The open line hummed. He could hear Robert “Call-Me-Bob” Zimmer, the bar manager, making little clicking noises with his tongue.
“I tried to give him a chance,” Marsh said. “I’ve been telling him to clean up his act. But I think it’s time something was done about it.”
“Where are you, Henry?” Zimm said finally. He was a big, poker-faced man with a dry sense of humor and an easy way with people. Everybody he worked with liked him. Marsh had been trying to get him fired for years. “People have been talking,” he said. “They’re worried about you. There’s been some concern. They say you’re showing all the signs of a real crack-up.”
“San Diego,” Marsh said. “We’re waiting for a flight. It’s Gina’s mother. She’s in the hospital again. Leukemia or something. Look, our flight’s boarding. I’ve got to go.”
“If anyone asks, Henry, you didn’t hear it from me, all right? But people are talking.”
“Thanks, Zimm. Just take care of Tommy for me, will ya?”
“Call me Bob,” Zimm said, and he hung up.
Time folded in on itself after that. He finished one pint, went across the street for another. When he finished that one, he went back out and bought a fifth. He passed out sometime around noon, and when he woke up, it was dark again.
He watched Saturday Night Live, flipping channels with the bottle balanced precariously on his stomach. He watched Jenny Jones and thought about his wife. The thing was, he hadn’t expected the guy to show. Never in a million years did he think there were people who did this kind of thing for money. He hadn’t been prepared. The Cub Scout motto came back to him, and he remembered his father, a remote, congenitally disturbed man plagued by a host of neuroses who had deferred in all matters to his wife, Henry’s mother, a woman whose overweening influence had driven him, Henry, to the far ends of the earth-to California-to escape, to make a life for himself, to raise his children where the woman could not smother them as she had smothered him. But curse of curses, fate of fates, he had married his mother, or a woman just like her, a woman who seemed in every way different from her but who had, in fact, turned out to be so much the same he could no longer separate the two in his mind, and the bitches at his back had become one.
Had she cheated? She’d lost interest in him sexually years ago, but then she’d never been much interested in sex. Still, he remembered times when it was free and easy between them. Certainly they’d fornicated once-twice, if they’d conceived the two brats, the bloodsuckers, and he wondered if that was when it had ended, when the first or the second of the kids had popped out, if that was the precise moment when the gates had swung closed, when the dream of better things and better times had died, stillborn. They-she and the children-had made his life a prison.
Sunday morning he washed his socks and his underwear in the sink. He found a Chinese takeout menu in the drawer by the bed, tucked into the obligatory Gideon’s, and he ordered spareribs and egg rolls for breakfast. He drew the curtains and paced the room naked. He stood under the shower until it ran cold. He passed out again in the afternoon, and when he woke, it was a quarter of two and he had fifteen minutes to haul himself out of bed and across the street to the store for another bottle.
5
The girl crept downstairs after dark. The television was blaring in her parents’ room, an apocryphal white noise, a bluish blush of light showing under the door. It gave the impression of something trying to get out, something she’d seen in a hundred horror movies, but it was only her mother in there, hiding away.
The lights in the hall burned like sentries and made her think of Bedouin fires in the desert, something she’d seen in National Geographic, though it was the words that came to her and not the image. Like Bedouin fires, she thought. The house was dark, as still as a mausoleum.
She’d just reached the front door when the noise from the television upstairs died and her mother’s voice carried shrilly down the hall.
“Where are you going at this time of night, Jaime?”
The woman had some kind of sixth sense; she had sonar like a bat’s.
“I’m just going for a walk, Mom. I’ll be back in a while.”
Her mother didn’t say anything for a few seconds.
“Well, okay, sweetie. But you be careful, will you? I hate to think about you walking around out there all by yourself after dark. I know it’s a good neighborhood, but don’t be long. I can’t stand to think about it.”
The girl rolled her eyes.
“Then don’t think about it, Mom.”
She didn’t wait for her mother to answer.
Outside was the roiling sky, the moon like a hole punched in the clouds, and the faint taste of the ocean on the air. She took it for granted they were near the water, although she couldn’t see it from the house. When they’d gone to Sacramento to see her grandparents, she’d missed it. She’d felt some nameless dread, an anxiety she couldn’t place until they’d come back across the San Mateo bridge, and she’d realized it was the ocean she missed all along.
She felt reflexively in her pocket for her keys before she pulled the door shut and stood on the front step for a minute, looking up and down the quiet street, the starlit confines of her world. A couple walked slowly past, dappled in shadow. They were climbing the hill, leaning into the grade, and they were maybe a few years older than she was. Moonlight glinted off the boy’s glasses, and the girl’s face shone, her lips parted in an expression that was at once abject and leery and was somehow frightening on both accounts. The boy was neat, clean-cut, and maybe a little embarrassed. He held her hand awkwardly, as if unsure what to do with it.
Boys were puzzling, Jaime thought, only in the depths of their stupidity.
A man went quickly past on the other side of the street, ducking under the trees, his face hung in shadow. His jacket flashed like a warning signal, bumblebee yellow, and the girl hesitated, letting him dart past before she came down the steps and crossed the lawn, turning up the hill toward the bus stop. Her mother’s paranoia was rubbing off on her. But if she’d married her father, Jaime thought, she’d probably be stark raving mad by now, too.
She waited until the end of the block to light a cigarette, although she couldn’t figure out how her parents hadn’t caught on by now, seeing as she’d come in reeking like a cigarette every day for almost a year. If they knew, they weren’t saying anything-maybe hoping she’d give it up if they just acted like they didn’t notice-and she didn’t see any reason to rub their noses in it.
The first few drags made her woozy, an ephemeral wooziness she wanted to hold on to for as long as it lasted and that was gone too quickly. The bus stop sat crookedly like a chess piece at the top of the hill, webbed in a skein of gauzy light from the street lamp, the opaque siding pitted and scarred. A dark-skinned woman in a rain jacket who was as wide as she was tall was waiting under the shelter, and she turned her eyes on Jaime as if some vague animal instinct had registered an incursion.
But there was no threat, no reason whatsoever to be alarmed, and she seemed smug then, sitting primly on the tiny seat, glancing quickly at Jaime out of the corner of her eye and looking away as she folded her arms across her chest.
She didn’t wear black for the sins of the teeming world, and not because she was obsessed with sex or with death or because she wanted to die, although she thought about it-with sex, it was the other great mystery-and not even because she came from what she considered the archetype of the dysfunctional family. Even Reynaldo, the Spanish exchange student who’d been trying to get in her pants for the last six months, seemed to think it meant there was something wrong with her. “It says to me you have great sadness,” he said, in that ridiculous accent that made everything he spoke seem a come-on. But then Reynaldo thought Americans were all head cases anyway, and there were things she couldn’t explain to him. There were things she couldn’t explain to anyone, not to her friends or her boyfriends, not to her parents or the endless procession of guidance counselors and psychologists they were always sending her to at school. Not to Principal Dryer, who’d taken an almost fawning interest in her, whose wife was cheating on him with Jaime’s math teacher. But she’d never questioned her own capacity to survive, and she knew something inside her would persevere. She’d made that decision a long time ago, without ever knowing she was making it, and she would not become crazy like her mother, she would not die inside like her father, who she half expected to find waiting at the breakfast table with a loaded gun one of these mornings. She didn’t know if Todd was going to make it, but she’d take him with her if she could, and she knew that one way or another, come what might, she’d survive them all with her soul intact.