Alone (6 page)

CENTRAL PARK WAS THE ONLY GOOD
thing about being uptown, as far as Gaia was concerned. Washington Square Park was really just a couple of city blocks. It had some nooks and crannies, but you could pretty much see it end to end from any angle. But this? A couple of miles of actual woodland in the middle of the city? It was pretty gorgeous.

Plus it provided her with infinitely more ass to kick.

The winding pathways and roads were even a little hard to navigate, despite her photographic-map-like memory. You could swear you were heading for Seventy-second Street and Strawberry Field, where the John Lennon garden was, and all of a sudden you ended up at Sixty-fourth, staring at Lincoln Center peeking out from a block away. Gaia loved the thrill of getting just slightly lost in the thick greenery, standing on a wide, flat rock surrounded by trees, even as the burps and backfires of massive delivery trucks on either side of the park were audible in the distance.

Not that this bucolic oasis, plopped smack in the middle of the city, was trouble-free.
Was it only in New York that solitude of any kind meant
the potential for danger was multiplied by ten?
Gaia wondered. She stepped silently through a particularly dense piece of the park, and sure enough, before she could even take in the local flora, she heard the unmistakable sounds of a pack of guys hopped up on their own testosterone.

“Yo, man, where's all the sissies at today?” one of them yelled.

“Yoo-hoo, you want a piece of me?” another one called out.

Skinhead homophobes.
Great! Gaia felt her senses sharpen as she tasted the potential for a good ass kicking. She hoped they were as stupid as they sounded.

She stepped farther into the trees and waited to see the group of goose steppers wander into her field of vision. Sure enough, they stepped out from between the trees, whacking at branches and laughing loudly. Just then a small man in pressed jeans, with carefully gelled hair and a Kenneth Cole backpack, wandered down the pathway. His footsteps slowed when he saw the pack of skinheads standing in his way.

“We thought we'd find someone like you here,” the head guy said. He was a particularly gross example of the male species, with his sickly pale skin and orangy-red eyelashes.
If he'd invested in a tube of Clearasil instead of the oxblood Doc Martens he's
wearing, his money would have been better spent,
Gaia thought.

“Look, I don't want any trouble.” The guy took his backpack off his shoulder and retreated a few paces. “Do you want my wallet?”

“Your wallet? Man, I want your ass six feet under!”

That seemed to be the cue. The skinheads rushed the little guy, who turned around and ran with surprising speed. He wasn't fast enough, though, and one of the skinheads had grabbed him by the waistband and lifted him off the ground when
Gaia leapt down on him from a tree branch above.

This was too good. Gaia shoved the little guy out of the way and yelled, “Run!” An order he was already obeying by the time it came out of her mouth. And then Gaia's body clicked into autopilot. If she saw a jaw, she smashed it. If she felt the breeze of a fist approaching her, she blocked it. The four men attacking her ceased to be individuals and became only body parts,
a hurricane of onslaughts
that Gaia dispatched with ease, one by one.

She could smell their aggression, their passion, their hatred and, as she felt the crunch of bone beneath her fist, their fear. That was where they lost. They were animals, humbled by their instinct, where Gaia, because she had no fear, was more like an efficient, logical machine.

Doosh
. Someone came at her from behind, and she shoved an elbow upward, into his crotch.

Whap-smak.
An ugly face said something rude, and she responded by whacking the heel of her hand up into his nose.

Kraaa-sploosh.
Someone's blood spurted out of a fresh wound and across his buddy's T-shirt.

Ha.
She wished all those yuppie gymgoers sweating it out in tae-bo-spinning-yoga-Pilates class could try this workout just once.
It created quite a glow in a young lady.

Dum-dum-dum-dum-dum. . .
Gaia suddenly felt an absence of aggression and heard retreating footsteps. She whirled around, hands out, making sure this wasn't just a lull in the battle.

“Aw, come on, guys. Gone so soon?” she called out. Three of the skinheads were racing away from her at top speed, and a fourth was stumbling, trying to run despite the fact that his broken nose was making his eyes gush with tears.

“Come back! I was just getting warmed up!”

But all her request did was light a fire under the last guy's ass, and he took off double time after his friends. Gaia was left alone in the park.

Of course, the battle over, her body began to rebel against her. She felt the familiar draining of all energy from her limbs. Gaia stumbled down the pathway, looking for a park bench, hoping to find someplace to
plant herself where she wouldn't look like a vagrant while recovering from her fight.

In front of her she saw a big clearing and a large brown building. In front of it was a metal railing and a bunch of benches. As the edges of her consciousness began to fade, a rushing sound like a waterfall whooshed into her ears. She made a tunnel-vision beeline for the closest bench and collapsed onto it just as her limbs went cold and her knees turned to jelly.

She lay motionless for many minutes until her body gave her the signal it was time to wake up. It felt like every nerve ending, every blood vessel, every organ was gathering together to get her attention. She imagined them all meeting up near her spleen, complaining about how she was overusing them all during those intense physical confrontations and going on strike immediately afterward so they had a chance to regenerate.

Then her conscious mind finally kicked into gear, interrupting her weird dreamy reverie.
Hey. Hello. Pull it together, Gaia. You've been out for almost ten minutes
.

She opened her eyes and saw the same blank white sky, felt the hard wooden slats of the bench under her back. She wiggled her fingers and toes, then flexed her arms and legs, checking for any damage.

Bruises? Of course. Broken bones? Not a one—not
even a rib. She was going to be stiff for a while, though. She sat up and looked around her. She was farther uptown than she had thought and farther west, too: this was the Delacorte Theater, where people lined up during the summer to see free Shakespeare in an outdoor setting.

Just outside the front of the brown building was a bronze statue of a thin, wraithlike girl in a flowy dress dancing with some dude in a hat. Gaia squinted at it as she sat slumped on the bench, idly reading the inscription at the bottom. Romeo and Juliet.
The star-crossed lovers whose love for each other caused them both to lose their lives.

Great,
thought Gaia.
Very romantic.
Boy meets girl, boy's family has a fit about girl's family, and forces outside of their control conspire to keep them apart no matter how much they care about each other. And this was considered the greatest romance of all time? No wonder the world was such a screwy place.

As it always did, Gaia's mind wandered back to Ed. No question, he was the total love of her life. Also no question that
being close to Gaia was going to doom him to total annihilation.
Obvious answer? Stay the hell away from him, no matter how it flattened her own heart.

Damn. A broken bone would have been so much easier for Gaia to endure than a broken heart.

OLD HABITS ARE HARD TO BREAK.
That was supposed to be an undeniable law of human nature, but Tom was finding that certain old habits were sloughing off him like skin from a molting snake.

Maybe the saying should have been, Old habits are hard to break, unless someone really wanted to get rid of them all along.

For example, his habit of always being alone. His habit of never trusting anyone. His habit of never, ever losing himself to pleasure, passion, and enjoyment of life. That was a habit he'd picked up after the death of his wife, to protect the safety of the daughter he cherished. And he hadn't realized how much he wanted to let it go until he'd met Natasha.

With an entire day at their disposal, at first they'd felt as giddy as children. Should they loll around in bed? Order up room service and feed each other bonbons? That, of course, was the last thing either of them really wanted to do. Part of their intense connection was their shared need to get out, to do, to accomplish things.

It turned out they were both scuba certified.

They found a local named Ted who had a boat and all the equipment on hand to motor them out to a bay where tourists didn't usually get to go. The ride was
choppy, but the wind was cool on their faces, and they held each other, sitting on life jackets, as they watched the shoreline spool past.

It had been a while since Tom had gone deep. When they reached the bay, it was as picturesque as he had imagined. It actually kind of looked like the opening shot from
Gilligan's Island,
now that Tom thought about it, but he didn't want to make such a goofy reference.

“My God,” Natasha said.

“What?” he asked.

“It's too stupid,” she told him. “But I was thinking, this cove looks familiar, like this television show where the people are lost on the island and one woman is a movie star?”

Tom kissed her.

They both belted themselves into the devastatingly heavy air tanks, and Natasha hung several extra weights on her lithe frame to keep her from bobbing to the surface accidentally. They strapped their feet into the long flippers—horribly clumsy on the deck of the boat but absolutely essential and graceful under the water. And they spit into their masks.

“When I first was told to do this, I thought it was so disgusting.” Natasha laughed, rubbing the gooey saliva across the inside of her blue mask. “But there's really no other way to keep it clear. Besides, it's my spit—I guess it can go in my face.”

“Where did you learn to dive?” Tom asked. “I can't imagine Russia being an offshore destination.”

“In Odessa it's pretty warm,” she told him. “You have to wear a wet suit, but it's okay. Not like this, though.” She looked around and sighed. “Are you boat sick?” she asked him.

“A little,” he admitted. “It vanishes as soon as you jump in.”

“Then let's go.”

They both put their regulators in their mouths and fell backward into the water, floating at the surface at first, then regulating the pressure in their ears as they lowered themselves down the rope that hung off the edge of the boat.

Here, in the deep, there were no words, no need for explanations. The only communication was through hand signals. She gave him the okay sign once they'd gotten a good thirty feet down, and he reciprocated. Then they began paddling slowly, meditatively, around the beautiful, clear bottom of the ocean.

The sand was an eerie, glowing white down here, and if Tom reached down to touch it, his handprint puffed out like a footprint on the moon. The fish kept to themselves at first, but after a while they came over, a few at a time, then a great, overwhelming school of deep blue creatures.

Tom looked up. He could see the sky far, far away, like a dream he couldn't quite remember. And the
whole time he heard his own breath, the steady, slow in and out of it filling his ears as it never did on the surface.

Natasha bonked him on the arm and pointed: Off in the distance a sea turtle was hovering, facing the other direction, waving its fins back and forth as if he were saying, “So-so, I'm doing so-so,” over and over again. They tried to stealthily paddle closer to him, but the turtle was well attuned to changes in the underwater atmosphere. He flicked to the side just enough to eyeball them—and then took off like a lumbering bear, kerflapping away on his fins and disappearing into the murky depths. Natasha turned to Tom and shrugged. “Bashful,” he could imagine her saying.

They paddled along silently, accompanied only by the sounds of their breathing. After a while Tom looked at his watch, double-checked his tank, and gave Natasha the thumbs-up signal. It was time to surface. They'd been down here as long as was safe, and they hadn't even realized it.

They slowly surfaced, carefully taking their time, and when their heads broke the top of the water, the real world seemed foreign and noisy, irritating and bright.

They plopped their flippers and masks on the deck and climbed up, squinting but with silly, blissed-out grins on their faces. Tom was pleased to note that
Natasha didn't say anything, not a word. It meant she felt the same way he did about coming out of a dive: like they had just left someplace sacred, and speaking too soon would ruin the moment.

They unclipped from their equipment, handed it all to Ted, and relaxed completely, lying on top of each other like a couple of flounders at a fish market, sighing with bliss at regular intervals. That is, until Natasha's cell phone shattered their peace with its shriek.

“Excuse me,” she said, still smiling, and Tom noted that she turned away from him slightly as she answered.

“Hello? Yes. Yes.
Da.
Okay. I understand.” She said a couple more words in Russian and then closed her phone. Tom looked at her expectantly, but she said nothing.

Something stirred inside Tom—something dormant, something he'd hoped would stay silent.
Old habits die hard,
he thought. He felt his old friend suspicion roll over, open its eyes, and tap the monitor next to its hospital bed. This particular habit wasn't quite dead yet: the habit of suspecting everyone, even those closest to you, of something nefarious.

He tried to smother it, but there it was: He was suspicious of Natasha. What was that phone call? Why didn't she fill him in? She just smiled, sat back, and acted like nothing had happened.

Well, maybe nothing had, Tom thought as he tried to return himself to his peaceful state.

Maybe.

Or maybe not.