The San Atanasio city bus pulled out of the same station Greyhound used. Vanessa had enjoyed lots of walks more than the one over to the station. The homeless people followed her. Sometimes they followed her in front of her, like a cat. They must have realized they wouldn’t get anything out of her. If they wouldn’t, they’d make her sorry. They succeeded at that, anyhow.
A hulking security guard with a pistol on his hip discouraged her adoring fans from going inside with her. “Thanks,” she told him sincerely.
He touched the brim of his black Stetson. “You’re welcome, Miss,” he said. “It’s what I’m here for. I know them, and they know me, too. Oswald—the tall, skinny dude with the Dodgers cap—he’s a pain in the neck even around here.”
Vanessa hadn’t thought that skid row might have its own standards. Wherever it got them, Emily Post would not have approved. “I brought it on myself,” she said. “I gave some money to one of them, so they all tried their luck.”
“That’ll happen, yeah,” the guard said. “It was a Christian thing to do, though.”
She never knew how to answer when somebody said something like that. Her family had put up a Christmas tree and dyed Easter eggs, but that didn’t make her a Christian. Her father mostly ignored religion. Her mother had grabbed at every New Age fad for years. Mom didn’t seem to do that so much now. Maybe she’d decided enlightenment didn’t come freeze-dried and prepackaged after all.
Signs that said things like NO SOLICITING! and NO LOITERING! hung all over the bus station. More guards made sure people paid attention to them . . . up to a point. As long as someone sat quietly and nursed a coffee cup or a little something to eat, they let him alone, even if it was dollars to donuts he wasn’t waiting for a bus. That seemed fair to Vanessa.
The ride down to San Atanasio took her through South Central L.A.: a ghetto since before World War II and now ghetto mixed with barrio. Storefront churches; heavily fortified liquor stores; equally strong check-cashing and quick-loan places; fried-chicken joints and taquerias; old, faded stucco houses, many with Spanish tile roofs; newer, just as faded apartment buildings; gang graffiti on walls and fences; burglar bars on every other place’s windows . . . Vanessa didn’t like coming through this part of town, not even a little bit. Hers wasn’t the only white face on the bus, but she didn’t have much company.
Nobody hassled her, though. People got on. People got off. Some people stared out the window till their stop came. Others blocked the outside world with earbuds. Those were way better than boomboxes, which could annoy whole city blocks. Here and there, people who knew one another chatted in English, Spanish, and Korean.
Vanessa got off at Oceanic. Farther east, the same street was called Compton. It had been Compton here in San Atanasio, too, till the city council decided it wanted nothing to do with the working-class (a euphemism for poor and tough) town with the same handle. What’s in a name? she thought as she walked to a bench around the corner to wait for the westbound bus that would get her close to home. But she and the city council knew what, even if Shakespeare didn’t. Money was in that one.
As soon as she sat down, the rain started falling. “Shit,” she said resignedly, and popped open her umbrella. She’d wasted a day. She’d feared she would, but she’d gone anyhow. And, the next time she thought of something that might do Bronislav a bad turn, she’d gladly waste another one.
• • •
A long time ago—Louise couldn’t remember quite when—there’d been a sappy movie about an affair between two people over the hill. They’d called it Love Among the Ruins. Louise did remember that it had made something of a splash. Most of the time, especially if you were a woman, Hollywood forgot you had those feelings as soon as you turned thirty—thirty-five, tops.
She and Jared were younger than the people in that movie had been. Still, she didn’t expect a director would come sniffing around for their story any time soon. Her boobs sagged. Her seat spread. She had stretch marks. Jared had a potbelly and that haircut that looked as if he’d done it himself with tin snips. No, they weren’t the most photogenic couple anyone could have found.
He did remember the movie when she mentioned it, though. She didn’t have to explain herself to him, the way she had so often with Teo. (She hadn’t had to explain herself to Colin, but he hadn’t cared. That mattered a lot.) “Oh, yes,” he said. “Too sweet for its own good, but they’ve cranked out plenty worse. What about it?”
“I was thinking that, if they ever made a movie about us, they could name it Love Between the Ruins,” Louise said.
Jared broke up. He had a loud, high, shrill laugh, one that filled the bedroom in his neat little house. “I like it!” he said. “I like it a lot. The movies do kind of forget that people our age get horny just like anybody else, don’t they? Maybe not quite as often, but we do.”
He scratched, not seeming to notice he was doing it. His belly had a scar on the right side, a souvenir of the day he and his gall bladder had parted company. Louise was a member of the Zipper Tummy Club, too. She had an appendectomy scar, just about the minimum qualifier. She hadn’t needed a C-section with any of the kids.
She set her hand on his. He would never win any World’s Greatest Stud competition. But then, Louise didn’t suppose the Hollywood Madam would be ringing her cell phone and requesting her services any time soon, either. When they fooled around, Jared cared about her as another person there with him, not just as an instrument of his own pleasure. As far as she was concerned, that mattered a lot more than size and gymnastics.
“It’s . . . nice with you, you know?” she said.
“With you, too,” he answered seriously. “That’s kind of the point of things. Or if it isn’t, it should be.”
“I’m not arguing,” Louise said.
“Good.” He nodded. “Don’t. Arguing will get you a yellow card. If you do it too much, it will get you a red.”
She’d soaked up enough soccerspeak to know that a yellow card meant you were in trouble, while a red card meant they threw you out of the match. She had no idea what she would do with her arcane knowledge, but she had it.
She poked him in the ribs. Colin had almost never reacted to that. Neither had Teo. Jared wiggled; he was gratifyingly ticklish. “Guess what?” she said.
“What?” Jared said. Not Chicken butt, the way Colin would have. He hadn’t noticed even the kids stopped thinking it was funny after a while.
Louise poked him again. “You can’t fire me now, you know. If you try, I’ll hire an attack lawyer and our whole sordid story will come out in court. It would be in the newspapers, too, only the newspapers don’t pay attention to anything any more.”
She didn’t faze him. Well, she hadn’t meant to. You couldn’t (or you’d better not, anyhow) say something like that unless both you and the person you said it to knew damn well you were kidding. “If I’d thought there was any chance I would ever have to fire you, I wouldn’t have made my lewd advances to begin with,” Jared said with as much dignity as a naked man could show. “And since you don’t seem to understand that, I see I’m going to have to give you a severe tongue lashing.”
Which he did. Louise wasn’t sure how severe it was. She was sure that, after he got done giving it, all she wanted to do was roll over and go to sleep. That was supposed to be what men did, which had nothin’ to do with nothin’.
The only problem was, she couldn’t. Instead, she went into the bathroom. When she came out, she started getting dressed. “I’ve got to get home,” she said regretfully. “Otherwise, Marshall will soak me even harder for making sure James Henry doesn’t burn down the condo.”
Jared sat up. He reached down, picked up his slacks, and pulled out his wallet from it. He extracted an engraved portrait of U.S. Grant. “Here,” he said. “Throw this into the pot.”
“You don’t need to do that!” Louise had a touchy pride about making it on her own if she could. It sometimes bent—she’d touched Colin for money more than once when sh
e was desperate. You did what you had to do, which wasn’t always what you wanted to do. She didn’t have to take money from Jared now.
He had pride of his own. Setting his thick glasses on his nose, he gave her a stern look. “Who said anything about needing to? I want to. You’re here because you feel like being with me for a while—at least, I hope that’s why you’re here. So why shouldn’t I chip in?”
After a moment’s thought, Louise decided arguing was a losing proposition. “Thanks,” she said, and stuck the fifty in her handbag.
Jared put on his clothes, too, so he could go to the door with her. He kissed her good-bye. “See you Monday,” he said. “Of course you know I’ll dock you if you’re late.”
“Of course,” she said seriously. She made her hands tremble. “Look—you can see how worried about it I am.” They both laughed. She swung onto her bike and pedaled away.
No stars in the sky: clouds covered them. With the power working, the streetlights were on. They did a much better job of warning her about bumps and potholes than her little headlight could. That was more to let other people know she was there than to show her the road ahead.
It was after eleven. Not many other people were on the road. An owl hooted from a tall tree. She never would have heard that if she were in a car. Off in the distance, a siren started to scream. Louise cocked her head, listening. Police car? No, an ambulance. Like any cop’s wife or ex-wife, she knew the difference in the notes. She hoped whoever was in it or whoever it was going for would be all right. For ordinary people getting around town, bicycles were okay. In an emergency, you still wanted internal combustion.
“Hey,” Marshall said when she walked into the condo.
“Hello,” she answered. “How’s James Henry?”
“Asleep.”
“I sort of had in mind when he was awake.”
“Oh, yeah.” He nodded, as if that hadn’t occurred to him. Louise tried to sniff without showing it. No, he hadn’t got baked. He was just being difficult. “He’s cool,” he said after another pause. “He, like, beat me a game of checkers.”
“Did he? How much help did he have?”
“Not enough for him to notice. Not as much as you’d think, either. He’s a sharp little guy.”
Louise already knew that. She didn’t mind other people noticing, though. Oh, no! She was smiling as she asked, “How’s Janine doing?”
Marshall hesitated. “She’s okay,” he said after that little stop-and-think.
“All right.” If Louise had felt nasty, she might have done some poking there. But she didn’t feel nasty; she was about as happy as she’d been since the day before the day Teo left her. So she asked, “And how about your little half-sister?”
“Deborah’s cool.” No hesitation there.
“All right,” Louise said again. She didn’t want Colin’s new child to be sick, or anything like that. Such vindictiveness wasn’t in her. If Deborah were homely, though, or bad-tempered, or stupid . . . Plainly, she wasn’t. Life would go on even so. Louise handed Marshall money. “Here’s some more you don’t have to tell Uncle Sam about.”
“Uncle Who?” he said as he stuck it in his pocket without looking at it. They exchanged knowing smiles, grownup smiles. You gave the government what you couldn’t help giving it. Anything more? You hung on to that. Louise was sometimes surprised her younger son by Colin—the kid who’d been her baby for so long but wasn’t any more—had got old enough to own a smile like that. But there you were.
And here she was.
And here Marshall wasn’t. “I’m gone,” he said, and out the door he went. Louise locked it behind him and worked the dead bolt. Yes, she was old enough that her onetime baby was no baby any more. Someone still liked her—loved her—just the same. It made a hell of a lot of difference.
• • •
Kelly puttered around the house on a Saturday morning. She’d hoped to spend it with Colin, but he’d had to go in to the station this morning. She couldn’t do a lot of the things she would have liked to do, because the power was down. When that happened once in a blue moon, it irked you every time it did. When you knew it could happen any old time, you worked around it—or you sat there cursing the darkness, which did you no good.
Okay. She couldn’t get online. Her cell had no bars. Even the landline was out—she checked. No TV, either. But she did have a battery-powered radio. Some local stations went on generator power during outages. And, with a lot of local stations off the air, she could pick up signals from ones farther away. Sometimes she could, anyhow. When the atmospherics were right.
She’d got Seattle once, in the middle of the night. Las Vegas, Phoenix, Albuquerque . . . They were all possible, but none guaranteed. San Diego stations came in better, but usually went off the air at the same time as their L.A. neighbors.
She clicked the digital station-changer, moving up ten kilocycles with every click. Here was bandera music, maybe from the Central Valley, heard through a waterfall of static. And here, a few clicks on, was the local news station, loud and clear. “We’ll stay with you till the generator runs dry,” the broadcaster said genially. “Or maybe the power will come back before then. In that case, we’ll stay with you till the lights go out again.”
He sounded resigned and amused at the same time. It wasn’t as if he’d never gone through this before. Everybody in SoCal had. There weren’t many places in the country any more where people hadn’t.
Sure enough, he went on, “Brownouts and power rationing continue as the Northeast tries to adjust to the loss of power from Quebec. In Boston, electricity is available from five a.m. to eight a.m. and from six p.m. to nine p.m. In New York City, the hours are six to eight a.m., eleven a.m. to one p.m., and seven p.m. to nine p.m. Philadelphia is the same as Boston. In Cleveland, the power comes on only between six and nine p.m. Consumers are anything but happy with the restrictions authorities have imposed.”
A new voice with a thick New York accent said, “This is a”—bleep!—“nightmare! It’s a”—bleep!—“joke, too.”
A woman’s voice, more educated: “This is like that city—Bucharest, that was it—before Communism fell. Can’t we do better than that?”
“If we can do better than that, it’s not obvious,” the newsman said. “We talked to Professor Emeric Brody of the economics department at Johns Hopkins University, to ask him why our difficulties seem so long-lasting.”
“Until the shutdowns in Quebec, we were using as much power as the grid could produce,” Professor Brody said. “When something close to twenty percent of it abruptly became unavailable, distribution systems were badly deranged. Outages and damage to equipment only made the situation worse.”
“What is the solution?” the newsman asked.
“If we are going to consume power at our previous level, we have to produce more,” the professor said.
“Wow! Ya think?” Kelly like to talk back to the radio.
But Emeric Brody hadn’t finished. “Oil-fired powerplants seem impractical now. Petroleum is expensive and needed for other kinds of fuel. But plants using coal and nuclear plants can be built. The main obstacles are political, not economic. Congress and the President have not been able to agree on what kind of plants to construct or where to put them. And so the Northeast has gone through what it has gone through. Maybe close to a hundred million angry voters will force action. Maybe—but they haven’t done it yet.”
“That was Johns Hopkins Professor Emeric Brody,” the local newsman said. “Thanks very much, Professor. My engineer on the other side of the glass has just shown me a sign to let me know we’ll have to shut down in ten minutes. I’ll come back with more news and the five-day forecast right after we give you these important messages.”
The messages were important only to the station’s bottom line. Kelly didn’t waste battery power listening to them. She went to see what Deborah was doing. Her daughter was playing with hand-me-down toys: stuff her folks had put in boxes when she outgrew
it. They figured a granddaughter might enjoy it one of these years, and sure enough. . . .
Deborah was feeding a Cabbage Patch doll a plastic drumstick and apple. “Now, Barry Woodrow,” she said, “you’ve got to clean your plate.” That Barry Woodrow wasn’t equipped to do any such thing didn’t bother her. She was a little kid. Like a novelist, she was allowed to make things up. She glanced over at Kelly. “Hi, Mommy! Want some lunch?”
“Sure,” Kelly said. “It smells delicious.”
“You’re silly,” Deborah told her.
“Thank you,” Kelly said.
That made her daughter laugh. Then Deborah said, “Read to me? Barry Woodrow has to digest for a while.”
“I’ll read to you,” Kelly said, which was how she almost always answered that request. She wondered where the devil Deborah had come up with digest. Wherever she’d found it, she knew what to do with it. “Do you want Oz or Commander Toad?”
“Oz,” Deborah said.
They were working their way through The Hungry Tiger of Oz. That was one of the books written by Ruth Plumly Thompson after L. Frank Baum died. Most of the time, novels by someone who continued a series were worse than the ones by the person who created it. Kelly thought the Oz books an exception to the rule. Thompson was a smoother, more clever writer than Baum. She gave Baum full props for inventing the world; Thompson probably couldn’t have done that. But Thompson did amusing things with what she’d inherited.
Deborah had enjoyed Baum’s Oz books, and she liked Thompson’s Oz books, too. She didn’t worry about which were better or why. As long as the stories were good enough—and as long as Mommy or Daddy was reading them—she just rolled with it. There were definite advantages to being a kid.
She wasn’t old enough for The Hobbit or The Lord of the Rings yet. Colin said his older kids had been seven or eight before he could get through those with them. The movies came out not long after that.
He also had an evil scheme for when it was Deborah’s turn. Apparently, he’d pulled it on all of his children by Louise, and looked forward to doing it again. When the story got to Shelob’s lair, he’d taken a fat rubber spider and stuck it in his pocket. As soon as Shelob came onstage at last after the big buildup, he’d yanked it out and waved it in the kids’ faces.
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