Rundown (8 page)

But Cass made some sort of artful exit a minute or two later and followed me into the dark garden, an interplay of lights from upstairs windows, shadowy night between the hedges.

I sensed her mental weapons-system lock on to me. She paused. She made a visual confirmation of my whereabouts, and then she took a long way around, under the wisteria beneath my parents' bedroom.

“So tell me what happened, Jenny,” said Cass.

Cass often started her chats this way. The
so
always irritates me, brushing aside anything you might have been thinking or about to say.

Her request was hardly a surprise, but I could not speak before she added, “I heard about Desert What's-its-name.”

“She'll need a firm hand,” I said.

One of Cass's artful pauses followed, and then, “Tell me what happened.”

“I've told everyone so much,” I said.

“It sounds like you have,” said Cassandra.

“I was very fortunate,” I said, keeping my tone neutral.

Cass tilted her head to one side, showing off her sixth sense, hearing what I was not saying. Cass was always getting jewelry for her birthday, even as a child, an heirloom opal bracelet, an amethyst brooch, astonishing gifts Mom planned months ahead. I was the one who always tore off the gift wrap to yet another book—full-color photos of bears in their mountain kingdoms, eagles in their last refuge.

“Can I tell you what I'm afraid is happening, Jennifer?” she said at last.

I gave a shrug: Tell me if you want.

“Forgive me for what I'm going to say, Jenny, but I am afraid that you might have gone up to Strawberry Canyon with the idea of pretending.” She said
pretending
like it was a despicable word, foreign, and pronounceable only by the carefully educated.

When I did not respond, she continued, “You might have made believe that an assault took place. You were always the one making your dolls have adventures, getting kidnapped or—”

“Why would I do that?” I asked.

Cassandra understands the importance of timing. “Maybe you thought,” she said, “enough attention was being paid to me, it's your turn.”

“I don't think you're being fair.”

Amazingly, I was able to say this without sounding like the proverbial little sister, a quaver in my voice. Cass had always been the one adults spoke to, engaging her in conversation as an equal, her poise deceiving them. They told her all about the bond market, their favorite movies, where to buy the best Italian wines. She asked all the right questions,
Oh, really?
Only I could see the flat indifference in Cass, how little she cared.

Cass didn't mention her talk with me a few nights ago. I had expressed doubts about my maid-of-honor-dress, and hinted that maybe one of her Stanford psych major friends would do the job more elegantly. Cass does not
get
angry. She exposes the anger that is always there, ready.

“Why would I do such a thing?” I heard myself ask—a blunder, I knew as soon as I said it.

“Think of the power,” she said. “Think of the position of strength you assert by becoming a victim.”

She saw me shrink inwardly, my bruised hand reaching the side of my neck, where a thorn scratch had formed a tiny scab, a comma.

“Tell me I'm wrong,” she said.

“Of course you are.”

“Promise me,” she said.

“Of course I promise you,” I said, outmaneuvering my sister just slightly.

Cass found her way to a white iron chair, practically glowing in the dark. Dad wanted to replace the wrought iron with teak.

“You and Danny have had a fight,” I suggested.

She slumped pointedly in the chair like someone protesting uncomfortable furniture. “Danny wouldn't dare fight with me,” she said.

The other night Cass had threatened to tell Mother an ugly thing about Dad. Sometimes I wondered what it was like to be married, to care so much about someone, but not really know what they were doing when they were away from home.

“Do you miss the days,” I asked, “when we had the apartment by the creek?”

“That dumpy place,” she said.

“Dad turned the television into a computer monitor,” I continued, “and wrote his menus with us looking up words in the Italian dictionary.”

And then Dad spoke, calling to us. The real Dad, not the man in our memory, asking where was everybody. He was close to us, having drifted in his ambling, possessive way, surveying the plants.

But for a moment he didn't see us, and we waited, like it was a game, Dad unaware of our presence.

Chapter 14

The phone rang the first thing the next morning, right after I ran six fast miles on Dad's running machine. I had slept badly, waking so many times I had at last given up and watched TV with the sound off.

I don't like working out on a speeding conveyor belt, red digits counting the distance in kilometers, reckoning in miles if I pushed a button. It routinely calculated how many calories I was burning off, if I were a one-hundred-and-sixty pound, forty-two-year-old male. Still, you get the exercise done, and I had not wanted to go outside that morning, the dark-before-the-dawn too dark.

My hand was eager to pick up the phone by reflex. I like answering the phone—I can't help it. Only as I lifted the instrument to my ear did I think, It's Detective Margate.

So I said hello with the phone not very close to my head, creeping up on the conversation.

It was a male voice, with none of that cop weight.

It was Quinn. He sounded different after all these months, his voice deeper and even more cautious than I recalled, so my heart didn't stop all at once.

“Jesus, it
is
you!” I said after he had talked for about half a minute, a prepared speech—Quinn is one of those people so sincere he can't think of what to say all at once.

“My dad's coming to Richmond this afternoon, on business, and I thought I'd like to drop by and see you.” I guessed that this, too, was a memorized statement, but then he said, spontaneously, “I'm worried about you, Jennifer.”

“Nothing to worry about,” I said. I gave
about
extra weight, maybe adopting Quinn's cadence. I wondered if he imagined me surrounded by fluffy lace pillows, a maid bringing me tea on a tray. His father had won and lost fortunes. Quinn and his dad thought about money all the time.

“You know what anger is,” said Quinn, the sort of empathic, half ironic thing that can make him hard to understand.

“I have heard of it,” I said.

“Well, so you know how I feel.”

We had agreed months before that our relationship was becoming way too steamy, and that since his father was taking a job running a casino in the Biggest Little City in the World, we should not be in contact any more.

It had worked, sort of. Out of sight, Quinn had faded, kept artfully in a mental upper room where I never looked.

But it all came back, every feeling.

Conures have a whistle that sounds like a steel roof being torn in two. Even an African gray, a phlegmatic, observant bird, can shriek like a fighter jet when he hears water trickling or music thumping on the radio.

Mr. DaGama was arguing with a man at the counter. Mr. DaGama had taught me that the customer is always right, even when he isn't. This customer, a thin man in a blue T-shirt, was complaining that the new cowhide leash he had bought had bite marks in it. Mr. DaGama was uncharacteristically adamant in explaining the obvious—that the leash had teeth marks because a dog had bitten the leather, “leaving the marks of teeth.”

“I expected a quality product,” said the blue T-shirt.

The parrots must have picked up the tension, because all of them began yelling in the back room.

“Get another leash off the rack, no charge,” said Mr. DaGama from behind the counter, with an attempt at graciousness.

“I wanted a full refund,” said Blue T-shirt. But you could tell the man was growing uncertain. Mr. DaGama has dark eyes and broad shoulders; he has no trouble throwing seventy-five pound bags of wild bird seed down from the truck.

There is a sign above the counter, tacked to a shelf among the profile shots of lorikeets and hyacinth macaws.
EXCHANGES WITHIN TEN DAYS
—
NO CASH REFUNDS
. Mr. DaGama raised his eyes upward to indicate the sign, which was located above and behind him. He looked like a man in the act of praying.

“All right, all right,” the man said. Despite what he was saying he wrapped the leash around his hand, like he was going to protect his fist in a fight. He said “All right,” a third time, not like he was agreeing, but like he was wise to some crime.

I hurried between the two men, unhitched a double-ply leash from the rotating rack, and pressed it into Blue T-shirt's unencumbered left hand. “This is a new kind of leash, a new model just released, way better,” I said.

Mr. DaGama put his hands flat on the counter.

“Strong?” asked the T-shirt man, but I could tell he would have accepted anything to get out of there.

“So strong you won't believe it,” I said.

“You run an animal shop, you can't take two-week holidays,” said Mr. DaGama, squeezing an eyedropper of bird antibiotic into Byron's water dish. “I never wanted to take a vacation, before now.”

Byron's crest shuddered happily upward in response to the attention, but his stools were green water. He had been sleeping with both feet wrapped around a perch. Birds sleep on one leg or the other, a two-legged sleeper is in trouble. The veterinarian from down the street had recommended a double dose of medicine and admired our heat lamp and the air humidifier. “You're doing everything you can,” the vet had said.

“Everybody needs to take a break from their routine,” I said, feeling smart in a housewifey way.

“I have never come so close to losing my temper,” said Mr. DaGama.

Byron yawned.

“This is very good!” said Mr. DaGama. “A yawn is a sign of normal sleepiness!”

This seemed to me like a slim reason for celebration, but I went out into the shop to tell Marta that Byron was yawning. Marta was stuffing sprays of millet seed into a paper bag.

I wanted to avoid Mr. DaGama for a little while. He had been stern with people since hearing about the attack on me the day before, although pointedly kind to me. He told me to take all the breaks I needed, and moved a chair into the back room in case I felt like sitting down. But even dogs brought in for a shampoo and trim sensed his mood, nervously quiet as he gave them a pat on the head.

“That's progress,” Marta was saying. “Byron is doing better.”

Millet is a pretty seed. It grows on stalks like plumes of grain, amber yellow. The trouble is that seeds fall off the stalk every time you touch it, so preparing a package of millet stalks takes care.

I helped Marta, bundling the stalks, running tape around the protruding stems, $1.49 per package, a good buy. All the Amazon family of parrots love it, eating the seeds with avid expressions.

“Mom says any time you want to dive Monterey she'll pack the wet suits,” said Marta. “Tomorrow, or next week, any time you feel the need.”

I could use a dive now, the growing pressure of the deep water in my ears, sunlight falling upward as I sank.

Sometimes when you bag up parrot seed—open a seventy-five pound wholesale sack, and weigh it out into smaller quantities—you run across moths. The insects live and breed in the big bags of dried corn kernels and pumpkin seed. I hate to kill them, and so does Marta, so we let them drift upward, gray fluttery creatures.

I didn't tell her I had talked to Quinn.

Chapter 15

I like the fragrance of the Hair Now! shampoo doctored to smell like papaya or coconut. Even the chemical-warfare scent of dye and hair-straighteners smells fresh and clean to me.

Some haircutters engage in talk, gesturing with their scissors, agreeing with their clients, nice to see the sun, we sure need this rain. Paula cuts and observes, saying little. I sat obediently in her padded chair, and she didn't say anything, surveying my image in the mirror. She waits before she goes to work, a sculptor studying the clay.

She lifted up various portions of my tresses and said, “How long since you were here?”

“Two months?” It had been three, at least. I never get it very short, just freshen up the ends and let it be.

She pinched bird fluff off the back of my head and held it up.

I told her I was in a little bit of a hurry, a luncheon date, actually saying the word “luncheon,” like I would be wearing white gloves.

“Oh, one of
those,”
said Paula, tilting back her head to study my follicles through her reading glasses.

I tilted back in the shampoo chair, and she said, “A little more,” tilted farther, and she said, “More,” and at last, “I thought you were in a hurry.” I was all the way back, and stared up at the black blades of the ceiling fan. I can never fit my neck in the right way into the crescent in the sink.

The scissors sounded loud, right next to my ear, an unsettling
hush hush
of steel blades, and by the time Paula was done, snips of my hair were all over the shiny tile floor.

I sprinted, fast even for me, but an unfamiliar red car was already parked in the driveway. This strange auto looked rakish and dangerous, the kind of car a cop is always pulling over.

He was in the kitchen. I took my time in the hall, listening to him talk about tomatoes. They were growing some in their back yard, he was saying, fertilizer mixed in with desert sand.

“I want Mr. Thayer to let me grow tomatoes,” said Bernice. “All these flowers—what good are they? Try to eat a hydrangea.”

Quinn tried to avoid argument, but I could sense him disagreeing, not wanting to, considering his words. “Some people like flowers,” he offered.

“Earth is for food,” said Bernice, sounding more military than ever.