Under the Boardwalk (6 page)

Hallie tried to smile at the scary dude. "Nice to meet you."

"The pleasure's all mine, Hallie. Listen," he added in his own loud whisper, "you wanna dump these bums and run off with a handsome restaurateur?"

She looked down at the table.

"I can offer wealth beyond measure and extra cheese on every pizza, what do you say?"

Kyle waved him off with a laugh. "She's had a rotten day, give her a break."

"Okay, I give up. You're stuck with the worthless bums. Now, what'll it be, guys?"

"No anchovies, right—what about onions?" Kyle asked Hallie.

"I love onions—if that's okay?"

"Whatever you want's okay—I told you, Chris has a cast-iron stomach."

Chris chuckled.

Kyle turned to Matt. "You heard the lady."

"Yup. One extra-large with extra everything—and onions—coming up." He disappeared into the crowd.

~*~

Kyle watched Hallie as she ate. He watched her delicate hands, covered in thin white scars like a cobweb etched across the translucent skin. He watched how she wrinkled her nose when she took a bite of peppery sausage, and how she listened with rapt attention while Chris told her one after another of the far-fetched stories of local heroes and rascals. He noticed the way her eyes widened in childlike wonder as she looked out the window at the lights of the amusement park. There was a gentle, innocent dreamer inside that tough shell, but the ghosts of her past were crowding close around her, stopping her from giving in to her true nature.

He thought about her namesake, the fearless and arrogant tortoiseshell cat they'd found orphaned years earlier. Its mother had lost a horrible fight with a raccoon, and the kitten had survived by burying herself deep in a woodpile until the predator had gone. When he'd let the little fur ball loose in the house, she'd given him one last scratch to add to the rest she'd inflicted during her capture, and then scrambled for cover behind the washing machine, apparently never to be seen again. He'd tossed a fluffy towel behind the machine for her to sleep on, placed food and water and litter box close by, and bandaged his wounds.

For weeks the only signs the little creature was alive were the empty food dishes and dirty litter box. Then, after a while, they began to hear noises in the house during the night. When anyone had gone to investigate, they'd seen a black-and-orange streak heading for the washing machine.

Slowly the kitten grew more trusting, and eventually allowed herself to be held and petted, but she'd still struggle wildly and scratch if she was startled.

Months later, Kyle had caught the cat with one of his socks in her mouth, cheerfully tearing holes in it with her teeth. He'd yelled at her, but Halloween just stared at him, as if to say, "you've gotta be kidding, mister. I know you're all bluff," and ripped another hole in the sock, purring all the while.

Kyle watched Hallie finish the last of her pizza.

"Do you want another slice?" Kyle asked.

Hallie shook her head. "I couldn't eat one more piece if my life depended on it. Oh, my poor stomach. Give it to Chris."

"He's busy," Kyle said with a smile.

Chris was staring at another booth across the restaurant. Kyle and Hallie both turned to see half a dozen teenagers crowding the booth, including one slender blonde who smiled shyly back at them.

"Don't look, guys!" Chris whispered. "You're embarrassing me!"

Kyle chuckled. "So go talk to her."

Chris took a swig of his soda like a gunslinger downing one before the big shootout. "Okay," he said. He didn't move.

Kyle laughed. "You want me to go over and break the ice?"

Chris stood up abruptly. "I'm going, I'm going."

Kyle watched Hallie turn to her cup of coffee, taking a sugar packet from the dispenser. He said nothing as she struggled to open the packet. Her fingers didn't seem to cooperate, but she was persistent, and he didn't dare offer to open the sugar for her. Finally, after what seemed a long time, she succeeded, and tore the paper packet open, poured it into her coffee, then took a sip.

She glanced up at him. He looked away so wouldn't see he'd been watching her. She could take care of herself, she'd said, and she was right. She'd survived whatever vicious predator had taken away her trust, but most importantly, he knew that the gentle, innocent part of her, the part that made her special, the part that seemed to draw him closer with every breath, had survived. It was buried deep inside, but it was still there. He vowed then and there that one day she'd show the world that part of her, without fear, and he'd be there to see it.

"Chris is a good kid," Hallie said, and he noticed she was watching him.

"They all are," Kyle agreed. "Wait'll you meet Zac...." His voice trailed off.

"What?" she asked. "Tomato sauce on my chin?"

He laughed. "No. I was just thinking. You remind me of Zac, somehow."

Hallie raised an eyebrow. "If he's Chris's twin, I don't see the connection. I'm nothing like Chris." She tapped her fingertips on the table. "See? No sense of rhythm."

Kyle laughed again. "Yeah. I can tell. No, Zac and Chris are fraternal twins, not identical. They're really different from each other." He took another drink of his soda. "It's the hardest part of parenting—letting each one find his own way without my interfering too much."

"Oh. The 'mission in life' thing." She smiled as she said it. Somehow the good meal and warm restaurant had relaxed her.

"Yeah," he said. "That silly old thing." He winked. "It's really true, you know. No two people are alike. Zac is almost as tall as Chris, but he'll never be a basketball player."

"So what'll Zac be? An over-age college student like me?"

"I don't know," Kyle said, watching her, entranced. Her brown eyes sparkled in the lamplight, beautiful yet wary. "He has the soul of a poet."

She laughed. "Oh. Just like me." She picked up a stray slice of pepperoni from her plate and bit into it. "I've never written a poem in my life."

"That's not what I meant," Kyle said seriously. "Zac's a dreamer—"

"—well, if you're going to be insulting...."

"That's insulting?" Kyle wondered again what had happened in her life to make her so cynical. "Sorry. Maybe I'm wrong. It's just an impression I got from the way Windy described you, and from watching you." He pushed his plate aside and rested his elbows on the table. "Anyway, Zac is a dreamer—in the best sense of the word. He has a vivid imagination and sees romance in everything. His main thing is history—family history, the history of this area, from the days of the Ochoa Indians to the conquistadores and cowboys and California dreamers right up to the present day. Even at fifteen, he already knows more than anyone around about all of this—even Windy." He nodded out the window at the sparkling shoreline. "He can probably tell you who lived in any one of those old houses at any time in the past hundred years."

Hallie looked out the window, eyes wide and wondering, as if her mind was filled with images of dusty cattle trails and strange, proud people gazing out across this same land in distant centuries. She shook her head. He watched her pull her imagination back, tamping it down again. "But what's he going to do with it?" she asked.

"Do?"

"For a living."

"He's only fifteen. He can explore and dream now. Eventually—"

"—He'll find his calling in life," she finished.

Kyle laughed and shook his head. "You say it like it's a curse. Okay, you win. Practicality makes much more sense. Let's go home and find you someplace practical to sleep—I think I've got some old boards in the barn that'll make a no-frills bed."

~*~

The bed turned out to be of wrought iron, piled high with an overstuffed mattress and antique quilts. It had been a Spanish general's traveling bed, Kyle had told her when he showed her the tiny attic bedroom. The room's walls were like all the rancho's, thick adobe blocks painted cream. Unlike the clutter downstairs, these walls were bare except for a carved figure of a saint nestled in a niche above the door, and some shelves of gnarled wood in one corner. The only furnishings were a small trunk of dark-stained wood with Chinese-looking carvings, and the amazing bed.

The bed had a canopy of curved metal pieces that arched up to brush against the room's ceiling. "How on earth did you get it in here?" she'd asked, looking skeptically at the room's low door, and the single deep window under the eaves.

"Zac'll tell you all about it when you meet him tomorrow," Kyle had said before leaving her to unpack.

Every time Kyle mentioned "his kids," there was so much pride in his voice. He was so at home here, running the ranch and caring for the kids. She felt a knot in her stomach—what was that like? To have someone consider you important? To have someone proud of you?

She opened up her two boxes filled with everything she owned in the world. Her few clothes fit easily into the small trunk. She lifted her last sweater out of the box, and there underneath it lay a dappled grey pony.

She picked up the little wooden figure and felt the tears spill down her cheeks. Wow. She'd thought she was done crying over it. But the day had been long, and exhausting, and she didn't have the strength to hold back the tears now.

The pony was the only one of her carvings to survive the last night of her marriage. She clutched it to her chest, stroking the smooth wood with her scarred hands.

A dreamer, Kyle had called her, not realizing what an insult that actually was. Her foolish dreams had led her to think her life could be a fairy tale.

She wondered what her life would have been like if someone had believed in her like Kyle believed in Zac, Chris, and Windy. She thought of her own life at fifteen. That last foster home.... She closed her eyes, as if that would shut out the echoing in her ears.
You worthless brat! Get back to work!
Aging out of the foster care system had seemed like the key to freedom. Once she turned eighteen, she was on her own, without a backward glance, without a soul in the world to root for her or even care if she lived or died. And yet she'd thought she'd live happily ever after anyway.

She looked down at her hands. She'd run from one mess right into another. If only she'd had the good sense back then to be practical. If she'd just been logical, kept her head down, and concentrated on surviving, everything would have been different.

She wouldn't have fallen for David Cooper.

He had seemed like her prince charming when he'd come into the restaurant where she worked. He'd flattered her, complimented her, then offered her a way out, an escape to a better life. He had used her dreams to trap her, offering security and promises of love to a scared teenager. It had been years before she'd realized the promises he'd made were a trap, and that the only dreams he cared about were his own.

She had lied to herself for so long—David could be so kind when he wanted to be—that somehow she'd been able to dismiss it when he swore that one day he'd break her the way he broke the furniture during his jealous rages.

She looked down at her scarred hands. She knew better now.

Hallie carefully placed the little horse on the corner shelf, and took a deep breath, wiping away the last of her tears.

She spent a long time by the room's only window, gazing out into the night. The windowsill was set deep into the adobe wall, and the foot-thick sill provided a nice perch for sitting and watching the darkness. It had been such a long day; it was no wonder her nerves were on edge, and the tears came when she'd thought she was all cried out.

Some moonlight shone through the fog, and as she watched the misty darkness she felt herself gradually relax. After a while her eyes adjusted to the dark, and she could make out the shape of the barn about a hundred yards from the house, and the tips of treetops beyond that. Far away, down the mountainside, she could see a glow that might have been the town of Pajaro Bay itself, but she wasn't sure.

Something moved by the barn. She watched for a while. Yes, there it was again: a bird, no, an entire flock of them, winging their way out from under the eaves of the barn, and heading off into the night. They looked like swallows, but she wasn't sure. That's funny, she thought. Except for one foster home on a ranch, she'd spent all of her life in cities, so she wasn't an expert on country wildlife, but she had never pictured flocks of swallows flying around at night.

There was a knock at the door.

"Come in."

Kyle popped his head in. "All settled?" Her hair was loose, he noticed, and the dark curls and her wide, dark eyes made her seem even more ephemeral and delicate than ever.

"Yeah. I'm just looking at these birds. They're fascinating." She seemed to find everything fascinating, he noticed, in spite of her claims to practicality.

Kyle came to look out the window where she pointed. He chuckled when he saw what she was looking at. "I don't know if you can take this after the day you've had," he said. "But those aren't birds."

"What are they?"

"
Listen to them. Children of the night. What music they make.
" He laughed ghoulishly. He noticed her confused look. "Never heard the quote? Bela Lugosi as Dracula. I guess you're too busy studying to watch the late-late movies. It's a good hobby when you have little kids. They keep you up a lot walking the floor, and later they keep you up waiting for them to get home."