I moved the wooden chair off it, flipped it up. Nothing to see except floorboards that had been painted shabby-chic white at some point in the last ten years. I went to the other end, did the same. Thought I’d drawn a blank but then looked closer at the end just under the bed. I went down on my knees and felt beneath the frame, close to where it butted against the wall.
It was tight, but a small section of board could be levered out. Underneath was a dusty gap, an ideal child’s hiding place. It was empty now, but I didn’t think it had been that way when Amy arrived.
Natalie was standing by the kitchen window, cradling her coffee in both hands and watching her son in the yard.
“So?”
I shrugged. “Like you said. Memory lane.” I caught something in the way she was observing the boy. “Everything okay?”
“Sure. Just a…Matthew seems to have gotten himself a little imaginary pal. No biggie. You just wonder what gets into their heads.”
“You asked him about it?”
“Sure. It’s just a friend, he says. They play together sometimes, you hear him talking quietly to himself once in a while. It’s not like we have to set an extra place at dinner. And it’s better than nightmares, for sure. Amy had those super bad.”
“Really?”
“God, yes. One of the earliest things I can remember—I don’t know how old I was, three maybe, four?—was these horrible noises in the night. Like a scream but deeper. Loud, then quiet, then loud again. Freaky. Then I’d hear Dad trudging down the hall. He’d get her back to sleep, but then it would start again an hour later. Went on for a couple of years.”
“Amy never mentioned that.”
“Probably doesn’t even remember. Sleep’s a war zone with kids. Babies especially. Friend of mine’s kid used to push his fingers into his eyes to stop himself from falling asleep. Seriously. Matthew was hell on wheels, too—you couldn’t get him to nap without pushing him from here to San Diego. And he’d wake up in the night four, five times. Like an on-off switch—straight to Defcon Five. You’d be lying there in the dark, house peaceful, baby asleep and all’s well with the world. Then, bang—he’d be wailing like his room was full of wolves.”
“Makes sense. Suddenly you’re awake and alone in the dark with no mom or dad to be seen or smelled or found.”
“Sure—that explains bad waking. But why fight sleep so hard in the first place?”
“Because it wouldn’t have been that way when we lived in caves. The whole family would be sleeping in a pile together, instead of exiling Junior into a room with scary murals he doesn’t understand and inexplicable things dangling from the ceiling. The baby thinks, Fuck this, are you insane ? It’s not safe to leave me alone. So they do the one thing that reliably affects their environment—scream their heads off.”
“You surprise me, Jack. I never realized you were so much in touch with your inner child.”
“Always. It’s the inner adult I keep losing track of.”
She smiled. “Yeah, well, maybe you’re right. But I don’t know. Kids are weird. They pick up TV remotes and hold them to their ears like phones and talk to people who aren’t there. You give them a toy saxophone and they put it straight in their mouths—and blow instead of suck, which is what they’ve done with everything else. They put empty cups to their mouths and go ‘Mmmm,’ and you think, Where did that come from? Have I ever gone ‘Mmmm’? Then one day they stop doing it. It’s how they break your heart. Some unbelievably endearing habit they develop, from nowhere—then bang, it’s gone again. Makes you miss them even when they’re still there in front of you, and that’s part of what loving is about, right?”
Suddenly she stopped, and her cheeks went bright red. I’d never seen Natalie embarrassed before. Wouldn’t have believed it possible, in fact.
“What?”
“I’m so sorry,” she said. “I have been a numb fucking bitch.”
I shook my head. “No you haven’t.”
“But—”
“Seriously. It’s not a problem.”
“But with Amy? How—”
“Everything’s fine.”
“Okay,” Natalie said. “I’m sure it is. She’s pretty tough.” For just a moment, she looked fiercely proud of her sister, and I wished I had a sibling to feel that way about me. “She has been…I don’t know, a little different since, though. Don’t you think?”
I shrugged. “I guess.”
Natalie persisted. “Maybe even before that?”
I looked up at her, surprised, and was disconcerted to find her looking at me, hard, with eyes very similar to her sister’s.
“People change,” I said, dismissively. “They get older. Grow up. May even happen to you someday.”
She stuck her tongue out. “There’s one thing I never understood, though,” she said, leaning on the sink and looking out the window again. Her son still playing sensibly in the yard, staying a statutory six feet from the road, as if a force field operated to keep him within a safe distance of the house. Perhaps it did. Amy wasn’t the only Dyer girl who ran a tight ship.
“What’s that?”
“How Amy wound up in advertising.”
“Things happen. I ended up a cop.”
“I never knew you when you weren’t, so that’s not strange to me. Plus, your being a cop made sense. What happened to your dad, and…You just made sense that way. More than you do as a writer, that’s for sure.”
“Ouch.”
“Say it ain’t so. But Amy, I mean…When she was a teenager, she was always the complete geek.”
I frowned. “Really?”
“You don’t know this? Totally. Forever making something out of weird bits of crap. Poring over books with titles that would make you lapse into a coma.”
“That doesn’t sound like the woman I know.”
“For sure. For years she’s the science-fair queen and poised to do something appallingly nerdy, and then suddenly one day she’s all ‘I want to be in advertising,’ as if it’s ‘I want to be a movie star.’ I didn’t even know what advertising was. She’d just turned eighteen, and she comes out with it at dinner one night. I remember it because the old folks had spent years backing her up on all the tech stuff, giving her rides to clubs, being proud—more than they ever were with anything I did—and then bang, that’s all history. I remember watching Papa across the table as she’s saying all this, seeing his shoulders slump.” She smiled, gaze still on her kid outside. “I was fourteen. First time I ever realized that being a parent maybe wasn’t a complete walk in the park.”
“She ever give a reason? Why she switched?”
“She didn’t have to. She was golden.”
“Natalie…”
She smiled. “I’m just kidding. No, she didn’t. Though I did ask her about it this one time. She said she’d met a guy.”
My heart thumped, once. “Someone at school?
“No. Somebody older, already in the business maybe, though that’s totally a guess. I figured she was attracted to this guy, didn’t work out…but she stuck with it. You know what she’s like. Dogged. Doesn’t matter how long something takes, how long she’s got to wait. Always been a girl with an eye to the long-term view.”
I’d turned to look out the window, though I had no interest in what was outside. I didn’t want Natalie to be able to see my face as I asked the next question.
“Don’t suppose she mentioned the guy’s name?”
“Actually, she did, and the strange thing is, I remember it. Pure coincidence. We’d had this one dog for years, and he’d died like two, three months before. He’d been around almost all my life, and I still missed him really bad. So I guess it stuck in my head.”
“This guy had the same name as your dog?”
“No, sweetie. The dog was called Whooper. Calling a person ‘Whooper’ would constitute cruel and unusual punishment, even in L.A. It was the breed. A German shepherd.”