Into the Night (12 page)
She craned her neck to look at him over her shoulder. "What are you going to do?"
"Are you going to be okay?" he asked.
"Yes, but—"
"Yes is all I need to hear," he interrupted.
"But—"
"Shhh. I want you to hold on really tight, because the net's going to bounce. Put your arms all the way through and loop the ropes with your elbows. Yeah, like that. Good. You feel secure?"
He'd gotten her attention now, that was for sure. Her eyes were wide as she turned to look at him. "What are you going to—
He didn't wait for her to finish. He went up, fast, almost all the way to the top of the obstacle. He could see her face, looking up at him. Good.
Okay, Joan. Watch this.
Muldoon let himself drop. Fast. With his legs free. From Joan's point of view it would look as if he were falling. And maybe, technically, he was. But it was a controlled fall. One that he could stop anytime.
And he did stop, directly beside Joan.
The ropes strained and groaned under his weight, and she bounced pretty hard, but she didn't lose her grip.
He'd timed it perfectly, executed it beautifully—and she had her eyes tightly closed.
"Oh, my God," she was saying. "Oh, my God, oh, my God!"
"You want me to do that again?" he asked. "And this time you can keep your eyes open so you can watch?"
Joan opened eyes that were filled with anger. "You childish bastard! You could have told me what you were going to do!"
Whoa. She was really pissed.
"This is supposed to be a demonstration, so—"
"This was a mistake. A big mistake. So if you're done showing off, dickhead, I want to get down."
"Oh, come on, you're not really going to quit on me, are you?"
"I Want To Get Down," she enunciated. "Why am I waiting for you? I don't need you to help me." She started toward the ground.
Muldoon followed alongside of her. "Joan—"
"Stop making it bounce!" she ordered. "Just stay where you are. I can get to the bottom by myself."
And she did.
But as soon as she hit the ground and started unfastening the harness, Muldoon went after her.
"I didn't expect you to be the type to quit and run away," he said. That was probably not the smartest thing to say given Joan's emotional state.
She looked about to boil over. "I didn't expect you to be a dickhead."
She got the last of the harness off of her and stormed to the bench, snatching her skirt, her shoes, and that oversized purse thing she carried around with her, before heading toward the gate and the parking lot.
Muldoon looked back at the cargo net. Jenk and Gillman were already on their way back to the ground. Cosmo was still perched up at the very top, like some kind of weird giant bird, basking in the afternoon sunshine.
"Stow the harness and rope," he ordered them, before dashing after Joan.
"Come on, wait a sec," he said, catching up to her, catching her arm in the parking lot.
But she yanked herself free and kept walking. "You scared me to death! You should have told me you could do that circus trick stuff right from the start! But no. You had to show off."
"I told you the O course was no big deal to any of us," he protested as she stopped in front of a rental car and fished in her bag for the keys. "I spent not an insignificant amount of time today talking to you about insertion techniques like HALO jumps out of airplanes and fast-roping down from helicopters. Didn't it occur to you that if we can do that, then something like the cargo net on the O course might not be such a challenge?"
"No." Joan unlocked the car door and threw her stuff into the backseat.
"Well, then, okay, I'm sorry."
She laughed as she climbed in behind the wheel, but it wasn't because she thought he was funny. "You're only sorry now?"
"No, that's not what I—"
"I think it would be a good idea if I were assigned a different liaison." She wouldn't look him in the eyes.
Oh, man. "Look, Joan, I don't think—"
"I'll call Lieutenant Commander Paoletti's office in the morning." She closed the door and started the car.
"Joan—"
But she kept the window up as she put the car into reverse, pulled out of the parking spot, and drove away.
"Shit!"
Muldoon turned to stomp back toward the O course and found Sam Starrett a few feet away from him, getting something out of the back of his pickup truck.
"Looks like that didn't go too well," Sam commented.
"Yeah, well, it would have gone really great—if my goal was to have her call me a dickhead and drive off without me."
Sam had the decency not to laugh in his face as he hefted his sea bag onto his shoulder and crossed around the back of his truck so he could talk to Muldoon without shouting.
"Sometimes you can measure how much a woman likes you by how mad you can make her."
Muldoon snorted.
"I know it sounds crazy," Sam said. "But it's true. And it's something I learned a little too late. Don't make the same mistakes I did. This White House lady might be in the exactly perfect emotional place right now for you to call her up and apologize profusely. I mean, really crawl. Admit to anything and everything. Tell her she was a hundred percent right. Women really like to be right. And then ask her to dinner."
"Yeah, I don't know about that." It was kind of hard to take romantic advice from a man who was miserable in his marriage and still carrying a torch for someone else. And the cowboy Texas drawl didn't help his credibility as Dear Abby, either.
"Suit yourself," the lieutenant said with a shrug. "But if I were you, I'd ask her to dinner before it's too late."
"I did," Muldoon told him. "She said no. She said she was tired"
"Tired isn't no. Tired is tired. Ask her again, for Christ's sake. Ask her to lunch if you don't want to ask her to dinner again. Ask her to have a drink. Ask her out on your boat. Don't just sit around with your thumb up your butt. Ask her fucking something. Or else she's right. You are a dickhead."
"Gee, thanks, Lieutenant."
"Anytime."
Mary Lou couldn't find her car keys. She was going to have to go pick up Haley in about half an hour, and she couldn't do it without her keys.
To make matters worse, it wasn't going to be too long before it got dark, and once it did, then she'd really have trouble finding them.
She was on her hands and knees in the Robinsons' garden, praying that any spiders and snakes she encountered would be of the nontoxic variety. She tried not to start crying again as she searched mostly by feel among the thick pink and yellow flowers.
"May I help you?" a musically accented voice asked.
Oh, Lord.
She couldn't bring herself to turn and look up into the face of the man standing beside her. The leather sandals and long, almost elegant dark-skinned toes were all she could bear to focus on.
It was the Robinsons' yard guy. She'd seen him in the neighborhood often enough over the past month or so—a tall, reed-thin, dark-haired, dark-skinned, foreign-looking man. He came every week to cut the Robinsons' lawn and tend their flower beds—one of which she was currently kneeling in, trying desperately not to crush. He was relatively new, but he kept the Robinsons' yard looking so good he'd already landed contracts with some of the other neighbors as well.
Despite the fact that he looked as if he might spend his free time organizing an al-Qaeda terrorist cell.
"I, uh, lost my car keys," she said. Mercy, what a stupid, foolish thing to have to admit. As if she'd been doing cartwheels here in this flower bed and they'd fallen out of her pocket.
"I threw them over here," she went ahead and admitted, wiping her sweaty forehead with the back of her hand, "so I wouldn't be tempted to drive to the Ladybug Lounge and get shit-faced drunk, all right? So, no, unless you have X-ray vision and can see where my keys landed, you probably can't help me. But thank you so very much for asking."
The sandals walked away, thank God for small favors.
But then the sandals came back. And she saw that the yard guy was carrying one of those metal detectors that people used on the beach to find lost jewelry and coins. "Please, allow me."
Mary Lou extracted herself from the garden, moving back to sit on the lawn. As she brushed dirt from her knees, he turned on the doohickey, and about four seconds later, he turned it back off, then reached carefully down among the pink flowers and pulled out her keys.
Thank God.
Instead of handing them to her, he sat down, cross-legged, beside her.
"Are you absolutely sure you want these back?" he said in a slightly British English-as-a-second-language accent.
With him sitting next to her, Mary Lou could look at him— really look at his face and into his eyes. When he'd first started working next door, she'd complained to her sister about it. It wasn't that she was prejudiced against foreigners. She was the first to admit he made the Robinsons' yard look great. But really, after 9/11, who wanted strange Arabs prowling around their neighborhood?
He was older than she'd thought from watching him from her kitchen window as he'd worked next door. Up close, she could see lines around his eyes and mouth. He wore a full beard that, although it was neatly trimmed, made his already dark face seem even darker.
From a distance, he'd always appeared to be scowling, but she saw now that that wasn't true. His craggy features and thick eyebrows only made it seem as if he were perpetually angry. In fact, up close, she saw that his default expression was a gentle smile.
And right now she saw nothing but kindness in his dark brown eyes.
He held her keys loosely in his big, work-hardened hand. She could have reached out, taken them, thanked him, and walked away and that would have been that.
But then he said, "I've seen you at some of the local meetings. I also go almost every night."
The lawn guy went to Alcoholics Anonymous, too. She stared at him.
"You're often there with your baby," he continued. "She is so beautiful, always smiling. You must be so very proud."
"I am," Mary Lou said.
He nodded. "I don't think you really want to go to the Ladybug Lounge today, do you?"
She started to cry. It was absurd—she was sure she'd cried herself out, over on her driveway and then inside the house as well. She'd sat in her kitchen, expressing her breast milk like some kind of human cow as she'd cried and cried and cried. But here she was, melting down again, and there was nothing she could do to stop it.
The lawn guy just sat there. He didn't reach for her, but he didn't run away, either. He just sat quietly beside her and let her cry.
"I'm sorry," she finally managed to say.
"Your sponsor is not home to talk to?"
"No."
He nodded. "Too bad. But that was very good thinking," he told her. "Throwing away your keys. Very smart."
Mary Lou looked up at him, wiping her eyes. "You think so?"
He gave her an even wider but no less gentle smile. "I know it to be so. You're here and you're still sober, and maybe that very bad moment has passed."
She wasn't so sure about that. This entire night was going to suck—picturing Sam with Alyssa... Oh, Lord, don't think about that.
"How long have you been sober?" she asked him. "I mean, if you don't mind my asking."
"Just over four years."
"Wow."
"And you?"
"Eighteen months," she told him.
He gave her another of those smiles. "That's excellent."
"Not as good as you. Dear Lord, four years..."
Out on the street, a car slowly drove past. It wasn't one of the neighbors—at least not one she recognized. What they would think, seeing them sitting here like this, she couldn't imagine.
"The trick lies in not thinking about it as one large block of time," he told her. "It's impossible for anyone to not drink for four whole years. But to choose not to drink for today? That's still difficult, but not quite as impossible. I should have answered your question by saying I have chosen to be sober today for four years' worth of days in a row."
"I thought Arabs weren't allowed to drink," Mary Lou said.
"Muslims have laws in which drinking alcohol is forbidden, yes," he corrected her. "But many still do. Christians aren't supposed to take the Lord's name in vain, is that not true? Jews shouldn't eat ham or pork. And Catholics have certain rules about procreation that they tend to ignore. Just as with every religion, there are those Muslims who follow the exact rule of the law, and those who practice less strenuously— to varying degrees. I myself grew up in a household where my parents and their friends chose to embrace the ways of the West and to serve and drink alcohol. And yet we observed Ramadan and practiced our faith in other ways."
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