Her face up close. Eyes bright and analytical, in assessment, as they often seemed to be. Then her hands came at me and I closed my eyes again. Felt her fingers on my brow, applying the dressing.
“As soon as the troopers told us what had happened, that’s when the fog set in. I could hardly even see through it. Way later, it got better. But it never lifted all the way. I still look at things through the fog sometimes. I tell you this unhappy story so you know what it was like to be me. Penelope Jane Rideout, eighteen. I got a good lawyer, a lot of insurance money, legal custody of Daley, the house, the cars, the investments, everything. All through the fog. I didn’t know how to do what I was doing. But I did it anyway. And the vultures started circling.”
And I understood. Things got quiet again. I felt the sting of alcohol on my right eyebrow, and the warmth of her breath on my face. “That’s an awful cut, Roland.”
“Awful people.”
“Let’s try an easy-change dressing.”
“We’ll show them.”
“You make fun of things when they hurt. I like that about you.”
“You invented the husband to scare off the vultures.”
“I had to. You can’t imagine how craven some of them were. Men who were married but unhappy. Men who were happy but willing to leave their wives and children. Men who were already grandfathers. Men who cried. Men who became violent. Men who unzipped. Men who would not go away. There were good men, too. More than a few. But they didn’t understand me at all. I was just a girl sleeping with her little sister, chewing on my nightgown sleeve when the fog came in and the tears wouldn’t stop.”
She was still working on my right eye, so I opened the left.
“Who was Richard Hauser?”
“A boy I liked in kindergarten. There were several years and cities between us before I swiped his name and bought myself an engagement ring. It’s a half-carat of cubic zirconium. I think that’s so funny. I don’t know why. But it makes me smile all the time. Very few people can tell the difference. I’m frugal — I mean, cheap. It cost me four hundred bucks instead of ten grand.”
She held up her left hand to show me her thoroughly counterfeit ring. And the maybe-gold wedding band alongside it.
“Clever. Why did your family move so much?”
“Dad and Mom. Work.”
“A publications director and a nurse.”
“Always a job for Dad and plenty of offers for Mom. They were grass-is-greener people. Always better somewhere else. When Daley was born they really sped up. Maybe they felt trapped. Every year a new city. Greener grass.”
I recognized some of that in my own parents. And Dad was career Navy for twenty years, so he had to go where they sent him. Scratched that itch for him. Mom the same way. Would still rather go than stay. I grew up in Navy towns, San Diego being the largest and longest.
She placed her hands on my cheeks. “Turn your head to the right.”
Which left me with both eyes open, facing my home, a century-plus-old fortress of adobe brick, with just a few lights on and its usual air of entropy, if not neglect. It deserved better.
“The hard part about faking marriage is digging up an occasional real man when you need one,” she said. “Socially, of course. I’ve managed. But really, people are always so willing to take other people’s word for things, don’t you think? I mean, it’s really much easier to believe what someone tells you than it is to follow every little suspicion down the bunny trail to see what’s really going on. Look at the couple with nine children locked up in the house, hardly fed them, chained them to the beds and starved them. Relatives? Neighbors? Nobody said one thing. Because they wanted to believe the family was normal, like the mom and dad said it was.”
I felt the cooler air as the bandage came off, then the swipe again of alcohol and antibiotic. Heard the rattle of paper as Penelope opened a new dressing.
“Good as new up here,” she said. “I’ll work on that back of yours, if you can hack it.”
I unbuttoned my shirt. She stood and came around behind me to help get it off.
“You have a nice body, Roland, but it hurts just looking at it.”
“Glad I don’t have to see it.”
“Well, time to get tough, hombre.”
I tried to let my mind wander as she lifted off one bandage after another, picked away at dried scabs and the newly surfaced grit. The mind won’t wander at times like this.
“Ever married, then?”
“Nope.”
“You’re sure?”
I felt her hands stop moving. “Now you don’t trust me.”
“You’re too good a liar to trust.”
Silence.
“Look, Roland Ford — I just told you something true about myself. My big bad. Maybe that was stupid. Some people are better off the less they know. They prefer it. Insist on it. I hope that’s not you. I chose you because you dig to the bottom of things and don’t quit until you’re there.”
“At the bottom.”
“Yes.”
“Is that even good?”
“It’s what I need.”
“What else are you hiding?”
I felt her slap on a fresh bandage. She came around and studied me. Hooked a strand of hair behind one ear. Drilled in with those flat blue eyes of hers. Her judgment look. Then the flash of her never-distant temper.
“It must be tiring being you,” I said.
“Now what?”
“Your anger. Your deceit.”
“Mister, if this was a movie and I had a knife, this is where I’d throw it past your head and it would stick in the tree trunk behind you and shiver back and forth. And I’d have your full attention and my anger would have produced good results.”
“Plenty of knives in the kitchen,” I said.
A staredown. Her weighing things. Then a split decision. Close on the judges’ cards. Her face relaxing in slow gradients.
“You’ll trust me someday,” she said. “You just watch.”
Then behind me again, picking away at my wounds with what felt like slightly reduced empathy. I was glad she didn’t have a knife. Not a word between us.
It seemed to take hours, and I was happy for it to be over. She sprayed on the topical painkiller and it cooled things off a little. She helped me back on with the shirt. Sat down across from me as before and buttoned me up. Leaned in closer. Eyes on me, her critical squint.
“There’s nothing I can do about this lip,” she said. “It’s going to have to heal on its own.”
Kissed it softly.
The yellow Beetle putting down the drive. Memories blowing in like a rainstorm.
16
Hellish heat, and the sun was barely up. Hot as Al Anbar Province, except for the eighty pounds of gear I wasn’t carrying.
I used the early light to dig a burrow in the sand behind a long-fallen tree trunk in a thicket of dead and dying greasewoods. I laid my shotgun on a bed of branches and my hunting vest over it. Set up my telescope for a view of the Paradise Date Farm.
Then took a few minutes and treated myself to coffee from a thermos and a sunrise cigarette. Listened intently for the bee-buzz of the little drone that had tracked me when I’d come here for a look around. So far, no sound at all but the occasional doves flying overhead on squeaky wings.