MILLION DOLLAR BABY

by Patricia Ryan

  She wondered how long he'd been watching her…

  * * *

  Chapter 2

  «^»

  "Dean." Laura had heard the surprise in her voice. She hadn't seen Dean Kettering since he and Will had shipped out to Saudi Arabia in January. He'd been unable to come home for Will's memorial service.

  He took off his sunglasses and slipped them into an inside pocket of his jacket, which was unbuttoned. The breeze flipped his tie over his shoulder, but he didn't seem to notice. His eyes, shadowed by the brim of his cap, were luminescent. Softly he said, "Hey, Lorelei."

  Lorelei. It had been his pet name for her all through college. "She was a siren who haunted the Rhine," he'd told her, "trailing a golden comb through her hair while she sang a song of savage beauty, luring boats to destruction on the rocks and rapids." The joke, springing from Dean's well-known contempt for the institution of marriage, was that Laura had used her sirenlike charms to entice Will Sweeney into a life of domestic docility, a fate worse than that of the sailors and fishermen who'd fallen prey to the Lorelei of legend. It had been good-natured teasing, or so she'd always assumed. She'd never been entirely sure about anything when it came to Dean Kettering.

  As Laura approached the staircase, Dean set his box on the ground and sprinted down to assist her, taking the easel and sketch pad from her and following her up the steps.

  At the top, she glanced down at the box, a small corrugated carton wrapped in rough twine. "What's that?"

  Dean bent to lift the box, tucking it under the same arm that held the easel and pad. "Some of Will's things. Letters and the like. I thought you'd want to have them."

  She met his gaze for a moment, then looked away and nodded. "Did you just fly in?"

  "Yeah, I'm on leave."

  "Are you hungry? Can you stay for dinner, or do you have somewhere you have to be?"

  "You mean, do I have an itinerary? Me?"

  She forced a smile. "Yeah, look who I'm talking to." She turned and started walking toward the house. "I've got some beef stew in the slow cooker, if you want some."

  His footsteps were close behind hers. "Laura."

  She didn't slow her pace. "’Cause there's plenty. I make it in big batches and freeze it for—"

  His hand closed over her arm, stilling her. He came around to face her. "I'm sorry. About Will."

  She nodded, not meeting his eyes.

  "I should have called you," he said. "I just didn't know what to say. And I'm no good at notes and all that."

  She gazed past him at the turbulent Sound. "It's all right. I got sick of everybody's sympathy." It wasn't all right, of course, but calling or sending a note would have been the thoughtful thing, and Dean Kettering had never been too good at doing the thoughtful thing. In college, he'd found certain women – those who were drawn to his feral, somewhat dangerous brand of masculinity – to be easy conquests, but once he ran them to ground, he generally dropped them without a word. He never officially broke up with anyone, never offered explanations; he just never called back.

  Dean stroked Laura's arm, a comforting caress. It was the first time anyone had touched her in so long. She closed her eyes to savor the warm friction of his hand through her worn sweatshirt.

  It was strange to feel Dean touching her like this. Back in college, they never used to touch. They'd avoided even the most casual contact, as if to do otherwise might pop open a Pandora's box of sublimated longing best left under lock and key.

  There'd always been that awareness thrumming between them, making everything quiver slightly just under the surface. Will had been oblivious to it, thank God; Dean had been his best friend since freshman orientation, Laura his steady girlfriend for even longer, since their sophomore year of high school.

  She used to worry that Dean would break down and put the moves on her someday – given the way he'd used women and tossed them aside, she'd half expected it – but apparently his bond with Will had kept any such impulses at bay. That had been fortunate for any number of reasons, not the least of which was that Dean, with his aura of reckless self-sufficiency, had scared her just as much as he'd intrigued her.

  They were complete opposites, she and Dean Kettering. Everything about him was foreign to her. He was a lone wolf – restless, predatory, impulsive and utterly autonomous. Laura, on the other hand, could not have been more of a communal being. She craved the warmth of other bodies around her, the security of the family bond – as did Will Sweeney, which was why it had felt so right, so comfortable, being with him.

  But now Will was gone, and she was alone again – frighteningly alone.

  "Laura?" Dean's knuckles grazed her cheek. "Are you okay?"

  Laura opened her eyes to find his face close to hers, his eyes filled with concern. She nodded and backed away from his touch. "I'm fine. Just a little…" She shook her head. "It's a little disorienting, is all – turning around and finding you here."

  "I would have called if you had a phone. You want me to split?"

  "No."

  "I mean, I know you came here to be alone. I've got a car. Maybe I should just—"

  "No, Dean." She touched his arm, then quickly withdrew her hand. "I'm glad you're here. It's good to have some company for a change. Come on inside. Let's eat."

  Dinner was a subdued affair, their conversation sporadic and awkward – a striking contrast to how it always used to be between them, the bantering and wisecracking that would leave Will choking with laughter. That was it, she decided; Will wasn't there to complete them. Without him to act as an audience for them – and a buffer for whatever it was that simmered so stubbornly between them – Laura and Dean didn't quite know how to be together.

  After dinner, she washed the dishes while he dried them and put them away; he knew where everything went, having spent innumerable weekends here with Laura and Will during their college years. Without looking up from the sink, she asked, "Do you have a place to stay tonight?"

  "No itinerary, remember?"

  "’Cause you can stay here, of course. I can make up the bed in the spare room, if you can deal with that lumpy old mattress. I remember how you used to complain about it."

  "That was before I discovered air force cots. I don't mind the mattress, but … it's probably best that I head out. I don't want to be any trouble."

  "You're not any trouble," she said, still without looking up.

  "Sure I am." His voice was low and had a strange, almost ominous edge to it.

  She did look up then, to find him standing closer than she'd realized, regarding her gravely. Pulling the plug out of the sink, she wiped her hands on a dish towel and headed upstairs. "I'll make up the bed."

  When she came back downstairs, Dean handed her the cardboard box and went out to fetch his duffel bag from the car. As he stepped onto the front porch, he pulled a pack of Marlboros from his pocket.

  She took the box into the little solarium on the south side of the house, which she'd turned into a painting studio, and set it on her worktable among cans of brushes soaking in turpentine and half-squeezed tubes of oil paint. The sun had set, so she flipped the switch, igniting the full-spectrum strip lighting overhead. Grabbing a drafting knife, she severed the cord that bound the box, took a deep breath and opened it. The top half of the box was filled with letters in envelopes, most addressed to Will in her handwriting. They'd all been opened and read with the exception of one, from her, postmarked February 3, 1995, still sealed. Obviously it had arrived after Will's death.

  Something compelled her to pick up her drafting knife, slit open the envelope and unfold the letter, which she'd written in India ink on a sheet of drawing paper and embellished with a border of baby booties, rattles and other icons of infancy.

  "Dear Will," she'd written, "Remember that night we decided to throw away my diaphragm? Talk about beginner's luck…"

  She dropped the letter back in the open box and turned away from it, wrapping her arms around herself. So, he hadn't known.

&nb
sp; Eager to shift her thoughts away from Will and the baby, Laura approached her half-finished, way-too-big painting of Long Island Sound, supported by two side-by-side easels, and examined it critically. Parts of the shoreline were still just loosely sketched, but she'd blocked in the stormy violet-gray of the sky and the bottle green of waves erupting on the beach.

  She opened her sketch pad to the drawings she'd executed on the beach earlier, retrieved a piece of willow charcoal from her toolbox and started filling in some of the details of surf striking the jagged boulders at the water's edge. As usual when she became absorbed in drawing or painting, she lost track of everything else – until she sensed that she wasn't alone, and glanced over her shoulder to find Dean leaning against the door frame, a bottle of red wine in one hand, watching her. He'd changed out of his uniform, she saw, into faded jeans and a black wool sweater topped by a denim jacket.

  He nodded toward the painting. "It's like a giant bruise."

  "Uh…"

  "The sky, I mean." He walked into the room, studying the painting with quiet intensity. "It looks wounded. The water—" his gaze lit on the tempestuous waves crashing on the beach "—just looks furious. Like it's wild with rage. This painting doesn't know whether it wants to scream or cry. Lots of passion there, Lorelei."

  She dropped her charcoal into the toolbox. "It's just a seascape."

  Will never used to comment on her paintings, except to say, "That one rocks," or "Another triumph, beautiful," which was fine; his praise was always sincere and enthusiastic, if a bit vague.

  Dean looked at her. "You've painted seascapes before. They didn't look like this."

  "Too melodramatic?"

  "No, not at all. It's…" He shook his head as he took in the immense canvas. "It's beautiful. But scary. When I look at it, I feel like I'm looking inside your soul."

  "That's scary?"

  He contemplated the painting grimly. "Right now it is."

  Laura pointed to the bottle of wine he held – a pinot noir of impressive vintage, its bottle furred with dust, its cork already removed. "Plundering my grandmother's wine rack?"

  "Will she mind?"

  Laura shook her head. "She hasn't even been here since she broke her hip two years ago. And she just kept the wine around for guests – never touched it herself."

  "Thoughtful of a teetotaler to keep something around for her friends to drink."

  "A teetotaler?" Laura chuckled. "You never saw her work her way through a pitcher of Beefeater martinis. She just didn't like wine."

  Dean's laughter startled her. It was so unexpected given their grief and their uneasiness with each other, and so refreshing. He looked suddenly younger, unencumbered, the carefree Dean Kettering of old.

  "I thought we could maybe bring this down to the beach," he said, holding up the wine bottle, "and take a walk."

  They used to take nighttime walks on the beach during their weekends here, she and Will and Dean; those walks were among her most pleasant memories of those years. After a moment's hesitation, Laura said, "Sure. Sounds great. Let me get my sweatshirt."

  They strolled down the moonlit beach, passing the bottle back and forth as they made small talk, mostly about sailing – their great shared passion. It was what Dean missed most, being in the air force, he told her – that freedom to get on a boat and just leave the world and all its responsibilities behind, to be one with the primal rhythms of the sea.

  "There's something I've always wanted to ask you," Laura said as they headed toward an outcropping of boulders – a familiar landmark that used to serve as the turn-back point for their walks. She perched on a flat-topped rock that was about waist high and tilted the wine bottle to her mouth, feeling the velvety-soft pinot warm her from the inside as it went down. "What's a wild and crazy guy like you doing in the military? I mean, it's strange enough that you even went to college, but accepting that ROTC scholarship? You and ROTC … the pieces never really added up for me."

  Leaning a hip against the rock Laura sat on, Dean withdrew his pack of cigarettes, shook one out and lit it with a match. In the old days, she would have needled him about smoking. But this wasn't the old days, and the thought of trading barbs with Dean Kettering here in the dark while they drank from the same bottle of wine felt, in a way, sacrilegious.

  Dean's cigarette glowed orange as he drew on it, gazing out over the water. Laura listened to waves shatter softly, one after the other, on the rocky beach. The salty breeze off the water penetrated right through her sweatshirt now that she wasn't moving; she tugged the zipper up to her neck, but it didn't help much.

  "Forget I asked," Laura said finally, handing the bottle to Dean. "It's a personal question. It's none of my business."

  "Friends are allowed to ask personal questions." Dean took a long swallow from the bottle. "I don't mind. I'm just not sure what to tell you. You're thinking I joined the air force in spite of being kind of a screwup.

  "I didn't say—"

  "When, really, that's pretty much why I joined up."

  Laura wanted to argue with him, to deny that she'd intended any slur to his character, but her tongue was stilled by the revelation that he seemed to think so poorly of himself. He'd always come off as self-assured, cocky even. Laura had never thought to hear him describe himself as a "screwup."

  "Did I ever tell you about my dad?" he asked, passing the bottle back to her.

  "Only that he left when you were a kid."

  "Yeah, I was eleven."

  "That must have been rough, having him just walk out on you and your mom that way."

  "I only wish he'd done it years earlier." He took another long drag on his cigarette, looking away from her. The tobacco smoke blended, not unpleasantly, with the briny sea air. They should make a men's cologne that smelled like that, Laura decided.

  "Was it that bad?" she asked, bringing the bottle to her mouth.

  He shrugged. "Mostly it was bad for my mom. He was a real bastard, always running around with other women. And he went through millions of dollars of her money."

  Laura choked on the wine. "Millions?"

  Dean's mouth thinned in a kind of grim smile. "Her side of the family is Southampton royalty."

  "Why did she marry him?"

  "She was pregnant with me."

  "Ah." She tried to hand him back the bottle, but he waved it away and took another drag on his cigarette.

  "Three guesses why he married her," Dean said. "And no, it wasn't because he was overcome with the urge to do the right thing. He'd already fathered two children out of wedlock that I know of, and there were more after he married my mom."

  "Wouldn't have anything to do with those millions, would it?"

  "Give the lady a prize. The old man had expensive tastes, and he needed a bankroll for them. While they were married, he bought two airplanes, three houses, at least a dozen Italian sports cars and pounds of diamond jewelry, none of which my mother ever saw. What he didn't spend, he pissed away at Monte Carlo and Vegas. When it was all gone, he split for Europe and married some baroness, leaving my mother destitute."

  "What about her family? Didn't they help her out?"

  "Just enough to get by. Her parents had disinherited her when she married my father, but they took pity on her and set us up in an apartment in Westhampton after the divorce. They never let her forget it was charity, though. And they never let me forget that I had that bastard's blood in my veins. All through my adolescence, every time I colored outside the lines, they were on my back, reminding me what a congenital SOB I was."

  "Some grandparents."

  "No, they were right. I mean, they were Nazis, but they weren't stupid. They had eyes and ears. I was always getting separated from the pack and acting out. Only time I was cool was when I was sailing. My friends used to let me take their boats out, and I got hooked on it pretty early. But on dry land, I was a trouble magnet. I got arrested once, as a juvenile – drunk and disorderly."

  "Seriously? I never knew that."


  "It was my only brush with the law, but I always hated toeing the line, always had an itch to go off and do my thing, regardless of how it affected anyone else."

  "That doesn't mean you're just like your father."

  "Doesn't it? Genetics isn't just some looney theory, Laura. It's real – it's bone deep. Underneath it all, I'm just like my old man – aimless, self-indulgent."

  Laura drained the wine bottle and set it next to her on the rock. "I'm confused. What, exactly, do your supposed character defects have to do with your joining the air force?"

  "You know." He inhaled the last of his cigarette, crushed it on the rock and slipped the butt into his front jeans pocket. "It's like when the delinquent son gets sent to military school in the hope that some structure and discipline will straighten him out. Only nobody sent me. I sent myself."

  "You thought you needed straightening out?" Laura couldn't help but smile.

  Gravely Dean said, "Don't you?"

  No easy answer leaped to mind. Laura couldn't deny that Dean would be better off if he settled down some. His plan to inject a little military starch into his personality wasn't really a bad one; in fact, it appeared to be working, to some extent. "You survived ROTC," she said. "And you made it through two years in the air force without going AWOL. If you were a bad seed, it would appear you've been cured."

  He shook his head. "It's a constant struggle to keep playing by the air force's rules. One of these days I'm afraid I'm going to deck a superior officer, or just walk off the base without looking back. I'm a court-martial waiting to happen."

  She rested a hand on his arm. They'd never talked like this – seriously, about things that mattered. "You're a better person than you think, Dean."

  A funny little glimmer lit his eyes. "Will used to say that."