Accompanying Alice (9 page)

He started when Alice pushed herself away from the door and dried her eyes on the sleeve of her robe. “I’m sorry,” she sniffed. He handed her a napkin from the holder on the table and she blew her nose. “I don’t know what happened. Something between my lies and their truth just snapped and I guess I just... Couldn’t do it anymore. Can’t handle it.”

“Yes, you can.” It was suddenly fiercely important to him to say something to her, to give her back a piece of what she might have lost today because of him. “You’ve handled tougher things today. Beside them, this is nothing.”

“But I—”

“You don’t give yourself enough credit,” he said softly. “I heard you with your daughter on the phone. I watched you with your sisters. Things don’t stop you because they’re difficult or because you aren’t sure what to do. Or because you find out that maybe what you were doing was the wrong thing. You handle what life throws at you.” He touched her hand, and his voice roughened. “Because you break down once in a while doesn’t mean you lack courage or can’t
handle it. It means you’re human whether you want to be or not.”

What was he saying? And who was he saying it to? Her, or to himself?

He touched her cheek and smiled at her because it seemed the natural thing to do. “You’ve got almost too much courage, lady. No one else would have done what you did for me this morning
—
not even the major. I still owe you for that”

His eyes were dark, deep, unending—too seeing, too close. In consternation, Alice looked at her hands. How many times had she needed to hear just those words, needed to be reassured in just this way that she wasn’t merely run
of
the
mill, wasn’t cowardly in the way she dealt with life? How many times had she wanted someone else simply to notice that she was more than she appeared to be? And now that someone had...

She shifted awkwardly, once again aware of him as she’d never been aware of anyone, aware of feelings and sensations roused by confusion and... Excitement and anticipation. “I don’t know any other way,” she said, pulling herself from her thoughts. “I was taught people count, no matter what they are.”

Gabriel smothered a grin and ignored the implication, nodding. “I was taught that, too, but I forget it sometimes.”

They looked at one another and something passed between them, a measure of trust, a bond of understanding, a sense of intimacy that made them both uncomfortable. Recognition drew them apart immediately. While Alice blew her nose and fled to the kitchen doorway, Gabriel white-knuckled the back of a dining
room chair. From these safer vantage points they eyed one another again.

“I-I’ll go down and get your jeans,” Alice said. “They must be dry by now. Your shirt was kind of a wreck
.
I threw it out, but you can keep my sweatshirt, and there’s some men’s Tshirts the girls and I have slept in. I don’t know about socks. We may have some men’s winter ones and there’s probably some boxer shorts left from when the girls were wearing them and—”

“It’s fine, Alice, really. It’s fine.”

“But you’ll need—”

“And I’ll get, don’t worry.”

“Oh.” She twisted her ear, unsure of what to say next, needing to say something. “Thank you for helping me with my sisters.”

“My pleasure.”

“And what Helen decided—you don’t have to come to the wedding, let alone be in it. I’ll just tell her you were a-a...fling.”

“You don’t have flings, Alice.”

“How do you...” she began indignantly, then blushed.
“
No.”

‘‘I’ll be at the wedding. I’d like to. It’ll be a good place to hide in plain sight.”

“You think—”

“I don’t know.”

Alice nodded thoughtfully. “Okay.” Then she laughed. “You don’t know what you’re getting yourself into. My family, weddings... You’ve only met two of my sisters and you haven’t survived my mother yet. Individually we all make great grown
-
ups, but you put us all together in a room full of hearts and flowers and—”

Gabriel smiled. “Will you be wearing full skirts?”

“Uh, yeah—what?”

“When the going gets tough, I’ll hide behind ‘em.”

Alice laughed. “I don’t think they’re that full.”

They shared a momentary grin, then Gabriel said seriously, “It’ll be all right No matter what happens, this won’t come to the same end as a botched undercover might, so don’t worry about it. I’m a survivor.”

“Hmm,” Alice muttered dubiously. “We’ll see.”

*

The afternoon passed companionably, accompanied by the staccato strains of rain on the roof. Alice finished cutting Gabriel’s hair, carefully matter
of
fact about touching him sensing that he was just as carefully matter
of
fact about feeling her touch
.
Afterwards she
put their interrupted lunch on the table.

She wasn’t good at being uncomfortable around people.

When her eyes cautiously strayed from her food and met Gabriel’s cautiously straying from his for the tenth time, she laughed hard, suddenly finding the humor in the whole ridiculous situation. Unable to resist her laughter, Gabriel chuckled too, trading gibes across the table with her about the day, about the tangled web of lies they’d woven and about the situation they’d cornered themselves in, relaxing for the first time in years.

While Alice put a few more pearls on Grace’s veil, Gabriel put a seal on the drippy faucet in the kitchen sink and told her a little more about his case, thinking aloud, trying to tie the ends of it together in a way that suited him while feeling that all he’d managed to accomplish was buying a few seconds’ peace in the eye of that particular storm.

The rain petered out toward evening.

Gabriel called his
forensics
expert to find out about serial numbers and ballistics tests, and Alice sat in the living room with the veil trying not to listen to his side of the conversation, because it bothered her. She felt responsible for him. For his life. And...

Trying to convince herself that whatever happened to him now was out of her hands, she bound more pearls into the handmade lace, jabbing the needle in, through, out and around again and again, wanting to hypnotize herself with the movement so she wouldn’t think. About anything. The ploy didn’t work. However briefly, she had a stake in Gabriel’s life now, and no matter what, she’d care what happened to him. She liked him.

Restlessly she opened another bag of pearls and thought about her girls in order to stop worrying about Gabriel.

When those worries backed her into another corner she tried thinking only about Grace and her veil, but wound up imagining how Grace would look as a bride, and how she glowed
whenever she looked at Phil, about the look that Phil gave her back, making Alice feel as though she should leave the room, leave them privacy in an emotion that was too uncomfortable for her to share.

She looked across the room at Gabriel, and the veil’s magic worked on her, gave her the same fleeting sense of longing for a man of her own that holding her sister Twink’s new baby gave her for a new infant of her own. The feeling never lasted. She always reminded herself of Matthew and his parents, of the negative side of caring for infant twins alone so that she’d stop wishing for what she didn’t have—and couldn’t bring herself to find.

The sun came out in time to go down.

Red and brilliant, it crowded the tiny house with shadow and illusion, fresh awareness and knowledge Alice didn’t want to possess. Needle poised inside a seed pearl, she raised her head to study Gabriel again.

Unlike her first impression of him this morning, she now saw an innate peacefulness about him, something at odds with the violence of his profession, a quality he must have grown up with rather than one he’d developed later. Something—she chose the word
helplessly
—good,
a sense of patience and repose, a quality to trust and rely on. A subtle man who, underneath an explosive surface, knew what was important in life and how to get it without grabbing.

Still waters,
she warned herself silently.
Watch out for deep holes.
But she couldn’t stop staring at him. Couldn’t stop herself from wanting him to turn around and see her, cross the room to her, touch her....

As though he felt the weight of her eyes, her fantasy on him, Gabriel cradled the phone and turned. The patterned shadows hiding his eyes seemed to change, to darken, to
intensify as he returned her study. Alice’s lungs stopped working. She wanted him to kiss her.

Shocked, she dropped her eyes quickly, stabbing the needle through the lace rose between her fingers. His gaze on her forced her to look up at him again. She’d never felt in quite so much danger before
—
not from him, but from herself. Her nerves, her emotions were coated in excesses, jangled to the point of explosion. The passion and desire she remembered feeling for Matthew at sixteen and seventeen had never seemed more juvenile, more irrelevant. The way she felt now was different from that. Her longing was deeper, more mature.

More adult.

A stray orange strand of sunset crowded into the room.

The slant of light made intimacy exist where it didn’t seem to belong, made closeness imperative, made them translucent to one another. Bonded them with a knowledge that didn’t come from knowing.

No move, no sound jarred the atmosphere. With both ears wide, Alice listened to the roar on the other side of silence. Goose bumps shivered up her arms, and she shook a little in the cool intangible breeze of decision. She wanted to kiss him and she wasn’t going to.

Without caring how, Gabriel knew what she thought, what she wanted. What
he
wanted. It was printed plainly in the air between them, as readable as words.

I can’t,
he thought and moved anyway, slowly, lazily, toward her.

Undercover means different rules from the ones you grew up with,
he imagined Markum saying over dinner one evening.
At the same time that you can’t afford to forget who you are, or what you’re doing, you can also never afford the truth, never forge ties with anyone. Compartmentalize everything. Your personal life can’t bleed into your professional life. Your undercover life can’t touch anything outside of it. Use your experiences, but never leave a frame of reference. In the long run what you’ll learn to be is less than an echo in an empty room. Remember that.

He stopped and swallowed, aware of the truth, aware of Alice, uncertain of whether he wanted to be aware of either.

As though pulled by some invisible connection, Alice dropped Grace’s veil and took the last two steps across the room to meet him. And stopped.

She didn’t want to do this. She couldn’t trust herself.

She’d been here before; she knew what came next. She’d fall in love, lose her mind and go to hell on good intentions. Think about it, she told herself. When it came right down to it, couldn’t she trace every pickle she’d been in during the past eighteen or so years directly back to the first time she’d kissed Matthew, had sex with him?

Her breath caught on her own slipshod imitation of The Truth as her mother saw it. Not as she herself saw it. Not as she herself wanted to see it. As her mother, grandmother and great-grandmother envisioned The Truth and passed it on to her. As she’d passed it onto the girls.