On the Fringe

“Mauu-uum!” Susan bellowed up the narrow stairwell, her voice like a dental drill on the back of Bonnie’s neck. “Mom! Aunt Jan’s here.”

Great. Could this day get any better?

She stood, brushed dust off the denim that covered her knees and, stretching her back, looked up to the rafters, praying for patience…clearly the one thing sweet old Pim hadn’t stuffed in her attic. Her grandmother was an accumulator. Was, is now, and ever shall be, she supposed.

“Bonnie?” Her sister’s voice was firm and demanding, usually critical, sometimes irate…but always a comfort in its familiarity. “Come down. We need to talk,” she said, though her attention was riveted on her niece. “Does your mother know you’re answering the door in this getup, young lady? Do you even own a bra?”

Susan, Bonnie’s fifteen-year-old daughter, had two older brothers, a father, fraternal grandparents, and cousins—Janice was not the only family she had and so she tended not to…value her as much as Bonnie did.

“I own a few, if it’s really your business, and my mother bought me this getup, old—”

“Susan.” Her sister and daughter could have been old and new versions of the same person standing together at the bottom of the attic steps looking up at her: both long and lean, short dark hair framing their faces—one artfully gray-streaked, the other neon pink–tipped—eyes wide and blue, the same do-something-about-her expression on their faces. “Would you bring me two bottles of water from the fridge? Please,” she added when the stormy expression didn’t immediately dissipate.

Astutely noting that her afternoon off might well be in peril, Susan turned on her heel, cast one last resentful glance at her aunt, and stomped off in her low-rider stretch jeans and short knit cami.

“You’re just asking for trouble with that girl.”

“I’m picking my battles.” Bonnie sat on a dusty step halfway down and gave a weary sigh. “She’s okay. She’s just…being a kid.”

“She’s sassy, rude, and you can see her nipples through that…top, I guess you’d have to call it since it wouldn’t cover her bottom any better.”

“That’s all true, but she’s not a runaway crack whore; she’s hardly bitched at all about helping me out here at Pim’s this morning, and frankly, I’d rather die than inflict on her the insecurities that I had about my body at her age.”

“What was the matter with your body?” She frowned, trying to recall as her gaze skimmed over Bonnie’s thirty-pounds-too-heavy, five-foot-eight-inch frame; the spiderweb laced through her thick, shiny, auburn waves of hair; the dust on the dark lashes around her gray-green eyes. She looked to be exactly what she was, an almost-forty-year-old mother of three, a third-grade teacher’s assistant, and a newly lapsed Republican.

“Nothing. That’s the point. There was nothing wrong with my body back then. I was a little taller than everyone else for a while, including most of the boys, and I had breasts…not even large breasts, just normal, really, a respectable C cup…but I thought I stood out like a giant pink cow in a flock of white sheep. I was always trying to hide and blend in and cover myself up. I was twenty-five before I knew how beautiful I was in high school and thirty-eight, with two boys in college, before I realized how great I looked at thirty.”

“And that’s my fault?”

“No. Did I say it was your fault?”

“No, but you sound angry. Like you were the only teenager in the world who ever felt weird and ugly. You weren’t. While you were busy being tall and voluptuous, oh poor you, I was dealing with Dad’s hawk nose and I was smart, so I was essentially invisible to everyone but the teachers and the geekiest nerds until some moron in a football jersey came to me looking for a miracle one short week before he’s due to flunk out of geometry and then, of course, it’s my fault he doesn’t get to play in a tie-breaker game where college scouts might have picked him up so he could play and party for another four years before he had to come back to Leesburg to sell cars at his father’s dealership where, thirty years later, they can actually—did you know?—refuse to let you test drive the most beautiful moss-green Lexus that you want your husband to buy you for your anniversary and then have to wait three months for after special-ordering it from a different dealership and…” She glanced away like she’d lost her next thought and let her body sag against the doorjamb. “I always padded my bras…so that in the event that someone actually did see me, they wouldn’t try to run a flag up my leg.”

She appeared so sad and sounded so dejected that when she finally looked up Bonnie burst into snorting laughter. It was the first heartfelt laugh she’d had in weeks.

“Oh sure.” Janice tried to look outraged, then shrugged and gave a grudging chuckle.

As far as Bonnie knew, there was nothing in her sister’s life that wasn’t bigger or better, sadder or worse, more or less than what she had—and that wasn’t always as annoying as it sounded.

“Actually, it’s Susan’s hair that concerns me most,” Bonnie said. It was a relief to finally admit it out loud. “It’s like one of those mood rings we used to have when we were kids, remember? In the four weeks since her dad left it’s gone from Cool Angry Blue to Royally Mad Magenta to Truly Pissed Pink. When she goes for Furious Flame Red I’m afraid her head’ll explode.”

Neither sister laughed. They both knew the frustrated, explosive feeling she was talking about and it wasn’t funny.

“Then you have to do something.” Janice made it sound so easy.

“Like what?”

“Beg Joe to move back in.”

“No.”

“Just until the two of you can work things out. See a marriage therapist or something. But stay together.”

“He chose to leave, Jan. I didn’t kick him out. And he’s welcome to come back if he wants to, but I’m certainly not going to beg him for anything.”

“Is this a menopausal thing? They say menopausal women have renewed urges for autonomy.”

“Autonomy?” She chuckled in disbelief. “No. I’m not menopausal.”

“And you’re sure there isn’t another woman?”

Joe Sanderson with another woman. This would have made everything less complicated for Janice—a lying, cheating, no-good womanizer like her first husband was something she had experience with and knew how to handle. But a smart, charming, handsome, hard-working, and faithful man who wasn’t feeling content in his life—and therefore with his wife—was a puzzle to her. And the fact that her sister felt pretty much the same way about the good, honest man made it a real conundrum.

“I’m sure. There is no other woman.”

There wasn’t even a good fight to clear the air…much less one to stir up any dust…

 

Bonnie could still hear the wind tapping rain against the window that Sunday morning four months earlier—clearly not when their problems began but when they started to surface, like dead bodies from the bottom of a dark lagoon.

It was cold and dreary and too early to get up. She cuddled into Joe’s warmth beside her in bed as if he were a pot-bellied stove in winter. He was always so warm. Even his toes were a comfort as they automatically reached for hers, rubbed, and then held them between his feet to heat them like slices of bread in a toaster. She knew he wasn’t fully awake when he rolled more completely toward her, lifting his leg so she could slide one of hers between his, or when he drew the covers more tightly around her shoulders as his arms came about her, because they’d cuddled like this hundreds and hundreds of times before and he rarely remembered the next day.

She knew, too, that he would hold her like that, safe and protected, forever…if she didn’t screw up and give him the signal—or what he always seemed to think was a signal.

In truth it was just a reflex she’d tried to harness for years. It was that pleasured moan when skin meets skin or cold meets warmth or lonely meets companion; that uncontainable hum from the back of the throat at the sudden, sharp awareness of the senses; that instinctive noise; that…signal that inevitably turned a perfectly glorious Sunday morning cuddle into full-blown sex—which, admittedly, could go either way, depending on her mood.

As it happened, her mood was favorable that morning…well, not at first, but Joe was nothing if not persuasive. His lips and hands knew all the right places to go and which buttons to push. He can’t remember to hang the toilet paper with the loose end on top or to readjust the driver’s seat after he drives my car or wait for the commercials to talk to me during Grey’s Anatomy, but Joe Sanderson can make love to his wife in his sleep, she thought, heavy-lidded and drowsy.

In fact, the more she thought about it and the more predictable his moves became, the more she began to suspect that he was…making love to her in his sleep. As his mouth kissed and nibbled its way down her neck, her mind fought the euphoria in her sex-drugged brain to listen to his breathing. Panting…he could be dreaming of sex. And if he was dreaming, well, how did she know if he knew he was making love to her? I could be anyone!

He pushed at her nightgown and his warm, wet mouth covered the tip of her breast. She sobbed in a breath of excitement as she started to wonder if she ought to speak—ask him if he knew who he was having sex with, ask him to say her name. But they always advised against waking sleepwalkers, not because of that old heart attack hooey, but because they wake up confused and disoriented and sometimes swinging their fists. This might be true of sleeping…sex participants as well, and she was in a precarious position here.

Moments after he entered her, Joe’s skin grew warmer and moist against the palms of her hands as he increased his efforts for an orgasm. She stroked him and kissed him and wondered how he could have been so angry with her just last night when he discovered—at the hardware store while buying a small replacement part for her broken garbage disposal—that she’d maxed out the Visa card again, and still want to make love with her this morning. That is, if he’s aware it’s me…For all she knew a hole in the mattress or a knothole in a tree would have been just as convenient for his dreams of…oh say, Nicole Kidman.

But Joe didn’t hold grudges. He was a blow-up-and-it’s-over kind of guy. She was the grudge holder. That’s true, she admitted to herself with a large sigh. But she wasn’t irresponsible with the money. We have children, children want stuff and stuff costs money. Yes, she was a little overindulgent with them but she didn’t mean to be and if she was spoiling them and ruining their character—not that he ever actually accused her of it—it was a little late to change things now. To suddenly cut the children off for no particular—

“What the hell are you doing?” Bonnie’s eyes snapped open to see Joe staring down at her, his strong, angular face flushed with exertion, his breath coming in short, desperate gasps. He looked ready to explode. “Baby, you’re killing me!”

“Oh! You’re awake.” Did she say that out loud?

In the dim light he looked surprised, then incredulous—so she must have—and then almost amused before he closed his sleepy hazel eyes, gave a soft chuckle, and lowered his forehead to hers. “This does feel familiar, sweetheart…” He took two more gulps of air. “…but not so much that I can do it in my sleep.”

“No, of course not. That was a stupid thing to say. I don’t know why I said—”

“You’re not into it, are you?”

“No. I am into it. I am. It’s great. Wonderful. I just…I was…I got…sidetracked.”

“Sidetracked.” His expression as he studied her was curious. After a moment, he sighed and rolled off her, asking, “Sidetracked where? To what? Problems at work? Here?”

“Nowhere. I was here. With you.” This wasn’t a conversation she wanted to have this early in the morning, under these particular circumstances, so she turned her back to him, bunched up her pillow, and tried to settle in again. “I was cold. I wanted to cuddle.”

“Okay. Good. Then why’d you give me the signal for sex?”

She pulled the covers up close to her face and mumbled into the pillow. “I didn’t.”

“What?”

“Nothing,” she said through her breathing space in the sheets. “I’m sorry, honey. Go back to sleep.”

“I’m awake now and don’t be sorry. Talk to me. What did you say just then?”

Oh, Christ! Well, fine. Maybe twenty years was long enough not to mention that an instinctive hum was not a fucking signal!

So to speak.

“I said…” She flipped the bedding back and half-turned toward him. “I didn’t.”

“You didn’t what?”

“I didn’t give you a signal. I gave a loud sigh, a purr. I was cold, you were warm, it felt good, I hummed. It’s an instinctive noise. I do it when I eat ice cream. I do it when I take a bubble bath and when I hug Susan or the boys and after my first sip of a really cold beer. It doesn’t mean I want to have sex. It’s just something that happens when something feels good or tastes good or…or is good, like sex. But it doesn’t mean I want it.”

She watched as his eyes scanned the ceiling, waited while he came to the inevitable conclusion.

“Are you telling me that all these years I’ve been thinking you wanted sex with me and you didn’t?”

“No. I love making love with you. You know I do. And when I’m not in the mood I tell you I’m tired or mad or whatever. Don’t I tell you?” He nodded. “All I’m saying is that most of the time when I make that noise, that nice moan, I’m just…making that noise. I can’t help it.”

“Why haven’t you ever said anything?”

She shrugged. “At first because I thought it was you wanting sex and that was fine with me—great in fact—but then after a few years I discovered I could get just the cuddle I wanted without all the bother of sex if I didn’t make that noise. And by then it was too late to tell—”

“The bother of sex?”

“You know what I mean.”

“I think I’m beginning to.”

“Stop it. We have a great sex life and you know it or you wouldn’t have stopped just now. You could tell I wasn’t really into it and you stopped. How many times has that happened?”

“How do I know you weren’t just too sleepy to do a better job of pretending this time?”

Proof of orgasm. Even having children wasn’t corroborating evidence.

“Have I ever lied to you?”

“I don’t know.”

“No. I haven’t. I make tiny omissions…for your own good, but I have never lied straight to your face.” She finished rolling over to face him more directly. “Do you believe me?”

“Maybe.”

“Then I am telling you straight to your face that I’ve only had to fake an orgasm maybe…eight times the whole time we’ve been married. You’re that good,” she added as a sugar coating.

His sweet tooth was still asleep. He came up on his elbow, more curious than wounded. “Which eight times?”

“Oh.” She groaned. “Give me a break. I don’t remember. I—Yes, I do. Both times you went out fishing with Greg Morris and came back sunburned and drunk and, unfortunately, amorous. You were done before my head hit the pillow, so I had to pretend I was done too so you’d roll over, pass out, and leave me alone.”

His keen green eyes narrowed as he tried to remember. “And the other six times?”

“I don’t know. And…and that’s not the point anyway. Actually, I’ve forgotten the point. What is it?”

“That what I always thought I knew about you might not be true. Maybe I don’t know you as well as I thought I did.”

“Oh, yeah. Well…” What could she say? She was a bride a month after she graduated from RFK High School in May. He was the ripe old age of nineteen when they married. How well could two people know each other after living side by side for twenty years? Did other couples discuss every little opinion or thought that passed through their minds? And how often were they allowed to change their minds? How could something not bother her too much the first dozen times it happened early in her marriage but drive her completely insane the last six dozen times in the last eight years? At what point in a marriage did it become okay for one to assume they knew the other so well that they could presume to know how the other would respond or react? And, come to think of it, she wasn’t the only one who didn’t always speak her mind. “Well, what about my mushroom soup meatloaf that you ate and hated for years before you said anything?”

“You can’t compare meatloaf to sex.”

“Yes, I can. It’s the same thing. I go to all the trouble of making what I think is a perfectly good dinner for you and you eat it and you say it’s fine and years go by before you mention to Susan that you used to luuuv your mother’s meatloaf and that she used the recipe off the oatmeal box.”

“Mushrooms have no taste.”

“Why didn’t you just say so? Why say it’s fine and choke it down if you hate it?”

“Because you hate to cook and you went to all the trouble of cooking the meatloaf for me, so I ate it.”

She sighed, loud and short-tempered. “Did you ever think that if I’m going to the trouble of cooking at all that I’d rather go to the trouble of making something you like than the trouble of making something you can barely tolerate? At least I usually enjoyed the sex I didn’t ask for.”

They studied one another in the weak morning light until Joe finally leaned over and dropped a kiss between her eyebrows, fell back onto his pillow, and closed his eyes. But he didn’t go back to sleep. She could hear the rumble of the gears grinding in his brain, even over the constant stream of questions in her head. What did this mean? Was their marriage in trouble? Were his feelings hurt? Was it better to get these things out in the open or, if they didn’t make you nuts, just let them go? Why’d she have to finally explain about the hum? And what were they going to use for a signal now?

That was just the beginning. In the weeks that followed, more minor irritations and misunderstandings came to light, and after those a few more. Nothing worth fighting about, nothing that changed the fundamental love they had for one another, but certainly enough to make them question, even more, how well they really knew each other…or if over the years they’d grown apart, become different people and if deep fondness and friendship—and kids and bills and habit—rather than true love, held them together.

“Maybe a few weeks apart,” Joe suggested after a vigorous bickering about who put what clutter in the basement and whose priceless possessions needed to be disposed of first.

“You’re leaving me?” Stunned, she stopped stacking boxes and turned to face him. “I want to keep seventeen boxes of Vogue magazines that I’ve been collecting since I was sixteen years old and you’re leaving me?”

“No. Of course not. It’s just something I’ve been thinking about lately.”

“Leaving me?” She glanced at the ceiling-high pile of boxes. “Look, I can probably whittle these down to…say, thirteen boxes, less maybe. And I don’t really care if you want to keep all the old fishing and camping stuff. None of the new stuff is broken or has any holes in it, but if you want to keep the old stuff, too, that’s okay. None of this junk is worth breaking up our marriage for.”

“Someday I’m going to wish I got all that in writing.” He chuckled and stepped forward to wrap his arms around her. “And you’re right. None of this is worth breaking up our marriage. Nothing is. I just think that…” He grasped her shoulders and held her at arm’s length. “God, Bonnie, do you realize how long we’ve known each other? We met at Chicky Davis’s birthday party when you were this…God, this luscious, funny, smart, completely unself-absorbed junior and I was a…just the opposite senior and…and aside from our daughter and my mother you’re the only woman I’ve ever loved. We fell in love young, we got married young, had kids young. We both gave up dreams to be together and I wouldn’t have it any other way but…”

“But what?” She braced herself.

“But maybe we need to step back a little, take a look at who we are…now. Who we are alone, who we are together. We’re not teenagers anymore; we’ve changed. A lot. Hell, we have a son who’s older than we were when we got married. Maybe it’s time to get reacquainted with ourselves…and then with each other again.”

She once heard or read somewhere that if the word divorce was never brought up during a fight or in a discussion with your spouse then it could never be an option in your marriage—and was acutely aware that Joe hadn’t gone anywhere near the word…yet.

And he was right about them changing over the years. Sometimes, she didn’t know where he stopped and she began. Other times, she felt a distinct division between him and a self she kept quiet and hidden away like an undesirable relative. As if that part of her was someone she didn’t think he’d understand, someone she wasn’t sure he’d even like…and yet it was still her, acting out from time to time, pushing to the foreground when she least expected it, surprising everyone—including herself.

Like now. Time alone was suddenly very appealing.

“I don’t know how you plan to spend time apart without leaving me.” She hoisted a box of magazines to the floor so they’d each have one to sit on. “But I’ll at least listen.”

His proposal was simple. They’d take two months—a negotiable time if either of them found it too difficult—and he’d rent a small, furnished apartment just minutes from the house.

“In case you need me to open a jar or kill a spider.” He grinned and she simpered back. He was joking, of course. He’d seen her deliver three babies, watched her napalm gopher holes with gas and matches in the front yard, and he had even cleaned up the mess after she killed a snake to death by hysterically chopping it into two dozen pieces with a garden hoe. She wasn’t a helpless female. “Or if one of us starts to go blind without sex.”

Now that might actually happen.

Everything else in their plan was to remain the same. The same joint bank account, same jobs, and the same car pool schedule for Susan.

She’d still be at home, but he’d be gone. And that’s why it wasn’t working…

 

Susan returned and handed both frosty, cold bottles of water to Bonnie with the silent, profoundly put-upon service only a teen can deliver.

“Thanks, honey.” Bonnie passed a bottle to her sister. “You’ve been a great help this morning. So if the floors are done and the rugs are back where they belong and all the crystal is washed, you can go ahead and leave if you want.” She was used to speaking to the girl’s back these days and pretended it didn’t bother her. She heard rather than saw her start down the front stairs and lifted her voice. “First check on Pim for me, will you?” Then in a low mutter, she added, “And when you see your dad tell him I’m wide open to the concept of joint custody.”

Bonnie took a long drag off her water bottle. Janice watched her thoughtfully for a few seconds before she broke the seal and drank from her own.

“Don’t give me that look.” Bonnie twisted the cap back in place. “You know, I thought he’d be back in a day or two with all this time apart to ‘find ourselves’ business out of his system. You said every couple could use a few days apart once in while, that it wouldn’t hurt us, that the kids would understand if we explained it to them. Now it’s been four weeks, the kids hate me because they think I drove him off, and you’re suggesting there might be another woman. If I’d known he could hold out this long I’d have been the one to move out. How come I’m still here with the kid and the big house to clean? Obviously, he’s the one who thought the plan through, not me. Plus, now they’re changing the aides around at school so I’m not sure which grade or teacher I’ll get when school starts next month, and Pim’s accident, and now she’s home from rehab and…” She sighed and stood to go back up the steep attic stairs, but she didn’t. “Pim still doesn’t know about Joe. I don’t know how to tell her.”

Pim wasn’t just their grandmother, she was the only mother Bonnie could remember clearly, their parents having died in a train accident when she was five and Janice was almost seven. A young, independent eighty-eight, Pim wouldn’t allow even her great-grandchildren to call her by anything other than the silly nickname she had picked up in her own childhood, back when postcards cost a penny, Marlboro cigarettes were twenty cents a pack, and the country had a total of 131 golf courses and just thirty AM radio stations.

A freak fall in her garden and a broken hip shortly after Joe left kept Pim stiff and housebound these days, and the lack of everything normal in her life was taking its toll on her mind: She was as loopy and unpredictable as a wire spring.

“Don’t try. It’ll just confuse her more. Besides, he may come home before she realizes he’s gone and you might not have to tell her anything.” Janice’s uncharacteristic optimism should have been Bonnie’s first clue that her day was taking a strange new twist, but it was so nice to hear she barely paid attention to it.

“I hope so. And I hope he comes back with enough answers for both of us, because with all that’s been going on here I haven’t had any time to get reacquainted with myself, much less ask myself questions…which sounds ridiculous when I say it out loud, doesn’t it?”

Janice smiled and nodded. “So what are you doing up here?” She peered into the dimly lit space above the stairs and grimaced. “Looking for a good hiding place?”

“That’s not a bad idea, but I’m actually looking for Pim’s magic carpet.” Janice arched a single brow. “I know, but she’s so insistent about having it with her that I think there must be some sort of rug up here that reminds her of a magic carpet. Maybe a mat or a throw or something from her childhood that’ll help her rest easier if we put it on the floor in her room.

“She’s been so restless since we brought her home. You’ve seen how agitated she gets, late at night. The other night, when I covered for the nurse’s night off, I caught Pim trying to get out of bed, saying she had to get to the rug before the dead of night or the magic would be gone. I had to promise her I’d look for it.”

“When exactly is dead of night, I’ve always wondered?”

Bonnie shrugged.

“And pretending to look, then reporting it gone…?”

“Has occurred to me…about a hundred times.” She grinned. “But I figured a quick look wouldn’t kill me and if I find something that helps her rest, so much the better. I hate seeing her so weak and feeble. It breaks my heart.”

Something in that statement caused Janice to look away as if she suddenly remembered some bad news. Bonnie knew the look well.

“I don’t want to hear it, Jan.” She started up the steps. Janice followed.

“But this is good news…potentially.”

“Right.” She glanced back at her sister’s attire—one of her best summer linen pant suits, pale blue, crisp, and tidy with low-heeled sandals that matched—which meant the news was really, really bad if she was chancing the dust and dirt in Pim’s attic. It was a cramped space at the top of an American foursquare, filled with junk and treasures that may not have been cleaned since the roof went on nearly a hundred years earlier. “As long as you’re up here, come over and help me move this rug out of the way. I think there’s something behind it, but it’s wedged in tight between the floor and that rafter there.”

“That’s not the carpet, is it?” Her face was a wince of disgust as she surveyed the sloppy cylinder of dusty gray and dark blue matting.

“No. I know this one, don’t you? She used it outside for her garden parties, remember?” Janice shook her head. “Doesn’t matter. Come help me.”

Janice held out her hands to display the professional Realtor look she had going, then waved her hands at her eyes and nose—which had convenient tendencies to plug, puff up, turn red, and run in the presence of dust, dogs, and fresh-cut grass—then shrugged helplessly. “Want me to try to catch Susan?”

“Oh, come on.” Bonnie climbed over several old beer boxes, a tatted footstool, a copper birdcage, and around the steamer trunk she’d been going through when Janice arrived. “You’re not going to get out of here clean anyway and it’ll only take a sec. Hold your breath.”

“All right, but then you have to listen to me.”

“I’ll have to listen to you anyway, won’t I? Take that end.”

All Janice had to do was push a little at the top of the rolled-up floor covering while Bonnie pulled from the bottom…well, shove hard when she jerked vigorously…okay, ram it with her shoulder as she wrenched with all her might before it fell like a tree in a forest. Dust billowed and they both turned their faces away until the cloud settled.

“Oh, for—”

“Wow. Look at this, Jan.”

Janice turned to see Bonnie straddle-walking the rug they’d just brought down, making her way to a smaller carpet, rolled up and leaning against the wall. Clearly the other carpet had shielded this one from the light and years of grimy neglect because even the outer, downside of this smaller carpet was bright with color.

It came out of its hiding space easily, not even as wide as Bonnie was tall.

“I bet this is it,” she told Janice, excited, feeling like something was finally going right in her life. “Look at the colors. And it’s not huge so it won’t be hard to get it down, and it won’t take up too much space in Pim’s room.”

“You don’t think it’s magic, do you?” There was a tone in her voice that assured Bonnie she would be locked up if she gave the wrong answer.

“Of course not, but if Pim thinks it is and if it helps her rest, that’s magic enough for me.” She settled the carpet lengthwise on the old dusty rug and climbed over both. She guessed she could manage to get it down the steps on her own and wouldn’t risk Janice’s health any further. Letting the lid to the steamer trunk fall back in place, she secured the straps and said, “I guess I can handle some potentially good news now.”

“I’m having an end-of-the-summer dinner party tomorrow night and I want you to come.”

“Boy, that is potentially good news.” Watching her sister curiously, she transferred the smaller carpet over to the top of the steamer trunk. Janice’s parties were always…comfortably elegant and catered, big or small. Still watching her sister suspiciously, Bonnie walked across the attic to her and, without looking away for more than a second, bent and picked up the far end of the big dirty rug and began walking toward the wall, lifting the rug higher and higher until she could push it back where it had been. Janice was looking very guilty; the eye contact was getting to her. “But that isn’t all your news, is it?”

“I invited Joe, too.”

Was that all?

“That’s fine. I keep telling you we don’t hate each other. We’re not even fighting. Neither one of us will make a scene in front of all your guests. I promise.”

“There are no other guests.”

“Jan—”

“The two of you need to deal with this, whatever it is. I don’t get it, but I think it’s gone on long enough. We’ll sit down and hash it out together.”

“Just stay out of it, will you?” She sat on the edge of the dusty old trunk, the carpet behind her. It felt warm against the small of her back. Nice. “Joe and I will work things out, alone. I don’t need you to do any hashing with my marriage, thank you very much.”

“Well, you need something. This much time apart isn’t healthy. You need to talk. You need counseling. You need something. Maybe you just need to go over to that place he’s living at and kick his ass around the room a couple times. That’ll get his attention.”

Bonnie ran a hand over the fine, colorful weave of the carpet, vaguely wondering if it might not be more of a mat than a rug, instinctively recognizing the craftsmanship and its antiquity as something special and rare.

“Maybe I need my own magic carpet,” she said absently, enjoying the soft underbelly of the carpet against the palm of her hand, eager to see if the show side was just as silky. She looked back at her sister, folded her arms across her chest, and tried to concentrate on the moment. “Maybe I should have stayed home the night of Chicky Davis’s birthday party. I sometimes wish I’d never gotten married, you know, and I wonder a lot about how my life would have turned out. Not that I’d ever—”

She watched as Janice’s face slowly elongated, her mouth and eyes stretching to form perfect Os of shock, amazement, and fear.

“Jan?” As she spoke, a shadow crossed her face, something passed between them and the bald lightbulb hanging from the rafters. Something in the room was moving…Bats! came to mind.

But before she could move or cover her hair and her face, darkness enveloped her. It came from above and behind her and fell like a curtain in front of her, leaving daylight on the sides. She stood to escape toward the light, felt a gentle nudge from behind, and fell up against it. At that moment it tipped, like it was going to fall on Janice. Bonnie’s body followed and she screamed…She felt herself falling.

Bonnie braced herself to land flat on her face, bringing her arms in to protect herself, trying to turn to one side, hoping to get her knees up to her chest so…What, she could bounce like a ball?

As illogical as that thought was, so was the fact that she hadn’t landed yet. In fact, she wasn’t falling anymore, she was…floating. She relaxed her arms a little and opened one eye to be sure.

Yep. Floating—like on an air mattress in a swimming pool.

“Jan?”

“Bonnie?”

“Jan?” She straightened her legs and stayed chest down for a minute, then slowly propped herself up on her elbows and looked around.

It was Pim’s rug, soft and bright in some Oriental pattern that was truly lovely or could have been, she thought, if she wasn’t floating on it eight feet off the ground.

“Bonnie?”

Carefully, as the carpet was prone to waffle a bit when she moved, she inched her way over to the edge, took a firm grip on the fringe, and eased her head over the side. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d been so happy to see her sister.

“Jan?”

“Bonnie, my God, what are you doing?”

“Floating?”

“Well, stop it. Get down from there.”

No need to tell her twice. She moved the rest of her body over, preparing to ease herself over the edge and land on the trunk below. She’d worry about corralling the carpet later. But just as she was about to shift her weight over the side, the rug curled in on itself, flipping Bonnie onto her back so she was staring straight into the rafters.

“I think it likes me.”

“Not funny.”

“Not really meant to be, but it won’t let me off.” And yes, she knew how that sounded, but she didn’t know how else to explain it. She sensed a power or energy from it and remembered the warmth she’d felt earlier. “Maybe you’d better go talk to Pim.”

“Pim?”

Bonnie rolled over and crawled over to the edge again. Janice looked up, impatient, her hands on her hips. She was frazzled and covered with dust, her eyes and nose turning red, hair mussed, her only sister hovering above her on a carpet. And somehow, she still looked like the boss of everything.

“Pim’s the only one who knows anything about this thing.”

“She’s also broken and feeble.”

“Not feeble. She knows about this. She’s been trying to get to it. She can tell you how it works.”

“Like a secret word or something?”

“Yeah. Like…bibbidi-bobbidi-boo!” They both held their breath expectantly.

“Sim sala bim!” Janice pointed her arms out in front of her and wiggled her fingers at the rug.

Nothing.

“Go ask Pim.”

“I’ll call Joe.”

“Joe?”

“And Roger, too. They should both see this. Joe can come to your rescue and you can hug and kiss and make up and then I think we should call both the National Enquirer and Star magazines to start a bidding war for picture rights to this. No one is going to believe it. I wonder if Susan’s gone yet. She can go next door and get the neighbors—We should get as many nonfamily witnesses as possible, I think.”

“I think you need to get a grip down there and go talk to Pim. It’s her carpet. She may not want the whole world to know about it. It was hidden, remember.”

For several seconds Janice looked like she wanted to argue, but all she said was “Well, all right, but take this.” She whipped her cell phone from her pocket and tossed it up onto the rug. “At least call Roger. He’ll get such a kick out of this.”

And off she went, her heels clattering on the steep steps as Bonnie sighed and let her forehead rest on the rug. Someone should get a kick out this, she thought, trying to put it all together in her mind.

A magic carpet. Her sister was right, no one was going to believe it. She didn’t believe it and she was stuck on it. Stuck on a flying carpet…no, it hadn’t actually flown yet.

Maybe all it did was float.

She lifted her head and looked around for Janice’s cell phone. It had slipped down the carpet into the valley her body made and was resting against her thigh. Clutching it in her hand, she heaved her body over to the center of the rug and drew her legs up under her to slowly sit up. She hated feeling helpless and started looking around for escape ideas.

If she stood up, she could easily reach the rafters and maybe get off the rug, but that wasn’t the same as getting herself down. She bucked a little to see if she could get the carpet to scoot forward to one of the columns holding the roof up, so she could stand and perhaps push it to the floor, but all it did was readjust itself to keep her from falling off.

She perceived that as well…that the carpet was taking care of her, keeping her safe. It wouldn’t let her off and it wouldn’t let her fall. To test this, she got to her feet. It wobbled like a table with one slightly shorter leg, then it was steady and sure. She walked from one end to the other, measured it in her mind as approximately five feet by nine feet, and was again struck by the color and vibrant pattern. She jumped on one corner, knowing it could give way and she might fall, but also knowing that it wouldn’t. It held like concrete.

“Okay. I admit it. You’re a really cool carpet,” she said out loud and then laughed because she didn’t know what else to do.

She couldn’t resist a hop to the center to stand like a surfer, bending her knees and swaying as she rode the imaginary crest of a…tsunami. After that, it was high-stepping, and the rug gave gently like one of those inflated moonwalk things they have for kids at picnics and fairs. Finally a high jump, then two, and then she raised her legs and landed softly on her bum, but she didn’t bounce like she would have on a trampoline, not like she hoped she would as she invented and discarded one escape plan after another in her head.

She still had Janice’s cell in her hand. As she stared at it she realized she was trying to remember the number that all her phones had on speed dial—Joe’s number.

She dropped the phone in her lap, covered her face with both hands, and growled with her teeth clenched. She didn’t want to be the first to give in, the first to break, the first to admit that she couldn’t handle her life without him—not that her life ordinarily involved situations like this, but still…He was the one who had left, he had to be the one to come back.

“He just has to be,” she murmured as though in prayer.

Stretching her stiff neck from side to side, she tried to quell her impatience with Janice for taking so long. She was sure Pim was doing her best to remember—she always did. Her best, that is. A thousand images of Pim coming to aid and rescue her over the years rushed to her mind…and then it went blank as something else, completely unrelated, tried to surface.

It came slowly as she studied the dark border around the edge of the carpet. At first it looked like part of the design, it was so well-blended in the weave of the rug, but on closer examination she could see that what looked like boxes all around was actually a series of lines and dashes placed high, low, and in between: vertical, horizontal, and diagonal. Some repeated, but there was no pattern to the order.

“These are your instructions, aren’t they?” She spoke more to herself than the carpet. Really. “This is some sort of language, but it doesn’t look Asian like the rest of you or even Middle Eastern. Not as fancy as hieroglyphics. Not runes either.” She’d come to the end of her knowledge of what foreign and ancient languages looked like, but she’d bet her life she was right about it being some sort of message. “Jan’s the brainiac, she might know.”

She sighed in frustration. “God, I wish you were in English.”

And then it was.

“Oh. Thanks.”

She knew she should be frightened, hysterical even, at least disbelieving, but the plain fact was, she wasn’t. She didn’t foresee any imminent danger: It wasn’t trying to hurt anyone and there wasn’t a single reason not to trust her own eyes.

She looked at the words alter and change, end and make, trying to figure out where to start. After several minutes she had it.

“Dead of night.” Definitely Pim’s magic carpet. She knew about it, must have known about it for years. But what did it mean? Did Pim want a ride on it…or was she already on a ride…one that would end at dead of night?

“So when the hell is dead of night?” She repeated Janice’s question from before and, still speaking to the rug as if it had ears, she added, “She’s in no shape to travel right now, so can we renegotiate this dead of night thing? Does it matter which night it is? Or can it be just any dead of night?”

Oddly enough, she got no answer.

Feeling a little desperate now, knowing that if she didn’t figure the carpet out it could affect Pim in some way, she started over, reading the directions again.

They didn’t make sense.

“What did I do? What did I do?” she chanted as she tried to remember what she’d been doing, what she had said, what she’d been touching or thinking when the rug came to life. It had to be her or the rug would have scooped up Janice instead, right? “What did I do?”

She recalled Janice’s stupid dinner party and asking Janice not to meddle with her marriage, rubbing the carpet, and wishing it was real and saying…

“I said, ‘I sometimes wish I’d never gotten married’.” She waited for the carpet to acknowledge her revelation. “That’s a horrible thing to say, I know. But I do sometimes. I wish I’d never gotten married.”

Tremors vibrated beneath her. “Uh-oh.”

A ripple started at each corner of the rug and worked its way along the fringe toward the opposite end, causing the carpet to turn slightly to the right. As the rippling picked up speed so, too, did the circling, until the rug had turned a full rotation and was starting on a second, a little swifter this time.

“Jan?” Something was very wrong and she was getting dizzy. She wanted off, but not by being thrown by a high-speed, centrifugal force. “Janice! Abracadabra! Okay, I take it back—Actually, I didn’t mean it anyway. I love Joe. I’ve always loved Joe. I’m glad we got married. Stop. Shit. Shazam! Jaan-ice!”

Faster and faster…the carpet was in full spin. And so was she. Her stomach roiled with nausea and her eyes couldn’t focus on anything; she wanted to close them but it just didn’t seem like a good idea. She needed to stay aware, watch for opportunities to save herself, maintain what little control she had left.

“Jan! Help me! Anyone! Jaan-ice!” Her scream rang in her ears as she drew her legs to her chest and buried her face in the small space between them. Her heart throbbed in her throat and she fervently wished she’d spent more of her life in church.

A whirring noise grew louder as the whirling accelerated, so she didn’t hear Janice holler, “What? I’m here. I’m coming,” from the bottom of the attic steps or see her arrive at the top and mutter, “Holy shit.”

The caller ID displayed her sister’s name as Bonnie scurried across the polished hardwood floors of her upscale condo in her stockinged feet, very late for work.

Great. Can this day get any better?

She flipped open her phone and put it to her ear as she lowered herself to the floor to look under the couch. “Jan. Jan. I love you. You’re my favorite sister. But I don’t have time to talk right now.”

Her hand slid across the Chinese silk the sofa was covered in and she remembered why she loved it.

“You sound out of breath. What are you doing?” Janice asked.

“I’m looking for a file that I brought home last night to review for a very…” She scrambled over the plush area rug to the wing chair she paid too much for at a White House auction—even with photo verification of it in Lady Bird Johnson’s bedroom—and looked under the cushion. “…very important investment meeting this morning. Shit!”

“What?”

“I snagged my panty hose.” She looked behind pillows, on top of shelves, in drawers, and along ledges as she made her way back to her bedroom to change. “I also got up thirty minutes late and my hair dryer blew up…After five years, out of the blue, it picks today to die. Think it’s an omen?”

“Of what? The coming of the Antichrist?”

“Maybe. I’ve heard that the man I’m meeting with this morning can be a little…not devilish, but…prickly.”

“Maybe it means the man you’re meeting with this morning is…the man.”

“Don’t be ridiculous. Hang on.” She tossed the cell phone on the bed, smoothed down her slim, navy, same-size-she-wore-in-college skirt, and adjusted her white silk blouse—no synthetic fibers for her…She picked up the phone again. “Have you told me why you’re calling yet? I can’t remember. And I’m in a hurry so it better not be about some man you think I have to meet. I meet plenty of…Oh, thank God!” She whipped the Watson folder off the shelf in her bedroom closet, as confounded as she was relieved, and focused next on shoes. On the bed disheveled sheets began to undulate slowly and with purpose as her overnight guest came awake. “Ah…I meet plenty of men on my own. I do. I’m thirty-nine, almost forty years old, and I have a great job that I love, a great car, a great condo. I’ve traveled all over the world and I can’t think of one single thing a man can give me that I can’t get on my own.”

Tony, a thirty-two-year-old magazine ad for healthy Italian living, cocked his manly brow at her in a lustful challenge. Clearly he thought he knew at least one man who could give her something special. Silently, she laughed at him with mild affection and opened the drawer in the bedside table to enjoy the expression of deflated fascination on his face as he peered in.

“Me either,” Jan said. “Not one single thing. Which is why I haven’t set you up with anyone for almost two years. No one I know needs that kind of a hammering.”

Hammering? She glanced at Tony and touched the side of his face, and when he looked away from the drawer she smiled at him. Pressing the cell phone against her thigh, she kissed him softly on the lips and whispered, “None of that stuff in there is as good as you are.” His dark umber eyes twinkled knowingly and she turned to leave the room…so much for hammered.

“So why are you calling me?”

“Just to hear your voice?”

“Jan. I have my jacket, my purse, and my briefcase. I’m walking toward the door. Speak.”

“I know you were just out here Sunday, but I was wondering if you could come again this weekend.”

“Is it Pim? Is she still loopy and confused?”

“Oh yeah. And she’s still harping on that carpet or whatever in the attic. She says you have it and that your life is in danger. I told her I’d call and check on you and she got very agitated. She told me to tell you that ‘dead of night will end the flight.’ That’s what she said. And you have to set things right again before that.”

“Before dead of night…which is when exactly?”

“How should I know? You’re the one with a nightlife.” Bonnie rolled her eyes, but didn’t correct her. If Jan knew how many early mornings and late nights were business-rather than pleasure-related she’d be…Well, Bonnie didn’t like to burst anyone’s balloon.

“I was going to call and let her talk to you herself—”

“Thank you, so much, for rethinking that one.” She pushed the button for the elevator to the parking garage. “I just don’t have time this morning. But I’ll drive over early Saturday and spend the night with her. Tell her I’ll bring everything I need to make her one of those chocolate soufflés she likes.”

“She’s not supposed to eat a lot of chocolate.”

“She’s eighty-eight years old, Jan. She can eat whatever she wants.”

“I’m just saying…”

The elevator doors slid open. Bonnie would lose reception when she stepped inside, so she stood on the threshold and held the doors open with one hand. “Sure you are, and I’m just saying there will be plenty of soufflé for all of us to have some. How’s that?”

“That’s better.”

“I thought so. I’ve got to go. Tell Pim I love her. I love you. See you Saturday.” She stepped back into the elevator, flipped the phone closed, and started looking for her keys as the elevator doors shut.

 

Ninety-six minutes later, the rapid tapping of her low-heeled shoes announced her arrival at the business offices on the fourth floor of Superior Atlantic Bank—one of the largest independent banks on the East Coast.

Her spine always stretched and straightened with pride when she walked through the waiting area and down the hall to her office because…well, she didn’t like to brag but she knew she belonged there, she deserved to be there, she was good at the work she did there. It was her bank. She came to Superior Atlantic right out of college with an MBA and a few courses in economics, political science, and commercial law—and with a burning compulsion to excel. Which she did, from the bottom up—from a brief stint as a teller to loan officer to operations. And when the opportunity arose to move upstairs and have her own office—with a view of the nation’s Capitol building—as a trust officer, she grabbed it. That was eleven years ago.

Her secretary, Angela, knew her step and raised her head from the task on her desk like a doe sensing danger. Sensing but not fearing. She and Bonnie were a team, had been for almost eight years, and they knew each other well.

“Please,” she whispered to Angela when she was close enough to be heard. “Don’t tell me the Watsons arrived early.” Looking around for her clients, she marched straight past the outer desk through the open door to her office. “You won’t believe the morning I’m having. The only thing I’ve escaped so far is a bomb in my underwear drawer.”

“Actually, Mr. Watson just called to say they were running about twenty minutes late.”

“Bless him. That’s my first lucky break today.” She set the briefcase on the shiny cherrywood desk and stashed her purse in the right-hand bottom drawer. With a weary sigh she fell back in the big, soft, red leather chair and stared at the large, brightly colored carpet she had framed over the alpine green sofa in the seating arrangement across the room. She usually found it refreshing, energizing. Today it made her nervous. “I locked my keys inside my condo…” She decided to omit the part about having to call the doorman to let her in because Tony was in the shower and couldn’t hear her screaming and beating on the front door. “And when I finally got to my car, one of the tires was flat. I had to take a cab to work.”

She swiveled in her chair and extended one of her legs.

Angela dutifully obliged and leaned over the desk to take a look.

“I was wearing my new Ferragamos this morning to impress Mrs. Watson, but then I changed to these at the last minute. I thought she might be more impressed if I didn’t fall off my shoes and break my neck today. I’m serious.” Angela’s skeptical smile made her feel foolish, like she was making up absurdities. “But she’ll be even more impressed if I don’t sound like a raving lunatic when she gets here, won’t she?”

Angela nodded, but her expression was sympathetic. “But after the Watsons leave we’ll bite the heads off live chickens and burn smelly candles. We’ll make all your bad luck go away.”

“Okay.” Bonnie slowly sat up, turned her chair to the desk, and took the Watson file from her briefcase, along with a folder full of preferred investment interests. “But you have to do the explaining if we get something nasty on the carpet.”

“Deal.” Angela’s good-natured smile was a comfort. “Do you need coffee now or do you want to wait for the Watsons?”

“I’ll wait, thanks, but I think I might take this opportunity to use the ladies’ room, freshen up a bit, so I don’t feel so frazzled.”

“Don’t be long. Your twenty minutes are almost gone.”

“Check. I’ll be back in two seconds.”

She felt better now that she was in the bank where she belonged. In fact, she’d often thought that the atmosphere of the bank was a huge part of what she loved about her job. The dustlessness, for instance, was always the first thing she noticed in every bank she visited, how dust-free they were…and not just the teller stations and desks, but the picture frames and plants as well. And the quiet—even when people were talking it was quiet. Even when they weren’t speaking in the hushed tones that might be respectful, or might be secretive, or might just be laryngitis, it was quiet.

Taking a deep breath as she crossed the large elevator bay toward the ladies’ room, she murmured a polite good-morning to a man about her age waiting for an elevator and inhaled again. Angela said she couldn’t smell it. Actually, most people she mentioned it to thought she was nuts, but what she loved best about banks was the smell of the money. She gave herself a reassuring nod as she passed by the mirror in the restroom—like now there were two of them who wished for the scent of money in an aerosol can.

She was almost finished when she heard the door to the hall open and close. Half hoping it was Trudy Campbell, who’d recently returned from an island cruise with her husband of twenty-five years, Bonnie opened the stall door with a tell-me-everything grin on her face…and froze.

The man who’d been waiting for the elevator a few minutes ago was now in the ladies’ room. He was tall, built rugged and lean, and that’s about all she noticed because he was also holding a gun, aimed straight at her chest. The sight of him was so unexpected, so outrageous, so terrifying that for some reason that had nothing to do with her high-level cognitive processes, she stepped back into the stall, then closed and locked the door.

“Oh, come on,” he said, with no small amount of scorn and disbelief in his voice. “What’s that? You can’t see me now so I don’t exist?” She could tell by the sound of his voice that he was walking in front of her door. “That a bank policy or something? Pretending not to see people?”

A disgruntled customer. Clearly angry, but he didn’t sound flat-out crazy.

“Or are you thinking I can’t shoot you through the metal door?”

Not so much can’t shoot as won’t shoot through the metal door, she calculated, because he couldn’t see where she was standing exactly so he’d have to shoot more than once to make sure he hit her—and it would only take one shot to alert security to her situation.

Her heart was beating so fast she was afraid it would burst.

She pressed her lips and held her fingers together as she leaned from side to side to see what she could through the small spaces on either side of the door. Suddenly, loud and furious, the toilet flushed when she triggered the motion detector. She released a startled, high-pitched gasp, and he…chuckled.

“Nervous?” There was a taunting amusement in his voice that he’d regret when she testified against him in court. “You don’t need to be. I don’t want to hurt you.”

That’s when she realized he could tell where she was by simply looking under the stall at her feet. Feeling frazzled and vulnerable, she hiked her skirt up to micromini level, reached up to hold on to the top of the left-hand side of the stall, then awkwardly planted both feet on the toilet seat. She needed to stay low so he couldn’t see her over the door.

How on earth had he gotten a gun past security? Man, that was maddening! They’d spent several million dollars on security and this wacko just breezed in with a gun, waltzing around like…Well, crooks could be very clever sometimes.

She felt tapping on the fingers of her left hand and looked up into his face over the left wall of the cubicle. Instinctively, she pulled her hand away as if he’d burned it and immediately lost her balance on the slippery lid. Desperate, she grabbed the wall with both hands, this time to keep from falling, and he grabbed one of her wrists to make sure she wouldn’t.

She quickly kicked off her shoes, righted herself, and yanked her arm out of his grasp.

“You’re going to break your neck if you stay there.” He rested the hand with the gun in it on the top of the wall—not exactly threatening her with it but casually reminding her that she didn’t have one. “Get down now and come out.”

Though the tone of his voice wasn’t harsh or menacing it left no room to doubt what he expected of her—full compliance. And in the fleeting seconds she took to decide if she would give it to him, she memorized the angles of his face, the small scar in his left eyebrow, the way his dark brown hair curled close to his forehead. His hazel green eyes were so keen and so aware they seemed capable of seeing through anything…including her.

Bonnie jumped the seventeen inches to the floor—always a better bearing than falling—and slipped her shoes back on. He did the same in the stall next to her and exited while she straightened her blouse and rearranged her skirt. She was appalled that she had nothing to defend herself with: no purse, no cell phone, no semiautomatic of her own.

He didn’t smile, but he nodded his head in approval when she left the stall. She edged forward and made a vague motion toward the sink. He waved his gun briefly. “Sure. Fine. But hurry.” He stepped up beside her at the sink. “Just so you know, I’m only taking one hostage today, and I’ve picked you. So anyone else who gets in my way from now on gets shot, and that includes anyone who tries to come in here while you’re stalling with the soap there.”

Immediately, all her friends on the fourth floor came to mind and Angela’s name came up neon red with fireworks and a marching band. The Watsons were bound to have arrived by now and Angela would be looking for her.

“S-so where are you planning to go next? From here, I mean.”

“You do speak.” She nodded and took note of the gently worn jeans and brown tweed sports jacket he was wearing—nice-looking on him but misconstrued by so many these days to be proper business attire. “I’m not sure where to go. I didn’t come in here planning to rob the place. I wanted…I don’t have a real plan yet.”

What? What kind of burglar was he to have no plan? This wasn’t some drive-through branch bank in the suburbs that passed out lollipops and coupons for a two-pound bag of grits with every transaction. This was Superior Atlantic, and everything about it—from the safe to the lamps to the locks on the front door—was state of the art. He was going to need a plan, a good plan.

“Well, this is a busy bathroom so…so maybe we can…um…Oh! The small conference room. All the windows have blinds and there’s a lock on the door. Wewe’ll be safe there until you iron out your plan.”

He studied her face. “Are you setting me up for a trap so you can escape?”

“No. Not yet. I…I need time to iron out my plans, too.”

One corner of his mouth curved up—like what she said was only half-funny. “Are you always this truthful?”

“I try to be, but no, not always.”

“Fair enough.” He took her by the arm and slipped the gun in the pocket of the jacket. “You look like a smart woman. Do I have to remind you not to do anything stupid? Don’t try to be a hero because I’m not going to shoot you—I’ll shoot your friends. Got it?”

“Yes.”

There was no one in sight when they left the lavatory. They stopped briefly at a large support column, surveyed the territory, hurried forward. Her knees wobbled, she was so afraid of making a mistake. His hand was very warm around her arm, his grasp firm but not painful. She was aware of his height and the strength of his body as he walked beside her, close and dangerous.

She wanted to scream—for several reasons—when she caught sight of the pinched-face and snide Valerie Barson from Mortgages coming toward them. Bonnie shuddered and shook her head, tried to feel shame for the overwhelming urge she felt to call out to her.

“What is it?” His voice was deep and low in her ear. “You okay? You’re not getting sick on me, are you?”

She turned to him slightly. “Please. Just please don’t shoot the woman in the purple dress coming toward us or I’ll go to hell for it.”

His expression was only slightly more curious than it was confused. And the self-inflated mortgage broker was oblivious to his stare when she passed.

“Bonnie.”

“Valerie,” she responded, though any other day she’d have said “Val” to annoy her—and just like that the encounter was over and behind them.

The Val/Valerie signal was weak and ambiguous, she knew that, and she didn’t expect Valerie to pick up on it, but she had to try. She had to stay aware and alert to any opportunity that presented itself.

“Not a good friend of yours, I take it.” She shook her head in confirmation. “And you were thinking of doing something to get her shot.” She shook her head again in denial and disbelief. “I like the way you think, Bonnie.”

She turned her head in surprise, remembered how he’d gotten her name—thanks a lot, Val—and decided that the more information she gathered about him…well, the more information she’d have.

“What’s your name?”

“Cal.”

“No last name, Cal?”

He turned his head and glanced over her shoulder when he heard a door close behind them. His grasp on her arm kept her from doing the same. She couldn’t see if someone was going into an office or coming out, if they were walking toward or away from them. “No last name. Keep moving.”

“This is your first bank robbery, isn’t it?”

“What makes you say that?”

“Well, no offense, but you’re not very good at it.” She met his eyes when he turned his head to look at her. They were a striking combination of deep green and golden brown—not too far apart—actually, really beautiful eyes for a thief. “There’s no real money above the first floor. No cash. Just forms, applications, a few checks, a lot of—” She stopped short and felt the small end of his gun in her ribs. Two young tellers came out of Human Resources chatting and happy. They smiled at both Bonnie and Cal as they hurried by.

“Careful,” he said, low and light and somehow making that innocent word sound threatening.

Bare minutes elapsed before someone else emerged from another office and stepped into their path. Another and then another. They would smile or speak if they knew her—it was almost like leaving bread crumbs for the police—and then suddenly, she remembered why she didn’t come this way very often.

“Bonnie.”

“Oh gosh, hello, Kevin,” she said, in much the same way Seinfeld greeted Newman. He was tall and so thin there was an inch of dead space inside his collar, with large brown eyes and a perpetually botched short, dark haircut. She was embarrassed to admit that they had had a very brief thing, nonsexual, thank God, several years ago, briefly, fueled by pity, for a short time. Big mistake. And he was married. Automatically, she stepped away to keep him out of her personal space and felt the robber at her back. She knew she should be too scared to stand so close to him, but frankly, Kevin was scarier.

“It’s good to see you, Bonnie. How’ve you been? What brings you down to our end of the hall?” She could picture saliva dripping from his wolfish fangs as he contemplated an early lunch—her.

“I’m fine. I’m showing my friend here, my good friend Cal around the bank.”

“Right. Good. Hi.” He stuck out his hand to the robber. “Kevin McNally. Good to meet you.”

Bonnie held her breath, unsure of what her captor would do. But then she had to wonder how, if he was holding her right arm with his left hand, he would hold the gun and shake hands with his right. And yet somehow, when he brought his right hand forward and locked his long-fingered, work-worn hand around Kevin’s soft, paper-pushing paw, it was empty.

Her mind instantly pulled up several spectacular scenarios of making a dash for the stairwell, or for an office with a phone in it while his hand was empty, but every plan came up with the same snag—too many people in the hallway.

“How’s it going?” Cal said, shaking Kevin’s hand like it was any old day on the calendar.

“I didn’t catch the last name.”

“He didn’t pitch it.” Bonnie stepped back into the exchange, to give the robber an easy out. She was aware that criminals needed plenty of choices and options. It was when they felt cornered or pinned down that the real trouble started “You don’t have to tell him, Cal, but if you do be prepared to get buried in loan flyers and credit card applications.”

She glanced up at Cal and caught him staring at her, bewildered and more than a little intrigued. A long second passed between them before he gave an indolent shrug and said, “I’m already on the mailing list.”

“That’s right. I forgot.” Trying to suppress any unnecessary gestures that might attract attention, she slipped her hands behind her back. “And more than the people who are our potential customers, we love the people who already are…more…than that.” Denim brushed against her fingers and for a quarter of a second they robotically palpated the leg underneath…at least she hoped it was a leg! She instantly made two fists and brought them to her sides. “Okay. That’s all. We have to go now. Bye, Kevin.”

“It’s great seeing you, Bon. Don’t be such a stranger.”

Cal was all but running to keep up with her. “Hey. Hey. Slow down. I won’t let him bite you.”

“Is that because you’re planning to bite me yourself? Because if you are you might as well shoot me now and get it over with, because I know what rape is about, buster.”

“Rape?”

“It’s about power and humiliation and…and little, bitty penises and I’m not going to give you the kind of reaction you want. Even if I feel it, I won’t show it to you. And…and that gun doesn’t really scare me either, you know. There are only five or six bullets in it and once they’re gone, they’re gone, and you’re dead meat. I’ll testify—”

“Be quiet.” The pressure of his grasp and the stern set of his jaw sealed her lips. Looking up, she saw that his eyes were murky green and hard as stone. “I don’t plan on hurting anyone unless I have to, okay? And I don’t rape. I don’t know what kind of bug crawled up your—”

“I put my hands behind me and felt your leg by accident.”

“So?”

“You moved.” His features softened with bewilderment. He looked totally unaware of the incident—and she felt like a fool. So she lied. “And I…well, I didn’t want anyone to see that you were holding my arm. People don’t walk around holding arms much anymore, and I hurried us away so no one would see and we could get to the small conference room quicker and…it’s there, behind you.”

He turned, looked both ways down the hall, and led her forward.

“Don’t go getting weird on me now, okay?”

“No. No, I won’t. That was…a misunderstanding. I’m better now. Much better.”

“Good.”

“Oh, you know what, though? Wait. Wait.”

“No.”

“I have a better idea.”

“Tell me inside.” He opened the door, turned on the light, pulled her into the room, and let go of her arm for the first time since they left the ladies’ room. It looked like one continuous move as he locked the door and twisted the knob to close the blinds, which were inside the window that was set inside the door. Then he hurried across the room to do the same to the the window that overlooked the street.

This was her moment and she was taking it. Two steps to the door and half a second to wrap her hand around the doorknob, just another spark of time to get the door open and she’d be gone.

“So who do you think will be faster, Bonnie? You getting through that doorway or me putting a bullet through your head?” he asked casually. He came up slowly behind her and gently steered her away from temptation.

And that was it. She was locked in a room with a robber and his gun. Her legs suddenly went weak and she sat down.

The small conference room was…small, and that’s why people didn’t use it often. There was space enough for the standard ten-foot table and the chairs if they were tucked neatly under the table, but put a body in a chair and there was no way to get around it. So Bonnie sat on the end where she had legroom. There was a cordless phone in the center of the table, no bathroom, no sink, no snack bar or soda machine.

“Are you okay? You look pale.”

She nodded. “I’m fine. I’m just not used to guns and thieves and missing important meetings and lying to people I hate.”

“You’re missing an important meeting?” he asked, and again she nodded as she ran a hand through her chin-length auburn hair—with really fabulous highlights at the moment. “What do you do? Do you think they’re looking for you already?”

“Oh yeah.” She was proud of the fact that people would miss her right away. A stupid thought at a time like this, she knew, but who wanted to be one of those invisible people who disappear and no one misses them. People with no friends and no family and no one who cares. One of those lonely people she was so afraid of becoming. “I’m a private banker.” She glanced at her watch. “And I’m about twenty-two minutes late for a meeting with a couple who made most of their money in car parts and wine. Interesting combination, don’t you think?”

“So you don’t work at this bank?”

“No, I do. I just don’t work with the general population anymore. I used to, but now people with certain amounts of money can hire me—through the bank, of course—to help them manage their finances, with everything from investment counseling to tax planning to legacy and philanthropic strategies to cash management. What about you? What do you do…when you’re not robbing banks, I mean.”

“Construction.” He finished looking through the blinds in all directions on the street side of the room and did an awkward step-sidestep combo in the eighteen inches of space between the conference table and the wall, to check out the hallway. “People with certain amounts of money, you said. What’s a certain amount?”

“Usually it’s at least $250,000 annually…although I do have two clients who started out with half that much.” She tapped her nails on the table, pinky to index finger. “One of them is my sister and her husband, even though I firmly believe that you should never do business with family…or mix family with money for that matter, so I’m actually doing both, but fortunately it’s working out fine.” She put her elbow on the table and hid her mouth behind her fist. “Sorry about that.”

“What?” His eyes were focused on the hall.

“I babble when I’m anxious.”

He glanced at her briefly and went back to his surveillance. Then, after a few minutes, he said, “My mother used to talk all the time. Constantly. Even when she wasn’t nervous.”

“And it drove you crazy, right?”

“Sometimes. Mostly it was like having a bell on a cat; it helped us to hear her coming so we could vanish.”

“Us?”

“I have a brother and a sister.”

“Do they know what you’re up to this morning?”

“Hell, I don’t know what I’m up to this morning.” He left his post at the door and step-sidestepped his way back to the window. “Got any suggestions?”

“On how to rob my bank? I don’t think so. But if you’d like to change your mind, you should do it pretty soon, before the police get here. The two of us can walk out the door together, part at the elevators, and go on about our lives. No one has to know about the past thirty minutes.”

He shook his head. “Someone’s going to know I was here this morning. Someone in this place is going to pay attention to me.”

She held her arms out wide. “What about me? You’ve got my full attention.”

“Can you get me a loan for half a mil?” His tone was testy. “Personal or business, fixed rate or not, I’m not picky. I’ll pay it back any way you want—if it’s fair. I just need the money.”

“For…”

“Land. Enough to build two hundred new houses on one-and-a-half-acre lots between The Plains and Markham.”

“For half a million?” She knew the area. It wasn’t far from Pim’s house and he was going to need more than half a million.

“Well, we already have $500,000 and the landowner says he’ll hold a note for that much more off the top.”

“I see. And your collateral?”

“Our business, our share of the land, my home, whatever you want.”

“Not your brother’s home?”

He shook his head once and lowered a blind with the nose of his gun. “He’s got kids.”

She couldn’t say for sure that she’d ever fantasized about being kidnapped or held hostage but she’d bet the villain was never as decent a man as Cal seemed to be. “I do think I can get you a loan, Mr…. um…” She smiled at his profile as he peered down at the street. “You still haven’t told me your last name, Cal.”

“I also haven’t told you the reason your…colleagues turned me down. And not just me but my brother, too, because he’s my partner.” She waited attentively—after all, talking money was her life. “I have a record.”

“Under the circumstances, I don’t know why I’m so surprised, but I am. You don’t seem like a criminal to me.”

“I’m not. Not anymore. The last time I was in jail was eleven years ago, for something I did four years before that. I was young. I was a punk. I paid my dues. Since then I’ve been busting my hump with my brother to keep our business together. And now that we’re at a place where we can finally take some risks and spread our wings a bit, we can’t because of my record.”

Felony arrests were covered by a bank policy, she knew, but at the moment she couldn’t say it was a good one, nor would she say it was fair. He had paid his debt to society; he had turned his life around and made something good for himself, but he was still being penalized.

And, no, the irony of discussing his sustained rehabilitation with his kidnap victim was not lost on her.

“Well, we’re not the only bank in town, you know,” she said optimistically. “I can’t believe those words came out of my mouth, but it’s true. Did you try anywhere else?”

It was time to move to the other side of the room again, so he nodded when he went by and said, “Three. Three other places. Same answer, same reason. What kills me is that if I weren’t around, my brother could do it on his own, easy.”

She felt miserable for him. “I’m sorry, Cal. I really am. It doesn’t seem fair to me either.”

“Don’t. You don’t have to say things like that just because you’re scared. I told you I wouldn’t hurt you.”

“I didn’t. I meant it. I am sorry everything turned out badly for you. And I’m sorry that what you’re doing now isn’t going to help matters,” she said, matter-of-factly. “But as much as I’d like to change things for you, I can’t.” She frowned. “Which makes me wonder why you picked me? Why not someone from Loans and Acquisitions?”

“What was the better idea you had before we came in here?” He smoothly changed the subject.

“Oh. It wasn’t important. I just remembered that Gil Hopkins’s office is empty for a while. He’s out having a couple hernias fixed. He’s a pretty big man and hernias can be dangerous if they’re not taken care of surgically.” He was looking at her with tolerance, like he might his chatty mother. “He’s in Accounting? There’s a computer in his office and a water machine and it’s just across the hall from a bathroom and there’s no street window, but it’s not as big as this. Do you get claustrophobic?”

“Seven years in prison and you get used to small places.”

“Seven years?” For some reason she’d been thinking a year for forging checks or hacking computers or jaywalking, maybe. “Can I…?”

“What?”

“Never mind. It’s none of my business.”

“What was I locked up for?”

“Yes, but don’t tell me. I’m just being nosy.”

“I got three years for taking a beat-up piece of shit truck when I was eighteen.” He wagged his head. “And I deserved that one, I guess. I thought I was real big stuff in high school…Someone your mother would have told you to steer clear of, I bet.” His smile was small and rueful. “If they hadn’t gotten me for the truck, they’d have caught me doing something else. Eventually. I was long overdue. But the second time, and this is seven years later when I’m about…twenty-five, I guess, I was almost completely innocent.”

“Almost completely?” She caught herself enjoying his story and tried to stop. It was bad enough that she liked looking at him so much.

“I resisted arrest. But you would, too, under the circumstances.”

“What circumstances?”

He glanced out the window in the door and crossed over to the street side, saying, “It was winter, right? So it was cold out but not freezing cold, you know what I mean?”

“I think so. When you can go without a hat but not without a coat.”

“Right.” He turned to look at her and she was struck by how peculiar it was to imagine him, with his open expression and easy manner, in jail, and it was flat-out weird to have to keep reminding herself that he was robbing the bank…and that she should be terrified. “That’s exactly what I did, too. I took off my hat, one of those knit caps, and stuffed it in the pocket of my coat. Everyone was wearing those big, green army coats back then, remember?” She shrugged, not really. “Anyway, I went to a buddy’s house to play poker one night, just an innocent nickel-and-dime game, and about twenty minutes into the game I get hot, take off my coat, and toss it on the guy’s couch. There were six of us and this seventh guy who came late; we made room for him and then he bailed before anyone cashed out. Some friend of somebody’s friend.

“So the game’s over. It’s about 2:30 in the morning. I grab my coat off the couch and head home. I’m not in my car ten minutes before I get flashing lights and pull over because I know about the busted taillight I haven’t fixed yet. I figured I’d give the same spiel I gave the other two times I got stopped, about the damage being new and having an appointment to get it fixed next week.”

“Haven’t you ever heard that honesty is the best policy?”

He gave her a quizzical look that amused her. “Don’t give me that, you’d have lied, too. Admit it.”

“I admit it.” She tried not to grin. “But you’re holding a gun on me so does that count?”

Cal’s lips curled up at the corners and his eyes sparkled with glee for a whole minute before he remembered the rule about not having fun with the captives.

“They didn’t believe me anyway. And when they called my plates and license in and found out I was a con they were all over me like a bad rash. I told them they could search the car, I had nothing to hide. I got out and put my hands on my head so they could frisk me. I’m an innocent man, right?” A derisive laugh slipped out. “I thought my head would explode when they pulled a baggie full of pills out of my pocket.”

Bonnie gasped, covered her eyes with her hands, and muttered, “It’s not your coat.” She slipped her hands down to cover her mouth and waited for him to continue.

“Also the bulk in my pocket that I thought was my cap—the cap I didn’t even check on after I stuffed it in my pocket because it was warm enough to go without it—was a gun. And it wasn’t just a concealed weapon, it was also a parole violation.” He let her groan and fall back in her chair in defeat. “You ever watch those cop shows and wonder how stupid the crook must be to try and outrun a cop car…and then a whole fleet of cop cars? Well, fear makes people stupid…and reckless. It made me real stupid and reckless. I head-butted one cop and rammed the other in the gut with my shoulder. They both went down, and I started running through the neighborhood, in the dark, with handcuffs on. Real smart.”

“And, of course, no one believed it wasn’t your coat.”

“Would you?”

Reluctantly, she shook her head. And okay, she was being pretty stupid and reckless herself because she believed him. She believed him and she liked him; liked the way his clear hazel eyes looked straight into her soul when he spoke and the solid, uncomplicated tone of his voice. She liked that his hands were rough and well-used but the nails were clipped neat and clean. There had to be some way to help him.

She watched as he crossed the room again. “Look, if we leave here now I swear I’ll do everything I can to help you get the money you need.” He was looking out on the hallway, taking a peek in both directions. “I know a few venture capitalists, maybe we can work something out there…or maybe a private investor…there are loans and grants from the government that hardly anyone uses. We’ll look everywhere and we won’t stop until you have all the money you need.”

He turned, leaned back into the corner behind the door, and looked at her. His eyes were soft and warm and scalpel sharp all at the same time. She felt a familiar, airy, boosting sensation below her diaphragm and immediately reminded herself that she was the captain of her own ship.

“Where were you a couple hours ago?”

“I know,” she said with sympathy. “And two hours ago I’d have had to turn you down for your felony arrests, too. The bank has rules. But I didn’t know you two hours ago and I wasn’t willing to use my own personal time to help you find the money you need.”

“Because now you know all about me.”

“Of course not, but I know more about you than when we first met, and I know I want to help you.”

For a long minute he stared at her, so long she finally squirmed in her chair. Eventually, he pushed away from the wall, saying, “Thanks, Bonnie, I appreciate the offer, but it’s a little too late. The cops are here.”

“No! Don’t answer it,” she said, when the telephone rang. She sprang from her chair and clamped her hand over his on the receiver. “Let me answer. I’ll tell them we came in here for a quiet, private meeting. I’ll tell them someone overreacted, that I’m here because I want to be.”

He shook his head and the phone kept ringing.

“Please, Cal, once they know this is a hostage situation for sure there’s only one way this can go—badly; our options will be gone and we won’t be able to turn back.”

“I understand. Now move your hand.”

“Um.” She scratched around inside for a minuscule amount of courage and used it all to say, “No. Now you’re making a mistake. Take another minute and think it through. Think about your life. About your brother’s life, and your sister’s. What about…do you have a wife?”

“Divorced.”

“Kids?”

He shook his head, his gaze on hers. “What about you? I bet some rich guy gobbled you…no ring?”

It was her turn to shake her head and she couldn’t remember the last time she permitted herself to feel self-conscious about never having been married. She withdrew her hands slowly and hid them out of sight, saying, “I was busy doing other things.”

“I’d like to know what, but first…”

A startled cry spilled out of her when she realized she’d been duped into freeing his hands. Her desperate lunge to secure them again ended in a sudden, frozen halt when a loudspeaker screeched outside the door.

“Joseph Sanderson, this is the police. Please pick up the phone so we can talk. Joe Sanderson. We know who you are, now all we want is to know what you need.”

He was a kidnapper and a thief and she couldn’t believe how hurt she felt that he’d lied to her about his name.

“Joe? Joe is your real name? Great. Fine. I suppose I get to call you Joe now?”

“You can if you want. My mother does, and a few people I grew up with, but I’ve been Cal to everyone else since I left home. Poor Joe had a reputation to live down, remember? My middle name is Calvin. Can you beat that for a stupid name?”

“Come on, Joe, pick up. Tell us what we can do for you.”

Cal held out both hands helplessly. “They’re asking so nice, I gotta pick up now.”

“No. I can still do it. I can defuse the whole thing right now. Please, Cal.”

An expression of wonder and…something close to fondness softened his features as he looked at her. He put his fist under her chin and gently swept the pad of his thumb across the rounded tip of her chin and said, “You asked—”

They both jumped when the phone rang again. He snatched it up impatiently and pressed the speaker end against his side.

“You asked why I picked you…I must have talked to a dozen people in this bank today. You were the only one who looked me in the eye, smiled at me, and wished me a good morning. If I hadn’t seen you I’d have gotten on the elevator and gone home empty-handed again. I’d have gone home to watch my brother pretend he doesn’t know it’s me that’s holding him back. But I did see you and…Damn it!” he said when the bullhorn in the hall started up again. He lifted the receiver to his mouth. “Can you wait a damn minute? I’m busy here. And it’s not like I’m going anywhere.” The phone went back to his waist. “Where was I?”

“But you did see me.”

He smiled and Bonnie’s knees went weak. “That’s right. I did. And I thought to myself, ‘Now there’s a woman. Friendly, honest, smart. A woman who would never give up, she’d never take anything on the chin and accept it. She’d fight.’”

“You got all that from a smile, a look, and a polite good-morning?”

“Was I wrong?” She shook her head—her rather inflated head—slowly. “But none of that is why I picked you. The reason I picked you to take as my hostage is…you were available.”

The gasp and the outrage and the humor and chagrin all arrived in the same breath moments before he burst into good-natured laughter. Swallowing chuckles, she whacked his left arm and then added her hand to his as he held the phone to his waist.

“That’s funny, Cal, but this isn’t. You’re in serious trouble, so get a serious attitude before you talk to them.”

“Yes, ma’am.” He scowled “Did I mention bossy? You looked bossy, too.”

She was about to make a retort when he put a finger to his lips and put the receiver to his ear.

“Sorry to keep you waiting. My hostage was giving me some flack…No, she’s fine, she’s just real mouthy.” His grin was teasing and so was her indignant eye roll. He held out the phone. “Tell them you’re okay.” She called out that she was and he took over again. “Here’s the deal, Ted, I haven’t decided what I’m going to do yet so back away from the door and stop calling every five minutes. I don’t want to go off half-cocked so don’t force me to. When I know what I want to do, you’ll know. Oh, and no more of that bullhorn, it makes my fingers twitchy.” He hung up. “How was that?”

“I think it was good. But don’t give them any reason to think I’ve been hurt or that you’re being abusive or they’ll storm us. Help me push the table up against the door. And turn out that light. You really are horrible at this.”

“You, on the other hand, are acting suspiciously adept at it.” He set one chair atop another and another, using them all to barricade the door. “Which leads me to wonder, why are you helping me?” He looked around and realized he’d stacked all the chairs and she had nowhere to sit but the floor.

“Thank you, but leave the chair. We should sit on the table anyway, for extra weight. Get under it if they try to break in.”

The looks they exchanged said it wasn’t a matter of if they tried to break in, but when—and if they both knew, why say it aloud?

“That’s another good suggestion. Have you thought of writing a book? How Not to Bungle a Burglary, and its follow-up, How to Be a Happy Hostage.”

Ignoring him, she sat on the tabletop next to him and started swinging her legs. She couldn’t help it—she hadn’t had a legitimate excuse to sit on top of a table since she was twelve.

“I’m helping you because I think you got a raw deal—not that any of this is going to make any difference. You know that, right? You can’t win this.”

“When you write your book be sure to stress the importance of faith and staying upbeat.” Bonnie turned her sternest look on him. He winked at her and she…gave up.

“Actually, I’m helping you because this is all my fault. When I walked by you, out near the elevators, you got sucked up into the vortex of my morning from hell.” He gave a soft, dismissive chuckle. “I’m serious. I woke up thirty minutes late today, my hair dryer blew up, I snagged my pantyhose, locked all my keys inside my condo, had a flat tire, took a taxi to work, was kidnapped, and held hostage.” She lifted her left arm. “And it’s not quite noon yet.” She turned her head to find him staring at her. “What?”

“Do you think that’ll hold up in court? Your Honor, I was just standing at the elevator, minding my own business—which, by the way, is grossly limited because of my two felony arrests—when this very pretty woman came along and I got sucked into her bad morning.”

“Works for me.” She especially liked the very pretty part.

“That’s the story I’ll use then. I like it.”

Bonnie nodded. “I’m going with Stockholm Syndrome.” He tipped his head and gave her a you-always-get-all-the-best-excuses face. “Well, why else would I be helping you?”

Cal sobered slowly and thoughtfully. “Don’t tell anyone, not even your best friend, that you did anything to help me in here. Not the slightest little thing. Okay?” She nodded. “And don’t make me out to be a monster either, all right? My niece and nephews might see the news.”

“You’re not a monster. I’d never call you one.”

He tipped his head in gratitude and slid off the table to check the window overlooking the street.

He was in great shape for a man his age…for a man almost any age, she decided, her gaze wandering from broad shoulders to trim waist, down long, lean legs. It was a fit, working man’s body.

Though he hadn’t said it aloud yet, they both knew that taking her hostage had been a gigantic mistake made in a rash moment of anger, fear, and frustration and now he was in over his head. If he could, she knew he’d surrender immediately, apologize to her, a vice president of the bank, and the cops, and go home. As it was, he was simply putting off going back to jail for as long as he possibly could. And she wanted to wait with him.

Knowledge and instinct were what she was all about…since doing her job was basically her whole life. She’d be the first to admit, but not to her clients, that the managing, projecting, planning, investing, and building of other people’s money was commonly an educated crapshoot—that she was pretty good at, by the way…And she wasn’t the first to say that.

But at the moment, what she knew in her head and felt in her gut was all wrong, backward, all tangled up.

She was in danger, his hostage, a stranger to him, but she felt like his friend and his partner—and okay, lover had crossed her mind once or twice, briefly, perhaps under different conditions. He’d had a gun in his hand the whole time she’d known him but he was no more a criminal than she was, she’d swear to it.

She looked across the room at him. He was holding his gun in both hands, staring at it as if it were a toy or like he could clearly see that it was way too small to defend him against the cannons he knew were coming.

The cops hadn’t given up and were calling every few minutes or so. It was her turn to pick up and hang up for a while.

“You know what?” She spoke softly into the silence that had stretched out between them for close to an hour. He looked up immediately, happy for the reprieve from his thoughts.

“What?” He pushed off the wall and walked halfway across the room to match her position: feet on the floor, butt on the table, arms propping up the torso.

“I was just thinking…I have a sister who’s eighteen months older than I am.”

He gave her a little smile and humored her. “What’s her name?”

“Jan. Janice. She’s Jan Everly now, but she used to be Jan Simms. Janice Simms? I’m Bonnie Simms.” A slow pucker started between his brows, but all he did was nod to encourage her to get to the point. “We…well, she mostly, went to school with a boy named Joe Sanderson. In Leesburg. What a coincidence, huh?” His pucker was now a Stage 4 frown. “Interesting, isn’t it?”

“It’s weird, is what it is. And I remember your sister. She’s the one who tutored Billy O’Neal for some test that he failed so he couldn’t play football on scout night and missed out on a college athletic scholarship.”

“Oh, give me a break. Billy O’Neal is a moron and that’s why he failed the test and couldn’t get into college.”

“And you…” He pointed an accusing finger at her, which she found unnerving. “You. God. Chicky Davis waited all night for you to show up at his birthday party and you left him hanging.”

“I was hanging, too, over a toilet bowl. I had the flu.”

“That…” He bonked her on the end of her nose with his finger. “…is a lie.”

“No.”

“Yes. I saw you. Peeking through the bushes on the other side of the garage at Chicky’s house that night. Just for a second, but it was you—but I didn’t know that until Monday. I even thought about exposing you…people hiding in bushes at parties are called entertainment, usually.”

“Why didn’t you?”

He shook his head once. “I don’t know.”

“I’ll never forget it. It was the first time a senior asked me out, and it was Chicky Davis, and it was his birthday—a special occasion—that he could have invited a million other girls to…The pressure was immeasurable. It’s no wonder I was nauseous…I threw up in those bushes, you know.” She hesitated, waited several beats. “So, is that all you remember about us?”

“About your sister, yeah. Nerdy chicks weren’t exactly my type.”

“She’s exceptionally bright.”

“Okay.” He looked away briefly, then came back to search her older face with younger eyes. “Your hair was more red back then, a lighter, brighter red. I’m amazed I didn’t recognize you, because you look pretty much the same—different haircut, softer curves but…you still have the greatest legs to ever walk out of Robert F. Kennedy High School.”

Her brows popped upward. “I was your type?”

He gave a short laugh and spoke bluntly. “No. Not even close. But there was a time when I would have made an exception. I wished I was more your type.”

“Mine?” Like, totally awesome. So rad, man. Really bitchin…Her inner teen was flippin’ out.

And he saw it. He smiled, pleased, and an amazing thing happened when he looked away in a surprisingly bashful fashion. She felt herself teetering on the brink of deep like…very deep like.

He cleared his throat. “The Monday after Chicky’s party, I asked around until someone pointed you out. I was curious. I wanted to see what kind of nobody junior would stand up a popular senior, an all-district quarterback…someone with Chicky’s clout.”

“I bet you were surprised.” She didn’t mean to sound self-deprecating.

“I was,” he said, still staring at his boots. “I felt…stunned, for weeks. I couldn’t believe that I didn’t see you first. You were all legs and…” He brought his hands up in front of his chest. They paused there for a fraction of a fraction of a second and went straight to his head. “And you had all that red hair.” He leaned close and looked at her. “What happened to your freckles?”

She shrugged. “My hair got darker and my freckles faded. Even trade.” He hummed and lowered his gaze to their hands, so close on the table between them. “So why didn’t you ever ask me out?”

He scoffed. “Well, for one thing, you stood up Chicky—”

She laughed. “I had the flu!”

“You were tested and proven undependable. You were unpredictable. You were a social disaster waiting to happen to the next guy who asked you out.”

“Maybe I didn’t like football players, what about that? Maybe I didn’t like Chicky.”

He gave her a look. “Everybody liked Chicky.” When he saw she couldn’t argue with that, he went on. “So what do you remember about me? Anything?”

“Yes, but wait just a second. What’s the other thing?” He frowned. “You said, for one thing, I stood up Chicky. What’s the other thing?”

“Oh. You weren’t my type. You were clean and bright and beautiful and innocent and the girls I dated…weren’t, for the most part. We liked to have all kinds of fun, if you know what I mean.”

“I think I do. Yes. I remember some of those girls.” He pretended to hang his head low. “And I knew who you were when I was a sophomore. You spent a lot of time with Max…um…”

“His name was Fred Maxton.”

“Yes. He made a friend of mine pull his gym shorts over his head and wear them around his neck for almost a month.”

He nodded like he was remembering, unhappily. “I grew up next door to Max. He was a year older, but we were pretty good friends—not that I approved of the things he did sometimes. And it’s not a good excuse for the things he did, but when he was a sophomore, he was a big, stocky guy and he got tipped, headfirst, into the cafeteria trash cans. Regularly. Kids are cruel to each other. And it goes around and around and around.”

“Can I ask a personal question?”

“Sure.”

“Earlier you said you didn’t have children. Is that by choice or…?”

“No. Definitely not by choice. I like kids. My brother’s kids are great. Having a few of my own would be…totally amazing. Great. But now…”

She didn’t want to think about now, at the moment.

“Did you come from a broken home?”

He shook his head. “I remember you used to live with your grandmother, right? Or was that someone else?”

“Pim is her name. My parents were killed in a train accident when I was five.”

“She’s still alive?”

“Oh yes.” She laughed softly and affectionately and started to tell him about Pim and the exciting life she led until she had to settle down again to raise the offspring of her only daughter. He listened while she told him of the faraway and exotic places Pim had been to, the magical and powerful people she’d met, and the many lessons and stories she learned to pass on to her and her sister. Everyone knows that being reprimanded or warned or alerted was always taken better and remembered longer if a fairy or a sultan or an evil dragon was involved…at least until middle school.

About halfway through the memories, she realized what they were doing—playing catchup. They were hurriedly cramming as much personal history into what little time they had to feel connected to one another; trying to live a lifetime together in a day.

Automatically, she answered and hung up the phone when it rang.

“You’re going to need to say something soon. Cops don’t play well in the dark.” He gave her a curious look and she smiled. “Okay. They don’t play well in any light.”

“Joe. You need to say something soon, man.” The man with the megaphone sounded frustrated. “Don’t keep us in the dark. Tell us how we can help you. Tell us what you want.”

“See?” They chuckled a little because the cop had used so many of her words. “And I have an idea of what to say…”

“Did you get that, Ted? I want a development loan for half a million dollars to be repaid to the bank at the going rate. I’ve already filled out all the paperwork. It’s in one of those offices down the hall.”

“Loans and Acquisitions,” Bonnie whispered helpfully, as she had been throughout the entire “demands” process.

“Loans and Acquisitions,” Cal repeated. “That’s where they are, all the forms I filled out. I do not want to steal the money, I just need to borrow it. Got that?” All Bonnie could hear of the negotiator was a buzzing noise from the phone at Cal’s ear. She watched Cal’s face for his reactions to what was being said. It was particularly expressive, his face…or she was particularly excellent at reading it. “I tried it that way, Ted, but they can’t put my past behind me.”

“Finish up. They’re talking to keep you distracted.”

He looked straight into her eyes and nodded; she reached out and took a light hold of the table edge for balance, and waited for the flutter in her chest to subside.

“That’s number one. Number two: I want total amnesty for everything I’ve done in this bank today. My hostage has agreed not to press charges if she walks out of here unharmed, so all you have to do is speak to the bank and the district attorney. And I want it in writing, both of them. I want loan papers and amnesty papers so I can read them.” He listened. “How long?” Bonnie held up four fingers and looked askance at him. He grimaced and shrugged. “Four hours. You have four hours, Ted. Is there anything you don’t understand?” His shoulders slumped in a frustrated fashion and he closed his eyes for several long seconds. “No. I meant is there anything about my demands that you don’t understand?” He covered the mouthpiece with his hand. “I think I’m Ted’s maiden voyage. He keeps talking to somebody else.”

“Like you do?”

He gave a silent laugh and turned back to the negotiator. “I don’t know. I’ll check and see if she wants to talk to you.” He covered the mouthpiece again and raised his brows at her in question; the choice was hers. When she looked hesitant, he tried to help. “They might not be as jumpy and anxious if they know you’re okay.”

She stepped closer and took it from him. The handpiece was warm from his palm and the moist scent of his breath lingered lightly as she pressed it to her face.

“Hello?”

“Ms. Simms, are you all right?”

“Yes. I’m fine, but…I’d appreciate it if you would meet Mr. Sanderson’s requests as soon as possible so we can all go on about our lives.”

“Is he armed, Ms. Simms?”

“Yes, of course. And also, could you tell my secretary, Angela, to contact my family and tell them I’m okay? And to be sure to apologize, profusely, to the Watsons. And to set up another appointment for the earliest possible day next week?”

“Is there a bomb in there, ma’am? Any kind of incendiary device?”

“Did you hear what I said?”

“Yes, ma’am. This conversation is being recorded, ma’am. Any bombs?”

“One moment, please.” She covered the lower half of the phone with the palm of her hand and met Cal’s eyes with hers. “He wants to know if we have a bomb.”

“Me,” he said firmly. “Not we. Don’t forget that.”

“A bomb could hold them at bay awhile longer.”

“It also might cause them to storm us sooner and harder with no thought to the hostage. You know, sacrificing the life of one to save the lives of many? Better say no.”

She did, but Ted was a suspicious soul.

“Is he forcing you to lie, ma’am?” Ted was eager for her to say something horrible about Cal, something incriminating or dangerous. What she wanted to do was extol his virtues…and not just the expression in his eyes or the grace of his big, calloused hands. She liked the way he protected his brother and concerned himself with her comfort and safety. She appreciated the kindness he’d shown her and his decision not to terrorize her by swinging the gun in her face all the time. She wanted to pummel the people who rejected his loan application, refusing him the second chance that everyone deserved. Angry and stressed, Bonnie’s hands trembled with frustration. “Ma’am, are you being coerced?”

“No! He wouldn’t do that! I have to go now.” She held the phone out to Cal who took it and then followed her with his eyes until she came to rest against a wall on the street end of the room.

With the shades drawn, the lights out, and the sun settling slowly on the other side of the building, it was getting dark and hard to see details—like cheeks flushed with emotion and a quivering chin. Then again, sometimes you don’t need any light to see.

“Four hours, Ted. Don’t disappoint me,” he said, keeping it short and to the point. He put the phone in the charger, then turned around to watch Bonnie with no little concern on his face. “Bonnie? Are you okay? Want me to add having Ted filleted to my list of demands?”

Her soft, nearly silent chuckle gave her body a slight shake and she turned around, her eyes brimming with unshed tears she was embarrassed for him to see. She held up one hand to stop him when he started to approach her, and swiped at a stray tear with the other.

“I’m okay. Honest. I’m having a minor meltdown. Not a big thing. Venting a little stress is all. I’m a girl. It happens.”

He kept coming and inside she groaned her dismay. What if she did something stupid and humiliating like…cry on his shoulder? What if she went temporarily insane and kissed him? It was intensely tempting. What if she totally lost it and allowed herself to care about him…care too much about him…maybe love him even? What if she…

So what if she did?

“I’m sorry, Bonnie. Really sorry,” he said, tipping his head to see her face. “This was such a bad idea. I’m sorry I dragged you into it.”

“You were angry and frustrated. That’s a lethal combination.”

“Doesn’t mean I get to take it out on you.” He took off his sport coat and tossed it onto the air-conditioning unit under the window. He peered through the blinds—up, down, all around—then opened them to let in the low glow from the streetlights, car lights and storefronts four stories below. “We need to stay down now, but at least we’ll have a little light. I think they’ve turned off the electricity. The good news is that once it gets too dark to see it should cool off a little.”

“Always looking on the bright side,” she said, teasing him. Stepping out of her shoes, she started to loosen the button at her throat. “Hot air rises, right?”

“Right,” he said, watching her slide down the wall to sit on the floor. “You want my jacket?”

“Thanks, but it’s not that much cooler down here.” She smiled cordially at him and he was about to explain that she could sit on his coat until he caught a glimpse of the glint in her eyes and realized she was teasing him.

“Smart-ass.”

“I am going to need a hand getting up, though. Straight skirts aren’t built for anything but looking good.”

“Well, I gotta tell ya,” he said, lowering himself to his knees and sitting back beside her. “Yours is looking very good.”

“Oh, I bet you say that to all your hostages.” She was unbuttoning the cuffs of her white silk blouse and rolling up the sleeves.

“As a matter of fact, I do. But I don’t mean it unless I’m saying it to you.”

She blushed. She did. He was playing with her and she was flattered…and she was also an idiot. There was no future for her with this man—no off-white wedding, no kids, no rocking chairs on the wide front porch at sunset.

Yet, she more than liked most everything about him. His humor and concern for her. His looks, of course, but also the strength it had taken to turn his life around after being in jail. And to throw it all away on a dream? What was that? Heroic? Reckless? Insane?

“I’m very proud of that, you know.”

“What’s that?” he asked, shifting slightly closer to her, as if the wall was too lumpy where he sat before.

“My weight and being able to fit into the same size clothes I wore twenty years ago.”

He smiled like she’d just told him an interesting body fact—like her foot was the same length as her forearm.

“My weight is one of the many things I am inordinately proud of—one of the many vain and frivolous and self-satisfying things I fill my time with because, aside from my job, there is nothing in my life that is real or true or praise-worthy.”

He was looking confused and a little wary now. “Everybody feels like that sometimes. I bet if you—”

“No. Not me. There are no service clubs in my life or charitable organizations, no music, no art, no white-water rafting, no neurotic obsession with a hobby. All I do is work.” She sighed deeply and leaned her head back against the wall. “I used to be a firm believer that having a husband and children was no way to define yourself. But it has recently occurred to me that if ‘wife and mother’ isn’t a definition then neither is ‘banker.’ Isn’t that right? Or ‘president’ or ‘dishwasher’ or ‘Indian chief.’ Really, in the end, it’s not what I do with my life, it’s what I do every day that matters.”

After several long seconds of silence crawled by, she opened the eye closest to Cal and had to smile at the thoughtful mystification on his face. She had to like a man who at least tried to understand the deepest, darkest inner workings of a woman’s mind.

“Right?” she asked just to get his reaction.

“Well…maybe…And maybe your blood sugar’s low from not eating all day. Want me to see if they’ll slide a cheeseburger under the door?”

She opened both eyes then and laughed. “No. Thanks.” She hesitated. “Actually, all that was a prelude to me telling you that I…admire you. I mean, this whole thing was a fiasco, of course, and you’ll probably end up in jail—”

“That’s so admirable.”

“But your heart was in the right place. Your intent was good. You didn’t do it solely for yourself: You did it mostly for your brother, so he wouldn’t be punished for something you did…and already paid for. You haven’t hurt anyone. You’ve been kind and sweet.”

“You think I’m sweet?”

“I can’t even remember the last time I did something brave or self-sacrificing.”

“I’m sweet?”

“Everything in my life revolves around me.”

“Sweet?”

“I don’t know when I became so selfish…so empty. Pim taught me better.” She turned her head and looked at him. He was already looking at her. “I don’t normally need this kind of…hammer to fall on my head to get me to recognize that I’ve strayed too far off the path. It’s insane, I know, to thank you for taking me hostage, but I’m afraid I’m going to have to because—”

As slow and smooth as a cake rises, as natural as water flows downstream, Cal leaned forward and pressed his lips against hers. They were soft and warm and jerked her pulses through the roof. He pulled away briefly, but she could still feel his breath on her lips, across her cheek, the heat of him inside her personal space. When he kissed her again his mouth was open and his tongue probed. She obliged, and the blood in her veins caught fire.

She could smell fresh sawdust and wind on him, and the large, calloused hands she so admired were unexpectedly tender as they stroked her cheek and slipped over her throat to the back of her neck, to support her head while he took the kiss deeper.

She lifted one jelly-muscled arm to his shoulder to cling—pooling on the floor beside him being out of the question. Her arm couldn’t stretch the breadth of his shoulders; the muscles in his arms and back were like stone—and she couldn’t recall feeling safer or more protected…or more vulnerable. Ever.

She loved it.

“I knew it,” he said breathlessly, his lips on her cheek and temple, then her throat. “I knew the first time I saw you, that day at school, I knew kissing you would be outstanding.” He kissed her other cheek and then the space between her eyebrows, like he couldn’t stop himself, like he couldn’t get enough. “I knew about your lips, too. So soft.” He caressed hers with his and then looked at her. “I even knew you’d taste special…like that one drop of pure sweetness you get from a honeysuckle. Remember? Did you do that as a kid, suck on honeysuckle?”

She nodded vaguely, palming his face and stroking the side of her right thumb across the stubble on his left cheek. “I did. I also did it last summer in Pim’s garden.”

His smile was wide and bright and quite possibly the sexiest thing she’d seen in fifteen years. “You…in the honeysuckle…in the summertime. Pretty picture.”

She shook her head and gave a soft laugh before averting her eyes. “My mental picture of you is pretty…clichéd, I’m afraid.” She peeked up through her lashes at him. His smirk and his laughing eyes were worth her discomfiture. “Tool belt, no shirt, jeans tight enough not to get caught in machinery…a black metal lunchbox.”

“What’s in my lunchbox?” he needed to know.

This was fun. She scooted back against the wall and wiggled around to get more comfortable on the floor.

“Need a cushion?” he asked.

“Yeah. But a couch would be better. Oh! Wait!” Too quick to stop him, he reached behind her, took hold of her waist on both sides and hauled her up onto his lap—sidesaddle because of her skirt. She immediately attempted to get off. “Cal, don’t be crazy. I’ll break your legs. At the very least, I’ll put them to sleep. You can’t be comfortable. The floor is hard enough without adding the weight of a second person to—”

Without word or warning he leaned forward, wrapped his arms around her stiff, awkward body, pulled her close to his chest, and then slowly lowered them back against the wall.

“Isn’t this killing your back?”

“Shhh. Relax. You might well be the last woman I hold in my arms for a while.”

“Oh. I’m so sorry…”

In the near dark his finger found her lips. “That was a statement, not a complaint.”

“Oh.” She felt her body relax on his, like butter relaxes on hot toast. “I see…”

“Good. I want you to see. Now tell me what’s in my black metal lunchbox.”

She laughed softly, then smiled as she picked up the steady, unhesitating rhythm of his heart with her ear against his chest. She realized then that it wasn’t what they talked about now as much as the intimacy of talking in the dark, the touching, the trust and closeness that mattered most. “Two sandwiches, two peach fruit cups, a spoon, a paper napkin, and a thermos of chocolate milk.”

She bounced on his chest a little when he chuckled. “What kind of sandwiches?”

“One is peanut butter and marshmallow.” He groaned. “No, it’s really good. You’ll love it. And the other one is this tofu-tuna stuff my sister makes that’ll have you crying it’s so—”

The clatter of metal on wood came first and immediately after the noise was so loud it took several seconds to determine that the chairs stacked at the door had fallen.

The signal.

They were coming in.

Cal pitched her into the darkness but she instinctively knew he’d sent her somewhere toward the table so she could crawl under it for protection.

“Cal?” She put her head down to let her eyes adjust—and to pick up the reins of what nerves she had left—then crawled cautiously away from the pale light from the street toward the dark shadow of the table. A loud, ramming boom reverberated in the room, and she screamed when they hit the door again. In the near darkness there was no way to tell how much space the table had given them. “Cal!”

“Right behind you.”

But he wasn’t. It was true that losing one sense—like sight—made the other senses—like hearing—stronger and more sensitive. And Cal was across the room to her left; he hadn’t moved yet.

She tried to picture what was there, what he might be after. A third resounding crash and she heard the table shriek in protest as it moved. Still, the noise and the force and the tremor through the room were nothing compared to the pressure and the power of each quaking beat of her heart.

Finally, she made contact with the table and put her back to it. She knew the other long wall was directly in front of her, the door was on her right and to her left was Cal, the street window, the air-conditioning unit below it, Cal’s jacket…and his gun in the pocket thereof.

“Cal, what are you doing? Leave it there. Get away from it.”

“Christ. Go back under the table, Bonnie. Please. I’ll be there in a second.”

“What are you doing?” Their voices rose and fell with every assault against the door, and with every blow the table moved a little more and the door opened a breath wider.

For an analytical, numbers kind of girl, she was acutely aware that what felt like slow motion was in fact flashing by in milliseconds, and that wisdom, practicality, and education were meaningless when fear prevailed and instinct took over.

Her instinct just then was strong and piercing. She needed to be with Cal. Good thing, too, as she found she’d been following the sound of his voice from the start.

However, she didn’t have the time to probe that instinct or the meaning of the relief that passed through her body like a frigid chill when she caught the subtle movement of solid in shadow. Her heart embraced this tiny piece of peace, protecting it from a world of fear and noise and danger.

“Cal?”

“Oh God, Bonnie!” She watched the black form, low in the shadows below the shine from the streets, lean forward, waving his arms through the space in front of him. “Baby, go back under the table. You’ll be safe there.”

“Come with me.” She reached out and touched him; he immediately had a solid grip on her and pulled her to her feet…into the light and into his arms. “Be safe with me.”

“Man, I wish things could have been different for us.”

“It still can be. There can still be an us. There might be a little jail time but, well, we’ll have the longest engagement ever.” He chuckled and she leaned back so she could see the shadows of his face; her hands moved to his waist. “This reminds me, though…”

The crash came again and they trembled as one.

Much better.

“This reminds me that when we get out of here I may…assault Ted. He’s a lousy negotiator. Both our demands were perfectly reasonable.”

“Mine, Bonnie. My demands, remember that.”

“Should we be sitting on the table? More weight?”

She felt his chest rise and fall with a resigned sigh, felt his arms tighten around her shoulders. She tightened hers around his waist—just in time for another room-rocking wallop.

“No. We won’t get that much more time,” he said. “And we don’t want to piss them off by resisting.”

“Then come back and…” She faltered when she moved her arm a little and felt something hard and unbodypart-like beneath her forearm. “…and get under the table with me. Please, Cal.”

She felt his fingers skim lightly over her face, coming to rest on the closed seam of her mouth as her fingers detected the open seam of the pocket in the jacket he’d put back on.

“I can’t,” he whispered, his face so close she could feel his breath on her lips—though she could barely make out any part of him or the pocket that she was slipping her hand into. “I need to stand and take responsibility for what I’ve done here, not cower under the table with my hostage. And I need to know you’re safe. Please. It’s almost over. I promise. Now go!”

He gave her a light, halfhearted shove and she staggered backward into the dark. But she wasn’t as disoriented as she might have been. The next blow didn’t just reveal the location of the door, it also let in a small wedge of the bright light from the hallway. It was both helpful and terrifying as it shed a momentary light on the gun in her hand.

The gun she’d pulled from Cal’s pocket. The suspiciously lightweight gun. The gun that wasn’t the cold, smooth, metallic texture of tempered steel, but the tepid, rough, brittle touch of plastic made in China.

“What the hell is this?”

“How’d you get that? Bonnie. Give it back.”

“A toy? A squirt gun? You kidnapped me with a squirt gun?”

“Bonnie…”

The police rammed the door again and let in enough light to show Cal searching the air for her with his arms outstretched. Their eyes met briefly before the darkness engulfed them again. He looked angry and determined. She immediately went to the floor and crawled six feet away.

“I told you I didn’t want to hurt anyone,” he said, like she didn’t know that if she spoke he’d have a bead on her location. “And no one will sell me a gun because of my record, you know. A plastic gun from the gift shop across the street was the best I could do.”

“There is no gift shop across the street.” She shouted over the racket at the door, which probably masked her location, but she moved three feet to her left anyway. “And I bet that squirt gun belongs to one of your nephews. This was your plan all along.” She moved to the right this time, and when the next crash on the door came she was hidden in dark shadow. “No wonder you didn’t have any trouble getting it through security.”

“The gift shop is in the lobby of the hotel across the street. Between the bar—where I went after getting hammered by your bank—and the men’s room—where I went after getting hammered on my own. It was in the window, and that’s when I got the idea. I just wanted to scare them. I wanted them to feel real fear, fear for their futures, let them see how it feels but…”

“But what?”

“Give it back, Bonnie.”

“But what?”

“I didn’t want to go back to prison,” he hollered in frustration. Then more calmly added, “I don’t ever want to go back to prison. So I walked back to the elevators and while I was waiting I decided that going back to my brother without the loan again was just another kind of prison I didn’t want to be locked up in.”

“Then I came by.”

“And you were everything I said before,” he said, sounding a little uneasy. “In fact, you’d already disappeared into the bathroom before I came up with a way to get my brother what he needed most.”

“By kidnapping me with a plastic gun. A plastic gun…to kidnap me with.” She knew it didn’t make sense but thought if she said it often enough it would…eventually. “But that’s just stupid. It’s crazy. It’s…”

It’s suicide came to mind mere seconds before his hand latched onto her left arm.

“No, Cal. No. Suicide by cop is not what your brother needs.” Struggling to get free of him and to keep him away from what looked like a very real gun at the same time, she knew their fracas wouldn’t last long—he was bigger and stronger than she was.

However only a few were more clever than she was…

“Your brother loves you. And your sister loves you. And what about my long engagement?” She brought her knee up between his legs and tagged him with a warning. It made him release her immediately, step back, and bend a little to protect himself—long enough for her to tuck the squirt gun in her bra because her waistband would be the first place he looked for it when he discovered her hands were empty. “I can’t let you do it, Cal. I care about you. Very much.”

And the police were taking their own sweet time…

She wrangled with him to keep her hand just out of his reach, but he easily overtook her, coiled his arm around her waist with her back against him in quest of the toy, and ultimately put his hand flat on her chest—her second best hiding place.

Next time she kneed a man she would have no mercy.

“Help!” She was hoping to distract him until she could get free. “Help me! The gun is plas—”

He silenced her with his hand.

“Shhh.” His breath was warm on the side of her neck—and all he did was hold her, seeming to be in no hurry to retrieve his deadly weapon.

Two easy jerks of her head and he freed her mouth immediately. She felt him at her back—shielding her, supporting her, enjoying her weight and form against him. He sighed and she guessed he was in another world for a few seconds, a happier world, a world where he’d made different choices, had a different life. She wanted to be there with him.

What they did have was one perfect moment—as warm as a lifelong friendship, as thrilling as sex, as intimate as any kiss—and they relished it.

Suddenly the table screamed one last time and the door gave way. Light flooded into the darkness of the small conference room like a Hollywood spotlight. Then everything happened at once.

In milliseconds she felt Cal’s fingers skim across her breast; the cops were shouting and screaming like they were going to war; Cal’s other arm was like something mechanical as it drew her to his left and then pushed her backward, behind him, as far as he could. Hard to throw backward. She did a short spin off the end of his right hand and without hesitation shot straight to his left and the stupid plastic gun it held.

She heard him say, “Please, Bonnie, get away from me,” like she was accustomed to obeying his orders. Then he refused to give her the toy…so she had to scratch his arm, deeply, and dig her nails into the back of his hand.

“Son of a bitch!” Either the surprise or the pain loosened his grip enough for her to twist the weapon free. She held it in the air as high as she could and turned away from him toward the officers tripping over chairs as they streamed into the room.

“It’s over,” she hollered back at them, holding the toy out to them for the taking. “No one’s been hurt. I have the weapon.” Two rapid claps of violent thunder wobbled the room. “It’s a toy. A plastic squirt gun. See?”

She frowned at the hot, searing pain in the middle of her abdomen and…high on her right shoulder. Not a good time to be sick, she knew, as the room teetered around her. Maybe it’s just aftershock…

“Oh God, Bonnie!” Cal put his arms around her, so warm and strong, pulling her back and down to the floor so he could cradle all but her legs on his lap. “Why did you do that? Why?”

The lights came back on with a glaring vengeance. She had a flash of a thought that the light had taken all the romance from the room, made it look small and…functional, but that was when she noticed the blood on Cal’s hands.

“Cal.”

“I wasn’t going to do it, I swear,” he was saying, trying to sound at least as angry as he was fearful for her and failing pitifully. “I had everything under control. I was going to surrender.”

“Are you…? Oh. Oh! It’s me! Cal, I think I’ve been shot!”

“I know, sweetheart, just be still. You’ll be fine. There’s an ambulance coming.”

There was a policeman standing behind Cal, but Cal kept jerking away from him.

“Cal,” she said, turning slightly in his direction and hissing when a stabbing pain ripped through her stomach. She was getting sleepy. “Cal, listen, I’m…I’m really sorry everything turned out badly.”

“Shhh.”

“I’m sorry I hid at Chicky’s party.”

“Me, too.” He leaned forward and quickly buzzed her lips with his, then barely breathed the word, “Honeysuckle.”

She grinned and closed her eyes to slow the spin of the room, let her senses float to every part of her body that touched his and soaked in the bliss of being near him.

Time may or may not have passed, but the next thing she heard was someone asking for directions to the patient.

“Cal, Cal,” she said, unable to hide the panic in her voice. “Stay with me.”

“Shhh. The ambulance is here. You’ll be fine.”

“I’ll never be fine again. They’ll take you away.”

“Shhh. I’ll be fine. I promise.”

She let her forehead rest on the stubble of his chin and for a moment they shared a minim of peace. Then she whispered, “I wish life could have been better for us.”

Even with her eyes closed, she felt the spinning begin—not a swirling spinning like inside her head, but spinning-spinning like…a Frisbee…or…a magic carpet…

Cautiously, she opened her eyes, but either the room or the rug was spinning so fast it made her eyes ache trying to see anything. She closed them again. The next attempt was better as she limited her field of vision to the end of her arm and…there was the beautiful, brightly colored rug she had framed and hung on her office wall. Only she didn’t have an office and…and it was Pim’s rug. And Cal…no, Joe was going to prison and…no, Cal was.

Suddenly, she cried out in panic and uncurled like a party favor—flat on her back. Her fingers scurried over her torso like crazed spiders, looking for bullet wounds and blood. She found none and for a moment was torn between enormous relief and wretchedness.

She rested her hands on her soft, loose-muscled abdomen, felt the pull of her tummy-tuck jeans, and came close to weeping with joy. She loved her flab! She did. She didn’t want any more of it but loved what she had. It was a reminder that her original life was so much better than it could have been, that there was some…divine, celestial reason that things turned out the way they did instead of how they might have transpired.

Looking up into the rafters, she thought the rotations might be slowing down, but closed her eyes again to keep from getting sick. She couldn’t really recommend carpet travel…except to those who had lost their way or needed to see what was truly important in their lives…It was nauseating and disturbing on several levels.

When the rotating slowed and the whir started to fade, she thought she heard her name being called. Seconds later, she was positive.

“Jan? Is that you?” She sat up, using her hands on the carpet to support her. She opened her eyes. The carpet wasn’t going any faster than a merry-go-round now and shapes were…taking shape.

“Bonnie? Can you hear me?”

“Yes. Yes.” She put a hand over her heart. “You sound so good! I’ve missed you so much.”

“But you didn’t go anywhere, honey.” She watched the carpet stop and hover high for several seconds—like it had its motor running. “You’ve been spinning up there for the last four or five minutes. I was afraid to leave you, in case I was hallucinating. And you had my cell so…Oh! Here it comes. I think it’s landing. This is so bizarre.”

And you don’t know the half of it, sister, Bonnie thought.

As if it had a crack pilot at the helm, the rug settled gracefully over the steamer trunk and positioned Bonnie like she was sitting on a high bench. She felt the heat of it against her palm and the nicest kind of thrill passed through her body as the gentle guardian—or whatever—in the rug bid her farewell.

“Thank you,” she murmured softly, spreading her fingers wide and pressing down significantly. “I won’t forget.”

Bonnie hopped down off the trunk and crushed Jan in her arms like an avocado heading for guacamole. “You are the best sister. You’re the only constant in my life,” she told Jan. “No matter what version of my life I’m living in, you’re there with me.”

“Of course I am. So what happened? You were awfully quiet up there. Thank God you’re all right. You are all right, right?” Jan was nervous and excited all at once and talking very quickly.

Startled, they both squealed as the carpet moved suddenly, lifting swiftly and hanging in the air, then rolling up like a shade in a window. It came down again softly, draped itself gracefully across the steamer trunk. Then it lay still, and Bonnie sensed it was inert, like the dollhouse or the birdcage in the corner. Jan kept a wary eye on it as she said, “What happened to you?”

“So much,” she said, walking backward, pulling her sister excitedly toward the attic steps. “You’re not going to believe it…and I can’t tell you right now…”

“Ah, come on!”

“And I need you to stay with Pim for a bit, can you do that?”

“I do have clients, you know. I’m a professional real estate broker.”

But more than a savvy businesswoman, Bonnie knew her sister was a bone-deep romantic.

“That’s fine. It’s not a big deal, I guess. I was going to tell Joe about all this, but it can wait until after the nurse comes. Oh, here’s your cell phone.”

“Joe?”

“Yes. My husband?”

“But I thought you were going to wait for him to come back to you, for your self-esteem.”

“More like my pride. And I don’t think there’s any room for pride when you’ve seen how fragile life is.” She turned off the overhead light and started down the attic steps. “When you’ve seen how one decision can alter your whole destiny.”

“You saw something up there? What’d you see? A premonition? A past life?”

“No.” Bonnie held the door open at the bottom and waited for her sister to come through. She closed it and shook the handle to make sure it was tight, then turned to Jan. “I saw my life as it might have been. I lived it.”

“In five minutes?”

“I think that must be part of the magic, because it felt like one very long day in a very different lifetime.”

“Different how?”

Bonnie sighed in frustration and palmed her sister’s cheeks. “Please. Stay with Pim. I’ll be back as soon as I can and then I’ll tell you all about it. I promise.”

“You’d better. I also want to know what happens when you see Joe.”

Bonnie grinned, then skipped down the main staircase while Jan remained on the second floor, leaning over the railing.

“I’ll be back soon. Put on a pot of coffee.”

 

“Hi,” she said when he opened the door. She was as anxious and jumpy as she had been on their first date—and even more in love. Just the sight of his face was a balm to her soul and the sound of his voice was like heaven.

“Hey.” His surprised expression dissolved into a hesitant happiness. “Is everything okay? The kids?”

“Yes. Fine. Everybody’s fine. Can I come in?”

“Sure.” There was still a small ripple of concern on his brow as he watched her pass by. He twisted a bit to close the door. When he turned back, she hurled herself at him—and the ripple was gone. He wrapped his arms around her and buried his face in the curve of her neck. They clung to one another for a long moment.

“Come home now,” she murmured close to his ear, her eyes closed, her senses absorbing his every nuance like she hadn’t absorbed them all before. The strength of his arms, the scent of warm shampoo and fabric softener around his neck, the sound of the hum—that hum—from deep inside him when he was overwhelmed with happiness.

She started slipping down his body and opened her eyes in time to meet his hazel gaze.

“I’m not going home until you hear why I left.” When her feet touched the floor, he released her. “I don’t want to be at home if you’re not there. And you haven’t been there, Bonnie.”

“I know. I wasn’t.” She hesitated. “But I didn’t know I wasn’t…and that’s just the first of a lot of strange things I’m about to say, so I need you to trust me.”

“I always have. Do you want to sit?”

“Not just yet. I’m nervous.”

“Okay.” The corners of his mouth twitched, but he didn’t laugh. He leaned back against the wall just inside the door. “I’ll stand, too.”

She nodded and was taken aback at how much better that made her feel.

“All right, now I know how this is going to sound but…I’ve been on the other side of the fence.”

“What fence?”

“The one where the grass is always greener on the other side…that fence. Only the grass isn’t greener, Joe, not even close. And anyone who says it is will only find out that it’s…you know, the green stuff the football players like?”

“Money?” His tone was dubious.

“No. Ah…Astroturf. The grass on the other side of the fence is Astroturf. It just looks real, but…well, maybe it is real and not Astroturf, because it seems like a life but it’s a life where we’ve made all the wrong choices…or just different choices, maybe, but we, you and I, we’ve made our best choices in this life. We’re so lucky, Joe.” She banded her arms around his torso and hugged tight. “We have so many of the things you can’t buy with money.”

“So then…” He rubbed her back slowly. “…we can afford a couple of black plastic squirt guns?”

Her heart stopped and a flush of fear washed over her. Which life was she in? Her life or her if-only life? Was this Joe or was it Cal in her arms…and if it was Cal, where was her Joe?

“Joe?” she raised her head to look up at him.

“Yes.”

“Cal?”

“Not really.”

“Then what…how do…” She caught herself, unsure if her mind could handle any more magic today.

He scooped her up close to his chest again and dropped a kiss on the top of her head.

“I’ll try to explain what I know so far.” She heard him swallow and knew he was thinking it through to get it all straight. “When I—Cal in the other life, got out of jail ten years after you died…”

“I died?”

He nodded. “One of the first things he did was to drive over to Pim’s house. Not our Pim, the Pim in his world.”

“Right.”

“He wanted to explain what had happened and apologize to her and your sister. He told her everything, even about the plastic gun. He was still devastated. He just couldn’t forgive himself for what happened. He started to cry and…Pim took mercy on him.”

“She took him up to the attic.”

“Yes. And explained about the carpet on the way up.”

“Explain it to me.”

“I’ll tell you what I know. Wanna sit yet?”

“Is this story going to get weirder?”

He smiled encouragement and pulled her down beside him on the couch.

“First she had him…Cal, dig the carpet out of its hiding place in the attic, haul it down the steps, and roll it out in the big part of the hallway by her bedroom door. She said it would take him anywhere in his life he wanted to go if he wished it. He could stay there for only one day to fix wrongs or to relive something that made him happy, but if he didn’t make a second wish to bring him back, before dead of night, he’d be stuck there forever.

“There, apparently, is a parallel world, his life because he made certain choices. And yours, if you’d chosen differently. The carpet takes you to what might have been.”

“But I didn’t know there was a ‘this life’ in that one, not like I know about that one in this one…did that sound like English to you?”

He laughed. “Yes. And actually I wondered about that, too, when Pim was explaining it—after all, Cal was falling for you and you did sacrifice yourself for him…not that I’m the least bit jealous.”

“You’re not really, are you, because I didn’t know—”

“No, honey, I’m not. Bad joke. Anyway, Pim says it’s part of the magic in the carpet: You don’t remember traveling to a different life, but you remember everything when you get back to yours.”

“That makes sense. So I can see how much fuller my life is and how the choices I made, like marrying you, made me a better person, less self-centered, more caring, not as rich, but perfectly comfortable, with time to cuddle with the man who loves me, who I adore and never want to be apart from again?”

“I believe so.” He chuckled and leaned forward leisurely to give her a slow, warm, wet kiss that made her want to cry for some reason. “Want to hear the rest of this now or go straight to bed?”

“I better hear the rest now—I might not be in any kind of shape to hear it later.”

“Okay. Um…Oh. The memory-loss business…You also forget about the second wish to get back. Apparently, that’s the chance you take, the danger of the magic; it has to come from you spontaneously.”

“For the same reasons, don’t you think?” she asked quietly, her mind drifting back. “And because if it were too easy…no one would…”

“What?”

“Pim. The other Pim, she tried to warn me. She knew I had the rug—and I did—framed over the couch in my office, and that I was in danger and had to make things right before dead of night.”

He shook his head. “I keep hearing that. When the hell is ‘dead of night’?”

She shrugged and they both chuckled, glad simply to be talking, alone, in a quiet place, together, at the same time.

Joe let loose a full-sized sigh and took another step toward bedding his wife. “Cal considered going back to the day he met you but he figured that would only turn out the same. He thought of going back to before his felony arrest, but then he never would have met you…and he wanted very much to meet you so…he went back to the night of Chicky’s birthday party.”

She gasped. “But that’s the night we…”

“And when I saw you hiding in the bushes I had the same choices Cal had—ignore you and assume that you’d find your own way home or flush you out and make sure.”

“Ha. Flush me out. That’s a good one.”

“But Cal hadn’t made the worst choice of his life yet—which was not meeting you—so he was still Joe, me, at the time. There was no parallel life for him yet. And it was me who went around behind the garage and started to pretend I was going to whiz in the bushes and…”

“…heard you scrambling to get out of the way.”

“…heard me scrambling to get out of your way.”

They said it together and laughed.

“I wonder why the kids don’t ask how we met more often.”

“I love how we met,” she said, a dreamy look on her face. “You very patiently listened to me tell you who I was and how nervous I was and that I only agreed to go out with Chicky because I didn’t know how to tell him no and I felt kind of nauseated and he wasn’t really my type and I might actually die if I had to join the party. And you told me to wait there and came back two minutes later with two cans of Coke and you gave me one. You said that you told Chicky that you heard I had the flu and not to tell anyone any different. And then you walked me home, in the moonlight, with your hands in your pockets. And I was in love before we reached the front gate.”

“For me it was when you came thrashing out of the bushes all flustered and pissy and indignant. Like you had every right to be sitting in those bushes without getting peed on. Then you got embarrassed, which was almost as much fun.”

“Pht.” She sobered. “So meeting me kept you from becoming Cal.”

They searched one another’s face and it didn’t seem to matter that they’d seen it millions of times before. Every day there was something new—a new laugh line, a single gray eyebrow hair, the fluctuation of fat in their cheeks, worry and wonder.

Joe drew his hand up between them and traced the edges of her lips with his finger while saying, “When dead of night came I was sound asleep in my bed in my mother’s house.”

“He didn’t make a second wish.”

He shook his head and released a long breath. “He did in a way. While he was at Pim’s he wrote the whole story in a letter, everything he could remember. He attached it to the carpet and when he was ready to go he made both wishes at once—to go back to the night of Chicky’s party and for the rug to return immediately to Pim without him.”

“The Pim in his world.”

“But with you dead and him basically pre-Cal that parallel didn’t exist for either of you anymore so the rug went back to the nearest Pim it could find.”

“Ours.”

He nodded. “And, of course, she read the letter when she found the carpet in her upstairs hallway. I’ve known this story for years—Cal’s story. Pim and I have talked about it and she said we should let it happen naturally, that we knew you wouldn’t be hurt…in this life so…so when you started acting, what’s the word…? Sidetracked? Sort of far away and unfocused…I thought you might need some space to think and…to do whatever you had to do to get you here this afternoon.”

Her smile was as slow to her lips as the twinkle was to his eyes—but everything else was picking up speed. Her pulse was off the charts.

“And so, my Bonnie wife,” he said, grabbing her shirt at the throat to hold her head steady for a slow kiss. “Whether or not the grass is greener depends on which side of the fence you’re looking over, doesn’t it?”

“I guess it does.” They locked their lips together, disengaging only once to pull his T-shirt over his head. Then she forced him back on the couch cushions—though it didn’t take much forcing.

“I’m thinking we should keep this place until Susan goes off to college,” he said, out of the blue, ducking her lips to see the buttons on her shirt. He zigged when she zagged, but she weaved when he bent, and she landed a solid kiss on his mouth. In seconds, he was helpless.

“Why?”

“Wa—Why what?”

“Why would you want to keep this place?” She kissed him again, deeply, and he mumbled his answer.

“Privacy.”

Giving him a moment to catch his breath, she looked around and nodded. “It could use some paint, but…What can we do here that we can’t do at home…when Susan’s babysitting.”

He grinned at her, taking her hand firmly in his. “Come on, I’ll show ya.”

It was after dark so the porch light was on and the door was locked. Bonnie knocked firmly on the etched glass windowpanes set in the door to get Jan’s attention.

She came down the hall from the kitchen with her arms crossed at her chest and an annoyed expression on her face. She stopped in the hall to flip her hair in the narrow mirror, then moseyed up to the door to stare at her sister. But she didn’t open it.

“I’m sorry. I know I’m kind of late.”

“Kind of?”

“Definitely. I’m definitely late and I’m sorry.”

“Did you bring anything to eat?”

“No. No, but I put frozen brownies in the freezer yesterday. Two seconds to thaw.”

She continued to survey her for several more seconds before she asked, “Anything of interest happen while you were away for these many, many long hours?”

“Well, Joe and I had sex.”

“What?”

“Sex! Joe and I had sex this afternoon!” she screamed while her sister climbed all over the door trying to get it open.

“What is the matter with you? Get in here. All the neighbors can hear you.”

“Got the door open, didn’t it?” Bonnie buzzed her sister’s cheek. “Didn’t the nurse show up?”

“Yes, but you said you were coming back so I waited.”

“I’m glad you did.”

“What about Joe?”

“I bet he’s glad, too. Shall we call him and ask?”

“For God’s sake. Are you high?”

“No, I’m just…real happy about my life again. It’s not midnight yet, is it?”

Bonnie started walking up the wide front steps and Janice followed.

“Maybe 11:15 or so.”

“Good, because I’ve been thinking…dead of night must be the darkest, quietest, loneliest time of night. Midnight is the middle of Letterman so you know people are up and watching. Two or three in the morning is when most bars close. So between three A.M. and five A.M. is the deadest part of the night.”

“That’s about what I calculated, but with the discrepancy between the hours worked for men and women of 7.9 versus 7.1 and people with degrees working 3.1 hours versus high school grads working 7.1—”

“Okay, I got it,” Bonnie said. “Tough problem, but we both came to the same general deduction. Right?”

“Yes.” They arrived at the top of the stairs. “So?”

“So, I’m going to need you to help me haul the magic carpet from the attic into Pim’s room.” She saw the pained grimace on her sister’s face and slung an arm across her shoulders as she led her toward the attic door. “Man, that rug was spinning so fast earlier I bet there isn’t one iota of dust on it.” Janice didn’t look impressed. “Just think of all the favors I’m going to owe you after this.”

That perked her up. She lifted a single brow to let her sister know that she wouldn’t forget and that payback was hell—but she didn’t really scare Bonnie.

“Tell me what happened,” Jan said softly and seriously, having reached the limit of her patience.

With great relish, Bonnie told her everything from the thrill of Cal’s kiss to being the proud owner of more than one pair of Ferragamo pumps.

“So you were always meant to be with Joe. God, that’s so romantic.”

“Our paths were meant to cross, that’s for sure. But whether we die and go to prison or become high school sweethearts who get married and have kids and live relatively happily ever after all depends on the decisions we make in the time it takes our hearts to beat.” She reached past her sister and opened the door to the attic. “I’ll never take what I have for granted again.” She paused. “If I do, you smack me, okay?”

“With pleasure.”

“You didn’t come up here after I left, did you?”

“You mean deliberately? Without force or impending disaster? No.”

“I don’t remember turning out the light, but I must have,” she said, pulling the cord that turned it on again.

And there it was, the amazing, spectacular carpet—its field and medallion, the brackets and borders crisp and bold and subtle at once; every warp and weft woven together with great skill and beauty…and magic.

“Are you sure Pim’s up to, you know, riding her magic carpet?” Janice asked as they approached it.

“I don’t know, but I want to give it a try. If she’s got something important to do I want to give her the chance. We owe her at least that.”

“What about me? Should I take a spin on this thing? Literally.”

“Do you want to?” Bonnie let out a labored ugh when she lifted the center and one end of the special rug, shuffling backward to face the steps and the door.

“Not really.”

“Maybe when Pim…doesn’t need it anymore or when you have a question with no good answer.”

“Are you going to ride it again?”

“No.” Bonnie said, quick and firm. “Never again.”

“Hmm. And Joe?”

“I love Joe…even when his name is Cal. And he doesn’t want to ride it again either.”

“What?”

“Joe is moving home as we speak, then he’s going to pick up Susan and a pizza and we’re going to live happily ever after. Lift your end higher over the railing there. That’s it. Good.”

“Well, that’s the best damn news ever,” Jan said, groaning laboriously. “I can’t believe we’re doing this ourselves when we both have big, strong husbands to call.”

“We’re doing it because we can, and because the fewer people who know about the rug, the better, right?”

“Not even Roger? I’m horrible at keeping…” Her sister had made the turn out the door at the bottom of the steps, but the last eighteen inches of the rug were jammed. Janice rammed it through like a pro. “…secrets from Roger. Even when I want to.”

“Then it’s okay to tell Roger, but I have to warn you he’ll probably think you’re insane.”

Janice laughed from the caboose. “That wouldn’t be something new, you know.”

They set the rolled-up rug against the baseboard in the hall a few feet from Pim’s bedroom, then tiptoed to the door. Bonnie tapped lightly and the middle-aged night nurse answered.

“Hi, Lucy, how are you?” Bonnie asked, smiling too big.

“I’m good. Can I get something for you? Pim is asleep finally.”

“No. We don’t need anything. But it’s getting late and Jan and I were thinking of going home. We thought you might like to take a break first.” She waved an arm. “Bathroom, food, drinks…Run around outside to stir up your blood a little.”

“I have taken care of my patients for many years at night,” Lucy said, more than a little huffy. “And I have never fallen asleep or needed to have my blood stirred.”

Janice stepped forward. She was the people handler in the family. “What my sister meant to say was that we’d like you to go downstairs until we call you to return because we want some private time with our Pim.”

Lucy made a tsk noise, grabbed her sweater off the rocking chair she preferred, and hurried out of the room.

“If that woman quits, you’ll be doing the nightshift until you can replace her,” Bonnie muttered, bending over the rug and picking it up again.

“Well, you had her running around outside to stay awake. The truth is so much simpler.” She picked up her end, always aware of her manicure, which was less than a week old.

“I’ll remember that.”

They waddled and pushed and jerked the rug, then stood still as statues, hoping that what they were feeling wasn’t happening. Bonnie made a half-turn to see Janice’s face go pale.

“It’s for Pim, Jan,” Bonnie said, feeling she had an affinity for the spirit of the carpet—all she could feel from it was gentleness and an eager desire to be near Pim. “Don’t be afraid. The carpet’s getting warm for her, not for us. Come on.”

They put their burden carefully on the floor…just in case…and closed the door. And neither one of them hesitated long before approaching the old woman’s bed.

She was tiny and thin-skinned. Bonnie had seen plenty of pictures of her with the raven-black locks of her youth, but in real life she’d never seen anything but the continually neat waves and curls permanently pressed into her silver-white hair.

“Look at her,” Jan said in a whisper. “Always the lady: She’s got blush and lipstick on. Isn’t she something?”

She nodded. “She’s one of a kind, our Pim.”

“But she isn’t dead yet so why are we whispering?” Pim asked, opening only one eye…which was enough. Her eyes were the bluest of blues, laser-quick, and shrewd.

“Oh! You scared me half to death, Pim!” Jan was more surprised than annoyed.

“Pim, you old possum.” Bonnie laughed. She had kids and kids played possum. “You better behave now because we found your magic carpet.”

“Oooooh.” Pim’s eyes and mouth became perfect circles. “My sweet, darling girls, you have saved me.” She clapped her hands, once, dramatically, then threw back the bedsheets like she planned to leap out of bed in her long, white, cotton nightgown. Both women automatically held their hands out, fingers up, to stop her. “Oh, don’t be silly. I’m not going anywhere…I’m slow as a county worker.” She looked straight at Bonnie. “I wasn’t sure if I was making sense when we talked last night. I’m not used to taking so many different prescriptions. Makes me fuzzy.”

“Makes you a little more than that, Pim. I thought you were hallucinating.”

“You were completely crazy is what you were,” Jan said.

The old lady’s laugh was elegant and infectious—a sound Bonnie would always cherish and remember.

“So how do you want to do this, Pim? Do you want to try getting up? Or do you want it in bed with you?”

“It is a lovely piece of art, but that still doesn’t win it a place in one’s bed. Carpets belong on the floor. So if you, my sweet girls, would be so kind as to unroll it there in the space in front of my dresser, I believe I can handle the rest of this operation on my own.”

While Pim straightened out her nightie, smoothed out the hair on the back of her head, and got her new walker ready for the ride, Bonnie and Janice wordlessly opened up the rug in front of the chest of drawers—but that didn’t mean they weren’t commentating. Head jerks, shoulder rolls, and severely contorted facial expressions were as easy to read in siblings as their DNA.

“Ah, what operation is that, Pim?” Bonnie suspected that she already knew, but with her grandmother’s mental acuity lately…

Pim’s blue eyes rose and took aim, drilled through Janice first and then Bonnie before she looked satisfied and spoke softly. “I think one of you already knows the operation I refer to.”

“I do,” Bonnie admitted freely—to be healthy, clear-minded, and fracture free. “And I think maybe I should or…or Jan should or the nurse or someone should be here with you—just in case something goes wrong.”

“The nurse?” Pim clearly saw her as a security breach.

“Okay. Me or Jan…or Joe.”

She lifted her head with a jolt and for the first time in…ever, looked guilty—though she gave no explanation or excuse or apology and went back to her business.

“Nothing will go wrong, dear.” She cheek-walked to the edge of the bed and lowered her legs into the square of space between the bed and the walker. Matter-of-factly she asked, “And did you, Bonnie girl, make your second wish before dead of night?”

“Yes, ma’am.” The idea of how close she’d come—because of her ignorance of the carpet’s power—to staying on the other side, to being dead right now, nauseated her. “I did. Luckily. The whole thing was an accident…and so was the second wish.”

“I apologize, dear, for sending you to fetch it. I forgot how sensitive it can be. I should have waited for Joe.”

Bonnie opened her mouth to speak, but Janice’s voice came out: “Joe’s been really busy this last month, Pim. Bonnie’s hardly seen him.”

“Too busy to come by and see me even once?”

“He did come…twice…that I know of, maybe more, but you were sleeping.”

Bonnie frowned at her sister, appreciating her willingness to lie for her husband, but fixed on the fact that her timing was a little off. Now that she and Joe were together again, she didn’t care who knew they were apart.

Pim nodded silently, looking at both of them expectantly. They looked back quizzically, clearly wanting to be helpful.

“Go!” she said, when their hovering finally started to get on her nerves.

“But are you sure—”

“Yes. Go.”

Pim was standing independently with her walker as they backed out of the door together, Bonnie’s hand on the doorknob.

She heard the latch click.

Janice said, “Do you think she’ll be all right?”

From behind them in the hallway Pim answered, “Will who be all right?”

Both sisters screamed and fell back against the door…which blocked their exit.

Their hearts hammered under their hands as they took in Pim’s usual healthy color and the lack of a walker. Her favorite cross-trainers were on her feet and a tall glass of milk was clasped in her hand.

“It’s too early for Christmas and Halloween, so you’re not hiding gifts or putting rubber snakes in my bed…though you’re a little old for that now, aren’t you? So why aren’t you at home this time of night?”

“We…we…” Jan was still trying to catch her breath as Pim opened the bedroom door.

“We, ah, were driving by and saw the light on.”

“We just wanted to kiss you good-night.”

Pim smiled her delight. “My sweet girls. Well, come in and let me get settled in bed. You can tuck me in like you used to, when you were up and thought I was still asleep.”

“You were awake?” Jan asked.

“Yes, indeed. I could have spent hours watching you play with my cosmetics, sweet Jannie.” She drank half her milk, slipped out of her sneakers, and climbed into bed with her long, white cotton nightgown tucked in around her. Bonnie went to the far side of the bed while Jan stayed near and together they pulled the sheets tight, stuffing the ends between the mattresses. “Oh, nice and cozy. Thank you, girls.”

Jan leaned in front of Bonnie. “Thank you, Pim, for everything. I don’t say that often enough.” She kissed the lady’s cheek and then her forehead. “I love you.”

“Oh, sweetheart, I love you as well. You’ve made my life an intrepid adventure.”

They smiled warmly and Janice walked lightly across the room to the door.

Bonnie tucked one of Pim’s silver curls behind her ear and smiled into the warm blue waters of her eyes. “Good-night, my Pim. Sleep well.” She kissed the hollow of her cheek. “Light on, down, or off?”

“Lights off in a moment but…but don’t forget, my girl, that wishes alone can’t make it right.” Bonnie froze in place. She realized then that she’d been half-hoping this Pim didn’t know about the carpet or what had transpired in the last few hours. “My darling, wishes are not enough to make your life what you want it to be. Even with a little magic, wishes aren’t enough to make you happy. Courage and faith and love and humor. Friendship. You need hard work and tenacity and a helping hand sometimes. You need good judgment, a sense of fairness, and—”

“A Pim to love you.”