Coming of Age: Volume 1: Eternal Life (19 page)

“What is this, John?” she asked.

“My revocable living trust and a durable power of attorney.”

“I see.” Wells had kept in touch with Jeanne Hale, who was now the full-time caregiver for Praxis’s wife. Without violating a confidence, Jeanne had let her know that the woman was failing fast. “You want to change the terms, I guess, in case your wife … does not survive you?”

His gaze held steady. “No, the succession is fairly clear and covers a number of contingencies. I want it changed now so that my daughter Callie becomes trustee, chief inheritor, and agent on my behalf.”

“Oh!” Jeanne had also mentioned some kind of upheaval at the engineering company, after Callista’s forced withdrawal. The daughter had moved into the family home full time, John himself was spending most days at home, and the entire household had suddenly gone tense and quiet, except for the fitfully dreaming Adele. Using admirable discretion, Jeanne had only discussed her sense of foreboding, not any juicy tidbits she might have picked up from overheard conversations.

“You can pretty much make that change with a word processor and a notary public,” Wells said now. “You don’t need an attorney for that.”

“Let’s just say I’m cautious. I want this ironclad and unbreakable.”

“I understand.” She opened the envelope, unfolded the documents and began scanning them.

“My sons can be very persuasive,” he went on. “And they will have a lot of power at their backs. I want to be sure any attempt they make to overturn this gets stopped dead in its tracks.” His voice was calm enough, but under the surface she could sense a suppressed rage.

“I understand.” A thought occurred to her. “What about Adele’s will? If it follows the pattern here—with your eldest son as trustee, followed by your other son, and only after him your daughter—and Adele should outlive you …”

“It don’t think that’s a reasonable possibility.”

Wells nodded. She turned a page and was studying the list of assets. Praxis was a wealthy man, she found, even by the standards of Sea Cliff.

“One other thing is that list,” he said. “Right now, it’s all tied up with shares in Praxis Engineering. I will soon be surrendering those outright. So we’ll need to show cash or some other liquid asset. I’m not sure what I’ll convert the shares to right now. Times are so unsettled. This has to be a work in progress.”

“Don’t worry. I’ll help you get started, John,” she said. “But I may not see it through. We’re dissolving the practice, Ted and I, and I may not be in town much longer. I’ll handle the trusteeship and inheritance issues right away, of course. But you may need to find someone else to work on the assets. I know two good attorneys, former associates of mine, who can do that for you. And you will want to stop my retainer as of the end of the month.”

“Oh?” It was his turn to look puzzled. “I didn’t realize you had … troubles.”

“Not trouble. But it feels like all the air’s gone out of the room.”

“I know what you mean. Like we’re all on short time.”

She gathered the documents. “We’ll survive.”

He took her hand. “I sure hope we do.”

* * *

Praxis entered in and ran the San Francisco Marathon that June. Although the organizers offered a pair of back-to-back half-marathon courses, he decided to try for the full twenty-six miles, which meant climbing and descending elevation changes of two to three hundred feet at least five times. He sternly told himself to have no expectations. He would run until he was tired, then he would drop out, cool down, and go home.

He gave himself the longest possible estimated finish time, six hours, and received a bib with the number 80,679. He would be starting a full hour after the fastest runners, but still early—six-thirty on a Sunday morning. Toward the end of the race, around noon, he thought he might be stumbling over a course littered with dispensed water bottles and fallen bodies.

The starting point was the Ferry Building at the foot of Market Street. The course went around the waterfront on the Embarcadero, through Fisherman’s Wharf, Marina Green, and Crissy Field. Then he was on familiar territory, up over the Golden Gate Bridge and back. From there he went down the western slope of the city, passing within three blocks of home, and across the Avenues. The course looped forward and back through Golden Gate Park, then proceeded east on Haight Street, crossed to 16th Street, down to the foot of Potrero Hill, and finally back along the Embarcadero to within a block of his office—his former office—on Steuart Street. It only felt like he was running half of the famous Forty-Nine Mile Drive around the city.

He did not push himself too hard, but he never let himself give up, either. He passed many younger, stronger people who sagged by the side of the road in defeat. For the last six miles his knees and ankles, shins and thigh muscles were throbbing, and he knew he would be hobbling around the house for a week. He wondered what it would cost, and how painful it would be, to have to have the doctors replace the joints where cartilage now rubbed against bone with implements of steel and ceramic, or maybe new bearing points grown from his stem cells. He was staggering and gasping and hating himself for the last mile.

But his heart felt fine, clocking a steady one hundred forty beats per minute.

He was a mess. He was a wreck. He was invincible.

* * *

Callie tried to spend at least an hour a day with her mother, to be there even if Adele wasn’t always aware. On the good days, when her mother decided to dress, they would sit downstairs and watch daytime television or maybe go out into the garden when the sky was clear and the sun warmed the wrought-iron bench. On the bad days, Callie would sit by her bedside while Adele nodded and dozed.

Once, when Callie had first come home, her mother asked her for a drink. Callie had consulted with the caregiver, Jeanne, who pursed her lips and frowned. “She’s not supposed to have it,” the woman said. “But I can’t see it makes a bit of difference now.”

So Callie had mixed a tablespoon of bourbon in three fingers of soda and given it to her mother. Adele took it, gulped it down, grimaced, and burped from the bubbles. The “daily soother” became a morning ritual, until Adele forgot to ask, then forgot who Callie was, and finally forgot who she was herself. But still Callie sat beside her and held her thin, pale hand.

When her mother seemed capable of hearing, Callie helped Adele remember her life through the stories from Callie’s childhood. She recalled the time Leonard tried to make a pet of a stray mongoose, when they were all living at the dam site in Ghana, and the animal bit him. She told about the time the family traveled to see the tidal bore, the “Silver Dragon,” on the Quiantang River in China. She remembered the mountain lion that chased Callie and Richard up a tree when their father was renovating the missile site in Idaho, and how Adele shot the beast in the shoulder—her father always claimed it was through the heart—with a Winchester rifle. She remembered the time she and her brothers, who had been raised on four different contents and in six different cultures, finally went to Disneyland and simply goggled at Main Street, the Mississippi riverboat, and the Fantasyland castle—although Richard said he’d seen bigger ones in Germany.

Sometimes Adele smiled. More often she simply nodded or shrugged. Once she asked, “Was I there?” And Callie said, “You were the glue that held us together, Mom.”

Lately, Adele simply slept. Fifteen hours a day. Then twenty.

Jeanne Hale took Callie and her father into the study one evening and said quietly, “There’s only so much I can do. Soon she’s going to need real medical support—the sort she can only get in a hospital or skilled nursing facility.”

Her father nodded. “Can you help with arrangements?”

“Of course. I’ll start making calls tomorrow.”

“She won’t like leaving the house.”

“I doubt she’ll know about it.”

“A blessing, I guess.”

* * *

Because the community center had no locker room for her to change in, Antigone Wells had vastly simplified her preparations and dress for going to and from class.

Instead of more complicated layers of underwear, she wore a simple pink nylon leotard under sweat pants and a fleece jacket, and slip-on sneakers without socks on her feet. Then, when she got to the ladies room—or even out in the corridor or in a corner of the exercise room—she could simply strip off the pants and jacket, shed the sneakers, and pull on her white cotton uniform
gi
trousers with their draw-string tie and the loose-fitting jacket that was closed only by the heavily stitched white
obi
belt around her hips. The leotard took care of any modesty issues as she bent and twisted during the workout. She had long ago stopped carrying a purse but instead put her house keys in one pants pocket, her money and cards in a billfold in the other. All she had to carry then was the
gi,
which she rolled into a compact bundle and tied with the belt.

That lack of encumbrance probably saved her life.

Wells was walking home after dark on Divisadero Street, and once again the streetlights were out. She could navigate only by the indirect light coming from the few open store fronts, lit porch lamps, upper-story windows, and the occasional sweep of headlights from passing cars. Otherwise she moved from shadow to shadow, and she could feel the tension rising in her neck and shoulder muscles.

She kept to the middle of the sidewalk and alternately scanned the dark spaces between buildings and the gaps between parked cars. Several times she paused on approaching the most densely shadowed areas. But each time she made it through alone and without incident.

Then her luck ran out. A figure in black detached itself from the side of a building and moved on a line to intercept her. “Hello, little lady!” said a cooing voice.

She didn’t know whether to speed up or slow down, engage or turn and run away. They hadn’t cover this kind of encounter in karate class, only the moves to make after a fight had actually started.

She was holding her
gi
folded and tied together by a loop of her
obi
belt. It formed a mass that hung about eight inches below her hand and glowed whitely in the darkness.

As the man came toward her, she swung it up hard, aiming for his face, the side of his head. He batted it away with a chuckle and kept on coming, his hands reaching out for her throat.

Her fists dropped below navel level.

She took a short step-slide toward him.

Fists jammed upward in a double head block.

When he stepped back, her rear leg came forward.

Toes arched, struck his groin, and whipped back faster.

As he doubled over, her hands came down in one-two chops.

She pushed him away, and he collapsed against the building wall.

She scooped up her
gi
and ran off down the street … all the way home.

Wells didn’t know if she had hurt the man, or whether the chops—which landed somewhere around his neck and upper back—had broken anything. If he was injured, or even dead, then she supposed she bore some legal responsibility. But she didn’t care. She couldn’t identify him, and it was a safe bet he couldn’t identify her.

But at the back of her mind was the glowing thought:
How about that, Wonder Woman? This stuff really works!

* * *

Leonard was in the chairman’s suite on the thirty-eighth floor—finally, at last, his office by rights—when Richard called for an emergency meeting. Leonard agreed that his brother could come up, and when he did, Richard was carrying a sheaf of printouts full of numbers.

“What’s all this?” Leonard asked.

“We’re going to lose the bid on Hetch-Hetchy restoration.”

“That’s not been decided yet, so it’s too early to say.”

“We were third in line, and that’s announced.”

“So what’s your point?” Leonard said.

“We’ve lost out on the Seattle flood control, the Beijing airport expansion, and the Stanford accelerator double loop. With Hetch-Hetchy gone, I started running our numbers in earnest.” He spread his papers across Leonard’s nice clean desktop. “Our backlog of projects is down to fifteen percent of where it stood a year ago. Not down
by
fifteen percent. Down
to
fifteen percent.” He pointed at another sheet. “Top-line revenues are down to twenty-five percent of year-ago. That’s old jobs being cancelled, including, most recently, the Mile High arts center, which they just took back and sent to our competition.” He pushed the two pieces of paper together. “Old jobs going away. New jobs not coming in.”

“I know things are tight,” Leonard said.

“No!” His brother shook his head. “They were tight a year ago.” He picked up a third sheet. “Now—we are not even covering expenses. Forget profits and dividends. Think core staff, office rentals, computer and telecommunications, taxes on this building, heavy equipment in the field,
people
in the field, even the cash in hand to buy the next brick and pour the next batch of concrete on projects where we’re already committed. It all adds up to more than we can possibly collect. Ten percent, maybe twelve percent more.”

“What do you want me to do?”

“Nothing—not unless you can pull a big fat lollipop out of your ass. Find us a sure-fire gigabuck contract, up-front loaded with one hundred percent profit.”

“There’s no need to be insulting.”

“I’m trying to make a point, Len.”

“All right, we’re in trouble.”

“No, we’re already dead.”

Leonard stared at him.

“Start proceedings with Burke today,” his brother told him. “I’ll try to get us twenty or thirty cents on the dollar for any assets that aren’t already in hock. Then we’ll have to cancel our current contracts and pay a slew of penalties. Hopefully, the one will just about balance out the other. We can close the doors next quarter, if not next month.”

“But … this is a hundred-and-twenty-year-old company!”

“No, Leonard. It’s a walking shell just bleeding money.”

“You to have do something. You have to save it!”

“No, you shoot it and put it out of its misery.”