CURRENT DAY
LOS ANGELES AIRPORT
MARIE SNORED HER dainty snore. I didn’t know at what point in the story she’d fallen asleep. There’d be plenty of time to talk about it again as long as we continued to talk. She’d scared me. I’d never seen her so angry. I couldn’t blame her, though. My fault. I did imply that Sonja no longer walked the earth. Stupid.
The constant drone of the plane’s engines lulled me to sleep, and I woke with the pilot’s announcement of our final approach into LAX. I gently nudged Marie. She came awake with a start. Her fists shoved into my chest in a wild-eyed, desperate attempt to defend herself, to escape, to flee.
“Hey, hey, it’s okay. It’s me,” I said.
“Oh, Bruno, jeeze.” She leaned over and hugged me, held on, end-of-the-world kinda tight. “I had the most horrible nightmare.”
I’d been the cause of that nightmare. Our trip back to the States to handle a problem without a solution, a problem that could only end in violence, had eroded our confidence. It forced us to stare down the barrel of a gun, waiting for it to go off. That kind of stress would give anyone a nightmare. Factor in the baby and no wonder she had bad dreams.
The flight attendant came by and said, “Please put your seats forward. We’re about to land. Thank you.”
I reached over and moved her seat forward and kissed her forehead. “Tell me all about it when we get in the car, okay?” Better if she cooled down emotionally first, instead of reliving it again so soon by telling me now.
She nodded and gripped my hand, waiting for the plane to touch down. I watched her closely.
The impending doom hanging over my head, the unknown resolution in how I’d handle the untenable situation with The Sons, helped me to cherish each precious moment.
After we grabbed our bags off the carousel, we took the shuttle bus to the rental car office and checked out a sleek new Ford Escape, “Bronzit” in color. To me it looked more like the copper from a penny. I liked the way the car handled. I drove, heading toward Burbank and the hotel. Marie sat in the passenger seat, staring out the window, her feet up on the dash, her open window letting the warm, dry Southern California wind blow on her face.
“Hey,” I said, “why don’t you tell me about what you’re going to buy at the Galleria Mall? We’re going to be staying about two blocks from there.”
She looked at me, this time without anger, only sadness.
“Bruno, in the plane when I fell asleep, I had this real bad dream and it scared me.”
“Don’t worry your pretty little head, missy. Big Bad Bruno Johnson’s here to protect you. It was only a dream. Dreams don’t mean a thing, darlin’. They’re just a product of your pent-up anxiety.”
She nudged me, a little too hard. “Hey, how come you don’t want to know about it? Dreams are the window to your soul. Don’t you at least want a glimpse at my soul?”
Boy, I sure didn’t want to throw my dog into that fight. “Hey, when you go to Macy’s, buy an extra suitcase for all those clothes you’re going to buy and bring home with us.”
She socked me with her little fist, crossed her arms, and stared forward.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “Please tell me all about your dream.”
She let me stew a few moments more. The dream bugged her too much, and she had to get it out.
“Really, babe,” I said, “tell me. I really want to know.”
She twisted around in her seat, swallowing hard before she started. “In the dream, I went into the bathroom on the plane. You know, one of those little cramped jobs with no space at all. And . . . and somehow this huge yellow life raft inflated with this loud hiss while I was in there. It shoved me right up against the wall. It pinned me against the wall so tight that I could hardly breathe. And . . . and the odor, it smelled terrible in there. Like moldering butt.”
I looked out the side window, trying my damnedest not to smile.
“Then I realized,” she said, “that the plane was in distress and going down. Going down in this corkscrew that made me sick to my stomach.” She put her hand up like a plane and moved it downward in a swirling motion. She turned to me, truly upset. “What do you think it means?”
I took a deep breath and tried to stay focused. I looked from the road to her and back again as I spoke. “Well, a good psychoanalyst, for which I think I qualify, would say that the dream was symbolic of feelings deeply rooted in your subconscious and points directly to your adoring and loving husband, the man soon to be the father of your darling little boy.”
Her expression went from serious to a half-grin. “That right, cowboy? Why don’t you lay it on me then? What does my psychoanalyst, with his degree from the University of The Sorry-Assed Street, think?”
I looked at her for a moment, trying not to smile, then back at the road. “It’s obvious. This dream indicates a deep-seated desire to have hot—”
She grabbed my arm. “Careful, Bruno.”
I hesitated. “Okay, look,” I said. “The airplane is this long, a cylindrical aluminum tube that resembles—”
“Bruno!”
“Okay, okay, you want it in a nutshell. Your dream, simply put, means you want to have hot, randy sex in a small bathroom in San Francisco.”
She giggled and stared at me for a moment.
“That’s what you got from what I just told you?”
“Sure did, babe. It’s obvious.”
“So when you say San Francisco, you mean like in Ghirardelli Square?”
I fought to stay in character. “Exactly. Chocolate indicates that you want to do it in that San Francisco bathroom with a tall, handsome black man.”
She laughed for the first time since we discovered the phone number written on Toby’s back. I hadn’t realized how much I needed to hear her laugh. It warmed my heart.
She calmed. Her laugh petered off. We rode in silence for a while.
She said, “Hot, randy sex, huh?”
“That’s right, the hotter and the randier, the better.”
“You mean like with Randy Travis, that kinda Randy sex?”
My head whipped around, my mouth dropped open. She’d blindsided me with that one.
My turn to laugh.
We drove some more. “Why Randy Travis? You don’t like country western.”
“I don’t have to like country western to—”
“Okay, okay, I get it, that’s enough.”
I thought about it for a moment. I took my eyes from the road and looked at her. “You haven’t been thinking about Randy when we . . . I mean . . . ah, jeeze. You haven’t . . . you know, been thinking about him while we’ve been . . . you know?”
“What’s that Bruno?” She shot me that impish smile I loved so much.
“Ah, jeeze.”
“Bruno?”
“Yeah.”
“Your ‘Ah, jeeze’ is stuck again.”