Accompanying Alice (6 page)

“But the serial number on the gun—”

“Might prove everything or nothing.”

“But how will you—”

“Tonight. I’ll have to stick around here awhile yet, but I know someone—tech guy. I’ll call tonight when he’s at home and can’t trace the call.”

Alice viewed him with the helpless sense that things would never again be as simple as she’d like. “I’m sor—”

“So am I.”

They regarded one another awkwardly, strangers with too much history between them, who knew both too little and too much too quickly about one another for comfort. Gabriel turned away first, fingering the veil. The nubby texture reminded him of a tablecloth his grandmother had made. His mother had laid the table with it every Sunday he could remember of his childhood, no matter where they’d lived at the time—Thailand, New Guinea, Vietnam...

Packed away in a box in a rented storage shed with everything else that reminded him of who he’d been taught to be, the cloth was his now, a family heirloom to be passed on with Great-Aunt Esther’s candlesticks and Great-Great Grandma’s wedding ring to the wife he didn’t have and never intended to have. He let the veil go. “Pretty,” he commented vaguely. “You do nice work. Did you say your sister’s getting married?”

“Saturday.” Alice wandered into the kitchen, took down a cutting board and knife and reached for a loaf of bread. “I’m a bridesmaid. Again. That’s four times in two years. I’ve made two wedding dresses, three veils and put the frou-frou on one hat. My mother always said when we found the right guys we’d go down like dominoes. Unfortunately she was right. I wish they’d start to elope.”

“Sounds like a big family.”

“Seven of us—all girls.” She shuddered and opened the
refrigerator to contemplate its contents. “Do you have any idea what it’s like to grow up with six sisters all younger and more in step with the world than you are? And my mother’s the youngest of five girls—even the grandchildren are all girls. Family reunions are a nightmare. You never know exactly how many people are going to be there, because all the women in my family have always listed just a little bit left of center and have absolutely no reverence for anything—and that includes an unfortunate tendency to exaggerate numbers. You have to cut every number they give you by at least eighty percent to even come close to the mark. Which is aggravating when you’re the one giving the
party.”

She paused for breath, then went on, “Then of course, once you get to the party, the husbands, who married these women thinking they were sane, are sort of forced to gather in a little bunch in the corner of the living room closest to the television and hope nobody’s rented a copy of
Gone with the Wind
because there’re more of us than there are of them, and they’ve never actually learned how to handle Brannigan women in bunches. The women, on the other hand, just gather serenely in the kitchen to trash political figures and movie stars, or to discuss how whichever sister who isn’t in the room at the moment should straighten up her life. Then when she comes back they tell her what they’ve decided.”

She leaned over and opened a refrigerator drawer. “Their latest decision for me is that I should get heavily involved with some
investment broker
who went to school with my sister Helen. The selling points are that he’s clean, intelligent, attractive and has a stuffed Blue Chip portfolio. He also thinks it’s time to settle down and have two-point-three kids.” She shivered and made a squeamish gesture with her hands. “Ugh! Frightening. Tact doesn’t run in my family.”

“Mmm.” Trying not to laugh, Gabriel braced the wide
doorway behind her. “You don’t participate in the family, er,
discussions
?”

Alice measured him and his apparent lack of intelligence over the top of the refrigerator door. “I didn’t say that. Are you kidding? I go to the bathroom before I leave home and
don’t drink anything once I get there so I don’t have to leave the room for any reason. Then I lead the discussion so they have as little chance to talk about
me
behind my back practically in front of my face as possible. No.” She shook her head. “Let them plan
my
life on the phone where they have to pay for the privilege. Are you hungry?”

Choking on a chuckle, he waved a hand at her. “Don’t go to any trouble.”

“No trouble. I’m starving.” She collected sandwich fixings into a bundle and kneed the refrigerator door closed. “So,” she said lightly, “I’ve never done this before. Are sandwiches appropriate for a hostage to feed her captor?”

As easily as it had come, laughter fled, leaving behind a yawning hole filled with anger and truth. Gabriel’s eyes flashed and his face darkened. The violence that lately always seemed to lie just below the surface of his control turned his hands into fists. He tucked them tight into the
pockets of the borrowed sweatpants. Her sweatpants. “You. Are. Not. A. Hostage.”

She glanced at him, startled, hearing the anger he fought to restrain. “I know. I let you use my shower, remember?”

“You’re a Samaritan, Alice. I might have killed you this morning before I even opened my eyes and just because you wanted to help me.
You
remember
that
. People like me, we’re hazardous to people like you. Don’t think of it as a hobby and don’t treat it like a game.”

“I don’t think of it as a game.” Alice removed the twist tie from the bread bag, unsettled by his vehemence. “I’m a rotten loser, so I don’t play games. Any games. Not even solitaire. Maybe particularly solitaire. There never seems to be much point.”

She tipped her head and took a quick inventory of his face, the fists bulging his pockets, the tension
in the muscles along his throat and through his shoulders, and she reached for reassurance automatically.

“Gabriel,” she said quietly, “when I saw you this morning, I was scared to death even before you pulled the gun. I know what you could have done to me and I know what you didn’t do. I’m not so much afraid of you anymore, but I’m still afraid—I’m not sure of what. It could be of everything, it could be of nothing. Some people get high on being scared, but I don’t. Fear kind of... paralyzes me. So I make jokes because the thing that scares me more than anything else is...” She hesitated, framing the thought. “If something happened and it was life and death and I was too afraid to move...” She grimaced. “I’m sorry. I’m explaining this badly. All I really mean is that I stopped this morning because, as scared as I was of you, I was more afraid of being too afraid to stop and try to do something
for
you. I don’t like being too afraid. Do you understand?”

It
took him a minute, but then he did understand, clearly and completely. Because the reason she’d stopped for him was exactly what drove him to do what he did for a living. Fear haunted him regularly. Not fear for himself, not fear of reprisal from someone else, but fear
of
himself, of his conscience. Of not being able to look himself in the eye. Of not doing the right thing. He’d seen too many people waste away in their own fear too afraid to open their doors, to notice a crime, to take on the responsibility to turn in a thief, a dealer, an extortionist, an abusive husband or parent. Cops sworn to “serve and protect” too afraid of ouster by the blue brotherhood to turn in—or to even notice—a dirty cop. Yeah, he understood.

“Understand?” he repeated. “Better than you know.”

Recognition stirred, linked them unexpectedly in those last four simple words. Alice blinked and bundled the clutch of food in her arms onto the stove, glancing at Gabriel again and again as she did so. Not her physical ideal, she thought, but attractive in an I’ve-seen-better-days sort of way. Not like Matthew, the all-American blond all-State running
back. No, this man was leaner, tougher, older, less open, less...

She searched for the word, couldn’t find it and settled for a phrase: less full of himself. He was a man who knew he could be wrong, and had been. And admitted it.

She looked at her hands in consternation. What an odd thing to think.

Unable to help herself, she regarded him again from the corner of her eye. Dissecting him like this surprised her. Generally, she steered clear of the man-woman nonsense, the eyes-across-the-room foreplay of staring, sizing up, wondering. But then she’d never been in this situation before, either. One on one, life and death… Every thought focused on the next instant, his next movement, her next response. It made her look at him again, twice, three times, led her to wonder...

Led her to wonder what?

She tried to keep her attention on what she knew: slicing bread, carving turkey, peeling carrots.

*
**

Gabriel watched her, then retreated to the dining room to retrieve the scissors he’d carried out of the bathroom. He needed a haircut to finish transforming himself into someone new. Now, when he most needed the distraction, seemed as good a time as any to do it. Also, distancing himself from Alice physically seemed the easiest way to retain his perspective, clear his head. She was not someone he’d struck up a conversation with in a bar or a grocery store, not someone to be attracted to first and consider later. She was someone whose life he was disrupting, at first accidentally and now on purpose, for reasons of his own. She was someone offering aid and comfort to an intruder, who could, as far as she knew, be anyone, do anything. The last time
he’d run across anyone like her he’d still been a Quaker, a conscientious objector, working as an orderly at a hospital in a refugee camp in Vietnam. She’d been a rebellious Catholic nun working with the American Friends Service Committee Rehabilitation Center at Quang Ngai who’d reiterated his parents’ belief that trust was the key to peace—
and happiness. She’d given him the St. Jude medal as a reminder of the impossible causes she and his parents passively fought for, then died for her beliefs a few months later.

It had been a long time since between Samaritans.

He returned to the kitchen with scissors in hand, and studied the blue robe on Alice’s back as it tightened and relaxed with every movement of her arms. Eighteen, twenty years. Long time ago.

“Horseradish?” Alice asked hesitantly.

“Hmm…what?” His head throbbed.

“Horseradish on your sandwich,” she repeated.

“No. Thanks.” Then in afterthought, “Look, you’ve already done enough for me, but do you have someplace—” He held up the scissors. “I need somewhere to give myself a haircut.”

Alice put down the knife and the slice of bread she’d been mayonnaising. “I’ll do it for you,” she offered without thinking. “You want it done before we eat?”

He looked at her face, her eyes, hearing the genuinely uncomplicated offer of someone who considered service to others a way of life, and he knew he shouldn’t let her touch him. Not emotionally, not physically, but it was too late. She’d already brushed past him, returning in a moment with a sheet to spread on the floor. She settled a chair on top of the sheet and took the scissors from him. He didn’t stop
her—
couldn’t
stop her—and straddled the chair at her direction. Felt her fingers fluff through his hair. He shut his eyes to the shiver that ran down his spine and felt her shadow on him, circling.

“How short?”

He shook his head. “Doesn’t matter so long as it’s different. “

“Hmm.”

Alice combed his hair back, lifted a strand and cut it. The clipping tickled his shoulder on its way to the floor, but all he felt was Alice’s fingers in his hair, the warmth of her
body at his back and a dizzying, burning sensation that went deep down inside him. The scissors made loud clipping sounds in his ears, then paused.