Kingdom by the Sea (Romantic Suspense) (13 page)

She
looked down and realized her hands were clasped together, hopefully.  “Oh, I
was just waiting.”

“Waiting
for what?  It's on you.”  Confused, she hesitated.  “Nicole, each hand you
either have to bet, check, or fold.  Are you gonna bet?”

“But
I don't have anything good,” she explained.

“
Nicole
. 
You're not supposed to tell me that.  See, that's another problem you
have—you're too sincere.”

“It's
just you...”

“Doesn't
matter.  Forget that it's me.  Remember—show some confidence, even if it's
bullshit.  Half of confidence is bullshit, you know.  Excuse my mouth, by the
way.”

“So
what you're saying is it's an act, in a way?  Poker?”

“It's
a total act.  What you portray, becomes what
is
.  At least until the
next hand.  You show no emotion unless it has a purpose.  You try to figure
out, based on what you have and what you see on the table, what your opponent
is likely to have—or not have.  You watch the way they bet, and then you play
off of it.  You psych them out to get them to do what you want.”

“It's
so complicated,” Nicole remarked.

“It
really isn't.  People become predictable.”

They
played a couple of hands, using hypothetical numbers, not real money, and
Nicole was really no better after a few tries at this, but she was having fun
anyway.

“Fifty,”
he said now, raising the bet.  She looked at her cards and frowned.  Then she
shook her head.  With a wry expression Michael said, “Nicole.  What does that
mean?”

“I
don't have anything.  Oh sorry!  I'm not supposed to tell you that.  Um okay. 
I just prefer not to bet an additional fifty dollars at this time.  How's
that?”

“Awful,”
he said.  “Too polite.”

“Jeez,
I can't be polite now, either?  I just don't fit in with your kind.”

“And
we've talked about this already—you can't just shake your head.  You have to
say something.  You have to bet, check, or fold.”

“Okaaay—I
fold.  Happy?”

As he
collected the cards, he grinned at her.  She felt her stomach tighten, and then
a brief fluttering in her chest.  God, there was just something sexy about him.

“Shit—Nicole,”
he said suddenly when two of her cards slipped out of his hand and fell face-up
onto the table.  “Hey—this was a good hand!  Why did you fold?”

“It
was?” she said, surprised, leaning in to look.  “What did I have?”

“Two
pair.  See?  A pair of eights and a pair of Jacks.  Damn, all I had was a
couple of fours.”  Discouraged, he shook his head.  “I can't believe you folded
like that.”

“Oh
my God, I didn't even realize!  I was so focused on getting either another jack
or another eight, so I could have a full house.  I guess I didn't see what was
right in front of me.”

At
that, he leveled her with a look.  “Do you remember what I told you before?”

“Yes,
but which part?  That moving too fast will scare people off?”

“But
what else?”

“‘Ask
yourself—what are the odds?’” she said, imitating him.

“
And?
”

“And
not to keep checking my cards or it's a giveaway that I have something but am
insecure about it.”

“Wow,
I really was a showoff tonight, wasn't I?  It sounds like I couldn't shut the
hell up.”

Even
as she giggled, she struggled to remember what else he had taught her, whatever
thing he was referring to now.  “Oh!  I know.  You said: Don't get your mind
set on one way the cards can go.  Look for every angle, because something else
can always come up to disrupt your plans.”

“Exactly.”

With
a pat on the table, Nicole smiled proudly.  Hey, she may suck as a poker
player, but she was still a good student.  Then it struck her...

“But
wait.  Before, you mentioned that mistakes in poker are mistakes in real life. 
What does all of that have to do with your real life?”

For a
moment, he hesitated.  Then shuffled the cards. 

“Nothing,”
he lied, “I just made that up.”

“I
want you to come with me.” 

The
woman in Danya Rosenberg’s dream spoke with gentle finality.

The
dream was so real, it was terrifying.  It was the kind of dream that, even in
the midst of it, you actively longed to wake up.

But
you waited it out, because it's all you could do.

Danya
explained now to this woman—who was some kind of nurse or teacher—in the dream
she kept shifting—that Danya simply could not go with her.

Dreams
were so perplexing.  It was the mood or feeling of the dream that lived on, not
the disjointed events that played out in a half-baked plot.  At eighty years
old, Danya was still confounded by the way your mind played such tricks.

“Don't
be afraid,” this woman said now. 

Danya
insisted.  “I want to wake up.  Please, please let me wake up now...I have such
a bad feeling.”

“Here,
sit next to me,” the woman urged, patting the cushion of the settee.  It was
some paisley fabric; it was familiar somehow.  It reminded Danya, suddenly, of
a sofa she had had in her first apartment in
Brooklyn
.  

Reluctantly
Danya sat.  She would stay disengaged from this warped version of reality, stay
focused on the escape of morning.  Her dreams were often upsetting.  She often
dreamed about those who had gone already, her family, sometimes her
daughter...  Now sadness clutched her chest like a fist around her heart.  “I'm
so afraid,” Danya admitted.  It had sprung from deep within; not a passing
fear, but an acute terror.  Now her heart began to speed up, her chest tensed
like it was being stretched too tight. 

“You
mustn't be,” the woman said soothingly.  “Everybody dies.”

“What
is this...?” Danya asked, suddenly confused and feeling helpless.  Almost feeling
like a little girl again.  Like her mother would come and take her hand.  Of
course Danya's mother was long gone.  Everyone who had meant anything to her
was gone.  Her heart squeezed again. 
Eliana,
her mind cried.
 Eliana...I'm
so sorry.

“To
everything, there is an end,” the woman said, providing a fractured kind of
answer.  Still, the words ran like ice water down Danya's spine. 

Wake
up, wake up,
Danya begged herself.  She opened her mouth to speak, but
no words would come.  Frozen, she felt tears well in her eyes, burn her nose. 
“I'm not ready for the end,” she said.  But the words were silent.  How
inexplicable; for the past two years, she
had
felt ready.  She had been
sadly, complacently resigned to an end.  Everyone thought if you lived to be this
old, you were lucky—but Danya didn't feel lucky.  Her husband was gone, and in
his absence, the harsh realization that she had spent her whole life under the
thumb of a controlling, cold man and for what?  To lose her daughter?  To never
know her grandson—Eliana's child with that Italian Catholic she'd married. 

At
the time it had all seemed so important.  Both Danya and Ariel had lived the
first twenty-five years of their lives in
Jerusalem
, and both had been raised in a
strict Orthodox tradition.  They had assumed it would be passed, in full
spirit, to their daughter. 

More
so than most of their relatives, Ariel had adhered to the oldest, most
traditional of the Orthodox tenets, which reviled any marriage outside of the
faith.  So when Eliana had come to them all those years ago, telling them she
had fallen in love with a man named Christopher Corso, she had been told
straight away that the match was unacceptable.  Of course, Ariel had been
crueler than that in his phrasing; he accused Eliana of carrying on,
disgracefully, in secret.  If Ariel was anything, he was an unforgiving man,
and Danya knew now, looking back, that it had nothing to do with his religion. 
It was just inside of him; it was who he was, just as any flawed person has an
intrinsic nature.  There were good and bad people in every group, Danya could
see now, but it took her years to observe and believe this, and by then, it was
too late to defy her husband.  Ariel warned Eliana that if she married this
man, she would never be welcomed back to his home, that she would be shut out.

The
worst part of it all was how weak Danya had been.  Being so traditional
herself, she had shared in her husband's disapproval at first.  Then, even as
her feelings softened, it was difficult to assert herself.  Danya had married
Ariel when she was only nineteen years old; her submissiveness to him had been
ingrained. 

After
Eliana had left to marry this Christopher Corso, Danya began to worry for her
daughter's health.  Eliana had always been asthmatic, prone to bronchitis, and
had never been a strong girl, physically, but such maternal appeals fell
quickly.  As Ariel would rigidly insist:
the girl made her choice
. 

One
day when Danya was cleaning out Ariel's closet, she found a stack of letters. 
Eliana had been gone for five years at that point.  The letters were unopened,
but their daughter's name was scribbled across the return address.  One of the
postmarks was from that very year.  Eagerly, Danya began to peel them apart,
when Ariel suddenly appeared.  He snatched the letters out of her hands and
refused to let her see them.  When asked why he had kept them at all if he
never intended to read them, Ariel said that it was so he could throw them in
their daughter's face if she ever came crawling back. 

It was
obvious that Eliana's defection hurt Ariel deeply, but with Ariel...the more
sadness he carried, the more it corroded into vicious anger.

Secretly,
though, Danya recalled the return address she had read on the envelopes.  And
one day she traveled to
Long Island
to see her daughter.  But when she got
to the address, she found that her daughter was no longer there.  A neighbor
simply said “they moved,” but she didn't know where, or much about Eliana and
her husband either.  Grasping at a hope, Danya told herself that she would
intercept the next letter that came from Eliana, which would reveal her new
address. 

No
more letters came.  At least not any that Danya could find. 

It
wasn't until Ariel died sixteen years later that Danya finally discovered what
had become of her daughter.  Little Stuart Weinstock from around the corner had
grown up into an attorney.  At Danya's request, he found the information. 
Indeed, Stuart Weinstock had been the messenger: Eliana had died of pneumonia
only a few months earlier, Christopher had died some years before that in a
construction accident, and the two had had a son named Michael.

Danya
would never forget the one time she met her grandson, Michael.  A clumsy way to
go about it, to be sure, but Danya had worked up the nerve to ride to the
garage where Michael worked.  For several minutes, she stood across the street,
just watching him.  He was a handsome young man; dark hair, dark eyes, like
Eliana.  While he worked, he appeared singularly focused on the task—until Danya
broke his concentration, approaching him and blurting out, “I am Eliana's
mother.  I am your grandmother.” 

Those
dark, cold eyes of his, that stony expression, not sad, somewhere between angry
and unfeeling altogether.  “Eliana's dead,” he had said.

“I
know,” Danya admitted.  “I wanted to...”

“You
made the trip for nothing,” he told her.

“But—”

With
steely calm, he cut her off.  “I have no interest.  You're too late.”  Then he
turned and walked away. 

We
have no daughter
had been Ariel's mantra and Danya had allowed herself to
agree in some fashion—or to pretend agreement—and now this would be her
punishment.  She had waited too long to make it right and now she truly would
have no daughter, ever again.  

After
that, Danya had tried again, futilely, to talk with Michael, to explain or
apologize, to get to know him, but he truly was as hard as he had seemed that
day.  Danya wondered when the boy had turned so hard.  Or if he just had that
in him, like Ariel. 

Thinking
of Ariel was always enraging.  Thinking of how weak and crumpled Ariel had
looked in his hospital bed, and how
that
was the man she had been so
afraid of all those years? 

“I'm
not ready for the end,” she repeated now, her voice no more than a broken
whimper.

“After
the end, is a new beginning,” the woman promised her.  “There is something good
to come.  I'll help you get there.”

“But
I don't want to go anywhere yet!  I just want to wake up.”

“You
have to come with me, Danya,” the woman insisted.   

“But
I...”  A hot tear slid down Danya's cheek, then another.  Her voice was barely
a croaking whisper, a choke, and she cried, “Please, I want to wake up.  I
have
to wake up—I have to see Michael again.  I have to try again...”