t just because of the roles she played. They suited her. She could be a total sweetheart.”

“But . . . ?”

“But,” Tommy said, “there were some ugly parts behind the public persona.
Ugly
isn’t the right word.
Damaged
, maybe. You can use your imagination to fill in the blanks, but this was a girl who looked like a grown woman when she was twelve years old, with a stepfather who was an alcoholic who had his alcoholic friends over . . .”

“I get it,” Dani said.

“In public she was America’s sweetheart,” Tommy said. “On film she was America’s sweetheart. In person the whole America’s sweetheart thing was a house of cards. She could turn violent and abusive . . . It was like she couldn’t stop herself. No one would have ever believed me if I told them. I thought I could help her. You tell yourself, ‘I’ll be the one who can help her get past the demons.’ But eventually you realize you can’t. Only she can do that. Finally she called off the wedding—”

“
She
called off the wedding?”

Tommy nodded. “I wasn’t exactly surprised. But we made a deal,” he said. “She needed to maintain the image. I told her I’d make it look like I called it off and be the bad guy. She’d get her picture taken being publicly heartbroken and bravely carrying on with her head held high, and I’d get myself photographed dating Playboy bunnies or whatever, and then she could go on being America’s sweetheart.”

“What did you get out of it?”

“What did I get out of it?” Tommy said. “Nothing. I had nothing to lose, and she did. She still needed to be a public figure. I just wanted to disappear. It’s tough when it’s all so public. Things like that take on a momentum . . .”

A car passed in front of them beneath the bridge. He watched the headlights approaching and the taillights receding. He listened to the Doppler effect as the sibilance of the tires against the wet pavement turned from a hiss to a fading sizzle. She’d felt tense in his arms, but now her body relaxed as she leaned back into him. They were safe and out of the rain where they were, even when the wind picked up, strong gusts driving the rain almost horizontal.

“Are you still in touch with her?” she asked, resting her head against his chest.

“Once in a while,” he said. “On the phone. You can imagine what would happen if we had lunch and somebody took a picture.”

“I see why you never said anything,” she said.

“The
New York Star
offered me a lot of money for the story,” Tommy said. “That’s also confidential.”