Pacific Beat - читать бесплатно онлайн полную версию книги автора T. Jefferson Parker (Chapter 18) #19

Chapter 18

Joseph Goins rang the doorbell once, then took a step backward on the creaking, uneven porch. He turned to look again at the immense avocado tree that cast its shade around him, at the weed-choked walkway up which he had just come, at the looming shapes of hibiscus and citrus and bamboo that stood tall in the yard, their tops connecting skyward, hushing the lot in shade and sealing off the house from the street. He already liked it.

A shriek issued from behind the door. The hair on the backs of Goins’s hands rose. Maybe it was more like a cackle, something containing a word.

“Mmmyyaa?”

What a grating tone, he thought. He rang the bell again, looking down at his box of cameras, photographs, clothes. The image came to him again of that man loitering across the street from the El Mar, the one with the tight jeans and the fancy billowy shirt. An idea had screamed up Goins’s backbone when he looked out and saw him, and he had listened to it telling him to get out while he still could. Cop, it said. See the cop who’s found you. It was part of the same idea that, the day before, had told him locate another room in case this happened. Thank God for the clarity, he thought, thank God for back doors.

“Mmmyyaa?”

“Mrs. Fostes?”

“Mmminute!”

Joseph took the newspaper from his box. A nice touch, he thought, like in the movies. He folded it back to expose the right column. His hand was still shaking. And whose wouldn’t? he wondered.

Carrying his box of things, he’d slipped out the back door and then walked down the bayfront to the video arcade, where he lost himself in the dark pinging metropolis of buzzers and bells and alarms. Everyone was looking at him. These California people know when you’re not one of them, he’d thought.

Aching inside, his mind swirling with contradictory messages, his face on fire with the heat of discovery and flight, he had sat on the seawall for a few minutes and just given up, just waited for them to come get him and take him away. A SWAT detail had pounded past him with martial precision, heading for the El Mar. The helicopter had settled over the motel, its rotors beveling the silence with chop-chops that he could see inside his eyelids — harsh, red-black blades cutting down from a blue sky. Three uniformed cops had marched by him, too, quick with purpose. And there he had sat, sunglasses and a bright painter’s cap on, his box of things beside him, wondering why they just didn’t stop and cuff him. Then he’d kept to the side streets, hefted the box up onto his shoulder to block his face from view, and headed south down the peninsula toward the address.

The door swung open and a withered, robed, white-haired woman beheld him with the palest blue eyes that he had ever seen. Her shoulders were curved over on top, like a paper clip. Her face was sunken, but the skin looked soft. With one bony dark-spotted hand she clawed her robe up close to her neck.

She’s lovely, thought Joseph Goins. He lifted the folded newspaper up to her, and watched with extreme care what she did now. “Are you Mrs. Fostes?”

“I am,” she said. Her eyes wandered, focusless, over the folded paper. Perfect. Sighted older woman seeks companionship for room and board, it said. To Joseph Goins, “sighted” could only mean almost blind. He was right.

“I’m Joseph Gray. Is the room taken?” he asked, smiling.

Her blue eyes locked on his face for a moment, and he took off his sunglasses to return their assessing gaze. “No. Come in.”

Even her speaking voice was a shriek, he noted, but it was a quieter one. He picked up his box and followed her bobbing down-white head into the house.

It was dark, warm, and filled with competing, unpleasant smells. A cat curled atop an end table, as if mounted to the lamp base. There was a slouching green sofa, an overstuffed chair in a floral pattern, a coffee table, and a television set, which was turned on. A dog the size and shape of a fluffy bedroom slipper zipped in tight angles around Joseph’s feet as he followed Mrs. Fostes toward the furniture. She sat slowly in the middle of the couch and lifted a bony finger to indicate the chair.

“If I could find my glasses, I could see you better,” she said. “I can hardly make out the TV from here. What’s on?”

“A soap opera, I think.”

“Where could they have gone?” She dug into a shoebox that lay on the table before her, a box filled with dozens of prescription bottles. “I don’t need them for these,” she said, tapping the box. “I can go by shape. But I can’t see the tube. Do you see them anywhere?”

Joseph looked around the room, his gaze moving to the top of the TV set, where a pair of black-rimmed heavy glasses sat. “No, Mrs. Fostes. I don’t.”

“I lost them for a month this winter,” she said. “Didn’t slow me down a bit.”

“What a lovely home,” said Joseph. The cat’s tail dropped off the tabletop, swung, twitched.

“It’ll do,” said Mrs. Fostes. “Are you a student?”

“I’ll be going back full-time in the fall,” he said. “UCI.” He knew all about the University of California, Irvine — the medical-research facilities, anyway.

“What’s your major?”

“Computers.”

“That’s the best field there is right now. My husband, John, he always said computers were the future. That was way back. He died in ’sixty-two.”

“I’m sorry.”

“So am I,” she sighed. “Where are you from?”

“Irvine.” May as well stay consistent, he thought. “My dad’s a computer salesman. My mom’s a homemaker.”

“Do you have a job?”

“I’m living off my savings right now. But I’ll be seeking a position in computers in the near future.”

“You’re certainly well spoken for a local boy. Your mouth isn’t loose when you speak. Do you surf?”

“I skateboard some.” Joseph chuckled, remembering the few dizzying moments he’d spent on the eighty-dollar board he’d bought, moments of vertiginous peril, banana-peel quickness, absolute befuddlement. “But I’m a good swimmer.” This much was true. He’d spent every available moment in the City Plunge, up until Lucy. Even through the long years of the state hospital, he had held an undiminished feeling of what it was like: the cool water parting before him, the way it would support you if you kept moving, the peacefulness of it.

She looked at him, a little off center with the soft blue gaze. “In the ad, I said companionship. What I like most is someone to read me the paper every morning. Perhaps discuss the major stories for a few minutes. Then, someone to talk with after dinner. Only for half an hour or so. We’ll make dinner together — the other meals we just fend for ourselves. I pay for groceries. You have to pay long distance telephone, but that’s about it. You empty the wastebaskets and take the trash out Thursdays. Sometimes I need help out of bed, but once I’m up and moving, I’m a hellcat. I prefer a young man or woman because I might need your strength occasionally, and, quite frankly — old people depress me. You’re welcome to bring a friend over when you want.”

“You can’t read the papers yourself?”

“No.”

“What about the pictures?”

“Only a blur — even with my glasses. Damn, where could they have run off to?”

Good, thought Joseph. His nervous system seemed to exhale. “Don’t you have other boarders?”

“Just Dolly, that’s the cat, and Molly, that’s the dog. There was a young girl living here until two weeks ago. She disappeared.”

“Disappeared?” asked Joseph. There was something about the way she said it.

“You know. Packed up and went.”

Joseph nodded. His fingertips were stinging now. As the days passed, they would crack and begin to bleed. They seemed just to come apart along the whorls, as if whatever holds skin together dried out. In the nine years he’d spent at the hospital, not a single doctor could explain this condition. It happened twice a year or so — no explanation. But Joseph had noted that it seemed to come either when things were going very well for him or very badly. It would become painful before long. “I’ll be more reliable than that, Mrs. Fostes.”

“Would you like to see your room, Joseph?”

He stood, smiling. “Sure.”

He followed her from the living room, lifting her glasses off the TV on his way by, and dropping them into his box.

The room was upstairs, at the end of a short dark hallway, last on the right. It was larger than both rooms of the El Mar Motel put together, with one window that looked over a sideyard crowded with trees and another that faced the street. The floor was hardwood that no longer shined. A cheapish fluffy blue rug lay in the center. There was a large desk along one wall, with two box-shaped items on it, each draped with a folded white sheet that was then taped snugly to the desktop.

How interesting, thought Joseph. He set his box on the floor, and asked what was under the sheets.

“A computer and a printer,” said Mrs. Fostes. “I bought them for my granddaughter, but she never used them. I have no idea how it all works.”

Joseph, who had never used a computer, nodded. “They all operate on the same... principles.”

“Well, the principle I use is to keep the dust off it in case she ever decides she needs it. There’s a bathroom across the hall.”

Mrs. Fostes walked slowly to the window, felt for the curtains, then grasped them in both hands and threw them open. “You could see the water when the trees weren’t so high.”

“I like the trees,” he said.

In the pale stream of sunshine, Joseph studied Mrs. Fostes’s eyes, the way they absorbed the light like old glass but didn’t send much back out. It must be sad to have your eyes quit working. Magdesh, at State, had taken out his own eyes with a pencil nub.

Suddenly, Joseph sensed a third presence in the room. He turned quickly. Standing in the doorway was a pretty young girl — she couldn’t have been more than eighteen — with her arms crossed and her head at an inquisitive angle. She had on a pair of stone-washed jeans, high-tech athletic shoes, and a Fine Young Cannibals T-shirt. Her hair was honey-colored and fine, and she wore it straight, gazing past a shining wall of it now as if she was looking around a corner at him. “The computer’s mine.”

Mrs. Fostes’s head turned suddenly in the girl’s direction. She had been trying to get a closet door open to show the new boy where his clothes could go. “I thought you were out, dear.”

“I’m going out.”

“This is our new boarder.”

“I’m Joe,” he said.

“I’m outta here,” said the girl. She turned and vanished, then her diminishing footsteps sounded down the stairway.

“She’s my granddaughter, not very manageable,” said Mrs. Fostes. “She lives here?”

Mrs. Fostes nodded. “She won’t read me the paper, or cook with me, or take her meals with me. She’s at an age. I understand... I was like that once. I’m surprised she was still home.” Mrs. Fostes gathered her robe up close to her chin again, and started toward the door. “She won’t bother you, Mr. Gray.”

Joseph knew some nicety was called for, but he couldn’t imagine what.

“Come down now and we’ll sign the agreement.”

Joseph heard the front door slam. “What’s her name?”

“Lucinda.”

Joseph’s entire inner being felt as if it were about to wrench itself inside out, like a sock. Lucy. For a brief moment, everything in the room went bright, so bright that he could hardly keep his eyes open. He slipped his sunglasses back on. His legs felt thick and his heart was throbbing up in his temples. “Well,” he said quietly. “That’s a nice name.”

“Don’t worry, she’s hardly ever here. Let’s go down and sign the paper now. Then you can unpack and get to know your room. I like to eat at seven, so we can start the dinner at six.” Mrs. Fostes hobbled to the door, steadying herself against the wall as she passed through. “I sure wish I could find those glasses of mine.”

An hour later, Joseph was lying on the bed, his hands crossed behind his head, staring up at the ceiling. Would Lucinda recognize him from the TV, the papers? She didn’t seem like a cognizant person, but who could know? Maybe the best thing was just to avoid her. His temples were still pounding, but not as hard now. The sun had gone past the window and a comforting shade had crept into the room.

The more Joseph tried to relax, the clearer became his memory of what had happened in the last few hours. They were on to him. They were close. They wouldn’t give up. That first electric shock he’d felt as he watched the cop loitering across the boulevard repeated itself up his backbone now, a dizzying comet of energy that shot into his head, dashed against his skull, and showered sparks back down onto the tops of his eyes. His fingers were beginning to burn.

He climbed off the bed, took the leather-bound journal from the closet shelf, and sat down at the desk. He had to pull up the tape to move the computer away to make room. He peeked under the sheet: a tan plastic box with a Japanese company name on the front.

Joseph smoothed his hand over the soft leather of the journal, arranging it perfectly before him. He took a deep breath, turned to the postcard of Poon’s Balboa, and opened. Seeing Ann’s handwriting — her actual handwriting — was something that still loosed armies of emotion inside of him. He could hear her voice as he read.

MARCH 26

I sent my letter to Dave Smith at Cheverton Sewer & Septic, not exactly a romantic address, but romance was not what I was after — not yet. David’s letters back to me were waiting in box 2212. My father was the one who gave me that box, not long before he died. He used it for the same kind of thing and told me to keep it secret. I’m always up for a secret — secrets are soul-builders — but I ended up telling my mother a year or so later. She wasn’t surprised. Living with Poon for thirty years is enough to take the surprise out of anyone.

Our first letters — this was late January — were all about the big, general things — politics, religion, people. Funny how the better you know someone, the smaller the things you talk about get. I think that David was getting the same pleasure I was from writing: When you tell someone about what you really think, well, it can seem interesting in new ways. Why do we share things with strangers we never tell our closest friends and family?

At the end of his third letter, David asked if I would tell him about Paris. Now, David was one of the few people who knew I never went to France, and he knew basically what happened that summer when I was fifteen. But he asked the question so tentatively, I realized how little he actually knew, how deeply he had buried it all.

So I told him about the conference between Mom and me and that lawyer — Nathanson — and how we made arrangements to give my baby away when she was born. Nathanson must have gotten some of his instructions from David’s father, but Blake Cantrell never once came and talked to me. By the time all this happened, David was already shipped back to Montana by his family, to finish out the school year, then work around the ranch. I missed him terribly then, and I wish I’d had Dad’s P.O. box then, because I knew he was writing me from Montana, but not one letter got past Mom. I wrote him every day, but found out later, of course, that he didn’t get my letters, either. Of all the minor cruelties surrounding the time, that stealing of the letters always seemed the cruelest.

The agreement that Mom and I made with Nathanson was that the baby would be given up at birth to an unidentified couple that Nathanson had located in upstate New York. I was not told their name. I signed several documents, Mom signing each time first because I was a minor. The empty lines across from our names were for Blake Cantrell and David. I tried to sneak a look at who was getting my baby, but I couldn’t see any names in the thick legal paragraphs. They all assured me it was for the best.

And as I wrote about these times to David — what, twenty-five years later? — it all came sweeping back to me, all the strangeness of that trip back to New York, the little house that was waiting for me on the lake, the nanny, Ruth, who turned out to be a fine lady and friend, the long summer months when I finally started to show, then got big, then the rainy morning in September when we left the lake and went to the hospital.

The delivery room was so bright and metallic; I remembered lying on my back and the terrible pain that came in waves. And the doctors and nurses behind their green masks, little eyes peering down on me, their voices steady and so matter-of-fact. Then the rising pitch in those voices when things started going wrong, the hemorrhage and the cesarean section, and finally, through the fog of anesthetics and the horrid sounds of instruments being applied to me, there, from between my upraised knees, this tiny bloody form that they pulled out, tangled and not moving and barely human it looked, and after all the kicking it had done inside me, so still and peaceful. And that one dreamlike glimpse of Little Warm — I had taken to calling it Little Warm because that’s how it felt inside sometimes — was the first and last I ever had. A few minutes later, they gave me something to put me out and when I woke up I was in a hospital bed, all cleaned up and changed into my favorite nightgown and Mom was standing there over me. The doctor came in a few minutes later and told me that Little Warm had been born “still.” It took me a moment to understand what he meant, but then it sunk in.

I think I knew that there would be something wrong with her — I had a terrible virus during my second trimester and David had it, too. I wondered what the fever would do to Little Warm.

As I lay there and looked up at Mom, there seemed to be some great cool depth opening up inside me, and I fell into it, eagerly, like running into the ocean on a hot summer day. I cried so much. Mom said it would get better, that nature had done what it had to do, and Little Warm was in a better place than she could ever be in the real world.

For nine months, Dear One, David and I had had a daughter.

Joseph looked up from the journal and stared out his window, past the cypress trees to the pale eastern sky. He heard the door downstairs slam. This part of the story always made him the saddest and the most furious, the fact that the world can push around a soul so pure and young as Ann’s, the fact that she was so alone then, so small against the system. He thought with disgust about David Cantrell, out on some ranch mending fence while Ann went through the fires of childbirth, thousands of miles from home, surrounded only by those so ready to he and cheat and use her for themselves.

How little she knew, he thought. He looked down at his fingertips, already starting to split along the whorl lines, not so much split as just open up. Next, he’d start hitting his fingers on things and the cracks would widen, bleed, widen more.

What a terrible thing it had all become.

MARCH 29

I had to wait three days to write again. My memories of Little Warm make me ache, as if it all had happened a year ago instead of a quarter century. And Raymond has been so moody these last few days — snapping at me about the house and my cooking, looking at me for long minutes with nothing to say.

David and I arranged to see each other again in late February, the twenty-fifth, I think. He sent a limousine that waited for me in the alley while I hobbled down in my heels, trying to get around the puddles.

When I climbed inside, there he was, offering me his hand. The coach smelled like leather and cologne; it was like stepping inside a man’s body, it felt so... inner. I sunk into the seat as the car moved away from the curb.

He told me I looked nice, and I told him nothing special.

In truth, I was so nervous, I could hardly keep myself in one piece. This moment was all I’d been thinking about since the day we set it up — an entire week to feel, well, a lot of very different, very strong things.

First, I was scared. I was scared that Ray would find out. I’d made sure he wasn’t working the peninsula shift; I’d made sure the limo wouldn’t be on the boulevard, in case the neighbors, or Mom, or Phil Kearns, or someone else I knew just happened to come by. My sense of betrayal was deep, and I fought it by telling myself that I was simply meeting a very old friend for a very innocent talk. Then why the new nylons? I wondered as I unrolled them up my legs. Why the hesitation about perfume — which one, which mood, how much — I wondered as I touched just a little behind each ear. Why these heels? Why did I stand in front of the mirror when I was finished, up on my tiptoes, turning a little to see if my butt was still high and firm and the silk dress was flattering? (It was.) I know why. It was because I was betraying Raymond’s trust, a trust that he had offered to me for twenty years of marriage. Every commonsense, conventional voice inside me told me to call this off, honor my pact as Mrs. Cruz, resist. But the other voices were there, too, assuring me that meeting an old friend — especially one with whom I had undergone so much — was an act not of betrayal but of affirmation. These voices told me my fear was not of Raymond but of myself, a fear that I could not be trusted, a fear of testing my commitment, a commitment.that I could reconfirm by going ahead with this. Dear One, if only I can tell you someday to be careful of the things we tell ourselves, of the things we’ll believe. The strange part is that in many ways, they’re true.

Also, I was just excited as all get-out to be dressing up, meeting a nice guy I used to know well, getting out of that cold, miserable little apartment and, well, to be letting someone else do the driving. I felt like a young woman again, not some tired

lady with two jobs, pushing forty and putting her husband through law school. I felt so light, so... interesting.

I’m glad you came, he said.

I asked him if he thought I’d chicken out. I told him I almost did, because it wasn’t my habit to cruise around in limos while my husband was at work.

He said he didn’t set this up to compare notes on how guilty we felt. He was hoping we could just keep it light, maybe do something silly.

Like what? I demanded.

Like this, he said.

He flipped open the cooler beside him and pulled out two champagne glasses. Mine had a purple rose tied to the stem with a purple ribbon. David had sent me roses like that in high school — it was our flower. I laughed and so did he. He poured some bubbly and we toasted.

To years gone by, he said.

And years to come, I said, and we drank. For a minute, I looked through the dark windows at the rain coming down again, the slick blackness of Coast Highway, the wet faces of the buildings shining in sign light. I felt like every inch of road we covered was an inch I’d never cross again, that I was moving on into unmapped territory, unsettled frontier. For a moment, I let myself believe it was true. And in that moment, I let myself admit how deeply I was rutted in my life, how numbingly familiar things had become, how astonishingly easy it all was, and, of course, how hard I’d worked to make it that way! David was looking at me when I turned to him.

I do this a lot at night, he said. I like to sit back and watch things go by. If you don’t think about anything while you see it, it seems new.

I said it must be nice to cruise Orange County, when you own half of it. A flicker of disappointment crossed his eyes.

Forget what I own for a while, he said. I’d like to. No one owns things, anyway — we’re renters. We all just rent, until the landlord comes.

We went out the boulevard to Coast Highway, south past the restaurants, through Corona del Mar, down into Laguna. I opened the window to get some storm. The waves were big at Main Beach, I could see the white foaming walls towering into shore; I could feel the power surge through the air when they broke, a sound you get in your chest, not through your ears.

You’re getting wet, he said.

I let the rain hit my face.

Same flake you were in high school, he said, and down went his window, too, and we sat there for the next five minutes riding through town while the wind charged in and the rain slanted through. He filled our glasses again and I could see the raindrops hitting the pool of champagne and bouncing off the rose. Neither of us said anything for a long time. It was just him and me and a couple of feet of leather between us, and a storm the shape of a window swirling into me.

I don’t know why I’m doing this, I said. But that was only partly true. Parts of us remain unrevealed to ourselves, but we catch glimpses of these missing pieces sometimes if we are awake and looking for them. So I had a notion of why I was doing this. I was surprised by the smallness of it. I was doing this as a simple way of not caring for a few minutes, a way not to have an experience but to let the experience have me.

“I never thought that Little Warm would be the last chance I’d get to have a child,” I said suddenly, and the words shocked me as I heard them.

He was brooding and quiet a long while, then finally said that when he learned that Christy, his wife, couldn’t have children, he wondered if it was some vengeful, poetic consequence of what had happened to me.

Then I caught myself saying things to him that I’d never said to anyone but myself, about the hugeness of what happened that fall in New York, and how long it took me to realize what my ruined womb would come to mean, how I’d look in the mirror or at one of the kids at school or see an expression in Ray’s eyes and realize again that I’d never pass myself on in that way, never have the chance to offer my best to a little being who needs me, never give Ray that gift, never, well... have one.

David’s window followed mine up. Getting pelted in the face by rain didn’t seem much fun anymore.

“There was one thing I wanted to say tonight,” he said. “It was the only thing I wanted to say. I’m sorry, Ann. I’m sorry for how it worked out.”

I shrugged. There have been times in my life when those words would have brought tears to my eyes and I’d have started blubbering, but after a while you just accept what is and don’t beat yourself up anymore about what isn’t. I mean, how much can a girl take?

“Me, too,” I said. “But it wasn’t your fault and it wasn’t mine, so what can you say?”

David was quiet for a long time. “Just that if I had the chance to do it again, do it right, do it now — I would.”

I looked at him for a moment. Always beneath the rational good sense in David’s eyes, I’ve seen the gambler that he is, the willingness to take a chance. He meant it.

“Well, that’s a fat, bitter pill, at this point,” I said.

“Remember our plan to run away and have it? Think of how different things would have been if we’d have had the guts to carry it out.”

I told him I’d thought of that every day for twenty-five years. And suddenly, I was aware of myself, unexpectedly, acutely aware of myself: the makeup running from the rain, my hair all a mess, my dress soaked, my husband almost off shift, my almost-forty body trying its best to stay young, my barren womb waiting there like some cute little house that nobody’s ever going to live in, and I thought, What in the fuck am I doing here?

“I turn into a pumpkin in about half an hour,” I said.

David tapped on the privacy glass and the driver headed for the left lane.

He said he wanted to ask me something.

Ask away, I said, though I knew what it would be.

Why did you marry Raymond so soon after... us? You were hardly out of high school.

Dear One, though I’ll probably never give this book to you, I must say that there are certain decisions made in life that are best left unexamined once you make them. Some things we must have the luxury of taking for granted, because if we entertained doubts about them, we simply wouldn’t be able to move ahead with life. I admit that I had asked that same question over the years, but never deeply, never with a passion to really know. I’ve always let the answer sit just out of reach, an unexamined mystery that requires no attention.

So I told myself then what I’d always known: that Raymond Cruz has a heart the size of California, and I was content to be a villager in it. I came to know Raymond as a girl of fifteen, secretly attached to a college senior of twenty-one I simply fell for in one lightning instant at a party, and was later made pregnant by. I came to know Raymond as a girl who’d just been through a secret death about which she could speak to no one but her parents and this college senior now exiled to Stanford University. I know now that I easily became lost in Raymond Cruz’s dimensions.

I told myself this, too, and I will tell you, Dear One, though I’ll never have the nerve to give this book to you: Besides the breadth of Raymond’s decency, I was seduced by his patient, tender, unwavering devotion to me. It would be a lie to deny that. I’m not sure when I first became aware of this devotion, but it was long before I turned into a woman, long

before we went as a couple to our first dance, when he was sixteen. I think it started when we were children in the neighborhood. I came to bask in that devotion like someone in the sun. It surrounded me; it waited for me; it was a dependable constant in a world of motion. And it would be a lie, too, to deny that I reserved the right to ignore it, to control my intake, to simply free myself of it when I wanted to be in a world that lacked the burden of someone else. That was often, in those first years, reeling as I was from what had happened in New York.

So why, as we walked the bayfront that fine spring afternoon, my eighteenth, Raymond holding my hand and respecting my distance with the silence I desired, did I ask him to marry me? Why? More than anything, as I ponder the question in the silence of this house I now share with him, I believe it was because I had seen the quickness with which life can take things away: my brother Jake just killed in Vietnam, David banished to the north, Little Warm to some medical-waste-disposal unit — I didn’t know what they did with her and I still don’t. No one can tell me that a girl of fifteen doesn’t feel genuinely. I felt with a depth of heartache that I still won’t let myself remember in any but my worst moments. And as I walked along the bay that day, I was aware, Dear One, excruciatingly aware that there was no God watching each footstep, no parent or friend powerful enough to guide my unsteady feet, no one devoted to my protection. There was nothing but him, Ray, walking beside me without words, holding my hand with just the right amount of possessiveness and tentativeness. He was my companion. He was my friend. He was soon — that night, in fact — my lover. Why did I marry him so soon after David?

“Mainly,” I said to C. David Cantrell in his limousine twenty years later, “to have something that wouldn’t go away.”

“But did you love him?”

“More than anything in the world,” I said.

Joseph Goins looked up from the journal, his heart heavy and his eyes misting over. Such a pure young thing, she was, he thought, so innocent.

And a plan started forming in his mind. It was still unclear, the actual details, but those would fall into place as they always did.

What he began to see was a way to end all of this running, a way to escape without having to leave, a way to make sure that people got what they deserved. A little wobble of excitement crept across his back as Joseph let the ideas come, let the plan take shape. He fingered the sheet taped over the word processor that sat on the table in front of him.

The late-afternoon sunlight warmed the avocado leaves outside his window, throwing a soft golden shade into the room. His fingertips burned with the terrible dryness that came when he began to feel this way. Joseph looked at the tree leaves outside, then pressed his fingers gently against the table. There was only so much of the world that he could take at a time, then he reached his fill and, like water brimming over the top of a cup, he simply had to go somewhere else.

Open your arms again, Sweet Ann, he thought. And let me in.

APRIL 2

What happened that night after our first ride in the limousine is important. I got home at quarter ’til one, half an hour before Ray did. I took off my wet clothes and put them on hangers far back in my closet; I washed and brushed my hair; I put on fresh makeup and lipstick. Then I got out some of our adult toys — we called them “learning aids” back when we used to use them — a red lace teddy that snaps under the crotch, a garter belt and some fishnet stockings, a very slinky black silk robe, some ridiculously high heels. My skin felt so warm and sensitive as I put it all on, opened a bottle of wine and poured two glasses.

I felt like a prehistoric flower inside, one of those kind that can gobble up a man if he steps in.

When Ray came home, I took him in my arms and we kissed, but it was mechanical and disembodied, and I could feel that Raymond was somewhere else. So he moved down and tried to please me another way.

But that night, well, it wasn’t going to happen.

So we ended up so strangely, with Raymond sitting on the bed where I had been, and me standing in front of him, quivering on those dumb high heels for balance. I poured another glass of wine, closed my eyes, drank the wine, said to myself, If you can’t make him happy, at least let him make you happy.

And I’ll admit now what I refused to admit then, what I drank the rest of the wine to deny — that I was hungry not for Raymond that night but for David. Although I could certainly not have said that I loved Dave Cantrell then, what I craved that night was not to be pleasured but to be loved, not to be worshiped but simply to be needed, not to take satisfaction but to give it. Sometimes I think of life as an elegant party going on constantly inside our heads. Mine is a masquerade. It was David’s role to wear the mask of love. Could I have known he would be so eager? I admit that from the first time I saw him again on Lady of the Bay, I believed he would be.

Ray had not played that part in a long time. Five months, two weeks, and eleven days, since the last time we made love, or held each other with true affection. I know because it was my birthday last year.

But the masquerade kept going on, despite my confusion. As the days went by, I was afraid, then elated. I was content, then desperately thirsty. Sometimes I even felt that I was being watched! I turned and saw no one; I scanned my mirror when I drove; I peeked from my windows when I was home alone. My conscience, Dear One, hounding me already. Once I thought I saw a young man — standing at a distance from the playground with a camera around his neck, staring directly at me. But when I looked again, he was gone. So, I thought, my conscience is a cute guy, dogging the heels of my betrayal, logging every step of my treachery. I was disgusted with myself. I was angry. My confusion was very real.

Joseph placed the Poon’s Locker postcard on the open page, then shut the journal over it. Things were beginning to make sense now, like an image coming through fog, as if Ann’s confusion were becoming his clarity.

It was too hard to get close to C. David Cantrell. Joseph was not allowed past the PacifiCo Tower security booth; he was hustled off the steps by security men three days running; he could neither walk nor drive past the guardhouse of Cantrell’s private Newport Beach neighborhood. He hit upon a simple alternative.

Joseph had just turned to lie down on his bed again when someone knocked on his door.

It was loud, so loud it sent a riot of alarm into his ears, a terrible clanging noise. As it settled into a quieter roar, he turned, to see Lucinda, halfway into his room and halfway out, studying him with her dark brown eyes. She brushed away a long golden band of hair and offered a very small smile. “What are you doing?” she asked.

“I—” Joseph’s tongue wallowed against his dry mouth, trying to get positioned. The roar was better now, but he couldn’t seem to get his thoughts down into his lips. His cracking fingertips felt as if they’d been held against dry ice. “I... was reading.”

“What a drag.”

Joseph thought with new terror of the leather-bound journal sitting on the table in front of him. He gathered it up without looking at it and slid it into his box beside the desk.

“Aren’t you gonna unpack?” she asked.

“Yes. In a while.”

“What were you reading?”

“Just a story.”

“Horror is my favorite,” she said. “If I really have to read.”

Joseph nodded. The ringing in his head lowered in volume again.

“My grandmother will talk your ear off. That’s why I’m gone a lot.”

“She seems like a nice old lady.”

“Old people are so, like serious. How old are you?”

“Twenty-four.”

“I’m eighteen. My name’s not rilly outta here. It’s Lucinda. Not Lucy. Lucinda.”

Joseph cleared his throat with some difficulty. “I’ve always... liked that name.”

She continued to regard him from behind a corner of bright straight hair. “So, can I come in, or what?”

“Sure,” he said calmly.

Lucinda slid in with an air of secrecy, and shut the door. She looked at him with a cumbersome, self-conscious expression — kind of a smile — then glanced around for somewhere to sit. She picked the bed. A deep updraft of warmth spread into his genitals.

“What beach do you go to?” she asked.

“Any beach.”

“I go to Fifteenth.” Lucinda apparently intended for this information to do something once it sunk in. “Older guys,” she prompted. “Even the cops there are cool. Cute, too.”

Joseph wasn’t sure why it mattered what beach you went to. It was all the same beach really, street numbers or not. Did Lucy... Lucinda like cops? “Cool,” he said.

“You’re not very tan. Where are you from?”

“Irvine.”

“Inland. Bummer. What do you listen to, like, for music?”

“I don’t listen to music.”

“That’s fully unbelievable.”

“It’s too... fast.”

“There’s slow ones, too. Slow stuff is old people’s music. I like it when it makes me all amped and crazy. You know, gets you through the day.” Lucinda sighed. She looked around, suddenly bored. Her eyes were quick, and they seemed to be looking for something specific. “Do you have a car?”

She’s looking for car keys, he thought, of course. He hesitated. “Yes.”

“What kind?”

“Porsche.”

Lucinda came back to life. “Get out of here!”

“But it’s in the shop.”

“Yeah, right.”

“It’s blue,” he said.

She looked at him, askance but hopeful. “Maybe we can drive around in it when it’s fixed.”

Joseph was suddenly clear of head now — no ringing, no interference. His plan was crystalizing. “Sure. But there’s some trouble with the mechanics. I’ve got to get my lawyer involved.”

“You got a lawyer?”

“On retainer.”

“The only retainer I had was when I was thirteen, but it hurt my gums.” She laughed at her own joke. Her smile was dazzling. “So, you really got your own lawyer?”

Joseph, for the first time in his life, was discovering what it was to impress. It seemed to come to him like a revelation from heaven. He’d always gotten by before by being the boy, the wonder-struck youth, the innocent. How well that had worked in Hardin County. It’s out by the swamp, Lucy. I swear. I couldn’t believe it, either...

He wondered whether this was his first taste of adulthood. “And I need to write him a letter on good paper, with a good word processor. It’s got to look important, because he is.”

“Well, like write it then, and we’ll go for a ride. I got lots of friends you’d like.”

“My computer’s in the shop also.”

Lucinda laughed, more of a snicker maybe. “Everything you have is broke. I suppose your lawyer’s in the hospital, too?”

“Can I use this one?” Joseph looked at the shrouded boxes on the desk before him.

“Fine with me,” she said. “Grandma bought that for me for college. A little like, early. I’m not ready for college.”

“I’m not familiar with this model.”

“Even a nerd can run one. It’s totally easy.”

“Will you show me how?”

“So you can write your lawyer about the Porsche?”

“Yes.”

She looked at him, torn between trust and her somewhat dim view of the stuff guys try to pull on you sometimes. Then she stood and offered him a coquettish smile, peeping out from behind that wall of hair again. “First, Joe, you got to take the covers off.”