Odd Hours

FOURTEEN

WE CONTINUED EATING, AS IF THE CONVERSATION and the events that had occurred since I had walked through the door were as ordinary as those of any dinner hour.

In fact, people were not in the habit of asking if I would die for them. And I was not accustomed to answering in the positive, without hesitation.

I would have died for Stormy Llewellyn, and she would have died for me, and neither of us would have needed to ask the other the question that Annamaria had posed to me. Stormy and I had understood, at a level more profound than mind or heart, at the level of blood and bone, that we were committed to each other at any cost.

Although I would have given my life for my lost girl, Fate had not allowed me to make that trade. Since the bullet-shattered day in which she died, I have lived a life I don’t need.

Don’t get me wrong. I do not seek death. I love life, and I love the world as its exquisite design is revealed in each small portion of the whole.

No one can genuinely love the world, which is too large to love entire. To love all the world at once is pretense or dangerous self-delusion. Loving the world is like loving the idea of love, which is perilous because, feeling virtuous about this grand affection, you are freed from the struggles and the duties that come with loving people as individuals, with loving one place-home-above all others.

I embrace the world on a scale that allows genuine love-the small places like a town, a neighborhood, a street-and I love life, because of what the beauty of this world and of this life portend. I don’t love them to excess, and I stand in awe of them only to the extent that an architect might stand in the receiving room of a magnificent palace, amazed and thrilled by what he sees, while knowing that all this is as nothing compared to the wondrous sights that lie beyond the next threshold.

Since that day of death in Pico Mundo, seventeen months earlier, my life had not been mine. I had been spared for a reason I could not understand. I had known the day would come when I would give my life in the right cause.

Will you die for me?

Yes.

Instantly upon hearing the fateful question, I felt that I had been waiting to hear it since Stormy’s death, and that the answer had been on my tongue before the question had been spoken.

Although I had committed myself to this cause with no knowledge of it, I was nevertheless curious about what the men on the pier were planning, how Annamaria figured in their plans, and why she needed my protection.

With the silver chain around my neck and the small bell pendant against my breastbone, I said, “Where is your husband?”

“I’m not married.”

I waited for her to say more.

With her fork she held down a fig, and with her knife trimmed off the stem.

“Where do you work?” I asked.

Setting the knife aside, she said, “I don’t work.” She patted her swollen abdomen, and smiled. “I labor.”

Surveying the modest accommodations, I said, “I suppose the rent is low.”

“Very low. I stay here free.”

“The people in the house are relatives?”

“No. Before me, a poor family of three lived here free for two years, until they had saved enough to move on.”

“So the owners are just…good people?”

“You can’t be surprised by that.”

“Maybe.”

“You have known many good people in your young life.”

I thought of Ozzie Boone, Chief Wyatt Porter and his wife, Karla, Terri Stambaugh, and all of my friends in Pico Mundo, thought of the monks at St. Bartholomew’s, of Sister Angela and the nuns who ran the orphanage and school for special-needs children.

“Even in this rough and cynical age,” she said, “you’re neither rough nor cynical yourself.”

“With all due respect, Annamaria, you don’t really know me.”

“I know you well,” she disagreed.

“How?”

“Be patient and you’ll understand.”

“All things in their time, huh?”

“That’s right.”

“I sort of think the time is now.”

“But you are wrong.”

“How can I help you if I don’t know what kind of fix you’re in?”

“I’m not in a fix.”

“Okay, then what kind of mess, what kind of pickle, what kind of trap?”

Finished eating, she blotted her mouth with a paper napkin.

“No mess, pickle, or trap,” she said, with a trace of amusement in her gentle voice.

“Then what would you call it?”

“The way of things.”

“You’re in the way of things? What things are you standing in the way of?”

“You misheard me. What lies before me is just the way of things, not a fix from which I need to be extricated.”

Out of the shallow bowl, she retrieved one of the huge floating flowers, and she placed it on her folded napkin.

“Then why did you ask that question, why did you give me the bell, what do you need me to do for you?”

“Keep them from killing me,” she said.

“Well, there you go. That sounds like a pickle to me.”

She plucked one thick white petal from the flower and set it aside on the table.

I said, “Who wants to kill you?”

“The men on the pier,” she replied, plucking another petal from the flower. “And others.”

“How many others?”

“Innumerable.”

“Innumerable-as in countless, as in the countless grains of sand on the oceans’ shores?”

“That would be more like infinite. Those who want me dead can be counted, and have been, but there are too many for the number to matter.”

“Well, I don’t know. I think it matters to me.”

“But you’re wrong about that,” she quietly assured me.

She continued to disassemble the flower. She had made a separate pile of half its petals.

Her self-possession and calm demeanor did not change when she spoke of being the target of killers.

For a while I waited for her eyes to meet mine again, but her attention remained on the flower.

I said, “The men on the pier-who are they?”

“I don’t know their names.”

“Why do they want to kill you?”

“They don’t yet know they want to kill me.”

After considering that response for a moment and being unable to make sense of it, I said, “When will they know that they want to kill you?”

“Soon enough.”

“I see,” I lied.

“You will,” she said.

Impurities in the wicks periodically caused the flames to leap, flutter, and subside. The reflections on the ceiling swelled, shrank, shivered.

I said, “And when these guys finally realize that they want to kill you, why will they want to kill you?”

“For the wrong reason.”

“Okay. All right. What would the wrong reason be?”

“Because they’ll think that I know what horror they intend to perpetrate.”

“Do you know what horror they intend to perpetrate?”

“Only in the most general terms.”

“Why not share those general terms with me?”

“Many deaths,” she said, “and much destruction.”

“Those are some spooky terms. And way too general.”

“My knowledge here is limited,” she said. “I’m only human, like you.”

“Does that mean-a little bit psychic like me?”

“Not psychic. It only means that I am human, not omniscient.”

She had plucked all the petals from the flower, leaving only the fleshy green receptacle, the sepals that had protected the petals, a spray of stamens, and the pistil.

I plunged into our monkey-barrel conversation once more: “When you say they’ll want to kill you for the wrong reason, that implies there’s a right reason for them to want to kill you.”

“Not a right reason,” she corrected, “but from their point of view, a better one.”

“And what would be that better reason?”

At last she met my eyes. “What have I done to this flower, odd one?”

Stormy and only Stormy had sometimes called me “odd one.”

Annamaria smiled, as though she knew what thought had passed through my mind, what association she had triggered.

Indicating the pile of petals, I said, “You’re just nervous, that’s all.”

“I’m not nervous,” she said with quiet conviction. “I was not asking you why I did it, only to tell me what it is that I’ve done to the flower.”

“You’ve trashed it.”

“Is that what you think?”

“Unless you’re going to make a potpourri with it.”

“When the flower was floating in the bowl, although it had been cut from the tree, how did it look?”

“Beautiful.”

“Lush and alive?” she asked.

“Yes.”

“And now it looks dead.”

“Very dead.”

She propped her elbows on the table, rested her face in her cupped hands, and smiled. “I’m going to show you something.”

“What?”

“Something with the flower.”

“All right.”

“Not now.”

“When?”

“All things in their time,” she said.

“I hope I live that long.”

Her smile broadened, and her voice was soft with the affection of a friend. “You have a certain grace, you know.”

I shrugged and shifted my attention to the flame within the red glass lamp between us.

She said, “Let’s have no misunderstanding. I mean-a grace on which you can rely.”

If she thought that she had distracted me with the flower and that I had forgotten the question that she had dodged, she was wrong. I returned to it:

“If they don’t want to kill you right now but will want to kill you soon, and for the wrong reason-what is the right reason? I’m sorry. Excuse me. I mean, what is the better reason they might have for wanting you dead?”

“You will know when you will know,” she said.

“And when will I know?”

As she replied, I answered my question in sync with her: “All things in their time.”

Crazily, I did not believe that she was withholding information or was speaking in riddles either to deceive me or to entice me. She impressed me as being absolutely truthful.

Furthermore, I had the sense that everything she had said had carried more meaning than I had taken from it, and that eventually, when I looked back on our dinner, I would realize that on this night, in this hour, I should have known her for who she was.

With both hands, Annamaria picked up her mug of tea and sipped from it.

She looked no different in this flattering lamplight from the way that she had looked in the gray light of late afternoon, on the pier. Neither beautiful nor ugly, and yet not merely plain. Petite yet somehow powerful. She had a compelling presence for reasons that I could not define, a presence that was not as magnetic as it was humbling.

Suddenly my promise to keep her safe was a weight on my chest.

I raised one hand to the pendant that I now wore.

Lowering the mug of tea, she looked at the bell captured between my thumb and forefinger.

I said, “‘The bell invites me…it is a knell that summons me to Heaven or to Hell.’”

“Shakespeare,” she said. “But that’s not quite the quote. And a man like you doesn’t need to doubt his ultimate destination.”

Again I lowered my gaze to the oil lamp. Perhaps because my imagination is so rich, I saw the leaping flame fashion itself, for just a moment, into the image of a dragon rampant.

Together, without more talk, we quickly cleared the table, hastily put away the uneaten food, rinsed and stacked the dishes.

Annamaria retrieved a car coat from a closet and pulled it on as I employed a long-handled wick pincher to snuff the flame in the kitchen lamp, and also the one in the lamp by which we had eaten dinner.

She came to me with just a purse, and I said, “You may need more than that.”

“I don’t have much else,” she said, “some clothes, but suddenly I don’t think we have time.”

The same hunch had harried me into quickly cleaning off the dinner table.

“Put out the other lamps,” she said, withdrawing a flashlight from the purse. “Quickly.”

I extinguished the remaining three flames.

As she played the flashlight across the floor, toward the door, out of the silent night came the roar of an approaching vehicle, a truck by the sound of it.

At once, she hooded the beam to prevent it from brightening the windows.

Brakes barked in the night, and the previously racing engine only idled now-in the driveway in front of the garage above which we waited.

A truck door slammed. And then another.