Fifty Mice: A Novel (22 page)

MISERABLE,
he stays up late drinking at the Parrot, unwilling to sit in the bungalow alone. One-legged Leo and the old actress are on the veranda, powering down Rusty Nails and arguing, as usual, about transubstantiation. “Welcome the fuck back,
bienvenue
, James or Jay, whichever.” Leo, lapsed Catholic but Pope Francis fanboy, thinks the doctrine is just another eschatological smoke screen, purely semantic, the Vatican Council throws up to cloak its more reprobate, pederastical appetites and transgressions; the actress is old-school Christian Science and convinced that everything is a metaphor.

Even Jay’s family’s departure.

“The Lord giveth, and, well, you know,” she says, and asks, basically, what did he expect? It hits him: she’s in the program: a protected witness relocated here to Catalina long ago, maybe even one step short of stardom once, and then, for all these years, derailed. Erased. Reborn.

Peromyscus polionotus,
Jay tells them, well into his third (or fourth?) frozen margarita, “is a small, nocturnal mouse found in the southeastern United States. A.k.a. oldfield mice, they’re monogamous, pairs
mate for life, and both the guys and the gals take care of the oldfield babies.”

Leo allows that he doesn’t like mice; rodents, in general, creep him out, although on one harrowing mission to Chile he was forced to eat degu (that country’s indigenous, brush-tailed rat relation) and, roasted over an open fire and well salted, it wasn’t all bad.

“The females,” Jay soldiers on, “have a greater impact on the success of the family unit than do the males—but consequently male oldfield mice get better perks from choosing carefully between potential mates who represent potential futures, or like: paths of life.”

“Same as it ever was,” Leo drawls, David Byrne–like, and, à la Dumas,
“Cherchez la femme, pardieu! Cherchez la femme!”

The actress raises her glass. “What he said. Here, here.”

Jay expands: “At Manchurian Global, we put them in a maze that my friend Vaughn built from scratch, using big pet-store aquariums divided by opaque panels that would isolate the females from each other, but allow the guys to schmooze the girls, individually and privately, so that we could track the amount of time spent associating with each female, and figure out which girl mouse which guy mouse was crushing on.”

Leo concurs that these parameters sound reasonable. The actress has mixed emotions about the largely passive role assigned to the “poor ducks.”

Some males, Jay admits, “were disoriented at first, and, you know, indifferent to the experiment. Focused solely on getting the fuck out, or literally confused by the parameters of their new situation.” The tequila is coursing warm through his veins. “We got mice from all over the country, in order to ensure a kinship coefficient that would not bias the outcome of the study.”

Leo grumbles that he doesn’t know what the fuck a kinship
coefficient is, and, Flomax kicking in, excuses himself for the men’s room. Jay slides his eyes to the actress. Thin white seams of last-century plastic-surgical corrections are ghosting through her carefully applied foundation; the Rusty Nails are making her eyes crazy red.

“As might be expected,” Jay tells her, sounding more and more like the paper Vaughn wrote, that Jay typed and spell-checked, “males spent significantly more time associating with, you know: exciting, vivacious, unfamiliar, distantly related females than with more familiar females.”

“Men love mystery,” the actress says, smiling. “You remind me of something,” she adds, drowsy. “From
Peter Pan
, one of those boys who were with him on the island, runaways who never wished to grow up. But more at the end, when they did, when they had to.”

Jay confesses that he never liked that story. The actress says she once played Peter Pan in a summer stock musical. “Like Mary Martin, but we didn’t have a rigging, so I just had to run around the stage and flap my arms.” Her words are beginning to slur.

The oldfield males were subsequently separated from their chosen female, and when Leo comes wobbling back, Jay tells them how he was witness to the corresponding listlessness and decline and full-on depression of the test subjects that made them unsuitable for further experimentation.

He says, “Many just failed to thrive, stopped eating, stopped grooming, stopped moving, and died.”

“Tout amour,”
Leo murmurs.
“Vouloir prendre la lune avec les dents.”

This mouse melancholia did not factor into the final, official study. “They’re just mice,” Vaughn had said. “Don’t read too much into it.”

“What happened to the boys who survived?” the actress wonders.

“Sold to pet stores,” Jay says, “as bulk food for large snakes and
other reptile predators.” And their litters provided subjects for subsequent studies involving experimental neuroses and the Milky White Maze.

The actress bursts into tears, and Leo and Jay can only watch, uncomfortable, while she excuses herself and fumbles for her purse by her chair and hurries out into the comfort of the night.

The Parrot has last call. Leo tells one final, bitter war story entirely in French, and Jay staggers home on mist-slick, black ribbon streets under a smudge of cloud-wrapped quarter-moon.

Home.

The empty bungalow and the bed he’s never slept in. Cold, stiff sheets, absent of wordless little girls, just the trace of Ginger’s perfume, and the weight of Vaughn and the murdered mermaid still unshakable; drunken spinning lime-and-reposado-fueled dreams of an impossible future to which only a Lost Boy can aspire.

•   •   •

T
hey’ve been moved to a new situation,” Magonis tells Jay the next morning in the video store. The shrink has a new walker, flat black, with big wheels and hand brakes. “You shouldn’t have taken that L.A. run.”

But would it really have mattered?
Jay asks himself, and answers himself:
No.
Slow-witted by a searing hangover, he rings up rentals for a reptilian, leathery-skinned long-timer in bicycle shorts:
Forrest Gump
,
The Wiz
,
Ordinary People
, and
Double Fattiness
, one of Sam Dunn’s chop-socky classics.

“Movies died in ’95,” the customer gripes, pretending Magonis isn’t there.

“Have a nice day,” Jay says. The door jingles out of tune as the shop empties of the interloper. Eyde. Jay remembers her name too late.

“New situation. What is that?”

Magonis approximates a shrug. “A
new
situation—”

“—like, another house on the island? Two Harbors?” Jay feigns calm and logical; he’s already decided it’s the best strategy (or
ruse de guerre
, as Leo would say) for now.

“No.” Magonis puts his hands in the pockets of his slacks and jiggles keys. “A more
permanent
situation,” Magonis says. “Long-term. Protection-wise.”

“Where?”

“On the mainland. Or maybe not. I’m sorry, it’s none of your business. Or mine, for that matter. Look, Jay—”

“You could find out, though.”

“It was never to be made permanent. We said that going in. Jay, this witness protection protocol has been around for a long time, with remarkable success rates, based on a few simple principles including ‘need to know,’ and ‘institutional firewalls.’”

“Is that good for Helen, moving her around all the time, is that healthy?”

Magonis stares at him.

“Because I’m just saying. I don’t know for a fact, but I’m guessing she and Ginger have soldiered through seven rings of hell long before they got thrown into this one, you and Public and the program, and subsequently you guys go yanking her, them, from place to place, school to school, situation to situation willy-nilly without a thought about how that impacts Helen—and Ginger, but especially Helen.”

“Helen’s fine.”

“I don’t think so.”

“Jay—”

“No, listen—”

“Jay—”

“—I read somewhere that kids who go through serial relationships, foster care, whatever, can grow up to be sick puppies. You know? Serial killers and stuff. Sociopaths. They’ve done studies. You must know about them. You guys have a
huge
responsibility here.”

“You understand our position, then,” Magonis says evenly.

“No,” Jay says. He does, but he can’t.

Magonis takes the electric cigarette from where he’s tucked it behind his ear. Rolls it between his fingers, no intention to smoke, just a prop, for effect. He says, “I thought you weren’t the family kind of guy.” He looks up into Jay’s eyes and holds them, level, piercing, unblinking. For some reason he wants Jay to say it.

Jay drops all pretense. “I want them back,” he admits. “Okay? Yeah. You took away my life, I want the one you replaced it with. It’s only fair.”

“Fair.”

“That’s right.”

Magonis bursts out laughing.

•   •   •

P
ublic is less amused.

“Jay,” he says, as a sigh, exhaling it. “This arrangement. It was never intended to be—”

“—permanent. I know. No shit. Well, guess what?”

Public studies him. At Magonis’s instruction, Jay has found the head Fed at Big E’s, waiting on a triple latte and chatting up Penny, cocktail waitress from the Garrulous Parrot who, from her easy body language and casual sharing of Public’s chocolate
croissant
, fingers brushing his, appears to have let the Fed introduce some measure of doubt into her fealty to the boat babysitter husband, Cody.

“Bring them back,” Jay says simply, “and I’ll tell you the truth.”

“This dislocation, your state of flux, it’s perfectly natural to form attachments. All the adjusting. It takes time.” Public finishes his thought before Jay’s offer fully lands. “What?”

“I’ll tell you what I saw, everything,” Jay says, playing his trump card, and straightens up, stubborn.

Silence. Public is, for once, flummoxed. And skittish: the way he sent Penny off when Jay showed up: brusque, impatient, unhappy. A man in flux? He repeats the offer aloud, frowning, as if trying to make sense of it.

Reading the tea leaves of Public’s distraction, suddenly understanding that maybe this has been Public’s folly and crusade, and he’s gone all-in on it, Jay is gambling that it’s the conundrum in the Glendale strip bar that they crave unwrapped: the flower girl: the mermaid: the shooting that happened there: Jay, girl in his arms, running away, running away. It can’t be anything else, can it? He’s making this up as he goes along, hoping it will be enough, hoping that he can make it enough.

They stand at the seawall, looking out at the rows and rows of boats and yachts moored, white, bright, promising, in the morning sun. The reek of fish and petroleum is almost overwhelming. A brace of high-school kids in yellow kayaks and orange life vests paddles out around the tongue of Casino Mole toward the kelp forests of Lover’s Cove.

“Everything,” Jay says again, impassive, waiting. “You got me. I give up.”

Public tilts his head to one side, a dog hearing a weird frequency, or wondering where you hid the squeaky chew toy. “I don’t understand, though. Why were you holding back from us all this time?”

“Maybe you didn’t offer me the right incentive.”

“But—”

Jay, honest: “I don’t know. I don’t know.”

Public seems to accept this. He’s pensive for a while, staring out at the harbor. Then: “What if they don’t want to come back?”

Jay says nothing. In this experiment, the parameters are fixed, there are no variables.

“Ginger and her daughter. You know . . . we can’t just force them to—”

“—Yes, you can. You can do whatever you want. You’re God.”

Public doesn’t deny it.

AN ENDLESS PARADE
of whitecaps paints a watery tessellation as far as the eye can see.

Unruly waves swell over the rocks of Abalone Point, sending cotton spumes of mist skyward with a rumbling, hissing symphony of indefatigable yearning.

Then, head thrown back, momentarily deafened by the rotor roar, Jay watches the helicopter arrive and spiral down to the helipad, settle, and go quiet, doors opening to release Helen and Ginger.

They step unsteadily to solid ground. Helen runs to Jay, leaps, arms wide, for him to catch, and she hugs him, hard in a silent bliss.

Ginger hangs back, her hair a mad tangle, her eyes dark and chary with that wacky ’90s grunge-rock art-school mascara he’s come to expect when she tries to doll herself up, her expression flat and unreadable but possibly pissed off. Her eyes find Jay for an instant before flicking away, and Jay follows her worried gaze to Barry, just turning and stepping, like a forgotten promise, into the shadows of the heliport terminal hangar, where Sandy has chosen to stay. Public declined to attend the happy reunion, explaining he had preparations to make with Doe. Jay doesn’t know what he expected from Ginger, but he’s
understandably uncertain, apprehensive: it’s a strange feeling, where something matters.

His mouth is dry, he can feel his pulse in his head. He’s spent so long being well defended, immune to loss.

They decide to walk back along Pebbly Beach Road. Everything is gauzy, as though there’s been a slow-smoldering fire inland, but it’s only the midday brume, hilltops ablur, sky scrimmed slate. Helen takes the concrete stairs down to the shore and throws stones in the ocean, while Jay and Ginger find a place among the jagged rocks to sit, already in the blue shadows of the naked cliffs, and watch her.

“What are you doing?” Ginger asks finally, faintly.

For the moment, Jay stays silent. It seems like Ginger knows what he’s doing, she just doesn’t want to ask why.

“What happened in L.A.?”

“Pretty much my whole life,” he says, tentatively, answering a different question, “I’ve never really wanted anything. I’ve never really had the courage to care about anything. You think you float? I invented floating.”

Ginger looks unconvinced. “Huh.”

“I did what you said. I ran. But that was the plan, right? Did they tell you to say it to me, or—”

“I meant run and keep running. If you’d kept going, what they wanted, or expected, wouldn’t have—”

Jay cuts her off, “And I saw what I didn’t have. And now my friend is missing, and a girl is dead, and I’m still clueless what these guys want from me, but I decided what I want. I decided.”

“You don’t know me,” she says. “You don’t know anything about me.” Up on the road, not so discreet, a stationary golf cart holds Barry and Sandy, who aren’t talking. Ginger tries to keep her voice low: “What we had was not a relationship, it was not a family, it was, I don’t know, what, an accident, a kind of theater.”

“I don’t care. It’s what I want. Can you understand that?”

Ginger watches Helen dance along the water’s edge. “I can,” she says softly.

“I don’t care what the world is, as long as you’re in it.”

He can see how this rocks her; in truth, it rocks him, putting the words one after another and saying it. Ginger slits her eyes and lifts her chin, almost defiant, and runs one hand through her hair to get it out of the way: “That doesn’t make any sense.”

“I am way past the idea of things making sense,” Jay says. “Nothing makes sense. Emotions are all that’s left.” He hesitates, then continues. “So, I figure, hell, let them anchor us.”

He hunts for Ginger’s eyes under the curtain of her bangs. “Let emotions rule.”

Helen tosses a huge boulder into the sea, so big that she has to use two hands and almost goes into the water with it, and the splash comes flopping back on her. She screams, happy, and glances back at them. There’s nothing coy in her look. Ginger smiles, brittle.

“I’m a marshal, Jay. I’m a Fed. Deputy U.S. Marshal Virginia Blake. I’m part of the team that put you here. And kept you here.”

“The inside guy.”

“Yeah. Put there just in case you want to, you know . . . confide to me what you won’t tell . . . the others.”

Now it’s Jay’s turn to be rocked by her words.

As she says them, as he reacts to them, thoughts rear-ending each other as he tries to re-calculate everything he knows, and expects, ruefully blinking back astonishment he chides himself for feeling because, waiting for Ginger and Helen to return to him, Jay had run through all the variations on the Ginger theme, and Ginger the Fed was one of them, sure, but he’d dismissed it as way too pat and paranoid. It certainly helps explain why she told him to run (or he hopes it does), but it isn’t the version of the story he was yearning
for. And, potentially, it makes things that much more difficult, going forward.

Or does it?

Ginger stares intently down at Helen, to avoid looking at him, a fragile uncertainty in her cant and posture.

“All that stuff about your boyfriend . . . ?”

“Husband. He’s dead. He was an asshole and he’s dead, and I don’t miss him.” She stops there, suggesting she’d decided there’s nothing more to explain.

“Did you—?”

“—Kill him? No. Public loves his fictions. I told you. It makes him feel like Zeus. Looking down on us mere mortals.”

“And Helen?”

“What about her?”

“She a Fed?”

Ginger can’t help but laugh. “No.”

“But not your daughter.”

There’s a long hesitation before she admits, “No. No she’s not.” She starts to tell him the story, how Helen’s parents were bad guys, bad people, killed by some other bad people, Helen saw it, and because of what she saw and because the killers fled the country and are still at large and know she saw them Helen’s at risk, and under the protection of the Marshal Service. But Jay hears only half of it; he watches as Ginger sweeps the hair back off her face again, gathers it at her neck, and ties a fat knot with it to hold it there. She doesn’t look like a Fed. None of the steady cast of appraising eye, she’s all over the place, nervous, shy, vulnerable. She looks like a work in progress, mercurial, a young woman who got to be a mom before she thought she was ready, discovered she was good at it and enjoyed it so much she doesn’t want to think about what might happen if someone decides to un-mom her.

“Does she remember what happened?”

“The doctors say maybe, maybe not, she was too young. But she hasn’t talked since it happened, either, so . . .”

“Right.” Jay can’t help adding, for the irony: “Maybe she does remember, and she’s just not saying.”

Evidently, Ginger doesn’t like the easy familiarity of this. She stands up, hands on hips, hair flowing: half a goddess, at least.

Jay stands up with her. “You love her,” he says, finally.

“I was assigned to her,” Ginger says, evasive.

“Oh. Is that all it is?”

“To protect her.”

“Right. Like a mom,” Jay says.

“Yeah.”

“And one thing led to another.”

Ginger snaps at him: “It’s not the same, okay? It’s not the same thing as . . . this. You and me. It’s not.”

Jay waits for her to calm. She unknots her hair, and combs at it with her fingers. She smooths her jeans with her palms. There are tears in her eyes, and she doesn’t wipe them away.

“They’ll take her away from you,” he says quietly. “Sooner or later.”

It’s a cheap shot, and he regrets it the moment after he says it. Ginger goes very quiet. She nods. “I know.”

“I just mean—”

“I know what you mean,” she interjects, without any bitterness. “Don’t make me choose, Jay,” she says. “This was a sweet, sweet dumbass gesture, to be sure, and maybe, I don’t know, heroic, even, but . . . There’s no happy ending here. Not for us. I’m just the inside guy, waiting for you to tell me what you know.”

“Why don’t I believe that?”

Her smile breaks his heart. Waves lap the rocks, brittle-sounding. Helen has drifted farther down the shore, out of earshot. Jay glances over at the grim Feds in the golf cart.

“What do they want from me, Ginger?”

Jay has to wait again. He’s not sure if she’s filtering what she’s going to tell him, or simply organizing it into a form he’ll easily understand. “They? We? Me?” She sighs, big sigh. “Last year we had this . . . problem. One of our guys, an unhappy marshal, went into business for himself. He had this list, of names—”

“—on a flash drive.”

“Yeah. Somebody else offered a whole lot of money for it.”

“Somebody who wanted to make the people on the list disappear,” Jays says.

“Worst case.”

“When is it ever anything but a worst case?”

“There was a meet. The deal going down. At the strip club with the mermaids. But our unhappy marshal got himself killed. We got there too late. And the list is unaccounted for.” Ginger looks at him. “We—they, Public and Doe, and the people they answer to—think you saw who the shooter was.”

“And the shooter will get them to the buyer.”

Ginger doesn’t appear to feel the need to respond.

Jay absorbs this. “Do you think that’s right?”

Ginger says, “I think you should tell them the truth.”

The silence that passes between them is thick with a weight of sober understanding, a connection Jay has never had with anyone. He can’t explain it.
This is life,
he thinks.
It matters, it’s messy, it’s ugly, it’s an act of faith.
A leap into the darkness.

Jay nods. “Yeah.” He wants to kiss her. It’s the craziest thing. Her eyes are dead and her hair is a tangle and needs washing. She looks
wrung out, he realizes. Someone who’s been running an ultramarathon, and there’s still hours and miles to go. He asks her where they took her and Helen when they left the island.

“Vegas,” she says. “So grim. Hellishly hot. Acres and acres of ambling ghost-town housing developments of foreclosed and repossessed properties we’ve been requisitioning for the program. Sketchy stucco split-levels with satellite dishes and three-car garages.

“All these displaced people, living lies,” she says. And she admits, “I shouldn’t be telling you that.”

Jay says it’s okay, he can keep secrets.
Ask Helen,
he wants to add.

Ginger stares at him for a long time. “The unhappy marshal was my husband,” Ginger says then, emptily, and walks down to the water, to Helen.

Jay’s mind reels. But he hears himself call after her, defiant, “I don’t care.”

She stops and turns and pulls her hair back again. Just holding on to it, this time. The sun unforgiving on her face as she looks back at him puzzled. “What?” she says. She heard him, though. He’s sure of it.

“I don’t care,” he tells her, meaning everything: the bad husband, the lie she’s lived, the part she’s played in this. “It’s okay. Doesn’t matter. It doesn’t change anything.”

She shakes her head and asks him something, but he can’t hear her over the surf breaking on the rocks.

“Say again?”

“After everything. After all this,” she says. “How can you trust me?”

This, he knows, is the question he should be asking himself. But he’s not. And he won’t.

Jay shrugs. “How can you trust anybody, Ginger?”