Even after they left the freeway-Brolan keeping a quarter-mile behind her-the fender-benders continued, red-and-blue emergency lights splashing bright light on white snow. The cops looked fatigued already. They'd have a long night, probably one or two fatalities.
Only when she reached her own block did Brolan speed up, his car sluicing through the heavy slush. As she pulled into her garage at the side of the Victorian that she was house-sitting all these years while some rich college friends of hers 'did' Europe, Brolan came right in behind her.
Anger overwhelming him, he twisted off the ignition key and jumped from the car. He didn't get far. Just as he was about to enter the garage, the automatic door started descending in jerky fashion.
He had to stay out in the night until she left the garage. With only moonlight as illumination, the neighbourhood took on an appealing, Christmas card look. Other Victorians could be seen silhouetted against the dark blue, star-flecked sky, their towers and gables and patterned masonry chimneys nostalgic symbols of a gender time.
She was as angry as Brolan. "Did you used to follow your wife around this way?" she said, emerging from the garage.
In the gloom he could not make out the details of her face, But he smelled her cologne and saw the appealing shape of her body inside her dark coat.
"Why the hell didn't you tell me about Culhane?" he said.
"Probably because it isn't any of your business."
So, there you had it. She wasn't even going to deny anything. Offer any excuses.
She said, "I want to go in." She seemed beat. "Alone." He wanted to strike something. Curse something. He wanted to tell her how betrayed he felt, but what was the sense of whining, when she so obviously didn't care. He also wanted to tell her about Emma.
When he thought of Emma, he realized how dangerously he was giving in to himself. He should be trying to locate Charles Lane, the man who'd bought the painting of Emma from her pimp. Surely a man willing to pay for a painting could tell him something about Emma.
She said, "I'm sorry, Frank."
He had never heard her apologize before, for anything, and the sound of it surprised him.
She came over three steps, her heels cracking a membrane of ice as she moved. She took him by the coat and tugged him gently to her. In the moonlit gloom, both of them dark figures against the white snow, she kissed him tenderly on the lips. He tried not to think about her kissing Culhane less than' half an hour before.
"Some things just don't work out," she said. "It's not anybody's fault particularly. It's just-they don't work out."
He had no idea what to say.
"I don't blame you for being angry with me, Frank. I don't even blame you for hating me. But I wish you'd try to believe me that I put everything I had into this relationship. It's just-we're different people, Frank. You want to settle down and get married again, and I understand that. But I'm younger than you, and I'm not ready for that. Not yet anyway. Maybe if we'd met a few years later-"
She left the thought unfinished.
At the mention of age Brolan felt foolish. Rather than her lover, he now felt as if he were merely some foolish older man who'd been pestering her, one of those pathetic men who embarrass themselves over young women.
He turned and started back to his car.
She grabbed his sleeve. "I'd like you to come in."
"What?"
"For a drink. I don't want to leave it like this."
"I don't think so."
But when she pulled him closer, he felt overwhelmed, felt love and lust equally, unable to stop himself.
"Please, Frank. Just this one last time."
He was trying not to read too much into her tone, but he couldn't help but feel that she was inviting him to go to bed with her.
He started to say no again, but this time she kissed him full on the mouth, and he knew there would be no backing away. He felt helpless again, the way he had with his first high school girlfriend. It was a perfect fusion of pleasure and pain.
19
Denise not only had hot chocolate, she also had a powdered doughnut and a ham sandwich on rye bread, with hamburger dills and mustard, and she had a tall glass of fresh skim milk. During all of which-or around which, actually-talking with her mouth full, she told him all about it. Everything. The guy in the wheelchair. Which was real weird because not even with the counsellor at the runaway shelter had she told everything. She'd skipped over the part, for example, where her dad got her older sister pregnant and where the sister had a breakdown and went to a mental hospital, where she wrote forlorn letters; and then Dad tried stuff on Denise, but Denise wouldn't let him, though she finally had to leave home to stop him, and how Dad always said it was Mom's dying that had made him this way, that he wouldn't have touched either Denise or her older sister if only he had a regular wife, like every other regular farmer he knew, and how it wasn't wrong anyway, really, because it was about love, it wasn't about rutting, groaning animal sex; it was about love, and who loved you more than your father (of course he was shit-faced whenever he started rolling along on that particular rationale), and by the time he was done trotting out his explanation for why he behaved the way he did, you started to get the idea that maybe by humping his own daughters, he was doing them a favour or something, for God's sake.
Anyway, Greg Wagner, the guy in the wheelchair, listened to all, never once getting glassy-eyed with boredom or smirking with superiority the way most people did. She even told him about the sleeping room she had and how everybody around her was a junkie-throwing up and sobbing on those long black nights when they'd had too much or not enough-and how, even though she didn't exactly believe in God anymore, she still said her prayers.
He said, "That's what I do, too."
"You don't believe in God, either?"
He shrugged his shoulders. "I guess not."
"But you still pray?"
"Yep. Because I figure it can't hurt."
And for some reason that cracked her up-she felt giddy, as she had the few times she'd smoked marijuana-just the way he said it.
And then he said, "You know something?"
"What?"
"I really like you."
She grinned. "You know what?"
"What?"
"I really like you, too."
"But guess what you could do to make me like you even more?"
"What?"
"Tell me what you were doing on the back porch."
She rolled her eyes. "Looking for this dude who tried to kill me."
"Kill you? Are you serious?"
"Yeah." She hesitated. "You know how I told you that I sometimes-you know, like, do the street-walking thing."
"Right. I remember that"
"Well, last night this dude picked me up and-well, he takes me out into the country, see, and I think he's going to try and do something really kinky, but what he does is, he tries to kill me. Tries to get his hands around my throat and choke me."
"God. Weren't you scared?"
"Terrified."
"So, what did you do?"
So, she told him all about it. Admitted lifting the guy's wallet; running till she was safe; talking to Polly about should she squeeze him for some money.
"What's the guy's name? In the wallet, I mean?"
"Brolan," she said. "Frank Brolan."
"Oh, it couldn't be!"
She was almost shocked by Greg's adamance. "Really?"
"He's a very nice guy," Wagner said. He kind of scootched himself up in his wheelchair. She could see that he was excited. But not in a good way. "What'd he look like?"