Winner Take All (2 page)

After a two-bottle dinner they had a couple of brandies, or at least he did. Erin sipped twice from her glass, then poured the remainder into his own and said, “Tell me about the break-in at the house.”

“You can’t still be reading the Wilmington rag.”

“My press agent has instructions to pass over anything she can find about you. Local man foils armed robbers by knocking them both cold, wasn’t that how they put it? Front page above the fold.” Erin toyed with the lay of her pearls and the spaghetti strap of her dress. She sounded almost shy. “Perhaps I shouldn’t keep such close tabs on you, but I couldn’t help myself.”

“I was terrified. But only after it was over. Before there wasn’t time for thought.”

Her smile flickered in the candlelight, ephemeral as myth. “Did you really knock them both out?”

Dale related the bare bones because she seemed so interested, even though the episode still gave him severe night sweats. Apparently he had caught the pair just after they had broken into the house, for nothing had been touched. Erin leaned across the table and pressed him for more. Her intensity caused the afternoon to become vivid once more. He had come home early to discover the nanny bound and gagged on the kitchen floor. Dale had then spotted the two men upon the landing by the baby’s room, which was why he went utterly berserk. He had
grabbed a nearby lamp, catapulted up the stairs, and taken them both down. Only afterward had he seen their guns. But it would not have mattered anyway. The bigger of the two men had been gripping Celeste’s doorknob with his gloved hand. The memory still drenched his vision with blood and fear.

Erin reached across and snagged his hand and scratched the surface with one fingernail. Back and forth, the proprietary gesture of a woman in comfortable possession of her man. “Let’s go back for a nightcap.”

He wanted to say it probably wasn’t a good idea. But the light in her eyes kindled a volcano of hurt and craving in his gut. Dale could not deny her. It was his greatest failing. That and the knowledge she could control him only because he still wanted so badly to believe.

Erin drove, as was their habit when he had been drinking. She rested one hand upon his seatback, where she could play with a wayward curl of his hair. Their careful silence saved him from confessing how time had become a blunt weapon that crashed against the walls of his life, shattering and homicidal.

When they turned off the state road and entered the tree-draped darkness, she came as close as she ever had to probing his wounds. “I’m so sorry for the way I spoke to the press.”

“Lied,” he corrected, but without heat.

“Lied,” she agreed, settling his hand into her lap where he could feel the pulsing warmth. “Lied and lied and lied again. But what was I supposed to do? I had hoped that if I didn’t return, didn’t contest the divorce, they wouldn’t discover anything until it was all old news.”

When they rounded the final corner, Dale regretted not having turned off the timer switch and the outside spotlights. The house stood upon its own moon-draped island, a mockery of cream-colored stone and dismembered fantasies.

As they started across the plank bridge connecting his island to the main road, Erin rolled down her window and let the brackish perfume sweep over her. “Things weren’t working out between us, you knew that as well as I did. Why give them any reason to gossip? Abandonment was a perfect reason for the divorce. If I’d come back, it would only have opened us to the risk of reporters sniffing out a story.”

The bridge had been part of his gift, a way of making the home he had built for her as perfect as he could make it. The Cape Fear delta had once been a world connected by such wooden scaffolds, where
barefoot boys could fish and crab and dream of better days ahead. The house was to be a waterborne palace where he would share the best of his world, and shield them from the worst of hers. Now, as the thick boards drummed softly beneath his tires, he could only manage a single word in response. “Abandoned.”

Wisely, Erin let the topic drop into the silver-black waters.

After he had paid the sitter, Erin walked up with him to see the baby. Or rather, she watched as he checked on Celeste. It was one of the most remarkable things about her, and the hardest trait he had been forced to forgive. Even now, as she stood beside him and stared down at their daughter, he could feel the utter lack of connection between them.

As they left the room, he asked once more, “What happened to you as a child?”

She gave him the same blank gaze she had always responded with when he tried to pry, and pulled on his hand. “Come let me pour you a drink.”

They settled on the glassed-in veranda, the lights so low they could study the play of moonlight on water and the glow of Wrightsville Beach across the bay. He watched her pour him an oversized single malt, slip off her shoes, and pad across the carpet to where he sat. Her eyes were so dark that it was only when he was close enough to taste her lips that he could make out the colors, and the moods, and the faint flickers of anything other than calm craving. Her long hair was a shade or two off black, depending upon the light, and framed her face with ardent precision. Her lips were astonishingly pale, her skin almost translucent. Her few freckles were so blanched they disappeared with the faintest frosting of powder. Or emerged when Erin wished to look her youngest. Her most alluring. Like now.

She folded herself down so that she rested on the carpet by his feet. She wrapped her arms around his calves, leaned her chin upon his thigh, and asked in as mournful a tone as he had ever heard, “Where did it all go so wrong?”

She could have been reading the brand upon his heart. He took a hard slug from his goblet, the liquid fire a mimicry of the heat raised by her words.

Erin leaned over him, her eyes hooded with the satisfaction of his
response. Her lips were as warm and welcoming as he remembered. As he could never forget. The taste was of honey and the scotch’s smoky sorrow.

Dale was back inside the dream for the first time in almost a year. He stood in the stadium for the seventh and final game of his professional football career. The rest of his teammates were huddled and huffing from the previous play. Dale took a moment to look around the stadium, almost as though he knew what was about to come. The capacity crowd shouted with one continuous voice. The pennants shimmered, the band’s brass instruments flickered under the lights, the grass was impossibly green, the evening incredibly pure.

That much had actually happened.

In the dream, the quarterback shouted words Dale did not hear. Dale started to ask what he was supposed to do, but the team was already moving into formation. He shouted for them to wait, but the ball was snapped. The quarterback turned and slapped the ball into Dale’s gut. Dale wanted to run. He knew that was his job. But his feet were caught. The grass had turned into vines, and the vines writhed and hissed and bared venomous fangs.

Then he was struck. Just like it had actually happened. One from the left and low, the other from the right and high. His bones crunched, low and high, and once again Dale heard them go from inside his skull.

The defensive linesman who had broken his collarbone rose first. He looked down at Dale, pinned to the ground by a fractured hip, and grinned. He said something lost to the blaring whistles and the shouts of his own teammates. Then the linesman reached down and given Dale’s helmet a little farewell pat. Just as had actually happened.

The dream sequence’s pattern was so well grooved Dale could be trapped inside and still watch it as he would a training film. At least now there was no pain, even as time slowed and the refs clustered and the doctor did his slow-motion dance across the turf toward him. The crowd’s roar changed now, from frenetic and thrilling to hungry. He was trapped on the ground, the latest morsel for them to devour. He had actually lain there for about five minutes, while the team doctor shot him full of painkillers and fitted a steel brace to his neck and back, in case he had fractured his spine. In the dream he usually lay
there for aeons, watching the crowd disperse with his team, and the seasons change, and the snow fall and cover him utterly. But tonight the doctor grabbed his arm and shook him hard, screaming for him to
wake up, wake up, wake up
.

Dale opened his eyes to discover that Erin was shaking him awake. But his head was pounding and the world was impossibly shattered.

Erin tore back the covers and began dragging him out of bed. “Get up and
help me!
”

Erin hauled him to his feet by sheer force of her indomitable will. Dale’s dismembered brain snatched frantically at images, all of them disconnected and painful. From the hallway, the smoke alarm gave off the high-pitched peeping of a terrified mechanical bird. In the distance he might have heard a baby screaming, which should have had him flying down the hall. But his legs didn’t seem to want to connect with his thoughts.

Erin let him go, and he bounced off the bed’s corner post before slamming into the hardwood floor.

His two old injuries both started flaming again. For an instant, as the pain thudded louder than the shrill peeping, he wondered if somehow the dream had managed to finally breach the barrier and enter his nighttime world.

Erin slapped his face and
screamed
at him. “
Move!
”

This was something she had never done. Not even in their worst moments, right after her arrival in Wilmington, two months pregnant and panic-stricken at becoming just another has-been, a woman who once was famous. Back when he finally realized his love could never compete with her voice and her career.

Then he smelled the smoke.

Dale lurched to his feet. He almost fell, but caught himself with a two-armed embrace of the bedpost. Erin was only half dressed and her hair hung tangled about her face. The baby was there in the room with them. Celeste lay upon a towel on the floor, squalling and kicking in panic. His daughter watched him with eyes that pleaded for him to pull himself together.

“Hurry!”

Then he
saw
the smoke.

Somehow he managed to get into his pants. He struggled with a
shirt Erin handed him, then flung it aside. He slipped into the first shoes he found, from two different sets and on the wrong feet. But it didn’t matter, because the smoke was
pouring
under the bedroom door.

Erin had the baby in her arms, wrapped in a wet towel with another draped around her head. Erin handed him a third, but he couldn’t make it work and still see where he was going. So he tossed it down. Then he had to pick it up again after he opened the door and met a solid, billowing wall.

The smoke was acrid and it
burned
. He peered down the hall but saw no flames. He started forward, pulling Erin along behind him. The smoke’s heat was something unexpected. His mind remained disconnected, like sparks flying up and disappearing into the final night.

He moved on reflex alone. Dale entered the guest bedroom over the slanting sunporch roof and rushed to the window. When he could not get it open he broke it with a chair, tearing out the entire frame and terrifying his baby girl even further.