Authors: Gregg Hurwitz
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Gregg Hurwitz
is the internationally bestselling author of
I See You
,
We Know
, and
Or She Dies
. A graduate of Harvard and Oxford Universities, he lives with his family in California, where he writes screenplays and comics,
and produces for the blockbuster television hit
V
.
Published by Hachette Digital
ISBN: 978-0-7481-1268-5
All characters and events in this publication, other than those clearly in the public domain, are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
Copyright © Gregg Hurwitz 2010
The moral right of the author has been asserted.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.
Hachette Digital
Little, Brown Book Group
100 Victoria Embankment
London, EC4Y 0DY
To Rosie, for introducing me to my adult self.
And to Natalie, for making it all make sense.
I won’t be the lonely one.
Glasvegas, ‘Daddy’s Gone’
The four-year-old boy stirs in the backseat of the station wagon, his body little more than a bump beneath the blanket draped
over him, his hip sore where the seat belt’s buckle presses into it.
He sits up, rubbing his eyes in the morning light, and looks around, confused.
The car is pulled to the curb, idling beside a chain-link fence. His father grips the steering wheel, his arms shaking. Sweat
tracks down the band of flushed skin at the back of his neck.
The boy swallows to wet his parched throat. ‘Where . . . where’s Momma?’
His father takes a wheezy breath and half turns, a day’s worth of stubble darkening his cheek. ‘She’s not . . . She can’t
. . . She’s not here.’
Then he bends his head and begins to cry. It is all jerks and gasps, the way someone cries who isn’t used to it.
Beyond the fence, kids run on cracked asphalt and line up for their turn on a rusted set of swings. A sign wired to the chain-link
proclaims,
IT’S MORNING AGAIN IN AMERICA: RONALD REAGAN FOR PRESIDENT.
The boy is hot. He looks down at himself. He is wearing jeans and a long-sleeve T-shirt, not the pajamas he’d gone to bed
in. He tries to make sense of his father’s words, the unfamiliar street, the blanket bunched in his lap, but can focus on
nothing except the hollowness in his gut and the rushing in his ears.
‘This is not your fault, champ.’ His father’s voice is high-pitched,
uneven. ‘Do you understand me? If you remember . . . one thing . . . you have to remember that nothing that happened is your
fault.’
He shifts his grip on the steering wheel, squeezing so hard his hands turn white. His shirt cuff has a black splotch on it.
The sound of laughter carries to them; kids are hanging off monkey bars and crawling around the beat-up jungle gym.
‘What did I do?’ the boy asks.
‘Your mother and I, we love you very much. More than anything.’
His father’s hands keep moving on the steering wheel. Shift, squeeze. Shift, squeeze. The shirt cuff moves into direct light,
and the boy sees that the splotch isn’t black at all.
It is bloodred.
His father hunches forward and his shoulders heave, but he makes no sound. Then, with apparent effort, he straightens back
up. ‘Go play.’
The boy looks out the window at the strange yard with the strange kids running and shrieking. ‘Where am I?’
‘I’ll be back in a few hours.’
‘Promise?’
His father still doesn’t turn around, but he lifts his eyes to the rearview, meets the boy’s stare for the first time. In
the reflection his mouth is firm, a straight line, and his pale blue eyes are steady and clear. ‘I promise,’ he says.
The boy just sits there.
His father’s breathing gets funny. ‘Go,’ he says, ‘play.’
The boy slides over and climbs out. He walks through the gate, and when he pauses to look back, the station wagon is gone.
Kids bob on seesaws and whistle down the fireman’s pole. They look like they know their way around.
One of the kids runs up and smacks the boy’s arm. ‘You’re it!’ he brays.
The boy plays chase with the others. He climbs on the jungle
gym and crawls in the yellow plastic tunnel, jostled by the bigger kids and doing his best to jostle back. A bell rings from
the facing building, and the kids fly off the equipment and disappear inside.
The boy climbs out of the tunnel and stands on the playground, alone. The wind picks up, the dead leaves like fingernails
dragging across the asphalt. He doesn’t know what to do, so he sits on a bench and waits for his father. A cloud drifts across
the sun. He has no jacket. He kicks the leaves piled by the base of the bench. More clouds cluster overhead. He sits until
his rear end hurts.
Finally a woman with graying brown hair emerges through the double doors. She approaches him, puts her hands on her knees.
‘Hi there.’
He looks down at his lap.
‘Right,’ she says. ‘Okay.’
She glances across the abandoned playground, then through the chain-link, eyeing the empty parking spots along the curb.
She says, ‘Can you tell me who you belong to?’
Mike lay in the darkness, his gaze fixed on the baby monitor on the nightstand. He had to be up in three hours, but sleep
wasn’t coming any easier than it usually did. A blowfly had been circling the bedroom at irregular intervals as if to ensure
his continued alertness. His mother used to say that a blowfly in the house meant that evil was stalking the family – one
of the only things he remembered about her.
He took a moment to catalog some less morbid memories from his early years. The few imprints he’d retained were little more
than sensory flashes. The scent of sage incense in a yellow-tiled kitchen. His mother bathing him. How her skin always seemed
tan. Her smell, like cinnamon.
The red light bars fanned up on the monitor. A crackle of static. Or was that Kat coughing?
He nudged the volume down so as not to wake Annabel, but she shifted around beneath the sheets, then said hoarsely, ‘Honey,
there’s a reason they call it a
baby
monitor.’
‘I know. I’m sorry. I thought I heard something.’
‘She’s eight years old. And more mature than either of us. If she needs something, she’ll march in here and announce it.’
It was an old argument, and Annabel was right, so he muted the volume and lay morosely staring at the damn thing, unable to
click it off altogether. A little plastic unit that held a parent’s worst fears. Choking. Illness. Intruders.
Usually the sounds were just interference or crossover noise
from other frequencies – a charge in the air or the neighbor’s toddler snuffling from a cold. Sometimes Mike even heard voices
in the rush of white noise. He swore there were ghosts in the thing. Murmurs from the past. It was a portal to your half-conscious
mind, and you could read into its phantom whisper whatever you wanted.
But what if he turned it off and this proved to be the night Kat
did
need them? What if she awakened terrified and disoriented from a nightmare, sudden paralysis, the blowfly’s evil spell, and
lay stricken for hours, trapped alone with her fear? How do you choose the first night to take that risk?
In the early hours, logic and reason seemed to fall asleep before he did. Everything seemed possible in the worst kind of
way.
He finally started to drift off, but then the blowfly took another loop around the night-light, and a moment later the red
bars flared again on the muted unit. Kat crying out?
He sat up and rubbed his face.
‘She’s fine,’ Annabel groaned.
‘I know, I know.’ But he got up and padded down the hall.
Kat was out cold, one slender arm flung across a stuffed polar bear, her mouth ajar. Chestnut hair framed her serious face.
She had her mother’s wide-set eyes, pert nose, and generous lower lip; given her looks and whip-smart demeanor, it was sometimes
hard to tell whether Kat was an eight-year-old version of Annabel or Annabel a thirty-six-year-old version of Kat. The one
trait that Kat had received from Mike was at least an obvious one – one brown eye, one amber. Heterochromia, they called it.
As for her curls, who knew where she got those?
Mike leaned over her, listened for the whistle of breath. Then he sat in the glider chair in the corner and watched his daughter.
He felt a stab of pride about the childhood he and Annabel had given her, the sense of security that let her sleep so soundly.
‘Babe.’ Annabel stood in the doorway, shoving her lank hair off
her forehead. She wore a Gap tank top and his boxers and looked as good in them as she had a decade before on their honeymoon.
‘Come to bed. Tomorrow’s a huge day for you.’
‘Be there in a moment.’
She crossed, and they kissed quietly, and then she trudged off to bed again.
The movement of the glider was hypnotic, but his thoughts kept circling back to the unresolved business of the coming day.
After a time he realized he wasn’t going to be able to sleep, so he went into the kitchen and made a pot of coffee. Back in
the chair, sipping contentedly from his mug, he soaked in the pale yellow walls, the raft of dolls on the floating shelf,
his daughter in angelic repose. The only interruption was the occasional buzz from the blowfly, which had stalked him down
the hall.
Kat skidded through the kitchen, her ponytail loose and off center. Annabel paused above the omelet pan and regarded the fount
of curls. ‘Your father did that, didn’t he?’
Kat shoved her stuffed polar bear into her backpack and climbed onto a counter stool next to Mike. Annabel slung the omelet
onto Kat’s plate, then leaned over and readjusted her daughter’s hair tie with a few expert flips and tugs. She dropped the
pan into soapy water, mopped the leak beneath the farmhouse sink with a foot-held paper towel, and moved back to finishing
Kat’s lunch, cutting the crust off her peanut-butter – no jelly – sandwich.
Slurping at his third cup of coffee and watching his wife, Mike felt like he was moving in slow motion. ‘I’ll fix the sink
tonight,’ he said, and Annabel gave him a thumbs-up. He noted the furry white arm protruding from his daughter’s backpack.
‘May I ask why you packed a polar bear for school?’
‘I have a report today.’
‘Another report? Aren’t you in third grade?’
‘It’s for that enriched-learning thing after class. I’m talking about global warming—’
Annabel, sarcastic: ‘No kidding.’
‘—and this isn’t just
any
polar bear.’
Mike lifted an eyebrow. ‘No?’
Kat pulled the white bear from her backpack and presented it theatrically. ‘This is no longer Snowball, my favourite stuffed
animal.
This
. . . this is Snowball, the Last Dying Polar Bear.’ She removed her eyeglasses from their case and put them on. The round
red rims added gravity to her expression. Not that she needed the help. ‘Did you know,’ she asked, ‘that polar bears will
probably be extinct by the time I’m a grown-up?’
‘Yes,’ Mike said. ‘From that Al Gore movie. With the melting icecaps and drowning polar bears. You cried for two days.’
Annabel said, ‘Eat your omelet.’
Kat picked at the edge. Mike gave the nape of her neck a squeeze. ‘Want me to walk you to class today?’
‘Dad, I’m
eight
.’
‘So you keep reminding me.’ Mike tugged his sturdy cell from his pocket and hit ‘redial.’ A few rings, and then the bank manager
picked up. ‘Hi, Mike Wingate again. Did the wire hit?’
‘Just a minute, Mr Wingate.’ The sound of keyboard typing.
As Kat and Annabel negotiated how many more bites Kat had to eat, Mike waited, drumming his fingers nervously on the counter.
It had taken him thirteen years to work his way from hired hand to carpenter to foreman to contractor. And now he was on the
brink of closing out his first deal as a developer. He’d taken some ulcer-inducing risks to get here, leveraging their house
and maxing out a handful of loans to buy a section of undeveloped canyon at the edge of town. Lost Hills, a Valley community
thirty miles northwest of downtown Los Angeles, had a number of advantages, the main one being that real estate was merely
expensive, not obscene. Mike had carved the land into forty generous parcels and built a community of ecological houses that
he had named, uninventively, Green Valley. Not that he was a diehard ecofreak, but Kat had shown an interest in environmental
stuff from an early age and he had to admit that those futuristic computer-generated photos of Manhattan flooded due to sea-level
rise scared the hell out of him.
The state’s offer of green subsidies had helped the houses sell
quickly, the cash from the final cluster of sales due to be wired from the title company this morning. This wire would get
him out from under the bank – finally, entirely – after three and a half years and meant they’d no longer have to eyeball
their checking-account balance before deciding to go out to a meal.
The bank manager’s breath whistled over the line. The typing stopped. ‘Still nothing, Mr Wingate.’
Mike thanked him, clicked his cell closed, and ran the sweat off his forehead with the heel of a hand. The little nagging
voice returned: What if, after all this work, something
did
go wrong?
He caught Annabel looking at him, and he said, ‘I shouldn’t have bought that stupid truck yet.’
She said, ‘And what? Duct-taped the transmission together on your beater pickup? We’re fine. The money’s there. You’ve worked
hard.
So
hard. It’s okay to let yourself enjoy it a little.’
‘And I certainly didn’t need to drop eight hundred bucks on a suit.’
‘You’ve got a photo shoot with the governor, honey. We can’t have you show up in ripped jeans. Besides, you can wear it again
at the award ceremony. Which reminds me’. She snapped her fingers. ‘I need to pick it up from the tailor this morning after
class. Kat’s got that back-to-school checkup this morning. Can you take her on your way in? Meet back here at lunch?’
In the past year, their schedules had gotten more complicated to coordinate. Once it had become clear that Kat and third grade
were getting along, Annabel decided it was time to go back to Northridge University for her teaching degree. State-school
tuition was manageable, as long as they bent the budget here and there.
Mike flipped his phone open and checked the screen in case he’d missed the bank calling back with good news. He rubbed a knot
out of his neck. The stress, still holding on. ‘I don’t know what was wrong with my old sport coat.’
Kat said, ‘I don’t think anyone wears plaid jackets anymore, Dad.’
‘It’s not
plaid
. It’s windowpane.’
Annabel nodded at Kat and mouthed,
Plaid
.
Mike had to smile. He took a deep breath. Tried for a full exhale. The money was already at the title company. What could
go wrong?
Annabel finished at the sink, tugged off her rings, and rubbed lotion into her hands. The engagement ring, a fleck of pale
yellow diamond that he’d scraped together two paychecks to afford, gave off a dull sparkle. He loved that ring, like he loved
their nice little house. The American dream distilled into two bedrooms and fifteen hundred square feet. Having money come
in would be great, sure, but they’d always known to be grateful, to appreciate how fortunate they were.
Annabel reached for his hands. ‘Come here, I got too much lotion.’ The light from the window was pouring over her shoulders,
bronzing her dark hair at the edges, and her eyes, picking up the frost blue of her shirt, looked translucent.
He raised the cell phone, framed her in the built-in camera, and snapped a picture. ‘What?’ she said.
‘Your hair. Your eyes.’
Annabel rolled her hands in his.
‘Gawd,’ Kat said. ‘Just kiss and get it over with already.’
The Ford F-450 gleamed in the garage like a spit-polished tank. The four-ton truck guzzled enough diesel to offset whatever
help Green Valley was lending the environment, but Mike couldn’t exactly haul gear to a construction site in a Prius. The
truck was extravagant – irresponsible, even – but he had to confess that when he’d driven it off the lot yesterday, he’d felt
more delight than seemed prudent.
Kat hopped into the back and stuck her nose in a book, the usual morning procedure.
Pulling out of the driveway, Mike gestured at the roof-mounted TV/DVD player. ‘Stop reading. Check out the TV. It’s got wireless
headphones. Noise-canceling.’
He sounded like the brochure, but couldn’t help himself; the new-car smell was making him heady.
She put on the headphones, clicked around the channels. ‘Yes!’ she said, too loud since the volume was cranked up. ‘
Hannah Montana
.’
He coasted up the quiet suburban streets, tilting down the sun visor, thinking about how nervous and yet excited he was about
today’s photo shoot with the governor. They passed a jewelry shop, and he looked at all the glimmering ice in the storefront
window and thought that once that wire hit, just maybe he’d stop by and get something to surprise Annabel.
As they neared Dr Obuchi’s, Kat’s face darkened, and she tugged off the headphones. ‘No shots,’ she said.
‘No shots. It’s just a checkup. Don’t freak out.’
‘As long as there are no needles, there will be no freaking out.’ She extended her hand with a ceremony beyond her years.
‘Deal?’
Mike half turned, and they shook solemnly. ‘Deal.’
‘I don’t believe you,’ she said.
‘Have I ever broken a promise to you?’
‘No,’ she said. ‘But you could start.’
‘Glad to see I’ve built up trust.’
Her mouth stayed firm for the rest of the drive and all the way into the examination room, where she shifted back and forth
on the table, the paper crinkling beneath her as Dr Obuchi checked her reflexes.
The doctor finished the physical and eyed Kat’s chart. ‘Oh. She never got her second MMR, since Annabel wanted me to spread
out the vaccines.’ She tugged at a lock of shiny black hair. ‘We’re late on it.’ She fussed in a drawer for the vial and syringe.
Kat’s eyes got big. She stiffened on the table and directed an imploring stare at her father. ‘Dad, you
swore
.’
‘She prefers to get ready for shots,’ Mike said. ‘Mentally. A little more notice. Can we come back later in the week?’
‘It’s September. Back to school. You can guess what my schedule
looks like.’ Dr Obuchi took note of Kat’s glare. Unwavering. ‘I
might
have a slot Friday morning.’
Mike clicked his teeth together, frustrated. Kat was watching him closely. He put his hands on his daughter’s knobby knees.
‘Honey, I’m wall-to-wall with meetings Friday, and Mom has class. It’s my worst day. Let’s just do this now and get it over
with.’
Kat’s face colored.
Dr Obuchi said, ‘It’s just a prick. Over before you know it.’
Kat tore her gaze from Mike and looked at the wall, her breath quickening, her arm almost as pale as the latex glove gripping
it. Dr Obuchi dabbed some alcohol on Kat’s biceps and readied the needle.
Mike watched, his discomfort growing. Kat kept her face turned away.
As the stainless-steel point lowered, Mike reached out and gently stopped the doctor’s hand. ‘I’ll make Friday work,’ he said.
Mike drove, chomped Juicy Fruit, and tried to keep from checking in with the bank manager for the fourth time that morning.
As they approached Kat’s school, he rolled down the window and spit his gum into the wind.
‘
Dad
.’
‘What?’
‘That’s not good for the environment.’
‘Like if a bald eagle chokes on it?’
Kat scowled.
‘Okay, fine,’ he said. ‘I won’t spit any more gum out the window.’
‘Snowball the Last Dying Polar Bear thanks you.’
He pulled up to the front of the school, but she just sat there in the backseat, fingering the wireless headphones in her
lap. ‘You’re getting some award thing for the green houses, aren’t you?’ she asked. ‘From the governor?’
‘I’m being recognized, yeah.’
‘I know you care about nature and stuff, but you’re not, like,
really
into it, right? So why’d you build all these green houses?’
‘You really don’t know?’ He angled the rearview so he could see her face.
She shook her head.
He said, ‘For you.’
Her mouth came open a little, and then she looked away and smiled privately. She scooted across and climbed out, and even
once she was halfway across the playground, he could see that her face was still flushed with joy.
Letting the breeze blow through the rolled-down window, he took in the scene. A few teachers were out supervising the yard.
Parents clustered among the parked cars, arranging play dates, coordinating car pools, planning field trips. Kids whooped
and ran and tackled one another on the grass.
It was a life he’d always dreamed about but barely dared to believe he could have for himself. And yet here it was.
He dialed, raised the cell phone to his face. The bank manager sounded a touch impatient. ‘Yes, Mr Wingate. I was about to
call. I’m pleased to tell you that the wire came through just this instant.’
For a moment Mike was rendered speechless. The phone sweaty in his grip, he asked for the amount. And then asked the bank
manager to repeat it, just to make sure it was real.
‘So the loan is paid off now, yeah?’ Mike said, though he knew he had just received enough to close out the remaining debt
five times over. ‘Fully paid off?’
A note of amusement in the man’s voice. ‘You are free and clear, Mr Wingate.’
Mike’s throat was tightening, so he thanked the manager and hung up. He tipped his face into his hand and just breathed awhile,
worried he might lose it here in the middle of the Lost Hills Elementary parking lot. It was the money, sure, but it was so
much more than that, too. It was relief and pride, the knowledge that he’d taken a gamble and put nearly four years of
nonstop effort behind it, and now his wife and daughter would never have to worry about having a roof over their heads and
food in the refrigerator and overdue tuition bills tucked into the desk blotter.
Across the playground, her image split by the cross-hatching of the chain-link fence, Kat climbed to the top of a fireman’s
pole and dinged the top bar with a fist. The sight of her made his heart ache. Her safe little world, composed of small challenges,
open horizons, and boundless affection.
Late for work, he sat and watched her play.
