She made a soft, anguished sound. “Oh, God. Bobby.”
“No,” he said, “you wouldn’t.”
“I miss him,” she said, “I miss him so much. Two weekends a month
… it’s so damn unfair.”
Her visitation privileges, she meant. The ex-husband was a lawyer, the self-righteous, conniving type. He’d not only found a self-serving excuse to abandon Bryn when he learned her paralysis was likely to be permanent, he’d sued for custody of the boy and convinced a sympathetic judge to rule in his favor. He had another woman now; Bryn thought he might’ve had her even before the stroke. The plan was for the boy to have a stepmother sometime this summer.
Runyon had met Robert Jr. once, on one of Bryn’s weekends with him last month. Nice kid, nine years old; smart, shy, liked computers and video games and football. No question that he loved his mother, but he seemed a little uneasy around her. Wouldn’t look at her directly, as if the covered half of her face frightened him or made him nervous.
Runyon said, “You’ll have more time with him as he gets older.”
“Will I? You didn’t have any time with your son.”
“Different situation. My first wife was a vindictive alcoholic-I think I told you that. She poisoned Joshua against me. After twenty years, there’s no antidote. Don’t let your ex do that to Bobby.”
“He hasn’t. I don’t think he will. Robert can be a prick, but he cares about Bobby. And doesn’t care enough about me to hurt me any more than he already has.”
“What about the new woman he’s with?”
“I’ve never met her and I’m not sure I want to.”
“Know much about her?”
“No, except that she sells real estate. She’s been good to Bobby-he likes her.”
“Can I ask you a personal question?”
“Yes.”
“Have you talked to Bobby about the paralysis?”
“Mother to son? Yes, as much as you can to a nine-year-old about a thing like that.”
“Let him see your face, without the scarf?”
Nothing for a few seconds. Then, “No.”
“Might help him understand better.”
“It would be cruel to subject him to that. He’s just a child.”
“Afraid of his reaction?”
“I don’t… What do you mean?”
“That he won’t be able to deal with it. Pull away from you.”
“You’ve seen my face,” she said. “Half a Halloween mask.”
Runyon had seen it only once, the first time their lives intersected, when he’d chased away a couple of smart-ass kids after one of them yanked off her scarf in a Safeway parking lot. Dim light, but it hadn’t seemed so bad to him. He said, “Eye of the beholder. It didn’t scare me away.”
“You’re an adult.”
“And you’re Bobby’s mother. He needs you.”
“And he can have me,” she said bitterly, “two weekends every month.”
“I only saw you together once, but you were tentative around him.”
“What the hell does that mean? Tentative?”
“No hugs, no kisses. You didn’t even touch him.”
“Oh, for God’s sake. That’s not true.”
“It’s true, Bryn. I wouldn’t lie to you.”
“You’re a fine one to dispense parental advice. How many times did you hug your son when he was growing up?”
“I didn’t have a choice. You do.”
“That’s enough! I don’t like being told how to deal with my son!”
He’d pushed it too hard, made her angry. A fine one to dispense parental advice.
“All right,” he said, “I’m sorry.”
“You should be.”
“I was out of line. I won’t do it again.”
“Better not if you want to keep this friendship.”
Quiet again until they were approaching Devil’s Slide on the way back. But she’d been thinking about his perceptions, weighing them; she broke the silence by saying, “Jake? About what you said earlier…”
“I didn’t mean to upset you.”
“Just being honest-I know. You were right, I don’t touch Bobby. I’m afraid to touch him, afraid he’ll draw away from me. He’s all I have left. I couldn’t stand to lose him, too.”
“You won’t.”
“It’s just so hard,” she said. “So hard.”
“Don’t let him feel you’re rejecting him and he won’t reject you. I think I’m right about that. Loving close is always better than loving at a distance.”
I t was after nine by the time they got back to the city. The coffee shop at Taraval and Nineteenth Avenue stayed open until midnight; they had dinner there, in a rear booth. A stranger sitting across from them couldn’t keep his fat eyes off Bryn. The third time he glanced over, Runyon caught his gaze and held it, impaled him until the man shifted both his gaze and his body and kept his attention on his plate, where it belonged. Damn people, anyway.
He took Bryn home afterward, walked her to the door. Before she unlocked it and went in, she said, “Thank you.”
“For what?”
“Putting up with me. Being honest. I’m such a screwedup mess.”
“Not any more than me and a whole lot of others.”
“I almost cancelled tonight. So depressed after I saw the doctor.”
“I’m glad you didn’t.”
“So am I.”
“Better now?”
“Better,” she said. “What you said, about Bobby, about loving close… it makes sense.”
“When can we get together again?”
“Not tomorrow. My mother’s night to call.”
Her mother lived in Denver, she’d told him, and was the only other person she could talk to about personal issues. But only for short periods; the mother tended to become weepy and critical.
“Wednesday, then?”
“Yes, Wednesday. Good night, Jake.”
“Good night.”
It was a short drive from Moraga Street to his apartment building on Ortega. On the way he turned his cell phone back on. He’d taken to switching it off when he was with Bryn; urgent calls were a rarity in the evening and their time together had become too important to let routine business intrude.
One voice-mail message, from Cliff Henderson in Los Alegres: “I looked through the trunk in Damon’s garage like you asked. The only thing missing I’m sure about is one of the photo albums. Mostly old pictures taken on hunting and fishing trips-Damon and me, my father, some of his hunting buddies. No damn idea why that crazy bugger would steal it.”
Too late to call Henderson back now. He’d talk to him about the missing album in the morning, in person.
Coming in late to the apartment, facing the emptiness, wasn’t so bad on the nights he was with Bryn. He turned on the TV for noise, booted up his laptop to check his e-mail. All he ever got were occasional business messages and spam, but he always checked it before he went to bed. One e-mail from Tamara tonight, sent after five o’clock, with some more background information on the Henderson brothers, their father, and their remarried mother. Didn’t seem to be much there, but you never knew what might prove to be important until you got deeper into an investigation.
In the bedroom later, he sat on the edge of the bed and looked at the framed portrait of Colleen on the nightstand. Another nightly ritual, but that, too, was different than it had been before. She would’ve liked Bryn, approved of him seeing her. Encouraged it, even. Just one of the things he’d loved about Colleen: she’d always wanted what was best for him.
8
SCHEMER
He sat on the edge of the motel tub, burning the last of the Henderson snapshots.
The cracked, leather-bound album lay spread open on his lap. The door was closed, the rattling fan switched on to clear away the smoke and keep it from setting off the smoke alarm. There were only a handful of snaps left in the album. He’d burned the rest over the past several days, a few each day.
He removed one of the last from its plastic sleeve, looked at it for a time. Lousy, like all of them. Poor composition, bad use of light and background. Cheap camera, probably. Amateur shit. He turned it over to read what was written on the back-“Hayden and George, Aug 1998”-and then spun the wheel of his lighter and touched the flame to one corner. It burned slow at first, then fast. When the heat began to sear his fingers, he dropped the charred remains into the toilet with the others.