Allison cowers beneath him, tears streaming down her face. A strip of duct tape seals her mouth. Another binds her hands. Blood runs from her nose.
A noise sounds behind him. The other one’s coming! With a rush of panic, he slides behind the door. An instant later the man he’d seen earlier bursts in. “I found some jewelry in the bedroom,” the man says. “That’s all there is. Let’s go, Cal.”
“There’s gotta be cash, Joey,” Cal snarls. “Find it.”
“There ain’t none. I checked.”
“Where’s the money?” Cal demands, grabbing Allison’s hair and jerking her head from the couch.
“She might be able to talk better if you took off the gag,” Joey points out.
Cal rips the tape from Allison’s mouth. “Where’s the money?”
“There isn’t any,” Allison sobs. “My dad doesn’t keep cash in the house.”
Cal doubles his fist. Coldly and deliberately, he hits her. Grinning, he hits her again. “Where is it?”
He sneaks from his hiding place, backing down the hall.
“She don’t know. Jesus, Cal, you’re gonna kill her!”
“Bullshit! She knows and she’s gonna tell.”
He can hear them arguing as he retreats. The phone in Dad’s room? No time. Run to the neighbors for help? Stop a car on the highway?
All at once he remembers the gun.
It’s a. 38-caliber Smith amp; Wesson, his father’s service revolver before he switched to the Beretta automatic. It’s on the top shelf of the coat closet, supposedly safe from prying hands. He knows from experience that he can reach it from the ladder to his loft.
He retreats to the entry and ascends the ladder, stopping partway up. Resisting an urge to climb the final rungs to the loft and lock the hatch behind him, he holds on with one hand, pawing through articles far back on the closet’s shelf.
It has to be here. Please be… There!
His fingers close on the gun. Then the box of. 38 hollow points.
Hurry… hurry…
Fighting to control his shaking hands, he opens the cylinder and begins jamming in shells as he’s seen his father do at the academy qualifying range. One, two, three…
A cartridge slips from his fingers. It clatters to the floor.
“What’s that?” Cal’s voice echoes from down the hall.
“I didn’t hear nothin’,” Joey answers.
He holds his breath, waiting…
“Guess you’re right,” Cal says finally.
He closes the cylinder and eases back down the ladder. Quickly, down the hall before they hear me. He hesitates at the living room door. Cocks the revolver. Terrified, he steps into the room.
“Nate! Wake up!”
“Wha-?”
I knelt beside Nate’s bed in the darkness. “Wake up, Nate. You’re having a nightmare.” I flipped on the bedside lamp and sat on the edge of his bunk. “Damn, you’re all sweaty. You’ve been crying, too. What’s wrong?”
“Nothing,” Nate choked, his voice thick with panic.
Gently, I pulled him to a sitting position. “Kid, I can’t help if you won’t talk to me. This isn’t the first one of these you’ve had. What’s going on?”
Nate looked away.
“Please tell me what’s bothering you, son.”
“I don’t know what’s wrong with me, Daddy,” Nate sobbed, abruptly bursting into tears. “I want to be good, but-”
“You’re not making sense,” I said, gripping his shoulders. “What’s being good have to do with anything?”
“I thought bright lights were customary during an interrogation,” came a voice from the doorway. Allison stepped into the room. She regarded Nate somberly. For a puzzling instant I had the impression that something passed between them. “Leave him alone, Dad,” she ordered in a voice as cold as ice.
I hesitated, taken aback by her tone. Puzzled, I returned my attention to Nate. “Kid, I just want to help.”
“I know,” said Nate, his words barely audible.
“Leave him alone,” Allison repeated angrily.
Ignoring her, I asked Nate, “Can we start over? Please tell me what’s going on in that head of yours. Maybe we can work it out together.”
Again, Nate glanced at Allison, then began crying anew. He was trembling, too. “Aw, kid, come here,” I said. I drew him to me and held him against my chest until he finally stopped shaking. More confused than ever, I tried again. “Nate, talk to me. Please.”
“Nothing’s wrong, Daddy,’ he said. “I didn’t mean to wake you. I won’t do it again.”
“Nate…”
“Please, Dad. Nothing’s wrong.”
I hesitated, shaking my head in bewilderment. “Okay,” I said. “But if you ever need to talk things over, you know, man to man…”
“That go for me, too?” Allison interjected bitterly. “Or is a ‘man to man’ with your daughter completely out of the question?”
“What are you so pissed off about, Allison? I swear, sometimes I don’t understand you.” I rose from the bed. “The sun will be up in a couple hours,” I said, completely at a loss. I ran my fingers through my hair and sighed. “Let’s… let’s try to get some shuteye.”
“I wish Mom would come home,” said Nate, wiping his nose on his pajama sleeve.
“A big amen to that,” Allison added fiercely. “I wish she were home right now.”
I turned in the doorway. “Me, too,” I said.
Confused and upset, I couldn’t get back to sleep. After pulling on a jacket, I grabbed my cell phone, descended to the beach, and sat on a large, lounge-style swing I had hung from the upper deck some years back. I’d been gazing out at the ocean and puzzling over my confrontation with Allison and Nate for several minutes when I heard a shuffling behind me. I turned. A pair of eyes shined at me from the darkness.
“Callie,” I said. “Couldn’t sleep either, huh?”
The Labrador moved closer and cocked her head, regarding me as if to say she wasn’t about to stay in bed with someone rustling around outside in the dark.
I patted the cushion beside me. “C’mon up, girl.”
Callie bounded onto the swing, balancing on unsteady legs as it swayed beneath her. Eventually the movement slowed and she lay down, stretching out on the cushions, head in my lap. I scratched her ears and ran my hand over her rust-yellow fur. “Life’s simple for you, huh, pup?” I said softly. “If you can’t eat it, hump it, or fetch it-piss on it.”
Callie responded with a perfunctory tail-thump. Then, with a sigh, she closed her eyes. Within minutes her lids started to flutter, her feet to twitch, and a small whine escaped her mouth as she pursued some phantom in her dreams.
Callie and I stayed there long into the night. Although Callie slept, I did not. Troubled by Allison’s bitterness and Nate’s unreasoning fears, I revisited my discussion with Catheryn at the Music Center, reluctantly wondering whether she had been right. Clearly something was terribly wrong with both Allison and Nate. Why had it taken me so long to see it? Rather than meeting my responsibilities as a father, was it easier for me to lose myself in the demands of work instead of facing a truth I didn’t want to consider, a truth I couldn’t accept? Part of me felt certain Catheryn was wrong. Yet no matter how many times I replayed our conversation-rationalizing, justifying, devising powerful new arguments and strategies and rebuttals-another part of me remained unable to dismiss her accusation. Disturbingly, the more I pondered the question, the more I was forced to face the heartbreaking realization that I had failed my family in some deep and fundamental way, inflicting a wound that might be too deep to heal.
Hours later I pulled my cell phone from my jacket pocket and punched in the international code for Rome. But as I started to enter the digits for Catheryn’s hotel, I hesitated. Unwilling to continue but not knowing why, I lowered the phone. Finally, as the sun began its slow ascent over the Santa Monica skyline, feeling more despondent than I had since Tommy died, I headed back into the house.