I eased the car up to the grove and swung it around so Isabella's walk would be as short as possible. Her cane tips left two perfect rows of circles in the soil on each side of her. It seemed to take hours to go a few yards. She started to fall and I caught her.
When we got her settled at one of the tables under the palapa, Isabella took off her baseball cap and I set out the food. She gave me an inquiring look when I brought my flask from the car and stood it on the old redwood table.
"You forgot the beer," I said, smiling.
Isabella smiled back. I drank.
We ate as the sun drew itself together over the western hills and started its slow summertime descent. The whiskey went straight to my center, then spread outward, suggesting velocity. Neither of us spoke. Few things are as agonizing in this life as a magical place bereft of its magic. The trees and hills around us assumed a fierce specificity in the evening light; each clod of earth and grain of soil seemed isolated, blindingly singular. Whiskey, I thought, blur this moment.
"Are you okay?" Isabella asked.
"I'm okay."
"I don't need s-s-surgery, do I?"
"No." I drank. A pair of doves split the sky above us wi the squeak of dry wheels-tight wings, diminishing shape gone. What speed, what motion!
"I wouldn't blame you if you went away for a wall," she said. "For a while."
"I don't want to be away."
"If I were you, I would."
"I'd still be with you, even if I was gone."
"Anchored to be. To me."
"No," I said quietly, while a voice inside me screamed Yes! Yes! Anchored! Buried! Chained! Drink!
"Do you remember what you said the last time we talked about the… the… this?"
I didn't.
"You said that tay-taying, staying with me was the nob thing to do."
"I didn't mean that in a bad way."
"And I don't want it to be noble for you to stay with me I w-w-wanted to take care of you. Because you're a hard man and I know you need somebody. I want it to be me."
"It is you, Isabella-only you." Liar! Cheat! Fool! Drink
"I wish we could make love again."
"It's my fault."
"You could close your eyes."
"I know."
"I don't want you going somewhere else for it."
"Never. I want you." I drank deeply. The sun inched dov in the sky. I looked for a moment at my hands, how dry and tough and veined they were.
"You know what the w-w-worst thing is?"
I shook my head. There seemed like so many to choose from.
"Losing you."
I stood up and, taking my flask, walked to the edge of the clearing, behind Isabella.
"I won't let that happen," I said. "It cannot happen. It's the one thing they can't take away."
Then my eyes were suddenly burning and I closed them, but the tears came scalding out. I lifted the flask and drained it. There was never enough.
"Oh," I heard her say from behind me. "Oh, Russ… shit"
When I turned to look, her head was tilted sharply to the right, her face twitching, and her right shoulder was drawn up, convulsing. Her eyes were wide. I could see her arm jerking as if wired straight into high voltage.
It was the biggest seizure she'd had-bigger even than the first, a year and a half ago. I ran and stood behind her, wrapping her quaking body in my arms, pressing my face against her violent cheek. She felt, to me, as if she were possessed by some alien force. Her words were slow, scrambled beyond comprehension, "Sose oreo d-d-do tis to you… nebber won d-d-dis happt…"
I timed it on my watch, as always: one minute and forty-five seconds. You cannot believe how long a minute and forty-five seconds can be.
Then she slumped a little, settled down in her chair, the demons departing. Her heart was beating hard. She inhaled deeply and let the breath out slowly.
"Am gin hab doot."
"Going to have to do what, Is?"
"Operation. I'm g-g-going to have them do it."
On the way home, she seemed to become clearer. She asked me whether I'd understood what she'd said during the seizure. I told her I didn't.
"It made p-p-perfect sense to me. I said I was so sorry to do this to you. That I never wanted this to happen."
I put my arm around her and brought her close to me "I know, baby. I know."
CHAPTER TEN
That night, after Isabella was asleep, I went into my study and took out the stack of unpaid medical bills. It was a couple of inches thick, with plenty of red-edged envelopes and attention: overdue stamps on the pages. Our insurance had been sufficient until the radiation-transplant procedure, which was not yet considered an approved treatment. I had paid out about ten grand, but the well was almost dry. Try as I did to ignore these debts, I was still aware that some eighty thousand was still outstanding, and my attempts to stall had been intercepted by a case manager, one Tina Sharp, whose telephone calls I routinely failed to answer. A sudden fury shot through me as I held this stack of demands, so I got out my lighter, set the corner of one on fire, and watched it burn upward. So what? I thought. Even if you burn them, you still owe, and what does a roomful of smoke get you? It would be harder to explain that to Izzy than it would be to just keep on lying about the insurance. I dropped the flaming paper to the carpet, mashed it out with my foot, and threw the rest of the stack back into the wastebasket.
I turned on the news. There were Midnight Eye segments on two of the three networks and on three local stations. Stunned neighbors of the Wynns were interviewed, impaled on the cameras for close-ups to show their worry and fear. Karen Schulz looking amazingly composed and fresh for Channel 7, said that they were "investigating the possibility that the Wynn, Ellison, and Fernandez murders are related." But Karen's reluctance to connect the three events was ignored heartily by the report who mentioned everyone from Richard Ramirez (the Nig stalker) to Hannibal Lecter, exhuming whatever past terrors might magnify the present one. Assuming this was the work a serial killer, he asked Karen how long it would be until they caught him.
"We're working on the evidence right now," she said. "The investigation is going very well, and that's all I can say."
This segment was followed by a short feature piece on a Huntington Beach indoor gun range already besieged by cus tomers-mostly women-wanting to learn how to shoot large handguns. The instructor displayed in his beefy hand a nick plated. 357 and said it would "stop any intruder in his tracks-if it's used right." His business was up 65 percent in one day.
I went out on our deck in the dark heat and drank. I tried to pray, but the prayer turned into a tirade. I could feel the motion calling me, the world of speed and movement. I went to the woodpile, took the ax, and split stumps until my hands bled. I could see the outline of Grace through a window, watching me. Yes, I thought, your father has the seed of madness him. I grunted the blade into one last log and trudged up the trail that leads from my driveway all the way to the crest of the hills. I did not forget my bottle. I stopped halfway up to continue my challenge to the powers that be. I nearly fell. I picked my way down a narrow trail to the Indian caves where Isabella and I used to picnic-and sometimes sleep-on hot summer nights like this one. The sandstone walls were illuminated by moonlight, and the cave mouths yawned invitations I was tempted to accept. I finished the bottle, threw it into a cave, then climbed back to the main trail. When I made the top, I broke into a run through the low, fragrant sage, snapping through the dry branches until I hit the fire road. I ran faster, toward town. All I could hear, way up there above the city, was the leaden pounding of my shoes in the dust and the sharp rhythmic pattern of my breath. My legs began to ache, so I pressed harder. My lungs seemed too small, so I ran faster. The sage and manzanita took on bright red outlines-the same dire red that had come to me in Amber's bedroom two nights ago-a vibrant, scintillating red. The landscape throbbed with it. I rounded the highest point and the Pacific spread out below, a twinkling prairie of water and light. I made my way down toward town, running, skidding, braking until I hit the first paved streets and ran downhill now past the big walled houses and the peaceful aromatic eucalyptus, down into the quiet streets that feed into Coast Highway, finally to the highway itself-even at this hour a steady river of streaking, moaning cars. I could feel my heartbeat in my fingertips. I turned north on Coast Highway, tripped and fell flat in a crosswalk, labored upright, and continued.