A Hard Light

by Wendy Hornsby

  “Glad you decided to join us,” I said as she caught me in her forward momentum and spun me.

  “I don’t have time. Mom, have you talked to Dad?”

  “He left a pager number with Fergie, but we haven’t spoken since last week. What’s up?”

  “The Sequel called.” As in, the second Mrs. Ian Scott MacGowen. The Sequel was the latest of Casey’s titles for her stepmother, replacing The Immaculate Linda. Casey took a breath. “She wanted to know if I’d heard from Dad. She doesn’t know where he is.”

  “Honey,” I said, stopping myself from commenting on history repeating itself, or mentioning that Linda should be familiar with Scotty’s M.O.: Linda was the reason I didn’t always know where to find Scotty during the last year of our marriage. I said only, “Your dad’s a big boy and he can take care of himself. Probably, he got busy today and he forgot to check in. You know how he is. Sooner or later, he’ll remember and he’ll call home.”

  Casey wasn’t mollified. “She hasn’t heard from him for almost a week.”

  “Is he out of town?”

  “It doesn’t matter if he’s out of town or not, Mom. He has a cell phone, a pager, a secretary, and a message service after hours. I can always find him. Except, I just tried him and the call went to an answering machine. That never happened before.”

  Mike said, “There are plenty of possibilities, Casey. He could have lost the pager, or broken the damn thing. Maybe he’s out of cell range and the message service is out for coffee. Is it possible he just doesn’t feel like talking to anyone right now?”

  She thought over the possibilities, pacing back and forth in front of us with her hands jammed into the back pockets of her jeans. She stopped, cocked her head, and looked at me, as if unsure of what she had to say. Or what was safe to say. After she had studied me for a while, she said, “Dad and Linda have been fighting a lot. Maybe they had a fight and he’s still punishing her. You know how Dad is.”

  “Indeed,” I said. “I’m sure it’s nothing more than that. He’s all right, or he would have said something to Fergie when he called me this afternoon.”

  “Right.” She was still thinking it through. “What was the longest he ever left you for after a fight?”

  “Forever,” I said. “And after the last fight we had, he wouldn’t talk to me for six months. If he had anything he needed to say, he left me a note. Tell Linda to watch the mail.”

  “Oh God. Dad and his stupid notes.” She made a complete pirouette. “I hate his stupid notes. Jeez, if he has something to say, why can’t he just say it to your face?”

  “What, and give someone an opportunity to answer back?” I caught her hand and drew her nearer to me. “Why don’t you call Linda? Tell her we heard from your dad today and there’s nothing to worry about.”

  “Don’t have time.” Casey shrugged, a big theatrical shrug finished with a full sweep of her arms. “I have a paper to type. I’ll be up all night.”

  “Better get to it, then. But call Linda first.”

  “Bye.” She jetéd away down the street with Bowser loping beside her, trailing his leash.

  Mike said, “Now it’s just you and me, kid. You want to walk some more?”

  “A little.” I slipped my arm through his and we walked on toward the park at the end of the street.

  “Mike,” I said, “what do you really think?”

  “About what Scott’s up to? He’s like the Unabomber. Now and then he has to remind everyone he’s still around.” Mike rubbed his cheek. “Does Scott know what happened to us?”

  “Not from me. But why should he care?”

  “I don’t know, but I think he does. I think he cares a lot.”

  We reached the end of the street and started back toward home. Mike walked slowly, in no hurry. He said, “I’m not the one to bring this up, because what does it say about me? But, I don’t get it, Maggie.”

  “Get what?”

  “How did you hook up with that asshole to begin with?”

  “Forgive me, Jesus, I couldn’t help myself. I was sixteen and he drove a Porsche.”

  “That’s it?”

  “Close enough.” I snuggled in against Mike and looked up into his face. “He was also handsome, older, worldly. Dangerous.”

  Mike nudged me. “Not exactly the answer I was hoping for.”

  I nudged him back. “And he’s a big bully. The truth is, I’ve been through so much crap with Scotty that I cannot for the life of me remember what the appeal was.”

  “You like bad boys.”

  “I like you.”

  Mike kissed the top of my head. “You never told me how you met Scotty.”

  I didn’t want to talk about Scotty. I let go of Mike and said, with exasperation, “Who cares?”

  “Not a big deal. You just never told me how you met him.” He gave me that narrow-eyed cop look again. This wasn’t idle conversation. It was a grilling. “How’d you meet Scott?”

  “He knew my big brother in Vietnam. He came to Berkeley to pay his respects to my parents the spring after Marc died.”

  “Driving a Porsche.”

  “Yep. First time he took me for a ride, I decided that I was going to marry him. And six years later, I did.”

  “Six years, huh? How much longer are you making me wait?”

  “Dunno.” There was nothing safe to say on that dangerous topic.

  This marriage idea was a sore subject between us. For Mike it was all pretty easy. When you fell in love, you got married. If you fell out of love, you got divorced. He had gone through the process twice before I met him and bore few visible scars.

  After my one and only failed attempt at marriage, I still felt as though I had gaping wounds. Even when, too briefly, I was pregnant with Mike’s baby, I wasn’t sure I was ready to try marriage again. How could I take the big risk a second time until I understood where I went wrong the first time? I loved Mike. But I didn’t have a very good history with men.

  My mother’s rented Ford rounded the far corner. I reached for Mike’s arm and stopped him. “I want to tell you something before we go back inside.”

  “Sounds ominous.”

  “It’s not, but I want you to know up front, before Guido and I get any further along with Bao Ngo. Before we go up to San Francisco.”

  When Mom turned into the driveway, her headlights hit us square on for an instant, washing us in white. I saw Mike’s face in that quick moment, saw something that looked like terror. Maybe it was a trick of light, I couldn’t be sure. I knew only that I had to be very careful or I might hurt him. Mike acts tough, but he is not.

  With no embellishment, I told him about the evacuation of the Cham Museum in Da Nang, about Bao Ngo and Minh Tam and Khanh Nguyen each accompanying an army truck loaded with art objects. And about how Bao Ngo dropped from view as soon as he entered this country. Mike was keenly attentive, but he seemed impatient, kept waiting for me to get to the punch line. What I told him was clearly not the sort of bombshell he expected. I just hadn’t gotten to that part yet.

  “There was a fourth truck,” I said. “Right after they all left Da Nang, the fourth truck disappeared.”

  “In the evacuation,” he said, a sort of counterpoint to the story, urging me forward. “A lot of stuff probably got lost.”

  “A lot of it did. Some of the museum collection was left behind. Some of it has turned up in the international marketplace.”

  “And …”

  “And it’s the museum that connects Khanh and Bao and Minh Tam. I have a feeling that what Bao did to Khanh is related somehow to the booty that got out of the country.”

  “I thought it was all fakes.”

  “Bao had fakes when he went through U.S. Customs,” I said. “But the U.S. wasn’t the first stop that Canadian ship made.”

  “You say he’s a scam artist?”

  “He’s a survivor.”

  “What does all this have to do with us going north this weekend?”

  I looked
around at the neighborhood at night, dark in the last phase of the moon except for streetlights that were shrouded among the huge old sycamore trees. All was quiet, sweetly peaceful. Every house holding its own set of secrets.

  I looked up at Mike, his white mustache defining the curve of his frown. I said, “Scotty and I both earned decent money. His law practice was successful—is successful—I was a prime-time TV anchor. We shouldn’t have had any problem covering the grocery bills. But sometimes we did.”

  “You’ve lost me.”

  “Scotty’s a gambler. Not penny-ante Vegas crap, but big-time: stock market, real estate, ventures. Every time one of his deals blew up—and they regularly did—just at the point where I expected us to go under, Scotty always managed to come up with a windfall and save his ass.”

  “Living on the edge is what turns gamblers on.”

  “I hated it,” I said. “I used to worry about where the windfall money came from. I half-expected a goon squad to come kneecap Scotty during the night.”

  “Go back. What does Scotty’s gambling have to do with this museum caper?”

  “I told you Scotty knew my brother in Vietnam. He also knew Khanh Nguyen. He was attached to the United States Agency for International Development, supposedly as legal advisor to the American cultural attaché.”

  “Probably CIA. And?”

  “And Scotty drove the fourth truck out of Da Nang.”

  CHAPTER

  6

  A storm blew in off the Pacific during the night Tuesday, bringing the first major rain in eleven months. The sound of rain pounding against the upstairs windows filled my dreams: Mirth Tam floated away down the river at floodtide, his head a dark marble bobbing above the churning current. In the dream, I ran along the stony bank calling his name, trying to catch him. Casey was a new little baby I clutched against me as I ran in a panic, terrified that I would fall with her and she would be swept away, but too afraid that Minh Tam would be lost to stop running.

  I woke up worried about where Minh Tam was spending the night. When I sat up to straighten the tangled sheets, I remembered something else from the dream: Like Minh Tam, my home had been washed out to sea.

  After months of drought, rainwater poured off the hard-baked land as it would concrete. The storm drains in our neighborhood were clogged with rubbish—the skeletons of Christmas trees and other domestic refuse—so there was nowhere for the water to go. By the time we got up Wednesday morning, the gutters along our street were already flooded and, according to the traffic report on the kitchen radio, the freeways all across town were at a standstill.

  “Good day to stay home,” I said, looking out the kitchen window at the lake our backyard had become.

  “Can’t.” Casey slathered cream cheese on two bagels. “Have to turn in my paper, and we have tryouts for Cinderella this afternoon. I have to be at school.”

  “Me, too.” Michael stood beside Casey at the counter, making sandwiches. “I can’t miss my bio lab.”

  Two days a week, Casey took a city bus to school. Michael drove her the other three days. He was a good driver and a conscientious youth. I never worried about him. But, like almost everyone in California, he had very little experience driving in bad weather. People forget from year to year what to do on those few days when the roads are wet.

  As if that isn’t bad enough, the first storm of the year always floats up accumulated road grime and motor oil and makes a slime that lies as slick as ice on the asphalt. Rush hour becomes a nightmare of bumper cars. I didn’t want the kids to be out there.

  I looked at Mike and some of the panic I was trying to hold down must have shown on my face; I had a flash of the kids floating away as Minh Tam had in my dream, sliding down a river of oily ooze in Michael’s tiny Toyota.

  “Michael,” Mike said. “Heads up.” When Michael turned, Mike tossed him the keys to his four-wheel-drive Blazer. “Take it slow, stick to the surface streets, and watch out for all the knuckleheads.”

  “I know how to drive, Dad.” Michael fished his Toyota keys out of his pocket and gave them to his father in exchange.

  “Give the guy ahead of you extra room and watch out for tailgaters.”

  “Dad?”

  A look passed between them, and Mike threw up his hands, relenting, backing off. “Just be careful.”

  “You know it.”

  My mother walked into the kitchen from the living room, where she had been reading the morning paper in front of the fireplace. She set the folded paper on the table next to Mike’s plate.

  “Mike,” she said as she refilled her coffee cup, her tone abrupt, almost accusing. “I looked through the entire paper and there is not even one mention of your case. There are several truly lurid accounts of the misdeeds of those cemetery folks, but nothing about your Pedro.”

  “Pedro’s not the sort of victim anyone cares enough to write about. Press doesn’t want him,” Mike said. “Same goes for his killers.”

  “No one?” Mother thought that over. She sat on the chair next to Mike and folded her hands on top of the paper, focusing her gaze on Mike. When she is thinking things through, the intensity of her stare can be disconcerting. She doesn’t mean to be rude, or to make people uncomfortable. It’s just her way.

  My mother is the perfect faculty wife, intellectual, sweet, independent. She even looks the part: tall, patrician, disdainful of makeup or artifice of any kind. She wore, on that dismal morning, a blue heather twin set she bought in an Irish wool shop probably twenty years ago, well-tailored gray wool trousers, and sneakers with a lug sole. I have known her to wear canvas shoes to the symphony because she forgot to change them, and to not much care when she discovered her lapse.

  Every morning, as far back as I can remember, Mother twisted her gray-streaked hair into a loose bun and nailed it in place at the back of her neck with two small tortoise-shell combs. Amazingly, the bun stayed put all day long, defying the laws of gravity, as if Mom, the wife of a physics professor, had a special exemption from nature.

  “Tell me, Mike,” she said, her tone intense, one long-fingered hand touching his arm to rivet his attention on her. “Do you care?”

  “Me?” Color rose on his face: My mother dwells in Berkeley, one of the great bastions of political correctitude. Her questions can be minefields. Mike, whose family consists of two sisters he never sees and an alcoholic father that he sees too much of, worries endlessly about saying or doing something that would diminish him in Mom’s eyes. She is, to him, the embodiment of an idealized picture of all that a family should be that he has carried around, longed to join, for his entire life. He did not want to lose my mother’s love. The truth is, he could not. Mother just takes people as they come.

  Mike said, “I care about the kids who killed Pedro the way a farmer cares about weeds in his cornfield. Pedro? I won’t say he got what was coming to him, but he didn’t go into that house to pray with those kids.”

  “Why did he go into the house?” Mother asked, her unplucked brows rising as her eyes widened.

  Before he gave an answer, Mike looked from Casey to Michael and then back at Mom. Pedro had gone into the house hoping to trade beer and bus fare for sex with a couple of teenage girls, but Mike wasn’t going to say so in front of Casey.

  “Milk for your coffee, Mom?” I set the carton in front of her, a diversion.

  “Thank you, dear.” Mom’s eyes slid toward the children. “Of course.”

  Mike reached back and tapped Michael’s elbow. “You two should probably get going if you don’t want to be late. Traffic’s a bear.”

  “We’re going.” Michael packed the sandwiches he’d made into two brown bags, added an apple and a granola bar to each, and then dropped one into his backpack and one into Casey’s. He handed Casey her backpack. “Ready?”

  “Ready.” Casey gave him a bagel wrapped in paper napkins and a plastic cup full of orange juice. Holding her own bagel and juice in one hand, with her backpack and dance bag slung over her sho
ulder, she still had a hand to open the back door so that Michael had hands to raise an umbrella.

  Heedless, young, invincible, she tossed her head and offered a breezy, “Bye, Mom. Bye, Mike. Bye, Grandma. I love you.”

  “Be careful,” Mike called after them as they went out, both of them huddled under the same umbrella.

  Suddenly there was silence, nothing but the constant pounding of the rain. Mike and I stood for a moment watching Michael and Casey, a single dark mass moving through the gray deluge on their way toward the garage.

  I turned to Mike when they were gone and he just shook his head, let out a big sigh, and then began gathering dishes off the table.

  “Aren’t they lovely?” Mother said. “Those two have become truly good friends, haven’t they?”

  “Yes,” I said. “We’re lucky.”

  She smiled at me as if I were a clever child. “It isn’t luck, Margot, dear.” She is the only person who uses my given name. “You and Mike have been very wise to make the youngsters dependent on each other. They have to break away from you and Mike, that’s the job of teenagers. How fine for them to move toward sibling bonds.”

  “They aren’t really siblings,” I said.

  Mother looked at me askance. “Aren’t they? Are they aware of that?”

  Mike chuckled. She was, after all, his chief ally in our domestic union argument. She adores Mike.

  “What are your plans for the day, Mom?” I asked.

  “I’m going home. Now that I see that my dear girl is indeed healthy, there’s no reason for me to clutter up the place. Anyway, tonight is bridge night and you know how your father hates to miss his bridge. I leave from Burbank at noon, the weather permitting, and Daddy is meeting the flight in Oakland. All is arranged.”

  Mother rose and hugged me, a little gingerly, because that is her way, always careful of personal space. “Thank you for letting me hover, Margot. It is much easier for children to be independent than it is for parents to let go. If I tell you to be careful on the road today, both of you, you will indulge me, won’t you?”

  “Sure, Mom.” I kissed her cheek, as soft and dry as fine silk against my lips. “I’m glad you were here. I needed you.”