by Ed Gaffney
You’d be surprised how quickly twenty-five cents per hour builds up when you’ve got a few thousand people working twenty and thirty hours per week.
Cliff and I were awarded attorney’s fees of $155,000, which we decided to use to buy a secluded vacation house on the reservation that we could time-share. I asked Cliff to keep it solely in his name, because despite the fact that I won more appeals than the typical attorney, I still lost my share. And one of the occupational hazards of practicing criminal law is having dissatisfied clients sue you. I thought it was prudent to keep my assets modest. Legally, the place was all Cliff’s. But I’d bet my life—in fact, as I drove my father there, I realized that I was betting more than just my life—that Cliff would always honor our agreement to share it.
And the house would work perfectly as a temporary hideout—it was tucked away in a remote corner of a sparsely populated Indian reservation. No one would find us there.
After Henley’s stroke, I did some work on the place, both to spruce it up, and so that he could get around if we ever got a chance to use it. I put a fresh coat of red paint on the front door, then I replaced a pane of glass in one of the windows that bordered it. I built a ramp from the entrance down to the driveway, widened some of the interior doorways, and even bought a smaller and lighter backup wheelchair, because some of the hallways were a little tight for his usual one.
As I drove the final stretch of dirt road up to the house, I realized that extra chair was going to come in very handy, since Henley’s usual one had been incinerated.
When I arrived at the house, I was happy to see that Amy and Erica were already there, sitting in their car, waiting for us.
We all made our way into the wood-and-stone house, which, thankfully, was in better shape than I’d remembered. Cliff and Iris had obviously done some work of their own on the place. All the lightbulbs worked; the spiderwebs were small enough so that even Erica felt comfortable clearing them out of the corners with a broom; there was hot and cold running water; and the refrigerator actually contained items we could use: a gallon of water, a six-pack of soda, four beers, a bottle of ketchup, and a jar of olives.
The kitchen cabinets had some canned goods, as well.
We certainly were not overstocked, but for an emergency, this was not bad.
I got Henley situated in his new chair, and while he and Erica explored the bedrooms, Amy came over to me in the living room and took off the heavy backpack she had been wearing over her black sweatshirt. I couldn’t imagine what was in there. She had always impressed on me the urgency of leaving quickly in an emergency, and I had no idea what she’d managed to pack before taking off.
She handed the bag to me, and said, “I hope nine thousand dollars is enough.”
TWENTY-FOUR
I ZIPPED OPEN the backpack to find it stuffed with newspapers.
But below three copies of that day’s Arizona Herald, I found approximately seven hundred ten- and twenty-dollar bills.
I had forgotten entirely about the money.
When we made the original “end of the world” plan, we decided that on her way to the rendezvous, Amy would stop at a bank, and get as much cash as she could out of the savings account she’d created with the life insurance proceeds she’d received from Dale’s death. Apparently, anyone withdrawing ten thousand dollars or more in cash had to fill out forms that Amy didn’t have time for, so she settled on nine thousand.
I hefted the bag onto my shoulder. “Wow. You’re the greatest survivalist ever. If you hadn’t remembered to get this, we’d be on the lam with a total of about thirty-five dollars. No, wait. I bought a sandwich for lunch. Twenty-nine dollars. Thanks.”
“I can’t even imagine what you’ve been through. Cliff called me. How’s Henley?”
“Well, other than the fact that his house burned down, and he had to save my life before I almost dislocated his shoulder on the way out, he seems great.”
She peered at my face closely, her blue-green eyes intent as she inspected the cuts. Then she reached up and gently touched my forehead above my left eyebrow. “You sure you’re all right?”
“Cliff asked me the same question. I feel fine. What’s the matter? Don’t I look okay?”
She shook her head slightly, grabbed me by the elbow, brought me into the bathroom, and turned on the light. “See for yourself,” she said.
I checked the mirror, and said, “Oh.” I did not look my best.
First of all, my hair—never a particularly strong suit for me—was ridiculous. It had arranged itself into a part greaser, part madman look. My face was extravagantly streaked with black smears of soot. I was also sporting two rather impressive-looking gashes—one on the left side of my forehead, the other on my right cheek.
I touched them, and couldn’t feel a thing. Either they were superficial, or the nerves in my face had temporarily shut down.
“Maybe I’ll clean up a little,” I offered. But before Amy left the bathroom, I asked quietly, “Hey. What did you tell Erica?”
Amy checked to be sure that the little girl was out of earshot. “I said we were having a special, instant vacation with you and her grandfather, because there was a fire at your house. She’s so smart that I’m not sure she entirely buys it, but she’s certainly willing to play along.”
Then Amy left me alone.
I washed my hands and face, only to find that there were no towels in the bathroom, so I left, dripping water liberally. I found my way back into the kitchen, hoping to find paper towels or napkins. There, Amy seemed to be heating something on the stove, although for the life of me, I couldn’t guess what it was. When she saw me, face and hands soaking wet, she said, “Wait right there,” and hurried off toward one of the bedrooms. Then she returned with a towel and two large packets of ten-dollar bills in her hands, and gave them to me.
“What am I going to do with all of this money?” I said, putting it on the counter, and wiping my face with the towel. She had placed a can of corn and a can of beans in a pan of water, which she had brought to a boil. “And how did you have time to pack a towel?”
“When you told me you thought it would be best if Erica and I didn’t come over for a few days, I packed a couple of bags, just in case,” she said. “I’ve never heard you sound so worried in my life. And you need to put that money in your pockets.”
So much for reassuring Amy that everything was going to be fine.
I stuffed the bills into my jeans just before Henley and Erica returned to the living room. The little girl took her grandfather’s left hand. “Grandpa says that his shoulder doesn’t hurt so bad,” she reported. “And he doesn’t have his bell here, so we made up a new system. Whenever he wants to say yes, he will squeeze my hand. Right, Grandpa?”
Henley smiled his crooked half-smile, and obviously squeezed his granddaughter’s hand. She beamed, and enthusiastically reported, “He says, ‘Yes!’”
Amy then announced that dinner was ready, and we all sat down around the table in the dining area. Along with the corn and the beans, Amy opened up a few cans of tuna fish. We ate on paper plates, with plastic forks that Cliff and Iris had left behind from their last visit.
I had no idea how hungry I was until we started. The canned vegetables and fish turned out to be the most delicious dinner I had ever eaten.
And as I sat there with the three most important people in my life, sharing some hard candies Amy had found for dessert, I was surprised at my emotional state. Because despite the fact that I had just seen my home burn to the ground and my father nearly murdered, at that moment, I felt incredibly lucky.
Bedtime for Henley was more difficult than usual.
He was fine with the new surroundings in general. The problem was that I had not yet outfitted the house with the special things needed by people with disabilities, like grab bars at the toilet and the tub, and an easier bed to get into and out of.
Fortunately, the second bathroom—the one at the end of the house by Henley’s bed
room—was equipped with towels and soap. Henley was much cleaner than I was after the fire, so all he needed was a sponge bath. The bruise on his right shoulder looked painful, but fortunately, the skin wasn’t broken.
Our biggest challenges involved the toilet and bed, where we had to get a little acrobatic. Thank God the stroke had left my dad’s sense of humor intact.
By the time I finished dealing with Henley, Amy had begun Erica’s nighttime ritual. Although the process usually took somewhere in the neighborhood of a half hour, for Amy, the payoff was well worth it. After putting on pajamas, getting a drink of water, reading a bedtime story, going to the bathroom and brushing teeth, and discussing what would happen tomorrow, the little girl always fell asleep quickly and easily, and slept deeply all through the night.
I grabbed the opportunity to take a shower.
Before getting undressed, I removed the hearing aid from my right ear, and the listening device Beta had given to me from my left, and put them both on the edge of the sink. Then I stripped off my clothes, which had been ruined by the fire.
The little nicks I’d gotten in the blaze had begun to make themselves known by that time. There were a few cuts on one knee and some on my hands to go with the two on my face. Curiously, I seemed to have been spared any burns, with the exception of one on my forearm and one on my neck. It looked like a couple of embers might have burned through my jacket and shirt without my notice. But none of that stopped me from enthusiastically blasting myself with the hot water spray.
As tired as I was, a feeling of freedom began to build in me as I stood there, washing the last of the fire’s grease and soot from my body. I was convinced that I had survived the worst of this experience. I wasn’t willing to risk my father’s life to defend Juan Gomez. There were other lawyers in Arizona. Someone else would be appointed to represent him—probably someone else much more qualified than I was.
And I was also sure that even if Amy and I had to take our family on the run for a short while, until the trial had blown over, we’d manage to find somewhere safe.
Obviously, I had no idea what was yet to come.
After I dried off, I threw on an extra T-shirt and pair of jeans that I’d left in the house the last time I’d worked there—the time I’d finished the wheelchair ramp to the front door. I had fully anticipated future carpentry trips to the place, but they never came to pass.
Henley hadn’t recovered as quickly or as aggressively as I’d hoped. As it became more and more obvious that he was going to need months, if not years, of rehabilitative therapy, and would spend the rest of his life in considerable discomfort, I felt somewhat selfish spending a lot of time away from him, messing around with a second home, when all of his needs were being met in the house on Payson’s Ridge.
As I came out of the bathroom and sat back on the decadently luxurious couch Cliff, Iris, and I had picked out on the day after we closed on the house, I began to question my decision. The rich wood paneling on the walls, the exposed beams running across the ceiling, the skylight view of the blue-black night sky and the full moon, were all powerful reminders of how much I loved this place.
And then Amy walked in.
She had changed out of her getaway black sweatshirt, sweatpants, and sneakers. She was barefoot and in jeans now. And she was wearing the blue-green shirt I’d given to her earlier that week.
“Hey,” I said, stupidly. “You’re wearing the shirt. Wow.”
She sat down on the couch next to me, and looked down. “I know. Is that okay?”
Okay didn’t even begin to cover it. Everything I had imagined about how the shirt would look on Amy had been swept away by a dazzling reality. The color of her already gorgeous eyes was now so vibrant that it was hard to look elsewhere. But that neckline literally demanded my attention, and from there, it was a very short trip to a very dangerous area that I could not afford to visit with my gaze, however briefly.
Yet of course, I did.
She didn’t look just amazing—she looked stunning. Like some Hollywood movie star from the era of the great beauties. Grace Kelly in Rear Window. Ingrid Bergman in Casablanca. “Um,” I said. She even smelled perfect. “I thought…I didn’t think…You like it? I mean, I didn’t expect you to wear it.”
Again, she looked down, and then back up at me.
And then she did smile, and I was lost.
“But you told me to wear it, remember? When I found the person that I wanted to share the rest of my life with? That’s why I put it on.”
I graduated near the top of my class at Arizona State University. I went on to Stanford Law School, where I edited the law review. So I understood very well what Amy was saying. It’s just that I still felt a loyalty to the relationship between Amy and my brother, even though he had died five years earlier. That loyalty had never allowed for even the possibility of Amy and me becoming lovers. The following idiotic statement was its last stand. “I don’t know…I wonder…Is it right…You really did put it on, didn’t you?”
As I uttered this nonsense, Amy moved closer to me on the couch. When I finished speaking, she punctuated my message with a firm, moist kiss on the lips. Now I was paralyzed and breathless. Pulling away approximately one inch, she proceeded to administer the coup de grace with a husky whisper directly into my mouth. “And I can take it off, too.”
Then she leaned back, and with a devastatingly sexy glint in her eye, she did.
TWENTY-FIVE
THE SAN LUIS Navajo Indian Reservation is a vast territory which, predictably, principally comprises some of the most inhospitable desert and mountain terrain in central Arizona. By law, such reservations are under the jurisdiction of the sovereign Indian nations to which they were given, and law enforcement is handled by tribal police.
When Cliff was going to law school, he had been one of the youngest people ever to serve on the tribal counsel. His family still lived on the reservation, and he still had close ties with many of the tribal police.
I had asked Cliff to alert the people he knew to our presence at the house, at least until we had a chance to make longer-term plans. And even though I was sure we hadn’t been followed, I also asked that they keep an eye out for any unusual or suspicious individuals or vehicles in the area.
So when I woke up the following morning, beside the woman I had finally and unexpectedly allowed myself to fully love, I felt safe enough to lie there quietly. I knew that we had many important decisions ahead of us, and that danger was just an ambush away. But for those few, unblemished moments, I just listened to a mockingbird sing to the new day, and watched as the rising sun’s rays sliced through a narrow gap in the curtains and lit a sliver of the far wall.
Then I heard a creak near the entrance to the bedroom, and before I could react, the knob turned and the door opened.
It was Erica, wearing her very pink pajamas. She saw me before she saw her mother, burst into a big smile, and ran toward the bed. I tried to shush her, but she had already committed to a big entrance. “Hi, Sleepy-bones!” she said boisterously, reaching up to give me a hug.
That woke Amy up, and she turned over to reveal a truly glorious case of bed head. When Erica spotted her, the little girl laughed with delight. “Hi, Mommy!” she said, scampering around to the other side of the bed. “Look at your hair!”
Everything was unfolding so rapidly that the awkward moment I’d expected hadn’t had a chance to arise. Before I knew it, Amy had hoisted Erica onto the mattress, and the little girl was crawling into position on top of the covers, between her mom and me. She rolled over so that the tip of her nose was touching mine. “Are you going to wake up now?” she asked me. “Is it time for breakfast?” I was just about to answer when she rolled in the other direction, facing Amy. “Mommy, are you going to marry Tom?”
I usually rise after a good night’s sleep with my mind firing at a pretty respectable rpm. But Erica’s entrance made it clear that I was fated to spend this morning staring stupidly at the conversation’s
receding taillights. “You’d like that, wouldn’t you?” Amy countered, pulling her arm out from under the covers to brush a strand of hair off Erica’s forehead.
A second later, an excited “Yes!” issued forth from the coral-colored dynamo that was suddenly scrambling toward our legs. A moment later, Erica was standing at the foot of the bed.
“And I’d also like breakfast, too, Mommy.”
I happened to know that there was precious little to eat in the house. Cliff and Iris had left a loaf of bread in the freezer, though, and there were some spices and condiments in the kitchen cabinets.
“Um, I was thinking about some extraordinary cinnamon sugar toast, myself,” I said, rising up on one elbow.
Erica gasped with delight. “Extraordinary cinnamon sugar toast? What’s that?” She jumped up and down and clapped a few times, and then said, “I have to go to the bathroom,” and bolted out of the room before I could answer.
“You know she’ll be back in here in about thirty seconds, wondering if your extraordinary special cinnamon sugar toast is ready.” Amy looked up at me with a sleepy gaze as I got out of bed and put on my clothes. Her hair was still a tower of dishevelment, but the morning did nothing to dull her beautiful eyes.
“I’ve got to get Henley up,” I said. “It’s probably going to take a little more than thirty seconds.” I tied my shoes and then looked back up at her. The dam holding back all of the emotions that had been welling up in my heart had been so thoroughly dismantled the night before that it was hard to remember it had ever been there. “You do realize that this changes everything.”
Amy sat up. She was wearing an oversized T-shirt that Iris and Cliff had given her with the words “What Part of ‘Love’ Don’t You Understand?” across the front.
“I don’t mean the extraordinary cinnamon sugar toast,” I added.
She reached her hand out toward me. I took it and she pulled me in for a quick, soft kiss. “I know you don’t mean the toast,” she said, quietly.
