As Good as It Got (16 page)

In the west, the sun had turned the clouds bright orange and pink. To the east, the sky deepened to navy. Trees had become black silhouettes. A faint glow rose from the beach where the Females thronged around the fire. She could almost imagine finding peace in this part of the country.

“Beautiful, isn’t it.” His step sounded on the porch boards; she felt him close behind her. “I never get tired of that view.

It’s hard to be taken over by your troubles when you see a sight like that. It’s like the souls of dead artists are up there putting on a show every night. A direct manifestation of a better place for all of us to look forward to.”

Uh . . . Ann found herself waiting for the cynical punch line she instinctively expected. Neither Paul nor any of their friends would ever let something so imaginative and naive go by without skewering.

She’d let it pass.

“Have a seat.” He dropped onto a simple pine bench softened with cushions, and poured out her second drink, then his apple juice.

She sat, pulling her jacket around her, less for warmth than for comfort. The bench was narrow enough that she could feel the heat of his body next to her. He handed over her glass and she took a big gulp, which joined the other gulps in a race through her empty stomach and into her bloodstream. At the end of this drink she’d be able to relax. Or maybe the next.

“Tell me about today, Ann.”

“Uhhh, not one of my best.”

“Talk to me.” His voice was low in the fading light, his body warm and the drink really good. “Tell me.”

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“About what? ”

“Whatever is in your head.”

She snorted. “Trust me, you don’t want to hear—”

“Yes. I do.” He leaned toward her to give more weight to his words, capture her attention more honestly, but for a silly tingling second she thought he was going to kiss her, and was shocked to realize she would have let him.

“Oh.” She felt a little overwhelmed and a little helpless, two feelings she absolutely detested. Worse, his sympathy and strength were bringing on the teary poor-me’s, and she hated those too. She drained her drink, damning the scotch for giving her a low when she’d needed a high.

“Talk to me.” He was whispering, which made him sound persuasive and sexy, like a boy trying to convince her to go all the way on the couch in his parents’ living room. Worse, he reached up and gently stroked back her hair, touching her cheek. “Tell me everything.”

“Patrick—” Her voice broke. She was going to tell him to stop. She was going to get up from this bench and walk away while she still had one tiny shred of her pride left, but his hand stroked the back of her neck, began massaging the tight painful muscles, making her want to moan with pleasure.

Yes, yes, right here on your parents’ couch
. “I . . . don’t want to be here.”

Crap.

“With me?”

“At this camp.”

“Where do you want to be?”

She bit back a pathetic girly sob and started to loathe herself in earnest. “I want to be returned to my life.”

“Before Paul died?”

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“Of course. Before.”

“You loved him that much.”

“Yes. Yes. I did.” She answered too quickly and realized too late that her response sounded knee-jerk. Worse, when she looked up guiltily, Patrick was frowning the frown of a skeptic. “He . . . we had a few . . . some problems. Every couple has problems.”

“True.” He went back to massaging; she went back to loving it. “Tell me something.”

“Mmm, what?”

“If Paul hadn’t killed himself, what would have happened to the two of you?”

She clutched her drink, felt her muscles tense again. The sun slipped down behind the trees, the light around them deepened and she shivered. For the past six months she’d thought only of Paul’s death, tried to come to terms with his loss and her culpability.

What would have happened if he’d stayed around to face their ruin?

“Are you cold?”

“No. No, I’m just—”

“I’ll be right back.” He got up and went into the cabin.

Ann sat, paralyzed. He’d let a lion out of its cage, and she had to deal with the beast. What would have happened?

Ann would still have had to get a job, nothing new there.

But Paul would have had to get a job too, and he’d sworn years ago, in a tirade against office politics, butt-kissing, and the dense concentration of idiots in the workplace, that he’d never again work for anyone but himself. Add in his track record of worsening depression, his chances of being hired would be slim to none unless he agreed to seek treatment, 138 Isabel

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which she didn’t think likely. He’d bring only scorn and amused superiority into a therapist’s office.

Patrick reemerged with a blanket that he draped over both of them, down to their feet, up to their shoulders, creating his and hers against-the-world intimacy.

“Any thoughts? ”

“None.”

“You thought about it. Tell me.”

“It’s none of your business.”

He put his arm around her under the soft scratchy warmth of the blanket, which smelled of Patrick and wool. “You’re a tightly wound spool. I want to find the end of your thread and unravel you.”

“Leaving me a hollow wooden core?”

He laughed, easy and free in the darkness. “Good one. How about I just want to be your friend. Help carry your load, be your beast of burden . . . uh, share the yoke . . . what else.”

“Lean on you when I’m not strong?”

“Yeah, that.” He hugged her to him, kissed the top of her head. Even that brotherly gesture starting a long rusty motor purring. “How about that I think you are one of the most powerful and special ladies I’ve ever met, and I care about your happiness? ”

Again she felt that some acid comment was needed to cut the sugar. “Patrick, I can’t just—”

“Okay. Shhh. No worries. Tell me more about Paris. I love Paris.”

“Tell me why you love it.”

“Well . . . I mean the Seine, the Eiffel Tower, the Arc de Triomphe, the Louvre, the croissants, the baguettes . . . ”

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She frowned. Not the answer she expected. “That’s tour-ist Paris. You didn’t experience Thailand that way, why would you—”

“I was making a joke, Ann.”

“Oh.” She laughed with silly relief.

“Tell me about your Paris.”

“What I love is how everything is so beautiful, and so tasteful, and so safe. Manners are still important, in a way we’ve completely lost in this country, and it makes the experience so . . . gracious and aesthetically satisfying. Like living in an art house movie. It’s why people want to live in gated communities here, only this isn’t isolated and fake, it’s real, a real city.”

“Yes. Exactly. That’s exactly why I love it too, Ann. You captured it so perfectly. All the beauty in all aspects. Thailand is like that too. I’d like to show it to you.” He was murmuring into her hair, and something warmed and loosened in her heart, making it dangerously gooey.

Who cared? She was drunk and wretched and if Camp Kitchy-Koo turned her brain to treacle, then fine, it would.

God knew goo felt ten times better than fury.

“Patrick . . . ” She struggled to steady her voice. “I don’t know if Paul and I could have . . . we might have had to sell the house. It was really huge. Too huge for the two of us.

And the mortgage was shocking.”

She moved uncomfortably, feeling like a traitor. Paul had delighted in living on the very edge of their budget, which, granted, was considerable. He’d had complete faith in himself and in his destiny to live and die a wealthy man. She’d shared that faith, simply because his was so absolute.

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“You’d have had to embrace a simpler life. That’s not a bad thing. On the contrary. I know that so well.”

Her stomach turned over; she felt a sudden sense of suffocation, as if truth had taken over her oxygen. It would have been a bad thing. She couldn’t picture her and Paul in a simpler life. Not as a couple. Not together. Since they’d started making decent salaries, their life had been defined by money.

Where they lived, who they knew, what they did, how they did it.

“Patrick . . . ” Her voice shook. She held out her glass and he poured for her, got his own bottle, poured for himself. “I don’t know that Paul would have liked a simpler life.”

He’d have detested it. He’d have sunk lower into depression, fueled by guilt and shame and resentment, not having the money barrier that made him feel special, that lifted him above the unwashed masses he used to be part of.

Their relationship had been dying for years. Paul had been dying for years.

“Oh God.” She gulped her drink, drained it, instantly regretted it. Patrick pulled out the bottle and she shook her head. “No more. It’s fucking with my head.”

“It’s helping you see more clearly.”

“No. Not this time. Not this time.” She threw off the blanket and stood abruptly, nearly overbalanced. Too much alcohol too quickly, too little in her stomach. She wasn’t seventeen, she should have realized. Tomorrow she was going to feel like hell . . . and oh
God
, she had to be up at four-thirty.

“I have to get out of here.”

“Whoa there.” He came up behind her, put his arms around her, firm and steadying. “My bad. I shouldn’t have let you have that much. But it also means I can’t let you go yet.”

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She turned in his arms, blinked at him stupidly. “What, I’m a prisoner?”

“No, darlin’.” He rocked her gently back and forth, like a tantrum-prone child he had to be careful of. “But I’m not letting you go in this condition. God knows what havoc you’d wreak. And if anyone found you this way, I could lose my job.”

“So . . . ” She frowned and tried to think. “What am I supposed to do, spend the night with you?”

“Sure.” He spoke easily, and a little alarm light went on, too faint for her to care. “Or just hang out until you feel sober enough to go back.”

In the face of this momentous decision and the easy rocking against his chest, her brain turned off. It was all too hard. Patrick’s arms were strong and capable. She’d deal with reality later.

“You’re safe with me, Ann.” He spoke earnestly. “You know that.”

“I’m not sure.”

“No?” He stepped back, took her hands, compelled her to look at him, his handsome face illuminated, the last rays of light from the west catching his gold earring. “I want you to do something for me, or at least think about doing it.”

“What?”

“Stop hanging onto Paul and to the past, to the materialistic driven life you led. That died with him. Look ahead.

Look around. Open your beautiful soul to other men and other more simple experiences.” He dropped her hands, took her shoulders, brought her close again, holding her tightly with his magnetic gray gaze. “The woman you had to be with him is not who you really are, Ann.”

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She gasped. Then took a long breath, prepared to tell him he didn’t know her, that he had no right to say that, no right to tell her anything about Paul or about herself.

Instead, she exhaled a dry sob.
Damn
the damn scotch.

His arms came around her again and she burrowed shamelessly against him, felt his lips on her hair, her forehead. She turned her face up, instinct and need taking over for common sense, and his mouth landed on hers, firm, practiced, and judging by the dark bolt of desire up her middle, exactly what she wanted.

But even while she gave herself over to the kiss that went on and on and on, she distantly noted in his sexy mouth the total absence of the sweet taste of apple juice.

Chapter 10

Death. Imminent. Ann rolled to her side, sending mental instructions to her chirping alarm watch to spontaneously combust. A second later her brain rolled, following her body—only her brain kept rolling, which sounded like a good idea to her stomach so it started rolling too.

Four-thirty A.M.
Oh my God.

Chirp-chirp-chirp
. She groaned, groped, knocked a pen off the bedside table, found the watch, shut the damn alarm off and flung the culprit back onto the table, head pounding, mouth rank. Last night was such a good idea. Seriously.

Tossing back three glasses of scotch on no food. Brilliant. A MacArthur genius grant was in her future.

Another good one: letting Patrick kiss her. But wait, there was more! Letting Patrick screw with her head until she decided her marriage had been empty and cold. Nice! This place did wonders for the soul. Next she’d find out she really hated her parents.
And
, she was a lesbian with an insatiable desire for young girls.

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At least she’d stopped at letting Patrick screw with her head, and hadn’t been stupid enough to let him screw the rest of her. Or wait, maybe he was the one who hadn’t been stupid enough. In any case, no screwing had happened. She was too drunk and too freaked out, and he was too employed.

Or no, too
gay
. She forgot.

After that one intense thirty second kiss, her instinct had kicked in with bad-idea messages, and then, thank God, Patrick had drawn back, looking confused, and insisted he hadn’t known what came over him, that this wasn’t like him at all, that he hadn’t been with a woman since high school and that he liked Ann too much to yadda and yadda, plus his job at the so on and so on would be etc., etc., etc.

Right. Even Peter Pan wouldn’t believe in that fairy.

She’d come close to asking how stupid he thought she was, but then figured if he wanted to keep pretending he was gay, he could go right ahead. Most likely he worried that if he took advantage of her drunken vulnerability, she’d wake up pissed and get him fired. Instead, she got the fun of waking up fatally hung over on a day she’d have to spend with fish-smelling men in a bob-’n’-weave boat.

Whee.

New experiences, Betsy had said, new experiences to help channel their lives in new and exciting directions. Ann didn’t want new experiences. She wanted her old familiar ones back.