Moonlight Magic

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The two shook hands congenially.

Men, Ellie thought. Did they never stop the good-ol’boy routine long enough to ask questions?

“Daniel was just leaving,” she said.

But she should have known. Her brother had Texas hospitality bred to the bone.

“Why don’t you join us?” he invited. “We’ve got plenty of chow and cold beer, and you’d be welcome.”

For a split second Ellie saw a look of such raw longing on Daniel’s face that her heart stopped. But the look disappeared when he smiled easily.

“Sorry, but thanks, anyway. I’m, uh, missing my party threads. My clothes were…stolen and…” He shrugged.

“That’s been happening on the beaches a lot lately,” Chad said. “But hell, buddy, we’re about the same size. I’ll loan you somethin’. C’mon in.”

And that was all it took for Daniel to join their party.

Chad found him a change of clothes, even a pair of shoes. Using the bathroom, Daniel showered, then joined the rest of them, wearing a pair of her brother’s khakis and a blue golf shirt, a color that intensified the aquamarine of his eyes.

Several of the other women noticed how well the shirt suited him, too, Ellie saw.

But the man was clearly a survivor. In a room full of burly marines, he wasn’t about to show interest in one of their wives or girlfriends.

Oh, no. He kept his interest for an intent perusal of Chad’s CD collection. And no woman there claimed the same attention as the sports page of a week-old edition of the Honolulu Times lying on an end table. He even studied the snack platter as if it were a painting by Michelangelo and he an admiring critic.

Daniel’s fascination with the mundane was, well, fascinating. And Ellie was fascinated.

Unobtrusively she watched him pick up a potato chip and examine its wavy shape as if the chip were an architectural wonder. Slowly he brought it to his mouth.

His lips opened…the chip entered. And when it touched his tongue, his eyes fluttered shut. He began to chew—carefully, as if each crunch might detonate an explosion.

Ellie watched, mesmerized by the slow, rhythmic movement of Daniel’s jaw, the infinitesimal stretch and compression of skin over his cheeks, the tiny arcing purse of his mouth. When at last he swallowed, so did she.

Or tried to. Her throat was dry.

Then her brother handed him a can of beer. “Here you go, Dan. Sorry about your gear getting ripped off. Bummer.”

Daniel looked uncomfortable, but lifted the can and nodded toward Chad in a small salute. “Thanks.”

When he’d first joined the party and was pressed, Daniel told them his things hadn’t been stolen at the beach, as Chad assumed, but at his hotel.

Ellie knew in her bones the man was lying. There were holes in the story big enough to drive a semi through. But her easygoing little brother had no trouble swallowing the tale.

“Don’t worry about the threads,” he said now. “I’m getting ready to deploy. Weeding out things, you know. You’ll be doing me a favor if you keep them. I’ve got more you can have, too.”

“Appreciate it.”

Daniel took a swig of beer, and Ellie, feeling like a voyeur, had to turn her head away from the look of absolute pleasure that passed over his features.

Everything the man did became a symphony of the senses, she thought, and felt her face grow warm at the memory of the way he’d touched her on the beach.

When he tasted her potato salad, though, Ellie knew she’d really impressed him.

Chad wanted this party to be an honest-to-goodness, Texas-style barbecue, with beans, potato salad, cole slaw and corn on the cob to go with the steaks, brisket, sausage and chicken he had on the grill.

Everyone who came pitched in, bringing meat, snacks, drinks and side dishes, but Ellie volunteered to make the potato salad, a family recipe and one of her brother’s favorites.

The party migrated outdoors when it came time to eat, and she found herself sitting across from Daniel at the picnic table on the side lawn. They weren’t the only ones at the long table, but they might as well have been.

Daniel sat with a paper plate full of food in front of him, but instead of diving in as the rest were doing, he stared at it.

“Find a bug?” Ellie asked.

He looked up to give her his quirky grin, the one with the infinite sadness behind it. For a man Daniel had a very expressive face.

“Did you ever notice,” he asked, “how perfect the geometry is on an ear of corn?”

“Can’t say that I have.” She didn’t like that word.

“Yeah, guess not.” Picking up his fork, he again examined his plate, studying its contents carefully.

From the look on his face, Ellie supposed whatever food Daniel decided to plunge the fork into first would determine world peace.

He chose her potato salad.

Around them the party noise faded to a low murmur. Ellie held her breath.

The fork entered the small hill of potatoes and came up with a good-size sample. In the creamy heap, she saw touches of the pale-green celery she’d added, the darker green of dill pickles, the red of pimento, flecks of brown peeling, golden egg yolk.

When at last Daniel brought the forkful of salad to his mouth, Ellie’s lips parted in automatic accompaniment.

He closed his eyes. Chewed. Swallowed.

And his face melted into lines of rapt appreciation.

Ellie exhaled a small satisfied sigh.

“Do you always do that?” she asked, after his second bite.

“What?” He forked into the baked beans, but she hadn’t made the beans so his reaction to them wasn’t of much interest.

“Treat everything as if it were created for your sensual pleasure.”

The fork stilled as he gazed back at her. “It’s just been a long time,” he said at last, with a touch of self-consciousness.

As an answer, the words made no sense at all.

But little about Daniel made any sense, Ellie thought. For one thing, nothing about him seemed to match.

On the beach she’d thought him a handsome footloose beach bum, but tonight he’d been a quiet, unassuming, slightly embarrassed guest, who treated everyone as if they were uniquely special and everything as if it were a gift from the gods.

“A long time since what?”

This time his grin was wide and mischievous, unmarred by any kind of melancholy. “Since I’ve had such delicious potato salad. You Texans know how to cook.”

Ellie grunted. Enough, already.

Leaning forward, she pinned him with her steeliest nurse’s look, the one that said, “Don’t mess with me, buster!”

“So tell me what you’re really doing here, Daniel Morgan, and don’t crank out any more fairy tales about robberies, either.”

But when Daniel lowered his fork without even tasting the beans, she felt as if she’d just told a kid his cookie was full of broccoli bits.

“You wouldn’t believe me if I told you,” he said quietly.

“Try me.”

Daniel eyed the woman across from him and knew by her steady gaze that Ellie wasn’t going to let this go. Yet what could he say that she would believe? Certainly not the truth.

But he gave it to her, anyway.

“The truth is, I can’t leave.”

And God knew he’d tried.

At first he hadn’t known where he was when he found himself again released from Tom and Janie’s back garden. He only knew he wasn’t back at the cove.

Tonight, though, he appeared to be in someone else’s yard, on a lawn surrounding a huge rambling house. Still, the nearby fence looked familiar, and he gazed at it for a long moment in puzzlement, wondering where he’d seen it before.

Then he knew. He’d been looking at it for years, but from the other side.

Hell, he’d gone no further than the house next door!

But he was free! Free!

Remembering what his hesitation cost him last time, he immediately sprinted toward the street that he could see through the trees, as cars passed by with their lights on…and slammed into something that sent him sprawling.

Seeing nothing in his way, he figured he’d tripped, so he gathered himself up and set off again.

This time he took no more than a couple of steps before smashing into something—something he still couldn’t see but was solid enough to send him crashing to the ground.

Lying in the grass, he studied the empty yard in front of him, watched a car speed by on the street, its headlights arcing through the overhead branches of the trees.

Next time he took the precaution of keeping his arms outstretched.

One step. Two. Three. Fou—Whap! Something stopped him in his tracks.

No matter how much he sidestepped or backed up, as soon as he started forward an invisible wall appeared, though not always in exactly the same place. It seemed to fluctuate a few feet on some whim of its own, but nevertheless prevented him from getting to the street.

But if the whatever wouldn’t let him move in that direction, then he’d leave by the back alley.

A plan that worked like a charm until he neared the Dumpsters. Whap! There it was again.

It took a while and a few ignominious falls for him to finally realize that no matter what direction he took, he could go so far and no farther.

The one direction he refused to try, however, was through Janie and Tom’s fence. Better this yard, with its limited freedom, than theirs where he had no freedom at all.

Defeated, he’d finally sat down at the picnic table to look over the house he must belong to now. Country-western music filtered from it out into the night, and through the double patio doors he saw a party of some sort going on.

A barbecue barrel near the patio filled the night air with the smell of charcoal and good times.

As Daniel watched, the door slid open and a woman with hair the color of moonlight stepped out.

Ellie!

She didn’t see him sitting there, and he didn’t call out. For one thing, he wasn’t sure she could see him. Not knowing what the rules were in his new situation—not that he ever had—he didn’t take anything for granted.

Then Ellie spotted him, had even been angry with him for some reason, but her brother invited him in and Daniel found himself—for the first time in years—actually under a roof. That was when he realized the whatever had now bound him to an apartment house.

Moreover, it actually allowed him to be the normal man he’d once been.

But it wouldn’t release him completely.

When the party followed its collective nose to the cooking meat outdoors, Daniel unobtrusively walked toward the street again.

The wall, now several feet farther out, was still there. But it affected only him.

One of the couples at the party had left early, calling good-nights as they walked over the lawn to their car parked on the street. They had no trouble at all passing through the invisible barrier keeping Daniel in.

And now Ellie wanted to know what Daniel was doing here.

Hell if he knew.

But thankfully one of the marines sitting at the picnic table with them asked her a question, giving Daniel a break from the third-degree he knew was coming.

When Chad joined them moments later, the talk became general, full of jokes and references he didn’t always catch, but he laughed as heartily as the rest of them.

It was a pleasure just to laugh, and he thought he faked normalcy pretty well until he saw Ellie eyeing him, a knowing look on her face.

Damn.

As the evening wore on and the party thinned out, Daniel knew he should leave, too. He just didn’t know how.

So he hung around, gathering debris in the part of the yard allowed to him, picking up cans and napkins in the living room, trying to look like a conscientious guest helping out a little before going home. By then there were only himself and Ellie and Chad left.