As his breathing returned to normal, he thought about the route he’d taken from Santa Monica – a major thoroughfare back to the freeway, save the final detour. What was that, really? Three turns? Had the Grand Marquis actually done anything out of the ordinary? Or was he jumping at imagined threats?
He gave a chuckle, palming sweat off the back of his neck. Officer, a Grand Marquis drove behind me for a few blocks. Made a couple turns, even. No, I didn’t catch a license plate, but maybe you could track it down using satellite imagery.
His guilt about the fraudulent green houses was working overtime, creating stalkers that weren’t there, making him cast a suspicious eye at everything from a baby monitor to traffic patterns. Besides, the only people who knew about the PVC pipes were complicit in one way or another, so who would come after him for that? And why? No one. No reason. No worries.
He watched the rearview the rest of the way home.
‘She’s scratching her head. All the time. Didn’t you notice?’
Mike watched Annabel picking through Kat’s hair. ‘No,’ he admitted.
‘It’s been going around school, and she seems to be the first in line every time.’ Annabel firmed Kat’s head beneath her grip, angled her into the strong bathroom light. It was late, and they were all tired. ‘Stay still, monkey.’
‘Don’t be mad at me,’ Kat said. ‘It’s not like I said, “What can I do to bug Mom today? Oh – I know. I’ll get head lice.”’
Mike set down his keys on the kitchen counter – he’d just dashed out to the drugstore – and pulled the treatment bottle from the bag.
Kat eyed the ominous red label. ‘What’s in that stuff anyways?’
Mike held up the bottle, squinted at the ingredients: ‘Gasoline, skunk juice, battery acid—’
‘Mom.’
‘He’s kidding.’
‘But there’s bad stuff in it. It’ll give me skin burns. And mutation.’
‘It won’t make you mutate,’ Annabel said wearily.
But as usual their daughter outnegotiated them, so they wound up using a home remedy Annabel found online – mayonnaise combed through Kat’s hair, turban-sealed with Saran Wrap. The getup accentuated Kat’s smooth features, the smiling elf face. Mike went into the master bathroom to dig mayo out from under his nails and listened on the monitor to Annabel singing Kat to sleep, the lullaby sweet and soft and, as always, way off key. ‘Lay thee down now and rest, may thy slum-ber be blessed.’ He smiled to himself before remembering the dirty black Grand Marquis he’d managed to convince himself was a tail, and he pictured how the milk shake had flown from Kat’s hand when he’d hit the brakes at the streetlight and – Shit.
The lizard.
He rushed out to the truck, finding the peanut-butter jar wedged beneath the passenger seat. The baby lizard, dead inside, thin and curled like a feather.
He carried in the jar as Annabel emerged from Kat’s bedroom. She said, ‘I laid a hand towel over her pillow so—’ She caught sight of the jar.
‘She wanted to keep him,’ Mike said.
Annabel shrugged. ‘How else will she figure it out?’ She crossed her arms, leaned against the wall. ‘Do we tell her?’
They’d been through it with hamsters and goldfish and a frog, but as Kat had grown older and more aware, each time seemed to be worse.
‘Yes,’ Mike said. ‘Have to.’
‘I know. You’ll do it?’
‘Sure.’
Mike set the jar down in the hall, entered, and sat on the edge of Kat’s bed. She peered up at him, puckish and vaguely alien in her mayo wrap. He pressed his fingertips into the comforter. ‘I will never lie to you, right?’
She nodded, and immediately the image of those buried PVC pipes came at him, the lie of the cover-up, the lie of the houses, the lie of the coming award. But this was not the time for that. This was the time for an eight-year-old and a dead lizard.
‘Your lizard died.’
‘Dead?’ She blinked. ‘Like, lizard heaven?’ Despite the wise-crack, her bottom lip trembled ever so slightly. A flash of remorse moved across her face, but then she bit her lip, forced it still. ‘Well, you can say “told you so” now.’
He hated to see how well she could rein in her emotions. He looked down at his hands, trying to figure out a way in. The Bad-Parenting Game?
‘We don’t talk about feelings,’ he said. ‘We swallow them and cram ’em down inside of us so they turn into hidden resentments and fears.’
Kat half smiled, her eyes glassy, and then her face broke and tears fell at once, spotting her cheeks. ‘I want my baby lizard not to be dead.’
He hugged her, rubbed little circles on her back, and she sputtered a bit against his shoulder. Finally she pulled back. ‘Can I see him?’
He retrieved the jar, and she held it in her tiny hands, tilted it so the lizard slid stiffly around the twig. ‘What happens to his body?’
‘Well, we can bury him in the backyard and—’
‘No,’ she said. ‘Zach Henson.’
It took a moment for Mike to pluck the name from memory – fifth-grader, leukemia, last year. Mike and Annabel had gone to the funeral just to shake hands with the parents and helplessly say the only thing one could – ‘If you need anything.’ After, they’d sat in the truck in the church parking lot, awed into a muted sort of terror, Annabel weeping quietly, him gripping the wheel, watching the relatives trickle by, faces chapped, posture eroded. As usual, Annabel put words to his thoughts and said, ‘Anything else I think I could live through, but if something happened to her, I think I would die.’
Now, Mike cleared his throat, set his hand on Kat’s tiny knee, and said, ‘Zach’s body has probably gone back into the earth by now.’
Kat scratched at her head through the sheath of mayonnaise and cling wrap, her face somber and thoughtful, and asked, ‘What if you and Mom die?’
‘We’ll be fine. You have plenty of time to worry about stuff like that when you’re older. Your job right now is to be a kid and have fun. We will always protect you. Until you can protect yourself.’
Kat rolled over, poked the pillow in the spot where her polar bear used to sleep. ‘But what if you just disappear one day, like your parents did? What would happen to me?’
The question cut the breath off halfway down his throat, and it was a moment or two before he could reassure her and kiss her good night. Walking down the hall to bed, he could have sworn he heard the buzz of that blowfly, portending ill, but when he turned, there was nothing at the seams of the ceiling except darkness.
Chapter 11
Mike’s oversize, pixelated face greeted him and his family one step into the Braemar Country Club. Tuesday’s Los Angeles Times article, blown up to the size of a door and mounted on foam, leaned against the entrance to the main dining room. Lined beside it like enormous dominoes were similar clippings from the state’s other major papers, giving the effect of tabloid wainscoting. Itching in his eight-hundred-dollar suit, Mike paused, uncomfortable.
Despite the newspaper photo’s clearly showing Mike’s heterochromia, the journalist had referred to his ‘blazing brown eyes,’ ignoring the fact that one of them was technically ‘blazing amber.’ But the oversight was nothing next to the fraud at the core of the politicized hype – Mike’s receiving an environmental award for houses that shouldn’t have passed the green code. Scanning the puff piece, which praised his work to the ozone-depleted heavens, Mike felt a rush of guilt and – feeling his daughter’s tiny hand in his – shame.
Annabel finally tugged at his arm, breaking him from his thoughts. Reluctantly, he entered, nodding at various well-dressed folks, many of whom beamed at him with recognition. Kat kept pace, clutching her backpack full of books, which she’d brought in case she got bored. Waiters circled with glasses of champagne and hors d’oeuvres he couldn’t recognize. He popped a pastrylike item into his mouth just to have something to do and scanned the crowd for a familiar face.
Kat had already
engaged Andrés’s kids in a game of tag. Annabel looked stunning in a red dress with a cutout back. He watched her drift effortlessly into a circle of heavily made-up women, moving with the grace bestowed by a proper upbringing and natural confidence. The woman was a marvel; each situation brought out a new facet of her. But even as he watched with pride, her ease seemed only to underscore how out of place he felt. It seemed the one place he fit in effortlessly was with his family.
He started toward his wife, but an older woman with a clipboard appeared between them, facing Annabel. ‘Michael Wingate’s wife, right?’ she asked. ‘I need to borrow you for a picture.’ She clasped Annabel’s hand in hers, leading her away. Annabel shrugged in mock helplessness and went with a smile.
Mike made his way across the room and caught the bartender’s attention. ‘Can I get a Budweiser?’
The bartender, a handsome aspiring-actor type, gestured at the bottles in the ice bucket behind him. ‘Only Heineken. You’re at the wrong party.’
Mike took the cold bottle. The bitter beer felt great going down. The last two days had dragged out, made slower by how much he’d been dreading tonight.
Gazing across the swirls of people, Mike spotted Andrés at one of the elegantly set tables by the dais. Carrying his wife’s purse and looking bored senseless, Andrés rolled his eyes, and Mike had to look away to hide his smile.
The sight of the governor’s chief of staff holding court one table over made the half grin go brittle on Mike’s face. Catching Mike’s eye, Bill Garner offered him a head tilt that he couldn’t help but interpret as conspiratorial. Were other people looking at him that way, too? He couldn’t get a handle on his uneasiness. For a week now, he’d been jumping at shadows.
At the far end of the room, floor-to-ceiling windows looked out across a sloping golf course, now dark. Mike angled his way through the crush, offering greetings to passing faces. Getting to the fringe of the gathering and having a view of the horizon calmed him a bit.
Just as he’d started to unknot his concerns, someone collided into him from the side. Stumbling to regain his footing, he spilled beer down the leg of his trousers.
A voice floated over his shoulder. ‘Oh, sorry.’ A wiry man with a patchy beard leaned in at him, gripping his arm. ‘I have CP.’
The man had breath like a birdcage, his lips spotted with black flecks. Sunflower seeds? He reached into a ratty brown sport coat and withdrew a handkerchief. Mike took it and swiped at the wet mark on his thigh, but the liquid had already seeped through the fabric.
‘Cerebral palsy,’ the man said. ‘Bad balance, you know? Again, I’m real sorry for that.’
‘That’s okay. I hate this suit anyway.’
The man’s sport coat looked like Salvation Army – corduroy, worn elbow patches, frayed sleeves. Mike offered back the handkerchief, and the man hooked it in a hand curled like a monkey’s paw. His eyes, set in a jaundiced face, twitched from side to side.
A hulking man stood idly several feet away, not uncomfortable but not at ease – not anything at all, in fact. He was so detached that it took Mike a moment to register that the two were together.
‘I’ve had my Achilles tendon lengthened eight times, my hamstring five,’ the man in the sport coat continued. ‘Eleven tendon releases in my right foot alone. Forty-four surgeries in all. That don’t even count Botox injections into spastic muscles. Then there’s the seizure meds, then the meds for med side effects, and . . . well, hell, you get the picture.’
Mike loosened his tie, wondering what the guy wanted. The big man remained immobile, looking at the draped walls, at nothing. Was he even listening?
‘And still the muscles tighten. I walk a little worse each year. Need a few more snips and cuts. Expensive as hell. Keeps me working, that’s for sure.’ He brought a wineglass up to his chin and spit sunflower seeds into it. A soggy wad had collected in the bottom of the glass, steeping in a quarter inch of leftover red wine. ‘All this ’cuz I didn’t get enough oxygen when I was riding down that birth canal. No fault o’ my own. But I gotta pay anyways, day after day.’ He snickered. ‘Karma’s a bitch, ain’t it, Mike? Catches up to us all.’
Mike studied the guy’s face. ‘How do you know my name?’
The man nodded at the newspaper blowups. ‘Man o’ the hour.’
‘And you are . . .?’
‘William.’
‘William . . .?’
William smiled, showing off yellowed teeth. ‘My kid cousin had scars like that.’ He nodded at Mike’s knuckles. ‘Old-fashioned fighting.’
Mike slid his hands into his pockets. ‘Had?’
‘People with knuckles like that don’t generally make it to happy middle age.’
Kat ran by, chasing Andrés’s son, shrieking laugher.
William gestured at them with his chin. ‘Look at the little ones. I could watch ’em play all day.’
The way William was looking at the kids made Mike squirm.
‘Cute girl,’ William said. ‘Must be yours – strong resemblance, those cat eyes. You can tell she ain’t adopted.’
A creepy remark, creepier still since Mike didn’t think he and Kat looked all that much alike. Why would the guy give a damn if Kat was adopted? Had Mike heard wrong, or had William actually placed extra emphasis on the ‘she’? A veiled reference to Mike’s foster-home past? Meaning what? And how could William know? Mike felt a pulse beating in the side of his neck.
‘So who do you know here?’ Mike asked.
‘Well, Mike, now I know you, don’t I?’
‘Sure,’ Mike said evenly. ‘But who invited you?’
Someone made an announcement, and they all began settling into their chairs. The woman with the clipboard waved Mike toward his seat by the podium, her gesture emphatic: We need you here now.
‘Better get going,’ William said. ‘Looks like they want you onstage.’
There was no denying it; this second evasion was intentional. Something had shifted in the air, gone sour.
And Mike’s patience had worn thin. He swallowed, tried to rein in his irritation. ‘You didn’t answer my question. How are you hooked into this?’
‘I’m just a guy who likes a party.’ William kept his eyes on Mike and spit out another sunflower shell, this time over the lip of the cup onto the carpet. ‘Plus, there’s a whole mess of finelookin’ women around.’ He gestured, again with his scraggly chin. ‘Look at that slice o’ pie there.’ Annabel was sitting at the edge of the banquet table up on the dais. Her chair was pulled sideways as she spoke with one of the waiters. Though her legs were closed, her dress was hitched on a knee, and from their lower vantage they could see a little triangle of white silk between her legs.
Mike felt his face go hot. He stiffened, and the big man, never shifting his blank gaze from the far wall, sidled a half step toward them.
Mike felt a surge of old instinct rising in him, gathering heat. His face was close enough to William’s that he could smell the stink leaking through his teeth.
The woman with the clipboard called Mike’s name. He untensed his muscles and stepped calmly away. Walking up onto the dais, he whispered in Annabel’s ear, and she straightened her dress, smoothing it over her knees. The lights dimmed, save those beating down on the banquet table, illuminating Mike and the other award recipients. Squinting out at the room, he could discern little more than shadowy figures around the far tables.
The governor made a grand entrance, his frame dwarfing the podium. He threw out a few opening cracks, a broad grin showing off the trademark gap in his front teeth. Mike registered the crowd’s titters but little else; his eyes were picking over the crowd. Annabel, misreading his tension, squeezed his hand supportively. Kat waved from Andrés’s table down in the front.
The other honorees got up and made brief speeches, but Mike couldn’t concentrate on what they were saying. He thought he spied William’s form moving across the back, but then there was an awful silence and he realized everyone was staring at him.
The familiar woman, sans clipboard, said Mike’s name again into the microphone. Annabel urged him to his feet, and, walking on wooden legs, he took the podium.
‘I, um—’ A feedback squawk; his mouth was too close to the mike. The wet fabric from the spill felt cold against his thigh. He did his best to put the bizarre confrontation out of mind. ‘I don’t really deserve to be here,’ he said.
At the VIP table, Bill Garner looked up at him, head cocked, lips wearing a tense little smile.
‘I mean, to give me an award when I already feel so lucky for what I have and what I get to do. I wake up every day thinking I’ve won the lottery.’ Finally relaxing a bit, Mike glanced at his wife. She was looking back at him with adoration. ‘Because I have. I mean, my wife, my daughter, steady work that I love.’
Mike glanced down at the podium. ‘And it’s not like building Green Valley was all selfless. It was a paying job.’ Eager to break the tension, a few people laughed, thinking he was joking. ‘I’m no great environmentalist,’ he said. ‘I just don’t want my daughter and grandkids to look back at me decades from now and be angry that I didn’t do the right thing.’
Annabel’s new diamond ring glinted, the big rock seeming to sum up how full of shit he was. As if reading his thoughts, she slid her hands into her lap and looked away, trying to keep her composure. Seeing her upset completely threw him, and for a moment he lost track of where he was. The silence stretched out uncomfortably as he grasped for words. He almost just came clean, admitted the lie, and walked off to start shoveling his way out of the hole he’d dug for himself and forty families, but instead he heard himself say, ‘Thank you for this recognition. I’m honored.’ Annabel closed her eyes, and he saw her heartbeat fluttering the thin skin of her temple. To applause, he stepped out of the spotlight, touched her gently on her shoulder, and murmured, ‘Let’s go.’
The lights were up now in the dining room, the ceremony over. Mike scanned the space, but there was no sign of William or the big guy anywhere. He felt ill, his mind racing, his stomach churning from the altercation earlier, from the phony award, from the way Annabel had averted her gaze when he was up there, as if she couldn’t meet his eye. He wanted to get home, burn off the night with a scalding shower, and put all this behind them.
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