Sleeping Alone (21 page)

He heard her words, but he also sensed their meaning. She wasn’t talking about the marina; she was talking about her own home. He told himself it was his imagination, that there was no way in hell Alex would think about selling her house, but he couldn’t deny the gut feeling that something had changed. He just didn’t know what it was.

* * *

Alex had a doctor’s appointment five days after Brian’s surprise visit. She hadn’t been sleeping well. Every time she closed her eyes she saw Griffin swooping down on Sea Gate like an avenging warrior, determined to claim her baby.

“You need rest,” Dr. Schulman said. “Your blood pressure is slightly elevated, and that intermittent spotting concerns me.”

“There was very little,” Alex said, clasping her hands tightly together. “I’m fine, Doctor. Really.”

“I’m going to have to insist on that sonogram, Alex. If you’re worried about the baby, I can assure you the sonogram is a safe procedure.”

Alex relented and made an appointment for April 2.

She’d keep it if she hadn’t already left town.

Making up her mind to confront Brian Gallagher had turned out to be the easy part.

Finding the right time turned out to be anything but.

Either she was working extra hours, or Mark was home on spring break or Mercury had gone retrograde and wasn’t coming out until the millennium. All Dee knew was that every time she thought she’d found the perfect time, fate told her exactly what it thought of her plans.

Opportunity finally presented itself in the form of a permission slip from one of Mark’s teachers. The science department was organizing an overnight field trip to the Pine Barrens on the same night as the second Save Sea Gate meeting.

Dee took it as a sign from God that she was doing the right thing.

Brian’s phone calls had slowed down to a trickle. She supposed it was because he’d finally gotten the idea that she wasn’t going to sleep with him again. At first he was cool to the idea of getting together, but she wasn’t about to take no for an answer. He might be terrific in the courtroom, but he was no match for a mother out to help her child.

The days until the field trip seemed to pass in slow motion. Rich and his wife left for Florida. Sally began the process of shutting down her bait and tackle shop. Eddie had an incident with a school crossing guard, and Alex moved back into Marge Winslow’s old place.

Only Dee seemed to be trapped in a state of suspended animation, waiting.

* * *

“Sorry I’m late.” Brian shrugged out of his camel’s hair coat and handed it to Dee. Only Brian would wear a camel’s hair coat at the end of March. “Traffic’s building up down here.”

“Tell me something I don’t know,” Dee said, draping his coat over the back of a chair. “It takes me an hour to get to the community college, and that’s after the evening rush.”

“The community college?”

Damn it. Why had she mentioned that? Nobody but Mark knew she was taking classes toward a degree. “I’m taking an adult ed course.” Basket-weaving. Embroidery. Astrology. Let him think whatever he wanted.

“Margo took a course a few years ago. Cake decorating.” He shook his head. “It didn’t occur to her she’d have to actually bake a cake in order to have something to decorate.”

There was an ugly subtext to his words that made her feel an unexpected kinship with his wife.

‘Sit down,” she said, gesturing toward the couch.

He glanced around the room. “I could use a Scotch.”

“Sorry,” she said. “I don’t have any.”

“Brandy will do.”

“I have coffee,” she said, sitting down on the chair opposite him. “If you’d like some...”

He shook his head, then brushed some cat hair off the sofa cushion and sat down. Apparently the cats in his world didn’t shed. The fact that she didn’t hit him in the head with a lamp was proof of how much she loved her son.

“Okay,” he said. “I’m here. What did you want to talk to me about?”

She met his eyes, then said the words she wished she’d said sixteen years ago. “I want to talk about our son.”

* * *

“You can let me off at the corner,” Mark said. “I’ll walk the rest of the way.” He was the last of the students to be dropped off.

Mr. Carling, his science teacher, pulled over to the curb and stopped the minivan. “Sure you can manage your gear?”

“No prob,” Mark said, grabbing his backpack. “See you tomorrow.”

The field trip to the Pine Barrens had been a total bust. First it started raining, then the police showed up and said Mr. Carling didn’t have the right paperwork from the county. Mark’s one chance to look for the Jersey Devil and it got screwed up.

“We have a curriculum planned,” the teacher had protested.

“Next time bring the right papers,” the cop had said, then directed them back to the highway.

The rain was coming down harder. Mark lowered his head and started jogging toward home. His mom usually had school on Tuesday nights. She was halfway toward getting her associate’s degree in business, and he was really proud of her. Maybe he’d make a pot of chili and surprise her when she came home. She’d been acting strange the last few weeks, as if she had something on her mind. He knew she’d been seeing Sam Weitz, but he didn’t think she wanted to marry the guy. At least he hoped she didn’t. It had just been the two of them for a long time now, and he didn’t want some guy coming in thinking he would run the house.

He remembered what had happened to his friend Karl. His mom had married a doctor last year, but the guy turned out to be a real bastard. He didn’t want Karl living in the house with them and sent the poor schmuck off to some military school in Vermont. As far as Mark was concerned, it was pretty shitty of the guy to even try something like that, but what had hurt Karl the most was that his mom let him get away with it.

Mark knew his mom would never let some jerk come along and push him out of his own house. Sure they fought about lots of stuff, like why he couldn’t get a car of his own or stay out past midnight, but mostly they got along pretty good. It wasn’t like he didn’t want his mom to find someone and be happy, because he did. But it scared him to think about a stranger coming into their lives and maybe hurting her. She tried to hide it, but Mark knew she’d been hurt by a lot of guys in the past, starting with John’s asshole brother.

He didn’t want to think about Brian Gallagher. Thinking about him always gave Mark a terrible feeling in the pit of his stomach, as if he was going to puke.

That’s weird,
he thought as he got closer to the house. Every light in the place was on. His mom had been complaining about the electric bill just the other night. She’d even laid out a plan to help them conserve power. No way would she go switching on all the lights before she went out.

Sweat broke at the back of his neck as he realized the car was still in the driveway. It was only seven o’clock. She wasn’t due home from school for another four hours. Maybe she was sick, he thought. There was always some stupid virus going around town. But that still didn’t explain the bright red Porsche that was parked next to his mom’s Toyota.

He knew that fucking car, and he hated it.

He ducked into some thick rhododendrons at the side of the house and peered in the living-room window. His mother was in Brian Gallagher’s arms, and it looked as if he was about to kiss her.

Mark fell backward into the bushes as his world spun out of control. Blood pounded inside his head, almost drowning out his harsh, guttural cry of pain. How could she do it... she knew what a bastard Gallagher was... he’d never been there for them before... why should he be there now? If she hooked up with Gallagher there would be no room for Mark in their lives. He’d end up just like his friend Karl, stuck in some shithole boarding school all alone—

Blindly Mark grabbed for the first thing he could find, a football-sized rock his mother had placed in the garden, and heaved it at the windshield of the Porsche.

The sound of glass shattering made him feel better, as if somebody had released a pressure valve. He grabbed the rock from the front seat, then slammed it against the shiny expanse of hood. He wished it was the bastard’s head. His blood beat furiously inside his veins, and the sound drove him on. He slammed that rock against the hood and the trunk and the driver’s side door.

It was too late. The son of a bitch couldn’t show up now after all these years and take over like he owned them. Maybe Brian Gallagher could fool his mother that way, but Gallagher couldn’t fool him. Mark closed his yes, but the image of his mother crying in the bastard’s arms ripped his heart in two.

“I hate you!” he yelled at the top of his lungs. “You bastard, I hate your fucking guts!”

* * *

Dee wasn’t a crier. She liked to say she was the only kid at Sea Gate Elementary who hadn’t shed a tear for Old Yeller or Bambi’s mother. It wasn’t that she didn’t feel things the way other people did. Actually her heart was every bit as soft as the next woman’s. She just worked harder to hide it than most women did. You had to when you were a single mother.

But when Brian looked her in the eye and said he refused to acknowledge his son’s existence, something inside her broke. Tears made you seem weak and vulnerable. She hated herself for crying, but after sixteen years she couldn’t hold the tears back any longer.

“I’m not asking you for money, Brian.” She struggled to control the quaver in her voice. “I’m only asking for you to acknowledge Mark as your son. He needs a family. He needs—”

The sound of glass breaking stopped her.

Brian glanced toward the window. “What the hell was that?”

“I don’t know,” Dee said. “It sounded like it came from the driveway.”

“Shit,” Brian muttered, releasing his hold on her. “The Porsche—”

The Porsche?
She had just poured out her heart to the father of her child, and all he could think about was his fancy car? The son of a bitch should be thankful she didn’t keep a gun in the house because if she did, he’d be lying in a pool of his own blood right about now.

He started for the door.

“Brian.” Her voice was sharp with anger. “We haven’t finished talking.”

“In a sec,” he said. “This neighborhood isn’t the greatest, Dee Dee. I want to make sure the car’s okay.”

She followed him outside in time to hear him bellow like a bear caught in a trap.

“What’s wrong, Brian?” She ran across the driveway to where he stood, bent over from the waist, trying to catch his breath.

He gestured wordlessly toward the car. The windshield was shattered, and a series of large dents arced across the hood and over the fender.

“Somebody got you pretty good,” she observed, walking around the car.
And if I knew who did it, I’d give him an award.

“Jesus,” he said, his voice hoarse and breathy. “Jesus.”

“It’s only a car, Brian.” Her tone was amused and more than a little disgusted.

He wasn’t listening. He opened the driver’s-side door and grabbed for his cell phone. She watched as he punched in 9-1-1. Anything she might have felt for him, any residual memory of love or longing or hatred vanished, and she felt free for the first time since she was fifteen years old.

* * *

The John Gallagher Alex knew worked with his lands. He repaired boats, took rich men out on deep-sea fishing expeditions, and watched over the marina now that Eddie had lost all interest in it.

The John Gallagher who took charge of the Save Sea Gate coalition’s second meeting that night was a stranger to her. He was forceful, erudite, downright passionate as he talked about his hometown and why saving that hometown should be important to all of them.

She hadn’t wanted to come to the meeting. Moving back into her house had been the first step in breaking away from John. The first of April was just two days away, and she wasn’t naive enough to think Brian Gallagher’s threat to contact Griffin was anything less than serious. For all she knew he’d already called Griffin, and the two of them were watching her as she spun slowly in the wind.

They had her trapped between a rock and a hard place. For days she’d been telling herself that selling her house to Brian and Eagle Management was the right decision, that anything she did to keep Griffin away from her child was beyond reproach. John would hate her for it, but he wouldn’t turn away from the baby, and that had seemed the most important thing of all.

But the more she listened to him talk that night, the more she wondered if she was doing the right thing. A standing-room-only crowd packed the auditorium. It seemed to Alex that everyone in town had gathered there to hear what John had to say about the future.

He’d presented a visual history of Sea Gate from its founding in 1752 to the present, with an emphasis on the glory days. He described the early colonists and the whalers who had helped build the town. The railroad tracks at the far edge of town had been specially constructed to bring Abraham Lincoln to Sea Gate during the Civil War. The address he’d presented hadn’t gone down in history the way the one at Gettysburg had, but the original notes still resided behind glass at the local library.

The late nineteenth century had seen the arrival of wealthy New Yorkers and Philadelphians looking for a place to spend the long hot summers. Sea Gate was just the ticket. Elaborate Victorian houses popped up from one end of town to the other, each one more fanciful and expensive than the last. Some houses displayed ocean views, while others faced the verdant town square. Ocean Avenue had boasted one of the first boardwalk in the United States, a wide expanse of wooden planks designed as a promenade by the sea.

Listening to John talk, she could imagine handsome men and beautiful women strolling arm in arm in the summer sun. She’d found herself blinking back tears as a bustling, successful Ocean Avenue flashed across the movie screen he’d set up at the front of the room. Time had been as cruel to the town as it had been to so many of its residents.

“We’re not Cape May,” he admitted, “but there was a time when we were every bit as popular. We can do it again, but only if we stick together.”

They were at a critical juncture. If a few more stores and beachfront houses toppled to Eagle Management, they wouldn’t stand a chance, and that suddenly seemed a terrible shame to Alex.