Out at Night

“Come on, I’ll show you where you’ll sleep.”

Katie took his hand and skipped beside him and Grace trailed behind, the sherpa hauling suitcases. It occurred to Grace that Mac already knew where the bedrooms were.

“Here’s where you and your mom can stay.” The room held two queen-sized beds with a view of the beach. “My room’s on the other side, and the bathrooms are in between. Want to see?”

Katie nodded, her eyes round.

“I’ll wait,” Grace said. Mac shot her that look again and she flushed.

That night they ate in the hotel dining room at a small table covered in brocade, next to a plaster wall of vivid pinks and oranges, wooden mermaids hanging in the archway. Katie sat next to Mac and insisted he cut her chicken, and he bent over it as if it were a sacrament. Nobody bothered them.

Clemens, the manager, explained that their villa had housed kings and queens, heads of business and Hollywood royalty, and that one of the hallmarks of the place was the other guests’ exquisite ability to leave those whose faces were familiar alone.

That, and the staff’s attention to detail, anticipating every need and silently meeting it.

It was as if the ground were slipping, but it was quality ground, a finer silt than Grace was used to. Even the towels she used to dry Katie after her bath felt better. Fluffier. Softer. Whiter. Part of Grace loved being taken care of. And part of her feared it. But Katie seemed to be slipping into this life with Mac effortlessly—and that, too, scared her.

She’d been alone for so long, making every decision about Katie, and now here was a man—her man, he’d been, a long time ago—reverently embracing his role as dad. Daddy. The big guy. Mr. Right who could do no wrong. At least not in Katie’s eyes. Part of her wanted to yell, Hold it! Wait! Who’s the parent here, anyway? Not wanting to hear the answer.

Some uneasy thing tremored under the surface and Grace knew what it was.

Sometime soon, Katie would look her right in the eye and ask out loud why Grace had lied to her about her dad. Lied about the most important thing in Katie’s life.

And Grace didn’t have a good answer.

She doubted she ever would.

“How do you want to handle this?” They were sitting on lounge chairs on the patio. From the bedroom, Katie murmured in her sleep.

Mac reached across the dark expanse and took Grace’s hand, his fingers warm, touch solid.

Past the railing and down the terraced walks, waves foamed whitely against the dark expanse of sand. Landscaping lights illuminated the palm trees and Grace saw a man and woman wading along the edge of the waves, holding hands in the growing dark.

The setting sun was turning the water a soft pink that glowed as if it were lit from within, and the air was heavy with the scent of hibiscus and the sea.

“We have to take it slow,” Grace said.

And then she got up and sat down next to him on his lounge chair, placed her hands on either side of his face and kissed him. He kissed her back, and pulled her on top of him. The rush was instantaneous, greedy, joyous, drugged with heat and desire. He rolled to his feet, picked her up, and carried her to his bed.

The clothes came off, and she wished again she’d packed better underwear, but who knew that instead of playing four rounds of Candyland she’d be sliding her hands over a man voted by People magazine as one of the top 100 sexiest men in America?

Last year’s list, she reminded herself. Although he still looked pretty good. His chest gleamed with a fine sheen of sweat. He shifted and she felt him against her. Liquid fire.

“Oh, brother,” she said. “Oh, oh, brother.”

She rolled away and wrapped a sheet around her. She took a long shaky breath. She rolled back toward him and put her hands on the flat of his chest. His skin burned the palms of her hands and that close, his eyes were heavy-lidded, his gaze intense.

“Grace.” He kissed her shoulder blade, the hollow in her throat where her heart was beating. “Talk to me.”

“It means too much.” Her voice was quiet. “If we made love and it didn’t work—and it would be making love, Mac, not just the physical part, what it means.”

He slid his hand under the sheet and cupped a breast and she sucked in a breath, almost in a panic, her body flooded with warmth.

He removed his hand with effort. He was breathing through his mouth. He had a nick on an incisor. He’d chipped it as a kid using his teeth to cut a fishing line. She was doomed. She already knew how he’d gotten all his childhood injuries. His knees touched her shins and shifted away.

He regarded her, loss and desire on his face. “What do you want, Grace?”

Her eyes filled. She felt his breath, soft, on her face. He searched her eyes. All the bones in her body seemed to soften; she was warm wax in his hands.

“For the last five years to go away. Not the part with Katie. The part without you.”

He rolled onto his back and stared at the ceiling. In the moonlight, his eyes glowed bright. “But see,” his voice was low. “That’s just it, Grace. That was the part without Katie. For me. That was the part.”

She couldn’t breathe. Her throat closed. The night air felt heavy against her face. She had done this, she had done this. And there was no fixing it.

She rolled away from him with effort and slid free of the sheets. She stood. Her legs trembled. Their clothes lay in a jumbled trail across the Saltillo tile floor and she took a shambling step.

“You bolt at the first sign of trouble.” There was no accusation in his voice; it was as if he were tracking the beats of a song, figuring out its rhythm. She realized her heart hurt.

“I bolt.” The floor was cold. She found her T-shirt and put it on. She needed underpants. She needed distance. She needed to remember to take her birth control pills.

“It’s as if you’re there one moment, and then you flip a switch and you’re gone. I don’t want you to go.”

Mac flung off the covers and stood. The heat between them was old, and raw and real. She looked away, but not before she’d seen that he’d seen it, too, in her eyes, on her face.

He pulled her to him and kissed her and she wrapped her arms around him and stood trembling, feeling the shock of his presence, the immediacy of his reaction. His arms seemed harder, somehow, than they’d been five years before, his muscles knotted.

“Hunger does that.” His voice had an edge.

She could feel her heart start to race. “That’s a little scary. Reading my mind.”

“I’ve had five years’ practice. You were squeezing it,” he added.

“I beg your pardon?”

“My arm. The muscle. You were squeezing it as if you were testing its strength against your memory. My arm won.”

“Yeah, memory’s a tricky thing.”

“Been my experience.” His body shifted and tensed and she felt the familiar fit of his body, both of them wanting more.

She dropped her hand to his back. She could still feel the sun in his skin. “Have you had a lot of that? Experience?”

“Do my best.” He slid a hand down her back, and she could see him tracking its impact, evaluating mentally the way her back tensed, the short intake of her breath when his bare hand slid from her T-shirt to her skin, the hooded light in her eyes.

And then it rounded a corner again, what she was feeling, and her eyes filled.

He stopped his hands and moved his naked strong body a fraction away.

“I did this to us, okay? I made it be not simple.”

“So now you’re beating yourself up.” His hands found her hips. He pulled her gently toward him and she felt again the blurring sweetness of desire, the melting heat. His palm grazed her buttocks, his eyes still on hers.

She was going to have to push him away. If not now, then soon.

Her breath came in short gusts. “What are you offering, Mac?”

“I think that’s pretty clear.”

“No, I mean it.” She rocked back away from him, but all that did was position her closer. If he moved, even slightly, toward her. Into her.

“Okay, what am I offering. The truth. Ask me anything.”

“Risky business.”

“Riskier not to.”

He touched her breast, her belly, the soft part of her that melted under his touch. They stood together in the dim light, their bodies naked except for her T-shirt. He swallowed. Sighed as if it took everything he had. He pushed her gently away.

“Truth then. I get the feeling you’re a whole lot of work. Maybe I’m not up to that. Maybe I’d give it my best shot, and still come up short.”

Her heart was beating very fast.

“You kept Katie away for five years. When I think about that too much, it makes me crazy.”

She couldn’t breathe.

“Maybe it is too late. Not for Katie. But for us.”

His room held a king-sized bed, a mahogany sideboard, a bar, a flat-screen TV. Through the French doors she could see the ocean. She looked everywhere except his face.

“So that whole ‘sticking around when you’re not sure’—that stuff you said after you got out of the hospital and flew here to surprise us and meet Katie—that’s bullshit?”

“I don’t want to do this anymore. Not here. Not this way.”

He was a big man, his movements economical. He found his shorts and pulled them on. It was abrupt, final, and changed everything. The small window he’d offered—the one through which she could have slipped without penalty or disguise—had closed.

It would take much more now to open it.

Yet as Grace returned to her solitary bed next to Katie’s, listening to the commingled sounds of the surf and Mac gargling into his sink, it seemed as if they’d been doing this forever, or a version of it, and maybe when things evened out, they’d add back in the sex part and get married.

A fantasy she’d construct brick by fragile brick.

THREE Friday

They spent the morning in a golf cart touring the candy-colored clapboard Harbor Island village, stopping at Angela’s Starfish for fresh conch, searching for Jimmy Buffett’s Cheeseburger in Paradise. Mac had been polite and remote with her, lavishing attention on Katie and right before Grace’s eyes, their daughter bloomed.

There had been one reoccurring speed bump, an awkward one, when she noted it: she seemed incapable of letting Katie and Mac hold a conversation without interjecting herself into it, trying to change the focus, not to her, but so that Mac was closed out.

He’d point at a modest wooden house set back from a road and tell Katie it was a library. Grace would turn her in the other direction and point out the sea.

As the morning wore on, the tendency became more pronounced until Katie and Mac’s defense was to close Grace out entirely, and it was then that she finally lost her footing on the emotional cliff face she was climbing—this strange new territory with no toeholds—and slid a good distance backward, scraping parts of her psyche she didn’t know existed.

Battered, she thought jauntily. But still there.

On the heels of that thought, she felt it start in her throat, and then behind her eyes. She’d found herself close to tears.

Now she and Mac lay on lounge chairs at the pool, watching Katie paddle in the shallow end, her water wings bright glints of inflatable pink plastic against the turquoise. A brilliantly colored wall of bougainvillea shielded the pool from the walkway. There were other people sunbathing on towels, but Grace didn’t get the sense that anybody was actively listening. It was only the two of them side by side, and the quiet sounds of Katie paddling and singing a small, tuneless song.

“I talked to my folks.”

“And?” She reached for her lemonade and drank.

“They were wondering if I could take Katie back to Atlanta for Thanksgiving. They live about an hour away. They could drive in.”

“You mean, by herself?” Grace kept her voice steady, but the panic was rising.

“Well, me.”

“That’s in less than two weeks.”

He was silent.

It hadn’t occurred to her until just that moment that maybe rehabilitating herself with Mac would be the least of her worries. The image of grandparents, bewildered and furious at having had a grandchild withheld, suddenly rose in her mind. It was another prick threatening the bubbly bliss of Grace’s imagined life.

“She’s barely five years old. I thought we were going to try trips, the three of us.”

“This is sort of one.”

“You flew out. I wasn’t expecting you.”

“I wasn’t going to meet Katie while I was in the hospital, Grace.

We agreed. I didn’t want to scare her. You’d told me any time I was ready was fine with you.”

“Yeah, well, people usually call first, but maybe that’s me.”

He started to speak and stopped. This wasn’t going the way she’d envisioned.

“She’s got a whole other side of the family, Grace, she’s never met.”

“She’s got plenty of relatives she hasn’t met on my side either, she can start with those; I barely know them myself, we can start together.”

She stopped. It was exactly what she’d done all day; promised herself she wouldn’t do again.

“I found us a therapist. Elise Lithgow.”

She sucked in a breath.

Mac scribbled a phone number on a napkin next to his Coke and passed it to her. Grace glanced at it. It was a Mission Hills prefix.

“She wants to meet both of us separately first, to see if we’re each comfortable with her, so if it’s not a good match, I’m open to something else, Grace, if you’ve got another idea.”

Grace shook her head. Katie grabbed the side of the pool and kicked. She was wearing pink nail polish on her toenails and every so often the color winked in the water.

“Grace, when you stopped me last night—slowed me down so I could think through what I was doing—I realized something. You were right.”

“No, no, I wasn’t. Do over. Let’s do a do-over.”

“Let’s just do it right.” He looked at Katie and hesitated. “When I was in the hospital I worked with a Realtor. I bought a place near your house; with the market sliding, everything’s available. It’s a condo in the Rondolet. Right around the corner.”

“I know where it is.”

It stood on Shelter Island, an enormous round building with views on one side of the San Diego Yacht Club.

“It’s far from perfect right now; it’s packed with an old person’s furniture—I bought the place from an elderly woman moving into a nursing facility—but it’s a place, and it means Katie will have her own bedroom when she visits.”

It sunk in. He had planned this. The whole time he was in the hospital, while she sat by the edge of his bed. While they talked about how the light fell on San Diego harbor and the exact timbre of their daughter’s laugh. He’d been working with a Realtor.

“Lots of kids wind up going between two houses. It’s not ideal, but it’s not the worst thing, either.”

Dissolving into sparkly bits! The big candy-colored house with the granite counters and the security gate. Evaporating into air! The three of them climbing, skipping the stairs to some phantom life where Mommy and Daddy lived in the same bedroom and Katie was down the hall and everybody ran in slo-mo in fields of daisies like some personal hygiene commercial. Fragmenting into pieces! The dream of laughing around the kitchen table ha ha ha and having the only silences be good ones, not the lethal kind that took years of explaining and apologies and therapy to sort out.

Gone, gone, gone, not ever having to work at it, and never, ever having to say she was sorry.

She started to say, Right! Say it with conviction and nonchalance and stopped, straightening in her lawn chair.

A Royal Bahamas policeman was bicycling to a stop outside the gate leading to the pool, and even before he scanned the sunbathers and locked eyes with her, she knew he’d come for her.

FOUR

They walked the beach. Pink sand foamed into a burst of white, the waves a dark green flattening into a purple so deep it looked inked. On the horizon a sailboat stood motionless.

Grace cut him a look. He was slightly built, very black, his gray shirt and shorts still crisp despite the humidity. He was wearing sandals. His name on the tag read epsten and when he spoke his voice was a deep baritone. “Thaddeus Bartholomew. Does the name mean anything to you?”

Grace shook her head.

He glanced around. No one was close enough to hear. A man in a leg cast and crutches limped away from them down the beach, his wife walking ahead, holding a cooler and a blanket. The wife never turned to check on him, striding briskly away from her husband as if he was paying for something not quite current in the marriage account. She seemed to be picking the least steady ground, the softest sand. He followed, a resigned slant to his shoulders, his wedding ring a dull flash against sunburned fingers.

“You received the message from FBI Special Agent Peter Descanso.” Epsten peered at Grace, his eyes bright.

“I’m on vacation.”

“Yes. With your daughter and her father.”

Grace shot him a look of surprise.

He said mildly, “Not all white people look the same, but those two do.”

“She has my color eyes,” Grace said. A rogue wave washed toward them and Grace took a step back. “And a dimple. You can’t really see that from where you stood, but it’s there.”

He started to speak and stopped.

“Some people think that Mac’s the one with the dimple, but he really isn’t. His is more of an indentation.”

He looked at her a long moment. “Thaddeus Bartholomew,” he repeated gently.

“Name’s vaguely familiar but that’s as close as I can get.”

She was still smarting that a stranger had immediately seen the connection between Mac and Katie. What if it wasn’t just physical? What if it transcended any bond she’d built with her daughter? And wow, the wrongness of that. Already putting Katie between them in a game of cosmic tug-of-war.

“He died in Palm Springs two nights ago. He was a history professor at Riverside University. Somebody shot him with an arrow. A bolt, they call it, in the States.”

“Special Agent Descanso—my uncle Pete—has been trying for years to get me to spend more time with him and his family. If you knew him—”

Officer Epsten shook his head.

“—but if you did, you’d understand this is so. Like. Him.” She was working up an aggrieved tone of voice. Soon she’d be able to thank Officer Epsten nicely and he’d leave, reassured that she’d done all she could, had nothing to offer. “Tracking me down on a family vacation so I could get pulled into something I know nothing about. Have no relationship to.”

Epsten stopped walking. “Special Agent Descanso, he didn’t explain in the letter?”

She shook her head.

“Mr. Bartholomew left a clue, one investigators think does involve you. He was dying, but resourceful.”

Epsten’s voice was measured and Grace realized in that instant she’d underestimated him. He wasn’t going away.

She was.

That’s what he’d come to tell her. She stared at the water. A teenage girl stood in the waves, her hair a springy golden mane against perfect skin.

“He sent a message to his home phone right before he died. At first, they thought it was just clicks, a child perhaps, playing. He had an oldstyle cell phone, no text messaging.” He turned. “It was Morse code.”

She snapped a look at him. He stared at the water. From the side, his profile was strong. A slight graying near his glasses betrayed his age.

“He spelled out your name, Grace.”

She licked a lip. “My first name? Because spelling out the word grace when you’re about to get killed by a maniac with a crossbow is probably standard stuff.”

“Both names. Actually the exact message was Find Grace Descans. He was cut off before he could add the o. He picked you, and they’d like to know why.”

He stooped and picked up a shell. It was small, fan-shaped, a soft purple and cream. He wiped off the sand and tucked it in the pocket of his shirt. “My granddaughter collects these.”

“I don’t have any choice, do I?”

“Not really.”

The teen in the ocean turned. It was a woman in her forties who’d had very good work done. A little too tucked around the eyes for Grace’s taste, but still.

“It’s bigger than somebody dying randomly in a field. Isn’t it?”

Three horses picked their way carefully down a path toward the water, riders gripping saddle horns, and Grace turned back toward the Pink Sands cabana on the beach where a Bahamian attendant named Bolo smiled, waiting to offer a towel and a mauve-colored lawn chair. Grace smiled and shook her head and kept walking, taking the soft sand trail cut into the side of the hill that led back to the villa. Officer Epsten kept pace.

“Are you going to answer my question?”

“There’s an international agricultural convention hosted by the United States government that starts in Palm Springs tomorrow and runs through Monday night.”

“Heard about it. Its official name is the International Ministerial Conference and Expo on Agricultural Science and Technology.”

He stared.

She shrugged. “A friend has a friend who’s involved in it.”

“Apparently Mr. Bartholomew was involved in it, too.” He scuffed the sand with the heel of his sandal. “He was not who he appeared.”

“How so?”

Epsten stared at her soberly. “You’ll have to ask Special Agent Descanso that.”

The villa was coming into view and she could see Katie on the balcony. She waved, and Katie bounced up and down and waved back. Mac appeared on the patio and he put his arm easily around Katie’s shoulders and Grace felt hollowed out, light.

“If you know about Katie’s father, then you probably know we haven’t had much time together.”

“And I am sincerely sorry for that, madam.”

Katie was laughing, Mac bending over her saying something only she could hear. Katie impulsively reached up her arms and hugged Mac hard.

Whatever Grace’s uncle needed her to do in Palm Springs was far less important than the likelihood of Mac forging a bond with Katie that forever altered the relationship she had with her daughter.

“I’ll be back to drive you to the water taxi, which will take you to Eleuthera. On Eleuthera, there’s transport waiting to drop you directly at the plane. They’re holding it for you.”

“Am I supposed to go right to Palm Springs?”

He handed her a sealed letter with an FBI insignia on it. “That, I do not know, madam.”

“How much time do I have?”

He glanced silently at the villa. Mac and Katie had disappeared inside, the balcony empty. He looked at her neutrally.

“Enough to say good-bye.”

“Mommy! Mommy mommy mommy mommy mommy!”

Katie threw herself at Grace. She was still in her swimsuit; her skin smelled of chlorine.

“Daddy’s going to take me out in the golf cart later, just the two of us. We’re going to find a store where they sell kitties. We’re not going to buy one, just look. I want to hold a fluffy one.”

Grace met Mac’s eyes over their daughter’s head. He shrugged and Grace felt a territorial tug.

“You need to take a bath, sweetie.”

“There was a bird that flew onto the balcony. It had orange on its head and a very, very big beak. This big.” She held out her hands in front of her nose.

“Sweetie, that’s great. I need to talk to Daddy a minute, okay? Let’s get you out of this wet swimming suit.” Her tone held just the faintest hint of criticism, and out of the corner of her eye, she could see Mac tense.

It eased something in her. She rested an open palm on her daughter’s shoulder.

“Come on, kiddo, I’ll start the water for you.” She moved toward the bathroom, Katie skipping next to her. “I’m going to show Daddy how hot to make the water, so he knows.”