by Dean Koontz
Walter toiled as a navy cook for twenty-four years, most of it at a harbor base rather than aboard ship, and Imogene worked as a dental hygienist. When he grew tired of measuring ingredients in hundred-pound and five-gallon increments, when she wearied of staring into gaping mouths, they retired from their professions and, at fifty, went to a school to learn estate management.
In ultrawealthy Montecito, California, they ran a twelve-acre property on which stood a forty-thousand-square-foot main house, a five-thousand-square-foot guest house, horse stables, two swimming pools, and vast rose gardens. Walter and Imogene thrived, managing a staff of twenty, until drunken Preston, then thirty and intending to reunite with his parents for the purpose of negotiating a guilt stipend, had slammed back into their lives by crashing his rental car into the gatehouse, collapsing half the structure, narrowly missing the security guard, and cursing out the owner, who helped extract him from his vehicle before it might burst into flames.
Preston in tow, the Nashes left California and returned to their roots, hoping that by dedicating a year to their son’s rehabilitation, they could restore him to a life of sobriety and self-sufficiency. Instead, he became the thing that lived in their basement apartment, sullen and reclusive, occupying himself with video games, smut, and drug-induced stupors. For weeks and even months at a time, Preston remained as elusive as the Phantom of the Opera—until one too many chemical cocktails gave him the screaming whimwhams so bad that he saw evil clowns climbing out of his toilet, or the equivalent.
Even in his silent and reclusive periods, Preston took a toll from his parents. Expectation of his next collapse was almost as emotionally draining as the event itself.
Estate managers usually were required to live on site, but no employer wanted the Nashes to bring along their pale and stubbled basement dweller. Instead of managing a major property and its staff, they were reduced to cleaning house and cooking for the Calvinos, a position they’d held for more than four years. Overqualified, they never acted as though the job might be beneath them; they worked hard and were cheerful, perhaps because work provided escape from worry.
When John entered the kitchen, Walter was plating salads at the center island. Five eight, trim, with steel-rod posture, he might have passed for a jockey if he had been a few inches shorter and ten pounds lighter. His small, strong hands and his economy of movement suggested he would be able to control half a ton of horseflesh with the subtlest pressure of a knee or the slightest tug of the reins.
“There’s no need to serve us dinner when we haven’t any guests,” John said. “You’ve had a long day.”
“You’ve had a long day, as well, Mr. C,” Walter said. “Besides, there’s nothing like some extra work to ensure against a sleepless night.”
“Well, don’t think you’re staying all the way through cleanup. The terrible trio can help Nicky and me. We’re nearly three-quarters through the year, and they haven’t yet broken twenty dishes. We don’t want to deny them every chance to exceed their personal best score.”
He drew a deep breath, savoring the aromas of onions, garlic, juniper berries, and well-cooked beef. “Ah, carbonata.”
Laying aside her ladle and setting the lid ajar on the stew pot, Imogene said, “You’re a regular bloodhound, Mr. C. No wonder you close so many cases.”
In youth, Imogene must have been a pocket Venus. Her features were still delicate and her skin as clear as morning light. In spite of her petite stature, she was not now—and likely never had been—fragile either in body or spirit. She had the air of one who could readily assume Atlas’s burden if he could not carry it any longer.
“But I don’t detect even a hint of polenta,” John worried.
“How could you smell polenta through such a cloud of stew? But it’s here, of course. We’d never serve carbonata without it.”
After another deep breath, he said, “Piselli alle noci,” which was an Italian dish of buttered peas and carrots garnished with walnut halves.
To her husband, Imogene said, “He’s got a better nose than you do, Wally.”
“Of course he does,” Walter agreed as he shaved fresh Parmesan on the salads. “After all those years of navy cooking, I’ve ruined my nose for nuance. Which reminds me, sir, leave the laundry-room door closed, we’ve got an ugly stink in there. I only discovered it ten minutes ago. I’ll deal with it in the morning.”
“What’s wrong?” John asked.
“I’m not sure. But my best guess is a sick rodent found a way into the dryer exhaust duct and met his fate just on the farther side of the lint trap.”
“Wally,” Imogene said with some exasperation. “The man’s about to sit down to his dinner.”
“Sorry, Mr. C.”
“No problem. Nothing could turn me off carbonata.”
“It’s just curious,” Walter said, “how the smell came on so suddenly. One minute the laundry room is fine, and a minute later, it reeks.”
11
JOHN SAT AT THE HEAD OF THE DINING-ROOM TABLE, NICOLETTE to his right, Minnie to his left and boosted on a pillow. Naomi sat beside her little sister, Zachary across from Naomi.
For the first time, the sight of his family gathered in one place didn’t at once warm John but instead inspired a cold tightness in his chest, a greasy sliding sensation in his stomach. The dining room seemed too bright, although the lighting was the same as ever at dinner, and every window invited hostile observation. The stainless-steel flatware flanking his plate had the sinister gleam of surgical instruments. His wineglass was indeed glass, a potential source of jagged shards.
For a moment, this curious uneasiness threatened to disorient him—until he understood the cause of it. Together, the family was five targets clustered, therefore vulnerable to quick annihilation. Although he had no incontestable proof that any enemy waged war against him, he was thinking like a man embattled.
His hyperbolic suspicion embarrassed him, and more important, he recognized that if not controlled, it would cloud his judgment. If he permitted his imagination to paint a gloss of evil on all things, he would provide camouflage for true evil. Besides, if you painted the devil on the walls often enough, you got the devil on the stairs, his footsteps approaching.
When John allowed his children to delight him, they soon lifted from him this pall of foreboding.
After grace, during the salad course, the primary subject discussed was the brilliant, the magnificent, the incomparable, the current that’s-who-I-want-to-be-when-I-grow-up, Louisa May Alcott, immortal author of Little Women, which Naomi had finished reading just that afternoon. She wanted to be Louisa May Alcott, and she wanted also to be Jo, the young writer in the story, but of course she wanted to be herself, embodying all the Alcott-Jo qualities while writing and living in her unique Naomi style.
Naomi seemed destined, as an adult, to appear on Broadway in the title role of a revival of Peter Pan. She contained both a tomboy who yearned for swashbuckling adventures and a perpetually breathless girl who saw romance and magic everywhere she looked. She wanted to know how to throw a perfect sinking curveball every bit as much as she wanted to know how to arrange roses to the best effect, and she believed both in Truth and in Tinker Bell. As likely to dance along a hallway as to run it, more likely to sing away a sadness than to sulk, she exhausted the possibilities of each new enthusiasm just as inevitably another one came along to captivate her.
As Walter whisked away the salad plates, Zachary said, “Little Women sounds like a giant bore. Why can’t you go nuts about vampire novels like every other dorky sixth-grade girl? Then we’d really have something worth talking about at the table.”
“I don’t find the living dead the least bit attractive,” Naomi said. “When I’m old enough to have a boyfriend, I don’t want one who drinks my blood. Imagine his bad breath and what a mess his teeth would be. All these girls swooning over hunky vampires, what they really want is to give away their freedom, to be controlled and told what to do and not have to think
—and never die, of course. It’s sick is what it is. I don’t want to be a forever-young living corpse, I want to be Louisa May Alcott.”
Minnie said, “It’s stupid how she has three names.”
“We all have three names,” Naomi said. “You’re Minette Eugenia Calvino.”
“But nobody calls me all three, like you guys said a thousand times already ‘Louisa May Alcott, Louisa May Alcott.’ It’s stupid.”
“Celebrity-shooters always have three names,” Zach said. “Like Mark David Chapman and Lee Harvey Oswald. There’s a bunch of others, but I can’t think of them right now.”
“Good,” his mother said. “I’d be very disturbed to have a thirteen-year-old son obsessed with three-name celebrity-shooters.”
“Zach is totally obsessed with the United States Marines,” Naomi said. “He’s got like eighty-six books about them.”
“I only have thirty-one books about them,” Zach protested, “and I’m not obsessed with the marines. I just like military history is all. Lots of people are interested in military history.”
“Relax,” Naomi said. “I wasn’t implying your interest in the marines is a homosexual thing. After all, you’re also obsessed with Laura Leigh Highsmith worse than you are the marines.”
“Three names,” Minnie observed.
John said, “Who’s Laura Leigh Highsmith?”
Minnie said, “Is she related to Louisa May Alcott?”
“She’s just a girl in my human-head class.”
The children were primarily home-schooled. For educational purposes, Naomi went out of the house only to music lessons and to junior-orchestra practices. Zach attended group lessons twice a week as part of an art-institute program for gifted children. Currently he was enrolled in a pencil class to learn the fine points of drawing the human head.
Teasingly, Naomi said, “Hey, does Laura Leigh Highsmith draw portraits of you?”
“She’s just a challenging subject,” Zach said. “Hard to get right. Other than that, she’s nobody.”
“Are you gonna marry her?” Minnie asked.
“Of course not,” Zach said. “Why would I marry a nobody?”
“What’s wrong with your face?” Minnie asked.
Naomi said, “It’s sure not sunburn. He’s blushing.”
“I’m not blushing,” Zach declared.
“Then it’s a bad rash,” Minnie said. “Mom, he’s got a bad rash.”
“Permission to leave the table,” Zach said.
John said, “Denied. You’ve eaten only a salad.”
“I’ve lost my appetite.”
“It’s the rash,” Minnie said. “Maybe it’s conflacious.”
“Contagious,” Naomi corrected.
Minnie said, “Permission to leave the table.”
“Why do you want to leave the table?” John asked.
“I don’t want no rash.”
“He’s drawn at least ten thousand portraits of Laura Leigh Highsmith,” Naomi revealed.
Zachary had inherited his mother’s talent—and his father’s grimace. “What’re you doing, snooping in my drawing tablets?”
“It’s not like reading a diary, for heaven’s sake. I like to look at your drawings, you’re so good, and I can’t draw for beans. Though if I was a good artist, I’d draw all kinds of things, variety, not a gazillion portraits of Laura Leigh Highsmith.”
“You always exaggerate everything,” Zach said. “First it’s ten thousand, now a gazillion.”
“Well,” said Naomi, “it’s at least a hundred.”
“A hundred’s a whole lot less than a gazillion.”
Nicolette said, “You’ve drawn a hundred portraits of the same girl, and this is the first I’ve heard of her?”
“That’s a really, really bad rash,” Minnie said.
For the main course, everyone but Minnie enjoyed the carbonata with polenta and vegetables. Walter served the girl spaghetti and meatballs because she had the culinary stubbornness of the average eight-year-old.
The conversation turned to Italian history, possibly because Naomi noted, rightly or wrongly, that the Chinese invented spaghetti, not the Italians, and Minnie wanted to know who invented meatballs, and to forestall any further diminishment of their Italian heritage, John invented a colorful story that placed the origin of meatballs squarely in Rome. They talked about Michelangelo lying on his back to paint frescoes on ceilings (according to Minnie, here was another guy with three names—Michael Ann Jello) and about Leonardo da Vinci inventing airships that would have flown if only the technology had existed to build them. Because there was no Italian front for the marines in World War I and because during World War II they served primarily in the Pacific theater, Zachary changed the subject to France in general and specifically to the Battle of Belleau Wood, one of the finest hours in the history of the Corps, while Naomi hummed “The Marine Hymn” and Minnie made surprisingly quiet machine-gun sounds to enhance her brother’s anecdotes of war.
For dessert they had lemon cake with layers of ricotta and chocolate. Minnie did not ask for vanilla ice cream instead.
The five of them washed, dried, and put away the dishes without breakage. Unthinkingly, Naomi pirouetted with a stack of clean salad plates, but catastrophe did not ensue.
Had they eaten earlier, there would have been games or contests or a story read aloud. But private time had arrived. Kisses, good-nights, and wishes for sweet dreams were exchanged, and suddenly John found himself alone, walking the ground floor to check that all the exterior doors were locked.
Standing in the dark at a front window, he watched the lamplit street bubble as if boiling. He had forgotten the rain, but it still fell, without pyrotechnics now, straight down in the windless night. The trees were flourished silhouettes, the yard black. The graceful arc of the porch, styled as an elongated temple portico, was crowded with shadows, but none of them moved or revealed a gleaming eye.
12
ZACH SAT AT HIS DESK WITH HIS ART TABLET, REVIEWING RECENT drawings and wondering if he might be turning into a girl. Not the way the usual bonehead in a movie goes walking alone at night in a godforsaken forest where only the terminally stupid would go walking, and he gets bitten by some godawful thing and on the next full moon he morphs into the Wolfman, with no interest anymore in vegetables or cereal grains. If Zach was becoming a girl, it was a less dramatic transformation, slow and quiet, with no thrashing or snarling or howling at the moon.
His room was certainly not a girly room; it was a shrine to the Marine Corps. Crowding the walls were images of a present-day marine in dress blues with white gloves, an F/A-18 Hornet in flight, a super-cool V-22 Osprey vertical-lift aircraft, the famous Iwo Jima flag-raising photo.… Most striking of all was a print of Tom Lovell’s horrifying but thrilling painting of World War I marines attacking German troops in close combat in Belleau Wood: poisonous mist, gas masks, bloody bayonets, facial wounds.…
If the marines would have him, Zach intended to be one of them eventually. Even if he was turning into a girl, they accepted girls in the marines now.
His dad’s parents had been art teachers, and his mom was a big deal in some quarters of the godawful art world. Zach’s talent had two origins, and he knew he ought to use it, but the question was What should he use it for? He didn’t want to teach art any more than he wanted to cut off his freaking ears and make a sandwich with them. You didn’t get to kick much butt teaching art. You didn’t get to blow up a lot of things for all the right reasons. And he would never care about what the freaking art-world snobs thought of him. His mom was the only non-idiot among her idiotic art-world friends. He wasn’t as nice as his mom, didn’t have her tolerance for snotty people, and he couldn’t always see the good side of them like she could. If he ever had his own godawful art-world friends, he would end up throwing them out ten-story windows and off overpasses, just to hear them splat.
Being an actual combat marine who, during lulls in the action, found moments to sketch scenes
as they had been, as no photographer could ever catch those moments—that struck him as important work.
Other kids his age were big on sports stars and pop singers. These days, sports stars and pop singers were as real as steroids and lip-synching. Phonies. Fakes. Something had happened to the world. Everything was plastic. It wasn’t always that way.
Zach knew the names of marine combat artists the way other kids knew pop stars. Major Alex Raymond, who had become famous for his Flash Gordon comic strip. Pfc. Harry Jackson, who did great work at the Battle of Tarawa. Tom Lovell, John Thomason, Mike Leahy in Vietnam …
Zach’s determination to make a life in the Corps was almost two years old. For a long time, he didn’t give a thought as to why this enthusiasm gripped him, but lately he began to understand.
When he grew up, he didn’t want to do boring monkey work just for the bucks. He needed to be part of something where people cared about one another, would die for one another, where they set high standards, where they respected tradition, honor, truth. These were qualities of his family, and the way they lived—to their own rhythm, pursuing their enthusiasms with little interest in the fads of the day, with respect for one another that still left room for poking fun—was something he would need for the rest of his life because he was addicted to it. His family had addicted him to living with purpose and fun. When he became an adult, he wanted his working life to be as much as possible like life in the Calvino family.
And he wanted to be a marine also because of his sisters.
Naomi was hyper but smart, flighty but so talented, frustrating but funny, and sometimes she talked at you until it was like being caught in a flock of fluttering birds, nice bluebirds and canaries, but an infinite number of them, twittering forever. Life with her was often like tumbling through a humongous rotating barrel in an amusement park, but when you came out the other end and got your balance, you realized it was better to be in the barrel sometimes than to be stuck forever on some boring dumb-ass merry-go-round moving at like a tenth of a mile an hour with freaking organ music.
