SUMMER of FEAR Page 22

  "May we speak?"

  "Outside," I said.

  We stood in the hallway. Tina Sharp wore an unpleasant perfume. She carried a briefcase. Her eyes were on the verge of bulging, and they looked watery and weak.

  "I'm sorry to have to track you down like this," she said "You answered neither my calls nor my letter."22

  "I couldn't face you."

  "I understand. I only wanted to inform you that the resection just performed on your wife is not covered under the plan."

  "Yes, it is covered under the plan."

  "No. Mr. Monroe, as you know, we could not cover the radiation-implant operation because it is not one of our approved procedures. Nor, according to our contract, can we cover any expenses incurred as a result of an elective, cosmetic, or non-plan-approved surgery. Today's operation, unfortunately, was just that."

  "So now, I'm another eighty grand in the hole."

  "I believe it will run closer to one hundred, Mr. Monroe. I didn't think you should bear that cost without knowing in advance that you would have to. If you had simply contacted me earlier, this would not have to come as the shock I know it is. I tried."

  I looked at Tina Sharp. She could have been, and probably was, somebody's mother. And daughter.

  "Well," I said. "There have been plenty of shocks lately. Thanks for coming down here."

  She offered her hand, which I shook. It was cold and dry.

  "I'm very sorry, Mr. Monroe. I know the facility will work with you on a repayment plan that will suit both parties."

  "Thank you, Ms. Sharp. You've been a wonderful balm in an hour of need."

  "I wish Equitable could have been there for you," she said. "I'm sorry we had to let you down."

  She turned and walked down the hallway toward the elevators.

  Back in Izzy's room, I sat and stared at the framed picture of her that she always brought for hospital stays—she considered it good luck. It stood on the bedside stand, leaning against flowers brought by Theodore. The picture is just a snapshot by an amateur, but the color is good and Izzy is caught just as she sees the camera—half surprise and half composure—regarding the photographer from beneath the black curls of her hair and the scalloped brim of a wide black hat. Her neck and shoulders are visible, bared by a strapless dress. Her smile is demure, confident, restrained. She shows no teeth, but her lips are beginning a happy rise and her eyes—to anyone who knows Isabella—are, I swear, reflections of a contentment so deep, it could come only from the center of her heart. For most people, it a picture of a woman in her prime. But for me, it is the image of one life we did not get to finish; it is a reminder of one future that will not take place as we had imagined; it is an ambassador from dreams that have passed. Thus, it is a thing of great beauty and great pain. We were newlyweds ourselves then, and the friend who took that picture understood the core of Isabella happiness, because on the back is written the simple caption

  Mrs. Monroe!!

  At that moment, sitting beside Izzy in the hospital room, would I have liked to go back to the time that picture was taken? 0h, truly. But I couldn't stay, because although perfection is a nice place to visit, no one lives there for long. I would rather have the chance to live that moment through, forward up to now with all the standard disappointments and struggles, all the commonplace raptures that lovers can expect, with all the simplicity of hope that picture holds. But I chose the woman, not the dream, and her path I will try to make my own. This is the promise I made, and that I intend to keep.

  But while I looked at Izzy and her picture, a deep and specific rage began to form inside me, at Martin Parish—for what he had begun that night of July 3 and was attempting to finish at the expense of Isabella. Never had I been more needed.

  Never again would Isabella need more love and care and understanding than in the days to come. And what could I do from behind the bars of Orange County Jail? How could I possibly raise bail with no money in the bank and the modest equity in our home? What about the medical bills?

  I thought of calling an attorney—I know plenty of lawyers. But if I was to admit myself to the great maw of the criminal-justice system, when might I be free again? And if I was to submit to the machinery of the courts, wouldn't it be, on some level at least, a confession that I was willing to play this deadly game on Martin Parish's terms?

  No. I called no attorney that night. Instead, I began to conceive a counteroffensive, one that would take as its keynote the very one that Martin believed was his alone: audacity. If I was to deal with Martin Parish, it would not be through the achingly slow gears of the bureaucracy.

  The ICU nurses eased me out around eight. I rose from Isabella's bedside with a sense of purpose in my desperation, and not a little meanness in my heart.

  Joe and Corrine were still sitting in the waiting area, but Grace and Theo were gone. Instead, Amber sat across from Isabella's parents. An uneasy detente prevailed over them, grouped together as a family might be, but only a simpleton would not have noted the rigid set of Corrine's back; the contrite, hand-folded isolation of Amber; and the intense attention brought by Joe to a magazine about cars.

  "Where have you been?" I said, boring straight into Amber's gray eyes as if I could differentiate truth from fiction in them.

  "Taking care of business."

  "Grace and your dad left," said Joe.

  A pause in the conversation implied Amber's invasion.

  "I wanted you all to know I care about Isabella," said Amber. "I'll go now."

  "No. You're coming with me."

  They all looked to me. I looked at Corrine, then Joe. "This is necessary." "I don't understand," said Corrine.

  "What are you going to do, Russ?" "I'm going to try to keep myself out of jail."

  I took Amber by the arm and guided her out. The night was compressed and heated, and the air felt dirty. Across the street from the Medical Center, the bright red sign for the World Hotel had gone haywire, now proclaiming, WORLD HOT.

  "You seem to have a purpose," said Amber.

  "Martin Parish was in your room the night Alice died. He beat her to death. We need to prove it."

  "You're goddamned right we do, and you saw him."

  "I saw him leaving. I need hard evidence now. He's trying to frame Grace and me. But he was there, and he has to have left something. Whatever it is, I need it."

  "You sound desperate."

  "How I sound doesn't matter."

  She took my arm and stopped us. "Russ? She's okay. She's okay."

  "Yes, she's perfect." The image of Izzy's swollen, blackened face sat right behind my eyes. She looked as if she'd been beaten half to death, maybe closer. Her pain was everywhere now, even in the air around me.

  "You don't have to lie to me about her."

  "She's perfect."

  "Are you okay?"

  "Get in."

  I opened the door for her, then slammed it shut on her dress. It protruded from the steel like a caught animal. I cracked the door and she gathered it in, looking at me from the interior. Her expression was of fear and pity, two emotions I've never been eager to provoke from a woman. A wave of shame broke over me—my face went hot and for just a second everything blurred. What I wanted at that moment more than anything in the world was for no one on earth to know me.

  I drove fast.

  Once I was on the freeway, I called Chet Singer's home number and pleaded my case to him. I told him I needed his official presence at the scene of an as-yet-unofficial crime, in order to gather evidence against Martin Parish for the murder of Alice Fultz. He said no.

  I told him an innocent girl was being framed, along with an innocent—in this regard, anyway—father. I told him that Parish was abusing his power with a skill and depravity that challenged the imagination. Chester said no.

  I told him, as I flew through the traffic on Interstate 5, that I was helpless against Parish and his official standing, that only an honest and genuine member of the law-enforcement community could pr
ovide true resistance to Parish's outlandish— but effective—machinations.

  "I can't and won't," said Chester.

  Amber yanked the phone from my hand and pleaded an eloquent case to Chet. It might have been the best acting in the world, but I knew that Amber was as serious now as I had ever seen her, that her desire to see Alice's murder redressed was tied intimately with her own desire to believe that she, Amber Mae Wilson, was capable of loving someone other than herself.

  Chet must have said no.

  Amber literally slumped against the door, her eyes searching my own in obstinate disbelief.

  "I'm sorry," said Chet Singer. "I'm very, very sorry."

  Then he hung up.

  During the silence that followed, I could feel the engine beneath me, the tires on the asphalt, the wind outside the glass, and the continuing speechless scrutiny of Amber Mae Wilson. The suburbs crept by on either side of the freeway, and I noted that most of the lights in most of the houses were on, discouragement to the Midnight Eye, and wondered how many fingers rested inches from how many triggers, how many new dead bolts had been set and reset and reset again, how many nightmares were ending in abrupt and sweat-drenched lurchings, how many fatigued eyes were fixed drowsily on paperback books or scanning the relief of acoustic ceilings in lamplight, how many children were sleeping in the beds of their parents while mother and/or father wondered dimly just what had got wrong in a county that had once promised prosperity, security, a nominally bright future.

  "Where have you been?" I asked.

  "That is not your business."

  "Then here's something that is. It's time to cut the shit, Amber. You sent two thugs to scare Grace back into your power. You're holding money over her. You ought to see what they’d to her. She's scared to death of you."

  "I had no idea," she answered quietly, "that Grace's caparity for delusion had reached such heights."

  "Well, now you know."

  "Could you please tell me who these thugs are?"

  "Cute. You hired them, so tell me."

  "I hired a licensed private investigator to inform me my own daughter's whereabouts and... habits. I hired him to see if he could find the netsuke Grace took from me. I hired him to tell her in no uncertain terms that she was on the verge of being written out of her trust—because she refused even to acknowledge me as a person, let alone as her own mother!"

  Another long silence, then Amber said, quite flatly, "May I tell you a story about when I was young?"

  "It's a little late for stories."

  Amber's fist smacked into my shoulder, then my thigh, then landed squarely on my jaw. I kept both hands on the wheel. She hit me on the ear, then the jaw again, then brought both her hands into play, tattooing the side of my face with sharp blows. I finally steadied the wheel with my left, then backhanded her with my right, a swat that landed squarely on the side of her face and sent a fleshy report through the car. She hesitated, slugged me hard on the shoulder again, then backed against the door, crying quietly.

  "I will not be held responsible for Alice," she said. "I will not."

  "Fine."

  "You must realize, Russell, that Grace is lying about almost everything."

  "She is most definitely not lying about the burns on her feet."

  "Burns?"

  "Continue, Amber."

  For the next twenty minutes, Amber built her case against our daughter: Grace had learned to lie while learning to talk; she had never answered to anyone but herself; she was self-serving, evasive, and capable of small malice; she had increasingly lived in a "dream world" since the age of four or five; she talked to "characters" who were not visible-, she invented tragic histories for nonexistent friends; she spun tales of classmates and neighbors engaged in preposterous behavior that Amber, upon investigation, had rarely found to be true; she seemed to derive almost as much enjoyment from being caught at a lie as from getting away with one.

  "She can change the truth faster than I can change expressions, Russ."

  "I wonder where she learned to do that."

  "Go ahead. Believe her. It's a game where she forces a choice. But I've been down this road enough times to know where the curves are."

  "And you will not be held responsible."

  "You've become cruel, Russell."

  "I go with my strengths."

  I sped down the interstate, the suburbs still sprawling every direction as far as the eye could see. As far as the Midnight Eye could see, I thought. What a hell this place had become,

  "I'm not trying to exonerate myself, Russell. I'm just trying to tell you there are explanations for what I did in... another life." "What did you do in the other life?"

  "For one thing, I ignored my own conscience."

  "And Alice was a place for you to start."

  Amber was silent for a long moment. "Yes. Yes, she was. You know, I was always so ashamed of her. One of the reason I left home at sixteen was so I would never have the time become like her. And now, Russ, when I say those words, I feel small and foolish and terribly selfish again."

  Her daughter's mother, I thought, but did not say it. "What was so bad about her?"

  "Nothing that I can see now, but then, when I was a little girl, well..."

  "Well what?"

  Amber breathed deeply. "I don't know how it happened but since I was very small, my family frightened me. They seemed like... like... imposters, or beings from another planet.

  Fultz. What a crude and backwoods name. Alice was two years older than I. Daddy was a roofer, always covered with asphalt that stuck in the cracks of his fingers and never went away. Mom took in cleaning. She had this dress I remember, a cotton/ poly shift kind of thing with vertical stripes of green and pink, and a little pink tie at the top, and gathered short sleeves that pinched her arms tight. It was always clean. She wore it all the time, it seemed. I hated its ugliness, its shapelessness, the way it made her look aged and hopeless and unattractive. Alice wanted to be like Mom. She'd help with the washing and ironing. She'd wear the same kind of dress. They both liked wearing those fake leather sandals that have a band over the toes and a sole that wears out and slaps against your heel when you walk. So, slap-slap-slap, Alice and Mom going from the washer to the drying line, slap-slap-slap, Mom and Alice going back to the porch when the wash was hung. And the way Mom held the clothespins in her teeth, fanned out like wooden cigarettes, and Alice, of course, chomping her own collection, slap-slap- slap, back to the ironing boards. One time I remember sitting in the shade of the porch and watching them. They were side by side at the clothesline, moving the pins from their mouths to the clothes. Mom was heavy by then, and Alice still very thin, but I swear I could see my sister's posture becoming old even then, and she couldn't have been much more than twelve. I had a magazine on my lap, a Cosmopolitan, I believe, and on the open page before me was a picture of a woman and her daughter running across a street in Paris, the mom holding down her hat, the daughter swinging a tiny shiny purse, both of them smiling and the men in the cafe looking most appreciatively after them. And I knew I would be that woman—one of those women—someday. This may sound like a vanity beyond vanities, Russ, but when I held a good heavy magazine in my lap as a girl and I smelled the smooth paper and looked at the attractive print and saw those advertisements, I simply knew---I understood that was where I belonged. I was positive. No slap slap-slap. I remember I cried then because I was so far away from Paris. And Russ, I'm crying now when I think about what a rotten brat I was, and when I think about Alice. How could anyone do that to her? She was an innocent, Russ. I flew her out to try to begin again, to become the sister I never was, and got her killed."

  "What were you going to do with her?"

  "Love her! Treat her well. See if she or Mom and Dad or anybody needed anything. Start over! Jesus, Russell, is that so hard to understand?"

  "How many of her boyfriends did you steal?"

  "Shit on you, Russell."

  "I imagine one was enough. One, Amb
er? One special guy of Alice's?"

  She slapped me again, quite hard. "He tried. I wouldn’t. It doesn't matter."

  "Is that why you couldn't trust your own daughter when she got older? Because your sister didn't trust you?"

  She looked out the window for a long time. "There maybe some truth in that."

  "How much truth?" "None of your business how much. What you need know is that I'd become proud of her. She turned out pretty by the pictures she sent me, although she was poor and never found a good job. And you know something? In the last few months, I'd begun to feel proud of all of us. Proud of our poverty, proud of the ugly dresses, proud of the fact that we were what we were. And what I wanted more than anything was to help Alice and tell her what a fool I'd been, and that I was proud I be a Florida Fultz. The last job she had was in a bowling alley cocktailing out by Orlando. I was feeling damned proud to have a sister who was humble enough to cocktail at a damned bowling alley. I believed there was a lot I could learn from her. I wanted her... forgiveness."

  By then, Amber was sobbing again. "And you know what made the change begin? Grace did. I looked back on our lives and I looked at all the fancy schools I dragged her in and out of, all the expensive tutors, all the elaborate meals in European capitals, all the attention we got, all the travel and excitement and money, money, money, all the paparazzi and covers and suntans and rubdowns and mud baths, and I couldn't remember one moment when we did anything like stand by a clothesline with pins in our mouths, just doing something together because it had to be done and making the best of it. I actually asked her, at one point, not to call me Mother. To call me only Amber. I lost Grace, Russell, more than you did. There was a point when she leveled those brown eyes of yours on me and I saw that she had distanced herself, that she feared me the same way I feared my own mother, and she was gone for me. The only thing I could think to do was hold on harder, keep her closer. Didn't work. Do you know that for the last six months she's never once returned a call? I do not exist for her. It breaks my heart."