Still Mr. & Mrs.

by Mary McBride

  She stiffened her spine and flattened her mouth, then sounded just like her horrible fourth-grade teacher, Mrs. Quill, when she said, “This isn't the time or the place.”

  “Well, when would the time be? And where's the freaking place?”

  Never. Nowhere. She craved a conversation, not a confrontation. She wanted her husband to open his heart as well as his mouth. Bobby still just didn't get it. It wasn't supposed to be like this. “I don't know.”

  Bobby swore and shot out of his chair as if it had suddenly caught on fire. She'd seen him react quickly before, moving with the agility of a great cat, but always in a situation that demanded some specific action such as deflecting a weapon or deterring someone bent on violence. Now, though, it was as if there was no specific action to dissipate all the energy and anger coursing through him. He looked like he was about to explode.

  After stalking to the sink, he turned the water on full force, then shut it off. With his back to her, he stood there for what seemed like an eternity, breathing deeply, his shoulders rising and falling as he stared into the wet sink. When he finally spoke, his voice was thick, but totally composed.

  “Is there somebody else?”

  Oh, God. The question was like an arrow through her heart, the bullet that she'd been trying to dodge all day. She wanted to scream “No! How could there ever be anybody else?” when he turned toward her with a look on his face that caused her even more pain. There was no anger in his expression. No sadness. No pain. Not even curiosity. Just that heartless cop stare. The dead look that said nothing could surprise him or shock him or make him lose his balance. The look that said he was invulnerable, to everything, even to her.

  Her heart felt desiccated, like a chunk of wood in her chest and her voice sounded parched when she dropped her gaze and whispered, “Yes.”

  Angela's breath came hard. Her heart ached, and tears stung her eyes. It wasn't supposed to be this way. She hadn't meant to tell him. Not now. Not here. God, maybe not ever. Her sudden confession had surprised her. Shocked the hell out of her, in fact

  But then Bobby did something that didn't surprise her at all. Without saying a word, he walked past her, out of the kitchen, out the back door, just out, taking all his feelings with him.

  If rocks could feel.

  She wasn't sure.

  But she was sure they couldn't change.

  6

  There wasn't much of a moon, just a translucent sliver—like a fingernail paring—on the black sky overhead. Bobby was surprised he could even see it, considering the red haze in his vision, while he made his way to the surveillance trailer to let the guys on duty know he was leaving the house for a while. Mike Burris opened the door for him, and Bobby stepped inside, willing himself not to put a fist through something, anything. Somebody else. There was somebody else. Jesus Christ.

  “How's it going on the inside?” Mike asked, resuming his seat in front of a small bank of monitors that displayed the Riordan house from half a dozen vantage points. “Want some coffee?”

  “No, thanks.”

  McCray, the older agent Bobby had met at the airport, emerged from the depths of the trailer, picking cashews out of a bag. “How'd that Taurus drive, Holland? Did it give you any problems?”

  “No. It was fine,” Bobby said. “Good choice.”

  “Well, we figured the household staff probably shouldn't show up in a reinforced SUV,” the older agent said, popping another nut into his mouth, angling his head toward the house. “How's it going up there?”

  Great. Fine. My wife's in love with somebody else. “Piece of cake. I just wanted to let you guys know I'm going out for a while. Just gonna take a walk around the neighborhood and get the lay of the land.” Bobby edged back toward the door before he could vomit on his shoes, before somebody started to make conversation to break up the monotony of staring at a console full of monitors where the activity was less than the average tropical fish tank.

  But before he could exit, Agent Burris swiveled around in his chair. “Hey, you didn't happen to hear the Red Sox score, did you?”

  “Sorry.”

  Bobby nearly ripped the door from its hinges as he stepped outside. He cut diagonally across the backyard, then walked slowly and deliberately down the drive, in the steady eyes of the surveillance cams, looking to his left and right and straight ahead like a man who actually had his mind on business.

  Once out on the road that ran past the Riordan place, he started to jog, and then broke into a run. In his street shoes, the repetitive pace on the hard pavement was punishing to his knees, but he was barely aware of it.

  Yes. Angela had said yes. There was somebody else. Who? That actor the guy from the L.A. field office couldn't wait to tell him about? Some celluloid scumbag with caps on his teeth and a perpetual tan. A pretty boy with designer hair. What was his name? Oh, yeah. Rod. Rod Bishop with the velvet voice and soulful eyes and soft hands and a heart worn prominently, no doubt, on his silken sleeve. Pussy.

  Did the guy appreciate the finely honed strength beneath Ange's soft exterior? Did he have any inkling of her courage and her skill? How could he possibly know what it was like to stand between a target and a gun?

  Jesus. Was he fucking her?

  Did Angela's eyes melt when Bishop touched her? Did he know that secret spot just behind her ear where she loved to be kissed? And that sweet, erotic hollow at the base of her spine? Did he know how to make her catch her breath with a well-placed, perfectly timed flick of his tongue? Did he take his time when he loved her, discovering as much pleasure in her rising passion as he did his own? Did she cry out his name again and again when he finally pushed her over the edge?

  A movie star, for chrissake. A shallow, candy-ass, cardboard cutout pussy.

  If that's what she wanted, fine. Fuck her. Fuck them both.

  He ran harder. Faster.

  After a mile he pulled up, bending over, breathing hard, his hands braced on his knees while a wave of nausea rolled over him. He fought it, just as he fought everything in him that smacked of weakness, of loss of control. He fought as if his life depended on it. Lifting his head, Bobby forced himself to focus on a cluster of lights far down the road while he took in deep, measured breaths of the cool night air and let them out slowly through pursed lips.

  Yes. She'd said yes. There was somebody else.

  God damn her.

  She's the best thing that ever happened to you, bro. All of a sudden Billy's voice sounded as clearly as if he were standing by the side of the road. His image flashed in Bobby's brain, first as a skinny kid with a milk mustache, then as a nervous, newly shorn plebe, and finally smiling at the wedding as he lifted his champagne glass in a toast, unaware that he only had six months before a bullet would rip the life out of his body.

  Bobby swallowed, forcing the bile back down his throat. The lights in the distance wavered and blurred, and for a moment he couldn't breathe at all. He was sick, coming apart at the seams, hearing his dead brother's voice telling him what he already knew. What he'd always known. Angela was the best thing that had ever happened to him. The best thing that ever would happen to him.

  But he wasn't the best thing that had ever happened to her. Or to Billy, either. They were his best things. His brother and his wife. But somehow he couldn't keep them. All his strength and intelligence, all his determination and skill, every fiber of his will, they were useless when it came to the people he loved. Billy. Ange. He couldn't keep them.

  No more than his mother had been able to keep the sun from sliding past the horizon, taking all the daylight with it.

  He cursed his brother one more time for stepping in front of that maniac's gun.

  “You think you could do it, Bobby?” Billy used to ask him after he'd had a few too many beers, leaning close, wearing the goofy half grin that exposed the crooked incisors the poor kid never had braces for. “I mean,” he'd whisper, “if you saw it coming, that bullet with your protectee's name on it, if you saw it coming almost i
n slow motion, like in a movie, do you think you could do it?”

  Bobby's answer was always the same—a shrug and a curt “Hey, it's the job.”

  “Yeah, but do you think—?”

  “Let it go, Billy, goddammit. We do our fucking job. That's all.”

  “Yeah,” he'd say, leaning back. “Still, you gotta wonder.”

  No, he didn't. Bobby wasn't one to wonder, to let doubts and questions wreak havoc in his head. Not then. Not now. Not ever.

  He straightened up, hauling in another long breath of the crisp early autumn air, looking for the moon and finding it hanging over a cornfield like a pale question mark.

  Jesus. What the hell was he supposed to do? Let her go? Quit? Just fucking quit? He didn't know how. He'd never quit anything in his life. And, by God, he wasn't going to start now.

  Maybe he never would be able to figure out the right things to say. Maybe he never would be able to expose his feelings the way she seemed to need. Maybe he couldn't keep Angela, but he could sure make it hard—damn near impossible—for her to go.

  He felt a little better, back in control, but not yet enough in control to face his wife in a bed the size of a large bath towel, so he headed down the road toward the distant lights.

  Angela tossed and turned, tussled with her pillow, and tangled the quilt and sheets. She got up and opened the window for fresh air, then got up again and closed it five minutes later because the crickets sounded like banshees out in the nearby cornfields. She knew it was five minutes later because she looked at the clock on the night-stand every five minutes, wondering when Bobby would return.

  Before getting into bed, she had called the trailer, ostensibly checking in, and Agent McCray told her that Bobby had gone out for a walk to get a feel for the neighborhood. But that had been over two hours ago. It wasn't that big a neighborhood, for chrissake!

  She never should have told him about Rod. It was just that he'd looked at her with his damned cop face, and everything in her had rebelled at the sight. His expression had almost dared her to say yes, there was somebody else, even if she wasn't so sure of that herself. That sticks-and-stones look of his always made her want to lash out, to cut him to the quick, to hurt him and those galvanized, invisible feelings of his, to bring tears to his eyes. Tears that, God help her, she could then kiss away.

  Angela flopped over on her side, jamming the pillow under her cheek. It wasn't that she was mean or vicious. She wasn't. All she wanted was for her husband to share his heart with her as generously as he shared his body. Was that too much to ask?

  According to Billy, yes, it was.

  It had been Bobby's quiet stoicism that had attracted her, yet only days after their wedding, she was already bugging her new brother-in-law, pumping him for clues to her husband's emotional reticence, already seeking advice on how to get him to open up. “Good luck,” Billy used to say.

  “I asked him about your father,” she'd said. “He told me what the man looked like, but that wasn't what I meant. How did you feel about him, Bobby? He just looked at me as if he couldn't even comprehend the question.” She'd laughed then and added only partly in jest, “I'm almost beginning to think he's a robot, Billy. Every time he cuts himself shaving, I look to make sure he bleeds.”

  Her brother-in-law faked a look of horror. “He does, right?”

  “Be serious, Billy. Your brother just won't open up at all.”

  She went on to tell him what had happened when their cat, Mr. Whiskers, disappeared. How cool and distant Bobby had seemed even as she was sobbing her heart out. How Bobby had said, “It's just a cat, Ange.” How Bobby had then slipped out of their bed that night and hadn't come home till dawn, denying he'd done anything but go out for a little fresh air. How their neighbors had reported seeing him trudging through alleys and shining a flashlight in every dark nook and cranny, while softly calling Mr. Whiskers's name.

  “He loved that cat,” Angela had wailed to Billy. “He was devastated, but damned if he'd admit it.”

  “You've just got to cut him a little slack, Ange,” he told her. “He's always been like that. Stoic. Self-possessed. It goes way back. Bobby's got feelings. He just can't afford to let them show.”

  “You show your feelings,” she'd answered irritably, “and you go just about as far back as Bobby does.”

  They were barely ten months apart, those two, the sons of Treena Holland and the married-but-not-to-mama chief of police of Wishbone, Texas. Bobby was apparently a dead ringer for their father, suffering the small-town slings and arrows of that resemblance as a consequence. Billy was built on a smaller scale, his features much softer, and his disposition sweeter by far. If Bobby was a rock, hard and immutable granite, then his younger brother was water, warm and yielding. And everywhere Bobby carved out a place for him, Billy just naturally flowed.

  Bobby bashed his way into West Point, pulling his brother inevitably along behind him. After that, there was the army and then the Secret Service. First Bobby, then Billy on his heels. It hadn't seemed to matter that Billy was mathematically inclined and a talented painter to boot. Bobby got his brother out of Wishbone, Texas, and then on to the only place he truly knew how to get, to the pinnacle of an agency where Bobby Holland's protective instincts made him the best of the best.

  To all appearances, it was the younger Holland who depended on the older one. The funny thing was, when she'd pointed out to Billy that maybe it was Bobby who desperately needed him, he'd given her one of those blank, unfathomable looks so like his brother.

  Angela opened her eyes now to look at the clock again. Past midnight. Part of her was furious that Bobby had left her here alone, on duty in Daisy Riordan's house. The part that wasn't furious was worried sick that she'd hurt him deeply and he was out there, somewhere, alone. If there was such a thing as angels, she dearly hoped that Billy was watching over his big brother right now the way Bobby had always watched out for him.

  As far as she could tell, Bobby had watched out for his younger brother from the start. She used to look forward to the times when Billy would drop by after work and she would prime him with a couple cold beers and then listen to his soft-spoken drawl as he told her stories, the ones in which he always cast his big brother as the hero.

  Once, according to Billy, their mother had given six-year-old Bobby a couple dollars and, with Billy in perpetual tow, had sent him off to Sledge's, the neighborhood gas station and convenience store, to pick up a package for her.

  “When he was just six years old?” Angela had exclaimed. “That's criminal.”

  Billy had just laughed at her outrage, and his hazel eyes crinkled deeply at the corners, the way Bobby's would if he'd practiced smiling more. “Well, you've got to understand, Angela, that Bobby was about forty when he was born, so that would have made him forty-six. Anyway, we got to Sledge's, and Bobby handed over the cash in exchange for a paper bag, which, as it turned out, had a six-pack of beer inside.

  “I don't think either one of us had had anything more than a couple crackers to eat that day, so Bobby put the bag back up on the counter, then picked a box of corn flakes off a shelf and got a half gallon of milk out of the cooler, then told old man Sledge, ‘We'll take these instead.’ Man, I can still see the look on that old guy's face.”

  Angela imagined she could, too. “What happened when you got home?”

  “Bobby sneaked me in the kitchen and fixed me a big bowl of cereal, then told me to eat quick while he went to tell our mama what he'd done.” Billy shook his head and sighed. “Needless to say, Treena took her belt to him. You know that pearly little scar on his shoulder, kind of looks like a comma?” Angela nodded, and Billy continued, his eyes distinctly moist. “That's a souvenir of that day. She opened him up like a fucking can of tuna.”

  Of course, when she'd gently touched that scar in their big brass bed that night and asked Bobby how he'd gotten it, he said he couldn't remember.

  It was ludicrous for Angela to ever have thought that, because they wer
e so close in age, the Holland brothers had grown up similarly. As Billy himself had put it, “I had Bobby. He … well, hell, he didn't have anybody.”

  Now Angela curled tighter in the little bed, drawing up her knees along with the tangled bed linens, and sinking her head deeper into the pillow, thinking that her husband still didn't have anybody. His father had never acknowledged him. His mother had traded her sons for alcohol decades ago. His brother was dead. His wife had left him, and tonight had pretty much told him she wasn't coming back.

  God damn you, Bobby Holland. You made me do it. You made me hurt you just to see if you would cry or bleed. If that's what you're doing now, crying out in the dark someplace, I'll never know it, will I? You'll never let me see. You'll never, not for a second, wear that tough-guy granite heart of yours on your sleeve.

  She bit her lip to keep from weeping. Dear God, she needed her husband's arms around her, yearned for his comfort more than anything in the world. She was so afraid, so terribly afraid that, when all was said and done, now that Billy was gone, Bobby had nothing left to give.

  Bobby was feeling better, sitting on a barstool at a honky-tonk called the Wayward Wind, the source of the lights on which he'd focused so hard earlier. Right now he was perusing the pattern of wet circles on the bar top in front of him, but damned if he could figure out if this was his third or fourth beer. Fourth, probably, judging from the pleasant buzz in his veins and the increasing attractiveness of the women around him. It was funny how, in a dive like this with sawdust and peanut shells on the floor and country music wailing on the jukebox, Wishbone, Texas, just naturally crept back into his speech.

  The hell with the job for a few hours tonight. He was taking a time-out from the hard-nosed hero business. Time out from his marriage, too. The hell with Ange and what's-his-name, the actor.

  “What did you say your name was?” The stick-thin blonde on his right nudged his arm with her bony elbow.

  “I don't think I said, darlin’.” He took another pull from his third or fourth beer, contemplating her appearance indirectly, in the bottle-lined mirror behind the bar. It was probably a good thing her platinum bangs disguised nearly a third of her face. On the other hand, her glossy mouth was generous and, unless he was just fantasizing, very suggestive.