SUMMER of FEAR Page 12

  "Would you like for Isabella to stay with us for a while?" Corrine asked.

  "I definitely would not."

  "Why, Russell?"

  "Because she's my wife and it's my job to take care of her."

  Corrine's accusing silence blended with the hum of the air conditioner. Joe got up, went into the kitchen, and came back with a pitcher of iced coffee, three glasses. Joe and I never talked over anything but cold Bohemia. So, I thought, Isabella has mentioned my drinking. Were the beers and the whiskey still on my breath?

  "If it is a job, Russ, then couldn't her staying here be a vacation—for you?"

  "I don't want a vacation. I miss her already."

  "Sometimes it's good to miss someone," said Corrine.

  "This isn't one of those times."

  Joe poured the coffee and handed me a glass. Corrine ignored him as he gave one to her, though I caught Joe's inquiring glance. He was torn here, I saw, between his unquestioned conviction that a man lives with his wife and his own wife's powerful maternal instincts. Joe was going to sit this one out for a while.

  "It would give you more time," she said. "To work, to do the things you need to do."

  "I'm working when the maid's there."

  Corrine was nodding preemptively: Isabella had already told her this, too. "I know how hard it must be."

  Clearly, she suspected that I hadn't actually been writing. One year, two months, and eleven days, I thought. But Isabella would never tell her this, out of her respect for the strange, sometimes misplaced sense of sacredness that many writers attach to their work. I was one of them. Isabella would tell no one that the work was dead, that nothing was happening, because anything sacred—even inappropriately sacred—is diminished by talk.

  "Isabella told me you haven't written in over a year.” Corrine said flatly. "She told me that in the hope we—she and Joe and I—might be able to help you. Of all the things that are painful to her, this is the worst—that she's made you not at to write."

  Well, fuck me, I thought. Was I going to hear about this on CNN next, Charles Jaco live from my study in the stilt house? The fact that our money was almost gone came rushing in from another part of my brain, on a collision course with the fact that I'd written nothing but articles for so long. I resolved, then and there, to check the balances in all our accounts, if there were indeed balances to check. I had been filing bank statements, unopened, for six months now, on the theory that what you can't see can't hurt you. Of late, I’d noted bank correspondence coming in white, rather than tan envelopes. I wanted my flask.

  "I'm working," I said. I could feel the anger boiling over into shame, which was certainly running red into my face by now. I hated the petulance in my voice.

  "I told you he was writing up something," said Joe, mercy pitch that Corrine ignored. "And the insurance covers the operation, right?"

  "yes."

  Corrine breathed deeply and leveled her lovely dark eyes at me. "Russ, I worry not so much about your work as about my daughter."

  Joe stared down at the glass in his lap. Corrine's eyes remained trained on mine.

  "The fall today shouldn't have happened," I said. "But no one can be beside her twenty-four hours a day."

  "We can, Russ. Joe and I. Let her stay. You can stay, too. She is our daughter, and you our son."

  She turned now to Joe, who, still staring down, must have felt her gaze.

  He nodded. "It's better for everyone," he said. "You been taking care of Izzy over a year now. You need a break. You need to make some money. After that operation, well, who knows?"

  The air conditioner hummed. I felt like I was being robbed by thieves packing kindness instead of guns. In my heart, I knew they were right.

  Why, then, was it so hard for me to agree? It took me a while to understand. When I did, all I could do was look back out the window, avoiding the imploring stares of these good, humble people. I didn't want to agree to leaving Isabella with them because I didn't want them—and myself and Isabella— to know how inviting the idea really sounded.

  Contradictory emotions rose up inside me, slamming against one another, tearing at one another, contesting ownership of my heart. I had never felt so divided, so hugely at odds with myself, as if I'd been cut into pieces and put back together wrong. Or was I put back together at all? I felt the motion calling, the velocity and the freedom of velocity. But I felt the same yawning emptiness I'd known as I stood in the sunlight of our bedroom just an hour earlier. I felt the liberty of not being responsible, of not having to listen with at least one ear for the sound of Isabella upstairs needing me to perform a simple task such as putting on her shoes or helping her into the shower or emptying the bedside commode or pushing her wheelchair over a bump in the floor or any of the other thousand tasks a person does each day for themselves, not thinking, not appreciating how easy it is to clip toenails when your legs are not paralyzed, how easy it is to make it to the toilet when you can walk, how easy it is to stand in your closet and pick out something to wear without worrying whether it's big enough fit over the leg braces you need in order even to stand up without falling to the floor. What liberation, to be free of that! But I also felt at the same time that dismal longing for her when she was out of my life—even for a few minutes! I could see our big bed without her in it. I could hear the silence that she had left behind. I could feel that vast, horizonless sadness of being without her in a world that existed only because Isabella was in it.

  My stomach was locked and aching; I could not feel the beating of my own heart.

  Finally, I began to swim straight through these opposing powerful rivers, looking for one thing that I could hold on without question. And I found it. I reached for it, sunk my finger into it, and clutched it tightly against my chest. What I wanted finally and without condition, was what was best for Isabella. Not for me. Not for Corrine and Joe. For Isabella.

  "She twisted her knee pretty good today," said Joe.

  "Enough," I said. I closed my eyes and rested my head on the sofa back. The clammy breeze from the air conditior landed on one side of my face. I heard Corrine get up, and moment later her hand settled against my cheek, fingers patting approval of my surrender.

  "Maybe you should go be with her for a while," she said. "I'm going to make dinner."

  I lay down next to Isabella in the small room. She stirred when I settled in beside her, smiled as I reached out and took her hand.

  "So, you ran out on me," I said.

  "I'll never run out on you. But this is b-b-better for a while."

  "I know. I was only making another bad joke."

  "Everything's going to be kay-o, isn't it?"

  "Yes."

  I kissed her and she moved a hand into my hair and pulled me closer. The kiss lasted a long time. When I moved my face down to her breasts, she spread her hand against the front of my pants and pressed gently. I slipped my arm under the sheets and traced her warm, dry center with my fingers. We lay there for a while, searching very slowly for what used to come so eagerly. Then she moved her hand back up to my face. I took it in mine.

  "Maybe after the op-op-operation, every work will thing again," she said.

  "Yes. Everything will."

  "I love you, Russ."

  I lay there with her for almost an hour, stroking her smooth round head while she slept with her face against my chest. I looked out the window at the pepper tree and watched a mockingbird flitting from one branch to another. I became that bird. I was nimble, feathered, capable of flight. I left the tree. I shot upward, piercing the hot blue sky. I streaked through the stars of some as-yet-unarrived night. I careened past the sun, out of the galaxy, deep into gaping, widening, limitless space, tears peeling from my eyes, beak sparking against the resistant atmosphere, feathers aflame, feet melting. I shot forward as a skeleton, a shard of vertebrae, a quivering atom of calcium. Motion. Speed. Velocity. Freedom.

  When Corrine called us for dinner, I helped Izzy get dressed and into her cha
ir.

  Then I left.

  At home, I poured myself a disciplined whiskey, roamed the outside deck for a while, then listened to a rather curt message from case manager Tina Sharp on the machine. I did not return the call. Rather, I sat in a patio chair where Isabella loved most to sit, facing southwest toward town. Our Lady of the Canyon lay atop the hills, the lights of Laguna flowing upward from between her legs, her pregnant belly protruding against the skyline. I went inside to answer the phone, but the caller hung up after I said hello. Cute.

  In my study, I set up the computer and went to work on the Citizens' Task Force story.

  First, I outlined the thing, thinking of the best way to make the readers feel included in the Task Force, not just reading about it. Basically, it was a flak job.

  I drank more because I didn't like the manipulative aspects of this piece, and because I kept seeing Isabella lying on that narrow bed in her parents' house, and because newspaper story structure is rigid enough to make it undentable by whiskey, resulting, I would guess, in the high rate of alcoholism among journalists. After all, I thought, I could slant the piece only far before Carla Dance threw it back at me. After all, it was: the Journal but, rather, a terrified public that would decide what to make of the Citizens' Task Force.

  The phone rang again, and again the caller hung up soon as I answered.

  Just like Amber used to do, I thought, twenty-odd years ago, when she was sneaking away from Martin Parish to meet me on the sly. Except our code was usually three hang-ups. That meant Amber was actually with Marty, scheming to be with me. She would tell Marty she was getting busy signals from a girlfriend. Three meant she would meet me that night. Nights with even-numbered dates were the bar atop the Towers Restaurant in Laguna. Odd-numbered nights were the back room of the Mandarin Chinese. Later, two hang-ups—oh, how I lived for two-hang-up nights!—meant she would come to my place. I always felt bad that it was Marty, but back in those days, when we were young, the cost of being with Amber was always worth paying. Always.

  The phone rang again, and to my astonishment, the caller hung up. Three calls. I checked the date, purely out of curiosity: an even night, the sixth, the Towers bar.

  I stared at the computer screen, searching for my lead. That first sentence is 50 percent of the work. Once the first sentence is right, the rest falls into place. I thought. I finally wrote:

  What if she's really at the Towers bar?

  No. I erased it. The image of Amber's ruined skull came back to me: the blood, the tangled mass of dark hair, the dead gray eyes. Then I saw her in the rented K car, looking at me fearfully from behind the windshield, illuminated briefly by the Coast Highway streetlight. Haunting me from the grave, wherever that may be. I thought of Isabella again. I wanted so much to love her.

  I wrote again:

  A drink or two at the Towers bar might be nice. You've earned it. You deserve it.

  No. I deleted that, too. I sat for a while, then churned out the first three pages of the story.

  I took a break, stared for a while into the refrigerate although I wasn't hungry. I sat on the deck again. I sat on our bed, missing Isabella in a crazy, grateful way.

  I went back into the study, finished the piece, and fax it out.

  Then I went downstairs, got in my car, and drove to the Towers bar.

  The mirrors and windows of the Towers are bewildering at night, and they keep the place dark. The ocean spreads to infinity eleven stories below, behind a wall of smoked glass. Mirrors throw the Pacific back at you from anyplace in the room, dizzyingly reversed, even along the ceiling, which is mostly glass too. You can't be sure what you're really seeing. The tables are beveled glass—rectangles of ocean reflected from the ceiling which picks them up from the windows—the furnishings all Deco: lamps supported by robed ladies, wall lights mount behind mirrored shells, ornate brass ashtray stands. There is black baby grand in the middle of the bar, and it was staffed that night by a young man with a nice touch and a voice just like whoever's song he was covering. He did not play as well as Isabella. The place was crowded, but I got a chair in a far corner. To my left was an eleven-story drop to black ocean; my right, the room; in front of me, a couple kind enough to let me share their drink table. The crowd was eclectic, as one expects in a hotel bar: middle-aged American tourists, perplexed foreigners, a few local dandies and not-so-young-as-they-looked women scavenging for the usual kinds of excitement. A couple kissed rather passionately in a corner. Two men, gay, tried to look at ease. A woman sat alone in the opposite corner fro me, smoking a cigarette in, of all things, about a foot-long holder. She had shiny straight blond hair and a truly silly pillbox hat— playing her Deco part with style.

  The couple right in front of me looked midwestern, middle-aged, middle management, and, as it turned out, they were. They were gabbing away, obviously a skosh drunk. The black glittering sea stretched out through the windows beside them.

  The man smiled at me when we reached for our drinks at the same time. "You a Lagunatic?" he asked, referring to our unfortunate nickname.

  "I am."

  "Nice little town."

  "It's a good place to live."

  "What do you do?"

  "Word processing. You?"

  "Structural engineer, back in Des Moines. Came for Disneyland, and some whale watching."

  He'd missed the whales by six months, but it was a little late to point that out. His wife smiled at me and picked up her drink. She was slender, sandy-haired, cute when she smiled. We talked a while, then the conversation dribbled off.

  A moment later, they were both looking at me rather pointedly. "Tell him, Mike," she said, nudging her husband.

  "You tell him, Janice," he said back, not unkindly. "You tell him."

  "Okay, I'll tell him." She leaned a little closer. "This is the worst place we've ever gone. By the time we book a new flight out and pay for a week's worth of a hotel room we won't use, it will have cost us over two thousand dollars. You've got sunshine, Disneyland, and a person slaughtering people while they sleep. I just felt like, since you lived here and this is a tourist town, you should know."

  I was in no mood to hear about tarnished vacation plan "Tough luck. We all have our disappointments."

  Mike chuckled uneasily. "You could be a little more polite about it, guy."

  "And you could get yourself thrown out this window," said. "So why don't you give it a rest?"

  "I'll be damned," said Janice, slapping her drink glass on the table and standing. "Mike, let's just get the hell out of here. Killers and drunks like this guy. This is a rotten place, and you can have it."

  "Thank you," I said.

  "Hope he gets you."

  "Who's that?"

  "The Midnight Eye."

  When Mike and Janice had left, I studied the crowd, observed a bearded man who wore a trim Italian jacket and a pair of expensive round glasses. He was roughly the Eye's size. He had the hair and beard. But I had him for a university type or a shrink. He was with a redhead who pouted, looking out the window.

  I smiled, kind of, then turned and watched the black Pacific. The Midnight Eye as a tourism deterrent, I though hurting Disneyland and the California gray whale. And what if he goes out again tonight?

  It got late and the crowd thinned. Amber, of course, did not show. I was relieved, exhausted, and deeply, furiously, sad when I thought about Isabella, which was every other second or two. Would the operation work? Would it be a disaster? On chance in ten...

  The piano player did a good job on "The Way It Is. Ponytail seemed to be pleading with the still-dour redhead.

  I paid my bill, went into the men's room, and threw some water on my face. Drying off with a paper towel, I regarded myself in the mirror and saw with some alarm the weight that had settled behind my jaws, under my chin. My nose was plumper—maybe a little pink—and my eyes seemed smaller. I look like a fucking manatee, I thought. Booze. Must cut that out. I straightened my back, inflated my chest, shoulders rela
xed, head erect. Better. On my way out, the blonde in the corner motioned me over. She had taken her cigarette from its ridiculous holder and now placed it between her lips, aiming it at me for a light. Sure. I bent over, instrument poised.

  When my thumb went down and the flame appeared and I set the fire close to her mouth, I saw that I was looking into the eyes of someone I used to know very well.

  My heart stalled. I stared into those unmistakable gray eyes, making sure.

  By the time my thumb released the lighter and Amber's face returned to the bar darkness, I had already begun-— tentatively, very hesitantly—to piece together what had happened.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  I drove south through the hot darkness. Amber slumped again: the far door in her utterly convincing blond wig and a pair of sunglasses across which the city lights inched like rain on windshield. The breeze whipped through her hair as she stared out the open window. Her face was pale and the shine of tears lay on her cheeks. The air smelled of ocean and exhaust and the opiate scent of nightshade—one of several sweet, poisonous beauties that blossom on our coast.

  We went in silence all the way to Dana Point. I locked and unlocked my fingers on the wheel; they were governed by alternating currents of dread and hope that I could hardly identify, let alone control. I felt as if I were falling, twisting untethered through the air, careening toward an impact that promised both death and clarity. I kept glancing across at Amber.

  She was crying without sound, a talent that had always amazed me. The only giveaways were the running tears and the sound of her congested inhalations.