Wildwood Road (15 page)

Wheezing, gritting his teeth against the sensation that something was still lodged in his throat, he grabbed the door jamb and struggled to stand. He glanced around, but there was no sign of them. Not a single trace of that phosphorescence, the unnatural moonlight of those terrible, expressionless faces.

“Jilly,” he rasped.

In the instant before he managed to focus upon their bed, he was suddenly sure she would be gone. The sight of her lying in the center of the bed with the spread drawn down, her chest rising and falling evenly, was enough to make his legs weaken beneath him. A rush of gratitude unlike anything he had ever felt filled him. He took several steps into the room and just stood over her, staring down at her, studying her to make sure there was no sign of any wound.

Jillian was pale, but otherwise she seemed unharmed. Michael shook his head. He was grateful, but he knew they had done something to her. A tremor went through his gut and he took a step nearer. She seemed to be sleeping, and he wondered how much of what just happened she would remember, and if she would think it had been a dream. He would shake her, just to be sure she was all right.

He listened to the darkness, glanced around the room for sign of any further intrusion. Already he was doubting himself. He had felt the fingers in his throat. Still felt the aftereffects of it. He had felt the words forced through his vocal cords, had been made to speak them. But he had read enough to know that it was possible that it was all still in his head. If so, well, then he was completely out of his mind.

A shrill little laugh bubbled up from inside him.

Jillian was the proof. If she had seen it. If she had felt it. If she remembered.

Yet as he reached for her shoulder to wake her, he hesitated. If she
had
seen them, what then?

As this final thought struck him, her eyes snapped open. Her gaze locked on him and her brow furrowed angrily.

“What are you looking at?” she demanded, her voice biting and cruel. In all the time he had known her, Jillian had never spoken to Michael that way. She had never even looked at him with such disdain. Now she only rolled over, turning her back to him.

“Go to bed, Michael.”

For long minutes he could only stand there in the dark, watching her and trembling with exhaustion and fear, and the weight of dread crushing him. She was entirely unaware of what had happened . . . and yet they had touched her. Violated her.

Whether she recalled it or not, how could she experience that and not be wounded by it?

Michael feared that the answer was simple enough: She could not.

CHAPTER NINE

On the day Michael proposed to Jillian, nothing went as planned. As far as she knew, he was out of town on a business trip to New York to present a new campaign to a client. His position at Krakow & Bester in those days could best have been described as coffee boy. Technically he was a designer, but little to nothing of what he had sketched or conceived since being hired had actually been used. His work on the Lifeboat account was about to change that. Despite the odd name, the company sold men's and women's clothing—mostly comfortable, earth-toned apparel. Every other campaign had been some funny twist on boating, or on an actual lifeboat. People sitting in a small watercraft staring at one another. The company wanted to get away from that.

In a meeting in which he was the junior member of the team, Michael bluntly told them he thought that was a mistake. He had put his job on the line with those words. Rolled the dice.

“What do you mean?” the marketing director of Lifeboat, Chet Griggs, had asked.

The weight of the attention on him was almost more than he could bear.

Michael had shrugged and attempted to appear relaxed. “It's just . . . well, for instance, what about this? Instead of people on a lifeboat, let's riff off of
Titanic
a little. A bunch of people are already in a lifeboat that's starting to be lowered down to the water. A few people are jumping into it. Except our guy, the guy dressed head to toe in
your
clothes, he's got this heavy steamer trunk and we can see a shirtsleeve sticking out, like it was packed in a hurry. And your logo is all over the trunk, right? And there's a member of the ship's crew, a purser or whatever, stopping him. ‘Sorry, pal, you have to leave your trunk behind. No room for your belongings.'

“Our guy, though, he seems pretty calm. ‘You go on ahead, then. I'll take my chances.' He won't get off the ship without his clothes. We do it as a series of ads, three or four, telling the story in sequence, and the last one is the best one. In the middle of the ocean, the guy's sitting on top of his trunk, sort of bobbing on the waves. Logo prominently displayed on the trunk. Lifeboat. And he's cool as a cucumber, just sitting there, or even lying back and enjoying the sun, abandoned in the middle of the ocean. But damn, he's got that trunk of Lifeboat clothes, so he's happy. And the tag line . . . I don't know, I'm not a writer, but something like ‘Lifeboat. Apparel for every occasion.' Maybe ‘every adventure.' Something like that.”

When he had finished, they were all still staring at him, but now their expressions revealed their surprise. Carl Berger, who'd been the senior art director at Krakow & Bester then, had frowned, sensing the change in the tone of the meeting. The clients were paying attention to Michael now, and not to him. Maybe he would have said something then, something to swing it back into his control. But he hesitated a moment too long.

The marketing chief, Griggs, smiled at him. “That's not what we were looking for, kid.”

Michael had blinked, face flushing with heat. “I know. It's just, I—”

“It's better,” Griggs went on. “Much better than any of the limp-dicked shit that we came up with.” He pointed at Carl, Michael's immediate superior back then, and his grin widened. “And it's much better than any of the crap you've suggested, Carl. Truth is, I wasn't thinking your agency was going to be able to give us what we need. But the kid may have just scored you the gig.”

“That's . . . well, yeah,” Carl Berger had muttered. “Michael's got a great eye. Great instinct.”

That was what he had said. But Michael already knew enough about the business to know what Carl was thinking:
You little prick, you upstage me like that one more time and I'll have you gone from Krakow & Bester so fast they'll put your goddamned picture on a milk carton
.

Lifeboat wasn't going to give them an answer that day, so Michael had driven back up to Massachusetts with Carl, a dreadful silence filling the car most of the time. Carl hadn't even wanted the radio on. Michael had known the guy was pissed, but hadn't understood why Carl could not just be pleased that it seemed they had a shot at the account. He could not have known that the man's job was already in jeopardy.

Krakow & Bester scored the account. The marketing director, Griggs, made no secret of the fact that it had been Michael's ideas that won them over. Paul Krakow gave the account to Michael, along with a promotion to art director. Carl quit the next day.

A week later, it was easy to convince Jillian that he had to go down to New York to make the presentation of the concept sketches to Lifeboat. Jillian was thrilled for him, and Michael was more than a little excited himself. But not about Lifeboat. Not on that day.

He had arranged everything so carefully, which made it almost funny when it all fell apart. Jillian's little sister Hannah had arranged for the two of them to meet for lunch at the Publick House on Beacon Hill in Boston. It was the place Jillian had taken Michael for his birthday on that first day they'd had lunch. It was a dark little pub, with dim lights and candles, even during the day. But it was quaint, and the food was good, and they'd enjoyed themselves quite a bit and gone back several times. Once, they had brought Hannah, so it wasn't a total giveaway that Hannah would ask Jillian to meet her there.

Lunch. Then maybe a quick shopping trip in Downtown Crossing. Jillian was always nervous about taking long lunches, but she could get away with it from time to time. It all made sense. It was foolproof.

But it was a Tuesday. And the Publick House was closed on Tuesdays.

Michael had taken the day off and slept a little late. When the phone rang, he had just stepped out of the shower and started to lather up his face to shave. He cursed, ran for the phone, and picked it up just in time to cut off his own voice on the answering machine.

“Hello?”

“It's Hannah.”

He knew immediately, just from her tone.

“What's wrong?”

As she told him, Michael began to cuss and he stomped his foot. Flecks of shaving cream sprayed off of his face. He ought to have known, he told himself. It all seemed too perfect.

“I'm sorry, Michael. I guess I should have called and checked first, but, I mean, who's closed on a Tuesday? Monday I could understand, but Tuesday?”

He consoled Hannah, telling her not to worry. After all, he was the one who should have checked the whole thing out, but it had never occurred to him, either.

“I could call her, tell her we'll go somewhere else. But she said she was going to be in a meeting all morning.”

“Don't worry about it,” Michael told her. “Just call and cancel. I'll take it from here.”

“What are you going to do? I mean, she knows it's coming, right? She just doesn't know when. So how are you going to surprise her?”

He laughed softly to himself, holding the phone slightly away from his face to keep shaving cream from getting on it. “I don't know. I'm Indiana Jones, today. I'm making it up as I go along.”

An hour and a half later he was in Boston. He had put on a brand new, crisp pair of blue jeans and a dark green sweater. His shoes were a bit scuffed, but not so badly that anyone would notice. The sky was a milky blue, as though it wasn't entirely sure whether it felt like being cloudy or not. It wasn't quite lunchtime yet, but already there were people swarming the streets, walking rapidly along with briefcases in their hands, or clutching cell phones to their ears. Women wore suits, many of them skirts, with sneakers for comfort. It was a strange sight, unique to big cities, and he never got used to it. But it always made him smile.

There was a chilly breeze sweeping through the streets of Boston, coming in from the harbor and making flags and awnings flap. Even so, it was a nice day in Boston. A day for walking through the Common with someone special, or window-shopping on Newbury Street. But Michael had more important things to do.

His first stop was at Milk Street Florist, where he picked up a dozen long-stemmed roses in a vase. He was improvising, so the vase was a necessary expense. The same thing applied when he stopped at a liquor store to buy a bottle of champagne. Perrier-Jouët was expensive enough without the pair of fluted champagne glasses he bought to go with it. He never hesitated, however. These were the things he needed for this moment. Jillian was worth it a thousand times over.

All through this morning marathon, his pulse was racing. His face felt flushed and his hands shook. He was nervous and excited all at the same time, on the verge of giddy laughter every moment.

From the lobby he called Jillian's number. Her group shared a secretary and he said a tiny prayer that she would answer the phone.

“Jillian Lopresti's line.”

“Kyra, it's Michael Dansky. If Jillian's there with you, don't let her know I'm on the phone,” he said quickly.

“Michael?” the secretary whispered back. “No, she's in a meeting. She'll be out any minute, though.”

He thought his heart would burst if it didn't slow down. “No, look. I'm downstairs and—”

“I thought you were in New York.”

The girl meant well, but he wanted to throttle her. “Kyra, please, listen. I'm coming up. I need you to meet me at the main desk and sneak me back to her office. I want to surprise her.”

“Oh, seriously?” Kyra asked, a little-girl thrill in her voice. “Is today the day?”

“Yes. Please don't blow it for me.”

“No way!” Kyra replied. “Hurry and get up here, though. She's seriously going to be out of that meeting, like, any minute.”

“I'm coming.”

It was the longest elevator ride of his life. Michael was disoriented when he stepped out onto Jillian's floor, but then the door on the far right opened and Kyra beckoned to him. Her giddy smile made him laugh. Co-conspirators, they hurried through a row of cubicles to avoid using the main corridor, and in moments she had safely ensconced him in Jillian's office.

“I'll call her number and let it ring once when she's on the way.”

Michael nodded and then Kyra closed the door, shutting him in. His arms were full and he was careful not to drop anything. He unwrapped the roses and put them in the vase, ignoring the price sticker on the crystal and not bothering to put any water in it. There was time for that later. He pulled the champagne out of its paper bag and set the two fluted glasses beside it on her desk. Then, from his front right pocket, he withdrew the small, black velvet case.

When he opened it, the diamond engagement ring glittered in the harsh office light.

He took one last, very deep breath, and arranged the open box on the desk so that she could see it when she walked in. Then he sat in her chair and waited for the phone to ring.

It never did.

Jillian walked in less than two minutes after he had sat down. Michael felt like he couldn't breathe. His heart skipped every other beat. His throat was dry. But when he saw the expression on Jillian's face, everything changed. Her gaze swept the office, staring at him a moment; then she blinked and focused on the desk. On the roses, and the champagne.

On the ring.

“Hi, sweetie,” Michael said.

Jillian raised a hand up to cover her mouth, but she could not hide her utter surprise and joy. A little, wondrous laugh came out of her and she shook her head, not in denial but in amazement. The best thing about her reaction was that she had known he was going to propose. Known that he was going to buy the ring, even. But the moment had snuck up on her so entirely that it had taken her by surprise in spite of that knowledge.

“Oh, my God,” she said, as Michael stood up from her chair.

He went to her, picking the ring up off the desk and holding it up for her to see. “Jillian Lopresti, will you marry me?”

Tears filled her eyes and rolled down her face. Her smile was radiant. “You're supposed to be in New York,” she said, slapping him on the arm.

Michael laughed. “That's not an answer.”

Jillian nodded. “Yes. Yes, of course.”

And she slid into his arms, shaking, and he held her tight, supporting her, for in that moment it felt as though all the strength had gone out of her and his embrace was the only thing keeping her on her feet.

But that was all right.

Michael would have been happy to hold her like that forever.

B
Y
M
ONDAY MORNING,
J
ILLIAN WAS
dying to get out of the house. Michael wasn’t sick. He was depressed or having a breakdown or something, but he wasn’t sick. On Friday night he had seemed his old self again, but all day Saturday and Sunday he had been stumbling around the house, as pale and just about as eloquent as a zombie. He was “working from home” again today. She had tried to be as understanding as she could, but there was a point at which reality had to kick in.

Get over it,
she thought.
Deal.

When she reached One International Place she stopped in the lobby to get the biggest, blackest, most caffeinated coffee she could find. For some reason she felt exhausted this morning, and no amount of concealer had been enough to hide the dark circles beneath her eyes. Jillian felt like crap, and she knew she looked like crap. It was shaping up to be a wonderful day.

There were too many people on the elevator and she felt claustrophobic and fought the urge to hit someone. No one from the firm was on the elevator with her except a Dominican mailroom boy with bad skin. Jillian avoided looking at him.

She waved her key card at the pad beside the frosted glass doors, then pushed her way inside. The receptionist brightened immediately upon seeing her.

“Morning, Jillian. How was your commute?”

Jillian barely slowed down as she passed the desk. “I managed to get here without killing anyone. I guess that passes for good.”

The receptionist's eyes widened and she made a little
o
with her mouth. Only when Jillian was already a dozen feet down the corridor did she hear the girl behind the desk mutter “Je-sus.”

Jillian froze, then turned on her heel and marched back to the desk. The girl blanched when she appeared once more, glaring down.