Hot Springs (23 page)

“Rowr rowr rowr,” she said.

“Don’t tell me, let me guess—you’re out of steak?”

“Rowr.”

“What about chicken? You do have chicken, don’t you?”

She gave this one some careful thought. “Woof,” she said, at length. “Woof woof woof, rowr.”

“Well, you go check then.”

He paged though some pictures of statues and plates. Then he turned to the index, first tried the
J
s, then had success with the
G
s. He found the chapter on Giotto and looked over the pictures in it, and the main thing he felt was confused. After all her complaining about religion, why was Bernice interested in pictures of Jesus? He liked the faces of the women looking down at the dying man. Their eyes were strangely wide, like the slits in the sides of helmets, or as if they were wearing masks.

“Woof,” said Emily, returning. “Woof woof.”

“No chicken, either? What kind of a restaurant are you running here? All right, I’ll just have soup.”

She made a whining noise.

“Peanut butter and jelly?”

This set off some enthusiastic yipping and growling, and she was gone again. He reconsidered the painting and wondered whether Bernice was really planning to put religious pictures on the wall of a bar.

The restaurant game showed no signs of running out of steam, so he eventually got them both some ice cream out of the freezer; they ate it out of coffee cups since he couldn’t locate any bowls.

At eight, the phone rang. They were in the living room on the second floor, a large open space that Landis could see from the repairs to the floorboards had been converted from a hallway with separate rooms, going through Donald Click’s old LPs. Most of them were jazz: Monk and Mingus and Parker and Getz. Landis was more of a rock-and-roll guy, but he wasn’t totally ignorant about jazz. He liked to listen to it on the radio—it always seemed to sound best that way, as if it were being beamed forward in time from the deep past. There was a Clancy Brothers album, too, which Landis remembered his own father owning, and which the old man had sung along to on nights when he was particularly drunk.

He thought about letting it ring, then decided there wasn’t much point. The phone was near the stairs. It was old, with push buttons and a cord, and the receiver felt heavy in his hand. “Yes?” he said.

“It’s me,” said Bernice. “Everything OK?”

“We’re fine,” he said. “What are you doing?”

“Nothing. Literally, nothing. There’s nobody here, and the band doesn’t start until ten. I already told him I couldn’t stay all night. Did she call?”

“No one called.”

“What are you doing?”

He looked at Emily, who was trying to draw the cover of Thelonius Monk’s
Underground
, using a ballpoint pen. “Just hanging out. Don’t worry about us.”

“I’m thinking maybe you’re right. Maybe we should keep moving.”

“We’ll talk about it when you get back,” he said.

“You still can’t stay over. You know that.”

“I have my own place,” he said, suddenly fed up with her, with her ridiculous changes. He put down the phone without saying good-bye. A second later it rang again, and he picked it up. “What?”

It wasn’t Bernice this time. “Can I talk to her?” He heard the tension and desperation in the woman’s voice, the careful attention she was paying to her words for fear of letting this thing she wanted so much slip through her grasp.

“Let me ask.” He cupped the receiver with his hand. “Hey, Emily,” he said.

“Pearl,” she said.

“Whoever you are. There’s a phone call.”

She put down her pen and came to where he was standing. “Go on,” he said. She put the phone to her ear. It looked big there.

“Hello?” she said. “Mommy!”

Landis stood watching her for a moment, then returned to the albums. He thought she might like some privacy.

Lying on his back, he looked up at the slowly spinning ceiling fan. The cross-country drive hadn’t helped his back. He shifted and stretched, aware of the dusty floor around him, but happy to have his spine in this new position. Emily wasn’t saying much, just an occasional obedient child’s
yes
, and Landis supplied the questions in his
own mind.
Are they feeding you? Are you OK? Do you miss me?
But inevitably there would be another question:
Do you want to come home now?

“All right,” he heard her say. He got up and went back to where she stood. “She wants to talk to you.”

“Yes,” said Landis.

“Listen,” said the woman, “I don’t want this to sound the wrong way, but can you tell me a little about yourself?”

“I don’t know. I’m not sure I can.”

“It’s important to me. You’ve stolen my child. That’s a criminal offense. Are you a criminal?”

He thought guiltily about the microphone currently under the bed in his rented room. “No. I’m not a criminal. Seriously. Not in the sense you mean. I’m just a regular person. I’m real sorry about all of this, if that means anything. It wasn’t supposed—”

“What way was it supposed to be? What way? Were you thinking there would be no consequences? Did you think that you could just walk off with the most important thing in someone else’s life and that would be it? That a mother wouldn’t fight for her own daughter? That there aren’t laws in this country? Go ahead, please, tell me—I want to know. What did you think? Why did you think this was a good thing to do?”

“I don’t know.” He looked down at his feet and wished he’d never picked up the phone. It had been a lot easier when Tessa Harding was just an abstract idea, a Bible-toting, SUV-driving yuppie who wore coordinated pastel outfits. The person on the phone didn’t sound at all like what he’d imagined.

There was a long silence. “That’s it? You don’t know?”

“Not really.” It occurred to Landis that he might be experiencing his last few minutes of freedom. At any moment, police would burst
in, guns drawn. “You can see she’s fine. She loves her mother, and she’s adjusting very well.”

“I’m her mother!”

“Hey,” he said, “it’s OK. Everything’s OK.”

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m trying to be understanding. But it’s not OK.”

“How do you know Robin?” he asked.

“That’s none of your business.”

“Well, can I ask you something else?” he said. “Have you called anyone?”

“Just let her come back,” said Tessa Harding. “I’ll fly out there and get her. You won’t have to go to jail. There will be no consequences. We can solve this whole thing easily, don’t you see? Nothing has happened, not really.”

“That’s not up to me. But I can suggest it to Bernice.”

“Please do. I can get her more money, if that’s an issue. I just want my daughter back.”

“This isn’t about money. But I’ll talk to her. It might not do any good, but I’ll talk to her.”

He put Emily to bed a little after nine, deciding to skip the bath since the idea of giving it to her alone made him uncomfortable. There was a ceiling fan in the room, and he turned it on low. The temperature outside had dropped somewhat after the rain, and a suggestion of a breeze came in through the window screen. Looking out, Landis could see rooftops jammed together, a jumble of chimneys and roof antennas and, lower, the stretched-out spiderweb of phone and power lines and the rickety wooden porches clinging to the backs of their brick houses.

“You want a story?” he offered. There was a whole bookcase full of things to choose from.

“Can you make one up?”

“I don’t think so,” he said. “But I read pretty well.”

“No,” she said. “It’s all right.”

“Got your own thoughts to occupy you, huh?”

She didn’t answer. He was pretty sure she was gifted in ways he was unequipped to understand, and it worried him more than a little to imagine how he and Bernice were going to provide a life for her that would be even close to what she deserved.

Bernice came home at one in the morning. He met her in the kitchen, where she was getting herself a glass of water, her hands trembling. She smelled strongly of beer and cigarette smoke.

“How was your date?” Landis asked. “Get much painting done?”

“I’m too short to bartend,” she said. “But one guy gave me a twenty-dollar tip. Of course, he asked to see my tits, too.”

“Free market economy,” said Landis. “You never know what you might be able to buy.”

“Well, he got a big smile and one of these.” She turned her head to the side, reprovingly, and made her finger a windshield wiper indicating “no.”

They went into the dining room. Landis had been in the chair in the parlor, half asleep, when he heard the rattling of the back door.

“You put her to bed?”

“Yeah.”

“She called, right?”

“She wanted to know if I was a criminal. I told her no. She’s worried, but I don’t blame her, given the situation. Anyway, she has some idea how much to trust you, but with me, she’s got nothing.”

“That’s ironic, isn’t it? She needs to decide if she can trust you. Maybe she ought to talk to me about it.”

“I just sat here all night with your daughter while you went out on a date. If you don’t trust me, you’re a fool.”

“It wasn’t a date.”

“What was it?”

She finished her water, then dug out the bottle of Black Bush and poured herself some. He watched her, then got himself a glass and joined her. They sat at the table sipping their drinks in silence. Outside, it had begun to rain again, lightly. “It’s him, isn’t it?” he asked her. “There was no baker.”

She stuck a finger in her drink, then moved it to her mouth and sucked it. “Of course there was a baker. I told you.”

“Nope. I’m starting to get it now. Talk about being used. You needed me to help you take her, but all along you were planning to get with this other guy.”

“That’s not true,” she said. “Stop.”

But he felt it in the air and in his stomach, even in his teeth. “Your mother’s boyfriend? How messed up is that? What—is the age difference between the two of us not enough? You need more? You’re completely out of control. Trust. You want to talk about trust? I can’t believe I got involved in any of this. I’m going home,” he said.

“Home, home? Or just home?”

He looked at her, all that strange beauty, all that deception. He stood. “Do what you want,” he said. “You will anyway.”

T
he palm reader’s parlor was over a magic-and-joke shop, just off Tejon Street and a couple doors down from the salon where Tessa got her hair done. It was decorated simply, with furniture that looked as if it were on its third owner—a green recliner, a yellow-gold daybed, a lamp made of antlers. The walls were painted a comforting dusty rose, and there was a bowl of peanut M&Ms on the table.

“Your hands are shaking,” said Madame Marguerite. She had a peculiar accent, but except for that and the orange scarf tied around her head, she seemed ordinary, with a plain face and smallish eyes, one of which wandered a bit. Her eyebrows were drawn on, and her lipstick was the color of wet sand. Tessa had once eaten at a place that featured belly dancing, and the dancer had struck her in much the same way. But what did she expect in Colorado? The belly dancer had
been blonde, with a doughy, unappealing stomach and more than a touch of underarm odor. Madame Marguerite was dirty blonde, freckled, attractive in a skinny, too-many-cigarettes way. She had probably gotten her palm-reading certificate over the Internet.

“I have a chill,” said Tessa. She took a single M&M from the bowl and placed it on her tongue. It was 9:00 AM and she’d been waiting in her car for twenty minutes for the place to open.

“You are left handed,” remarked Madame Marguerite. “That means you are right-brain dominant. Intuitive, not so interested in intellectual things.”

“I suppose.”

“And you are worried about something.”

“Yes, that’s right.”

She took Tessa’s hand and ran an exploratory finger along its edge, then held it open. “The life line is long and deep—that’s very good. You have a spade-shaped hand, indicating manual dexterity. You are probably good at fixing things around the house, perhaps even musical?”

“I teach piano,” said Tessa. “But that’s not what I want to know. I mean, that’s something I already know.” The M&M had begun to dissolve on her tongue, in spite of her mouth’s dryness. She crunched it up.

“Ah,” said Madame Marguerite. “You are one of those people who want to know the future.”

“Sorry,” she said. “But the sign does say Palm Readings. That was twenty-five dollars I gave you. I thought telling the future was part of the bargain.”

“The future doesn’t exist. That’s the big secret. It’s now, and now, and now. And now.” She smiled. “See what I mean? It just keeps coming.”

“Then why am I here?”

“You want to know about
now
. It might seem like I’m being difficult, but I’m just trying to be clear.”