“What gives?”
“You’re standing on the memories of a dead woman, you asshole! That’s what gives!”
The Texan’s face darkened and he strode up to me. “That right? ‘Cause you didn’t seem too busted up about bein’ in here when my dick was up your ass.”
“You’re outta here!”
He snorted a laugh. “And you oughta watch that mouth of yours, son,” he said, jabbing the tip of his index finger into my chest, “’cause I don’t take kindly to faggots talkin’ shit to me.”
I’d never been a violent person, but this hayseed had awakened something hard and cold in me, and this something new was eager to teach him a lesson.
In one impossibly swift movement, I snatched up a shard of glass that had fallen onto the bed and brought the jagged tip of it up against his throat. Through clenched teeth I told him, “And I don’t cotton to dumbass rednecks threatening me in my own house.”
The Texan grew very still, the hostility in his expression replaced now by surprise and a sensible measure of fear. “You’re fuckin’ nuts, you know that?”
“And this is your last chance to leave here in one piece.” I applied pressure to the make-shift knife at his throat and a thin line of blood trickled down his neck. “Gonna take it?”
He backed away slowly, both hands raised in a gesture of surrender. When he bent to retrieve his boxers, he didn’t for one second take his eyes off the weapon I gripped tightly in my fist. Stalking him out into the hallway, I flicked on the light switch. At the second-floor landing, he gathered up more of his clothing. The instant we reached the front entry, he snatched up his Stetson off the bench, threw the front door wide, and darted out into the dark street buck naked.
I couldn’t help smiling at his comical departure. Although another part of me very much wanted to run after him and hurt him.
No sooner had I secured the deadbolt than his pickup truck rumbled to life and peeled out.
I headed for the kitchen to retrieve a broom and dustpan. That was about the same time my legs began to tremble. My newfound bravado was waning.
I’d been so adrenaline-charged that only now did I realize that I was still gripping the shard of glass in my fist. Blood was dripping through my fingers onto the tile floor and the gash across my palm under the bright kitchen lights looked fairly serious.
Common sense dictated I drive to the ER in Arcadia to get stitches.
Instead, I rinsed the wound in the sink with warm, soapy water and uttered every swearword known to God and man from the stinging it generated. Some hydrogen peroxide and a large, gauze bandage later, I was back in the doorway to my mother’s bedroom, feeling weak and vaguely sick to my stomach.
No matter how miserable I felt, shame and remorse were there to guilt me into cleaning up the damage I’d caused. What the fuck had gotten into me?
I set about cleaning up the larger pieces of broken mirror first, stealing glances at the room’s other contents—the cheerful calla lilies she’d hand-painted and which bordered the space, the champagne silk drapes tied back with the exotic tassels we’d purchased on a long-ago trip to Morocco together. A floral Queen Anne chair sat in the far corner, her nightgown draped over the back, exactly where she’d left it. The last book she’d read rested on the nightstand beneath her prized Tiffany lamp. She’d loved to read in her native Italian and taught me to speak and read it at an early age. She’d never speak to me in that language again.
My eyes grew hot as I righted the jewelry case, poised to return the jumble of chains and necklaces, rings and other adornments to their proper compartments.
The black velvet liner inside the main cavity of the box, I noticed, had worked itself loose on one side from the fall, revealing a hollow beneath it. Tugging on the fuzzy dividers, I managed to lift the tray out without further damaging the piece.
Beneath this compartment was a yellowed envelope.
I removed it, flipped it over, and lifted the brittle flap with a wince, a reminder of the injury to my palm. CERTIFICATE OF LIVE BIRTH, it read. My name, Joshua Austin Iverson, was printed above Laura Marmaggi-Iverson, MOTHER OF THE CHILD. Mom had always called me by my middle name so as not to be confused with, or reminded of, my father who’d died when I was five.
A review of the FATHER OF THE CHILD field intensified the nausea churning in my gut. Joshua Anthony Iverson wasn’t listed there. Only the words SINGLE PARENT ADOPTION.
The room tilted at a sickening angle and my stomach lurched.
This was a mistake. It had to be!
My father had died in a hang-gliding accident when I was five. I distinctly remembered him. He looked just like me, except that he’d had black hair. There were a dozen or more photo albums filled with pictures of him, of our life together as a family, somewhere here in the house. Mom had put them away years ago, explaining that seeing them had hurt her too much.
A sour wave of bile flooded my mouth and I slumped onto the edge of the bed, falling backwards into the cool, dusty bedding. The room and cold, nighttime world beyond the darkened windows blurred. My breathing came in a string of shallow wheezes. I couldn’t get enough air into my lungs and began to panic at the sensation of being sucked down into the narrow channel in the mattress that had once cradled her lifeless body.
I squeezed my eyes shut against the suffocating, sinking sensation, which only made it worse. When I reopened them, there were people in the room with me. They peered down at me, their expressions a mixture of both concern and curiosity.
Oh, but I knew these faces. They’d visited me in dreams shortly after Mom died; twelve beautiful females of different ethnicities all dressed in flowing white and silver gowns and talking all at once in a strange language I couldn’t understand.
The one closest to me had my same blue eyes and smile. She looked as though she wished to reveal something important to me. But when I tried to reach out for her, I couldn’t move.
Beyond these twelve women the hallway lay in obscurity now. Phantom shapes moved along it in eerie slow-motion, their faces hidden by the deeper shadows. Flash of alabaster skin. A shaved head. The gleam of onyx on a pale finger.
The scent of rotting citrus began to rise up from the mattress to permeate my mind, filling it with the terrifying image of a deep gash in the earth’s crust. Nothing grew around it, the scorched landscape an all-encompassing expanse of burnt ochre and rust. Perfect desolation.
Something brushed against me then.
I struggled to find it in the increasing gloom, as I was compelled to draw nearer the edge of that terrible chasm and peer down into it.
From its fathomless depths, I heard a dark, glittering voice call out to me:
“Welcome home, child…”
CHAPTER 3
“I’ve known you since the eighth grade, man,” Mark Gold reminded me from the passenger seat of my Jeep Wrangler. “Ditch the happy mask already and let it out.”
I wanted to, but instead focused on the busy but moving 110 Freeway.
My head, my everything, felt as though the British National Rugby Team had used and abused it all night long. Also, my injured palm was itching something wicked beneath the gauze bandage. I’d invented a lame but effective story about cutting it on broken picture frame glass in the basement, because the truth was entirely more bizarre and unsettling than the fiction.
The other major aspect of last night’s drama I’d intentionally left out over breakfast with Mark that morning? My hook-up-gone-wrong with the Texan. He wouldn’t understand.
Let’s face it, I could scarcely wrap my mind around taking a guy home for sex!
However, fear of a homophobic reaction from Mark played no part whatsoever in my omission of the truth. His West Hollywood design firm employed gay men and women and, to my knowledge, he interacted with them just fine. He was traditional, though. It was easier to be accepting of how others lived when they weren’t family members or your best friend.
In any event, why stick my neck out to re
veal something about myself that in all likelihood would never happen again?
Besides, I’d made it this far without having contemplated sex with another man. I was fairly confident that I could get through the next thirty years in a similar vein.
Be that as it may, it felt weird to be keeping such a big secret from him.
“I mean it, Austin. Pull this jalopy over, pound the goddamned steering wheel, and scream your fuckin’ head off. Trust me, you’ll feel a lot better afterwards.”
“Then what? Hate her forever for lying to me?”
“Maybe,” he responded evenly. “Or at least until the day you realize that Laura was the best mom in the whole world—next to mine, of course—and choose to forgive her.”
On a rational level I knew he was right. I’d been determined to use booze and slut-avoidance as a means to escape my grief over her death. Laura and I’d had a great life together. She’d loved and supported me unconditionally, and her memory deserved nothing less than my loving gratitude in return. On an emotional level, though, all I could feel was that a big, fat rug had been pulled out from under me, which it had!
Our exit, Avenue 52, was coming up fast. “Almost there,” I said.
Now it was Mark’s turn to look tentative. Reaching into the scuffed cup holder in the console separating us, he plucked out the business card I’d slotted there and read aloud the swirly print on the front of it. “Psychic Joy, your Mystic Rose. Seriously? This is how you wanna spend your thirtieth birthday?”
Joy Ebersole (a/k/a Psychic Joy) and I had met by sheer coincidence shortly after Laura’s passing. Not surprisingly, Joy didn’t believe in chance encounters. I needed her guidance and, as a result, the Universe made certain our paths intersected. Truth was, for the past few weeks Joy Ebersole had been serving more as therapist to me than actual clairvoyant.
“It is.” I downshifted and braked to a shuddering stop at the end of the short off ramp. My poor Jeep really had seen better days. “And as my best friend I expect your full cooperation. I just wish Christie were here.”
“So my gorgeous shiksa of a wife could watch my mashugana best bud squander his inheritance on a con artist?” Mark used his hands a lot to talk, not unlike every other loveable member of his Brooklyn-based, Italo-Jewish family. He was the Scully to my Mulder. If he couldn’t touch something, it wasn’t real.
“You’ll just have to see for yourself,” I told him. “Joy’s the real deal.”
Mark sighed, tossed the card onto the rear seat, and then rested his hand against the back of my headrest. “Seems to me you’d be better off blowing some dough on a power wash and some car deodorizer. When did you become such a slob?”
He was referring to the increasingly ripe smell coming from my open gym bag in the back seat. In addition to this, a dozen or so empty, plastic water bottles littered the rear floorboard, where the remnants of several fast food bags also lived, a fact about which I never planned to tell my personal trainer.
“I’ve been sublimating,” I admitted. “And yes, it’s probably time to start thinking about trading the Jeep in on something newer.”
“And safer,” he said with an anxious laugh. “I keep waiting for bottom to drop out.”
Mark had pretty much summed up the way I felt about my life of late, which further served to underscore how much I needed his support, along with this distraction today.
I rocked my head in a slow, side-to-side motion to work out some of the tension I hadn’t realized had settled there. A few minutes later, we were winding our way up a steep, narrow street in the Mount Washington neighborhood of Los Angeles, before coming to a stop in front of a California bungalow with peeling white paint and faded purple trim. The house slouched more than stood in a yard overgrown with bougainvillea and yellowing grass.
Once I’d killed the engine, Mark exited the Jeep with a resigned sigh. He leaned against the passenger door with folded arms and waited for me.
I got out, too, and moved around to the front of the vehicle. “Look at it this way. You’re here strictly for moral support and as a thirtieth birthday gesture to your best friend. Think you can handle that?” I said it with a wink.
Despite his skepticism, the warm Los Angeles sunshine was doing much to buoy my spirits. I craved sunlight, always had. Mark was my polar opposite, which made our first-year, college dorm living situation quite a challenge.
He nodded and pushed off the Jeep’s dusty door. “Lead the way.”
Last night’s dream made an impromptu push at my consciousness, so I pushed it right back. This was my day. Weirdness was not invited to the party. “After you...”
Mark opened the rusted chain-link gate and moved along the uneven concrete path leading to the front porch. I couldn’t help admiring his athletic frame as he walked ahead of me, his deep olive skin a complement to the peach Polo shirt he was wearing, his unruly mop of dark brown curls catching in the light breeze. The man was not only handsome but looked every inch his Southern Italian ancestry.
Weird. I’d never given much consideration to his physical appearance before now.
“Behold, the Great and Powerful Oz.” He indicated the plump tabby cat curled up in a patch of sunlight on the porch swing. “Sure I can’t talk you into doing something else?”
“Welcome,” a female voice announced from within.
The screen door sagged open with a creak to reveal a large, middle-aged woman with long, chestnut hair, smiling eyes, and dressed in a multi-color Hawaiian muumuu. She greeted me with outstretched arms and I let myself sink into a warm, invisible cloud of (what else?) rose-scented perfume. On anyone else the fragrance might have smelled cheap. To me, it added to her off-beat charm and the utter sense of calm I experienced whenever I was in her presence.
“Joy, this is Mark.”
She gave me a final squeeze and stood back to assess him, a little coolly, I thought. I’d never seen Joy anything other than cheerful. “Nice to meet you.”
Mark offered her a circumspect nod. “Likewise.”
“C’mon in boys and make yourselves at home. Just gimmie a minute or two to finish setting up the reading room. My client before you ran a little over.” At which point she turned and hurried down the narrow hallway to the rear of the small house.
Once Joy was out of earshot, Mark whispered, “Laura wouldn’t approve of this.”
The Godzilla-sized headache that wasn’t going away any time soon mule-kicked me.
“But keeping adoption secrets from me all these years is completely acceptable?” Mark had told me to take off the Happy Mask. Wish granted.
“Okay. She messed up.” He said it with upturned palms. “I’m in your corner on this one. She also adored you. Doesn’t that make you feel, I dunno, like you’re disrespecting her memory by paying some charlatan to find out who your real folks are?”
I loved Mark Gold a lot. On rare occasions, like this one, I didn’t like him very much. I’d been sucker-punched and needed his support. Why didn’t he get that?
Images of last night’s debacle with the Texan dropped in uninvited again. My mother’s room—Laura’s room—flashed behind my eyes. In it, I saw myself lunge for that shard of mirror, recalled the unbelievable speed with which I’d done it and the cold intent behind what I’d planned to do with that sliver of glass.
Had I acted on what instinct demanded of me in that moment, the explosive rage driving me, Mark and I would be standing in a very different place right now.
“I miss her, too, Buddy.”
The sensation of strong arms wrapping around me re-anchored me in the present.
It was a rare gesture for Mark, and one I sorely needed. So I stood there and let him hold me, breathing in the fresh, clean scent of him.
And just like that, I felt centered again.
Mark Gold certainly ticked me off from time to time, but he could just as easily calm me down. I guess that was what true friendship was all about. The good, the bad, and the everything in between.
He broke the hug to retrieve a buzzing cell phone from his front jeans’ pocket. “Hey, babe.” After a brief pause, I watched his brown eyes grow large and bright. “That’s awesome!” When he looked over at me and some of that light faded. “Yeah, I’ll tell him. See ya soon.”
“You’re bailing, aren’t you?”
He nodded with a not-so-convincing grimace. “Chris says happy birthday, by the way. And yes, I feel like a complete shithead.” I wasn’t inclined to disagree but waited for an explanation. “A potential client needs to see us right away. We’re in the running to design and build a five-star restaurant for him in Santa Monica. Getting this job would put us on the map.”
Selfish me wanted to guilt him into staying. Best friend me shoved his metaphoric violin back in its case. “You need the Jeep?”
He leaned in to wrap big hands around either side of my head and kissed my forehead. “Thanks for the offer, Buddy, but Chris is in Silver-lake. She’ll be here in a few minutes.”
“Psychic Joy’s ready now,” she called out from down the hall. “And Mark? You’re gonna knock it out of the park at your meeting.”
We both exchanged quizzical glances.
“Told you she’s the real deal.”
“Yeah, and totally eavesdropping in on our conversation.” Gold skepticism was firmly in place once more. “I’m gonna wait outside. See you tonight at dinner?”
“Tell that client he’s an idiot if he doesn’t hire the two of you.”
“From your lips!” he called out over his shoulder on his way to the front door.
“Don’t let it get to you. It wasn’t meant to be, dear,” Joy said upon my entrance into the small bedroom she used as a spiritual reading room.
A cluster of white candles burned at the center of a small, square table and an old light fixture above added extra illumination. Drawn blinds concealed two casement windows and spicy incense hung thick in the air, tickling the back of my throat.
“He’s a non-believer. Right now we need all the positive energy we can muster to lift the veil of mystery surrounding your adoption.”
Incubus Moon Page 2