With Every Breath (24 page)

Joe got out of the car, lifting Josh along with him. He was still grimacing. For all the care he had taken with Sheila, they had gone right past Mildred Diehl on the boulevard.

Maddie unlocked the door and they went inside. She grabbed Josh’s hand and held him back, letting Joe make a quick tour of all the rooms.

"Well?" she asked when he came back.

"Unless somebody besides you moved that dresser in front of the bedroom window, everything’s fine."

"I did that," she admitted.

He scowled at her more curiously than judgmentally. "Why?"

"Because if anyone tried to move it, I would have heard that for sure."

"And then what would you have done?"

Her eyes went a little helpless. "I don’t know. I just.. . I had this terror that if I tried to get through last night in any other way. I’d have woken up this morning and ..." She glanced down at Josh.

He got her drift. Josh would have been gone.

He tried to imagine living with that kind of fear day to day. With Lucy, it had been one anguished heartbeat and then it was over, except for the lingering guilt, the dull ache, the loss. But Maddie spent every breath, every moment, afraid that that hell would begin. It made him feel a little weak in the knees with his own fear that he wouldn’t be able to stop it from happening.

"Got anything to eat around here?" he asked, changing the subject.

"We’ve been real big on sandwiches this week." Maddie moved for the kitchen.

"Good enough."

She got mayonnaise and mustard and cold cuts from the refrigerator. Joe slapped sandwiches together with the abandon of a man who rarely took the time or bother to feed himself well.

She checked the phone again. It still wasn’t working.

By the time she joined Joe and Josh in the living room, she realized that she felt more relaxed anyway. Suddenly everything there was homey and cozy ... safe.

"How about a game of cards?" she asked suddenly.

Joe looked up at her and realized that she was talking to Josh. The boy didn’t answer—God, he wondered, how did she keep her spirits up in the face of that, too?—but he went down the hall toward the bedrooms and came back with a deck of cards.

They sat munching sandwiches over a game of something Maddie called Mexican Rummy. It took Joe all of a

minute to realize that there wasn’t such a game. It was devised to heavily favor a six-year-old.

Joe had been born with a competitive streak as wide as Texas, even when it came to kids. And he discovered that he didn’t mind letting Josh win. The first time it happened, the boy’s cheeks flushed. The second time, his eyes sparkled. Joe threw the third hand himself.

He leaned his back against the sofa and stretched his long legs out in front of him, grimacing at the painful straightening of his right knee. He glanced over at Josh. All in all, he thought, it was turning out to be reasonably easy to keep his eyes and hands off her.

Hell, I’ll get through this just fine.

It was almost time for dinner when the boy finally started getting rammy. He went to the front door that Maddie had meticulously relocked. He opened it and stared out longingly.

"Is he trying to tell us something?" Joe asked in an undertone.

"Is it a good idea?" she countered.

"What? Going outside?" He thought about it and shrugged. "Why not, as long as all three of us go? We’re not under siege here. I’m just playing out a hunch."

A few minutes later they were bundled up and crossing the road to the beach. The sun was bright, but the wind was brisk, coming in off the sea. They passed some stubborn surfers bundled up in wetsuits, not having a good time of it at all. The water was soft, finally letting go of the memory of the storm.

Josh ran ahead of them.

"So how come you married this guy?" Joe asked suddenly. "Seems to me like you have more sense than that."

Maddie was startled, then she felt a rush of irritation.

"Do you honestly think that he was crazy as a loon from the first, and I was attracted to him anyway?"

His jaw hardened. "Don’t know. That’s why I asked." Maddie took a deliberate breath. "I met him at Shooters." At his expression, she explained. "It’s a bar on the intercoastal waterway. My crowd went there with some frequency, and so did his." Then she paused and shook her head. "Not that he really had a crowd. It was deceptive. You thought so at first. He was always with the same people. It took some getting to know him to realize that he was really a ... a loner. Abnormally so. In fact, I didn’t realize it until after I started going out with him, and then he never wanted to go anywhere, to do anything that involved other people."

Joe made a sound deep in his throat. "Yeah, well, if he was obsessed with you, that makes sense."

"Now it does."

"So you dated him, and then what?"

"He asked me to marry him."

He slid his eyes to the side to look at her. "Big jump. You haven’t mentioned the L-word."

She grimaced. "I’m not sure it ever really came into play. Not on my part."

"And you married him anyway?"

"I was twenty-seven. I’d accomplished a lot, but not what I wanted most. I wanted to have kids, a family." She’d had a driving need to prove that she was different from her parents, she remembered. She’d been on an urgent quest to find out if she could love anyone at all. She loved Aunt Susan, yet she knew she could walk away from that woman easily enough. If Rick had said good-bye, she knew she could have lived with that as well. So she’d needed desperately to prove to herself that she wouldn’t feel that way about her own child.

She had married Rick without loving him because

she hadn’t been sure she was capable of love, that she didn’t possess some kind of genetic emotional void.

"Kids were the next step on my achievement ladder," she went on quietly. "The biological clock had a long time to run yet. I wasn’t running out of time, not really, but I was in a hurry."

Joe was quiet for a long time. "I have a theory about that."

"Uh-oh. Another one?"

He looked at her sharply. She was smiling. He managed to grin himself, not sure if he was fiercely glad or thoroughly stupefied that he was actually going to tell her another one. And that she seemed curious enough to hear it.

"I’m not sure real love happens but once in a lifetime," he said finally.

"How does this fit into what you said the other day?"

"None of those things is real love. They’re all variations."

"Even the one-two punch?"

"Yeah, when it slides into something else." He paused. "You’ve got mutual like and respect, like the arranged marriages way back when. I grew to love her, that sort of insipid crap. Then you’ve got physical attraction, which tends to burn out sooner or later, and when it does you wake up and scratch your head and realize there’s nothing left at all without it. Then you’ve got obsession, love gone over the edge, what we were talking about before. And finally, you’ve got ... well, for lack of a better term, the real thing."

"Okay," she said slowly.

"The average human animal has a life expectancy of what—seventy-five years?"

She raised a brow. "Animal?"

"Well, we are."

Maddie thought about it and shrugged, conceding the point. "Something like seventy-five years," she agreed.

"So with all that span of opportunity, with all that time to choose from, who’s to say that the real thing is necessarily going to land in your lap in that single decade of your twenties?"

She scowled. "You’re saying that if there’s only one true love for each person, then that person could cruise into your life when you’re ten years old, or thirty, or fifty-five. There’s no telling when they’re going to get around to turning up."

He looked over at her steadily for several steps. "Yeah. That’s it exactly. And society—or maybe just human nature—doesn’t generally allow us the patience to wait until we’re fifty-five. God’s got one hell of a sense of humor, and I just don’t see Him making things too easy for most of us. No way would He fix it so that sometime right after your twenty-first birthday you should start keeping your eyes open because Mr. Right or Ms. Perfect is going to stroll into your life right then. See, the thing is, we’re the ones who decide that we ought to get married and settle down in our twenties or thereabouts. So what the average human animal does is say, hell, here I am at thirty, time’s all gone, better hurry. And this lady here is pretty good, so I’ll settle down and buy myself a mortgage with her. You get married because it’s the time in your life when you’re supposed to get married, whether or not you’ve found your real love or not."

"Consciously?" Maddie shook her head. "I don’t think I buy that. Human nature is just too inherently romantic. Nearly every song ever written is about love. People crave the real thing."

"Unconsciously," Joe argued. "Most of us are too smart to make a conscious decision like that, and you’re right,

we’re too romantic to settle for less, if we know that’s what we’re doing. But we reach this point where we want to move on to the next plateau, or maybe we just start doubting that the real thing is ever going to come along, so we start looking for it. We find somebody who very nearly fits the bill, and settle down to do all those things that are ingrained in us from the cradle, you know, the kids and the white picket fence routine. It sounds like you did it, and I know I did it. And now we’re both divorced." Maddie nodded thoughtfully. "Okay."

"Something like a full half of us end up divorced," he went on. "We wake up twenty-five years down the line and have the real Ms. Perfect finally get around to making her appearance, but by then we’ve already created a life and these kids with this almost-perfect lady. So some of us stay married and cheat ourselves out of true happiness. But just as many give in to their hearts and say ‘adios’ and start over." He was quiet for a moment. "So what do you think?"

She thought he was the most thought-provoking, amazingly sensitive man she’d ever met.

"Well?" he prodded again, feeling nervous.

"You scare me, Joe."

His face hardened. "Why?"

"Because you’re the kind of man who could be my real thing."

She turned abruptly on her heel and went back the other way. Then she began running. Her words nearly knocked his knee out from under him. He put his weight down wrong on his bad leg, and pain shot up into his thigh, but he scarcely felt it.

He watched her go, pretty scared himself. Wanting her was bad enough. Having her want him back was something he really didn’t know how he was going to handle.

He started moving after her. It would be almost impossible to chase her with Josh in tow. Not that he could have run fast enough anyway—she was tearing— but the boy slowed him down even more. Joe didn’t want to chase her, and he didn’t want to let her out of his sight.

Not just then. He had that feeling. Something was imminent; something was about to blow.

Maybe it was just his own life.

He stopped and looked around anyway, unable to shake the feeling. It was an itchy, urgent thing at the back of his neck. But the beach was deserted except for the surfers and a dark, unidentifiable figure trudging along up in the dunes near the road.

"Come on, Josh." He pulled on the boy’s hand. "We’ve got to hurry." Then he had a brainstorm. "Show me those legs we were talking about the other day. Your house is the goal line. Your receivers are all covered. You’re gonna have to go for it yourself. Fourth down. Fourth quarter. Thirty seconds left on the clock. And you’re down by four. Field goal won’t cut it. You need the big TD."

Josh looked up at him, rapt, then he began sprinting. The kid really did have quite a pair of legs on him. They ran up the beach, Joe a little bit behind him. By the time they reached the house, they were both out of breath. Josh fell on the porch and actually laughed aloud. Pain was exploding in Joe’s knee, enraged at the abuse.

"You ... won the ... game, sport," Joe panted. "High five." Where the hell was she?

He slapped the boy’s upraised hand, yanked open the door, picked him up, and carried him inside. "Go get us something to drink, huh? I bet your mom’s thirsty, too." He set Josh down again, threw his coat on the sofa, and went looking for her. She was in the bathroom. She was brushing her hair ferociously. She jumped when he appeared in the door.

"Forget I said that," she said tightly. "It was ... impulsive. Stupid, really."

Forget it. He wanted to, and doubted if he’d manage it. "Okay."

"I didn’t mean ..." She closed her eyes, not willing to look at him, not even in the mirror. "I don’t want to get involved again. Not now. Maybe not ever. I’m sorry. It’s not you personally, Joe. It’s just that I’ve got a pretty rotten history, and I’m not willing to take a chance again."

"No. I mean, yeah. I understand. Me, either. We’ll forget it."

"Good." She took a deep breath. "Where’s Josh?"

It occurred to Joe then that she must have been terrified by what she had said to run and leave her son. His own heart kept thundering. "Getting us something to drink."