Take Me Two Times Page 21

  Shock knocked the breath out of him. “That’s not true!”

  “Don’t bother denying it. I saw your face.”

  “I was relieved that you were okay, Gwen!”

  She shook her head implacably.

  “I was out of my mind with worry. . . .”

  She just looked at him. “Yeah. That was so clear when you went out to a bar that night and left me alone.” She covered her mouth with her hand.

  He closed his eyes and leaned against the wall, remembering: Gwen in a hospital bed, pale against the pillow, her eyes huge, her hair a mess. She’d curled into a fetal position under the sheet and blanket.

  He’d sat on the bed next to her and taken her hand. Said he was sorry. And he was. Sorry for what she’d gone through. Sorry for what might have been.

  Had he felt relief on any level?

  Terrible question.

  A question nobody had asked him, too awful to verbalize.

  Gwen’s mother had said it was God’s will, that it was probably for the best, that they were too young to be parents. That there was time in the years ahead.

  He’d nodded. What else was there to say?

  He’d driven her home to their efficiency in the old green Ford truck that smelled of mildew and cat pee. She’d climbed into bed and curled into her fetal position again. Didn’t want the TV on.

  Was there anything he could bring her?

  Doughnuts. Chocolate-covered doughnuts. Entenmann’s.

  He drove to the store and brought them home. She stared at the box. She stared at him. He didn’t know what to do or what to say or how to make it better.

  A buddy of his called. Did he want to go get a beer? Not a good idea, man.

  She continued to stare. Said it was okay; she wanted to be alone. Go. He should have known better, but . . .

  All right, man, I’ll meet you for an hour.

  He came back in three.

  Gwen had eaten ten of the doughnuts and drunk a quart of milk. He didn’t know if she’d been sick afterward. She pretended to be asleep, but he didn’t think so, judging by her breathing.

  He felt like an asshole, but what was he supposed to do—watch her fake being asleep? He couldn’t. He got dressed again and slipped out the door. Walked and smoked. Drove and smoked. Bought a six-pack at a convenience store, sat on the stoop, drank two of the beers, and continued to smoke until the sun came up.

  Had she thought that because of his behavior, he hadn’t cared?

  Quinn opened his eyes and she was still looking at him, as if he were a particularly revolting insect, so gross that she couldn’t even bring herself to crush him with her shoe.

  “You were relieved,” she repeated. “No crying, no diapers. You could go ahead and go to grad school. You were free. . . .”

  “I wasn’t relieved! I was wrong to go out that night, but you told me to. You didn’t seem to want me there.”

  She just shook her head. “You should’ve known better.”

  “Well, I didn’t. Stupid guy behavior. I’m sorry! I was twenty years old, Gwen. I didn’t have a decent job, much less a career. I couldn’t afford the diapers or an acceptable place to raise a kid. I didn’t have any concept of how to be a parent. Yeah, I’ll tell you straight-out: I was petrified. So sue me. But God damn it, that doesn’t mean I was glad when we lost the baby.”

  She didn’t say anything.

  “Did I run dancing into the street? Set off fireworks? Christ, Gwen! This is so unfair. I thought, at the time, that your mom was right. We had plenty of time ahead of us. It was sad, but we’d try again one day.”

  He felt his anger rising up again. “So that’s why you left. Because you made an assumption about my feelings and condemned me for it. That’s great, Gwen. That’s just fucking great.”

  “You still can’t admit it, can you?”

  “Admit what? And who are you to sit in judgment of me?” he said. “I stepped up to the plate. I proposed to you! And that’s a hell of a lot more than my dad ever did. He knocked up my mom, refused to marry her, and then took off. I did right by you, which is more than you did by me. You’re the one who ran away.”

  “I had good reason! You went to a bar, Quinn. A bar, after we lost the baby.” She turned her back to him as if she could no longer look at him.

  “Because you wouldn’t fucking talk to me!”

  “It was at worst cruel and at best immature.”

  “And writing me a note and taking off was mature?”

  She bowed her head, hugged herself. He could see the tips of her fingers digging into her own ribs. The three tender, vulnerable vertebrae at her nape reproached him, accused him. She was obviously upset—why couldn’t he be the one to hug her? Why was she having to hug herself? He took half a step forward.

  Then she raised her head, and her hair came down like a curtain over those unprotected vertebrae. She turned to face him and slowly unwrapped her hands from around her body. She gave him a tiny nod. “You’re right. I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have run. And I owed you a face-to-face explanation.”

  Fifteen years he’d been waiting to hear her say those words . . . and now she’d said them. He forgave her instantly—so easily that it made him furious. Did he have no self-respect?

  Was this all it would have taken, a few words, to salvage their marriage?

  No. He knew that the problems had been deeper than that; they hadn’t learned, back then, how to grow and adapt to the world individually, much less together. They’d been so young and unformed and naive.

  They stared at each other across the table, the flowers and the wine he’d brought now seeming borderline obscene.

  “I’m sorry,” she said again.

  He nodded. “Yeah, well, I’m sorry, too. And the bar—it’s not what you think. I wasn’t licking tequila outta some bimbo’s navel.”

  “I know that.” Gwen looked tired. She slipped her arms back around her body, lower this time. Across her belly. It was body language that blocked him out. Told him to go away. Stuffed him back into that dark, suffocating, communication-starved place where misguided beliefs thrived.

  “Tell you what, honey,” he ground out. “Don’t make any more assumptions about me. Try talking to me instead. Even cussin’ at me.”

  She searched his face, a strange expression on hers. What the hell was it? Hope? Fear? Mistrust? Damned if he could tell. The Oklahoma weather was easier to read than Gwen’s beautiful, blank, sphinxlike features.

  Air. He needed air. He was suffocating on the past. His boots heavy on her floorboards, Quinn brushed past her and headed out the back door, slamming it behind him. Outside, the humidity embraced him cloyingly like a two-bit whore, and the stars in the night sky sparkled like cheap rhinestones.

  In the corner of Gwen’s yard stood a palm tree, which had dropped a couple of now-moldering coconuts. He drew back his boot and kicked one, sending it in a neat spiral to the right, over the neighbor’s fence.

  He winced as he heard a crash and craned his neck to see where it’d landed. Touchdown: right in the barbecue grill.

  The motor of a car started nearby, just as the neighbor came barreling out the back door. “What the . . . ?”

  “Sorry, man.”

  Fortunately, the guy laughed, and they exchanged a few words. Then Quinn went back inside.

  “Gwen?”

  No answer.

  “Gwen?”

  Music continued to play softly on the stereo, and the lights still blazed. Their glasses, the wine bottle, and the food remained on the dining room table—along with a piece of paper and a key.

  Oh, no way. Another goddamned note? After the conversation they’d just had? Stunned, he grabbed the scrap of paper.

  Lock up when you’re done. Leave key under mat or give to Sheila. G.

  Quinn strode to the window and looked out. The little red Prius no longer sat in the driveway. His damned good-bye girl had run out on him again.

  He clenched his jaw so hard he thought his teeth
might shatter. He sat down heavily in one of Gwen’s fifties-style chairs, which creaked under his weight. He thought about smashing every one of those stupid Wonder Woman plates.

  And then . . . then things started clicking in his mind.

  She hadn’t been happy to see him. She’d looked tired and pale. She’d been pacing like a cat on a hot griddle. She’d spit out her wine. She couldn’t—or wouldn’t—eat shellfish. She’d wrapped her arms around her belly. And finally she’d blurted out the truth about why she’d left him. Why now?

  He was dumber than a bag full of hammers. Quinn got up so fast that he knocked over the chair. He righted it and then headed for the bathroom adjoining Gwen’s bedroom. He pushed the door ajar. He briefly took in all the little details that defined the space as Gwen’s: the pretty monogrammed hand towels, the small crystal soap dispenser, the beeswax candle. Even the wastebasket to the right of the toilet was tasteful. He looked inside it. Nothing.

  Bull in a china shop, he reversed directions and stormed the little powder room, where he found what he was looking for: a package in the trash. EZ Pregnancy Test.

  His heart launched toward his esophagus. Without even registering what he was doing, he sank to his knees and pulled the box from the wastebasket. He searched among the folds of the plastic bag that lined it until he found it. Two innocuous blue lines stared up at him from a window in a small white plastic stick.

  Innocuous? Yeah, right. He felt like a manatee hit by a speeding Cobalt. How in the hell was Gwen pregnant? He did some quick math. It was possible, of course. Just barely, but stranger things had happened. Or was it not his? He sat there on his knees and scrubbed his hands over his face.

  It was his. He knew that instinctively. But even if it wasn’t, he didn’t care.

  She hadn’t known how to tell him, unconvinced as she was that he’d wanted the first baby. And now everything had gone hell western crooked again.

  Quinn got up from the floor, went back out to the dining room, and seized the open bottle of wine. He walked with it to the living room sofa and sank down onto the couch. He thought about history repeating itself, and doubted that he was any wiser or more sensitive fifteen years later, or Gwen would’ve stuck around to tell him.

  He told himself that she’d just gone driving around the block to clear her head, that she’d come back soon.

  She didn’t.

  chapter 28

  “I waited at her house for hours,” Quinn said to Sheila the next morning. “She never did come back.”

  Sheila’s hair looked freshly frosted, her bosom was upholstered in tiger-print spandex, and she’d painted her fingernails a delicious shade of rusty, week-old-murder red.

  “Listen, Ken doll,” she told him. “Gwennie’s hip to all kinds of sophisticated surveillance techniques. You sittin’ there with the lights off won’t fool her.”

  “She won’t answer her cell phone.”

  “A smart man might take that to mean she don’t want to talk to you.”

  “What if something’s wrong? Something’s happened to her? You have to tell me where she is. You have to let me know how to get in touch with her.”

  “No, lovey, I don’t. Like all the agents, our Gwen keeps a ‘go bag’ in her car. And when she goes, she goes. She’s fine. She’s just traveling for work.”

  “Where?” asked Quinn again.

  Sheila sighed, opened the top drawer of her desk, and reached for a nail file.

  “I’ll pay for the information,” he said in a low voice.

  For a moment her eyes gleamed. Then Sheila jabbed the nail file into his chest. “You most certainly will not. What kind of gal do you think I am?”

  Oh, please, lady. Don’t make me answer that question. Quinn removed the instrument from his solar plexus and apologized. “Look . . . I’m not stalking her. I’m genuinely concerned. She’s out there trying to find a murderer and a mask, and she’s, well, she’s not herself.”

  Behind black cat’s-eye glasses with little red devils in the corners, Sheila’s eyes narrowed. “What d’you mean, she’s not herself?”

  He shifted from foot to foot. “She’s just not, that’s all.”

  “Spill, Ken doll, or lose me forever.”

  Quinn cursed under his breath, but she’d folded her arms across her desk, and that gimlet-eyed stare told him she wasn’t budging unless she got the dirt. So did her rhythmically drumming, rusty acrylic talons. Sheila had him by the short ’n’ curlies.

  He pulled a Baggie out of his pocket. Inside the Baggie was the pregnancy test. He dropped it in front of her keyboard.

  Sheila turned it over and inspected it. The little red devils on her glasses had pointy tails. Her thickly painted mouth formed an O. She raised her head and ran her gaze up and down his body, stopping for a beat too long around his fly.

  He could feel his equipment pulling an instant turtle.

  “Naughty, naughty!” Sheila crowed, shaking her finger at him. “Yeah, uh-huh, and I told that girl you’d do her in a chicken suit, didn’t I?”

  “Excuse me?” said Quinn, bewildered.

  “But honestly.” Sheila slapped her own forehead. “Ever heard of a rubber, Kenny?”

  Christ, he could feel himself blushing. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d blushed. “I . . . uh. We—”

  “It’s a little jock stocking? Known to prevent this sorta thing from happening.”

  Quinn just stood there, mute.

  Finally she took pity on him. “She’s preggers, huh? I can see why you’re going nuts.”

  He nodded.

  “Assuming it’s yours.”

  Quinn drew a deep breath at the suggestion that it wasn’t; but again, he didn’t care. “It’s mine.”

  “All right. She’s gonna kill me, but . . . our Gwennie’s in Venice, chasing some jeweler and rowing your little microtyke around in a gondola. Go take care of her. Make sure she eats. Hold her hair if she pukes. But don’t get on the wrong side of those raging hormones, you hear me? Remember, you’re hunting an armed pregnant woman. . . . Good luck to you, Kenny. You’ll need it.”

  She’d been clattering away on her keyboard during this speech, and now she hit the print button on her computer. It spit out a piece of paper, which she handed to him. “Flight schedule. Hotel info. Now give me some sugar.” She pointed at her cheek.

  Quinn hesitated, then bussed its powdery, wrinkled surface. He smelled a bizarre combination of hash browns and White Shoulders.

  “Do you love me, Ken doll?” She smirked at him.

  Already sidling out the door, he nodded like a bobble-head.

  “Good. I wanna be godmother, you hear?”

  Gwen didn’t consider her hasty exit running away, exactly. It was more of a dodge. She was in no way ready to have the pregnancy conversation with Quinn even if she’d been wrong about him, all those years ago. Had she been? After all, he had been wrong about her. . . .

  The insanity of the Miami airport distracted her from her thoughts. MIA was always a mess: crowded and illogically designed, with little to no signage. She got her boarding pass and made it through security with little incident, though.

  Getting her rubbery knees to actually walk her into the belly of the plane was the real trick.

  She always hated to fly, since she was all too aware that she had no control over how she got back down to terra firma—but flying while she knew she was pregnant was infinitely worse. Now two lives were at risk.

  Baby. Baby. She tried to bend her mind around it. Tried to reconcile the whole concept of being a mother with her high-risk career. Tried to imagine telling Quinn. Just the thought had her reaching for the airsick bag tucked in the seat pocket in front of her.

  And yet she felt an indescribable joy . . . like champagne running riot through her veins. Like warm sunshine on bare skin.

  The flight was long, and though she tried to sleep, the knowledge that a tiny life grew inside her created a riot of different emotions. Could her body hang on to
the pregnancy this time? Would the baby be a boy or a girl? Would it be healthy? How would Quinn react? Would he want to be a parent? How much of a role would he want to play in the child’s life?

  Worry blurred into images from her own childhood: the Cat in the Hat, Tigger and Eeyore, Mickey Mouse-shaped pancakes. Crayons and coloring books and sidewalk chalk. Easter dresses and Barbies, hula hoops and Twister. Blue Birds and Brownies and Girl Scouts. But all the toys and games were different today, weren’t they?

  She went back to worrying.

  Gwen arrived at Venice’s Marco Polo airport, staggered off the plane, and passed through customs quickly.

  As she walked outside to the vaporetto, she was proud of herself. She’d white-knuckled it through the flight without a crutch, bypassing the Xanax and the vodka entirely. Booze and drugs weren’t the most effective prenatal vitamins.

  The vaporetto was crowded and buzzed with dialogue in Italian. A cranky-looking man stepped on her toe while getting on board, and a black-clad woman in a headscarf knocked her in the head with a baguette when she stepped past. The early February wind was chilly, and the spray off the water contributed to its bite.

  But none of this bothered Gwen, with the stunning vista of Venice spread out before her. The water shimmered silver under a gray sky, reflecting and alluding to the centuries-old secrets and intrigue hidden behind the windows of every palazzo.

  Miami and Venice: Though both cities had been built on the water, the similarities ended there. Miami flaunted sex and skin openly: vast stretches of sand, money, corruption, and flesh. There was nothing mysterious about Miami. If the city had a symbol, Gwen felt it would be a thong.

  Venice concealed its sins behind the facades of history and beauty and charm. Aristocratic, jewel-like, sophisticated . . . Gwen loved Venezia but was also conscious that whispers of ancient, veiled decadence traveled along its canals and lurked under its picturesque bridges. Venice hid its venality, its malice, behind costumes: corsets and panniers, wigs and masks.

  And still, though Machiavellian in its beauty, the city was seductive, extraordinary.