Grief could drive a person crazy. She’d heard that said, and she believed it. But she wasn’t going to allow such a thing to happen to her. She would be sufficiently tough on herself to stay in touch with reality — as unpleasant as reality might be. She couldn’t allow herself to hope.
She had loved Danny with all her heart, but he was gone. Torn and crushed in a bus accident with fourteen other little boys, just one victim of a larger tragedy. Battered beyond recognition. Dead.
Cold.
Decaying.
In a coffin.
Under the ground.
Forever.
Her lower lip trembled. She wanted to cry, needed to cry, but she didn’t.
The boy in the Chevy had lost interest in her. He was staring at the front of the grocery store again, waiting.
Tina got out of her Honda. The night was pleasantly cool and desert-dry. She took a deep breath and went into the market, where the air was so cold that it pierced her bones, and where the harsh fluorescent lighting was too bright and too bleak to encourage fantasies.
She bought a quart of nonfat milk and a loaf of whole-wheat bread that was cut thin for dieters, so each serving contained only half the calories of an ordinary slice of bread. She wasn’t a dancer anymore; now she worked behind the curtain, in the production end of the show, but she still felt physically and psychologically best when she weighed no more than she had weighed when she’d been a performer.
Five minutes later she was home. Hers was a modest ranch house in a quiet neighborhood. The olive trees and lacy melaleucas stirred lazily in a faint Mojave breeze.
In the kitchen, she toasted two pieces of bread. She spread a thin skin of peanut butter on them, poured a glass of nonfat milk, and sat at the table.
Peanut-butter toast had been one of Danny’s favorite foods, even when he was a toddler and was especially picky about what he would eat. When he was very young, he had called it “neenut putter.”
Closing her eyes now, chewing the toast, Tina could still see him — three years old, peanut butter smeared all over his lips and chin — as he grinned and said, More neenut putter toast, please.
She opened her eyes with a start because her mental image of him was too vivid, less like a memory than like a vision. Right now she didn’t want to remember so clearly.
But it was too late. Her heart knotted in her chest, and her lower lip began to quiver again, and she put her head down on the table. She wept.
That night Tina dreamed that Danny was alive again. Somehow. Somewhere. Alive. And he needed her.
In the dream, Danny was standing at the edge of a bottomless gorge, and Tina was on the far side, opposite him, looking across the immense gulf. Danny was calling her name. He was lonely and afraid. She was miserable because she couldn’t think of a way to reach him. Meanwhile, the sky grew darker by the second; massive storm clouds, like the clenched fists of celestial giants, squeezed the last light out of the day. Danny’s cries and her response became increasingly shrill and desperate, for they knew that they must reach each other before nightfall or be lost forever; in the oncoming night, something waited for Danny, something fearsome that would seize him if he was alone after dark. Suddenly the sky was shattered by lightning, then by a hard clap of thunder, and the night imploded into a deeper darkness, into infinite and perfect blackness.
Tina Evans sat straight up in bed, certain that she had heard a noise in the house. It hadn’t been merely the thunder from the dream. The sound she’d heard had come as she was waking, a real noise, not an imagined one.
She listened intently, prepared to throw off the covers and slip out of bed. Silence reigned.
Gradually doubt crept over her. She had been jumpy lately. This wasn’t the first night she’d been wrongly convinced that an intruder was prowling the house. On four or five occasions during the past two weeks, she had taken the pistol from the nightstand and searched the place, room by room, but she hadn’t found anyone. Recently she’d been under a lot of pressure, both personally and professionally. Maybe what she’d heard tonight had been the thunder from the dream.
She remained on guard for a few minutes, but the night was so peaceful that at last she had to admit she was alone. As her heartbeat slowed, she eased back onto her pillow.
At times like this she wished that she and Michael were still together. She closed her eyes and imagined herself lying beside him, reaching for him in the dark, touching, touching, moving against him, into the shelter of his arms. He would comfort and reassure her, and in time she would sleep again.
Of course, if she and Michael were in bed right this minute, it wouldn’t be like that at all. They wouldn’t make love. They would argue. He’d resist her affection, turn her away by picking a fight. He would begin the battle over a triviality and goad her until the bickering escalated into marital warfare. That was how it had been during the last months of their life together. He had been seething with hostility, always seeking an excuse to vent his anger on her.
Because Tina had loved Michael to the end, she’d been hurt and saddened by the dissolution of their relationship. Admittedly, she had also been relieved when it was finally over.
She had lost her child and her husband in the same year, the man first, and then the boy, the son to the grave and the husband to the winds of change. During the twelve years of their marriage, Tina had become a different and more complex person than she’d been on their wedding day, but Michael hadn’t changed at all — and didn’t like the woman that she had become. They began as lovers, sharing every detail of their daily lives — triumphs and failures, joys and frustrations — but by the time the divorce was final, they were strangers. Although Michael was still living in town, less than a mile from her, he was, in some respects, as far away and as unreachable as Danny.
She sighed with resignation and opened her eyes.
She wasn’t sleepy now, but she knew she had to get more rest. She would need to be fresh and alert in the morning.
Tomorrow was one of the most important days of her life: December 30. In other years that date had meant nothing special. But for better or worse, this December 30 was the hinge upon which her entire future would swing.
For fifteen years, ever since she turned eighteen, two years before she married Michael, Tina Evans had lived and worked in Las Vegas. She began her career as a dancer — not a showgirl but an actual dancer — in the Lido de Paris, a gigantic stage show at the Stardust Hotel. The Lido was one of those incredibly lavish productions that could be seen nowhere in the world but Vegas, for it was only in Las Vegas that a multimillion-dollar show could be staged year after year with little concern for profit; such vast sums were spent on the elaborate sets and costumes, and on the enormous cast and crew, that the hotel was usually happy if the production merely broke even from ticket and drink sales. After all, as fantastic as it was, the show was only a come-on, a draw, with the sole purpose of putting a few thousand people into the hotel every night. Going to and from the showroom, the crowd had to pass all the craps tables and blackjack tables and roulette wheels and glittering ranks of slot machines, and that was where the profit was made. Tina enjoyed dancing in the Lido, and she stayed there for two and a half years, until she learned that she was pregnant. She took time off to carry and give birth to Danny, then to spend uninterrupted days with him during his first few months of life. When Danny was six months old, Tina went into training to get back in shape, and after three arduous months of exercise, she won a place in the chorus line of a new Vegas spectacle. She managed to be both a fine dancer and a good mother, although that was not always easy; she loved Danny, and she enjoyed her work and she thrived on double duty.