Riptide

six

By the time Jennifer left the lobby she had composed herself. Whatever Richard had been thinking, she was still sure he would never harm her, or anyone.

“Checkin’ up on him?”

The voice came from behind. She turned and saw the building manager, a heavyset bald man with a perpetual stubble of beard.

“I told ya the goddamn building didn’t fall down,” he added as he walked up to her, his mouth working on a wad of something black.

“I needed to see for myself.”

“Right. You don’t trust me. Hey, if you’re so concerned about your crazy-ass brother, why ya got him living in this pile?”

It was uncomfortably close to what Richard himself had said. “He likes it here.”

“Yeah? Well, I wish he didn’t. The rest of my tenants ain’t too wild about him bein’ around. ’Specially the ones in number twenty-two, right below him.”

“What complaint could they possibly have?”

“Only that he makes a racket late at night. Every night, at least recently. We’re talking two, three in the A.M., okay? He comes stomping in, all agitated. It drives ’em crazy, hearing all that shit from upstairs.”

“Richard goes out at night?”

“That’s what I’m tellin’ ya, genius. He’s a fuckin’ tomcat, always on the prowl.”

“I had no idea.”

“Yeah, I guess it would be asking too much to have you keep an eye on the crazy son of a bitch.”

“I do keep an eye on him. He’s always around whenever I come by.”

“Try coming by at night. Or in the morning, early. That’s when he hangs out at the graveyard.”

“Graveyard?”

“The one on Pico and 14th. You know it?”

“I know it.” Her voice was low.

“Lady in number sixteen goes jogging every day. Runs through the cemetery. Says he’s there a lot, just standing around, talking to himself. Or maybe he’s talking to the dead, for all I know.” The manager spit out a chunk of whatever he was chewing. “She wants him outta the building. Everybody does. I’d kick his ass out on the street in a minute if the law would let me. Speaking of which, he don’t pay the rent, I’m having him evicted, okay?”

“He’ll pay you. He’s just…forgetful.”

“He’s non compost mentis, is what he is,” he said, getting it wrong. “He’s a freakin’ nutjob, okay? You shoulda had him committed a long time ago.”

“He’s my brother.”

“So what?”

Jennifer turned away without answering. She was halfway down the front walk when she heard him call after her.

“Hey. He ain’t violent, is he?”

“Why would you ask that?”

“Some of the women, they say he gives ’em the evil eye. Hostile. Real scary.”

“He’s not violent.”

He couldn’t be.

***

When she got back to the house, her phone was ringing. She picked up before her machine could intercept the call. “Hello?”

“So you survived the quake.” It was Casey.

“Still have all my fingers and toes. You?”

“I’ve got all my appendages. And I do mean all.”

“This is how they came up with the expression, call someone who cares.”

“Harsh, Pee-wee. Very harsh.”

“But accurate. And don’t call me Pee-wee. According to the news, Pacific Area got the worst of shaking. How bad is it?”

“Well, it’s not Northridge, but way worse than Chino Hills. A lot of old buildings are gonna be red-tagged. Hopefully not yours.”

“This house is solid,” she said with pride. “It’s survived a century of seismic events.”

“You’d better hope your luck holds. Anyway, I’m riding patrol for the rest of the day. Emergency protocol. You know the drill, nobody on patrol side goes home. My advice is to stay off the streets. Traffic’s a mess.”

“It didn’t seem too bad to me.”

“You’ve been out already? Gawking at the damage like every other lookie-loo?”

“I had to check on my brother.”

“I didn’t know you had a brother. He okay?”

“Yes, he’s…fine.” As fine as he ever was.

“See, I’m learning more about you every day.”

“I’m endlessly fascinating.”

“You are,” he said over a crackle of radio crosstalk. “You’re an exotic riddle, like the Sphinx. A woman of mystery and intrigue — ”

“Enough with the compliments.”

“It’s never enough. Just give me time. I’ll wear you down, Silence.”

“Don’t count on it, Wilkes.”

“You know you want me. You’re just making me work for it.”

“Self-delusion is a terrible thing.”

“You should know. So you’re sure there was no damage to your place? Did you check everywhere?”

“I checked.” She decided she had to tell someone and it might as well be him. “Part of my cellar wall crumbled. And you’re not going to believe what I found.”

“I’ve been wearing a uniform for eight years. There’s nothing I haven’t seen or won’t believe.”

She told him. When she was through, there was a brief silence on his end.

“Shit,” he said finally.

Childishly she was pleased to get a reaction out of him. “Is that your professional opinion?”

“How the hell did they get there?”

“Maybe it’s some kind of family crypt from way back when.”

“I’m coming over.”

“It’s not necessary.”

“I think it is. See you in five.”

“Really, I — ”

Dead phone.

It was nice of him to worry, she guessed. But she wished he wouldn’t.

With a dustpan she swept up the mess under the fireplace. Shards from the decorative jars were intermingled with the sea glass. She would have to sift through the fragments later. It was easy enough to tell them apart. Sea glass developed a frosted patina of minute crystalline formations. What began as a fragment of an ordinary bottle underwent a magical transformation into a gem. A sea change.

Next she tackled the family photos on the stairs. Most of the glass plates had cracked, but the frames were undamaged. She gathered up the pictures, stacking them neatly. It was funny how rarely she noticed these photographs, though she passed them several times each day. There were shots of her mother on Santa Monica Pier and at a picnic in the Angeles National Forest. She had been a small woman, like Jennifer herself, with the same fragile doll-like quality, but without the assertiveness to compensate for it.

And there was her father, a harried, rumpled man in a loose-fitting suit, his gaze far away.

She had just one memory of her father. She couldn’t even be certain it was a real memory, and not some trick of the mind. She saw herself as a very little girl, riding the carousel on Santa Monica Pier in her father’s lap. The horses whirled, and she was laughing, her father’s strong arms around her waist, holding her tight.

She didn’t want to think about her father. Yet she couldn’t help it. He was so much a part of her life, this man she’d barely known.

Aldrich Silence graduated from USC’s School of Medicine near the top of his class. Though he could have had his pick of lucrative positions, he chose to open a small private practice in Venice. Most of his patients were uninsured, impoverished, or actually homeless. He didn’t make a lot of money. He didn’t care.

He met Marjorie Taylor on a blind date arranged by friends. Unlike other women he’d met, Marjorie didn’t try to convince him to better himself by moving to Beverly Hills. She didn’t think he needed to better himself. She liked him the way he was.

They were married in a hippie style ceremony on the beach. Jennifer was born four years later. By then Aldrich’s practice had begun to fail. The problem wasn’t his uninsured patients. It was Aldrich himself.

He’d started to act “funny,” as Jennifer’s mother would always put it, around the time he turned twenty-six. This was fairly late for the onset of schizophrenia, and the symptoms weren’t correctly diagnosed until they were unmistakable.

In the early years of the illness, he had long periods of normality interspersed with brief spells of irrational behavior. At those times he was uncommunicative and morose. His conversation didn’t track. He would make strange associative leaps. He would get angry for no reason. Occasionally he was violent, breaking small items, slamming doors. On the rare occasions when Marjorie spoke of it, years later, she stressed that he never laid a hand on her. But she was afraid he might.

Aldrich became unpredictable. Some days he didn’t show up at the office. When he did see patients, he would forget their names, ask the same questions over and over, misunderstand their responses. Challenged, he would erupt in rage. Once, he began screaming at the white-haired nurse who ran his reception desk. She quit, and he couldn’t find a replacement.

After the illness was finally diagnosed, Aldrich was sent away to a private psychiatric clinic. He came back seeming clearheaded and calm, almost normal. But the improvements didn’t last.

When Jennifer was two years old, Marjorie gave birth to a second child. A son this time.

Perhaps it was the added responsibility that pushed Aldrich over the edge of the precipice he’d been walking. Or perhaps he had been headed over the edge for so long that even the birth of a son couldn’t save him.

A week after Marjorie returned from the hospital, Aldrich went out to the tool shed in the backyard, and there was a single percussive noise, startling the doves that congregated by the birdbath. Marjorie found him with the gun still in his mouth, his hands gripping the barrel, his fingers clamped down in a final nervous spasm. The back of his head had come off with a gout of blood that sprayed the hammers and power drills pegged to the wall.

Jennifer was home at the time, but at age two she had no understanding of what had happened. Her daddy was there in the morning, and he was not there in the afternoon. That was all.

When she was a little older, she grasped that her daddy hadn’t just gone away. He died. He was taken up to heaven. She knew no details. Perhaps some nascent intuitive sense prevented her from asking.

She was nine years old when a gossipy student in her third-grade homeroom told her the story. Your daddy shot himself. I heard my parents talk about it. They said he went crazy and blew his brains out. Bang!

Jennifer ran crying out of the room. The teacher found her in the bathroom, slumped on the floor and sobbing.

Her mother was called to pick her up early. In the living room, Marjorie sat down with her and told her it was true.

Why’d he do it, Mommy?

I don’t know, Jenny. He’d been acting funny for a long time.

Funny how?

Just…different. He was sick. And the medicine they gave him wasn’t working.

He was a doctor. Doctors don’t get sick.

Sometimes they do.

It wasn’t much of an explanation. But to this day, it was all she had.