The Intruders (33 page)

She handed me a large cup, filled it. “So. Amy didn’t say you were gracing the area.”

“She doesn’t know. It’s a surprise.”

“Uh-huh. Tangled web you guys weave. Speaking of which, is it just me or has big sis been acting a little wacked recently?”

“In what way?” I said, careful to keep my voice flat.

“She drops by here today with no notice, then asks me if I have tea. Well, of course I have tea. I am the homemaker from hell, but I do try, and Don likes it first thing. Tea, I mean. But Amy? Tea? That’s a new one.”

“She’s been drinking it some recently,” I said. “Maybe she’s doing a campaign on it.”

“Okay. So I’ll tell Mulder and Scully to stand down. But here’s item two: Any idea what the date is?”

“Of course,” I said, reaching for it. “It’s…”

“Right,” she said. “Given a couple seconds, you could name the month and maybe even the day. That’s not what I meant. That’s Man Time. I’m talking Woman Time. In my people’s calendar, it’s Annabel’s Birthday Plus Six Days.”

“Annabel,” I said. “Your Annabel?”

“She was twelve last week.”

“Your point being?”

“Whalen card and gift conspicuous by their absence.”

“Christ,” I said. “I’m sorry. I—”

She held up her hand. “Jack, you couldn’t name my daughter’s birthday if your life depended on it. Mine either, or Don’s. You probably have your own written on the palm of your hand. So how come we always get cards?”

“Because Amy knows.”

Natalie drew a checkmark in the air. “Not just birthdays. When Don and I got married. When Mom and Dad died, their wedding anniversary. She lives the family chronology. Year in, year out, she gets the job done.”

“Did she mention this when she—”

“That’s the thing. She stops by without warning, drinks her tea, goes upstairs, comes back down, kiss-kiss, good-bye. She’s exactly the way she always is, which is mainly a sweetie, also slightly killable—but she neglects to mention forgetting her niece’s birthday, which by now she must have realized she’s done.”

“She went upstairs?”

“To her old room. It’s Annabel’s now.”

“Did she say why?”

Natalie shrugged. “Amy’s what—thirty-six this year? Maybe it’s a memory-lane deal. Gather up the past before the Alzheimer’s really kicks in.”

“You mind if I go take a look?”

“I already did. She didn’t touch anything, far as I can tell. Why would she?”

“Still…”

Natalie cocked her head to one side, and you could tell immediately how the boy in the front yard had acquired the habit. “What’s this about, Jack?”

“Nothing. Just intrigued.”

“Go nuts, Detective. Annabel’s at band practice. Second on the right.”

I left her in the kitchen and went upstairs. The second door along the hallway was slightly ajar, and for a moment I remembered Gary Fisher’s dream so clearly that I hesitated. But then I pushed the door open.

It would have been different in detail when Amy lived here, naturally. Posters of different bands. Merchandising goods associated with different movies that had now probably been remade twice. Otherwise it was archetypal.

It’s strange being in the childhood space of someone you love. Knowing her now is not the same as having known her before, and that pre-you person will remain a stranger even if you go on to die hand in hand. It’s odd to imagine someone so much smaller and younger, to see the shapes and angles through which she learned about the world. You hear echoes. You cannot help but wonder whether she now always feels most comfortable in spaces of similar size or height, or if the bedroom you share with her adult incarnation feels wrong to her for not having a window in that same position. You picture her sitting on the edge of this bed, feet neatly together, staring into the future with the acquisitive and slightly alien gaze of the child.

It didn’t take long for me to notice something Natalie couldn’t have been expected to spot. The room was in flux—it had been neat recently, and it would be again—and objects and clothes and bits of furniture were strewn around. But the rug that covered the center of the floor was at precise right angles to the bed, with no wrinkles at any point. I doubted that Annabel had left it this way.

I moved the wooden chair off it, flipped it up. Nothing to see except floorboards that had been painted shabby-chic white at some point in the last ten years. I went to the other end, did the same. Thought I’d drawn a blank but then looked closer at the end just under the bed. I went down on my knees and felt beneath the frame, close to where it butted against the wall.

It was tight, but a small section of board could be levered out. Underneath was a dusty gap, an ideal child’s hiding place. It was empty now, but I didn’t think it had been that way when Amy arrived.

Natalie was standing by the kitchen window, cradling her coffee in both hands and watching her son in the yard.

“So?”

I shrugged. “Like you said. Memory lane.” I caught something in the way she was observing the boy. “Everything okay?”

“Sure. Just a…Matthew seems to have gotten himself a little imaginary pal. No biggie. You just wonder what gets into their heads.”

“You asked him about it?”

“Sure. It’s just a friend, he says. They play together sometimes, you hear him talking quietly to himself once in a while. It’s not like we have to set an extra place at dinner. And it’s better than nightmares, for sure. Amy had those super bad.”

“Really?”

“God, yes. One of the earliest things I can remember—I don’t know how old I was, three maybe, four?—was these horrible noises in the night. Like a scream but deeper. Loud, then quiet, then loud again. Freaky. Then I’d hear Dad trudging down the hall. He’d get her back to sleep, but then it would start again an hour later. Went on for a couple of years.”

“Amy never mentioned that.”

“Probably doesn’t even remember. Sleep’s a war zone with kids. Babies especially. Friend of mine’s kid used to push his fingers into his eyes to stop himself from falling asleep. Seriously. Matthew was hell on wheels, too—you couldn’t get him to nap without pushing him from here to San Diego. And he’d wake up in the night four, five times. Like an on-off switch—straight to Defcon Five. You’d be lying there in the dark, house peaceful, baby asleep and all’s well with the world. Then, bang—he’d be wailing like his room was full of wolves.”

“Makes sense. Suddenly you’re awake and alone in the dark with no mom or dad to be seen or smelled or found.”

“Sure—that explains bad waking. But why fight sleep so hard in the first place?”

“Because it wouldn’t have been that way when we lived in caves. The whole family would be sleeping in a pile together, instead of exiling Junior into a room with scary murals he doesn’t understand and inexplicable things dangling from the ceiling. The baby thinks, Fuck this, are you insane ? It’s not safe to leave me alone. So they do the one thing that reliably affects their environment—scream their heads off.”

“You surprise me, Jack. I never realized you were so much in touch with your inner child.”

“Always. It’s the inner adult I keep losing track of.”

She smiled. “Yeah, well, maybe you’re right. But I don’t know. Kids are weird. They pick up TV remotes and hold them to their ears like phones and talk to people who aren’t there. You give them a toy saxophone and they put it straight in their mouths—and blow instead of suck, which is what they’ve done with everything else. They put empty cups to their mouths and go ‘Mmmm,’ and you think, Where did that come from? Have I ever gone ‘Mmmm’? Then one day they stop doing it. It’s how they break your heart. Some unbelievably endearing habit they develop, from nowhere—then bang, it’s gone again. Makes you miss them even when they’re still there in front of you, and that’s part of what loving is about, right?”

Suddenly she stopped, and her cheeks went bright red. I’d never seen Natalie embarrassed before. Wouldn’t have believed it possible, in fact.

“What?”

“I’m so sorry,” she said. “I have been a numb fucking bitch.”

I shook my head. “No you haven’t.”

“But—”

“Seriously. It’s not a problem.”

“But with Amy? How—”

“Everything’s fine.”

“Okay,” Natalie said. “I’m sure it is. She’s pretty tough.” For just a moment, she looked fiercely proud of her sister, and I wished I had a sibling to feel that way about me. “She has been…I don’t know, a little different since, though. Don’t you think?”

I shrugged. “I guess.”

Natalie persisted. “Maybe even before that?”

I looked up at her, surprised, and was disconcerted to find her looking at me, hard, with eyes very similar to her sister’s.

“People change,” I said, dismissively. “They get older. Grow up. May even happen to you someday.”

She stuck her tongue out. “There’s one thing I never understood, though,” she said, leaning on the sink and looking out the window again. Her son still playing sensibly in the yard, staying a statutory six feet from the road, as if a force field operated to keep him within a safe distance of the house. Perhaps it did. Amy wasn’t the only Dyer girl who ran a tight ship.

“What’s that?”

“How Amy wound up in advertising.”

“Things happen. I ended up a cop.”

“I never knew you when you weren’t, so that’s not strange to me. Plus, your being a cop made sense. What happened to your dad, and…You just made sense that way. More than you do as a writer, that’s for sure.”

“Ouch.”

“Say it ain’t so. But Amy, I mean…When she was a teenager, she was always the complete geek.”

I frowned. “Really?”

“You don’t know this? Totally. Forever making something out of weird bits of crap. Poring over books with titles that would make you lapse into a coma.”

“That doesn’t sound like the woman I know.”

“For sure. For years she’s the science-fair queen and poised to do something appallingly nerdy, and then suddenly one day she’s all ‘I want to be in advertising,’ as if it’s ‘I want to be a movie star.’ I didn’t even know what advertising was. She’d just turned eighteen, and she comes out with it at dinner one night. I remember it because the old folks had spent years backing her up on all the tech stuff, giving her rides to clubs, being proud—more than they ever were with anything I did—and then bang, that’s all history. I remember watching Papa across the table as she’s saying all this, seeing his shoulders slump.” She smiled, gaze still on her kid outside. “I was fourteen. First time I ever realized that being a parent maybe wasn’t a complete walk in the park.”

“She ever give a reason? Why she switched?”

“She didn’t have to. She was golden.”

“Natalie…”

She smiled. “I’m just kidding. No, she didn’t. Though I did ask her about it this one time. She said she’d met a guy.”

My heart thumped, once. “Someone at school?

“No. Somebody older, already in the business maybe, though that’s totally a guess. I figured she was attracted to this guy, didn’t work out…but she stuck with it. You know what she’s like. Dogged. Doesn’t matter how long something takes, how long she’s got to wait. Always been a girl with an eye to the long-term view.”

I’d turned to look out the window, though I had no interest in what was outside. I didn’t want Natalie to be able to see my face as I asked the next question.

“Don’t suppose she mentioned the guy’s name?”

“Actually, she did, and the strange thing is, I remember it. Pure coincidence. We’d had this one dog for years, and he’d died like two, three months before. He’d been around almost all my life, and I still missed him really bad. So I guess it stuck in my head.”

“This guy had the same name as your dog?”

“No, sweetie. The dog was called Whooper. Calling a person ‘Whooper’ would constitute cruel and unusual punishment, even in L.A. It was the breed. A German shepherd.”

I had been so prepared for hearing the name “Crane” that I had to check if I’d heard her right.

“The guy’s name was Shepherd?”

“Yep.” She looked blank for a moment. “Funny. Nearly twenty years go by, and you can still miss a damned dog.”

Ten minutes later her husband returned home with a clarinet-toting child. My relationship with Don had always revolved around his getting me to tell cop stories. We hadn’t arrived at a new MO since. His daughter greeted me with grave politeness, as if part of a self-imposed practice regime for interacting with the nearly elderly. I had no idea how to broach the subject of her birthday, and so I didn’t.

Natalie walked me to the door soon afterward. “Been nice to see you, Jack,” she said unexpectedly.

“You, too.”

“Sure everything’s okay with you guys?”

“Far as I know.”

“Well, okay then. So—where are you going tonight? Amy was dressed up mighty nice.”

“It’s a secret,” I said.

“I hear you. Keeping that magic alive. You’re an inspiration to us all. Well, come see us again soon—or we’ll come to you, and you don’t want that. Oh, that was the other thing today.” She laughed. “I thought you guys moved to Washington. Not Florida.”

“What do you mean?”

She held up her hand, fingers splayed. I shook my head, no clue what she was talking about.

“Amy in bright pink nail polish?” she said. “What’s up with that?”

I left not knowing where I was headed, walked down residential streets in soft, midevening air. People parked their cars, drove away, got home or went out. Others stood in kitchen windows, glanced down out of bedrooms, stood watering plants in their yards. I wanted to head up those paths, stand in those kitchens, sit in a big easy chair in one of those living rooms, and say, So—what’s up? Tell me how you live. Tell me all. Other people’s lives always seem more interesting, coherent, simply more real than my own. Television, books, celebrity culture, even plain watching the world go by: all a desire for an existence that has a directness and simplicity we never feel, that seems real and true in a way our own smudged and fractured days never do. We all want to be someone else for a while. Seem to believe, almost, that we already are, that something stands in the way of the lives we were supposed to have.