A book on killing people with four-foot razor blades? Hardly.
He scratched his head. Weird, Mom, it’s like I already know this stuff.
She had read it, and found it mostly impenetrable, but when she began to apply it to sewing, some of it made sense. Know the Ways of all arts. Know the Ways of all professions.
Studying other art forms—pottery and painting, macramé and sculpture, did give her ideas for her own work. Costuming was three-dimensional art. Wearable art. Studying drama, and the art of the stage, told her even more. And magic—the art of illusion. So Musashi, the ancient sword-killer, had touched a basic principle that held true even about something apparently as far removed as sewing.
Somehow, it was calming to her to think about this. Do nothing that is of no use.
She was chewing her guts out because she had slept with her husband to save his life. Because she was being “unfaithful,” in some inexplicable way, to a man whom she had only met once, seven years ago, for three minutes. It was absurd, and seen through that lens, she found it within herself to laugh, quietly.
Damn, life was so strange.
Thank you, Musashi. And Alexander Marcus, for bringing him into my son’s life.
She clicked the mouse again, opened the trash can icon, and dragged the letter file back out. What the hell. Even if the entire relationship was nothing but a fantasy, she was in the business of fantasy, wasn’t she?
Everyone needs a little fantasy from time to time. She just needed a little more of it now, that was all. The whole damned town is going sour, she thought, especially for the children. She wasn’t the only one who felt that way, but most people traced the problem back to the preschool trial. She knew better, and so did Patrick’s friends, and their parents.
The problem started earlier, had begun with sun and sand, and ended with tragedy.…
28
It was a day in early October of 1994. For the older kids, school had already begun, and the weather had begun to break, gray skies crowding out the sunshine in the way it always did. Summer had been beautiful, so lovely that between late May and September, it had been possible to forget the bleakness of winter.
The gorgeous summers were one of the factors keeping her in the Northwest, even after discovering that her skills with needle and thread might be sold more dearly in Los Angeles or at least San Francisco.
She and Otis had actually spent a month in southern California, staying with cousins while Otis interviewed for work. As wonderful as she thought the city was (the nightlife along Sunset and Santa Monica and the Crenshaw district!), when no work materialized and they returned to the Northwest, she had been relieved, even when the first serious and unmistakably frosty nip hit the air.
This was home. This was right. This was what she knew and understood. Cold, wet winters with the promise of snow. Springs like the kiss of an awakening goddess, and summers bright and hot and alive enough to make you forget the lip-cracking winter cold or the endless spring rains. A verdurous cascade of leaves and grass and needles that looked and felt and smelled as if it would go on and on forever.
And when it began to shift, when the first breath of cold signaled the end of summer, and the beginning of a long, long fall, a tumble into the maw of winter, it triggered something within her. It signaled that time changes, the year turns. Another year gone, Vivian. Another year closer to that final cold. There was work to be done, cloth to stitch, long, slow love to be made in the depths of the marriage bed, and children to bring squalling and yawping into the world.
She could, year by year, feel her body changing in a way she knew would never have happened, had things worked out differently. Had Otis’s job not fallen through, had she joined the tribes of the endless spring, in sunny, sunny California.
And now was one of those times. The mornings had begun to bare their teeth. She was awakened by the feathery whistle of wind from the Columbia River, an arctic whisper under her nightgown, tripping along the spine. Oh, sure, by noon the sun would be out, and the sky would try to convince you that it had all been a joke, that the cold wasn’t real, that the summer wasn’t over.
But nightfall came much earlier now.
So before the weather broke, she decided to take the last good weekend and drive out to the beach, to take a last look at the sun-swallowing waves before they turned cold and gray. The beach wouldn’t be crowded: by now the vacationers from Spokane and Eugene would have retreated from the shores, packed up their summer vacations and returned to their lives.
But from Claremont, the drive was no more than forty minutes, straight out the Coast Highway, then south a bit, through the industrial maze and past the little mom-and-pop restaurants selling their fresh seafood specials and hot pastries. On the way back from the beach, Otis would probably pull in at one of them, and celebrate the day with a warm meal.
But now they sought one of the little wooded coves in the stretch of Oregon State Park along the coast, one of the areas that shifted so abruptly from woods to beach, soil becoming sand in the stretch of a few feet, leading down to cliff or cove, and hard, flat waves.
The families caravanned out: The Wallaces, Sevujians, Darlings, Valdezes and Emorys.
The kids were all about six then. Lee and Herman would be in kindergarten in a week, the others would stay behind in Claremont Preschool. The quintet would be broken, and in the way that things went in the world, it was possible that they would never be the same again.
Otis pulled their battered station wagon with its BACK OFF, I’M A GODDESS bumper sticker into the county parking lot at eleven in the morning. It was deserted. There were traces of a hell of a party the night before, and motorcycle tracks spooling out along the sand. Most of the beer cans and bottles had been scooped up in a big net and deposited near if not in a trashcan, but a few stray sun shirts and cutoff jeans were still sopping and bereft of owners. Otis picked up a halter top with one huge finger and dangled it sardonically.
“Must have been a hell of a party.”
Their dog Willie was running back and forth along the beach, barking at the waves and the birds, reveling in the thundering avalanche of new smells. Willie was a medium-sized mutt, maybe thirty-five pounds, a cross between a Labrador retriever and a Doberman pincher. Patrick adored him, and had raised him from a puppy. The dog’s mother had been a Lab, a class project at Claremont Preschool, all of the children pitching in with effort and money to raise her from a pup. She managed to run away for a couple of days one spring, and returned looking oddly abashed. Sixty-odd days later she bore a fine spanking confusion of puppies, and their teacher held a litter lottery.
Frankie, Patrick, Destiny, Lee and Shermie had pooled their tickets, vowing that if any one of them won a puppy, all of them would have a puppy. Patrick won the mutt, and had made as good as he could on the deal. Willie made the rounds of the other kids’ houses, as much as their parents tolerated. But when it was time for him to come home, when the last of the parents dropped him off at their trailer park, Vivian thought that she saw a special perk to the mutt’s ears, a little extra spring to his step.
Willie loved them all, but he belonged to Patrick.
The kids were fanning out across the beach, running and screaming, throwing rocks at the surf. “Don’t go too far!” Otis called.
“And stay together,” Mrs. Sevujian added. “Stay away from the rocks.” She pointed at a finger-shaped rock pile that speared out a hundred yards into the surf. Waves hissed and coiled and broke at its base. The kids loved to play on it, but one mistake could cause a tragedy.
Another group partied about a hundred yards further down the beach. Black smoke rose in wisps from their oil can, was caught and spun by the wind, and dissolved into the salty air. It was too distant to see their faces, but easy to imagine that they were happy, laughing, sharing love and companionship and grill-striped hot dogs on the last good weekend of the year.
Vivian and the other parents busied themselves setting up beach chairs and coll
ecting wood. Afterwards they peeled down and smeared on sunblock in token acknowledgment of the waning sunlight. It was warm that day, but not hot by any measure. The sky wasn’t overcast—it was merely cool, as if they were viewing it through a pane of refrigerated glass. The wind carried a clear message, reinforced by the gray clouds: Winter is coming. Enjoy the day.
And so they did. Within an hour, the fire pit was going, and the cars, unpacked, yielded drinks and salad and various meats to be roasted at the pit.
Some of the older kids were plunging into the water, and the younger ones had gained permission to join them on a buddy system: each of the younger children was joined to an older, who had the responsibility.
Vivian wasn’t completely comfortable with this: she saw some of the glances between the teenagers, and suspected that the energy between Delta and Robbie, for instance, fourteen and fifteen respectively, was beginning to build. Delta was ripening quickly, and she was ready for some adventure.
At fifteen, Frankie’s older brother Robbie already drew the attention of older girls (and women, if one paid attention to salon gossip). He was tall, athletic, intelligent. His parents were the Reverend and Mrs. Darling, the only ones of the group who hadn’t needed financial assistance to get their child into Claremont. Considering Claremont’s sliding scale, that meant that they were paying a pretty penny—but Frankie’s father was the associate minister at Lord’s Grace Baptist church, his mother the dental hygienist who had snagged him. They had been eager for her to get back to work, and considered Claremont Preschool their best bet. She was a willowy brunette gone a touch soft around the middle. The Reverend Darling looked as if he might have stepped out of a funeral home ad in GQ.
At any rate, what was abundantly clear was that Robbie, good at football and baseball, a terror on the dance floor, and a fair little scholar, was headed for great things.
The Darlings had had Robbie when the Reverend was forty-one, and his bride thirty-five. Rumor had it that five or six years later Mrs. Darling had suspended her birth-control pills due to her husband’s seriously diminished sex drive. As it happened, there was still one shot left in the clip, and in 1988 Frankie was born.
Frankie was a stubby six-year-old, sweet-natured and intense. His parents treated him with a sterile kind of affection, but brother Robbie just flat loved the kid.
And the love was reciprocal—Frankie followed Robbie everywhere, in a manner that most older brothers found downright embarrassing. Not Robbie. The fastest way in the world to start a fight was to say something negative about Frankie, imply that he was a little slow mentally, or simply too sickly to survive.
Frankie wasn’t slow, Robbie insisted, although Frankie’s speech could be a little hard to understand. You just needed to listen carefully to him. “And you should see him with video games. He’s a whiz.”
And Frankie never looked at Robbie with anything less than adoration. No one cheered harder than Frankie when Robbie charged past the goal line for a touchdown.
No one, except perhaps Delta.
Delta Valdez was Destiny’s older sister, sloe-eyed and dark skinned, perhaps mature beyond her years, but still not fully ripened by half. She carried with her the hint of a phenomenal maturity, a certain promise of the flesh. Everyone knew, but no one said anything about it, certainly not to her father, who was prone to jealousy. Perhaps too damned jealous.
The beach outing progressed, a slow crescendo of sun and sand and warming then cooling surf, games of tag and tubs of ice and beer, volleyball and treasure hunting, naps on grainy blankets and the sounds of children begging their parents to run with them, play with them, applaud as they risked life and limb.
And the parents got into it as well. Once upon a time three of the five fathers had played football. Stiff joints and bad backs were actually forgotten as reluctance grew into acceptance, which evolved to enjoyment, and then eagerness and finally competitiveness.
Now, this was just the parents. Robbie wasn’t a part of the game, and the teenagers found themselves in the water watching the younger kids—whichever of the younger sprouts weren’t watching the parents make fools of themselves.
And that was the way it evolved. The three groups:
Parents and adult friends, those who played and those who cheered or watched and made sarcastic commentary. Teenagers, who were charged with the care of the younger kids. And the children, who were herded back and forth like calves, shrieking with pleasure from one makeshift game to the next.
In the main it was a wonderful day. A twisted ankle here, a mild sunburn there, and Mrs. Valdez, who was working on a miniature castle of beer cans.
And a little flirting. Well, that was to be expected. After all, why in the world would the former front line of Claremont High bare their chests and shoulders and huff and puff in the sun if not to win the admiration of the former cheerleaders?
And at this remove, everyone remembered having run the long ball, having sacked that quarterback who went on to play a minor position for the Chargers or the Dolphins. And due to the inevitable damage wrought by gravity, friction and time, the Reverend Darling, who never indulged in anything more strenuous than recreational tennis, found that he could compete quite well with yesteryear’s beefy gridiron giants.
The beach had been staked out, the fifty yard line demarcated by a wire trash basket and the tumbled pier of rocks pointing out toward the horizon. Teams were drawn up, five to a side, former football players and former cheerleaders, a teacher, a couple of accountants …
All of the parents and step-parents were out on the playing field. The battle was surprisingly evenhanded, with Otis facing the beefy Joseph Sevujian, who was a year younger and therefore had never faced him in varsity ball. Both had wondered what this moment would feel like, and they grinned and grimaced at each other as only aging jocks can.
At first, Vivian watched from the sidelines. She lounged in a folding chair, her eyes sheltered by a pink, floppy sombrero. But as the game got more competitive, one adult after another was pulled onto the field, until every parent was co-opted, and the sun and beer-drenched hilarity had engaged them all.
The time seemed to float by. Vivian went out for passes, got knocked rump-over-teakettle in the sand and came up laughing. She was supposed to just grab the flags trailing from the runners’ trunks, but with the agreement of all concerned touch slowly turned to tackle. Although tackles were hard, they were fair, and no one was hurt. The afternoon went on like this, and perhaps, had things not gone so terribly wrong, Vivian would have remembered it as one of those wonderful, perfect late-summer days, the kind of day about which people say: “Remember that game? That great game? I’d like to have another game like that.”
But days like that, times like those, can never really be recaptured, because there is a magic that happens when your attention is in one place, and something slowly, gradually builds at the periphery of your awareness, and when it does, it has a life all its own.
In this case, all of their initial attention had been on the children, on making sure that the kids had a hell of a day. And with their attention there, something else had a chance to grow, something good and strong, and that would remind them of the lost days of their youth with every deliriously wrenched joint, every deliciously pulled muscle. And the new thing, that subconscious thing, slowly pulled their attention away, creating a perceptual hole.
It was only later, at the hospital, trying desperately to understand how the day had gone so badly wrong, that they had pieced together the truth and determined what had actually happened.
While the grown-ups had reveled in their creaking joints, almost all of the kids had headed into the surf. Under the watchful eyes of the older teenagers the kids had enjoyed these last hours of summer, and the hard, white sand upon which the waves pounded their steady, eternal rhythm.
There were enough of the older children to watch—just barely enough. Hermie’s older sister could watch the two-year-old Sevujian twins, and thirteen-year
-old Brett Wallace supervised the others. But like it or not, Robbie and Delta were the backup. They needed to watch Destiny and Patrick, but most especially, they needed to watch Frankie.
Because if there was any wild card in the entire situation, it would be adoring, helpless Frankie. He stayed on the beach most of the time, making sand castles, drawing his name at the tide line, and watched Robbie playing in the sun and the surf.
And, of course, at Robbie’s side was Delta, so long of limb, with ready smile and full, beautiful lips. Delta of the long, straight hair that streamed behind her in the water like a dark halo.
* * *
Almost inevitably, Robbie had noticed that all of the adults, distant on the beach, were occupied with their game.…
He spit out a mouthful of the salty water and turned his eye to Delta, who swam close to him, then pushed away, laughing like a seal. It was only natural that he would look for Frankie, and see him quietly occupied on the beach, far from the sparkling line where the tide darkened the sand. Frankie was never adventurous. Frankie never really took chances. And Frankie was something very close to a perfect alibi.
So, with everyone occupied watching someone else, or the sand, or the ball, or the waves, Robbie and Delta worked their way over behind a boulder on the long rocky spur, and found themselves completely alone.
He was fifteen, but despite being a young man of extraordinary physical presence, had had very little experience with girls. Being a Baptist preacher’s son was both a curse and a blessing. Girls were fascinated with him, but kept him at a slight distance, simultaneously idolized and isolated.
Charisma Page 20
