Waking Hours (41 page)

“No, no,” Tommy said, realizing that Mills assumed they needed privacy. “Actually I was hoping you could stay the night. Did you bring the girls?”

Mills called out, “Beyonce! Aretha!”

A pair of massive black rottweilers trotted in from the television room, cropped tails wagging. Dani took a step back, then held out a hand for the beasts to sniff.

“They’re friendly,” Tommy said. “Unless you don’t belong here, and then they’re not. That’s what I meant about being safe. Plus . . .”

He crossed the kitchen to a panel by the door, where he pressed a sequence of buttons on another keypad.

“The Ponzi guy I was telling you about was paranoid,” Tommy said. “With good reason. Anyway, the security system he put in is state of the art. Watch.”

He showed her the video feeds on his computer monitor. One revealed a pair of bright orange shapes moving along the side of his garage.

“Tommy!” Dani said, pointing at the screen in alarm.

“Relax. That’s infrared,” Tommy said. “Heat vision. Those are raccoons trying to get into my garbage. The cans are sealed, but they won’t give up.”

“I thought you said the security system was state of the art,” Dani said. “You can’t even keep raccoons out of your garbage?”

“Nothing can keep raccoons away from the garbage,” Tommy said.

He led her upstairs. He’d done most of the decorating himself, choosing the furniture and the carpets and the art on the walls. The house was masculine, but not in a way that made women uncomfortable—no deer heads mounted on the walls or beer can pyramids to step over. He’d picked up a house’s worth of mission furniture at an estate sale. They turned right at the top of the stairs. At the end of the hall, he opened the door to Dani’s room.

“I have two more guest rooms for guys, when my friends come by to hang out,” he told her. “The bathroom has shampoos and creams and body lotions and whatever. I just told the girl at the spa shop to give me a bunch of stuff women like. The bathtub has bubble jets, so if you want a bubble bath, don’t use too much or you’ll fill the room with suds. There’s a terry cloth bathrobe in the closet, and just use the intercom if you need anything.” He pointed to a panel and speaker set into the wall by the door. “My room is #1. Press All Call if you want to reach every room in the house.”

“I think I’m good,” Dani said. “Can I just ask you—did Cassandra Morton ever live here?”

“Nope,” Tommy said. “I bought this place after the whole Tom-Sandra thing blew up. I was living in Laurel Canyon when we . . . dated.”

“Just curious,” Dani said.

“I’m at the other end of the house,” Tommy said, “but I’ll leave the intercom open. Lucius’s room is off the kitchen. The dogs will stay downstairs.”

He suddenly remembered something. “Oh, man . . .”

“What?”

“We ran out of The Pub without paying the tab,” he said.

“Without eating too,” Dani said.

“I’m hungry,” Tommy said.

They returned to the kitchen, where Tommy told her he could make a pasta alfredo with fresh prosciutto, whip up a quick chicken pad Thai, throw together an omelet with fresh eggs from his French Marans, or she could choose from a variety of breakfast cereals. She said cereal sounded fine.

He set two bowls on the table and filled two glasses with orange juice, grabbed a twelve-pack of single-serving cereals from the cupboard and a gallon of milk from the refrigerator, set them on the table, and retrieved a pair of spoons from the silverware drawer. He tore two sheets of paper towels from a roll suspended on a rack above the sink and handed one to Dani. He watched as she tore open a box of Corn Flakes, a box of Raisin Bran, and a box of Froot Loops, emptying all three into her bowl before adding milk.

“What are you doing?” he asked.

“What?”

“You can’t do that.”

“Do what?”

“Mix different cereals in the same bowl,” he said. “General Mills would have you court-martialed.”

“Why?”

“Who does that?”

“Lots of people.”

“Name one.”

She had to think. “Angela Merkel,” she said. “Former president of Germany.”

“You’re bluffing,” he challenged. “How do you know that’s true?”

“How do you know it isn’t?” she argued. “The Germans are surprisingly creative where breakfast cereals are concerned.”

For a moment Tommy felt as if they were an old married couple, comfortable with each other in a way he hadn’t known before. He’d known plenty of women who were impressed by the things about him that didn’t matter, his looks or his money or his celebrity. With Dani, none of that made the slightest difference.

He had to ask.

“Do you ever think about what happened?” Tommy said. “Something happened in high school. At the homecoming dance. You felt it too, right?”

“I did.”

“Have you thought about it?”

“I hadn’t for a while,” she said. “But I have since running into you again.”

“So what do you think it was?”

She hesitated.

“We were eighteen,” she said.

“I was nineteen,” he reminded her. “You were like . . . I don’t know, thirty.”

“That’s a good thing?” she said. “I certainly wouldn’t have thought so then.”

“That came out wrong,” he said. “I just mean, you’ve always been so . . . functional.”

“You sure know how to turn a girl’s head,” she said, smiling. “First you yell at me for the way I eat cereal, and then you tell me I’m old but functional.”

“I didn’t mean it that way,” he said. “You’ve just always been this person who gets things done and gives 110 percent. You always knew what you wanted, way before the rest of us did.”

“I overfunction,” she said. “I’m overcompensating. Because I’m constantly thinking I’m not good enough. It’s childhood trauma–related.”

“What childhood trauma?” he asked. He wanted to know everything about her, but he didn’t want her to think he was prying. “Unless you don’t want to tell me.”

“My parents left me at a highway rest stop.” Dani laughed. “No, seriously. They did. We were on vacation when I was seven and Beth was five, and we flew to Las Vegas and rented an RV, but my mother wanted to have a car too. We were in Monument Valley somewhere, and I had to go to the bathroom, but the bathroom in the RV didn’t work, so we stopped at a tourist trap. I went to the bathroom while my parents were bickering. When they left, my mom thought I was in the RV, but my dad thought I was with my mom. This was before cell phones. So it took almost an hour for them to realize I was missing. I was certain they’d left me behind because I’d caused all the trouble in the first place.”

“That must have been terrifying,” Tommy said.

She yawned and finished the last of her orange juice. He took the dishes to the sink, then walked her to the bottom of the stairs. He thought to offer to walk her to her room, but didn’t. He asked her to remind him in the morning to go back to The Pub and pay their tab.

“Sweet dreams,” he said. “Or at least meaningful ones.”

“Let’s hope,” she said. “I was thinking tonight I’m going to intentionally try to dream about my folks. Just to see what they have to tell me. And by the way, don’t think the irony is lost on me. They abandoned me at the tourist trap, so I abandoned them at the airport in Africa. Subconscious payback. That’s the guilty secret I have to live with.”

“I wasn’t going to say anything,” Tommy said. “Aren’t dreams the way we work through the stuff we can’t talk about when we’re awake?”

“Something like that,” Dani said. “Do you realize how smart you are?”

“Smarter than the average bear,” he said.

“Good night,” she said.

The next morning she told Tommy that she was disappointed. She didn’t dream about her parents. She’d hoped they’d have something to tell her. Instead, her dreams had been empty, vague, useless, devoid of meaning.

“I wouldn’t be so sure,” Tommy said, offering her a cup of coffee.

“Why?”

“Maybe the dreams didn’t mean anything,” Tommy said. “But look at what you’re feeling right now. You’re angry, right?”

“A little,” she said. “Which is pretty stupid.”

“I don’t think so,” he said. “You’re angry because your parents let you down. You wanted them to help you in a dream, and they didn’t.”

“And?”

“Just like you’re angry with them in real life,” Tommy said. “You don’t feel guilty because you abandoned them. You’re angry because they abandoned you. They died. They left you behind. You’re mad at them.”

She nodded in agreement. As obvious as it was, it was something she hadn’t thought of before. Kara Leonard had been angry at her sister. It was one of the predictable stages of grieving.

“Physician, heal thyself,” she said. “Now you know why I went into psychiatry. You never stop learning. Particularly from your mistakes.”

She told him she had a big day ahead of her, one that included a briefing that afternoon from Baldev Banerjee, the medical examiner. Tommy walked her to her car and watched as she drove away, but after she was gone, he thought about what she’d said about learning from one’s mistakes.

Acting on the premise that that was true, he went to his computer and navigated to YouTube, where he searched for “Gunderson” + “Sykes,” which brought him to the video clip of the accident, which he had never viewed until now. It all came flooding back. He saw the offense break from the huddle, approach the line and set, and he watched the defense react. He watched the opposing quarterback call an audible, and he could remember precisely what the quarterback had said. He saw himself gesticulating as he called out a defensive audible. He saw the play take shape. He saw Dwight Sykes slicing across the middle. He saw the ball leave the quarterback’s hand. He saw himself make contact, just as the ball reached the receiver . . .

He clicked on the Pause icon to freeze the frame.

He studied the picture, the other players in the frame, their expressions, the referee positioning himself to make the call. What was there to learn from his mistake? He decided to search the frame the way one might search a crime scene, dividing it into grids and taking it apart one grid at a time. Even then, he almost missed it.

He noticed a digital readout of the time left on the clock in the upper right-hand corner, not part of the action on the field at all.

The clock read 2:13.