Chance

A predatory species

Within an hour he was at the house. It was the first time he’d actually been inside since moving out and he was shocked to find the place in such disarray. Boxes filled the living room. Closet doors opened upon empty spaces, gutted and boned. Nothing was as it had been. Carla had apparently made the decision that while continuing to look for buyers, the house should be leased. “We can’t afford to live here,” she told him, in response to his taking the place in, her manner accusatory.

A mountain bike, its tires caked in dried mud, sat in the nook off the living room that had once housed his piano. He took this for the dyslexic personal trainer’s but found little point in going there. Nicky had been expected more than three hours ago. She had been seen at the school talking to some friends, none of whom seemed able to say when exactly she was last seen or where she was. Calls to friends’ houses had proven fruitless. And of course there had been no calls in on the part of Nicky. Carla, never a model of restraint, had called both Nicky’s school and the San Francisco Police Department to file a missing persons report.

Chance was at a loss. There was a voice at one shoulder saying surely there was some simple explanation for all of this. They would learn it at any moment. The phone would ring. Nicky would check in. The call to the police was certainly an overreaction on the part of his ever overreacting soon-to-be ex-wife. The voice at his other shoulder said things he didn’t want to hear, the stuff of any parent’s darkest imaginings, and that was only the beginning as the voice of bad tidings morphed into that of Raymond Blackstone, looming above him in the restaurant, lit by party lights. “A predatory species,” Raymond Blackstone had said, and said again now in the ruins of Chance’s former house that was like visiting the scene of a wreck on the high seas, the water swirling with the flotsam and jetsam of a life come to ruin. He had never felt more impotent or more driven by murderous unfixed rage. “What did the police say?” he asked.

“Who was the last to see her? The names of friends… They wanted to know if she had a boyfriend. They wanted to know if she uses drugs.” Carla began to cry. She was a slight, energetic woman, in one former incarnation an aspiring yoga instructor before abandoning that to become an aspiring marriage counselor and then on to the aspiring photographer that, to the best of Chance’s knowledge, she was today.

He circled her with an arm. She leaned briefly into him then pulled away, her eyes puffy, ringed in red, her face framed in the light brown curls Chance had once found so attractive. “Do we even know?” he asked. “Who was the last to see her?”

“Shawn. But all Shawn said was that she had seen her walking near the marina, that she was by herself and that she assumed she was on her way home.”

“Do we have Shawn’s number?”

“I already called. So did the police.”

“Then we do have a number.”

“Are you even listening to anything I’m saying?” Carla asked.

“Yes, but I’m not going to just sit here. I can’t. If there’s someone to talk to I want to talk to them.”

She was looking for the number when the call came in. It was Nicky. She was alive, less than a mile from home, but she was also in tears, in need of a ride. Someone had punched her in the face and taken her purse.

Chance went. Carla stayed to make the appropriate calls. He found her at a gas station on Lombard. She had no money. The owner, a Pakistani gentleman of perhaps fifty with scant English, had let her use the station’s phone. She was seated just outside the office in a metal folding chair, looking fairly stoic as Chance drove up. It was a moment or two before she spotted his car and him getting out, walking to meet her. At which point she more or less broke down. She’d fallen to sobbing in the time it took for Chance to reach her.

He pulled her to his chest then held her at arm’s length to look at her face. There was some redness on one side, the beginning of a slight bruise at the edge of her right eye. Her pupils were round and symmetrical. “How are you feeling?” he asked.

“How do I look?”

“Like someone slapped you. Do you have any pain, is what I’m asking.” He raised his hand. “Follow my finger.”

“Daddy…”

“Indulge me for one second.”

She made a point of looking away. “Can we just go? Please.”

He was aware of the owner watching them from the open doorway. “Thank you,” Chance said. “Thank you for letting her use your phone.”

The man nodded and raised a hand, as if to say it was nothing.

“Okay,” Chance said. “We will assume your pupils are reactive.” They started toward the car. “I will look more closely at home.”

“I’m fine,” she said. She’d stopped crying, exasperation and what she seemed now to have taken for some public humiliation at the hands of her father having apparently trumped whatever else she’d been feeling when he drove up.

They were by now on their way home, passing among the trees of Golden Gate Park—the route she had always favored. “Will you tell me about it?” he asked.

“Some asshole hit me and took my purse.”

“With his fist or an open hand?”

“Open hand,” she said, her voice reduced to the point of being nearly inaudible.

“Where did this happen?”

“I was on my way to the yogurt place.”

“On Chestnut Street?”

She nodded. “Do we have to talk about all of this right now?”

“We have to talk about it at some point, Nicky. We need to know what happened. You were three hours late.”

No response.

“Your mother was calling all over, the school, the police…”

He could hear her groan. “How are you feeling?” he asked. “I want to know that at least.”

A moment passed. She reached to touch his arm. “I’m fine, Daddy. Really. Thanks for coming.” They rode another two blocks in silence. “It’s just so gross,” she said.

“What?” Chance asked.

“Everything.”

They found on arrival a disturbing number of cars parked before the house, including one black-and-white patrol car, the words SAN FRANCISCO POLICE DEPARTMENT in gold lettering across its door. “Jesus Christ,” Nicky said, with a weariness that cut to the bone. It was, given the enormity of the world’s sorrow, a small thing, yet it cut him all the same. If the Almighty could note a sparrow’s fall, why should not a father lament the signs of a child’s passage from innocence, however incremental? They parked half a block down and trudged back up the hill together.

The police wanted a signed report on the mugging. As Nicole and Carla sat down at the dining room table to give them one, Chance moved to the front porch in hopes of being alone. He very much needed to collect his thoughts. What he got was Holly Stein, the principal of Havenwood, rushing to join him.

Holly Stein was an impeccable woman of perhaps fifty with the air of a Berkeley professor. “I’m wondering,” she said, “if we might have a moment alone.”

It felt to him that they were already alone but Holly Stein seemed to have other ideas, indicating by way of a head nod toward the open doorway, toward his wife and daughter seated at the table with a uniformed officer, that some further removal was yet required.

“We can use the study,” Chance told her.

The study was, like the house, full of ghosts and cardboard boxes but missing furniture. “It’s been a while since I was called before the principal,” Chance said, closing the door behind them. The missing furniture in this particular room was that sold to the Russian under false pretexts.

“You’d be surprised how often I hear that one,” she said.

“Not original, you’re telling me.”

Holly smiled. “We’re concerned about Nicole,” she said.

“Yes, it’s been a rough day. Thank you for being here.”

“It has been rough. I’m so sorry. How is she?”

“Shaken. I think she’ll be fine.”

“Who wouldn’t be shaken? My God.”

They stood for a moment in silence, during which time Chance noted a number of what appeared to be exercise books piled along one wall, those and a rather sleek gym bag, half open. The fucker’s taken my study, Chance thought. He nearly said it aloud.

“There is another matter we need to discuss,” Holly said. “I’m sorry it has to be now, but maybe now is as good a time as any.”

Chance was only half listening. He was still thinking about the dyslexic personal trainer prowling about the premises. The word marijuana caught his attention.

“It was only a stem. In her art box…”

“Someone was going through her things?” The question was more or less reflexive.

The principal of Havenwood stiffened noticeably. “She left it in her last-period classroom,” she told him. “Under the circumstances…”

Chance nodded. He’d taken to chewing on the inside of his lip.

“As you know, the school’s policy is zero tolerance when it comes to drugs of any kind.”

“I am aware of it,” Chance said.

Holly nodded. A moment passed.

“I guess I’m not quite sure what you’re saying,” Chance said. “Are you telling me this because you wanted me to know? Or are you telling me she’s being kicked out of school?”

“Zero tolerance is just that,” Holly said. “We’re still talking about it, but yes, expulsion is a very real possibility.”

They stood with that, the very real possibility of things.

“And of course I wanted you to know. Whatever happens with the school… you need to know what’s what.”

Chance nodded. He was thinking about what was what.

She affected a look of deep concern. “All of this that’s going on…” she added, treading lightly but treading nonetheless, “…it can be very hard on a child…”

“The divorce.”

“Yes. And I’m sure I’m not telling you anything you don’t already know. But we may see things from our end not so obvious at home, especially when there are two homes. You may not be aware that Nicole’s grades have dropped. Classes she was getting A’s and B’s in last year… If things continue apace, she’s on track for C’s and in one case something less.”

“I’m sorry. I was not aware of that.”

She allowed herself a deep breath. “What I’m seeing is that there may be a pattern developing—falling grades, signs of drug use…”

“I would hardly call a stem in her art box ‘signs of drug use.’ ”

She went on as if he hadn’t spoken. “There hasn’t been time for us to talk to her yet about where the marijuana came from… but we’re thinking this today…”

Chance just looked at her.

“The marijuana had to come from somewhere. Did she get it from someone on campus, and if not, then where? Might that have been where she was today, after school? Could there have been more in her purse? Might someone have known about it? Might that have been what the thief was after?” She paused once more. “I don’t know the answers to these questions and I’m not accusing her of anything save what we already know. I also know this has been a rough day… and I am so glad she is okay. But I felt that you needed to hear this. And I wanted to say it to you. Not them.” She looked to the closed door of his office, allowing him to guess that the “them” in question was the uniformed officer now at his dining room table. Who would have thought?

He questioned Nicky himself, later that night. The report had been filed. The police were gone. They were seated on the front step of the porch, a place where they had often sat together when she was very young, in another age of the world.

“What difference does it make if my grades are shitty?” Her starting position. “I’m not going to be there anyway.”

“I’m guessing you’re not serious.”

Nicky looked to the darkness at the foot of the hill.

“You just got smacked and your purse stolen. So let me be blunt. Was there marijuana in your purse? Was there money to buy it? Is that what you were up to?”

She looked at him as if he’d been the one to strike her. “I was on my way to get yogurt. This guy just came at me, out of nowhere.”

“I’m sorry, Nicky, but I had to ask that.”

“Is that was she thinks, Ms. Fatass?”

“Be happy she said it to me and not the cops. That’s called cutting you a break. Where did you get it?”

“At school. Everybody has it.” She wiped at her eyes with the back of her hands. “This is such bullshit.”

“To a point, yes, but it’s the bullshit we all have to live with. Better to learn how than to rail against it.”

She said nothing and they sat for some time in the soft light of the porch. The night had taken on the salt smell of the ocean. “You know what I remember, sitting here?” Chance asked. He was tired and looking for some happier note on which to end. “I remember the day… you must’ve been about three, and we were sitting here and you said the words outer space out of the blue. Do you remember that?”

Nicky nodded. “Yeah, sort of. I said it was down there.” She pointed toward the end of the street.

Chance laughed. “Yes. I thought it was so strange and funny that you would just come up with a phrase like that, something I’d never heard you say, and when I asked you where outer space was, you pointed down the hill and you said it was down there.” A moment passed. “I remember that like it was yesterday.”

“I guess that’s where I thought it was,” she told him.

He’d pushed her no further on the subject of the stem in her art box. Her final position was the one she’d begun with, that she’d gotten it from someone at school, but would not say whom. “Now or ever.” He was inclined to believe her. Which left the guy coming out of nowhere to slap her and take her purse, either as a random act of violence or because someone had put him up to it, someone who never got his own hands dirty but who got things done. Talk about a fucked-up twenty-four. On the sleepless night that lay before him there could be no consolation in the axiom of choice. The very idea that Raymond Blackstone had reached into his life and touched what was most precious ruled that out, that and pretty much all other consolations as well.

One more letter from the IRS was waiting when he returned to his apartment. And why not? It had been that kind of day. He tossed it unopened upon a small pile of other unopened mail he knew to contain bills from attorneys. There had been times of late, and this was one, when he felt himself to be in the midst of some profound disintegration, as if the mental construct that had been Eldon Chance, cheap trick to begin with, was about to disappear altogether, nothing in its wake but the faint odor of a spoiled egg. He felt the need to confide in someone, to lay bare his fears, to talk about what, if anything at all, could possibly be next, but he had no idea who would want to hear it. Nor could he imagine anyone he knew having anything worthwhile to say on the subject. As far as that went, he had no real idea about who would even take his call at such an hour without thinking him delusional; a pathetic enough admission but there it was. Dwell too long on that, there might well be brains on the ceiling by first light, a brief notice in the Chronicle. Fearing the worst, he broke from his room near midnight and set out by car in the general direction of Allan’s Antiques.