Sundays at Tiffany's - James Patterson [50]
“It was to make up for not taking me anywhere for my fifth birthday. Or my fourth. Probably my third, too.”
“Yeah, it was.”
“It was the first time I ever remember being really happy,” I said, smiling at the distant memory. “You and I built sand castles with my stupid Barbie doll pail and matching shovel. We went to some ice cream place in town where they mixed chocolate chips and peanuts right into the coffee ice cream. We went swimming every day, even though the water was freezing, with a capital Brrr.”
“Good times, huh?” Michael asked.
“The best. Remember the Cliffside Beach Club? And Jetties Beach?”
“Let’s go back there, Jane.”
I smiled. “I’d love to. When?”
“Right now. Today. Let’s go. What do you say?”
I stared into Michael’s green eyes and I sensed that something was up, but I didn’t want to ask him what it was. I figured that he’d tell me soon enough. Plus, there was chicken Jane again. The fantasy is much better than the reality.
“I’d love to go to Nantucket,” I said. “But you have to promise to answer a few questions while we’re there.”
Fifty-nine
“FIRST QUESTION,” Jane said on the ride out to the airport. “You weaseled out of telling me if you ever dated. But have you ever fallen in love?”
Michael made a face, sighed, then said, “The way it works, Jane, is that after a while, I seem to forget what happened in the past. That’s not my choice, by the way. In answer to your question, I don’t think so.”
“So this would be the first?” asked Jane, and Michael smiled at her confidence in assuming that he had fallen in love with her. He hadn’t said so, but she’d been able to tell. And she wasn’t wrong.
“How about sex?” she asked next.
Michael started to laugh. “Let’s ease our way into this. One question at a time, okay? Now, let’s talk about something else, Jane-Sweetie.”
“Okay. When I was a wee, small, little girl, I remember that we used to take Eastern Airlines up to Cape Cod. We’d go a couple of times every summer,” Jane said as the cab rattled up to the old Marine Terminal at LaGuardia Airport.
Michael gave her a kiss, lingering on the softness of her lips and noticing the twinkle in her eyes. She was a grown-up woman, but he loved the innocent, childlike quality she still had.
“Are you trying to shut me up?” Jane asked. “This kissing thing?”
“Not at all. I just . . . like it.” And he kissed Jane again.
The cabdriver finally barked back at them, “You two gonna get out of the cab, or are you going to sit here and make lovey-dovey all day?”
“Lovey-dovey,” Jane told the guy, laughing, and he almost smiled back.
Michael paid the driver and grabbed their two small suitcases. Once inside the old terminal, he paused and peered around.
“What are you looking for now?”
“Him.”
Michael pointed to an old guy in a floppy brown windbreaker with the letters CCPA on the chest pocket. His face was sunburned and covered with age lines.
“Cape Cod Private Air?” Michael asked as he walked up to him.
“The one and only,” he answered in a gravelly voice. “Follow me, folks. You’re Jane and Michael, right?”
“That would be us,” said Jane.
They followed the old man, and in a few minutes they were boarding a small plane that looked suspiciously like the one Michael had seen in pictures of Lindbergh’s transatlantic flight.
“You think this plane’ll make it to Nantucket?” Jane asked, only half joking. Michael hoped she wasn’t remembering any recent crashes of small planes.
“Have a little faith, lady,” the pilot said.
“We’ve got plenty of that,” said Michael. “You have no idea.”
In a few minutes, the propellers were spinning, and the plane was cruising down the runway like a drunk stumbling around the Bowery.
“When I imagined my own death, I hadn’t actually pictured a plane crash.” Jane tried to joke, but her hand gripped Michael’s firmly.
Michael felt his throat tighten and his chest start to hurt again. Jane was being funny, but he’d gotten a bad feeling about what she had just said. Were they meant to crash, and then, what, he would die too?