She sat down between us with her laptop computer and shook her head. “Microsoft Word sucks.”
“Don’t use that word,” I said.
“But it’s called word.”
“You know what I mean, young lady.”
Her mother pulled the little machine onto her own lap and looked at the flip-up screen. She tapped in a few commands and tilted the screen toward Penny. “It’s the Windows that’s throwing you, not the word processing program. See, you’ve got too much open, the thing just got clogged. You’ve got to go through and close them, one at a time, or, you can use this.”
She showed Penny the right command and set the computer back on her daughter’s lap. Frankly, I’m amazed that any nine-year-old can learn to operate a computer at all, not to mention two word processing programs, three data operating systems and God knows how many different keyboards, printers, CD readers and floppy backups. I wonder if they stock the classrooms with these things to educate kids or just to sell them similar gadgets when they’re adults. I asked Penny what subject she was on.
“Science,” she answered. “I’m learning the planets. Before that, I finished my report on slavery.”
Computers. Planets. Slavery. The world of a healthy, somewhat privileged American nine-year-old.
“Your face looks sore, Terry,” she said, looking up from the screen. “It’s turning blue, like a bruise.”
“It is a bruise.”
“Did they arrest the girl who bit you?”
“They’ll put her in protective custody. Later, depending on what happens to her parents, she’ll go with relatives, or maybe to an institution.”
“What did she do wrong?”
I thought about that a second. “Nothing, really.”
Melinda looked over, her eyes condemning me over the tops of her reading glasses.
“Then you try,” I said to her.
She shifted her body and reached out to touch Penny’s hair.
“Don’t, Mom. What did the girl who bit Terry do wrong, to get put institution?”
“Put in an institution,” Melinda corrected.
“Okay. In an. What did she do?”
“She became a prostitute. That’s when you sell your body for money, or other consideration.”
“To do what with?”
“It depends.”
“Why did she become that?”
“Her father and mother forced her to. So they’ll go to jail. She was lucky that Terry was there, to arrest her parents.”
Penny looked at me, understandably concerned that cops taking parents away from their children was good luck. I shrugged. Melinda will sail Penny into moral oceans that no nine-year-old can be expected to navigate. Mel believes in treating children as the adults they will become. I believe in treating them like the children they will never be again. This difference of opinion is occasionally hard for us to live with. But because Penelope is not my daughter, I almost always defer to Melinda. Though I still didn’t think a nine-year-old needed to be an expert in the California Penal Code.
My ex-wife believes I never protected my own beautiful son from the “real” world enough, and I agree. I admit that I allowed him to do some of the things he wanted to, foreseeing the hurt he might suffer in the trying. Those tears of his still move me. He was a timid boy in most ways, and I wanted to encourage his confidence. I’ve changed now, far too late to do him any good. If I had it to do all over again, I would have handled it differently. I truly wish that the living, seven-year-old Matt Naughton was here right now to prove that I had been a good father. Or a bad one; I don’t care. Just here.
We watched TV for another hour. A little after ten, Melinda told Penny it was time for bed. Penny protested but not very hard, because Melinda is inflexible on household rules, and Penny knows it.
“I want Terry to tuck me in,” she said.
“Then ask Terry to tuck you in,” said Mel, and she walked out of the living room and into the kitchen.
An hour later I found Mel in her study. She does a lot of work at home. Since being assigned to the Fraud and Computer Crime detail two years ago, she’s gone from being computer illiterate to computer devoted. I keep waiting to catch her playing solitaire, or watching a CD, or browsing consumer products on the Net, but I’ve never found her doing anything but work on her machine, or sometimes writing letters. For Melinda, work is peace. She is not a person who enjoys many things, but work is one of them. No surprise that in two years she’s worked her way to second in command of Fraud and Computer Crime — a twelve-person section.
She looked up at me when I went in, and let her reading glasses dangle on the chain around her neck.
“Tired?” she asked.
“Not really. I’m going to take Moe up the hill. Want to come?”
“I’ve got work.”
She studied me for a moment. She has a clear-eyed, analytical gaze that gathers much more than it gives away. I’d hate to be one of her suspects in an interrogation. In fact, I’ve seen her work — through the one-way mirrors — and she is extremely effective. But her stare melted into a smile and she nodded her head slightly.
“Nice work today, Terry. Four months to nail that creep. And you ended up doing something decent for the girl. You should feel good about you.”
“Thanks, Mel. I do. But I think about the life Chet took away from her.”
“You can’t be everywhere at once.”
I stepped forward and kissed her lips. I didn’t hold it long because I knew she had work to do. Those lips are sweet as sugar when she wants them to be. Just six months ago we were to the point of going weeks or more without anything more intimate than a peck on the cheek — if that. Mel was a wreck. Her father had died. And though he had avoided her in childhood like some guilty secret, she had tracked him down and stayed in touch with him in a remote but regular way the last few years of his miserable life. His death hit her hard. And I realized that the end of someone you desperately want to love you but never did can hurt as much as that of someone who treasures you. Maybe it’s just one last confirmation of your own unlovability. But Melinda’s inner darkness gradually broke, and something of her old self has emerged from the long, black night.
“See you soon,” I said.
Our house is on Canyon Edge, the fifth one in from Laguna Canyon Road. It’s a ramshackle little place, built in three stages, over three decades, in three “styles” — none of which I can really define. But it was affordable for Mel and me as co-buyers, and the money is worth the quiet canyon life and the beautiful Pacific, which is just a couple of miles away. In the big fire of ’93, it was one of only eight houses on Canyon Edge that didn’t burn down. Thirty-seven were reduced to nothing but fireplaces and chimneys that day in October.
I let Moe out of the backyard and we headed down Canyon Edge, away from Laguna Canyon Road. The road is crooked and uneven, without streetlights and sidewalks, but it also has almost no traffic because it dead-ends a half mile into the canyon. Once we were past the last rebuilt house I stood for a moment on the scorched foundation of Scotty Barris’s place. Scotty didn’t rebuild because he wasn’t insured. It was an old place, the oldest on the street, built by Scotty’s father and uncles back in the early twenties. Now it’s just a rectangle of black cement with weeds growing up through it and some twisted rods of rebar bent at odd angles. For sale.