The Nomination (21 page)

Jessie glanced at the clock beside her bed. It would be nine-thirty in New York. “It's, um, this is Jessie,” she said. “Jessie Church.”

“Oh. Jessie.” There was a hesitation. Then Jill said, “Please hold on. I'll wake her up.”

Jessie said, “No, wait. Don't.” But she realized that Jill wasn't listening.

A minute later Jessie heard the sound of Jill's muffled voice, as if she was holding her hand over the telephone receiver. She heard Jill say, “Simone.” The rest was unclear.

Then: “Jessie?” It was a soft, low-pitched, sleepy voice, and even in that one word, her name, Jessie detected a faint accent. French, probably. Bonet looked like a French name.

Jessie sat there with her back against the headboard of her motel bed pressing her telephone hard against her ear.

“Jessie? Jessie Church? Is that you?”

Jessie realized she'd been holding her breath. She let it out in a long sigh.

Then she disconnected.

E
ddie Moran's mental alarm clock woke him up at four o'clock on Saturday morning. He dressed quickly—sneakers, blue jeans, brown shirt—then stuffed his backpack with a day's worth of supplies. Three bottles of water, three Hershey bars, two apples, binoculars, the digital camera with the long zoom lens, flashlight, knife, insect repellent, notebook, two pens, black sweatshirt, and lightweight green windbreaker.

He was in his car at 4:15 and turning into the pull off beside the trout stream a half hour later. He nosed his Explorer against some hemlocks at one end of the area to leave room for the other fishermen who might want to try this place. He figured, it was Saturday, looked like it was going to be a nice spring day, and there'd probably be a lot of fishermen out. He regretted that he didn't have any equipment stowed in the back, but he figured his new decal would announce him as just another out-of-state trout fisherman if anybody bothered to look twice at his vehicle.

The sky was just beginning to fade from black to purple as Eddie Moran crossed the street and ducked into the woods.

He picked his way through the scrubby oaks and evergreens parallel to Mountainview Road until he came to her driveway. He followed the driveway, keeping inside the woods, and after about five minutes he saw her house. He crept closer, crouched there on the edge of the opening, and surveyed the setup.

The driveway ended in a turnaround in front. A big SUV was parked there. Judging by the size and the squarish shape of it, it was an old-model Jeep, one of those huge Wagoneers, he guessed, but it was still too dark to see clearly. The building itself was your basic New England farmhouse—two stories high, a couple of dormers on the roof, open porch across the front, with a new-looking glassed-in addition on the back, and beyond that a wooden deck. Behind the house the ground sloped away into a valley, and some low hills rose up in the distance against the dark western horizon.

From where he was kneeling in the woods, Moran could hear the gurgle of water. It seemed to come from the valley in back of the house. Another trout stream, he guessed.

He moved around to the side of the house, keeping inside the line of trees, until he found some high ground. It was a little wooded knoll from which he could watch both the front and the back of the house. It was on the edge of the field that abutted the side yard, and a clump of big hemlocks grew there. It was about fifty yards from the house—close enough to see everything with the binoculars, far enough to remain safely hidden.

Moran crawled under the hemlock boughs and sat experimentally with his back against the trunk. The ground under the tree was a pillow of old hemlock needles. It was more luxurious than he had any right to expect.

He took off his backpack, fished out his big bowie knife, and cut away some branches that blocked his view of Li An's house and yard. Then he looped his binoculars around his neck, spread his windbreaker on the ground, sat on it with his back against the tree trunk and his pack within reach, and settled in to wait.

It would be a long day, but Eddie Moran had spent a lot of long days waiting in the woods, and none of them had been as comfortable and relaxed as this one promised to be.

For one thing, he didn't expect there to be other men sneaking through the woods who'd kill him if they found him and if he didn't kill them first.

A mosquito buzzed in his ear. He squirted some repellent onto his palm, rubbed his hands together, and coated his face, neck, and hands. Then he dug under the layer of old hemlock needles, grabbed a handful of damp dirt, made mud of it between his oily palms, and rubbed it on his face and the backs of his hands. It adhered nicely to the slick insect repellent.

He ate an apple.

Overhead, one by one, the stars winked out. The purple sky faded to pewter. Birdsong filled the woods.

Eddie Moran sat there under the hemlocks, watching and waiting.

“GOOD MORNING, MAC. I want to tell you about something that happened last night. I need to talk about it for a minute. It is not in the sequence of my story. I do not know if it is—or will ever be—part of the story. Maybe. Maybe it will be how our story ends. It would make a lovely ending.

“I had just gotten into bed when the phone rang in the other room. Jill answered it. I heard her speak, I heard a strange tone in her voice. When she brought me the phone, she had this odd, concerned look on her face, as if she had heard that somebody I loved had died and that she feared I would be terribly sad. Then she said it was Jessie on the phone.

“I will not tell you the whole story about how I figured out that May, Jessie Church, that is, my dear daughter, is living in California using a different name. As I've mentioned, I wrote her a note several weeks ago asking her—begging her, really—to call me or write to me, but she never did.

“Now she was calling me. She was there, on the telephone. But when I spoke her name into the phone, she said nothing. I heard her breathe for a moment. Then she hung up.

“It must have been May. Jessie. I'm sure it was. Who else could it be? And because she called me—even though she hung up without speaking to me—it must mean that she thinks I am her mother.

“At first I was very sad that she hung up when I spoke her name. I cried. But Jill pointed out that this was really a reason to rejoice, a cause for hope, and I have decided that she is right. It is a very big thing to speak to your mother after a whole lifetime. Jessie needs to understand this and what it means. I am hoping that she will call me again, and that this time she will speak to me.

“So I went to sleep with this feeling of hope that Jessie will call again, and that I will be able to see her and hold her hand and tell her our story before I die.

“I confess that when I awoke this morning I felt less hope. The mornings are not good for me. But now I can feel my hope returning. And I will see you today, Mac. That is another cause for happiness.

“So I am happy today after all, dear Mac. I will see you soon.”

AFTER AN HOUR of driving with Katie beside him, it occurred to Mac Cassidy that they only had one subject of mutual interest to discuss. Of course, neither of them mentioned it. They never did.

Instead, he asked her the standard questions about school—how did she like her teachers, what was she reading, did she get any tests or papers back lately, questions he supposed he asked her every evening—and she answered them fully, with none of the impatience or evasion that you'd expect from a normal fifteen-year-old girl.

Even when he asked her about boys, she didn't roll her eyes. She didn't care about boys, she said. They were so immature. She'd been asked out a few times, but she told them no.

What she didn't say to Mac Cassidy, but what he suspected, was that she didn't go out with boys because she didn't dare to leave her father alone.

He wanted to just blurt it out: “Honey, let's talk about Mom, what do you say?”

No, that wasn't the way to approach it.

He could say: “I miss Mom every day. How about you?”

What he really wanted to say was: “It wasn't your fault.”

Except the next thing he would say would be: “It was
my
fault.”

He knew Katie was lugging around a load of guilt. He was certain that she knew he was, too. And neither of them could talk about it, not to each other, not to anybody.

So Mac and his daughter devoted themselves to worrying about each other and avoiding the subject that preoccupied them both.

Freud said you were “normal” if you were able to love and to work. Mac was back at work now, and he knew that once he started actually writing the book, he'd be able to lose himself in it. As for love, if love for your daughter counted, then Mac Cassidy was a master of love.

Love for a woman? He hadn't thought about that kind of love since that March evening over a year ago. He didn't know if that made him abnormal or not.

As for Katie, her job was school, and she excelled at that, so he supposed that meant she was able to work. He understood that Katie's version of love was consoling and taking care of and worrying about her father, playing the role of surrogate wife, obsessed with the fear that he, too, would suddenly die. You didn't have to be an expert to know that was not even close to normal.

He wondered what would become of them.

JESSIE DECIDED TO follow the back roads the rest of the way from Illinois to Beaverkill, New York. She wasn't so sure that she'd end up there anyway. Meanwhile, she wasn't in any hurry. She liked seeing the countryside, the farms and the newly planted fields and the lime-green foliage of the springtime leaves.

After she'd hung up on S. Bonet, she'd lain back on her bed with her eyes closed, letting her mind fly free. She remembered that Jill had spoken the name “Simone,” and then she connected the woman's first name with her last.

Simone Bonet. That was her name.

Jessie had heard of Simone, usually that way, that one name. Simone, as though she didn't need any last name, like Cher or Madonna. Jessie didn't know anything about Simone except that she had been some kind of cult movie icon.

She'd done nude scenes that were considered daring for her time, Jessie seemed to remember. She didn't think she'd seen any of Simone's films. If she had, they weren't memorable.

Jessie wondered if this Simone Bonet was that movie Simone.

Simone Bonet, whatever Simone she was, believed that she was Jessie's birth mother.

Jessie wasn't at all sure she wanted to find out whether it was true. She had no particular curiosity about it. It had taken a while to get used to the idea that both of her parents were dead.

And yet she found herself drawn to Beaverkill, New York, and she figured she'd keep driving in that general direction until she got there. Then she'd decide what to do next.