Brasher nodded. “You go on home now. Your mama be fine. Best you go now, take care of your woman…those nice kids.”
Riley made an involuntary movement of denial that involved his whole body. “She’s not my woman,” he said on an exhalation as he twirled his windbreaker over one shoulder. “Wish she could be, but…” He shook his head and walked to the door. “It’s never gonna happen.” He took a deeper breath trying to make room for his heart-still a stone, but too big now for his chest.
“Boy, what you mean by that?” Brasher threw a look toward the bathroom door, then came over and caught Riley by the wrist.
Riley shrugged and looked past him, looking for escape. “Oh, you know…she’s got the children-”
“That’s what’s holdin’ you back? What’s the matter with you, boy? Those kids, they need you-you tell me you don’t see that? That boy, his eyes, they follow you ever’ where you go, ’bout eat you alive. That little girl, she just want a daddy to love her, you can tell that by lookin’.”
“They need a father. They don’t need me.” Now Riley’s face felt like stone, and his voice sounded like it. He opened the door, but Brasher followed him through it and into the deserted hotel hallway.
“Boy,” the older man said in a wondering tone, “I know what you’re thinkin’. You thinkin’ you gonna be like her?” He jerked his head toward the room they’d just left. “Like your daddy was?”
Riley flinched. He said harshly, “I can’t risk that possibility.”
For a few moments Brasher didn’t say anything, just gazed at the floor, his hands hooked in the straps of his overalls. And for some reason, instead of walking off and leaving him there, Riley found himself waiting, while tension hummed behind his eyeballs and through his molars and vibrated in the pit of his belly. Finally, the old man lifted his head and looked not at turn, but dreamily into the distance beyond his shoulder.
“Remember,” he said softly, “that time the big storm come through-you were a little boy, ’bout ten-an’ afterward we went out to the island-”
Riley nodded. He caught a sharp, edgy breath. “And we found the osprey on the beach. I remember. It had been injured in the storm and couldn’t fly.”
“No, boy-he only thought he was injured. He only thought he couldn’t fly.” Brasher chuckled low in his chest. “Poor old osprey so battered and beat-up in the storm, he too scared to fly. He just sittin’ there on the beach, too scared to move.”
“I walked right up to him,” Riley said slowly. “I was going to put my jacket over him so we could take him home…fix him up. But before I could, he started to flap his wings and hop, trying to get away. And then he just…flew away.”
Brasher shook his head, his body jerking with silent laughter. “Just needed a strong-enough incentive to make him try. Found out he wasn’t as banged up as he thought he was. Fact is, he was fine.” He stopped chuckling and gave Riley a sideways look. “That woman, you know, she got the healer’s touch.”
Riley gave a laugh of surprise. “How’d you know that?”
Brasher shrugged. “See it in her eyes…her hands, too. Oh, yeah, she got the touch.” His smile broadened. “Maybe she’s meant, boy-” he pointed toward the ceiling “-you ever think ’bout that? Maybe she meant to heal you.”
Riley laughed again, this time with a growing sense of lightness and hope. He said with a smile of irony, “I told her once I was the doctor that was going to take care of her.”
It was then that his beeper went off.
Summer had never liked wind. She’d grown up in the desert where the winds blew so incessantly they molded the trees and shrubs to their will. She’d lived in a part of the Los Angeles Basin where the Santa Ana winds blew down the valleys and through the passes with enough force to toss tractor-trailer rigs like toys, hot and dry enough to suck every last drop of moisture from plants and people alike. She didn’t mind rain, even in torrents, and actually found thunder and lightning sort of exciting But wind to her seemed like something alive, like a raging beast trying to get to her where she cowered inside her pitiful shelter. When the wind blew hard, she felt small and helpless, and afraid.
But she couldn’t let the children know that. For them she had to be strong, confident and brave. Even when the power went out early on, and they couldn’t make popcorn or watch videos as they had during the big thunderstorm, she stayed cheerful, making an adventure out of it. Instead of popcorn, they made peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches by flashlight, took them upstairs-along with a huge bowlful of grapes-where, as before, everyone including Beatle climbed into Summer’s bed. No one was going to be doing any sleeping, not with the wind screaming like someone being tortured, and things snapping and crashing and thumping around outside. So, instead of watching videos, Summer read while David held the flashlight They’d finished The Black Stallion and were well into The Black Stallion Returns by now. Summer kept the portable radio on the nightstand, tuned to the emergency station but turned down low.
Once, after a particularly loud crash that made the windows rattle and the bed shake, Helen crept closer against Summer’s side and said in a small, frightened voice, “Mommy, is this the hurry-cane?”
Summer put an arm around her and hugged her. “Sure is. Remember what Brasher said? ‘It’s a bi-ig ba-ad storm.’ ”
Helen giggled, then instantly looked as if she might cry. “He said Riley. would take care of us, but he’s not here. Mommy, when is Riley comin’ home?”
“Soon,” said Summer firmly. “He’ll be here soon. Hey-you know what? I’m tired of reading. Why don’t we sing for a while? How about, ‘Jingle Bells, Batman Smells-’ ”
“Mom!”
“Well, okay, then how ’bout, ‘On top of Old Smo-o-key, all covered with fleas…’”
They were singing that, all the verses they could remember, as well as some really silly ones they made up on the spur of the moment, when suddenly Summer went very still.
David stopped singing and gasped, “What?”
“Hush,” she said, giving him a squeeze. “Listen…”
“It’s quiet!”
“Does that mean the hurry-cane is over?”
“No, dummy, it’s the eye. That means it’s only half over.”
“David, please don’t call your sister a dummy-how would you like it if I called you a dummy?” But she said it in a teasing way, tussling playfully with both children, a surefire way to start a roughhouse. But before it could get under way, Beatle went “Wuf!” and jumped down off the bed.
“Riley’s home!” Helen said with a little gasp of joy.
But Summer said, “Hush,” and her arms tightened around both of her children. She hadn’t heard a car drive in or a door open. And Beatle’s tail wasn’t wagging. Instead, from her tiny throat came a low but unmistakable growl.
“Mom-”
“Shush!”
At that moment, from downstairs there came a terrible screech. A panic-stricken “Get out, get out, get out!” Then a splintering crash. And finally…silence. Dead silence.
But Summer knew. Someone was in the house.
Riley was on his cell phone shouting at the top of his lungs, trying to make himself heard above the roar of wind and rain and the futile slap of his windshield wipers. Somewhere out there in that chaos of fallen trees and blowing shingles and whipping power lines he knew Jake Redfield was doing the same.
“I can’t get through,” he bellowed. “It’s flooded here. I’m gonna have to try another way. Dammit, can’t you do something? Send a damn helicopter!”