SUMMER of FEAR (12 page)

It was the biggest seizure she'd had—bigger even than the first, a year
and a half ago. I ran and stood behind her, wrapping her quaking body in my
arms, pressing my face against her violent cheek. She felt, to me, as if she
were possessed by some alien force. Her words were slow, scrambled beyond
comprehension, "Sose oreo d-d-do tis to
you...
nebber won d-d-dis
happt..."

I timed it on my watch, as always: one minute and forty-five seconds.
You cannot believe how long a minute and forty-five seconds can be.

Then she slumped a little, settled down in her chair, the demons
departing. Her heart was beating hard. She inhaled deeply and let the breath
out slowly.

"Am gin hab doot."

"Going to have to do what, Is?"

"Operation. I'm g-g-going to have them do
it."

On the way home, she seemed to become clearer. She asked me whether I'd
understood what she'd said during the seizure. I told her I didn't.

"It
made p-p-perfect sense to me. I said I was so sorry to do this to you. That I
never wanted this to happen."

I put my
arm around her and brought her close to me "I know, baby. I know."

That night, after
Isabella was asleep, I went into my study and took out the stack of unpaid
medical bills. It was a couple of inches thick, with plenty of red-edged
envelopes and
attention: overdue
stamps on the pages. Our insurance had been sufficient until the radiation-transplant
procedure, which was not yet considered an approved treatment. I had paid out
about ten grand, but the well was almost dry. Try as I did to ignore these
debts, I was still aware that some eighty thousand was still outstanding, and
my attempts to stall had been intercepted by a case manager, one Tina Sharp,
whose telephone calls I routinely failed to answer. A sudden fury shot through
me as I held this stack of demands, so I got out my lighter, set the corner of
one on fire, and watched it burn upward. So what? I thought. Even if you burn
them, you still owe, and what does a roomful of smoke get you? It would be
harder to explain
that
to Izzy than it would be to just keep on lying
about the insurance. I dropped the flaming paper to the carpet, mashed it out
with my foot, and threw the rest of the stack back into the wastebasket.

I turned on the news. There were Midnight Eye segments on two of the
three networks and on three local stations. Stunned neighbors of the Wynns were
interviewed, impaled on the cameras for close-ups to show their worry and fear.
Karen Schulz looking amazingly composed and fresh for Channel 7, said that they
were "investigating the possibility that the Wynn, Ellison, and Fernandez
murders are related." But Karen's reluctance to connect the three events
was ignored heartily by the report who mentioned everyone from Richard Ramirez
(the Nig stalker) to Hannibal Lecter, exhuming whatever past terrors might
magnify the present one. Assuming this was the work a serial killer, he asked
Karen how long it would be until they caught him.

"We're working on the evidence right now," she said. "The
investigation is going very well, and that's all I can say."

This segment was followed by a short feature piece on a Huntington Beach
indoor gun range already besieged by
cus
tomers—mostly
women—wanting to learn how to shoot large handguns. The instructor displayed in
his beefy hand a nick plated .357 and said it would "stop any intruder in
his tracks---if it's used right." His business was up 65 percent in one
day.

I went out on our deck in the dark heat and drank. I tried to pray, but
the prayer turned into a tirade. I could feel the motion calling me, the world
of speed and movement. I went to the woodpile, took the ax, and split stumps
until my hands bled. I could see the outline of Grace through a window,
watching me. Yes, I thought, your father has the seed of madness him. I grunted
the blade into one last log and trudged up the trail that leads from my
driveway all the way to the crest of the hills. I did not forget my bottle. I
stopped halfway up to continue my challenge to the powers that be. I nearly
fell. I picked my way down a narrow trail to the Indian caves where Isabella
and I used to picnic—and sometimes sleep—on hot summer nights like this one.
The sandstone walls were illuminated by moonlight, and the cave mouths yawned
invitations I was tempted to accept. I finished the bottle, threw it into a
cave, then climbed back to the main trail. When I made the top, I broke into a
run through the low, fragrant sage, snapping through the dry branches until I
hit the fire road. I ran faster, toward town. All I could hear, way up there
above the city, was the leaden pounding of my shoes in the dust and the sharp
rhythmic pattern of my breath. My legs began to ache, so I pressed harder. My
lungs seemed too small, so I ran faster. The sage and manzanita took on bright
red outlines—the same dire red that had come to me in Amber's bedroom two
nights ago—a vibrant, scintillating red. The landscape throbbed with it. I
rounded the highest point and the Pacific spread out below, a twinkling prairie
of water and light. I made my way down toward town, running, skidding, braking
until I hit the first paved streets and ran downhill now past the big walled
houses and the peaceful aromatic eucalyptus, down into the quiet streets that
feed into Coast Highway, finally to the highway itself—even at this hour a
steady river of streaking, moaning cars. I could feel my heartbeat in my
fingertips. I turned north on Coast Highway, tripped and fell flat in a
crosswalk, labored upright, and continued.

I stopped at Ron's bar for a drink, but they wouldn't let me in. At
Adolfo's, they did, and I downed two quick beers. Another one at the Sports
Tavern, another at the Saloon, which left me downtown at 1:00 A.M., sweating,
stinking, exhausted, drunk, and without immediate prospects for a ride back out
the canyon to my house. I called Isabella, got Grace instead, told her
breathlessly that I loved Izzy and everything would work out. "Tell her
that," I demanded. Grace asked me where I was and I gave her my
approximate whereabouts.

At the intersection of Coast Highway and Forest Avenue the main corner
of our little hamlet by the sea—I just stood a watched the cars go by. They all
had slowed to that deliberate, negotiable speed perceived as actual by the
drunken. The sound of their tires—just a few feet away from me—was of rubber
swooshing through water. I wondered whether it had rained while I was in the
phone booth.

I put out my thumb and watched the cars pass. I was close enough to the
highway to make eye contact with any driver who looked my way. A streetlight
beside me cast each passing interior into cool, stark visibility, from which
the faces stared back as from a stage. What their eyes offered me was smug
refusal, nascent fear, and the overriding desire that I would go away.

I did not. I stood my ground, thumb out, challenging every windshield face
that passed by me.

And that was exactly where I was standing a minute two later when the
gray Chrysler K car—a body style so bland as to be noticeable—rolled up and
made the right turn onto Forest, directly in front of my outstretched thumb. I
was vaguely aware of a yellow rental-company sticker on the right bump But what
I was most aware of was the driver's face, staring me in that moment of perfect
enlightenment as the car slow, for the turn.

In a heartbeat, I
made a positive identification. It was not difficult, not even a little. The
driver was—undoubtedly, assuredly, without any shred of doubt at all in my
mind—no other person on earth than Amber Mae Wilson.

She looked
afraid.

I stepped in the
direction of her disappearing car, misjudged the curb height, and lost my
balance again. I was clever enough to make it look as if I was just trying to
sit on the curb. So I sat on the curb. People parted around me, muttered,
passed on. Amber's car vanished into a left turn on Third. I rubbed my eyes,
watched a manhole cover levitate, and listened to the sharp slap of waves
mixed with the hissing of car tires on pavement.

A moment later, Grace's red Porsche appeared in front of me and I felt
my daughter's strong arms lifting me up to stand on my own two, only slightly
functional, feet.

"Get in, Russell."

I felt the transmission engage beneath me, heard the roar of the
exhaust, watched the shops of Forest Avenue blink past us. I could hear myself
talking. I was telling Grace everything that had happened on the nights of July
3 and 4. I was back in Amber's room, somehow, reliving every detail of those
dismal nights, confessing my obsession with Amber, my run-in with Martin
Parish, trying to explain to my daughter that her mother's body had disappeared
and that truly, truly I loved Isabella more than any living creature and all
we'd wanted was a normal life and maybe a child....
"And I swear,
Grace, I just saw Amber driving a car not five minutes ago right down
this..."

My daughter's hand pressed against my mouth.

"Shut up, Russell, you're embarrassing
yourself."

I shut up, melting into the g force of Grace's turn onto Broadway. She
glanced at me.

"Look," she said, "Amber's alive, no matter what you
think you saw. It's totally in keeping with the way she is.
You,
of
anyone, should know that. Were you as drunk that night as you are now? How in
hell do you know what you saw? As for you and your pitiful
obsession
with Amber, well, you're just another one of a million men made stupid by her.
Maybe the only man made even stupider than you is Marty.
He's
so fucked
up, he thinks he saw
me
there that night, when I was watch a goddamned
movie with Brent Sides."

"You can prove that?"

"When and if I choose to," she snapped. “I’ll tell you
something, Russell. My mother is so full of deceit and manipulation, I wouldn't
doubt it if she'd played a great big joke all of you. I know her. Nobody in
this world has gotten more of her hatred than I have."

"I wouldn't know."

"You sure wouldn't. While you were slogging away the Sheriff's
Department, Mom and I were galavanting around the world, having
fun."

Grace turned onto Coast Highway and headed north. She ground the car
into second and shot past a tourist trying to make it across the asphalt,
flipping him off through the window as we whipped by his wide-eyed face.

"I tried to find you," I said.

"That's not the point. You did, or you didn't. You could have found
us, anyway. Those postcards I sent you from Rome? I wrote them from a boarding
school not twenty miles from your home, sent them to Amber, who mailed them to
you from Italy. By the time you got them, she was in Paris, anyway, used that
trick a lot on you. Amber didn't want you to see me and she saw to it. It's the
way she works. Funny, though, because you were one of the few men in the world
she didn’t want me to see."

"I don't understand."

"Did you know she tried to turn me out when I was ten? Not like a
whore, I mean, but like
a...
woman.
She had me nylons and makeup and heels and pranced me around this party like
some kind of show pony. She encouraged me to keep the company of men three
times my age. And when I wouldn't what she wanted, when I'd dress the way a
girl wants to and mouth off to her big beautiful friends and just get up and
leave when I felt like it—
that's
when she started to despise me. Every
inch I carved out for myself was a point of betrayal for her. She suffocated
me. Later, she became delusional."

"What delusions?"

"That I was trying to take away her men. That I was stealing her
money. She accused me five years ago of stealing this stupid netsuke and inro
that John and Yoko had given her when we were in New York one year. She loved
the ugly little thing because
they'd
given it to her, right? I didn't
take it, but she's been obsessing over it for five years now, demanding I give
it back, claiming I stole it just to hurt her. I never even wanted the
goddamned trinket, though it's worth about twenty grand. But she's convinced
I've got it stashed in a safe-deposit box somewhere. For that, she's threatened
to write me completely out of her will."

"And your response?"

"I told her to fuck herself, keep her money, and leave me alone. I
can work. I've got a job. Or at least I had one until those creeps Amber sent
started hanging around the store. They truly scared me. They
really
scared me."

"Amber sent the men?"

"Of course she did. It's all a way to get me frightened back into
her fold. She doesn't want to write me out of her will. She just wants me to
lick her boots."

Grace jacked a right turn onto Cliff and headed down toward the Canyon
Road. "Look, Russell. I've got my problems, but they're not your problems.
I appreciate you putting me up for a few days. Take care of Isabella—she needs
you. And quit thinking about Mom. She's a waste of time. Believe me."

I thought about these words, and they seemed to be full of great wisdom.
From the mouths of babes. "Drive faster," I said.

My
head snapped back against the rest and the engine howled from behind us.
"I want to see Izzy. I want to love my wife."