The Color of Light

by Wendy Hornsby

  “You were up to something,” I said. “You were trying to get into his daughter’s pants.”

  Kevin blushed at that. He looked over his shoulder and around the room where, nearly three years after his death, my father’s presence still hovered. Leaning close to me, Kevin whispered, “Was your dad always out there, watching you? Us?”

  I shuddered at that awful notion, thinking about some of the stupid stunts we pulled as kids. Fortunately, the statute of limitations had run out on even the worst of our transgressions.

  “He couldn’t possibly have been out there all the time,” I said. “I think someone tipped him off whenever she was in the country so he could keep an eye on me.”

  “She? Your mother?”

  “Isabelle,” I said.

  “He was afraid Isabelle would snatch you?”

  “Among other things,” I said. “When my dad took me away from her, my arm was in a cast. Dad had a restraining order against her.”

  “Did she ever try to kidnap you?”

  “Not that I’m aware. But she did lurk,” I said. “In the strongbox where I found the film I showed you, there were a dozen more film reels, and she is on every one of them.”

  “You are a big snoop, Maggie,” he said, laughing. “You couldn’t resist seeing what was on the old reels so you went out and had them converted to digital so you could see them, didn’t you?”

  “Occupational hazard I guess, just like you, Mr. Detective,” I said, feeling no chagrin. “What would you have done?”

  “Exactly what you did. If I could squeeze the processing fees out of the department budget.” Kevin glanced toward the television. “Is she on that film?”

  “She is.”

  “Show me.”

  I hesitated before restarting the disc where we left off, with Larry Nordquist running away down the street and his pals quickly dispersing.

  My little group, triumphant, reassembled and continued on toward school. When we crossed the next intersection, a busy commercial street, Dad stopped following us and remained focused instead on the front of a neighborhood pharmacy. Behind the reflections of the street on the shop’s front windows, people can be seen moving around inside the store. Someone—a silhouette—stands inside the door, looking out. After we passed by, the door opened and a slender woman—Isabelle—stepped outside. She watched us for a moment before she began to follow in our direction. Suddenly, she stopped and turned as if someone had called to her. Her face registered alarm at first, and then great pleasure when she must have seen that it was Dad who called out to her. Seeing her face light up chilled me; Dad did have that restraining order for good reason.

  “That’s her?” Kevin asked, moving forward for a closer look. “Your real mother?”

  “The woman who gave birth to me, yes. But she wasn’t my real mom.”

  “Can you zoom in on her?”

  “Not very much.” I paused the last frame and enlarged it until the image dissolved into a disorganized mass of pixels. “The film stock Dad used has low resolution. There isn’t much that can be done with it.”

  “Did you ever meet her?”

  “The only time I ever spoke with her was the night she died. But I didn’t know who she was until later.”

  He cocked his head to study me. “Why weren’t you going to show her to me?”

  “Because she is not germane to the issue at hand.” I hit Stop and watched Isabelle’s scrambled image fade to black.

  “Germane? Give me a break. I only went to San Jose State, not to Cal like you and your egghead friends.”

  “You chose to go to State because you thought you wouldn’t have to work as hard.”

  He conceded the truth of that, a cocky grin on his face as he rose and crossed to the television. “I wanted to play football, but I didn’t want to get hurt. Those guys at Cal are big.”

  He ejected the disc. “I need the original film reel, too.”

  “Thought you might.” I went to the desk and took it from the ­drawer.

  “Copies, too, please.” He held out his hand.

  “You have the only one.”

  “Yeah, sure.”

  “It’s true,” I said. “When the TeleCine technician at the San Francisco affiliate of my network made the digital conversion of the original Super 8 reels yesterday, he burned one disc each and downloaded the files to the Cloud.”

  “I have no idea what you just said.”

  “I can access the film from any computer, anywhere I can get Internet. But there is only one disc. So far.”

  “God, I feel like a dinosaur.”

  I was ready to say good-bye—I had work to do—but he began to walk a slow circuit around that very familiar room, probably for the last time, looking at pictures on the walls, books in the cases, various little mementoes my father kept around where he could see them. Reminders of a good life.

  One beautiful spring afternoon, Dad sat down on a bench in the backyard for a little nap, and never woke up again. My mom stayed in their big old house in Berkeley, alone, until late this spring when I persuaded her to move closer to me and my college-age daughter, Casey, in Southern California. In early summer I had spent a few days with her in the house where she and my father had lived for half a century, the house where they raised my older sister and brother, and where they brought me when I was very young, helping her to decide what she wanted to take with her to her new apartment. The rest she left for me to deal with; the task was too huge for her, too fraught. So, there I was, spending a July week—maybe two—stirring up dust and occasional ghosts buried among the family’s accumulated treasures and detritus as I cleared out the place for the next tenant, the university’s housing office; the University of California, Berkeley, where my father taught, and my alma mater, was only a few blocks away.

  Kevin lingered beside the leather sofa set in a niche among bookshelves. It was on that couch during the summer before my senior year in high school, on the night before Kevin left for college, that I surrendered to him that which Sister Dolores of Perpetual Sorrows, the morals and standards officer at the convent high school where my parents stashed me, referred to as my most precious jewel. Or as Kevin called it, my cherry.

  Running a hand over the arm of the sofa, a wistful smile on his face, Kevin asked, “What are you going to do with the sofa?”

  “I don’t know yet.”

  “If you’re going to dispose of it...”

  “I can just see you dragging that home to your wife. How would you explain it?”

  “Did I tell you we’re not—”

  I put up my hand to stop him. “I’m seeing someone, Kevin.”

  “Mrs. Nussbaum told me.”

  I laughed. “I don’t know why anyone in this town bothers with the Internet when we have an information resource like Gracie Nussbaum.”

  “You gotta love Gracie.” He flashed a smile that was so full of sweetness that I remembered why I had once found him so irresistible.

  He picked up a small framed photo of the two of us in high school, flicked something off the glass and turned it to face me. “Your prom or mine?”

  “Could have been either,” I said, walking over for a closer look. “Since we went to different schools I wore the same dress to both.”

  “May I?” He had already slipped the picture into his pocket before I nodded assent.

  I saw the grin that suddenly lit his face, but I didn’t see his move coming. There was an arm around my shoulders and one under my legs and when I had re-established a relationship with gravity I was prone on the sofa with Kevin’s substantial bulk atop me.

  “Clever move, Kev,” I said, pushing against his chest. “What’s this about?”

  There was the strangest look on his face, as if he were more surprised than I was about the position we were suddenly in. Ages ago, when we were dating, he thought that particular maneuver was just awfully funny. But he wasn’t smiling as he gripped my side in his big hand and gently squeezed my rib cage as if
he were checking a tomato for ripeness.

  “Don’t you dare tickle me,” I said, batting his hand away. “I hated it when you tickled me.”

  “Yeah.” His hand relaxed but he didn’t remove it. He didn’t smell the way I remembered, no Brut, no pepperoni—more like shampoo and scotch. “It’s just... God, you used to be such a bag of bones.”

  “And now I’m fat?” I shifted sideways until I was out from under him, wedged on my side with my back against the back of the sofa. He relaxed, stretched out facing me.

  “Jesus, no,” he said. “It’s just... You have more substance than you used to have. I wasn’t expecting it.”

  “Funny thing, buddy,” I said, giving him a nudge. “Last time you flipped me over your shoulder I was seventeen years old. A little girl. I’m all grown up now.”

  “That’s the thing of it,” he said, brow furrowed as he searched my face for something. Was he counting lines in my crow’s-feet? “We were golden back then, weren’t we, Maggie? Golden.”

  “You were a good boyfriend, Kevie.” I combed my fingers through his mussed hair. It wasn’t as thick as it once was, or as dark; the furrows made by my fingers exposed a lot of pink scalp and silver streaks. “Every Friday night, except during football season, you put on your letterman’s jacket, borrowed a car and drove down to pick me up from school. You were handsome and smart and fun, and I was the envy of everyone in school.”

  “Everyone include the nuns?”

  “Especially the nuns. You were a nice Catholic boy.” I propped myself up on an elbow and looked down at him. “But that was then.”

  “Just for old times’ sake, how about we get rid of all these clothes and have one more bare-assed roll around on this big sofa?”

  “Might be interesting,” I said, struggling to sit up; he gave me an assist. “But it’s a real bad idea.”

  “Sometimes, though, don’t you wish you could go back?”

  “Not for a minute,” I said, straightening my shirt. “I’m in a pretty good place right now, not perfect but pretty good. It took a lot of work to get here. I don’t want to go back.”

  “What if you could, though, knowing what you know now?”

  “Same answer.” I swung my legs over his hips and pushed against him, trying to get to my feet. Instead of giving me a hand, he disentangled himself from underneath me and scooted around until he was sitting upright next to me. I stood and held out my hand to him. “I’d probably just make a whole new set of mistakes. Besides, when we were kids, if we knew half what we know now, we would have ended up in Neuropsychiatric. No thanks. To tell you the truth, some of the big secrets from back then, I wish they had just stayed secret.”

  He looked up from checking that the Beretta affixed to his belt was secure. “What secrets?”

  “The truth about my parentage for one,” I said. “And I could have lived the rest of my life without seeing that photo of Mrs. Bartolini.”

  “You could be right, but I look around at the way things are now and I wonder if the whole world has gone to shit. I mean, tell me honestly, what do we have to look forward to?”

  “Kev?” I took his face between my palms. “Why don’t you do what other guys our age do when they feel this way? Go buy yourself a Maserati.”

  He finally smiled. “On a cop’s salary?”

  “Then have a messy mid-life fling with a twenty-two-year-old blonde.”

  “Already tried that.” His face colored. “Didn’t work out so well.”

  “Could that be the reason you and the wife aren’t...?”

  “That’s part of it.”

  I shook my head. “Kevin, Kevin, Kevin.”

  “This guy you’re seeing,” he said as he tucked in the front of his dress shirt and pulled his jacket straight. “It’s serious?”

  “It could be,” I said. “Too soon to say. But I don’t want to do anything that might muck it up.”

  “Let me know if it doesn’t work out,” he said, checking his watch. Suddenly, he was the cop again. “I have to get back to work.”

  “Me, too.” I looked around the room at all the laden bookshelves that needed to be sorted and packed up. “You’ll let me know what you find out about Beto’s mom?”

  He grew still, looking down at me with his cop face on. He was at least eight inches taller than me so I had to lean back to look up at him.

  “I need to know, Maggie,” he said, the heel of his hand resting on the butt of his gun. “Who did you invite over to see that film? Your friend or a cop?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  “When Beto asked me to look into his mom’s case again, I warned him that he might not like what I found out, especially if it implicates his dad in some way,” he said, watching me closely. “Mag, what if my investigation turns up something that points to your father?”

  “I’d like for you to tell me. As a friend.”

  “We’ll see,” he said. “We’ll see.”

  Chapter 2

  After Kevin left, the house felt hollow, as a house does when all of its inhabitants have moved away. I didn’t count myself among the missing because I hadn’t lived there for a very long time. If I had left some essence or emanation anywhere, I thought it would be at my own house down south.

  I went back to the task of cleaning out Dad’s big old mahogany desk, the undertaking that had been interrupted the day before when I found the films locked away in a bottom drawer.

  A man’s desk is a very private zone. Who knows what you might find there, besides a random crime scene photo or films of the owner’s former paramour, and various other things a man’s widow might prefer not to learn about her late spouse? That’s why Mom had left the job for me. And rightly so.

  I found that Dad had kept a neat file of his correspondence with Isabelle, my natural mother, after she relinquished custody of me. These weren’t love letters, far from it, at least on his part. But seeing them would have been a painful reminder to Mom of Dad’s infidelity, though my very existence must have been daily proof enough that it had occurred.

  Because it might be useful to me as Isabelle’s estate wound its way through the arcane French probate system, I set the file in a box with other things I found in the desk that I wanted to keep: handmade cards from my brother and sister and me, an old address book, a few family photos, Dad’s passport, an old wallet molded to the contour of his rear end by years of use. In the wallet I found an unfilled prescription for blood pressure medication, some expired credit cards, his faculty identification card and about fifty dollars in cash, which I stuffed into my own pocket.

  Other than that, most of what I found was old pens, tangled paper clips, university stationery yellowing at the edges, and endless scraps of paper with indecipherable hand-scribbled notes and calculations; Dad, a physicist, doodled in mathematical formulae. I pulled out the top drawer, and as I dumped its odds and ends into a trash bag I could almost hear Dad’s voice in my ear: I think there’s still some good use to be found in that red pen; One day when you need a paper clip, you won’t have one. I felt him so strongly that I actually turned my head to check behind me. Nothing there except dust motes floating in the sunlight streaming through the garden windows.

  I was disappointed Dad wasn’t there because I had so many questions to ask him. About Isabelle, certainly, but after seeing his little movie, it was the events of the day that Mrs. Bartolini—Tina—died that I needed to have explained frankly.

  There are things that happen when we are children that sit restlessly on our shoulders for the rest of our lives and affect the way we venture about in the world. For me, the first of those events was the loss of my older brother—my half brother—during combat in Vietnam when I was very young. The second of course was the murder of Beto’s mother a few years later. I began to understand at a tender age not only how fragile and precious life is, but also the randomness with which life can be stolen away.

  Our parents, our teachers, Father John the parish priest—all the adults
in our lives—sheltered us, as they saw fit, from the grim details about the hows and whats of Mrs. Bartolini’s passing. Like the real scoop on the mechanics of sex, we were left with little more than ­rumors and our naive imaginations to figure out what happened to her.

  The word murder alone conjures up vivid pictures in the mind of a ten-year-old, but when I was ten, a sheltered little shit, I was so ignorant of the ways of the world beyond the protective bubble of my neighborhood that I could not have comprehended what was done to Mrs. Bartolini in the process of her dying even if someone had seen fit to tell me.

  The squeaking of the back gate’s hinges interrupted my ruminations. I went over to the windows to see who was there.

  Toshio Sato, my parents’ longtime yardman, pushed his cart of tools along the uneven brick walkway, stooping from time to time to snip faded roses from the flower border. For as long as I could remember, Mr. Sato had mown and edged half of the lawns on our street every second Monday, starting at the top of the hill and working his way down.

  Mr. Sato stopped, took off his broad-brimmed straw hat and wiped inside the sweatband with a big white handkerchief. With his hat off, I could see that his thatch of black hair had become little more than feathery white wisps, but his back was still straight and his step was strong. For a man with his eightieth birthday in his rearview mirror, he looked very good.

  Watching him, it occurred to me that he was only one of many grown-ups who routinely moved in and around our house and our neighborhood when I was a child, and to whom I generally paid scant attention. Other than Mr. Sato, there had been the dry cleaning deliveryman, Vera who cleaned our house twice a week and sometimes baby-sat me, Dad’s students and colleagues, Mom’s piano pupils, various friends and others. I wondered how many people also had access to the Bartolini house?

  Taking the filled trash bag with me, I headed outside to speak with Mr. Sato. When I opened the back door, I startled him.

  “Oh! It’s you, Maggie.” He patted his chest to show his heart was pounding.