Abe is out of the truck and on the move, dragging his cutters over to the cars, where Chippies are gesturing violently for him. Someone’s caught in the middle car, and with all the sparks from the power lines, they fear electrocution for those inside.
There are two people in the front seat of the sandwiched car. Abe ignores the driver as she appears dots, sets to work on the roof of the car to get to the passenger. Again he’s at work, cutting with a delicate touch as the snips shear the steel with great creaks and crunches, metallic shrieks covering repeated moans from the girl in the passenger seat. Xavier slithers in from above and is quickly at work, giving a rapid sequence of very exact commands to Abe above, “Cut another foot and a half back on the midline and pull it up. Farther. Okay, take that sidewall out of the rear door, we can get her out here.” Stretcher set, for a teenager in yellow blouse and pants, all stained blood red in an alarmingly bright pattern. Xavier and the Chippies run her to the truck and Abe works his way into the smashed car to check on getting the driver out. In the right rear door, lean over the blood-soaked seatback—
It’s Lillian Keilbacher. Face white, lips cut, blond hair thrown back. It’s definitely her. Her chest—crushed. She’s dead. Dots, no doubt about it. That’s Lillian, right there. Her body.
Abe backs out of the car. He notes that the car was a new Toyota Banshee, a little sport model popular among kids. Seems he’s gone deaf; he sees the turmoil of spectators and cars around them, but can’t hear a thing. He remembers Xavier, sweating, talking in a near hysteria about the time he turned over a dead kid in a car and saw, just for a moment, his son’s face. He makes a move toward the car, thinking to check the girl’s ID. But no, it’s her. It’s her. Carefully he walks to the curb and sits on it.
“Abe! Where—Abe! What are you doing, man?” Xavier is crouched at his side, hand on his shoulder. “What’s wrong?”
Abe looks at him, croaks, “I know her. The driver. Friend of the family. Lillian, Lillian Keilbacher.”
“Oh, man.…” Xavier’s face scowls with distress; Abe can’t stand to look at him. “We got to go anyway, the other one’s still alive. Come on, bro. I’ll drive, you can work in back.”
Abe is qualified to do the medic work, but when they reach the truck he can’t face it. He balks at the rear door. “No, man. I’ll drive.”
“You sure you can?”
“I’ll drive!”
“Okay. Be careful. Let’s go to Anaheim Hospital.”
Abe gets in. Seat belt on. He drives. He’s a blank; he finds himself at the freeway exit leading to Anaheim Memorial and he can’t remember a single thought from the drive, or the drive itself. Xavier pops his head through the window. “This one looks like she’ll pull through. Here, make a left here, man, ER is at the side.”
“I know.”
Xavier falls silent. Wordlessly they sit as Abe drives them to the ER ramp. He sits and listens while Xavier and the nurses get Lillian’s friend inside. Memory brings up to him the image of Lillian’s dead face rolling toward him, looking through him. His diaphragm’s all knotted, he’s not breathing well. He blanks again.
Xavier opens the driver’s door. “Come on, Abe, slide over. I’ll drive for a while.”
Abe slides over. Xavier puts them on the track to the street. He glances at Abe, starts to say something, stops.
Abe swallows. He thinks of Mrs. Keilbacher, his favorite among all his mother’s friends. Suddenly he realizes she’ll have to be told. He imagines the phone call from a stranger, this is the Fullerton police, is this Mrs. Martin Keilbacher? At the thought his jaw clamps until he can feel all his teeth. No one should ever have to get a call like that. Better to hear it from—well, anybody. Any other way has to be better. He takes a deep breath. “Listen, X, drive me up onto Red Hill. I got to tell her folks, I guess.” As he says this he begins to tremble.
“Oh, man—”
“Someone’s got to tell them, and I think this would be better. Don’t you?”
“I don’t know. —We’re still on duty, you know.”
“I know. But they’re almost on the route back to the station.”
Xavier sighs. “Tell me the way.”
As they turn up the tree-lined, steep street that the Keilbachers live on, Abe begins shaking in earnest. “This one on the left.”
Xavier stops the truck. Abe looks past the white fence and the tiny yard, to their window of the duplex. A light is on. He gets out, closes the truck door quietly. Walks around the hood. Come on, he thinks, open the door and come out, ask me what’s wrong, don’t make me come knock on your door like this!
He knocks on the door, hard. Rings the bell. Stands there.
No answer.
No one’s home.
“Shit.” He’s upset; he knows he should feel relieved, but he doesn’t, not at all. He walks around the duplex, looks in the kitchen window. Dark. Light left on in the living room while they’re out, SOP. Xavier is leaning his head out the window. Abe returns to the truck. “No one’s home!”
“It’s all right, Abe. You did what you could. Get back in here.”
Abe stands, irresolute. Can’t leave a note in the door about this! And the two of them are still on duty. But still, still … he can’t rid himself of the idea that he should tell them. He climbs back in the truck, and as he sits he has an idea. “Jim’s folks live up here too, and his mom is a good friend of theirs. Drive me by there and I’ll tell her and she can take over here, we can get back to the station. They go to church together and everything.”
Xavier nods patiently, starts up the truck. He follows Abe’s directions and drives them past house after house. Then they are at Jim’s parents’ duplex, well remembered by Abe from years past, looking just the same to him. Drapes are closed, but lights are on inside.
Abe jumps out and walks to the kitchen door, which is the one the family always uses. Rings the bell.
The door opens on a chain, and Lucy McPherson looks out suspiciously. “Abe! What are you doing here?”
At the question Abe loses the feeling that it made sense to come to her. Lucy closes the door to undo the chain, opens it fully. She looks at him curiously, not getting it. “It’s good to see you! Here, come in—”
Abe waves a hand quickly. Lucy squints at him. She’s nice, Abe thinks, he can remember a hundred kindnesses from her when he was the new kid in Jim’s group. But in recent years he’s noticed a distance in her, a certain reserve behind her cheery politeness that seems to indicate disapproval … as if she perhaps thought Abe was responsible for whatever changes in Jim she doesn’t like. It has irked him, and a couple times he found himself wanting to say, Yes, yes, I personally have corrupted your innocent son, sure.
Random thoughts, flashing through Abe’s confusion as he sees that tiny squint of suspicion or distrust. “I—I’m sorry, Mrs. McPherson.” Say it. “I’ve got bad news,” and he sees her eyes open wide with fear, he puts a hand forward quickly: “No, not about Jim—it’s about Lillian Keilbacher. I just came from their house, and there’s no one home to tell! You know, you know I’m a paramedic.”
Lucy nods, eyes shining.
“Well,” Abe says helplessly, “I just found Lillian in a car crash we were called to. And she was dead, she’d been killed.”
Lucy’s hand flies to her mouth, she turns to one side as if bracing for a blow. It’s as bad as Mrs. Keilbacher. No, it’s not.
“My Lord.…” She reaches out hesitantly, touches Abe’s arm. “How awful. Do you want to come in and sit down?”
That’s almost too much. Abe can’t take it, and he backs up a step, shakes his head. “No, no,” he says, choking up. “I’m still on call, got to go back to work. But I thought … someone they knew should tell them.”
She nods, looking at him with a worried expression. “I agree. I’ll go get the Reverend Strong, and we’ll try to find them.”
Abe nods dumbly. He looks up into her eyes, shrugs. For a moment they share something, some closeness he
can’t define. “I’m sorry,” he says.
“I’m glad you came here,” she says firmly. And she walks him back to the truck. Something in the kindness of those words, and in the fact that his task is done, breaks the restraints in Abe, he can feel the shock of it again; and he shakes hard all the way back to the station, while X drives grimly, muttering “Oh, man … oh, man…”
Back at the station they collapse on the couch. The football game mocks them.
After a while Xavier says slowly, “You know, Abe, I don’t think we’re cut out for this job.”
Abe drinks his coffee as if it were whiskey. “No one is.”
“But some more than others. And not us. You’ve got to be stupid to do this job right. No, not stupid exactly. It takes smarts to do it right. But…” He shakes his head.
“You’ve got to be a robot,” Abe says dully. “But I’ll be damned if I’ll become a robot for the sake of some job.” He drinks again.
“Well…” X can only shake his head. “That was bad luck, tonight. Damned bad luck.”
“A new definition.” But neither of them even cracks a smile.
For a long time they just sit there on the couch, side by side, staring at the floor.
Xavier nudges him. “More coffee?”
59
Lucy returns to the duplex and wanders the rooms aimlessly. Dennis is due back from Washington late that night. Jim’s got class. Briefly she cries. “Oh, Lillian—”
Then she goes to put on her shoes. “Got to get organized, here.” She calls the Keilbachers. No answer. She’s got her sweater on, ready to go—but where? She calls the church. Reverend’s out on call, she gets his answering machine. Everyone’s gone! What is this? Vicar Sebastian, ineffectual as always, answers his phone and is reduced to speechlessness by Lucy’s news. He and Lillian were good friends, it may be he even had a crush on her. So he’s no help. Lucy finally says she’ll come pick him up. He agrees. Then she calls Helena, who thank the Lord is home, and tells her the bad news. Helena can’t believe it. She agrees to meet Lucy at the church.
Lucy drives to the church without seeing a thing. She just had lunch with Emma Keilbacher that day, and Emma didn’t mention any plans to go out that evening, did she? So hard to remember at a time like this. And she just worked with Lillian yesterday—
She forbids herself to think along those lines, and collects herself before going in to the church offices. Helena is already there, bless her. The vicar, pale and red-eyed, slows them for a prayer that Lucy has no patience for. They’ve got to find Emma and Martin.
So they get into Lucy’s car, and she drives to the Keilbachers’ house. Still no one home.
“I suppose they could have gone out to eat when Martin came home.…”
“They usually just go to Marie Callendar’s during the week.”
“Yeah, that’s right.” Between them Lucy and Helena know every restaurant that Emma and Martin might frequent. So Lucy drives them to Marie Callendar’s, but they’re not there.
“Where next?”
They try the El Torito on Chapman. No luck there. They track to Three Crowns, and then Charlie’s; the Keilbachers are nowhere to be seen.
They return to the house. No luck. It’s really very frustrating.
After that it’s a matter of friends they might be visiting. Vicar Sebastian feels telephoning around is a bad idea, so there follows a nightmarish interval of visits to all the friends of the Keilbachers they know: finding they aren’t there, pausing to give the friends the news, driving on.
Lucy begins to feel more and more strongly that they should find them, it strikes her as terrible, somehow, that so many people should know and Emma and Martin still be unaware. They’re all getting frustrated, vexed, upset; it’s hard to agree on what to try next.
“Do you suppose they already heard from the police?” Sebastian asks.
Lucy shakes her head. “Abe came straight to me, there wouldn’t have been time, I don’t think.”
They track all the way to Seal Beach where the Jansens moved, then into Irvine, back to the house, over to the church, then to the Cinema 12 theaters down in Tustin.… No luck, they just aren’t to be found.
“Where are they?” Lucy demands angrily. Helena and the vicar, cowed by Lucy’s determination to find them, are out of ideas.
Defeated, Lucy can only drive back to their house, frustrated and mystified. Where in the world are they?
She parks on the street in front of the Keilbachers’ duplex. The three of them sit in the car and wait.
There isn’t much to say. The whole neighborhood is still. The streetlight overhead flickers. Street, gutter, curb, grass, sidewalk, grass, driveways, houses, they’re all flickering too, leeched of color by the mercury vapor’s blue glow: a gray world, flickering a little. It’s strange: like holding watch for some mysterious organization, or performing a new ritual that they don’t fully understand. So strange, Lucy thinks, the things life leads you into doing.
Headlights appear at the bottom of the street, and Lucy’s heart jumps in her, like a small child trapped inside, trying to escape. The car approaches slowly. Turns into the Keilbachers’ driveway.
“Oh, my God,” says Helena, and begins to cry.
The vicar begins to cry.
“Now wait a minute,” Lucy says harshly as she opens the door and begins to get out of the car. “We’re doing God’s work here—we’re his messengers, and it’s God speaking now, not us,” and sure enough it must be true, because here’s Lucy McPherson crossing the lawn toward the surprised Keilbachers, Lucy who gets teary if she’s told the story of someone’s suffering or sacrifice, Lucy who waters up if you look at her sideways—here she is just as calm as can be, as she stands before Emma and Martin and gives them the news—as steady as a doctor, as they help Emma off the lawn and inside. And all through that long horrible night, as Emma is racked with hysterical grief, and Martin sits on the back porch staring at little handprints in the concrete, at nothing, it’s Lucy that they turn to to make coffee, to fix soup, to hold Emma, to deal with the police, and with the mortuary, and with all the business that the others cannot face, shaken as they are; it’s Lucy they turn to.
60
When Dennis arrives home from Washington, very late that night, exhausted and depressed, he finds an empty house. And no note. At first he’s angry, then worried; and he can’t think what to do about it. It’s completely unlike Lucy, he can’t think of a possible explanation where she could be at three in the morning. Has she left him, like Dan Houston’s wife? A moment of panic spikes into him at the thought; then he shakes his head, clearing it of such nonsense. Lucy wouldn’t do it.
Has something happened to her? An hour passes and the fear grows in him, then almost two hours pass, and it’s just occurred to him that he could call the reverend, rather than the police, when she pulls into the driveway. He hurries out to greet her, relieved and angry.
“Where have you been!”
She tells him.
“Ah,” he says stiffly, and puts his arms around her. Holds her.
He’s too tired for this, he thinks. Too tired.
They stand there. He’s awfully tired. He remembers a game he played with his brother when they were boys, during the marathon driving tours his parents took them on. At night in the motel rooms they took a deck of cards and divided it, and made card houses on the floor, in opposite corners of the room. Card fortresses would be a better name for them. Then they took a plastic spoon from McDonald’s, and used it as a projectile—bent it back like a catapult arm with their thumbs and fingers, and let fly. The spoon took the most hilarious knuckleball flights across the room, and mostly missed. They laughed.…
And when the spoon hit the card houses, it was so interesting; it didn’t matter whose was hit, it was just fun to see what happened. They noted that the card houses acted in one of two ways when struck by a direct hit. Thwap! They either collapsed instantly, the cards scattering, or else they resisted, sett
led down a little, and somehow in the hunkering down lost little or none of their structural integrity, their ability to hold up. Perhaps curiosity about that made Dennis an engineer.
Random images, in the exhausted mind. Where did that come from, he thinks. Ah. We’re the card house now. There’s never a situation where one card is threatened, the others left in peace; they’re all threatened together and at once. All in a permanent crisis. How long has it been going on? Spoons flying from every direction. And the house of cards either holds or flies apart.
He’s too tired for this, too depressed; there’s no comfort in him to give. Lucy begins to sob in earnest. He tries to remember the Keilbacher girl; he only saw her a few times, flitting in and out. Blond hair. A lively kid. Nice. Easier to imagine Martin and Emma. Ach. Bad luck. Terrible luck. Worse by far than having Judge Andrew Tobiason turn down a protest despite the evidence; worse than anything possible in all that world of corruption and graft. Ach, it’s bad everywhere. Spoons from every direction. He’ll have to check out Jim’s car, make sure it’s all right. He doesn’t know what to say. Lucy always wants something said, words, words, but he doesn’t have any. Are there any words for this? No. Some strange stubbornness, of an interlocking placement, holds certain card houses up, under a fluky barrage of blows.… He hugs her harder, holds them up.
61
Jim hears about it the next day, from Lucy. “It was Abe who was the paramedic called to the accident.”
“Oh, no. You’re kidding.”
“No, and he drove by to tell the Keilbachers, but they weren’t home, so he came by to tell me. He looked bad.”
“I bet.”
Jim tries to get Abe on the phone, but Abe’s parents are still on vacation and there’s no answer up at the house; the answering machine is off.
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