SUMMER of FEAR (17 page)

"If it is a job, Russ, then couldn't her staying here be a
vacation—for you?"

"I don't want a vacation. I miss her
already."

"Sometimes it's good to miss someone," said
Corrine.

"This isn't one of those times."

Joe poured the coffee and handed me a glass. Corrine ignored him as he
gave one to her, though I caught Joe's inquiring glance. He was torn here, I
saw, between his unquestioned conviction that a man lives with his wife and
his own wife's powerful maternal instincts. Joe was going to sit this one out
for a while.

"It would give you more time," she said. "To work, to do
the things you need to do."

"I'm working when the maid's there."

Corrine was nodding preemptively: Isabella had already told her this,
too. "I know how hard it must be."

Clearly, she suspected that I hadn't actually been writing. One year,
two months, and eleven days, I thought. But Isabella would never tell her this,
out of her respect for the strange, sometimes misplaced sense of sacredness
that many writers attach to their work. I was one of them. Isabella would tell
no one that the work was dead, that nothing was happening, because anything
sacred—even inappropriately sacred—is diminished by talk.

"Isabella told me you haven't written in over a year.” Corrine said
flatly. "She told me that in the hope we—she and Joe and I—might be able
to help you. Of all the things that are painful to her, this is the worst—that
she's made you not at to write."

Well, fuck me,
I thought. Was
I going to hear about this on CNN next, Charles Jaco live from my study in the
stilt house? The fact that our money was almost gone came rushing in from
another part of my brain, on a collision course with the fact that I'd written
nothing but articles for so long. I resolved, then and there, to check the
balances in all our accounts, if there were indeed balances to check. I had
been filing bank statements, unopened, for six months now, on the theory that
what you can't see can't hurt you. Of late, I’d noted bank correspondence
coming in white, rather than tan envelopes. I wanted my flask.

"I'm working," I said. I could feel the anger boiling over
into shame, which was certainly running red into my face by now. I hated the
petulance in my voice.

"I told you he was writing up something," said Joe, mercy
pitch that Corrine ignored. "And the insurance covers the operation,
right?"

"yes."

Corrine breathed deeply and leveled her lovely dark eyes at me.
"Russ, I worry not so much about your work as about my daughter."

Joe stared down at the glass in his lap. Corrine's eyes remained trained
on mine.

"The fall today shouldn't have happened," I said. "But no
one can be beside her twenty-four hours a day."

"We can, Russ. Joe and I. Let her stay. You can stay, too. She is
our daughter, and you our son."

She turned now to Joe, who, still staring down, must have felt her gaze.

He nodded. "It's better for everyone," he said. "You been
taking care of Izzy over a year now. You need a break. You need to make some
money. After that operation, well, who knows?"

The air conditioner hummed. I felt like I was being robbed by thieves
packing kindness instead of guns. In my heart, I knew they were right.

Why, then, was it so hard for me to agree? It took me a while to
understand. When I did, all I could do was look back out the window, avoiding
the imploring stares of these good, humble people. I didn't want to agree to
leaving Isabella with them because I didn't want them—and myself and Isabella—
to know how inviting the idea really sounded.

Contradictory emotions rose up inside me, slamming against one another,
tearing at one another, contesting ownership of my heart. I had never felt so
divided, so hugely at odds with myself, as if I'd been cut into pieces and put
back together wrong. Or was I put back together at all? I felt the motion
calling, the velocity and the freedom of velocity. But I felt the same yawning
emptiness I'd known as I stood in the sunlight of our bedroom just an hour
earlier. I felt the liberty of not being responsible, of not having to listen
with at least one ear for the sound of Isabella upstairs needing me to perform
a simple task such as putting on her shoes or helping her into the shower or
emptying the bedside commode or pushing her wheelchair over a bump in the floor
or any of the other thousand tasks a person does each day for themselves, not
thinking, not appreciating how
easy
it is to clip toenails when your
legs are not paralyzed, how
easy
it is to make it to the toilet when you
can walk, how
easy
it is to stand in your closet and pick out something
to wear without worrying whether it's big enough fit over the leg braces you
need in order even to stand up without falling to the floor. What liberation,
to be free of that! But I also felt at the same time that dismal longing for
her when she was out of my life—even for a few minutes! I could see our big bed
without her in it. I could hear the silence that she had left behind. I could
feel that vast, horizonless sadness of being without her in a world that
existed only because Isabella was in it.

My stomach was locked and aching; I could not feel
the beating of my own heart.

Finally, I began to swim straight through these
opposing powerful rivers, looking for one thing that I could hold on without
question. And I found it. I reached for it, sunk my finger into it, and
clutched it tightly against my chest. What I wanted finally and without
condition, was what was best for Isabella. Not for me. Not for Corrine and Joe.
For Isabella.

"She twisted her knee pretty good today,"
said Joe.

"Enough," I said. I closed my eyes and
rested my head on the sofa back. The clammy breeze from the air conditior
landed on one side of my face. I heard Corrine get up, and moment later her
hand settled against my cheek, fingers patting approval of my surrender.

"Maybe you
should go be with her for a while," she said. "I'm going to make dinner."

I lay down
next to Isabella in the small room. She stirred when I settled in beside her,
smiled as I reached out and took her hand.

"So, you ran out on me," I said.

"I'll never run out on you. But this is b-b-better for a
while."

"I know. I was only making another bad
joke."

"Everything's going to be kay-o, isn't it?"

"Yes."

I kissed her and she moved a hand into my hair and pulled me closer. The
kiss lasted a long time. When I moved my face down to her breasts, she spread
her hand against the front of my pants and pressed gently. I slipped my arm
under the sheets and traced her warm, dry center with my fingers. We lay there
for a while, searching very slowly for what used to come so eagerly. Then she
moved her hand back up to my face. I took it in mine.

"Maybe after the op-op-operation, every work will thing
again," she said.

"Yes. Everything will."

"I love you, Russ."

I lay there with her for almost an hour, stroking her smooth round head
while she slept with her face against my chest. I looked out the window at the
pepper tree and watched a mockingbird flitting from one branch to another. I
became that bird. I was nimble, feathered, capable of flight. I left the tree.
I shot upward, piercing the hot blue sky. I streaked through the stars of some
as-yet-unarrived night. I careened past the sun, out of the galaxy, deep into
gaping, widening, limitless space, tears peeling from my eyes, beak sparking
against the resistant atmosphere, feathers aflame, feet melting. I shot forward
as a skeleton, a shard of vertebrae, a quivering atom of calcium. Motion.
Speed. Velocity. Freedom.

When Corrine called us for dinner, I helped Izzy get dressed and into
her chair.

Then I left.

At home, I poured
myself a disciplined whiskey, roamed the outside deck for a while, then
listened to a rather curt message from case manager Tina Sharp on the machine.
I did not return the call. Rather, I sat in a patio chair where Isabella loved
most to sit, facing southwest toward town. Our Lady of the Canyon lay atop the
hills, the lights of Laguna flowing upward from between her legs, her pregnant
belly protruding against the skyline. I went inside to answer the phone, but
the caller hung up after I said hello. Cute.

In my study, I set up the computer and went to work on the Citizens'
Task Force story.

First, I outlined the thing, thinking of the best way to make the
readers feel included in the Task Force, not just reading about it. Basically,
it was a flak job.

I drank more because I didn't like the manipulative aspects of this
piece, and because I kept seeing Isabella lying on that narrow bed in her
parents' house, and because newspaper story structure is rigid enough to make
it undentable by whiskey, resulting, I would guess, in the high rate of
alcoholism among journalists. After all, I thought, I could slant the piece
only far before Carla Dance threw it back at me. After all, it was: the
Journal
but, rather, a terrified public that would decide
what
to
make of the Citizens' Task Force.

The phone rang again, and again the caller hung up soon as I answered.

Just like Amber used to do, I thought, twenty-odd
years
ago, when
she was sneaking away from Martin Parish to meet me on the sly. Except our code
was usually three hang-ups. That meant Amber was actually with Marty, scheming
to be with me. She would tell Marty she was getting busy signals from a
girlfriend. Three meant she would meet me that night. Nights with even-numbered
dates were the bar atop the Towers Restaurant in Laguna. Odd-numbered nights
were the back room of the Mandarin Chinese. Later, two hang-ups—oh, how I lived
for two-hang-up nights!—meant she would come to my place. I always felt bad
that it was Marty, but back in those days, when we were young, the cost of
being with Amber was always worth paying. Always.

The phone rang again, and to my astonishment, the caller hung up. Three
calls. I checked the date, purely out of curiosity: an even night, the sixth,
the Towers bar.

I stared at the
computer screen, searching for my lead. That first sentence is 50 percent of
the work. Once the first sentence is right, the rest falls into place. I
thought. I finally wrote:

What if she's
really at the Towers bar?

No. I erased it.
The image of Amber's ruined skull came back to me: the blood, the tangled mass
of dark hair, the dead gray eyes. Then I saw her in the rented K car, looking
at me fearfully from behind the windshield, illuminated briefly by the Coast
Highway streetlight. Haunting me from the grave, wherever that may be. I
thought of Isabella again. I wanted so much to love her.

I wrote again:

A drink or two at the Towers bar might be nice.
You've earned it. You deserve it.

No. I deleted
that, too. I sat for a while, then churned out the first three pages of the
story.

I took a break, stared for a while into the refrigerate although I
wasn't hungry. I sat on the deck again. I sat on our bed, missing Isabella in a
crazy, grateful way.

I went back into the study, finished the piece, and
fax it out.

Then I went
downstairs, got in my car, and drove to the Towers bar.

The mirrors and
windows of the Towers are bewildering at night, and they keep the place dark.
The ocean spreads to infinity eleven stories below, behind a wall of smoked
glass. Mirrors throw the Pacific back at you from anyplace in the room,
dizzyingly reversed, even along the ceiling, which is mostly glass too. You
can't be sure what you're really seeing. The tables are beveled
glass—rectangles of ocean reflected from the ceiling which picks them up from
the windows—the furnishings all Deco: lamps supported by robed ladies, wall
lights mount behind mirrored shells, ornate brass ashtray stands. There is
black baby grand in the middle of the bar, and it was staffed that night by a
young man with a nice touch and a voice just like whoever's song he was
covering. He did not play as well as Isabella. The place was crowded, but I got
a chair in a far corner. To my left was an eleven-story drop to black ocean; my
right, the room; in front of me, a couple kind enough to let me share their
drink table. The crowd was eclectic, as one expects in a hotel bar: middle-aged
American tourists, perplexed foreigners, a few local dandies and
not-so-young-as-they-looked women scavenging for the usual kinds of excitement.
A couple kissed rather passionately in a corner. Two men, gay, tried to look at
ease. A woman sat alone in the opposite corner fro me, smoking a cigarette in,
of all things, about a foot-long holder. She had shiny straight blond hair and
a truly silly pillbox hat— playing her Deco part with style.

The couple right in front of me looked midwestern, middle-aged, middle
management, and, as it turned out, they were. They were gabbing away, obviously
a skosh drunk. The black glittering sea stretched out through the windows beside
them.

The man smiled at me when we reached for our drinks at the same time.
"You a Lagunatic?" he asked, referring to our unfortunate nickname.