Where Serpents Lie

Ten

I struck out with both listing agents. Evans was in his seventies and Johnson was a fifty-year-old family man recently diagnosed — the agent told me confidentially — with AIDS. Two of twelve out of the way. I used a pay phone in a mini-mall to call three more of the agents, and set up appointments for the next day. I posed as a potential buyer because tomorrow was Saturday and even agents, hungry as they are for action in a cool market, don’t want to give up weekends to answer questions.

But I had a bad feeling about The Horridus investigation, so I went back to the Sheriff headquarters and picked up both the Pamela and Courtney files to study at home. I always have a bad feeling about investigations until they’re closed and the creep is in the can. But I felt even worse about this one than the others — something about the “pageantry,” the ritual, the threat of escalation and our slender evidence filled me with dread. I looked at Frances’s station, wondering if that big pink envelope might be on top, but that was a ridiculous idea, and it wasn’t. It’s hard not to be suspicious about things when it’s part of your job.

On my way home I dropped by two more pet stores that sold reptiles and showed my sketch to the clerks. Never seen him. We sell lots of snake food. Sorry. On the way out of the last one I picked up a Truck and Van Trader magazine to see if anyone was offering a late-model red Chrysler van for sale. But because we hadn’t released our description of the vehicle, I wondered if this part of the case was a waste of time. If he suspected his van had been seen, why not just garage it for a while? Sell it in Los Angeles or San Diego counties? Or paint it?

By the time I turned off of Laguna Canyon Road and rolled into the narrow driveway on Canyon Edge, I was tired and discouraged. I briefly thought of all the action I was missing at Tonello’s — Fridays are a true free-for-all. The liquor flows and the tongues loosen and you never know what you might hear. Maybe Jordan Ishmael would dance in his underwear. I thought of Donna because I always thought of Donna. I was not quite enough of a fool to believe, even for a moment, that the three of us — Melinda, Donna and I — were not headed for some kind of disaster. Someone would get hurt. Maybe we all would. But enough. I was home for a Friday night with people I loved, and I had my files on Pamela and Courtney to ponder late, when the house was quiet and the ghosts were free to roam and offer their opinions.

We took Penny to her tennis class — our standard Friday evening. It’s a late one that starts at seven at the high school courts, for the advanced nine- to twelve-year-old girls who love the game. Melinda and I sat on a wooden bench at courtside and watched Penny and the others do their drills. There’s something about a youngster who is developing skills that makes me very happy. I watched Penny lean into her two-hand backhands, her head steady and her knees bent, sending the ball high over the net with lots of spin, and deep into her opponents’ court. She’s an intensely focused player, and quick to pounce on mistakes, much like her mother would be if she played the game. The yellow ball arced back and forth over the clean green court. There was the clomping of tennis shoes and the wonderful pop of strings on felt. The dusk was falling and you could see the Pacific not far away, dark and brooding under the orange-black sky. The light of the sun bounced off the windows of the houses behind us, turning them copper. I turned and looked. Someone was barbecuing up on the hillside. The new palm trees in front of the high school swayed lazily in the breeze and you could already see the first stars and the moon in the sky, even though the sun wasn’t down yet. I took Melinda’s hand and held it against my leg. She stiffened at first touch, like she almost always did, then relaxed and moved closer to me. She kissed my cheek and I squeezed her fingers with my own. After the hell that Mel went through with her father, and within herself, her new affection was like the sun coming out after a long and bitter night.

We watched Penny, saying little. Something about this time of evening asks you to be quiet. So we sat there close together with our fingers locked and our palms loosely touching and watched the yellow balls go back and forth. I thought about Matt because I always think about Matt when I feel good. When I feel bad I think about him, too. We were snorkeling off of Shaw’s Cove here in Laguna when he died. It was a freakish situation that took the doctors several days to explain. I agreed to an autopsy, though the thought of Matthew’s perfect little body being torn by the saws was a thought that made me vomit, more than once. I didn’t know anything was wrong until I saw him floating on the water. I got to him and stripped the mask off his lolling face and swam for shore with all my might. On the sand I proned him out and slapped his face, listening for his heartbeat. I couldn’t hear anything inside him because my ears were roaring and this flock of seagulls had chosen the air right above us to hover and caw and cry. I got him to start breathing. The next thing I did was gather his cool little body in my arms and run. I was a lot faster than a call to 911 and a wait for help. Across the beach, up the steps, and down Coast Highway for about a mile to the little walk-in emergency clinic. It didn’t take long, maybe five or six minutes in all, but I held him close the whole way, because to me he was the most precious parcel on earth. I talked to him the whole time. I still remember what I said. I burst into the waiting area and carried Matt past the desk and the nurses, back into one of the examination rooms, where a doctor was talking to a woman. They were both briefly horrified. But the doctor understood almost immediately and he took one look at me and one look at my son, and grabbed Matthew away from me. I told him what happened while he applied the oxygen mask to his face and the nurse attached the cardiac shock pads to his tiny chest. He ordered me to get the extra blanket from the other exam room, which I did, but when I tried to get back in he’d locked me out. A few minutes later, it was over.

Penny’s coach told them to take five, so she came over and set her racquet on the bench. She plunked down between us, breathing hard in the way a nine-year-old breathes hard, and you understand that in about fifty seconds they’ll be fully recovered and ready to go again. “I’m hitting good, Terry.”

“Well. You’re hitting well.”

I don’t know why Penny addresses nearly all her tennis comments to me. She’s been playing a lot longer than I’ve known her. Maybe it’s because we come out here and hit sometimes on the weekends. In fact, she’s been addressing me instead of her mother, or both of us, for the whole year we’ve shared the same roof. I’ve wondered if it’s her way of welcoming me to the unit. I’m flattered by it, I suppose, but I sometimes wonder if Melinda is as unfazed by being “second” as she says she is. Not having any children of my own, it’s hard for me to say what might hurt a parent’s feelings and what might not.

Penny then offered me this very penetrating, unguarded, hopeful look, a look I’ve never seen her cast on anyone else. Her pupils seem to bore right in, but not in aggression, rather approval. There is a twinkle of humor in her gray irises. I think it means she accepts me as a person, and has unique feelings for me, and that they are good feelings. I’ve come to think of it as Our Look, because I return it as best I can, though I have no idea what I look like, gazing back.

“How’s the backhand, Pen?” asked Melinda.

“The usual,” she answered absently.

“Well, what’s the usual?” asked Melinda.

“You know, Mom.”

Melinda smiled and pulled Penny’s cap down over her eyes.

“Mom, cut it out.”

“Boo-hoo,” said Melinda.

“Boo-hoo,” I said.

Penny bounced off the bench and took up her racquet. She studied us. She tapped her mother on the top of the head with the strings, then me. “You’re just sticking up for her, Terry.”

“I think she’s worth sticking up for,” I said.

“And it’s nice to be stuck up for, sometimes.”

“My boyfriend’s going to stick up only for me,” said Penny.

“No use hogging all the good feelings,” said Melinda. “There’s enough of those to go around.”

Penny let out that impatient exhale that kids save for the ignorant, then skipped onto the court.

“She sure has gotten to be a smart-ass the last year,” Mel said.

“Kinda has.”

“She’s competitive and jealous.”

“Maybe she’s going out of her way to make me feel welcome.”

Melinda shook her head. “I don’t think so. It’s not that I don’t think she’s generous enough for that. Or duplicitous enough to fake it to get what she wants. She genuinely adores you.”

I thought about that. Melinda ascribes levels of sophistication — as in sophistry — to Penny that I don’t see. I see a lack of guile. It’s another example of the difference in the way we see children in general, I suppose.

“Do you really think she’d BS me?”

“Oh, yes. I think it’s instinct for some people. Intuitive self-preservation. Smearing a little honey on things. She knows you like her, and that’s your weak spot. She’s not exploiting it yet, I don’t think.”

“You make her sound like a Borgia.”

“I think she has depths you don’t see. Well, do you feel welcome with us?”

I thought about that for a moment. The last year had been full of good things for me and full of disappointments, too. “Yes, most of the time. I don’t forget that you two are the family and I’m kind of the third wheel, but... third wheels are good sometimes. Like on ATVs and trikes and—”

“—No, really, do you feel welcome, or don’t you?”

“I have. You’ve never made me feel like an outsider. And Penny hasn’t, either. I think she likes me.”

Melinda turned her face to me and studied me hard. She had that interrogator’s expression, the placid one that bores in, gathers all and gives up nothing in return. “In fact, she’s playing us off against each other a lot more now than she used to. She’s using you to leverage her discontents with me.”

“I see that. But I wonder where to draw the line.”

“You shouldn’t cater to her, Terry.”

“Do you really think I do?”

“Of course you do. You’re a sucker for affection, just like we all are. I don’t blame you. I just don’t think it’s probably good for Penelope, in the long run, if you overdo that kind of thing.”

I felt gut punched. I hated even the idea of getting between her and her daughter. I wanted harmony, not conflict. Clear lines, no clutter. Who doesn’t? Few things in life are more surprising than assuming your partner agrees with you, only to find out she or he vehemently does not. You wonder where you’re getting your ideas of who they are.

“I really didn’t think I was. But I won’t. I’ll be real careful about that.”

“Do what you mink’s right, Terry. It’s just a phase. It will be over soon.”

Melinda turned away and watched the court. “But what I’m saying is, it’s a cheap-shit stunt to endear yourself to her if you’re not going to stick around.”

Wham.

She looked back at me with a cruel little smile. I’d seen a lot of that smile back around the time her father died and we were both in our separate worlds of torment Not so much, lately.

“I’ll always do what’s best for her, Terry. Always.”

“You should. And so far as my sticking around goes, I’m here. And I’m happy to be here. I adore both of you. You’re two of my favorite people in the whole world.”

She nodded, still looking back at me. The smile was gone. “So you don’t think that I’m just a dried-up old bag who won’t give you a family of your own?”

“Not going to answer, Mel. You know what the answer to that is.”

And well she did, because this line of inquiry had come up before. So far as being dried up, Melinda has always been squeamish and uncertain about her own sexuality. Not prudish so much as afraid, slightly ashamed. With me, anyway. I have no idea what she was like with Jordan Ishmael. “Dried up” was a phrase she introduced herself, though she has been quite a bit less than dried up on several occasions with me. She’s often called herself my “old girl.” It’s been a term of self-endearment, as well as a way of getting me to acknowledge that her two years of seniority don’t bother me in the least. They don’t and never have.

So far as not giving me a family, that’s a decision she made clear to me from the very moment we even considered moving closer to each other. Long before we decided to share a home. Marriage, maybe, she said: no children. She had been there and done that. I agreed wholeheartedly. I had had Matthew, and he was a perfect human and a perfect memory, and he was enough. I had no desire to bring another child into the world. None of them would ever be him. I believed that I had been blessed once and blessed almost completely. And I believed that only a fool would ask more of life than that.

Melinda has told me a hundred times — the first few in all seriousness, the others as a kind of tossed-off joke — that I’d be better off with a young bimbo who would have my babies and still look good in a two-piece five years from now. But the fact that Melinda is the absolute opposite of a bimbo is exactly what made me love her to begin with. I took to her unadorned qualities like a trout released into a cold mountain brook.

From the beginning there was no ditz or glitz in her; no mindless levity; no primping and preening; no consuming vanity, gyms, StairMasters or step aerobics; no low-calorie, nonfat, high-fiber diets; no weaves or perms or makeovers. In fact, until six months ago, she rarely wore makeup or did more with her hair than wash and comb it. Until six months ago I never saw her bring home clothes from anywhere but the discount warehouses. Until six months ago, when Mel began to pull out of that spiral that began with the death of her indifferent father, she rarely wore lipstick. Since that low point she’s shopped upscale two times and made regular attempts to prettify herself. She sometimes wears lipstick and makeup.

I’m not sure what to make of it or how to react to it. If it was a sign of happiness or newfound confidence, I’d be happy, too. But in spite of her noticeable improvement since those dark days, I wouldn’t describe Melinda Vickers — she reclaimed her maiden name when she divorced Jordan — as a happy person. There’s a sadness in her that I cherished from the start. A sadness that seemed like a perfect mate for my own. And it’s still there inside her, just beneath the new outfit from Nordstrom and the occasional lipstick and the neatly trimmed hair. But her sadness is the one thing about Melinda that I loved in the beginning and have become impatient with. I think it’s time for her to move beyond it. It’s not necessary. But who am I to say what her heart should feel?

I’ve been no help to her at all. I changed when I met Donna Mason. It actually seemed like something in the air I was breathing in that elevator, and maybe it did have to do with pheromones or some other biological mystery. I was instantly, subtly altered, my polarities tweaked, my point of view adjusted. I was lifted, turned and set down facing a slightly different direction. In that instant I saw myself with different eyes. I saw the world, and Melinda, too, with different eyes. It was like seeing clearly for the first time, or, more realistically, for the first time in a long time. Beginning then, with a four-floor elevator ride, I started to rethink a lot of what I thought I knew. That moment was a beginning and an ending. And since then I’ve been wondering how to accommodate the changed Terry Naughton with the old one. I’ve been as cautious as I can, as slow as I can, as self-examined as I can. I’ve put on the brakes, rationalized the circumstances, had a thousand long talks with myself. I’ve cursed the change, punished myself for undergoing it just when Melinda needed me most, loathed myself for stepping into that elevator, bludgeoned my own heart for its excitement. But after all of that, the fact remains, untarnished as a ball of solid gold: I am in love with Donna Mason and with the Terry Naughton I become when I think about her. I feel like many good things are possible with her, through her, around her. But I am dazed and suffocated by the Terry Naughton who lives his lying life with Melinda. I feel ready to shed away the old and make room for the new. Bottom line is I’ve made one gigantic mess of things, and I know this. There will be hell to pay.

I didn’t answer her question about being an old bag who wouldn’t give me a son or daughter. I sensed the ocean of unsaid things welling up around us, splashing over the sides of our rickety little boat, the sea swells in the distance high and black and frothing at their tops, advancing. I yearned for tequila but I quit carrying the flask two months ago.

After tennis we all went to a bluff-top café on Coast Highway where the food is good and cheap and you can sit on stools overlooking the Pacific. The ocean was flat and shiny as lacquer, but I still kept seeing those waves heaving up toward us.

That night Melinda came to bed in a salmon-colored slip I’d never seen before with lipstick freshly applied and a bit of dizzyingly sensual perfume coming from her. She was assured and eager, even a little greedy.

It was one of those times when you make love without words because you understand that you are either continuing something or ending it, and you don’t want to know which.