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  After tucking Nick into the love seat at the other end of the room, where the wall heater hummed directly above his head, so, theoretically, he wouldn’t hear anything, Daniel peeked under a mound of organza in the center of the room, which was hiding an ugly pink plastic slide that had belonged to one of my nieces. Giving it a confused look, he dropped the fabric and crossed the room to me. No doubt he was wondering why the playroom was shrouded in shimmery cloth and draped with twinkle lights.

  “I think Mother was trying to make our new honeymoon suite a little more appealing,” I said, keeping my voice low and taking a glance at Nick. His little mouth was hanging open already. He was out. It still felt odd, having ended up here in the rumpus room together. I understood it, of course, but it wasn’t much of a wedding night, especially for two people who had waited—with growing difficulty, I might add—for the wedding to actually happen. “Sorry,” I whispered, snickering and dropping my face into my hand. The day had been too weird for words, right down to the point where my father tripped on the train of my gown and pirouetted into the first pew after he officially gave me to my groom.

  “I think the room’s pretty appealing.” Daniel’s voice was low and smooth, with a strong hint of come hither. When I glanced up, his eyes were smoldering, but he wasn’t focused on me. He was checking out the Barbie Dream House. He’d noticed my nieces’ work. “Wanna play with Barbie and Ken?”

  I stifled a laugh with my hands, a hot flush traveling from one end of my body to the other.

  “Twister?” Daniel’s suggestion was throaty and playful. “Spin the Bottle?” Extricating a glass Coke bottle from the hidden toy shelves, he held it between two fingers, twisting it back and forth, one dark eyebrow fanning suggestively.

  The heat on my skin intensified, boiling up from some smoldering place deep inside. “I will if you will.”

  “Mmm,” he murmured, setting the bottle on Barbie’s balcony. “I already am.” Slipping off his tuxedo vest, he draped it carefully over Barbie and Ken’s bedroom, admonishing, “A little privacy, please,” before he crossed the last few steps between us and took me in his arms to make me his Irish bride for real.

  We discovered that Barbie and Ken had nothing on us—that when you’re young and in love and you’re finally together, lumpy sofa beds and goofy attempts at romantic decor, U-Hauls waiting outside the door, and tenuous future plans don’t matter. You’re in your own world, and there’s no one there but the two of you. Everything seems right, because the one thing that matters most, really is.

  Sometime in the wee hours in the morning, I dreamed I was living in Barbie and Ken’s dream house … on the African savanna, where tall amber grasses waved in an ever-present breeze.

  I saw lions prowling in the distance.

  Something shook the balcony, making the floor squeak and wiggle. “Donnn’t,” I muttered, my mouth gluey and stiff. “I’m watch-ennn … the l-lions.”

  “What?” a voice answered. A man’s voice. I felt a hand on my shoulder. I tried to shake it off.

  “The li-unnns,” I heard myself murmur. “Biggg li-unnns.”

  “Mallory?” The voice was pulling me away from the savanna. I wanted it to stop bothering me. It was important that I keep a lookout for the lions. “Mal?”

  More shaking. My eyes opened to blurry twinkle lights and silky white walls, billowing slightly. Where was I? “Wait … the li-unnn …” Sometime between the words lions and are coming, it became clear that the sentence made absolutely no sense.

  Reality rushed over me, and I was a bride on my wedding night. In my mother’s rumpus room, with a three-and-a-half-year-old silhouetted on the other side of the organza curtain, trying to find his way in. My brain leapt to full awareness, and both of us scrambled into our clothes.

  “I’ve got him,” Daniel whispered, standing up and slipping through the curtain.

  Before Daniel could round him up, Nick found a gap in the draperies on my side of the bed. For a moment, he was like a little mummy, trapped between two layers of fabric, and then he emerged, sucking on his thumb knuckle, his hair tousled in little flyaway curls, his eyes droopy and huge.

  “Did you get scared?” I whispered, and he nodded.

  Despite all the parenting books—I had poured over a few in my crash course on step-parenthood—I did not gently-yet-firmly guide him back to his own bed. Instead, I let Nick pull the covers aside and hook a knee over the mattress.

  He was halfway in by the time Daniel tracked him down. Hands braced on his sweats, Daniel heaved a sigh, looking at the two of us, Nick with his soulful eyes and me just back from Barbie and Ken’s house on the African savanna. “Sorry. It’s just that he’s in a strange place.” Daniel’s disappointment was obvious as he made his way around the bed, clearly caught between the soft tug of parental devotion and the lure of further romance. A little hitchhiker in the middle of the mattress wasn’t in the plan.

  “Places don’t get much stranger than this.” I rolled over and folded an elbow under my head, gazing at Daniel in the dim light as he slipped beneath the comforter again. His arm made a bridge over Nick, linking us, and I toyed with his fingers.

  “Yeah, and then there are those lions.” In the glow of the lights, I saw his grin.

  I quieted a laugh with the pillow. “I guess I didn’t mention that I talk in my sleep.” One of the many things that isn’t a problem until you try to share living space. I was worried about that, deep down, though I hadn’t admitted it. I’d been on my own since leaving my parents’ house for college. I wasn’t sure how good I would be at accommodating the needs of two other people. After finally breaking my parents’ stranglehold by taking a job in Tokyo following college graduation, I’d learned to relish my independence.

  Daniel closed his eyes, as if he had none of the same concerns—not a thing troubling his mind to make him lie awake. “Now you tell me.” He smiled another sleepy smile.

  I closed my eyes and willed the lions to stay away. In terms of dream analysis, Kaylyn had informed me, predators symbolized deeply held fears. The sort that make us feel like the hunted rather than the hunters. I’d been dreaming of predators for over a week. Last night it was a full-grown bear trying to get into my car and eat the Clean Energy Bill. Tonight, lions outside Barbie and Ken’s house.

  Even though I’d never been good about prayers—having grown up in a household that was loosely religious in the old-world sense, prayers were more of a recitation offered before special meals, at family funerals, and at church services on holidays—I offered up a silent plea.

  Please help me give this everything I’ve got, and please let that be enough… .

  Surely the Almighty could see the fear balled inside me, even on this most special of special days. Surely He knew that I’d looked at the large window in the bathroom of the church earlier that night and briefly contemplated how hard it might be to climb through it in a wedding gown. Panic really didn’t describe that moment.

  I continued my midnight prayer, offering up a laundry list of issues I thought God might want to address, or that at least probably merited notification. Sometime during the latter half, I drifted off to sleep, suddenly peaceful, the lions far away.

  In the morning, I awoke to a kick in the gut. Letting out a sleepy “Ooof!” I jerked awake, the room whirling around me in a confusing swirl of sights, sounds, and thoughts.

  Ouch, that hurt!

  Did someone just hit me, or did I dream that?

  Where am I?

  What was that noise? There’s someone in my bedroom! Call the police!

  I jerked upright and the first thing I saw was a bare back—muscled, manly, the dim light of morning falling over the skin, making it look softer than it was. He was sitting on the edge of the bed, poised to get up. The wedding night replayed in my mind as he looked over his shoulder. “You’re awake,” he whispered.

  “Somebody slugged me, I think.” Rubbing my ribs, I pretended to be in pain, then glanced at Nick, stretched ou
t in a star shape in the middle of the bed. Careful not to disturb him, I bunched the pillows and rested against the back of the sofa.

  Daniel grinned, a smile that was half sweet, half wicked. “Want me to kiss it and make it better?”

  Desire heated my cheeks, the rumpus room around me making me feel like a bad girl about to be caught in a game of Truth or Dare. “You could try. But then I have a feeling we’d have a hard time beating the rush-hour traffic.” The plan was for the two of us to grab the few things we’d brought in with us and hit the road early. We had a long way to go, and since neither of us had any experience towing a trailer long distances, we suspected that our journey to Texas with what Daniel had dubbed the gypsy wagon, would be a slow one.

  “You’re so practical,” he teased, and I felt an odd little pinch. Insecurity nipped, taking out a little piece of flesh, making me wonder if Daniel was worried that he might have married a killjoy—someone not very spontaneous and exciting. Someone who was too worried about beating the morning traffic to live in the moment.

  A dreamer, a vagabond like Daniel, who wasn’t afraid to travel the Third World with a backpack and a bicycle, would get tired of a too-practical wife, and probably sooner rather than later. He’d be sorry he married me. He would realize that all of this was a mistake.

  “Whoa, what’s that look for?” His question told me immediately that he’d sensed sheer panic leaking into the room like radiation from a nuclear meltdown.

  “Nothing.” I smiled, trying to cover up, but my heart was racing, the air escaping my throat in little puffs. My lost independence wrapped around me like a giant anaconda, slowly squeezing, sensing fresh meat.

  I looked at Nick, so small, so innocent, his tawny curls falling over the pillow in a sun-bleached halo. The weight of responsibility pressed hard on my stomach. You could ruin his life. When this doesn’t work out, when you can’t hack it, you’ll break both of their hearts. You’ve never been able to keep a relationship together, even under the best of circumstances.

  These are hardly the best of circumstances.

  Daniel’s hand found mine. He’d leaned across the bed, his arm again bridging Nick, linking the three of us. “No second thoughts?”

  I forced a smile, told the first lie of my marriage. “Of course not.” I tried to picture getting into Daniel’s Jeep, heading for Texas with the U-Haul filled with wedding gifts, as well as Grandma Louisa’s Fostoria crystal and other things we didn’t want to send in the shipping container. The beating in my chest grew wilder, more erratic. The slithering coil of fear squeezed tighter.

  “Guess we’d better get packin’ then, Kemosabe,” he said, with the gleeful abandon of a twelve-year-old kid on his way to Boy Scout camp.

  “Guess we’d better,” I agreed. We’d said our good-byes last night, on the theory that leaving the house before the whole crew woke up would make things easier.

  Within thirty minutes, we were dressed, the suitcases were packed, and we were ready to scoop Nick out of the bed, spirit him into the Jeep, and shout, “Wagons ho!”

  Unfortunately, the Great Chief had set her alarm clock for a very early hour and mustered from their beds every member of the tribe. A conglomeration of sisters, in-laws, nieces, and nephews were waiting, bleary-eyed after last night’s celebration. Mom had made quiche.

  She waved off Daniel’s assertion that Nick wouldn’t be fit company if we woke him for breakfast. “Oh, he’ll be fine,” she insisted, with the casual hand swipe that typically accompanied statements like, It didn’t cost that much, or I know you’re in the middle of your work day, but guess what happened at bridge club this morning …

  When my mother had her mind set on something, there was no fighting it.

  We roused Nick. He was cranky. Conversation around the breakfast table was drowsy and bland. My eldest sister’s husband, a columnist for an Annapolis newspaper, filled me in on the sordid history of Jack West. “You know that his second wife and her ten-year-old son vanished under mysterious circumstances, right? The Mexican authorities never solved the disappearance. Two people, just gone without a trace from the family vacation home in Bocas Del Gallo. Poof.” Illustrating with his hands, he leaned close, his eyes meeting mine meaningfully as my mother and sisters chatted about variations of quiche. Daniel was busy trying to placate Nick with fresh fruit in strawberry sauce.

  “They didn’t exonerate Jack West, either,” my brother-in-law continued. “West skipped the country before charges could be pressed. No sign of the wife and the ten-year-old stepson, even after twenty years. No bodies. Didn’t turn up somewhere else in the world living under assumed identities. Nothing. They just vanished off the face of the earth.” He glanced surreptitiously at my eldest sister, Carol, from whom he was undoubtedly keeping this information. This wasn’t the sort of bombshell Carol would handle well. “Keep your eyes peeled down there.”

  I blinked, swallowing a lump that had nothing to do with the horse pill prescribed by the dentist. “Geez, Corbin.”

  “I don’t mean to kill the wedding bliss,” he whispered out the side of his mouth. “I just thought you ought to know, that’s all. It was a big story, back when it happened. From time to time, some news show or other picks it up again—he is Jack West, after all. He’s a curiosity. But, hey, it’s not like he’s been in any other trouble. Well, there was that prosecution for the financial thing, but they couldn’t get the charges to stick.”

  “Oh, that makes me feel a whole lot better. Thanks.” I set down my fork, having suddenly lost my appetite. At the end of the table, Daniel caught my gaze, shrugging toward the door. Over the past weeks, he’d read every story he could find about Jack West. He undoubtedly knew about the vanished second wife and stepson. It bothered me that he hadn’t told me about it.

  “It’s … interesting,” Corbin whispered, scooping up a last forkful of quiche. “Let me know if you hear or see anything strange, that’s all.” My favorite brother-in-law was always looking for the story that would reel in a Pulitzer and a job at the New York Times, the holy grail of reporting, in his view. “I’m sure you don’t have anything to worry about—in terms of personal safety, I mean. The man undoubtedly has plenty of people working for him on that ranch. None of them have disappeared, I guess.”

  “Oh, that’s reassuring.” Nothing about this move felt right. It was tying my insides in slipknots.

  Corbin patted my hand. “I shouldn’t have said anything… .” The sentence seemed to trail off unfinished, the words definitely not meaning what they said. “Forget that I brought it up. I was just … pawing into the story a little the other day. I didn’t come up with anything.”

  “Are you going to keep pawing into it?”

  He shrugged, falsely casual, then he cut a nervous glance toward Carol, who was giving us the fish eye. “Oh … I’ll have an ear to the ground. Listen, don’t tell Carol about any of this. She’s already upset that you’re moving away, and you know how your sister can be.”

  An uneasy prickle skimmed the back of my neck. “You’ll let me know if you find out anything though, right?”

  “Sure, sure,” Corbin agreed, suddenly anxious to disengage.

  Breakfast was soon over. When we rose from the table, one of my teenage nieces became emotional because I wouldn’t be there to see her in her prom dress. My mother started crying, too. Then Carol started crying, Trudy broke down, and my two middle sisters, Merryl and Missy, joined the weep fest. Brothers-in-law scattered in all directions, anxious to exit the pool of female emotion. Daniel’s parents, having been phoned by my mother, showed up for one last good-bye. Nick suddenly decided that he wanted to go home with them. Daniel’s mother clutched him so tightly, I thought she might break him. Daniel’s father, a big man with an even bigger heart, got watery-eyed.

  Nick threw a fit when he saw the Jeep, and strapping him into his car seat was like trying to put a spider in a straitjacket. I’d never seen that side of Nick before. I was used to handing all out-of-control kids
to their mothers when things got difficult. I had no idea what to do, except stand there looking like a helpless idiot while Daniel engaged in the wrestling match and tried not to look aggravated in front of everyone.

  We drove away with Nick screaming, kicking, wailing, and reaching toward the window as if he were being hauled off by kidnappers. Daniel gripped the steering wheel with both hands, his muscles stiff, his jaw tense, the playful smile nowhere to be seen.

  Ten minutes out my parents’ door, we hit rush-hour traffic. Forty-five minutes passed as we inched our way toward the open road. By the time we made it, Nick had cried himself into oblivion. I quickly joined him in sleep, curling my body toward the window and trying to push Corbin’s warnings from my mind.

  To keep your marriage brimming,

  With love in the loving cup,

  Whenever you’re wrong, admit it;

  Whenever you’re right, shut up.

  —Ogden Nash

  (Left by Herb and Charlie Hampton, telling the young folks how it’s done)

  Chapter 5

  On day three of the U-Haul honeymoon, we crossed Louisiana and passed into Texas. Texas was experiencing a May heat wave, and the air-conditioner on the Jeep was all but out of commission—not what you want to discover when you’ve been traveling through Arkansas with a carsick kid in the back. Daniel and I had our very first marital head-butting session over whether to stop at a car wash and shampoo the smell out of the backseat. Daniel didn’t want to discuss anything that had to do with stopping. We were already behind schedule, and there was no way we would make it to our new home in the early afternoon, as planned.

  Tucked safely in the console were Jack West’s instructions as to how we were to find the place. Eerily, we hadn’t heard from the man in over a week. I hadn’t looked at the sheet of notebook paper where Daniel had written the directions. I was afraid to. I doubted there was anything on there like, Turn just past the shopping mall or Go one block beyond Starbucks.