“Dad’s retired. Playing golf and kind of bored. Mom’s still hyperactive, running the girls’ watersports programs at the high school.”
“I always loved those two.”
“And yours?”
“They’re still in Montana when it’s warm. Dad’s thinking of selling his practice and retiring.”
Jen comes around the little table and hugs Belle. Wonders for the millionth time if this is really good for either of them.
“I’ll see you later, Belle.”
“But which me will you see?”
Belle’s old joke from when they were kids.
At home on Castle Rock, Jen changes into a one-piece swimsuit and warms up for her hour of breath-control training in the high school pool.
Stands for a moment at a window and looks across the rain-greened, unspoiled hills, Laguna Canyon Road a winding black ribbon bustling with cars, the blue sky holding wispy clouds.
Loves this canyon. Loves these beaches. Loves this city.
In the kitchen she pours the last half of her black pepper vodka down the sink.
In the upstairs bathroom she flushes the Xanax pills down the drain.
Minutes later she’s in the LBHS pool with weights on her ankles and in her hands, running in slow motion across the bottom as hard as she can toward the far deck.
15
Still flush with adrenaline from beating down on King Jim and his pirates, Brock stalks a sidewalk in downtown San Diego, pulling a wheeled cart of naloxone, clanking oxygen cylinders, and bottled water. He’s posted to all his Rescue Mission followers, and is hoping to get a little participation here. He’s got on a black-and-green Go Dogs T-shirt with the snarling dachshund mascot, and cargo shorts loaded with granola bars and vitamin packets. He and Mahina are looking for anyone struggling to breathe.
He knows there will be some customers, just up ahead in the shadows of the towering Central Library. There are Right Fighters and cops around, giving Brock hard looks and occasional nods of recognition.
One of the Right Fighters waves at them.
“Guns on the left, clowns to the right,” says Mahina.
It’s late afternoon and the streets around the library are crowded with tents and strung tarps and shopping carts stuffed with clothes and blankets and random items from boom boxes to swim fins, a beaten guitar, boxed wine, donated greens wilting in plastic bags, dog kibble, a trike, an American flag on a tilting pole. People everywhere, tucked into the shadows, some moving and others still as statues on this breezeless day. A dog, a parrot atop a tent, a pet rat on a man’s shoulder.
Just behind him, Mahina tugs a cooler filled with chopped, chilled pineapple and watermelon.
“You, bro, you’re looking puny to me,” Brock says, kneeling next to a heavyset man in a wheelchair.
“Hard to breathe, got ’can?”
“You don’t get Narcan yet,” says Mahina, offering him a cube of watermelon. “You just dose?”
“No, no, this morning.”
“Narcan’ll keep you alive but mess up your brain. You’re not overdosing. You need air, man. Oxygen. Breath of Life.”
Brock gets the pulse oximeter onto the guy’s cuss finger. The guy is sweating but his cheeks are cold.
He and Mahina have trained sixteen hours to do this. They pay for the oxygen cylinders, naloxone, food, and water out of the unsteady Breath of Life Rescue Mission bank account.
“You’re all over the place, man,” Brock says.
“The ’can keeps me high.”
Mahina has the cylinder out, and she fixes the breathing mask to the top. Brock takes off the oximeter and holds down the big man’s arms as his wife presses the mask to his face and toggles open the valve.
The big man inhales deeply, then again. Brock and Mahina lock eyes briefly and he sees not just compassion in her but forbearance — the same things he feels.
Sometimes he hugs these sufferers; sometimes he wants to slap them silly.
“You just breathe in big, mister,” Mahina says. “Take in the breath. Take in the life.”
Brock notes that one of the Right Fighters is videoing him from across the trashy, fast-food-wrapper-strewn street. Mahina walks toward them, her own phone brandished like the weapon it is.
“You a Jesus nut?” he warbles through the mask.
“I’m a life nut. I want you alive. I want you alive enough to get up and help these beat-up souls around you.”
“I gots Petey to take care of. My dog. He’s got a soul, too.”
“You bet,” says Brock. “I’m going to let go your arms now, so don’t be thrashing around. I’m going to get you some cold fruit and water. Keep breathing, bro.”
Brock and Mahina’s next client is face up on the sidewalk on a sleeping bag, and she’s completely stopped breathing.
In seconds, Brock has the Narcan out and sprays the full four-milliliter dose into one nostril.
All Brock and Mahina can do is wait two minutes before administering a second dose, but they know that every second of not breathing means brain cells dying off fast. They’ve heard dozens of times from friends and family that when some naloxone revivals come to and revive, they’re not the same person ever again.
But just thirty seconds later this young woman gasps and tries to dig her fingernails into the sidewalk, and is soon gulping air as deeply as she can.
Mahina has the oxygen cylinder on her, mask snug and valve open.
The woman sits up, crossing her bruised and dirty legs. “Thanks. Thanks.”
Breathing deeply still, she looks at Mahina then Brock with what looks like gratitude and suspicion.
“What’s your name, woman?” asks Mahina.
“Gail.”
Brock fetches a cold bottled water from his cart, breaks it open, and hands it to her. She brings it to her lips, hands shaking.
“It’s going to get bad when the ’can wears off,” says Gail.
“Don’t get high again too soon,” says Mahina. “You’re just going to be doing this again. Unless you just overdose, up and die.”
“I don’t want to die.”
Gail pulls on the oxygen for another three minutes. Eats some melon and pineapple and downs another bottle of water.
“Help me up?”
With both big hands, Mahina pulls her upright. Gail manages to pick up her sleeping bag.
“Thanks again.”
She drags the ragged red nylon sleeping bag to the library wall, underhands it into a blue dome tent among other dome tents and lean-tos, then waves back at them, stoops, and crawls in.
When she’s inside, Brock looks at Mahina, shakes his head with weariness, and turns to see the Right Fighters shooting video of him again.
“You’re saving the wrong people, Stonebreaker!” one calls out, raising his phone high.
Brock feels the anger and takes off toward them, mayhem in mind.
“Thanks for the invite, Saint Brock! We’ll see you again!”
They sprint off in different directions.
Brock brakes and watches them go, heart pounding, bile rising.
16
Next afternoon Casey is on time for his Travel & Adventure Magazine interview and photo shoot up in Hollywood. A cover, no less. Last month it was Gal Gadot.
He’s standing on a small stage in nothing but swim trunks, his back to a ceiling-high black backdrop blanched bright by a blinding forest of lights. It’s hot, even with the fans turned up high to make Casey’s yellow-blond hair stand up and lean back with apparent velocity.
T&A is what Casey calls this mag, aware that his A is part of what they’re after here. The magazine contract requires one backside image to include “minimally and tastefully exposed buttocks, mutually acceptable by both parties.”