“And you’re going to bring your brother.”
“I have to, James,” she said. “I can’t leave him with my mother. We’ll have to get all the legal stuff taken care of, and now we’re gonna have to fight your mom’s lawyer—”
“But we’re going to take care of all of that. I want him to come too, Audrey. I know how much you love him. I just need to know that’s still what you want.”
“Of course it is,” she said. “I wish it wasn’t, because then I wouldn’t have caused you all this trouble—”
“Stop,” I said, cutting her off again. “Please don’t ever say that again.”
“Okay.” Her voice was cautious. “Please tell me what’s going on with you.”
“I just want you to promise me,” I said. “I don’t want us to ever be separated again. I just don’t want to waste any more time.”
“Okay,” Audrey said again, nestling against me. She was quiet for a minute, and I thought she’d fallen asleep. “What’s it gonna be like?”
“What?”
“Living in your mansion in California,” she giggled. “The way things are going, it seems like we’re never going to get there.” She yawned. “Like it’s a fairy tale…”
I wrapped my arms around her. “Well, my house isn’t a mansion—not exactly. It’s all one level, up in the hills. I have a great view when there’s no smog. And I get all the sports stations, every single one. Even in my room.” I smiled at her in the darkness, picturing her in my house. “You can have your own closet, and if you behave, your own shelf in the bathroom.”
“If I’m living with you, I’m going to need more than one shelf,” she laughed.
“Well, okay. You can have more than one. If you’re good. What else is my house like… hmmm… I have a really big refrigerator.”
“Bigger than the one in Boston? ’Cause that thing’s huge,” she said.
“Yes, it’s bigger. And no offense, but Audrey, a Barbie mansion has a bigger refrigerator than the one you have in Southie.”
“Ha ha,” she said, punching me lightly. “But keep talking. Tell me what our life would be like.”
“Well, we would get up every day, and then we could do a quick workout in my gym—yes, I have a gym—and then you’d make me breakfast. Preferably French toast because you’re pretty good at that. And then I’d go to work—”
“And I’d go to work, too,” she slipped in.
“Yes, of course you would. Or you can go to school full-time. Just don’t let any of the students or professors ask you out. Then I’d have to fight them.”
“That might be hot, actually.”
“It might be. Yeah, it probably would be.” We both laughed then, and it felt so good. “But seriously, that might be a great place to start. And then I could pick you up from school, and we could go visit Tommy. On the weekends, we can go to dinner. We can take Tommy to the beach or to the park—we don’t have crap weather in LA. It’s totally different. You can go outside all year. And we can go see the Red Sox games in Oakland when they play the A’s. We can fly up in my private plane. We can fly to Hawaii for a long weekend. You can make me dinner every night.”
“Ha,” she said again, but she sounded pleased.
I paused for a second and traced her spine with my finger. I took a deep breath. “And then we can have kids, and you change their diapers—all of them, because I have a feeling that would be beneath me—and they’ll go to all the best schools. We’ll take them to Disneyland. We’ll go watch their music shows and their plays, and they can play baseball and be awesome at it like their dad, and they will never like the A’s, the Dodgers, or the Yankees, and if they are girls they will have beautiful, Bambi-like eyes like their mother. So there.”
“Bambi-like eyes?” she asked, and giggled.
I blew out an embarrassed sigh. “Mock me if you will. Just promise me,” I said, still stroking her back. “Promise me we are going to do all the things.”
“I promise,” she said, her face pressed against my chest. “I promise.”
* * *
The next morning, Audrey brought me coffee in bed.
“I’m going to make a few phone calls,” I said, “starting with Danielle’s parents. Even though I don’t have hard evidence, I believe my mother was at the very least involved in the accident somehow. I have to let them know. They still live in Tewksbury; I can look up the number.”