My stomach was locked and aching; I could not feel the beating of my own heart.
Finally, I began to swim straight through these opposing powerful rivers, looking for one thing that I could hold on without question. And I found it. I reached for it, sunk my finger into it, and clutched it tightly against my chest. What I wanted finally and without condition, was what was best for Isabella. Not for me. Not for Corrine and Joe. For Isabella.
"She twisted her knee pretty good today," said Joe.
"Enough," I said. I closed my eyes and rested my head on the sofa back. The clammy breeze from the air conditior landed on one side of my face. I heard Corrine get up, and moment later her hand settled against my cheek, fingers patting approval of my surrender.
"Maybe you should go be with her for a while," she said. "I'm going to make dinner."
I lay down next to Isabella in the small room. She stirred when I settled in beside her, smiled as I reached out and took her hand.
"So, you ran out on me," I said.
"I'll never run out on you. But this is b-b-better for a while."
"I know. I was only making another bad joke."
"Everything's going to be kay-o, isn't it?"
"Yes."
I kissed her and she moved a hand into my hair and pulled me closer. The kiss lasted a long time. When I moved my face down to her breasts, she spread her hand against the front of my pants and pressed gently. I slipped my arm under the sheets and traced her warm, dry center with my fingers. We lay there for a while, searching very slowly for what used to come so eagerly. Then she moved her hand back up to my face. I took it in mine.
"Maybe after the op-op-operation, every work will thing again," she said.
"Yes. Everything will."
"I love you, Russ."
I lay there with her for almost an hour, stroking her smooth round head while she slept with her face against my chest. I looked out the window at the pepper tree and watched a mockingbird flitting from one branch to another. I became that bird. I was nimble, feathered, capable of flight. I left the tree. I shot upward, piercing the hot blue sky. I streaked through the stars of some as-yet-unarrived night. I careened past the sun, out of the galaxy, deep into gaping, widening, limitless space, tears peeling from my eyes, beak sparking against the resistant atmosphere, feathers aflame, feet melting. I shot forward as a skeleton, a shard of vertebrae, a quivering atom of calcium. Motion. Speed. Velocity. Freedom.
When Corrine called us for dinner, I helped Izzy get dressed and into her chair.
Then I left.
At home, I poured myself a disciplined whiskey, roamed the outside deck for a while, then listened to a rather curt message from case manager Tina Sharp on the machine. I did not return the call. Rather, I sat in a patio chair where Isabella loved most to sit, facing southwest toward town. Our Lady of the Canyon lay atop the hills, the lights of Laguna flowing upward from between her legs, her pregnant belly protruding against the skyline. I went inside to answer the phone, but the caller hung up after I said hello. Cute.
In my study, I set up the computer and went to work on the Citizens' Task Force story.
First, I outlined the thing, thinking of the best way to make the readers feel included in the Task Force, not just reading about it. Basically, it was a flak job.
I drank more because I didn't like the manipulative aspects of this piece, and because I kept seeing Isabella lying on that narrow bed in her parents' house, and because newspaper story structure is rigid enough to make it undentable by whiskey, resulting, I would guess, in the high rate of alcoholism among journalists. After all, I thought, I could slant the piece only far before Carla Dance threw it back at me. After all, it was: the Journal but, rather, a terrified public that would decide what to make of the Citizens' Task Force.
The phone rang again, and again the caller hung up soon as I answered.
Just like Amber used to do, I thought, twenty-odd years ago, when she was sneaking away from Martin Parish to meet me on the sly. Except our code was usually three hang-ups. That meant Amber was actually with Marty, scheming to be with me. She would tell Marty she was getting busy signals from a girlfriend. Three meant she would meet me that night. Nights with even-numbered dates were the bar atop the Towers Restaurant in Laguna. Odd-numbered nights were the back room of the Mandarin Chinese. Later, two hang-ups-oh, how I lived for two-hang-up nights! — meant she would come to my place. I always felt bad that it was Marty, but back in those days, when we were young, the cost of being with Amber was always worth paying. Always.
The phone rang again, and to my astonishment, the caller hung up. Three calls. I checked the date, purely out of curiosity: an even night, the sixth, the Towers bar.
I stared at the computer screen, searching for my lead. That first sentence is 50 percent of the work. Once the first sentence is right, the rest falls into place. I thought. I finally wrote:
What if she's really at the Towers bar?
No. I erased it. The image of Amber's ruined skull came back to me: the blood, the tangled mass of dark hair, the dead gray eyes. Then I saw her in the rented K car, looking at me fearfully from behind the windshield, illuminated briefly by the Coast Highway streetlight. Haunting me from the grave, wherever that may be. I thought of Isabella again. I wanted so much to love her.
I wrote again:
A drink or two at the Towers bar might be nice. You've earned it. You deserve it.
No. I deleted that, too. I sat for a while, then churned out the first three pages of the story.
I took a break, stared for a while into the refrigerate although I wasn't hungry. I sat on the deck again. I sat on our bed, missing Isabella in a crazy, grateful way.
I went back into the study, finished the piece, and fax it out.
Then I went downstairs, got in my car, and drove to the Towers bar.
The mirrors and windows of the Towers are bewildering at night, and they keep the place dark. The ocean spreads to infinity eleven stories below, behind a wall of smoked glass. Mirrors throw the Pacific back at you from anyplace in the room, dizzyingly reversed, even along the ceiling, which is mostly glass too. You can't be sure what you're really seeing. The tables are beveled glass-rectangles of ocean reflected from the ceiling which picks them up from the windows-the furnishings all Deco: lamps supported by robed ladies, wall lights mount behind mirrored shells, ornate brass ashtray stands. There is black baby grand in the middle of the bar, and it was staffed that night by a young man with a nice touch and a voice just like whoever's song he was covering. He did not play as well as Isabella. The place was crowded, but I got a chair in a far corner. To my left was an eleven-story drop to black ocean; my right, the room; in front of me, a couple kind enough to let me share their drink table. The crowd was eclectic, as one expects in a hotel bar: middle-aged American tourists, perplexed foreigners, a few local dandies and not-so-young-as-they-looked women scavenging for the usual kinds of excitement. A couple kissed rather passionately in a corner. Two men, gay, tried to look at ease. A woman sat alone in the opposite corner fro me, smoking a cigarette in, of all things, about a foot-long holder. She had shiny straight blond hair and a truly silly pillbox hat- playing her Deco part with style.
The couple right in front of me looked midwestern, middle-aged, middle management, and, as it turned out, they were. They were gabbing away, obviously a skosh drunk. The black glittering sea stretched out through the windows beside them.