Darkness, Take My Hand (6 page)

It was close
to midnight when I left Diandra’s, and the city streets were quiet as I drove south along the waterfront. The temperature was still in the mid-fifties and I rolled down the windows on my latest hunk of shit and let the soft breeze cleanse the musty confines.

After my last company car suffered a coronary on a bleak, forgotten street in Roxbury, I found this ’86 nut brown Crown Victoria at a police auction my friend Devin, a cop, had told me about. The engine was a work of art; you could drive a Crown Vic off a thirty-story building and the engine would keep chugging long after the rest of the car had shattered into small pieces. I spent money on everything under the hood and I had it outfitted with top-of-the line tires, but I left the interior the way I’d found it—roof and seats yellowed by the previous owner’s cheap cigars, back seats torn and spilling foam rubber, broken radio. Both rear doors were sharply dented, as if they’d been squeezed by forceps, and the paint on the trunk was torn off in a jagged circle that revealed the primer underneath.

It was a hideous eyesore, but I was reasonably certain no respectable car thief would want to be caught dead in it.

At the traffic light by the Harbor Towers, the engine hummed happily as it guzzled a few gallons of gas a minute, and two attractive young women crossed in front of the car. They looked like office workers: Both wore tight but drab skirts and blouses under wrinkled raincoats. Their
dark panty hose disappeared at the ankles into identical white tennis shoes. They walked with just a hint of uncertainty, as if the pavement were sponge, and the quick laugh of the redhead was a bit too loud.

The brunette’s eyes met mine and I smiled the innocuous smile of one human soul acknowledging another on a soft, quiet night in an often bustling city.

She smiled back and then her friend hiccupped loudly and they both fell into each other and laughed uproariously as they reached the curb.

I pulled away, slid onto the central artery, with the dark green expressway girded above me, found myself thinking I was a pretty odd guy if a smile from a tipsy woman could still lift my spirits as easily as it had.

But it was an odd world, too often populated with Kevin Hurlihys and Fat Freddy Constantines and people like a woman I’d read about in the paper this morning who’d left her three children to fend for themselves in a rat-infested apartment while she went on a four-day bender with her latest boyfriend. When child welfare officials entered her apartment, they had to pull one of the kids, screaming, from the mattress his bedsores had fastened him to. It sometimes seemed in a world like this—on a night when I was filled with a growing sense of dread about a client who was being threatened for unknown reasons by unknown forces whose unknown motives couldn’t possibly be good enough—that a smile from a woman shouldn’t have any effect. But it did.

And if her smile picked up my spirits, it was nothing compared to what Grace’s did when I pulled up to my three-decker and saw her sitting on the front porch. She was wearing a forest green canvas field jacket that was four or five sizes too big for her over a white T-shirt and blue hospital scrub pants. Usually the bangs of her short auburn hair fanned the edges of her face, but she’d obviously been running her hands through it during the last thirty hours of her shift, and her face was drawn from too little sleep and too many cups of coffee under the harsh light of the emergency room.

And she was still one of the most beautiful women I’d ever seen.

As I climbed the steps, she stood and watched me with a half-smile playing on her lips and mischief in her pale eyes. When I was three steps from the top, she spread her arms wide and tilted forward like a diver on a high board.

“Catch me.” She closed her eyes and fell forward.

The crush of her body against mine was so sweet it bordered on pain. She kissed me and I braced my legs as her thighs slid over my hips and her ankles crossed against the backs of my legs. I could smell her skin and feel the heat of her flesh and the tidal pull of each one of our organs and muscles and arteries hanging as if suspended beneath our separate skins. Grace’s mouth came away from mine and her lips grazed my ear.

“I missed you,” she whispered.

“I noticed.” I kissed her throat. “How’d you escape?”

She groaned. “It finally slowed down.”

“You been waiting long?”

She shook her head and her teeth nipped my collarbone before her legs unwrapped themselves from my waist and she stood in front of me, our foreheads touching.

“Where’s Mae?” I said.

“Home with Annabeth. Sound asleep.”

Annabeth was Grace’s younger sister and live-in nanny.

“You see her?”

“Just long enough to read her a bedtime story and kiss her good night. Then she was out like a rock.”

“What about you?” I said, running my hand up and down her spine. “You need sleep?”

She groaned again and nodded and her forehead hit mine.

“Ouch.”

She laughed softly. “Sorry.”

“You’re exhausted.”

She looked into my eyes. “Absolutely. More than sleep, though, I need you.” She kissed me. “Deep, deep inside me. You think you can oblige me, Detective?”

“I’m a hell of an obliger, Doctor.”

“I’ve heard that. You going to take me upstairs or are
we going to put on a show for the neighbors?”

“Well…”

Her palm found my abdomen. “Tell me where it hurts.”

“A little lower,” I said.

As soon as I closed the apartment door behind me, Grace pinned me against the wall and buried her tongue in my mouth. Her left hand grasped the back of my head tightly, but her right ran over my body like a small, hungry animal. I’m usually on the perpetually hormonal side, but if I hadn’t quit smoking several years ago, Grace would’ve put me in intensive care.

“The lady is in command tonight, I take it.”

“The lady,” she said and nipped my shoulder, not very lightly, “is so horny she might have to be hosed down.”

“Again,” I said, “the gentleman is happy to oblige.”

She stepped back and stared at me as she pulled off her jacket and tossed it somewhere into my living room. Grace wasn’t a big neat freak. Then she kissed my mouth roughly and spun on her heel and started walking down my hallway.

“Where you going?” My voice was a tad hoarse.

“To your shower.”

She peeled off her T-shirt as she reached the door to the bathroom. A small shaft of streetlight cut through the bedroom into the hall and slanted across the hard muscles in her back. She hung the T-shirt on the doorknob and turned to look at me, her arms crossed over her bare breasts. “You’re not moving,” she said.

“I’m enjoying the view,” I said.

She uncrossed her arms and ran both hands through her hair, arching her back, her ribcage pressing against her skin. She met my eyes again as she kicked off her tennis shoes, then peeled off her socks. She ran her hands over her abdomen and pulled the drawstring on her scrub pants. They fell to her ankles and she stepped out of them.

“Coming out of your stupor yet?” she said.

“Oh, yeah.”

She leaned against the doorjamb, hooked her thumbs in the elastic band of her black panties. She raised an eye
brow as I walked toward her, her smile a wicked thing.

“Oh, would you like to help me remove these, Detective?”

I helped. I helped a lot. I’m swell at helping.

It occurred to me as Grace and I made love in my shower that whenever I think of her, I think of water. We met during the wettest week of a cold and drizzly summer, and her green eyes were so pale they reminded me of winter rain, and the first time we made love, it was in the sea with the night rain bathing our bodies.

After the shower, we lay in bed, still damp, her auburn hair dark against my chest, the sounds of our lovemaking still echoing in my ears.

She had a scar the size of a thumbtack on her collarbone, the price she had paid for playing in her uncle’s barn near exposed nails when she was a kid. I leaned over and kissed it.

“Mmm,” she said. “Do that again.”

I ran my tongue over the scar.

She hooked her leg over mine, ran the edge of her foot against my ankle. “Can a scar be erogenous?”

“I think anything can be erogenous.”

Her warm palm found my abdomen, ran over the hard rubber scar tissue in the shape of a jellyfish. “What about this one?”

“Nothing erogenous about that, Grace.”

“You keep evading me about it. It’s obviously a burn of some sort.”

“What’re you—a doctor?”

She chuckled. “Allegedly.” She ran her palm up between my thighs. “Tell me where it hurts, Detective.”

I smiled, but I doubt it was much of one.

She rose up on her elbow and looked at me for a long time. “You don’t have to tell me,” she said softly.

I raised my left hand, used the backs of my fingers to brush a strand of hair off her forehead, then allowed the fingers to drop slowly down the edge of her face, along the soft warmth of her throat, and then the small, firm curve of her right breast. I grazed the nipple with my palm
as I turned the hand, moved it back up to her face and pulled her down on top of me. I held her so tightly for a moment that I could hear our hearts drumming through our chests like hail falling into a bucket of water.

“My father,” I said, “burned me with an iron to teach me a lesson.”

“Teach you what?” she said.

“Not to play with fire.”

“What?”

I shrugged. “Maybe just that he could. He was the father, I was the son. He wanted to burn me, he could burn me.”

She raised her head and her eyes filled. Her fingers dug into my hair and her eyes widened and reddened as they searched mine. When she kissed me, it was hard, bruising, as if she were trying to suck my pain out.

When she pulled back, her face was wet.

“He’s dead, right?”

“My father?”

She nodded.

“Oh, yeah. He’s dead, Grace.”

“Good,” she said.

When we made love again a few minutes later, it was one of the most exquisite and disconcerting experiences of my life. Our palms flattened against each other and our forearms followed suit and at every point along my body, my flesh and bone pressed against hers. Then her thighs rose up my hips and she took me inside of her as her legs slid down the backs of mine and her heels clamped just below my knees and I felt utterly enveloped, as if I’d melted through her flesh, and our blood had joined.

She cried out and I could feel it as if it came from my own vocal cords.

“Grace,” I whispered as I disappeared inside her. “Grace.”

Close to sleep, her lips fluttered against my ear.

“’Night,” she said sleepily.

“’Night.”

Her tongue slid in my ear, warm and electric.

“I love you,” she mumbled.

When I opened my eyes to look at her, she was asleep.

I woke to the sound of her showering at six in the morning. My sheets smelled of her perfume and her flesh and a vague hint of hospital antiseptic and our sweat and lovemaking, imprinted into the fabric, it seemed, as if it had been there a thousand nights.

I met her at the bathroom door and she leaned into me as she combed back her hair.

My hand slid under her towel and the beads of water on her lower thighs glided off the edge of my hand.

“Don’t even think about it.” She kissed me. “I have to go see my daughter and get back to the hospital and after last night, I’m lucky I can walk. Now, go clean up.”

I showered alone as she found clean clothes in a drawer we’d agreed she could commandeer, found myself waiting for that usual sense of discomfort I feel when a woman has spent more than, oh, an hour in my bed. But I didn’t.

“I love you,” she’d mumbled as she drifted off to sleep.

How odd.

When I came back to the bedroom, she was stripping the sheets from the bed, and she’d changed into a pair of black jeans and a dark blue oxford shirt.

I came up behind her as she bent over the pillows.

“Touch me, Patrick,” she said, “and you die.”

I put my hands back by my sides.

She smiled as she turned with sheets in hand and said, “Laundry. Is that something you’re familiar with?”

“Vaguely.”

She dropped the pile in a corner. “Can I expect that you’ll remake the bed with fresh sheets or are we sleeping on a bare mattress next time I come over?”

“I will do my best, madam.”

She slid her arms around my neck and kissed me. She hugged me fiercely and I hugged back just as hard.

“Someone called when you were in the shower.” She leaned back in my arms.

“Who? It’s not even seven in the morning.”

“That’s what I thought. He didn’t leave his name.”

“What’d he say?”

“He knew my name.”

“What?” I unclasped my hands from her waist.

“He was Irish. I figured it was an uncle or something.”

I shook my head. “My uncles and I don’t talk.”

“Why not?”

“Because they’re my father’s brothers and they aren’t any different than he was.”

“Oh.”

“Grace”—I took her hand, sat her beside me on the bed—“what did this Irish guy say?”

“He said, ‘You must be the lovely Grace. Grand to meet you.’” She looked at the pile of bedclothes for a moment. “When I told him you were in the shower, he said, ‘Well, just tell him I called and I’ll be dropping in on him sometime,’ and he hung up before I could get a name.”

“That’s it?”

She nodded. “Why?”

I shrugged. “I don’t know. Not many people call me before seven, and when they do, they usually leave a name.”

“Patrick, how many of your friends know we’re dating?”

“Angie, Devin, Richie and Sherilynn, Oscar, and Bubba.”

“Bubba?”

“You met him. Big guy, always wears a trench coat—”

“The scary one,” she said. “The one who looks like he might just walk into a Seven-Eleven one day and kill everyone inside because the Slurpee machine isn’t working.”

“That’s the guy. You met him at—”

“That party last month. I remember.” She shuddered.

“He’s harmless.”

“Maybe to you,” she said. “Christ.”