I would have to find a way to help Luna.
• • •
My first dawn back at home, the urn was still on the counter and it hadn’t moved a millimeter. Suddenly, I heard a booming noise from above. Was it another rocket crash? I hurried outside to see multiple hot air balloons flying overhead, firing up their burners. I recognized the dairy’s balloon, the cow jumping over the moon that I had seen with Marley. I had to smile.
Today was day one of Albuquerque’s balloon fiesta and it was a perfect, clear October New Mexico morning. The workmen had left a ladder in the backyard to fix a hole on my flat black roof. I had once claimed to be jaded by the balloon fiesta, but I couldn’t resist the spectacle. I climbed up the ladder and walked to the edge of the flat roof. As my house was at about 6,500 feet in elevation, I was at eye level with the eight hundred balloons of all shapes and sizes floating in the so-called “Albuquerque box." The "box" was the geographic condition that made this valley perfect for the fiesta every October.
I sure wished that Luna had worked with balloons instead of rockets. Balloons don’t explode as much. God, Marley would have loved this.
At eight o’clock that morning, I saw Dew and Denise in the driveway, returning with bagels and lox from Einstein Bagels. Maybe I was biased, but bagels made by locals in Albuquerque were better than the ones from the lower east side of New York.
“Dan, where are you?” Dew yelled.
“Up here!” I yelled.
“Can we join you?” Dew asked.
“Bring some chairs.” I replied.
It took a few trips, but they carried up a few of the stylish chairs along with the bagels, and we had a picnic on the roof. They both looked relatively normal in basic black. Denise had foregone a pentagram, and Dew even sported a pink polo pony on her black sweater. I liked having a family, even a small weird one that favored dark colors.
Luna came out, still groggy, and panicked when we weren’t on the patio, or anywhere else on earth. “We’re up here!” the three of us yelled.
We all ate in our stylish chairs up there on the roof with its view of the Sandia Mountains as the sun roared over the summit, and the occasional balloon floated above. Today was the Special Shapes Rodeo, and we spied a balloon sponsored by the bank that was shaped like the Wells Fargo stagecoach. Another balloon looked like Darth Vader’s helmet if he was somehow put on Mount Rushmore.
“Luke, I am your father,” Dew said in a bad Darth Vader imitation. “My real father and I used to recite that when I was little.”
Neither Luna nor I responded to that; we just stared at the other balloons. There were balloons shaped like bumble bees, angry birds, and flying saucers. We all smiled in spite of ourselves.
After a few more bagels and a few more balloons, Dew turned to her mom.
“Since you don’t have a job any more, there’s really no reason for me to stay in New Mexico and attend school for computers to program a satellite that’s never going to launch. Dan says I should try to find myself.”
“You actually listened to me?” I asked her.
“I guess so. Now that you’ve had a near-death experience, it’s like you’ve gained wisdom.”
“I’ll keep that in mind.”
“Where will you go?” Luna asked.
“To one of the coasts,” she said. “Try to worm my way back into law school, any law school. I don’t think this idea of replacing lawyers with software is ever going to happen in my lifetime.”
“If anyone could have done it, it could have been you,” Luna said.
“By the way,” she asked, “can I borrow the car? And some money?”
Luna fiddled with her phone and must have transferred money to Dew’s account. “That’s the last of it,” Luna said. “That should last you two weeks. And we have to return the car to Dragon Moon at the end of the month or they’ll repo it.”
“I’ll survive,” she said.
Dew gave her mom a hug and then came over to me. “You would have been a great dad for Marley if you just had a little more time.”
We didn’t say anything more, just hugged. I would miss Dew, and I hoped she would turn out all right. Maybe she would take over the world someday. How bad could that be?
Dew climbed down the ladder and drove off in Luna’s car. I wondered if I would ever see her again. After the last of the balloons had landed in the valley below, and Luna and Denise went down the ladder, I stayed on the roof.
The sun felt good, but I was still cold, very cold, yet the cold Fall air made me feel alive. I heaped on some of my Mom’s old blankets and expected I looked a bit like a papoose. What the hell was I going to do with my life?
I thought of Marley, of course. He would have loved the balloons. I didn’t know whether he was religious, or whether he went to heaven or hell. I had a vague knowledge of the myths regarding ghosts. Ghosts were usually the spirits of people who died due to violence and their spirit was unsettled, stuck between worlds. Marley fit into that category, right?
Fatigue caught up to me, even this early in the morning. I closed my eyes, thinking about ghosts and balloons and was startled when Denise returned. She was holding Marley’s Star Wars diary.
“The school sent this to us at the hospital,” Denise said. “Marley would want you to have it.”
Want me to have it? I was surprised that she used the present tense, as opposed to the past. I didn’t want to question her about it, though. Marley had once said I could see his diary when he was ready, I guessed he was ready now.
Ready or not, I took the diary from her, “Thanks,” I said. “I miss him.”
There was a long uncomfortable pause there on the roof. The balloons were long gone, but the view of Albuquerque below was still great. The leaves were turning.
“My work here is done now that Marley’s gone. I think I’m overqualified to be Luna’s nanny. Or yours.”
“I never quite got why you were here.”
“I was here for him,” she said. “For Marley. We were closer than you knew. We were cousins, but he was more like my brother. I just wish I could have done more to save him.”
“What more could you have done?”
She shrugged that Denise shrug. “It’s your job to take it from here,” she said.
“What do you mean?”
“This will be the last time you’ll see me for a while.”
“Where are you going?”
She laughed. “You know the story of my name? Aunt Luna made a joke when her sister, my mother Jen Song, was pregnant. Remember?”
“De-neice and de-nephew,” I said. “But de-nephew died at birth next to the border.”
“I thought so,” she said. “But I’m going on a quest to find him. Wherever, whoever, or whatever he is. I got a lead that he might be in Lordsburg. There was some incident down there.”
“You’re going to walk the earth like Caine in Kung Fu,” I said, quoting Samuel L. Jackson in Pulp Fiction.
“Who’s Caine and why would I need to know kung pao? That’s chicken with peanuts, right?”
I stared at her. She smiled. I don’t think I’d ever heard Denise tell a joke before.
“Don’t worry about it. Maybe someone can write a book about your adventures. Or turn it into a TV series.”
Another great book that I would never write, The Lordsburg Incident. Denise hugged me one more time. She then whispered into my ear. “He’s trying to reach you,” she said. “I can’t help him, and I can’t help you anymore. It’s going to be up to you to get in touch with him.”
Before I could ask what she meant, she vanished, seriously vanished, right in front of me. Did she jump off the roof in a puff of fire and brimstone, or was it just the mold burning?
“Was Denise real?” I asked Luna when she came back to the roof holding a backpack filled with supplies for the mo
rning.
“Who?” she asked.
“Denise, that girl who didn’t say much and seemed to have magic powers.”
Chapter 31
Lawyer on the Roof
Of course, Denise is real,” Luna said. “People ignore her, so she’s just able to disappear without anyone noticing. Didn’t you hear her slam the door behind her?”
I stood at the edge of the roof and did indeed see Denise walking in the distance at the edge of Tramway Boulevard. She must have sensed we were watching, turned and waved to us.
Luna and I got back in the stylish chairs on the roof. Luna looked beautiful in turquoise sweats and without make up. I liked the touch of gray in her hair and wrinkles were better than the Botox. She was real. She was human. We were Ma and Pa Kettle up here.
“Grow old along with me,” I said. “The best is yet to be.”
“Is that a poem or a proposal?”
“I don’t know yet.”
“We’ll see,” she said.
We now officially had an empty nest up on the roof, and yet it didn’t feel so empty alone with her under the blue New Mexico sky. She smiled at me, and then pulled a tablet from her back pack, and got back to work.
“What are you working on, barracuda?” I asked. “Trying to swim back to Dragon Moon?”
“No, it’s all about you,” she said. “I’m working on you.”
“What do you mean?”
“I’m working on the response to your disciplinary complaint. The hearing is coming up. That didn’t go away while you were in your coma.”
“What’s gonna happen with your Chuy?” She stared at me, as I shook my head. “Force of habit from listening to clients. What’s going to happen with your Danito?”
“Let’s see what the disciplinary board says.”
She worked on her tablet for a while and then her hands cramped up. “Damn it!” she said.
“You okay?”
She shook her head. “I’m better. The heavier dose of Crotaladone helps, a bit. You didn’t see me at the funeral. I totally broke down and they put me in a hospital bed next to you for a day. I can’t really process it. I keep telling myself Marley’s going to come through the door.”
“I do, too. Denise made it sound like he’s trying to reach out to us from the other side.”
“Denise is crazy, you know that,” Luna said.
“How do you cope?”
“I’ve lost everyone in my family—it’s an empty nest, but I’m going to throw myself into another project.”
“What project is that?”
“You. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have work to do.”
“I have some work to do too.” Luna went down the ladder and left me up on the roof. I decided to read Marley’s diary in all its Star Wars glory. Sir Nathaniel’s comments in my dream about all of Marley’s faults, seemed to come word-for-word from entries in the diary. How would I know about them to put them in my dream, put them in the mouth of a man I had not yet met?
The next few pages talked about Marley’s anticipation of hell week. All that was in the dream as well. There was no way I would have known that either.
And then that missing page, page 237. It was missing, exactly as it had been in the dream, along with the page behind it, 238. The next page, page 239, had Marley’s writing about killing everyone. I had seen it up on the Mondopad in my dream, word for word, chicken scratch by chicken scratch.
“Oh, my God!” I said.
Luna must have heard me inside the house, as she hurried out to the patio. “Dan, are you all right?”
“Can you come up here for a moment?”
She came up the ladder. “I saw this page, page 239, in my dream,” I said. “Page 237 was missing in the real diary. Just like in my dream.”
“That’s impossible.”
“I don’t have any psychic gifts, Luna. But I get headaches, as if someone is sending me messages in Morse code by tapping on my head with a hammer. Unfortunately, I don’t know the code.”
“The hammers are actually coming from the workers on the bathroom.” She looked at the diary. “Hmmm. I guess I didn’t know my son as well as I thought.”
“I hope we hear from him again,” I said.
Luna frowned. “I’d better get back to work on your disbarment case. I think you’d better get off the roof while we work on things.”
“Being a lawyer on the roof is better than being a fiddler on the roof,” I said.
“Well, you might have to learn fiddling. I don’t know if I can keep you as a lawyer.”
We went down, and inside to my home office, then we shut the door behind us as workers arrived to finish the bathroom.
“We’re almost done,” Tyler said.
The sounds of hammers in the background, Luna and I went to her bedroom and went over all the complaints on her laptop and quizzed me about the particulars in each case. In the old days, she would have made a trial notebook like I did. Now she did everything online, or in the cloud, and put it in her phone. She literally had my entire life in the palm of her hand. She had created a file for each disciplinary complaint, with everything in its proper place. She then sent it to my phone. I, naturally, had trouble opening it.
“Say ‘Look up evidence in Anna Maria complaint,’” she said.
I spoke into my phone, and within moments, I had a veritable law library at my fingertips. She had created flowcharts for every contingency, depending on how the testimony went.
Luna was a barracuda lawyer and barracudas could move a lot faster than rattlesnakes.
“I missed being a lawyer,” she said. “It was something I was good at. And it wasn’t rocket science. I wasn’t very good at rocket science.”
“I’m sorry I’m the reason you had to come back into the practice,” I said.
“A multi-million-dollar rocket exploding at launch and my getting evicted is the reason I’m becoming a lawyer again, not you,” she said.
“We make a good team,” I said. “In law and life.”
“We’ll see.”
• • •
By the end of the day, Tyler had finished. Twenty years of jungle mold was gone from the desert. It smelled like lavender, like daisies. It smelled like Luna.
Sadly, Tyler took the ladder with him when he left. Maybe it was a good thing. No one likes a lawyer on the roof. I still had mold in my life, but hopefully Luna and I could remediate that as well.
That evening, I noticed Luna’s sweats were two sizes too big. She was disappearing before my eyes. Alarmed by Luna’s continuing weight loss, I attempted to cook a hearty dinner, a recipe from one of her mom’s old cookbooks of an exotic burrito with blue corn and green chile. I served Luna dinner by candlelight, outside, just as the sun was setting.
“Not bad,” Luna lied after her first bite. “Hold on, I have something that will make it go down better. We found an old bottle of wine under all that mold.”
I couldn’t tell if she was kidding. She showed me the famous Los Alamos wine with its radioactive glow that she had always raved about. I must have saved a bottle from when we were married. How it got under my bathroom I would never know. Perhaps there was something radioactive in the wine that mutated my concoction into something edible.
We drank toast after toast. “To Marley,” she said with every gulp.
“To Marley.”
The pink light of the sunset hit the Sandias just right as our glasses clinked. One ray hit the descending tram on the Sandia Peak Tramway, and it looked like a star coming to earth. The tram must have stopped, because the light lingered on it. That had to be an omen of something.
“Give me a moment,” I said.
I picked up Marley’s urn from inside the house and brought it out to the table.
“Marley liked sunsets,” I said.
&nbs
p; “Sunrises too,” she said.
Luna was about to say something else, but stopped and took in this incredible moment in, the darkening sky, the pink glow of the mountains, and the shimmering reflection of the tramway. Somebody inside the tram must have had a mirror because the light from the sun reflected off tram and shone directly on the urn—just like in Raiders of the Lost Ark when the sun showed the true location of the lost ark itself.
“I feel it,” she said.
“I do too,” I said. “Boy, are we a close family.”
For a moment, I stared at her. The pink light captured her perfectly and I was in love all over again.
Before I could do anything, she held up her hand. “Don’t forget the hearing is coming up. Right now, we’re attorney-client privileged.”
I nodded. She was right. She went off to the bathroom and gulped another pill—or two or three. Then she cried throughout the night.
Chapter 32
Santa Fe Trial
Luna arranged a status hearing before a full-fledged disbarment proceeding. We would meet with the counsel of the disciplinary board under the purview of one of the justices of the New Mexico Supreme Court, there in the courthouse up in Santa Fe. Still, it was unclear what this “hearing about the hearing” would entail. Luna prepped on her computer as if my life was on the line.
I drove the Lincoln up to Santa Fe while Luna sat beside me exchanging emails on her phone. She pointed out all the issues with the three cases. I had not stolen money, and that’s usually what it took for a lawyer to permanently lose his license. Then again, she reminded me that the breakdown docket was littered with suspended attorneys who had the mere “appearance of impropriety.”
Traffic slowed at the base of La Bajada hill, a steep ascent that marked the informal divide between Albuquerque’s orbit and Santa Fe’s.
We finally passed a fatal accident with the flashing lights of ambulances and police cars. I thought about Marley’s prediction over the phone that someone on the other end would die in an accident on the road to Santa Fe. I had no way of knowing if this accident had anything to do with that prediction.
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