Into the Night (32 page)
Charlotte's face was pale, and he realized he'd probably told her too much.
"There are dozens of islands in the Pacific that the Marines are going to take back from the Japanese, one bloody battle at a time. But we can't go in like that again. We need to get our men all the way to the beach. If there's a coral reef like Tarawa's out there on that next island, we need to rig it with explosives and blow a hole into it before the landing craft are on top of it.
"So, see, I've been thinking. I'm a strong swimmer. And I'm sure there are other men who grew up near the water. Ten or twelve of us could swim to shore and get a firsthand look at both the beach and the fortifications. We could carry explosives—I know there are some that work underwater. We could rig any obstacles that we find and blow 'em sky high. We could use snorkels so the Japs wouldn't even see us out there."
Charlotte's mouth was hanging open. "But if they did... ?"
He met her eyes. "Chances are, with a dozen small targets, at least one of us would make it back to the fleet with the information we gathered."
She stared at him, incredulous, slowly rising to her feet. "You're serious, aren't you? You want to write this letter to Senator Howard to involve him in setting up some kind of swimming Marine death team. Dear God, Vince!?
"No," he said. "Charlotte. Death team? That's not what I have in mind."
"It sounds to me like you're out of your mind! Swimming to shore? How could you swim all that way with a gun?"
It was a good question. One he'd thought long and hard about. "We wouldn't carry guns. It wouldn't be worth the drag or the weight, especially if we're carrying explosives. See, I'm talking about trying to make it to shore without the enemy seeing us, about swimming quite a distance and—'
She laughed, but it wasn't because she thought any of this was even remotely funny. In fact, she was furious. "You are... you're completely insane!"
"No, I'm—"
"Yes! You want to swim with a handful of other men to a Japanese-held island without a single gun. What do you think they're going to do when they see you, Vince? Wave to you? Offer you some sake?"
"Well, that's just it. They won't see us. We'll go in at dusk, swim back at night."
"Oh!" She was shouting now. "Now you're swimming across the ocean at night! Do you know how big the ocean is? Do you know how hard it is to swim at night? And it's not like the boat that's waiting for you will have running lights! You know, there are much easier ways of killing yourself. I'm sure you can find one that doesn't involve wasting the senator's— or my—time!"
"I'm not trying to kill myself. I'm looking to save lives."
"By sacrificing your own!"
"You see this?" He pushed himself off the bed and grabbed his uniform out of the closet. "Look at this. It looks like a uniform, but it's so much more. Every single man who gets dressed in one of these—Army, Navy, you name it—every man, both officer and enlisted, knows that. It's all about sacrifice. Those Marines who died at Tarawa weren't running away from the Japanese! They were running toward them. Do you think we didn't know we were already dead when those boats got caught on that reef? But we were wearing the uniforms of the United States Marines, and we did what we had to do for our country. Most of us died, but some of us made it through. And those of us who made it through, well, we didn't let the others die in vain. Yes, it's a sacrifice, Charles. I don't want to die—no one wants to die—but I will goddamn do what I have to do to keep my country safe."
There were tears brimming in her eyes and, as he watched, they spilled over and ran down her cheeks.
"I don't want you to go back," she whispered. "I don't want you to die, somewhere, all alone, so far from home. I dream of James almost every night. He's alone and dying and calling out for me. It haunts me, Vince. I couldn't bear it if you haunted me, too."
He couldn't look at her. He had to turn away, to put his uniform back in the closet, or else he'd do something stupid, like reach for her. But she didn't want him to reach for her. She wasn't going to let herself love him.
He didn't blame her.
"Well, I don't want to go back, either," he told her quietly. "But I have to."
"Maybe you don't," she said.
"Yes," he said. "I do. Will you help me write that letter, Charles?" He finally turned to look at her. "Please?"
"No," she said, and walked out of the room, shutting the door quietly behind her.
Mary Lou's heart sank as Kelly held open the door for her with a smile and a glass of beer in her hand. "Come on in." She turned toward the kitchen. "Hey, everyone, Mary Lou is here."
The friendly smile sure was nice, but oh, Lord, she hadn't even considered the fact that there'd be alcohol at this thing.
Mary Lou clung to her handbag as she followed Kelly into a brightly lit kitchen that opened into a living area on one side and a dining area on the other. Surprisingly, it wasn't all that much bigger than her own house.
The windows were bigger, though.
Sliding glass doors in both rooms opened onto a deck and framed a view of a neatly kept backyard filled with flower gardens and surrounded on all sides by other neatly kept backyards.
"Hey, Mary Lou," Lt. John Nilsson's wife, Meg, greeted her with a wave of a corn chip from her perch at the counter that separated the kitchen from the dining area. Her baby girl, Robin, was just a few months older than Haley, yet somehow Meg had managed to slim right down to her pre-pregnancy weight without any trouble at all.
Despite her apparent diet of corn chips and beer.
God, Mary Lou hated her. She gave Meg a big smile. "Hey, Meg. How's Robin and Amy?" Meg was also more than ten years older than Mary Lou, with a twelve-year-old daughter from her failed first marriage.
"Let's just say that it's three years, ten months, and fourteen days until Ames learns to drive, and between now and then I'll clock three hundred thousand miles," Meg said. "Sailing lessons, dance, theater classes, soccer . . ." She laughed. "I'm not working at all right now, and to be honest, I love every minute of it."
She exchanged some kind of pointed look with Kelly— obviously there was an unspoken understanding between the two women. Mary Lou felt a yawning, empty hole in her chest.
Why couldn't Meg be her best friend? What was so great about Kelly Ashton, who wasn't even married to Commander Paoletti?
Somewhere outside, a lawn mower started with a roar.
"Everyone, this is Mary Lou," Kelly announced, crossing to the sliders and pushing them closed against the noise.
There were five women in the kitchen and the only one Mary Lou knew besides Meg was Teri Wolchonok, beauty to the beast who was the SEAL team's heart-stoppingly scary Senior Chief Stan Wolchonok. Delicately pretty Teri actually flew helicopters—helos, as the SEALs called them—for the Coast Guard.
"You know Meg and Teri," Kelly said to Mary Lou. She gestured to a slender young woman who looked an awful lot like Gwyneth Paltrow, only with darker hair. "This is Christy, who's dating Mark Jenkins, and Shonda—"
"Who used to date—past tense, honey—Chief Wayne 'the Duke' Jefferson. "The Duke.' Can you believe that?" Shonda was a very dark-skinned African-American woman with short-cropped hair that she'd dyed blond, and a wide smile that lit her from within. "What kind of grown man walks around calling himself 'the Duke'? I gave him up last year for Lent and decided to make it permanent. I come to these 'Wheels Up, Whoops, I'm Sleeping Alone Again Tonight' parties to remind myself that my decision to ditch the man was a smart one."
"Instead you sleep alone every night," teased a woman—a girl, really—who was still dressed in a waitress uniform. She held out her hand to Mary Lou. "I'm Ellen."
"What do you know from sleeping alone?" Shonda countered. "Ellen's spending time with Jay Lopez—and everyone and their baby sister knows our little Lopez has taken a vow of celibacy." She turned to Christy. "Or was that Jenk?"
"No, it definitely wasn't Mark." Christy laughed as if that were a very funny joke.
"Well, it sure as hell wasn't 'the Duke,'" Shonda said. "And check out that look on Joan's face. She's thinking' What are these lunatics talking about?' "
"Joan DaCosta's visiting from Washington," Kelly told Mary Lou. "She works at the White House."
"So ix-nay on the President Bryant okes-jay," Shonda said.
"Who's celibate?" Joan asked. "I definitely missed something here. Slow it down a little. Have mercy on me and explain some of these inside jokes."
Joan DaCosta—thank the Lord—had an even bigger butt than Mary Lou. She really hated being the fattest woman in the room.
She moved over to the windows as the women continued their banter, feeling decidedly like an outsider. Even Joan, a visitor from the East Coast, was more comfortable here than she was.
"Jay Lopez is celibate, and Christy had breast implants," Kelly was explaining.
"Yeah, right," Christy said with a snort. "I went to the plastic surgeon and said, 'Gee, Doctor, I long to be a whopping 32B. Can you help me out?'"
The room erupted in laughter.
"Mike Muldoon is gay," Kelly continued, "and Cosmo Richter... Say it with me, now!"
"Was recruited to join the SEALs from his cell in the lifers wing of a federal penitentiary." Nearly all of the women finished in unison before dissolving into more laughter.
"Well, I kind of believe the one about Cosmo," Joan said. Despite her big butt, she was really very pretty when she laughed.
Outside the sliding door, in the next yard over, a man was cutting the grass. Was that... ? Could it be ... Ihbraham? Mary Lou tried to look closer just as he disappeared behind some shrubbery, and knocked her head—pretty hard—against the glass. Which, of course, Kelly and Meg both noticed. They pretended not to, but Mary Lou knew they saw.
God, she was an idiot. Way to fit in. She moved away from the slider, rubbing her head when no one was looking.
"You wouldn't believe the rumors out there," Teri was saying to Joan. "Stan and I have a hot tub in our backyard, where apparently we have orgies every weekend."
"But you never invite me," the other women all said in unison.
More laughter. Mary Lou forced a smile.
There were four different bottles of wine out on the kitchen counter, along with glasses.
"Help yourself, Mary Lou," Christy said to her with a smile. "It's a self-serve party. You want it, you get it yourself. Beer's in the fridge."
Kelly slapped her forehead. "Oh, shoot!"
"What?"
"Mary Lou, I'm pretty sure there's some soda in here." Kelly opened the refrigerator. "Tom actually likes to drink that high octane root beer, or..." She opened the freezer. "I could mix up a can of lemonade?"
Mary Lou moved into the kitchen area. "I'll just have water."
"We have cranberry juice... ?"
"That would be great," she said. She hated cranberry juice, but Kelly was determined to offer her something.
"I'm really sorry." Kelly poured the juice into one of the wineglasses.
"It's all right," Mary Lou said as she took the glass, even though the sight of those wine bottles on that counter were driving her crazy. God, she needed some air.
But Kelly closed the kitchen window as the sound of the lawn mower got louder. "Figures Ihbraham would show up today."
Mary Lou stopped looking at the bottles of wine. "Ihbraham Rahman?"
Kelly laughed in surprise. "Yeah. Do you know him?"
"He does yard work in our neighborhood. He's really good."
"And apparently quite reasonable. He's out here two or three times a week. Everyone's hiring him."
"I'm glad to hear he's doing so well," Mary Lou said. "He told me that his business is pretty new. He's been working hard to get clients."
Kelly laughed. "Yeah, he keeps telling me two months are free with a yearlong contract. But Tom's really into gardening. It's therapeutic, believe it or not. The flowers out there are his."
Mary Lou moved to the window to look out. "Wow." Their gardens were quite lovely. She never would have guessed in a million years that Commander Paoletti liked growing flowers.
"I've got a total brown thumb," Kelly said. "I told Ihbraham I'd definitely call him if Tom's ever out of town for any length of time."
With a smile, she led Mary Lou back toward the rest of the women. They were still talking about the rumors that were constantly being spread about the SEALs.
"What I want to know is, has anyone ever seen Mike Muldoon with a woman?" Ellen asked.
"I think he really is gay," Christy agreed.
"Why do you think that?" Joan asked. "I've spent some time with him lately, and I don't get that impression at all."
Teri cleared her throat. "He's not gay. I went on a date with him once."
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