Golden States

by Michael Cunningham

  “What are you up to now?” Mom said.

  “I’m looking for the moon,” he told her. The more she irritated him, the more important it seemed that the house be made fast against whatever lurked outside. He checked the latch, and found it fastened.

  “If I’d known kids were going to be this jumpy,” Mom said, “I’d have gotten goldfish instead.”

  The house wound down for the night. Lizzie was already in bed, and David put on his pajamas and pretended to go to sleep. Mom came upstairs after the news. She gave a dry, papery sigh at the top step, and her footsteps, measured but light, one foot falling a little harder than the other, diminished down toward her room. Janet stayed in the living room with the television, watching Johnny Carson. David could hear the heightened rhythm of laughter and applause. He wondered if she would go swimming. Every now and then he got up and walked to the window in his pajamas. The yard was unchanged. The two redwood lawn chairs sat facing the house. A line of yellow light rimmed his door and he went and stood with his ear to the wood. He could make out a man’s voice on television. The voice droned, paused, exclaimed; for a moment it sounded like a live man downstairs. David cracked his door open. Applause drifted up the stairwell, and a man hollered, remotely, “Thank you, thank you, I love you all.”

  He went back to bed and lay on top of the blanket, with his legs straight out and his arms at his sides, palms up, as if to cup sound. The television rattled on. His mind dulled with the effort of listening and after a while he thought thickly that his body had risen a fraction of an inch off the bed. His thoughts were a heavy line he followed up, up into brightness. He saw, vividly, a gypsy pedaling a bicycle on a red dirt road. Then he was asleep.

  He woke later, with a start, surprised at having slept. Thelight was gone from around his door. He jumped out of bed and ran to the window, to see if Janet was swimming. He found the pool smooth and empty. Sleep clung to him, and everything was strange. The world had moved an inch or two off center, so that all its qualities were usual but wrong—nearly perfect imitations of themselves. The trees’s splayed roots hugged the edge of the coping like sleeping snakes. The moon, which had risen and was no more than a sliver, just as Mom predicted, skated on the water beside the brighter, aspirin-colored sphere of the streetlight. David watched the scene in dumb wonderment. This was his yard.

  He felt more than saw something in the shadows. His attention crept toward the far corner, by the fence, where a small triangular thicket of oleander and birds of paradise bloomed. Something there. He thought first of coyotes. He searched for the spark of an eye or a tooth. For an instant the garden was ordinary, and then his eyes shifted focus and he saw a man standing in the bushes. The man was no more than a shape, shoulders and head. He fell out of focus, turned into oleander with branches that suggested a man, and when he came back into focus there was no doubt. A man, standing outside, watching the house.

  David paused, mesmerized. It was a man, it wasn’t, it was. He drew closer to the glass, so close his breathing made a blotch of fog. The man moved. David was out of his own room, down the hall and through Mom’s door in an instant.

  The sound of Mom’s breathing filled her room. It was the room. David crossed the black floor through the breathing darkness to her shape under the blankets, and jostled her shoulder. She coughed, and when she stirred she sent up a sweet-sour, sleeping smell.

  “What?” she said. “What is it?” Her eyes shone in the darkness and she was suddenly terrifying, an undersea creature wrongfully disturbed. David lost his voice.

  “Urn—” was all he could manage.

  “What is it, honey? Are you sick?”

  “There’s a man outside,” he said, and his voice squeaked on the word man. “A man,” he repeated.

  Mom sat up and said, “Where?” All the sleep had gone out of her voice.

  He’s standing out by the pool,” David said.

  “Is he trying to get in the house?” Mom asked.

  “I don’t know. ” His voice cracked again.

  “Where were you when you saw him?” Mom’s voice had descended into the throaty, rolling calm it took on during catastrophes. When Dad pushed David down the stairs, she had picked him up and said in the deep, calm voice, “Take us to the hospital quick,” as if it was something they did every day.

  “In my room,” David said. His own voice out of control. “He was standing out there looking at me.”

  “Are you sure?” Mom said.

  “Yes.”

  “Okay. Let’s call the police.”

  She got out of bed in her nightgown and followed David to the door. He controlled an impulse to make her go first into the hall. When he stepped out, the stairwell lay ahead of him like a pit, with the phone on the other side. He made it past the stairs to the telephone table, taking speedy little steps, urged on by the cloud of Mom’s warmth and odor. He picked up the receiver and handed it to her. She dialed one digit.

  “Operator? The Rosemead police, please.” She paused. “Emergency,” she said, and laid a hand on David’s shoulder to counterbalance the word.

  “Hello? This is Beverly Stark at one oh one Buena Vista. We have a prowler.”

  David was impressed with her competence. She knew just what to say to the police. He liked the word prowler too—a good shrinking word, like a dog’s name.

  “Outside,” she said. “No, I don’t think so. Fine. Thank you, sergeant.”

  She replaced the receiver. Now they were alone again, back in danger. He wondered if he heard a stealthy scraping from below. He thought of the gun in Mom’s nightstand.

  “Just stand right here,” she said to him in a hushed voice. “We won’t wake up the others. We’ll just wait for the police to get here, okay?”

  “Okay,” David whispered. He ached to say, “Let’s get the gun,” but couldn’t. The gun was hidden away, unacknowledged; it did not exist and would not exist unless Mom herself summoned it up. She held his shoulders, and he slung his arms loosely around her bony hips. This reminded him of another time, shimmering at the edge of memory, when he and Mom had hidden in the dark together, waiting for help.

  The door to Janet’s bedroom opened, and she stood in the black doorway, her legs invisible beneath her white nightgown. She floated like a ghost.

  “What’s going on?” she asked in a whisper.

  Mom motioned her over, and she came. “David saw somebody out in back,” Mom said in her collected voice. “The police are coming.”

  “Oh,” Janet said. She crossed her arms over her chest and Mom lifted one hand off David’s shoulders to touch her shoulder, too.

  “Do you think we should wake up Lizzie?” Janet whispered.

  “Lord no,” Mom said. “She’d go after him with a baseball bat.”

  Janet laughed, a thin whistling laugh that forced itself through her nostrils. She started to speak, when the pulsing red light of a police cruiser bled suddenly through Mom’s open bedroom door.

  “Saved,” Janet said. Before Mom or David could move she started down the stairs. David followed her, and Mom came right behind.

  David was right behind her when Janet opened the front door and stepped into the dazzling beam of a flashlight. Thelight delineated her body like an x-ray. It held her pinned at the threshold, and flicked off. Her nightgown turned solid again.

  “Evening,” a gravelly man’s voice said. “You report a prowler?”

  David and Mom squeezed themselves in on either side of Janet in the doorway. A patrolman stood on the front stoop. He had a square, handsome face in which only the mouth moved.

  “I guess we did,” Janet said.

  “I reported the prowler,” Mom said, working her way in front of Janet, taking charge. “I’m Beverly Stark.” David noticed, as he sometimes did, her habit of announcing her name to people as if she expected them to have heard of her.

  “My partner’s in the back,” the patrolman said. Behind his broad body the revolving light of a cruiser stained the front l
awn pink and gray and pink again.

  “Thank you for coming out,” Mom said. She covered herself with her arms. She was so tiny before the uhiform. David stepped around and stood between Mom and the patrolman.

  “I was the one that saw him,” he said.

  “Tell me what you saw, please,” the policeman said.

  David glanced nervously back at Mom, who nodded. “I saw a man by the pool,” he said. “Over in the bushes by the fence.” In a fit of embarrassment, he spoke these sentences to the policeman’s square, black shoes.

  “What was he doing?” the policeman asked.

  “He was just standing in the bushes,” David said. “Looking at me.”

  “Looking at you?” the policeman said. “How could you tell in the dark if he was looking at you?” The policeman wore a wristwatch big as a silver dollar. The black hairs of his wrist curled up over the metal band.

  “Well, I couldn’t, really,” David said. “But he was standing there looking. ”

  “Was he trying to get in the house?”

  “Yes, ” David said, and his voice cracked.

  “Was he?” Mom asked. “Are you sure, David?”

  “No,” David said. “I don’t know.” He couldn’t imagine how he had worked himself over into the wrong.

  The partner returned from the back, walking behind the puddle of light his flashlight cast on the ground. “Negative,” he said. “Nobody’s there.” He was younger than the other, but shared his wide, well-cut face. They might have been brothers.

  “Looks like a false alarm,” the first one said. “Nobody saw him but the boy here.”

  “It’s not a false alarm just because nobody’s standing back there with an ax, for God’s sake,” Janet said. “If David says he saw somebody, he saw somebody.”

  “Right,” the partner said. “Anyhow, there’s no one on the premises now.”

  “Did you check the windows?” Janet asked with irritation. “The windows haven’t been tampered with,” the partner said. “If you like, we’ll come in and check the house.”

  “Please,” Mom said. “We’d all sleep better.”

  The three of them hung back to let the police enter. The police brought with them into the house their smell of aftershave, fried food, and leather. They split up, running the beams of their flashlights all over the dark rooms. David followed the partner, who had not been so skeptical about his story. The partner walked briskly through the living room and the kitchen, shining his light here and there, surprising everything with light. There was the milky green glass of the television, there the shiny leaves and grotesque shadow of the rubber plant in its brown plastic pot. In these slashes of light the house looked haunted, a mute witness to murders.

  After the police had gone through with their flashlights they turned on the lamps and checked again, upstairs and down, looking into every closet. They opened the door to Lizzie’sroom. She didn’t wake up. David wondered with a chill how often they found somebody hiding in closets, or in little girls’ rooms.

  When they finished their circuit they met back at the front door. “Looks like everything’s all right,” the first one said. David stood hating him. He hoped to find a big black man in the hall closet as soon as the police were gone. Then he crossed his fingers and glanced at the ceiling, to cancel the wish.

  “Thank you for checking,” Mom said.

  “No trouble,” the man said, looking at David as if it had actually been a lot of trouble. “Part of our job.”

  Janet squeezed the back of David’s neck, reassuringly. “Keep it safe for democracy, men,” she said.

  “We get a call we answer the call, miss,” the partner said. “We don’t pick and choose. You never know when people are really in trouble.”

  “I know,” she said in a subdued voice. “Don’t mind me, I’m the crazy daughter they keep in the attic. Thank you for coming, really.”

  The partner let his flashlight beam creep along the floor and stopped it short of Janet’s feet, where it quivered. “Apology accepted,” he said, and a smile broke, startlingly white, in his heavy face.

  “Yes, thank you, you’ve been grand,” Mom said. “Come on now, crew. Back to bed.”

  “No trouble, ma’am,” the partner said. He shifted his focus to Janet and added, “Just call me any time there’s trouble.”

  She said thanks and smiled, in the particular way she sometimes did, her head cocked and her brows lifted skeptically.

  “Bye,” David said. He said it too loudly. He said “Bye,” again, at the right volume.

  “Evening,” the first one said, settling his mouth in a grumpy, doglike way. They both left, and the first one closed the doorfirmly, with a finality that suggested the outdoors was private property, and the Starts were being evicted into their house.

  “Assholes” Janet said.

  “Is it you lizzie gets it from?” Mom asked.

  “Hey, Lizzie slept through this whole thing, didn’t she?” Janet said.

  “What I wouldn’t give to sleep like that.” Mum said.

  David thought with satisfaction of how angry Lizzie would he to have missed out. She always fought sleep like death itself but yielded to it. when it took her, so completely that she slept through earthquakes and thunderstorms. She always instructed everyone to wake her up if anything important happened.

  “You know,” Janet said, “it s sort of cold in here.”

  “Weil, what about a shot of brandy?” Mom said.

  “Good idea.”

  “Can I have one too?” David asked.

  “Oh sure” Mom said. “Maybe you”d like a cigar too.”

  They ail went into the kitchen. Mom took a bottle from the cabinet and poured brandies into two juice glasses. The glasses had pictures of sliced oranges on their sides.

  “You said I could have one too.” David told her.

  “You can have a sip of mine.” Mom said. “A small sip.”

  David took the glass from her and raised it cautiously to his lips. The trick was to swallow as much as possible without spitting it back up. He let some seep in and held it on the back of his tongue, a thick brown taste that burned. To get rid of the burning he swallowed, which only pulled the liquid heat in a line down through his throat and chest. His eyes filled with tears, and it was a while before he could regain enough breath to say, “Ahh. that’s good.”

  Mom took the glass back from him. and held it aloft. “Cheers.” she said with a faint smile.

  “I really did see a man in the backyard” David said.

  “Sometimes it’s hard to tell in the dark,” Mom said. “Don’t worry, you were right to tell me about it.”

  “I think there was a man in the backyard,” Janet said.

  “Well, maybe there was,” Mom said. “He’s gone now.” “Right,” Janet said.

  “There’s nothing to worry about,” Mom told David.

  “Can I have another sip of your brandy?” he asked.

  “No. What are you, a midget in disguise? What have you done with my little boy?”

  “I don’t know,” David said. He slipped his fingers between the buttons of his pajama top and plucked at the single wiry hair that grew from his nipple.

  “If we have another Peeping Tom, let’s not call the police,” Janet said. “Let’s just deal with him ourselves.”

  “If we have another Peeping Tom,” Mom said, “I can stand in the window and show him a thing or two that’ll send him into another line of work.”

  “Mother. There’s a child present.”

  “Him? He’s practically thirty.”

  “Well then, he can have some of my brandy too,” Janet said. She handed David her glass. In his excitement he took too deep a swallow. The liquor seared his throat and came right back up again. He sputtered it all over the table. The burning buzzed in his nostrils.

  Mom said, “Whoops,” and patted him on the back.

  “Listen,” Janet said.

  “What?” Mom asked her.

/>   “Nothing. My imagination.”

  “Did you hear something?” Mom said.

  “Nope. Drink your brandy. I’ve been turning into a nervous old maid these past few weeks.”

  “I’ve been turning into a nervous old maid since 1972,” Mom said.

  “What did you hear?” David was finally able to ask through his choking.

  “Nothing,” she said. “Don’t listen to me, you’ll get as crazy as I am.”

  “Let’s just go to bed,” Mom said. “Squeeze your eyes shut tight and before you know it it’ll be morning.”

  “Right,” Janet said.

  “David? Hit the sack, school day tomorrow.”

  “Okay,” he said.

  For a long moment before going upstairs, the three of them kept still, listening. Deep in the house a pipe gurgled, a rude froggy sound like male digestion. They all laughed and went to bed.

  David slept patchily and woke with the first light. A bird piped outside, a single repeated shrill like metal twisting on metal. He’d had a bad dream, a variation on the monster dream, which was already dispersing into his blood as he woke.

  He got up and went to the window. It was a violent sunrise, the sky burning orange at the horizon, setting fire to the scraps of cloud that hung behind the black branches of the tree. The pool blazed pink, and wisps of steam rose up into the warming air.

  He put on his jeans and T-shirt, checked his hair, and went downstairs. The house held its darkness. When he walked out the kitchen door the new light cut through his clothes, brilliant and cold. His breath ran before him in darts of vapor. He walked around the pool and checked for footprints in the little corner garden. Nothing. He went out through the gate and around the side of the house, and found no prints in the dewy grass. The man was gone. David crossed the lawn and stood at the edge of the sidewalk. He turned to look at the house. Its pale yellow face stood blue with the sun behind it; the windowswere black as tar paper. He looked up and down the street. On the Starks’ side the houses were all shaded, blue or gray depending on their daylight colors. On the other side the houses burned, pure white or deeper white.