She didn’t understand, and she didn’t move to straighten herself until he grabbed her with one hand and his cane with the other and pulled her out of the tent and into the moonlight.
“I’m afraid it’s terribly inappropriate,” he said in Leslie Pollard’s Brit accent as he led the way, limping toward the still-lit mess tent, “for you to come to my tent, unchaparoned, at this late hour, Miss Anderson.”
“I’m sorry,” she said. She didn’t necessarily look like a woman who’d just had sex. No, the flushed, tear-streaked face and crazy hair could’ve belonged to a woman who was grieving and distraught. If you had a G-rated imagination. “But I . . .”
“I know you have more questions about him. Your dead friend. Dave Jones.” He fished in his pants pocket for his handkerchief, taking advantage of the opportunity to try to adjust himself so his balls would end up only half crushed. But nope, it was hopeless. He was doomed.
Before he handed the handkerchief to Molly, he used it to wipe his mouth—God forbid she’d started wearing lipstick and had left a telltale streak on his face. “I’m not sure, though, what more I can tell you,” he added. “I only met him a few times.”
It was hard to tell what bemused her more—his pretense of propriety, his painfully real limping, or the fact that he was carrying a handkerchief. She wiped her eyes, blew her nose. “I’d heard rumors that . . . Crazy stuff, like, he’d killed this man, and, I don’t know, run off, I guess, with his wife,” she said. “But then someone said that he killed her, too . . .”
No way. That old story had made it all the way to freaking Africa . . . ? It apparently had been twisted and changed, like the message in a worldwide game of telephone, but still . . .
“I knew him well,” Molly continued. “Dave Jones. He would never have hurt anyone.”
Um . . . Jones made a mental note—file this under things to talk about at another time. Right now, though, he had other priorities. They’d finally moved out of hearing range of the other sleeping tents, so he leaned closer to her, lowering his voice, and changing the subject. “It’s important that you don’t do anything out of the ordinary, Mol. This might be crazy and paranoid, but damn it, if you managed to hear about . . . Look, I don’t want word getting back to the wrong people that my do-gooder ex-girlfriend has suddenly gotten very cozy with some guy she supposedly just met. Unless you’ve added casual sleepovers with strangers to your repertoire—”
“You know I haven’t,” she told him.
Yeah. He nodded. “That means anyone with brains will put two and two together and know it’s gotta be me.”
She stopped him with a hand on his arm. But she didn’t touch him for long—as aware as he was that Sister Maura was in the mess, making herself a cup of tea, taking a break from the hospital’s night shift. The nun didn’t seem to have seen them out here in the moonlight, but they couldn’t know that for sure.
“So we’ll need to be discreet,” she said. Her eyes welled with tears again. “I can’t believe that you’re really here. Wow, that is one awful haircut.”
“We were discreet in Indonesia,” Jones told her. He took off his glasses, polishing them with the edge of his shirt. It was something to do with his hands. As opposed to reaching to push her hair back from her face. Or pulling her into his arms again, to kiss her, to finish what they’d started. “And how long was it before your entire camp knew? Two days or three?”
“Then we’ll have to be even more—” she started.
He cut her off. “Discreet’s not good enough.” He put his glasses back on. “What happened in my tent tonight . . . Mol, it’s not going to happen again.”
“What happened in your tent,” she pointed out, “only half happened.”
Yeah. He was well aware of that. “Not for a while, anyway,” he added.
“You’re serious, aren’t you?” she said, searching his eyes.
He tried hard to look resolute. This had been way easier in theory, as part of his grand plan. “We need to do this right,” he told her, reminding himself as well.
“When?” she asked. “How long is a while?”
“Months,” he said.
Molly laughed—a burst of disbelief. “You came all the way around the world to—”
“Have coffee.” He nodded. “With you. To sit at the same table, across from you. Shit, Mol, to sit in the same mess tent with you is enough—I don’t even need to be at the same table.”
“For months,” she clarified. “Units of time, usually consisting of a complete lunar cycle.”
“Yeah,” Jones said. “And we should start with you not talking to me again for, I don’t know, maybe even a couple of weeks.”
She was starting to get mad. She just didn’t get it. “You can’t be serious—”
“Jones is dead,” he told her. “Think about it. I’m the one who brought you that news. What’s that expression, you know, about shooting the messenger . . . ? So okay, church ladies usually don’t shoot people, but they probably avoid ’em for a while.”
“I’m certainly mature enough to be able to separate the bad news from the bearer of the bad news,” she shot back. “Or haven’t you noticed three additional years of wrinkles on my face—”
“We need to make this look real,” he interrupted her again. “Don’t you get the fact that just being here scares the shit out of me? I won’t put you into danger. Again. God knows I’ll burn in hell for what I did the last time—”
She interrupted him, waving away both his mortal sins and the years he’d spent trying desperately to redeem himself. “So you think my ignoring you for a week or two is going to convince all the people who are watching us—who might not even be watching, might I add—that you’re not you. So then what?”
One of the people who might not even be watching—the battle-ax, Sister Maria-Margarit—had opened the squeaky screen door of the nuns’ larger, wooden-framed tent. She tied the belt of her robe around her waist as she started toward them.
He had to talk fast. “Then we take it slowly. We have a conversation in the mess tent every now and then. Eventually you invite me over for tea. In the daylight. With your roommate there. We stretch it out—over as many months as it would take for a geek like Leslie Pollard to realize he’s in love with you—and then to get up enough nerve to actually do something about it.”
And the sister was upon them.
Leslie turned toward her. “I’m so sorry, did we wake you? Miss Anderson was having trouble sleeping, naturally, after receiving such bad news . . . She came to my tent with some questions, and of course, that’s not the proper place for a conversation, so . . . I thought perhaps a glass of warm milk . . . ?” He lowered his voice conspiratorially. “She was so upset, I didn’t want to leave her alone.”
Sister Maria-Margarit didn’t cluck, didn’t hug Molly, didn’t show a snippet of sympathy. In fact, the look she gave Jones was filled with suspicion.
But it was probably no different than the way she looked at every man who walked God’s earth.
He turned back to Molly, sending her a silent apology as he nodded his farewell. “I’ll leave you in good hands, then, Miss Anderson.”
“Thank you for being so kind,” she said. “Mr. Pollard. And I apologize again for disturbing you and . . . everything.”
He knew exactly what she meant by everything, and, yeah, as he walked back to his tent, he knew that the next few months were going be among the longest of his entire life.
CHAPTER
SIX
SHEFFIELD PHYSICAL REHAB CENTER, MCLEAN, VIRGINIA
DECEMBER 7, 2003
EIGHTEEN MONTHS AGO
What were you like when you were a kid?” Gina interrupted the post-sex glow to ask.
There was a short time, right after they made love, when Max held her in his arms and seemed almost relaxed.
It had occurred to her that, instead of lying back and enjoying the moment, this might be the time to get him talking.
But Max now
shook his head. “I was never a kid.”
She laughed, turning to look up at him. “Yes, you were. Come on. What was your favorite . . . TV show growing up?”
He shook his head again. “I didn’t watch much TV.”
“Charlie’s Angels,” she guessed, laughing when he rolled his eyes. “I bet you were one of those guys who had a picture of what’s-her-name—Farrah—on your wall at college.”
“No comment.” But he smiled. “I was more into music than TV during college. I mean, we watched Saturday Night Live, sure, but . . . Give me Chrissie Hynde from the Pretenders any day. She was hot. And she could really sing.”
Music. They talked music a lot. It was easy to talk about music. “What was your favorite TV show when you were, like, ten?” she asked him.
“Jeez, I don’t know,” he said. “I watched what my brother and sister wanted to watch. They were so much older . . . Tim was a sports fan, so we saw a lot of baseball and basketball. And when they weren’t around . . . My grandfather was really into Elvis. I watched a lot of Elvis movies with him.”
Elvis movies. That was too funny. “How old were you,” Gina asked, “when your grandfather had his stroke?”
“Nine.”
“That must’ve sucked.”
“Yeah.”
She was silent for moment, just watching him, half hoping he’d say more, but knowing that he wouldn’t. He’d told her once—a long time ago—that he was nine when his sister first tried to kill herself. It must’ve been one hell of a year.
The first of many.
No wonder he felt as if he hadn’t had a childhood.
She leaned forward to kiss him on the side of his face, but he turned and caught her mouth with his.
God, the man knew how to kiss. It would have been so easy to let this be the final punctuation mark at the end of the conversation. To let this kiss slide them into one of those two-condom nights.
But it was getting late and she couldn’t stay forever.
As much as she would have liked to.
She gently pulled away.
“So what’s your favorite Elvis movie?” she asked.
He laughed.
“Come on,” she said. “This isn’t heavy stuff—you’re allowed to answer.”
“I don’t know,” he said. “I really only watched because my grandfather wanted to.”
“So . . . What?” Gina asked, propping herself up on one elbow to look down at him. “You sat there with him in the living room and did quadratic equations in your head while staring into space?”
He rolled his eyes again. “Okay,” he said. “Just . . . gimme a break—I was nine, okay? And my grandfather stopped being able to talk, but when he watched these movies, he, I don’t know. He looked almost happy. Sometimes he even laughed out loud. Shit, I would’ve climbed into one of those movies to live there permanently if I could’ve. So yeah, I had a favorite. Follow That Dream. Which probably means nothing to you.”
“Hey, I had some significant Elvis exposure,” she said. “That’s the one with all the kids and the station wagon, right?”
He laughed. “Wow. Secret Elvis fans unite.”
God, she loved it when he smiled like that.
“I had a great-aunt who had two pictures hanging in her apartment in Bayside,” Gina told him. “One was Jesus, the other was Elvis.”
“Black velvet?”
“You know it. My idiot brother told me that he was one of the most important saints, and I . . . Well, I actually believed him. I’m embarrassed to say how old I was before I realized it was only a joke.” It was her turn to roll her eyes now.
It earned her a soft laugh. “The patron saint of rock and roll,” Max said. “I like it. I mean, he was a stepping stone to more sophisticated music, but for me, it pretty much all started with Elvis.”
Back again to music. But okay.
“Did you ever play an instrument when you were a kid?” Gina asked him.
He looked at her, apparently decided the topic was still safe enough, and said, “When I was in middle school, I really wanted to play the guitar. I’d discovered Hendrix by then, you know?”
She nodded.
“So I went to the school music teacher, and . . . She got me this violin that she kept on hand—for kids who wanted to try it out before renting one for an entire year.”
“A violin?”
“Yeah,” Max said. “Apparently that was where you had to start in the string department in our school. I remember her telling me that I had to earn the right to play the guitar.”
“Oh, man,” Gina said. “Your middle school music teacher would’ve made my middle school music teacher have a heart attack. I mean, there would have been a knife fight in the teacher’s lounge. Did you, like, totally never go back to the music room ever again?”
“Not quite,” he admitted. “I was . . . Well, I figured, how hard could it be?” He made a disgusted noise. “What a disaster. I was always good at everything but . . .”
“Not the violin,” she said. “That’s one of the hardest instruments to play. That was so stupid of that teacher.”
“Yeah,” Max agreed. “I was listening to stuff like ‘Crosstown Traffic’ and ‘All Along the Watchtower’ and the teacher wanted me to master ‘Three Blind Mice’ on this piece of crap that I never managed to get in tune. It didn’t help that the tolerance for noise in our house had dropped to negative five. I mean, I could listen to Hendrix with my headphones on. But practicing was . . .” He shrugged. “I quit after a week.”
“Was that when your sister was—”
“Yeah,” he said. “What was your favorite Elvis movie?”
Okay. Gina had gotten more than she’d expected with that story about the violin, so she backed down. “The one where he plays the priest,” she told him. “I mean, I thought he was a saint, right?”
“So how old were you when you found out he wasn’t?” Max asked.
“Third grade,” she said. “It was ugly. This stupid fifth-grade boy—Patrick O’Brien—wouldn’t stop talking about how Elvis sucked and how he’d died of an overdose. So I gave him a bloody lip and a black eye—I really kicked the crap out of him, out on the playground. I got into so much trouble. The principal made me go to the library right then and there—my clothes were all muddy, it was so humiliating. But she made me research the details of Elvis’s death.” She sighed. “It was not a good day. I remember my mother was at work, so my Uncle Frank—he was living in our basement because he was having trouble finding work—he came to school to pick me up. Fighting was a serious deal. I was suspended for two days, and I had to apologize to Patrick and his parents before I could come back. Only, I knew that would make it all worse, right? Imagine if you were that kid, and this third-grade girl comes to your house and . . .”
Max was smiling. “Poor bastard.”
“Yeah, you think it’s funny, but I was despondent,” she told him. “Heartbroken. All those prayers—going out to some phony antisaint? This hero of mine—a drug addict? You know, I come from a long line of firefighters and cops. Doing drugs was on par with murder and arson in our family.” She spooned back against him, pulling his arm more tightly around her. “I can’t believe I haven’t told you this story before. I haven’t, have I?”
“No.” He reached up to brush her hair away from his face.
“Uncle Frank sat me down and told me that heroes sometimes make mistakes,” Gina said. “He told me that despite the mistakes he’d made, Elvis maybe should’ve been made a saint anyway, because he brought so much light into so many people’s lives. Like Great-Aunt Tilly, who didn’t have a lot to be happy about after Great-Uncle Herman died.
“He also made me take a shower and change my clothes,” she continued, “and he took me right over to the O’Briens’ house, and he told me what to say so Patrick wouldn’t terrorize me for the rest of the year.” She snorted. “Frank told me that I had to restore his pride and that I had to say to him, ‘I’m sorry, I was wron
g. Thank you for not hitting me because I’m just a girl and I’m littler than you, too, and you obviously know that boys shouldn’t hit girls.’ And I was all like, ‘But he did hit me—I won that fight, fair and square! What about my pride?’ And so Frankie let me write a note, to give to Patrick without his parents seeing, and it said, ‘If I ever hear you say that Elvis sucks again, I will make you sorry.’ ” Gina laughed. “And after we got back home, Frank let me play his drum kit for the first time. We kids weren’t allowed to touch it, but that day he let me sit down—he actually gave me a lesson, and it was magical . . . Of course from then on, I would sneak downstairs when no one else was home and play. I think he must have known . . . Anyway, Patrick O’Brien always avoided me on the playground after that.”
Max was smiling. “My grandfather would’ve adored you.”
A long time ago, Max had told her the story of how his grandfather met his grandmother—an American—in India in the 1920s. They were both thirteen when his grandmother, Wendy, got separated from her school group. Raza Bhagat had walked her safely home. He’d then gone and learned English in some remarkably insane amount of time, like two weeks, so that he could talk to her more easily.
Apparently, the attraction went both ways. They were married in 1930—and back then their relationship was considered interracial and quite scandalous. It was made worse by the fact that Raza wasn’t high caste.
After the second world war, Raza, Wendy, and their son Timothy—Max’s dad—moved to America, where they were slightly less outcast, especially when Raza got a high-paying job in the aviation industry.
Raza embraced his wife’s country with enthusiasm—a place where a rocket scientist born in a laborer’s body didn’t have to spend his entire life hauling manure.
“I would’ve loved to have met him,” Gina said. “Your parents, too.”
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