The Unsung Hero (39 page)
Tom had to laugh—the irony was intense. He was used to being the one who had to leave. And he’d never really understood before what it felt like to be left behind. It was frustrating and annoying. He felt cheated and wistful as well as hopeful that she’d come back soon.
But he understood completely about having a job that required her to get up and go at a moment’s notice. And the last thing he was going to do was whine and guilt her out. He pulled the sheet up to his waist, hiding the hard evidence of his desire, as he propped himself up on one elbow.
Kelly turned and looked at him as if suddenly remembering that he was there. “Hang on, Pat.” She covered the phone receiver. “It’s about Betsy. She started chemo today and apparently the oncologist gave her an antinausea drug that didn’t do the trick. She’s been throwing up blood for the past hour and her parents are scared to death. I really need to—”
“Definitely,” he said. “Go. And don’t worry. Between me and Joe, we’ve got your dad handled.”
She exhaled her relief. “Thank you so much.” She uncovered the phone. “Pat, tell them I’ll be there as soon as I can.”
She hung up the phone, pulled a dark-colored T-shirt over her head. “I’m so sorry about this.”
“Think of it as forced anticipation. And later tonight, when we do get a chance? . . . Oh, baby, get ready for fireworks.”
She laughed. “Promise?”
“Absolutely.”
She was standing there, looking at him as if she was about to change her mind. “It’s so stupid. My going in, I mean. Vince Martin and the rest of the staff at the hospital have this completely covered. There’s really nothing I can do.”
“Except make Betsy’s parents feel better by being there.”
“Except for that.” She pulled her hair into a ponytail, still gazing at him. “You’re really okay with this, aren’t you?”
Tom lay back in her bed, his hands up beneath his head. “I admit I would like it a hell of a lot more if you could stay. But I know all about getting a page or a phone call and having to go to work. It doesn’t always happen at the most convenient time, and that’s life. In fact, I was just thinking how it’s usually me who has to climb out of bed at an inopportune moment.”
He watched as she brushed a little makeup onto her face, put on some lipstick. “I guess you probably have a lot of . . . inopportune moments, huh?”
She was jealous. She was trying hard not to be, but she was. Usually jealousy made him want to run away screaming, but this time, coming from Kelly, it made him feel undeniably pleased.
“Not really,” he said. “Certainly not lately. And never anything special, you know?”
She glanced at him. “I didn’t mean to sound . . . I’m not trying to pry, or . . .”
“I don’t have anything to hide,” he countered. “I mean, yeah, I’ve had relationships, but . . .”
Never one that made him feel even remotely like this.
Jesus, he couldn’t tell her that. It scared him to death, the intensity of his feelings and her potential reaction—or lack of reaction—to them. He’d never used the word love preceded by I and followed by you. Never. He wasn’t even sure that was what he was really feeling, and not some hormonal imbalance caused by seventeen years of delayed gratification.
“I really don’t want to know,” Kelly told him. “Really. It doesn’t matter. I don’t know why I said that.”
Tom was just as glad to let it drop. “Call me from Boston,” he said to her. “I mean, if you have time.”
She looked at herself critically in the mirror. “They’re going to know, aren’t they? Just from looking at me. I’ve got that whoo-whee, I-just-got-laid look.”
He laughed at that. “No one’s going to be able to tell that from looking.”
“Oh, yeah?” She looked at him, eyes narrowing. “You’ve got it, too. If you go downstairs right now, Joe and my father are going to know. If you’re not careful, we’re going to find ourselves in the middle of a shotgun wedding.”
“Your father’s not that old-fashioned.”
“No, but Joe is.” She lingered, her hand on the doorknob. “There’s Chinese food in the refrigerator. Just heat it in the microwave when you get hungry.”
“Hey, aren’t you going to kiss me good-bye?”
She laughed. “Are you kidding? I don’t trust myself within six feet of you. I’ll kiss you hello, later.”
“Fair enough.”
“I really need to run.” She still didn’t move. “Thanks for the best day I can remember. Ever.”
“Thank you, for . . .” Being you. Jeez, when had he turned into a sappy greeting card?
“God,” she said, “I can’t believe I’ve finally got Tom Paoletti in my bed, and I’m about to get in my car and drive away.” As she shut the door behind her, he heard her laughter.
She was gone.
Tom lay back, breathing in the ghost of her perfume. He had to laugh, too. That made two of them. He couldn’t believe he was here in Kelly’s bed, couldn’t believe what he felt when she smiled at him, couldn’t believe she’d wanted him so desperately, too, couldn’t believe they’d finally made love.
He climbed out of bed and went out onto the balcony to watch her get into her car. She didn’t look up, didn’t look back. She just drove away.
In a few weeks, when he was the one who had to leave, he wasn’t quite sure he’d be able to do the same.
Mallory looked at her living room, imagining it from David’s perspective.
Shabby sofa. Shabby recliner. Worn and stained wall-to-wall carpeting. A small room, only one window—and it was covered outside by a rusting white-and-turquoise awning, succeeding in making the room even darker and uglier than it had to be.
Cheap-shit artwork hung on the walls, from the time Angela had that job at the chain motel off Route 128 in Beverly. The place went out of business and Angela—in a brilliant move—had accepted six awful oil paintings in lieu of her final check.
David gazed at the still life on the wall behind the couch, his face carefully blank. Mal knew he saw amazingly crappily executed art in a garish gold-painted baroque-style wooden frame. But she saw more. She saw a reminder of her mother’s folly.
Why the hell had she brought him here? What was wrong with her, anyway?
They’d been sitting in David’s apartment, looking at the photographs he’d taken of her and Brandon. Most of them were extremely good. And as weird as it was to look at herself in a bikini, she looked good, too. She’d made herself look the way she imagined this Nightshade character was supposed to look—strong and brave and invincible.
But the lighting was bad in some of the pictures. The kisses were overexposed. Didn’t it figure? They were going to have to shoot the kisses over again. Just her luck.
The sandwich David had made her was delicious and while she ate it, she’d asked him about drawing graphic novels. Did all comic book artists do it this way—by taking photos?
David told her everyone had their own method. There was no wrong or right way—although there were some people who thought taking photos like this was cheating. But it wasn’t as if David actually sketched over them. He just used them to remind himself how the human body moved.
He’d shown her which of the photos he thought he’d use the most, which he’d pin up right over his drawing table. And she’d told him they were so much better than anything she’d ever taken.
David being David had picked up on that right away. And one thing led to another until here they were. In her crappy house in the low-rent part of Baldwin’s Bridge. In her crappy living room. Where she was about to show him some of the crappy photos she’d taken with her crappy Instamatic over the past few years.
Angela had left a pack of cigarettes on the coffee table. It was all Mallory could do not to light one up.
David kept glancing back at the still life from hell, as if he were afraid it was contagious.
“My grandfather painted that,” Mallory told him. “Pretty good, huh?”
David looked at Mallory, looked at the painting. “Amazing,” he murmured. He leaned closer to look at the brush strokes. “That is really awful. A true artistic nightmare. Your grandfather—” He pointed to the signature. “—Mary Lou Brackett, is clearly a genius.”
Busted. Mallory grinned at him. “Grandfather Mary Lou was something of an eccentric. Extremely brilliant, but tortured. Understandably.”
“His disturbed presence certainly radiates from his work,” David said, smiling back at her.
Behind his ugly glasses, beneath his terrible haircut, his eyes were warm and intelligent. He liked her. She could see that just by looking at him. He didn’t have that slightly glazed look in his eyes most guys got when they spoke to her. He wasn’t here, in her house, because he wanted to score. He liked being with her. He was here because he wanted to hear what she had to say, because he really did want to see her photographs.
David didn’t care what her house looked like—so what if it was the smallest, shittiest house in all of Baldwin’s Bridge. It didn’t matter to him one bit.
“Do you mind if we look at your pictures in the kitchen, Nightshade?” he asked. “Grandpa Mary Lou’s fruit bowl is a bit overwhelming.”
“There’s another one in there,” she warned him. “It’s even worse.”
“Worse.”
“There are six . . . heirlooms altogether,” she said. “Naturally we hung the very best in the living room.”
David went into the kitchen. “Oh, God,” she heard him say as he started to laugh. “Grandpa Mary Lou signed this one Elizabeth Keedler. Either he had a multiple personality disorder, or he was attempting to break into art forgery.”
“By copying the style of the as-yet-still-unknown master of motel oil painting, Elizabeth Keedler?” Mallory raised her voice so he could hear her. “He was extremely shrewd.”
David came out of the kitchen. “And you have six of these, you say?”
“That’s right. Come on, it’s safe—at least relatively safe—in my room.”
She led the way down the hall. Her room was tiny, but it was all hers. She kept her photo albums in her bookcase. She pulled the latest one from the shelf.
David stood in the doorway, suddenly and obviously uncomfortable. “You know, I was just kidding. I don’t mind sitting in the living room.”
She watched as he looked around the room, at her narrow bed, the dresser, her little built-in desk, the slant to the ceiling. This had been an add-on to the back of the house, a former toolshed or pantry. One of Angela’s boyfriends had put a window in about ten years ago. He hadn’t quite finished it before they’d broken up, so Mallory had painted the sill herself. Gleaming black. It was still the best part of the entire room.
David looked at the movie posters and pictures that covered every inch of her walls, at the books that overflowed her bookcase and sat in precariously tall piles on the floor.
And then he looked at her, sitting there cross-legged on her bed.
“I don’t mind if you come in,” she told him. “I know you’re not going to, like, attack me or anything.”
He nodded, suddenly as serious as if she’d just given him a medal for saving the Rebel Forces from the Death Star. “Okay. Good. I’m . . . glad you know that.”
He left her door wide open, pulled her chair from her desk. He slipped his neon backpack from his shoulder, but instead of putting it on the floor, he sat with it on his lap. And he unzipped it. “You know, I was thinking, you could borrow my camera if you want.”
“What?”
He took it out of his pack by the neck strap, the enormous lens reattached. “My camera. There’s a new roll of film in it. Color prints, thirty-six exposures. You’ve got this evening and tomorrow morning off—you could shoot this entire roll if you want.”
Mallory stared at him. “You want to lend me your camera.” That thing had to cost at least four paychecks.
“Sure.” He held it out to her, and when she didn’t take it, he set it down next to her on the bed. “It’s easy to use. Pretty much point and shoot. You may want to play around with the settings when the sun starts going down, but you probably remember all that from media club.”
He trusted her with his camera.
David put his backpack on the floor, then held out his hands for the photo album she was clutching. “So let me see your pictures.”
She held it even closer to her chest, afraid she wasn’t good enough, afraid he’d take one look and laugh. “I took these with an Instamatic. They suck, so don’t pretend they don’t, okay?”
He smiled. “Okay.”
Mallory’s stomach did a slow flip as she handed him the album. He had the best smile. And the deepest brown eyes.
He opened the album, screamed, and slammed it shut. “Oh, my God! These suck!”
Mallory laughed and kicked him with her bare foot. “Don’t be a jerk.”
“Whoa,” he said, “let me see if I’ve got this straight. I say they suck, and I’m a jerk. You say they suck and . . .” He looked at her expectantly.
Mallory rolled her eyes. “And I’m a jerk. All right, they don’t suck, okay?”
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