Mike climbed into the truck and tossed the enormous file onto the vast plane of the dashboard. Jimmy eyed the file but said nothing. Mike had told him he needed to run an errand, and it was clear enough he hadn’t wanted to say more than that.
The music was all ska rhythm and subbaritone bleating. Mike turned down the volume, but kept the channel in a show of largesse. ‘Thanks for waiting.’
Jimmy shrugged, bopping to the tunes. ‘You the boss, Wingate.’ Pulling out, Mike watched him poke at the buttons on the console, turning on the seat warmer – a seat warmer in fucking California. ‘Hey,’ Jimmy said, ‘can I have this truck, too, when you done with it?’
‘Not if you play this music in it.’
Jimmy made a dismissive sound, tongue clicking against his teeth. ‘Shaggy’s shit so smooth, you get VD just listenin’ to his ass.’
‘That’s by way of recommendation?’
‘Better than your James Taylor shit.’
‘My James Taylor shit?’ Mike rolled the knob in protest. A few channels over, Toby Keith was crooning that he should’ve been a cowboy, a sentiment not shared by Jimmy, judging by the sour twist of his mouth.
Mike loved music, but particularly country with its twang and swagger, its paternal America, its celebration of hardworking men who punch a clock their whole lives and don’t ask for nuthin’. Parents were heroes, and if a man put his sweat into the land, he could have a shot at an honest life and good woman’s love. An honest life. Those PVC pipes bobbed up through Mike’s thoughts like a corpse that wouldn’t sink, and for the rest of the drive and the baking walk through the stone yard he was distracted and useless.
On the drive back, they passed a cemetery Mike hadn’t seen before, so he pulled off the frontage road and turned in.
Jimmy looked across at him, displeased. ‘We don’t got enough to finish today that you gotta do this again?’
Mike said, ‘Two minutes.’
The guard in the shack kicked back on a stool, reading the L.A. Times. Mike rolled down the window and was surprised to confront himself in a grainy black-and-white photo beneath a headline reading, GOVERNOR SHOWS FOR THE GREEN. Yes, that was Mike, grinning in all his lying, hypocritical glory, his arm stretched around the governor’s considerable shoulders. The paper rustled and tipped, the guard’s ruddy face appearing. The guy waved Mike through without asking any questions. There was a time when Mike got stopped at every checkpoint and reception booth, but now he was legitimate, with a knockoff Polo shirt and an overpriced fucking truck.
He parked under an overgrown willow, and they climbed out, Jimmy tapping down his pack of smokes. ‘The hell you look for in all these graveyards anyway?’ Jimmy asked.
‘John.’
‘Just John?’
‘That’s right.’
And a woman born in the late 1940s.
‘There a lotta Johns out there, Wingate,’ Jimmy said.
‘Five hundred seventy-two thousand six hundred ninety-one.’
The cigarette dangled from Jimmy’s lower lip. His eyebrows were lifted nearly to his dense hairline. He took a moment, presumably to ponder Mike’s sanity. ‘In the country?’
‘State.’
‘You know he dead, though? Just John?’
Mike shook his head, thought, Wishful thinking. He grabbed the file off the dash, because he didn’t need Jimmy nosing through it, and headed off.
The sod yielded pleasantly underfoot, and the dense air tasted of moss. A snarl of rosebush plucked at his sleeve. He found his first one three rows in – John Jameson. The dates were a stretch, but you never knew. Two more rows, the file growing heavy in his arm. Tamara Perkins. Maybe you. A gravestone at the rear fence, lost beneath dead leaves. He swept them with his foot, unearthed another cold, carved name. Maybe you. He scrutinized dates and wondered. He closed his eyes, breathed in the familiar scents, and dreamed a little.
He knew, of course, that neither of his parents was in this cemetery or any of the countless others at which he’d stopped over the past twenty years. He couldn’t even be certain that they were dead. Given that splash of blood on his father’s cuff, he assumed that his mother was. And his father could well have been brought down by any variety of perils. But even if one or both of Mike’s parents was in the ground, and even if through some marvel of chance and guesswork he arrived at the correct cemetery, he could stroll straight over the right grave and still not know. So what the hell was he looking for here on these lush swells? The rites that were denied him? After all, he never got the deathbed visit, the box and shovel, the ash-filled urn.
He passed the aftermath of a service, people breaking off in solemn twosomes and quartets. A rubbed-raw exhaustion hung over the gathering, all those universal fears and vulnerabilities laid bare. And Mike at the periphery, traipsing between gravestones like a zombie, trying to convince himself that he came from somewhere, anywhere. Trying to convince himself that as a four-year-old boy he might have been something worth keeping.
Your mother and I, we love you very much. More than anything. Feeling intrusive, he gave the widow a wide berth and a gentle nod. It’s Morning Again in America. Walking up a jagged path of broken stone, he pictured the way Hank’s dress shirt had bagged between his shoulders in the back, slack from his lost bulk. Nothing that happened was your fault. He sensed the phantom bite of the station-wagon seat belt’s buckle beneath his hip, saw the sweat tracking down the flushed back of his father’s neck, felt that void in his four-year-old gut. Where’s Momma? He thought of the high curve of his mother’s cheekbones, his eyes misting, and then he became aware of his arm, sweating under the weight of the file.
It was an absurdity, the file. A collection of random men and women who shared a birth year or a first name or a vague set of descriptors. He’d always kept it at Hank’s. What was he gonna do now? Take it home? Leaf through it with Kat?
A pastor’s voice, cracked and portentous, carried down the hill from a second service: the age-old incantation, ashes to ashes, dust to dust.
Something in Hank’s illness had jarred loose a new awareness, a harsh reality Mike couldn’t help but meet head-on. Maybe it was the symbolism of his sole remaining accomplice in the search being stricken with a death sentence, but it hit him with sudden, vicious certainty that failure was inevitable and that it had always been inevitable. He’d been searching for a needle in a stack of needles.
He would never know.
A trash can appeared around the turn, a sign from the accommodating universe, and Mike looked down at the bulging file, trembling in his too-firm grip. He held it over the mouth of the can, closed his eyes. Ashes to ashes. Dust to dust. He let it fall. The twangy rattle echoed off the surrounding stone.
Case closed.
Chapter 9
The baby monitor, with its soothing blue trim and newborn-soft edges, was designed to project calm. Its red lights – five of them, like an equalizer bar on an old-fashioned stereo – were designed for the opposite effect. An emergency flare, harsh red, coded by man and nature for fire, danger, blood.
The first bar flickered on, then came steady, laying a crimson glow across Mike’s face. Bar one meant static, usually. The color, a perfect match for the alarm-clock digits, currently showing 3:15. Annabel slept soundly, her breath a faint whistle.
Now the second bar joined its counterpart, climbing the ladder, adding weight and force to the alert. With a thumb, Mike nudged up the volume until he could faintly discern the rush of white noise. The air-conditioning vent kicking on in Kat’s room? When he’d last checked on her, she’d been as still as a scone beneath the sheets, tucked in with the polar bear, both heads sharing the pillow.
A muted hush of air leaked from the monitor, a dragon exhaling.
Then a voice, faint as a whisper, sandblasted with static: She looks so peaceful when she sleeps.
Mike went board-stiff, frozen, his thoughts spinning, looking for traction. Was he dreaming?
But then, again, fuzzed at the ed
ges: Like an angel.
He bolted upright, hurling back the covers, Annabel yelping beside him. He was running down the hall, feet pounding the floorboards, his wife calling after him. Skidding through Kat’s door, tensed for combat, fighting for night vision, he took in the room in a single scan.
Nothing.
He slapped the light switch.
Kat sleeping as contentedly as he’d left her. Annabel was behind him now, breathing hard. ‘What? What is it?’ She was whispering hoarsely, though you couldn’t wake Kat with a jackhammer when she was out like this.
‘I thought I heard a voice.’
‘That said what?’ She clicked off the rocker switch with the heel of her hand, and the room fell dark. ‘What did it say?’
He pinched his eyes, the afterglow of the ceiling lamp hanging on in the darkness. He could hear the crickets sawing in the creek bed that ran behind the property line. Annabel stroked his back.
‘I thought it said . . .’ He was shaking now, rage burned out, leaving behind adrenaline and a vague kind of terror. He felt his muscles, each one individually, taut and bull-strong.
‘What, babe?’
‘“She looks so peaceful when she sleeps.”’ Repeating it put a charge into him, made it real again.
‘You’ve had a lot going on lately.’ Annabel rested a hand on his cheek. Her face held empathy and – he feared – pity. Despite his embarrassment, he was compelled to draw back the curtain and check the window. Locked.
Annabel said, ‘What are you . . .?’
He made a snorkel mask with his hands, peering through the glass at the dark backyard. ‘The window autolocks, so someone could’ve slipped back out and lowered it.’ From the side he could feel the weight of Annabel’s stare. ‘I’m just saying it’s possible. They could have been in here, whispering at me through the monitor.’
‘Mike,’ she said, ‘who’d want to do something like that?’
Chapter 10
When Mike picked Kat up from school the next day, she carried a jar containing a twig and a baby lizard. She climbed into the back, slid the headphones on, and clicked around the TV channels. He watched her in the rearview, figuring you know you’re doing a good job as a parent when they take you for granted.
‘Take those things off and say hello.’
‘Wireless,’ she said. ‘Noise-canceling. I’m just trying to get our money’s worth.’ She held the jar aloft, showing off the lizard. ‘Look! I caught him. And Ms Cooper helped me make a home for him.’
‘I’m not sure he can breathe in there, baby.’
She pulled off her red-frame glasses and folded them carefully in their case. ‘I poked holes in the lid. He’s fine.’
‘He needs more oxygen than that. He’ll die if you keep him.’
She shrugged. ‘I like him, though.’
The trapped lizard bothered Mike more than seemed rational. His irritation grew. Kat was so mature generally that it was easy to forget the ways in which she was age-appropriate. One of the hardest parts of parenting, he’d found, was keeping his mouth shut the times when he wanted to control her, to step into her brain and throw the levers.
‘Where we going?’ Kat asked.
‘I have to pick up some cabinet handles from the Restoration Hardware on the Promenade. Figured we’d walk around a little, grab a bite.’
In the backseat her face lifted with excitement and the sun caught her eyes – one amber, one brown, both vibrant with hidden hues. His anger dissipated instantly.
They drove for a while, and then she tugged off the headset and said, ‘Sorry I didn’t say hi when I got in the car.’
He noted the smart-ass set of her mouth – she was prompting him to play the Bad-Parenting Game – so he said, ‘It’s not your behavior that’s bad. It’s you.’
‘It is,’ she said, enjoying herself, ‘an innugral part of who I am.’
‘As your father I must grind the self-esteem out of you. Scour it from the corners—’
‘Of my black little heart.’ Her giggle caught fire.
By the time they reached Santa Monica, they’d been joking long enough that he’d forgotten about PVC pipes and baby monitors and Sunday’s dreaded award ceremony with the governor. They walked holding hands along the Promenade, except when he had to carry her past the headless mannequins in the Banana Republic display window. She hadn’t been scared of mannequins, he suspected, since she was four, but a ritual is a ritual.
He picked up the cabinet handles, and they bought some French bread and horseradish cheddar from a farmers’ market outpost and sat on a metal bench by the stegosaurus fountain and listened to a busker playing ‘Heart of Gold’ with genuine, street-burnished soul. A homeless man reclined opposite, lost in a heap of dirt-black clothes. Mike thought the guy was long gone but then noticed he was mouthing the lyrics, smiling to himself as if remembering an old lover. The man put his hand inside his ragged jacket and made his heart flutter, and Kat laughed, her mouth full of food.
The busker was wailing, blowing that harmonica on its hands-free brace, and the homeless guy shouted observations and facts at them, as if in argument. ‘This guy does Neil Young better’n Neil Young!’ ‘I had a little T-shirt shop in NYC.’ ‘My daughter’s a dental hygienist in Tempe, married that guy, said I can visit whenever I want.’
A woman in clown makeup twisted balloon animals – only two bucks a pop. Mike peeled a few dollars off his money clip and handed them to Kat. ‘You want to get one?’
Kat scooted off the bench, walked past the balloon lady, and handed the bills to the homeless guy, who stuffed them into his beggar’s cup with a wink.
She returned and slid up next to Mike, and he marveled a moment at her intuition. The busker had moved on to ‘Peaceful Easy Feeling,’ and the setting sun stayed warm across their faces. Mike’s thoughts for once were on nothing but the moment at hand.
He carried Kat on his shoulders back to his truck, both of them humming along to different songs. They’d stopped for french fries and milk shakes, and Kat, still munching, buckled into the backseat with a glazed expression of contentedness that made Mike smile. She said, ‘What?’ and he said, ‘Someday you’ll know.’
As he turned onto San Vicente, she piped up. ‘I lost Snowball the Last Dying Polar Bear.’
A glance at the rearview showed that she was upset. Mike asked, ‘Where’d you have him last?’
‘I don’t know. I realized at school. Ms Cooper had the whole class help me look for him. But we couldn’t find him anywhere. Then I remembered bringing him back home. I looked everywhere in my room, but . . .’ She gazed out the window, distressed, then shrugged. ‘I’m getting too old for stuffed animals anyways.’
‘Not Snowball,’ he protested.
She said, ‘Maybe it’s time,’ and a part of his heart cracked off and blew away.
He was formulating a response when he spotted, three cars back, a black sedan. He’d noticed it before, pulling out after him when he’d exited the parking lot. He turned left. The sedan turned left. That pilot light of paranoia flared to life in his chest.
His eyes glued to the rearview, he signaled right but drove past the turn. The sedan neither signaled nor turned. Headphones on, Kat was lost in the TV screen, swaying with the truck’s movement. The air was grainy with dusk, pricked with headlights, so he couldn’t get a clear glimpse of make or plate. The muscles of his neck had contracted back to remembered form; how quickly it felt as though they’d never relaxed at all.
When Mike glanced down from the mirror, the stopped cars at the streetlight were zooming back at them fast – too fast. He hit the brakes hard, Kat’s milk shake flying from her grip onto the seat next to her. ‘Motherf—crap.’ They stopped inches from the bumper in front of them.
‘Motherfffcrap?’ she repeated, giggling.
He tore off his T-shirt, tossed it back to her. ‘Here, use this to mop it up.’
‘Sorry, Dad.’
‘Not your fault, honey.’ He angled th
e mirror. The sedan was still there, idling behind a minivan, one headlight peeking into view. The edge of the hood looked dinged up, dust clouding the black paint.
‘—or the moon?’ Kat was asking.
‘Sorry, what?’
‘Which do you like better, Mars or the moon? I like Mars, because it’s all red and—’
The light changed, and Mike waited a moment before trickling off the line. The minivan changed lanes, and he caught a glimpse of the sedan’s tinted windshield and front grille – looked like a Grand Marquis – before a Jeep slotted in between them.
He turned off onto a residential street and gunned it.
‘Dad. Dad. Dad.’ Kat had a long french fry she needed to show him.
‘Cool, honey. That’s a big one, huh?’ In the band of reflection, just beyond her uplifted fry, he saw the Mercury turn off after them.
Kat adjusted the headset and sank back into her TV show.
Mike wheeled around the corner, accelerated, turned again, and reversed up an alley. He turned off the car, killed the lights.
‘What are we waiting for, Dad?’
‘Nothing, honey. Just need to think for a minute. Watch your show.’
She shrugged and complied.
Night had come on abruptly, dogs barking, security lights glaring, living-room windows lit with TV-blue flickers. Being shirtless made him feel oddly vulnerable, the vents blowing cool air across his torso. He looked down at his hands, white on the steering wheel, which brought him back to –
Headlights turned up the street. Prowling. Approaching.
Mike found a wrench in the center console. He cupped his fingers around the door handle, bracing himself. The headlights swept into direct view, blaring into his face, and just as he was about to leap out, the garage door next to them started shuddering open. The beams shifted, and he saw the car behind them – not a dark sedan but a white Mercedes. It pulled in to the driveway, the man at the wheel offering a suspicious glare.
Mike breathed. In the backseat Kat’s face glowed from the screen, her blinks growing longer. After another minute he eased out onto the empty street. Cautiously, he took the next turn. Nothing.
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