“Yeah.” He didn’t sound absolutely sure. “I think they’re already starting to come around.”
“So when do you get him? When do we get to meet him?”
“He’s in the hospital. Do you remember the baby that was abandoned at the church?”
“The one in the shopping cart after Thanksgiving?”
“Yes. He’s our new son. Or he will be soon, anyway. We still have quite a few hoops to jump through. The police found his mother.”
I listened to the rest of Michael’s story, and I can’t say I entirely blamed my parents for having doubts about the arrangement. Baby Nicholas had a large Filipino family, most of whom lived in a slum in Manila. Mariela, the baby’s mother, was only fifteen. She came to the U.S. with her uncle and got pregnant almost as soon as she enrolled at Desert Pines High. The baby’s father was a 32-year-old go-kart mechanic, and he was eager to pretend none of this had ever happened.
The family had tried to care for the baby, but he had medical problems that they couldn’t handle. That’s why he ended up in a shopping cart on the doorstep of St. Andrew’s. Now he was in the hospital, where he’d have surgery to close a hole in his heart as soon as he was strong enough.
“But he’s not a crack baby,” Michael said. “That’s something to be thankful for.”
“Well, I can’t wait to meet him,” I said, hoping I sounded sincere. One look at Michael was all it took for me to decide not to tell him Mom’s little secret. He had enough on his mind.
“What’s on for tomorrow?” I asked.
“We left everything up in the air,” Michael said. “Dinner, though, for sure. Okay?”
“Yeah,” I said. “Wouldn’t miss it for the world.”
:: :: ::
As I covered the miles to David’s house, I found myself hoping he’d still be up. I was dying to know what he thought of my family. As I made my way along Warm Springs Road, a flashing arrow sign caught my eye. Lou’s Discount Liquor was still open, and on impulse, I pulled into the parking lot. I figured I owed David at least one bottle of Chianti.
The spaces in front of the store were taken, so I pulled around to the side. There were no other cars parked there, and it was dark. In some Las Vegas neighborhoods, I might have found this scary, but not here. This was Green Valley, the kind of community that advertises its family values.
Inside the store, it didn’t take me long to pick out a bottle of red wine and pay for it. I had just reached the Max when I heard heavy footsteps behind me. Surprised, I turned to look.
All I saw was a ski mask before I was spun around and slammed against my car. The brown paper bag in my arms fell to the ground and the wine bottle smashed as my assailant wrenched my right arm and twisted it against my back. His forearm crushed my throat, pressing so hard I couldn’t breathe.
“Don’t make any noise, bitch,” he said. “I’ve got a knife.”
He wrenched my arm even harder, and I caught sight of the glint of metal. He moved the blade under my jaw, letting up on my neck.
“Please,” I tried to say, but all that came out was a croak.
“Shut up,” he said, twisting my arm until I felt my shoulder pop. I stifled a scream. “You don’t want me to slip.”
Just then a door on the side of the building opened. A man carrying boxes emerged, silhouetted by a flood of light.
“Shit!” my captor hissed. He released me, and I turned in time to see him sprinting away. He disappeared into his car and sped out of the parking lot.
I slumped against my car, struggling for breath. The liquor store man had seen everything, I told myself. But as I tested my arm and decided it wasn’t broken, the man threw his boxes into the dumpster. He walked back into the store and shut the door.
As soon as I could manage it, I climbed into the Max. Pain shot through my shoulder and arm, and my neck felt bruised. With my good arm, I pulled down the visor and checked my face in the mirror. That’s when I saw the blood.
Blood! There it was, spreading on my white sweater. The guy had cut me, and I hadn’t even felt it! I pulled my turtleneck down. There was blood all over my neck, but I could see the source. It was a cut on my jaw about an inch from my earlobe. God, if it had been a little lower …
I squeezed my sweater against the cut. I could feel it now, but the flow of blood was definitely diminishing. Damn! I’d just been mugged, and the guy could have killed me! I thought of all the times I’d walked around New York City after dark, and no one had ever bothered me. Now, here in Henderson, Nevada, “a great place to call home,” a man in a ski mask had attacked me with a knife. And it was apparently such an everyday occurrence that the liquor store guy didn’t even care.
Or maybe he didn’t see it happen, I thought as I looked again at the store. The light was behind him when he stepped outside, and he’d had a stack of boxes in his arms. He probably hadn’t even realized something was going on. There wasn’t much noise, and it had all happened so fast. I looked again at the store, wondering if I should go back inside and get help. I thought about calling the police, but I realized I didn’t even know what kind of car my attacker had been driving. If it weren’t for the smashed bottle of wine and the blood on my sweater, I might have wondered if it really happened. I rubbed my shoulder. It had happened, all right.
I decided the best thing to do was to go to David’s house. It was less than three miles away, and I’d be able to collect myself and wash the blood out of my sweater. It was too bad the Chianti was gone, I thought as I backed out of my parking space, but that seemed to be the only real casualty. The cut on my neck had almost stopped bleeding, which meant it probably wasn’t be too serious.
I kept repeating “It’s not too serious” to myself like a mantra as I drove to David’s house. Even so, by the time I pulled into his driveway, I couldn’t grip the steering wheel tight enough to keep my hands from shaking. I was shivering all over when I pressed the doorbell, and it was only after I had already rung it that I remembered I had a key.
I was fumbling in my backpack when David opened the door in his bathrobe.
“Copper!” he said. “I know I gave you a—good God! What’s wrong?”
He pulled me through the door and held me by the shoulders at arm’s length.
“What happened? You’re bleeding! Are you all right?”
I was shaking all over. I stared at him as tears formed in my eyes. David wrapped his arms around me, and I couldn’t hold them back.
“I’ll—get—blood—on—your—robe,” I wailed.
“Hey, hey,” he said, stroking my hair and hugging me. “It’s okay. It’s okay.”
The shaking had mostly subsided when David finally got me settled in his recliner and tucked a fuzzy plaid blanket around me. He pulled up a footstool and held my hand.
“What happened, Copper?”
As my story emerged, David grew more and more insistent that we call the police.
“You need to make a report, if nothing else,” he said. “The guy could try it again.”
“I’m not ever going to that store again,” I said.
“What if he’s not an ordinary mugger?” David said. “What if he works for Bobby Marks? You’ve got to consider the possibility that you’re making some people nervous.”
I pulled the blanket around myself more tightly. I was shaking again.
“I didn’t see him. He was wearing a ski mask.”
“You don’t remember anything else? Even your impressions could be important.”
I closed my eyes.
“He was about my height,” I said. “And not fat. Oh, and the ski mask was dark green, I think.” Somehow, thinking about the attacker was actually calming me down, and I was beginning to remember more details.
“Good work,” David said. “Do you remember what else he was wearing?”
“Maybe something d
ark,” I said. “Oh! And running shoes! He was wearing white sneakers!”
“How about his car?”
“I think it was a sedan, but I don’t know what color,” I said. “And I didn’t see the license plate.”
“What color was he?” David asked.
“What?”
“The guy. Was he white? Black?”
“Oh. I don’t know,” I said. “No, wait! I saw his arm. He was white, and his voice sounded old. Not ancient—maybe my dad’s age.”
“See, you really know quite a bit. More than enough to make it sensible to call the police.”
“No,” I said.
“Copper, can you give me one good reason why not?”
“I don’t want to call them. It won’t help,” I said. “Look how much good it did after my apartment got ransacked.”
“It can take time,” David said.
“It would be all over the newsroom tomorrow,” I said. “I can’t face Ed Bramlett.” And a police investigation would definitely spoil my time with Daniel. There was no way I was going to let that happen.
“This is more important than what people think,” David said. “Copper, you could have been killed.”
“Calling the police doesn’t change that.”
David sighed heavily. “You should change your clothes at least,” he said.
I couldn’t argue with that. I was still wearing my bloody sweater.
My arm and shoulder were getting stiffer by the minute, but after I cleaned the wound, put on some sweats, and left my sweater soaking in the bathroom sink, I felt much better. I found David in the kitchen eating chocolate ice cream out of a half-gallon carton.
He had changed clothes, too. He was wearing a pair of dark blue sweatpants and no shirt. I couldn’t help noticing that he looked pretty good without a shirt—not nearly as hairy as I would have guessed, and his chest muscles were nicely defined in a way that didn’t look too locker-room macho.
“Did I get blood on your robe?” I asked.
“Not enough to matter,” David said.
“Good,” I said. “And thanks.”
“What for?”
“For putting me back together,” I said.
“Feeling better?”
“Much,” I said. “My arm’s going to be stiff for a while, and the cut still hurts, but I’ll live.” I tilted my chin up to show David the scab that was forming on my jaw.
“You need ice cream,” David said. “It’s very restorative.”
He got up, retrieved a spoon from the dishwasher, and handed it to me.
“I don’t do bowls after midnight,” he said, holding the carton out to me. I loaded up my spoon.
“Your family’s a trip,” David said. “A real adventure in WASP land.”
“What makes you say that?” I asked. “I mean, I know we’re pretty much the Anglo-Saxon stereotype, but—”
“Very nice, very polite Mount Rainier kind of folks.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Everybody’s cool as a snow-capped peak on the outside, but lots of geothermal activity deep down. You know, secretly ready to blow up without notice and destroy Seattle.”
“You think we’re that bad?”
“It’s not bad. It’s just different from my family. We’re more Mount Etna. No buildups. Lots of little eruptions all the time. And a whole lot of venting steam.”
“We’ve never talked much about how we’re feeling.”
“We’ve always talked too much about how we’re feeling. Or maybe I should say ‘yelled.’ Which reminds me, I’ve got news.” He scooped another spoonful of ice cream out of the carton. “Rebecca wants to go through with the divorce.”
“Oh,” I said. “I’m sorry if I—”
I couldn’t help thinking that I had pushed things along by answering the phone earlier.
“You had nothing to do with it,” David said. “I told you I wasn’t very married. This is just proof.”
I licked my spoon.
“I’ve got some news, too,” I said. “After you left tonight, Michael and Sierra announced that they’re adopting an abandoned baby. My parents aren’t too happy about it, and—they’re having their own problems, as well. Seattle just might be in serious danger.”
David chuckled and dug into the ice cream again.
“You know,” he said, “there’s a big upside to your family reunion.”
“Right,” I said.
“There is! You have much less time to worry about Victoria McKimber.”
I groaned, but he was right. A few days ago she was all I could think about. Now, in the cargo van of my life, she was taking the way back seat to Mom, Dad, brother, sister-in-law, nephew-to-be, and approaching boyfriend.
Except, damn! I still had to meet Heather on Saturday.
Chapter 16
Friday, December 23
The alarm on my cell phone went off at seven. I must have fallen asleep, because it woke me up. But I couldn’t have slept for more than three hours, because David and I stayed up until after three playing backgammon, and I was still wide awake when I went to bed. My arm still hurt, and my brain refused to slow down.
I dragged myself to the bathroom. One look in the mirror told me there was no way I was going to work. The scab on my jaw was far too noticeable, and I had huge dark circles under puffy eyes. A constellation of purple bruises had appeared on my right arm, and my shoulder ached.
I called Chris Farr, got his voice mail, and left a message saying I was sick. It wasn’t quite true, but it didn’t matter. I had to look at least halfway presentable when I picked up Daniel, and that was going to take coffee, Advil, dark circle concealer, and time.
David had left early, and I was happy to have a whole peaceful house to myself for a couple of hours. I turned on some Mozart and took a leisurely bath improved with what I assumed was Rebecca Nussbaum’s ylang-ylang bubbling bath oil. The phone rang while I was in the tub, but this time I wasn’t even tempted to answer it.
The hot bath made my shoulder feel much better, and afterward I made coffee and sat down at David’s kitchen table in my sweats. Thank God for David, I thought, and I wondered how I could ever thank him enough for letting me stay at his house and for taking care of me after my awful experience. A Christmas present didn’t seem quite right, even if I called it a Hanukkah gift. I finally decided I’d get him something nice for New Year’s. Something to wish him a happy new life, since it looked like his marriage really was on the road to nevermore.
But mostly, as I sat there in David’s kitchen, I was thinking about Daniel. Even with my cut and bruises, I still felt that kind of anticipation you only feel when someone you’ve been longing for is about to arrive. While I was in the bath, I had let that delicious, tingly feeling take hold of my belly and spread out all over my body. It stayed with me while I dried off, and it didn’t go away when I put on my clothes. As I sat imagining our reunion, it grew even more intense. I’d often gotten pretty excited when Daniel and I were online, but there was nothing like the real thing—real bodies, real contact.
By the time I left to pick up my Christmas gifts and go to the airport, I felt almost completely normal. Except for the cut on my chin, my face looked pretty good, and I was glad it was long-sleeves weather. None of my bruises would show until I took my sweater off.
:: :: ::
I love McCarran Airport. If I ever get really depressed, my cure will be to go there and hang around the escalators all the arriving passengers come down. College buddies, party girls, Asian families, brides-to-be—they’re all exploding with excitement because they’re finally setting foot in—ooh, ooh, ooh!—Las Vegas. The anticipation is so intense that if you inhaled it, you’d probably get high. But when I arrived to meet Daniel, all that euphoria was no match for my own. I hadn’t seen him since August. That wa
s nearly four months. In four months, a rabbit attains adulthood! In four months, entire insect civilizations rise and fall! It’s a freaking eternity!
But now, it was about to end. Daniel’s plane was on time—hallelujah, praise the Lord, and thank you, Jesus!—and I knew he was on it because he sent me a text message from L.A.
I’m about to board! See you in an hour or so, babe!
He sounded as excited as I felt.
I waited behind the security checkpoint, where I could see arriving passengers walking from the gates. Daniel was easy to identify from a distance. He is tall, and I would recognize his sweetly gangly lope anywhere. He had a curly mop of sun-streaked hair, and I could swear his smile was electrically enhanced. If a fairy turned a golden retriever into a man, the result would be Daniel Garside. A shiver ran through my body as I watched his approach. He was here at last!
I kept my eyes glued on him, but he didn’t make especially rapid progress. He was talking to a woman while he walked. They were laughing and using their hands, and then she dropped her shoulder bag. A bunch of stuff spilled out of it, and Daniel helped her pick everything up. Damn. I wouldn’t have paid much attention if she’d been an old lady or a mom with three kids, but this chick was Vegas perfect. She had the mile-long legs, huge yet mysteriously perky breasts, and a lion’s mane of blonde hair. I watched as she touched Daniel’s arm, and they both laughed. Then, all of a sudden, something seemed to be wrong with her shoe. Needless to say, it was of the stiletto-heel variety, and she leaned on Daniel while she adjusted it.
I suppose I shouldn’t have been surprised. Daniel really did have the irresistible charm of a beautiful, friendly dog. Women and children always found him instantly appealing. I couldn’t begin to imagine what it was like to have dental hygienists, postal clerks, and Denny’s waitresses all immediately ready to climb into bed with you, but that was the story of Daniel’s life. The amazing thing was that men liked him, too. My father thought he was “a wonderful guy,” and Michael had told me that he was really glad he was joining the family for Christmas because “he’s a lot of fun and so obviously right for you, Copper.”
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