The Old Man

by Thomas Perry

  Marcia bought a large bag made of brown buttery leather that could be interpreted as either an overnight bag or a briefcase, wrapped each item of clothing in tissue, and put them all inside. Then she bought a birthday card, wrote a note, and sealed it. “Sarah,” it said. “I’ll be waiting at 6:00 p.m. Thursday at Jerry’s Deli in West-wood. Don’t drive and don’t bring your phone, computer, or iPad. If you see anyone watching or following you, keep walking, and we’ll try again. Love, Mom.”

  Hank wrapped the bag, sealed it inside a plain brown box, and took it to a messenger service. Hank had it sent to Sarah’s address, to be delivered in the evening after 9:00 p.m., but not left if she was out.

  On Thursday afternoon they parked in the municipal lot on Broxton and walked to Jerry’s at 5:50 p.m. They sat at a table where they could watch the front window, but far enough from it so they could slip out the back door if they needed to.

  They sat like what they both had been—parents of a female student who was at a university far from home and had been for so long that she had slipped her moorings. Home was no longer the place where she was from, but the place where her life had taken her. The Dixons drank coffee from thick, heavy white mugs and waited. Hank knew that if he looked around the large room he could find other sets of parents meeting their children here, but he didn’t, because looking invited looks.

  At 6:04 a young woman appeared in silhouette, her long booted strides bobbing her across the big front window, the sun hitting the street at an angle that illuminated the short dark-brown wig and her very white skin and red lips. She came inside, saw them instantly, and smiled.

  She sat at their table and took off the sunglasses to lean close and kiss her mother. “Happy Halloween. What do you think?”

  Her mother said, “We didn’t want you to stand out. And keep your voice down.”

  Sarah laughed. She looked at Hank Dixon. “You’re still with us? You can’t give it up, right?”

  “Something like that,” he said.

  “What does that mean?” said Marcia.

  “It’s a private joke,” said Sarah.

  “Sarah, I have to tell you some things quickly,” Hank said. “We’re not going to be able to see you again for a while.” He took out a card. “There’s a trust fund set up for you. It’s called the McDonald Trust. Here’s a business card with the account information. Memorize it today. If you need money, just call them up and they’ll wire some to your account. They withhold the taxes, and they’ll send you a 1099 to prove it each year at tax time.”

  She held the card. “You did this? Why would you do this for me?”

  “I like surprises. Now I’m going to take a walk and let you two talk.” He looked at Marcia. “Don’t be too long.” He stood up and walked out the front door.

  Sarah turned to Marcia. “Did you know about this?”

  “No.”

  “Why would he do this?”

  Her mother took a deep breath, and then let it out in a sigh. “He’s that kind of man. He likes you. He already set up trust funds for his own daughter and her kids years and years ago. Beyond that, don’t try to understand him. There’s too much history that’s too long to tell, too many complications nobody has time to explain. Just do what he said and let it go.”

  “But this is all crazy. This getup I have to wear—the boots are nice, but—and you running away from Chicago with him. Why?”

  “Running away with him is more fun than most people have in a lifetime.”

  Sarah stared at her for a second. “So why don’t you look happy? Not calm either.” She leaned close and whispered, “Did he get caught doing something illegal?”

  “I wouldn’t say that, exactly,” her mother said. “It’s complicated.”

  “But he’s a criminal?”

  “No, he’s not.”

  “Is he wanted?”

  “No.”

  “What, then?”

  Marcia leaned close and whispered in her ear. “Years and years ago he was an undercover policeman. He put some very powerful people away—drug suppliers from South America. Recently the son of one of them, who had been a child at the time, saw him in Chicago and recognized him. So now he’s been told to go away and cool off for a time, while the police handle the criminals.”

  “Is he—”

  “Wrong questions,” her mother said. “Wrong conversation. We don’t have much time together, so let’s really use it. You’re a wonderful daughter and always have been. If I die tonight, my life won’t have been wasted because I had you. Keep being the same kind of person. Do good in the world. Have babies too, if you can. Part of me would like to simply stay right here in LA and watch you do all of it. But that would accomplish nothing except to intrude on your life, and to waste the part of my life that’s left to me—to kind of spit in the eye of the universe. Do you understand what I mean?”

  “You love him. You think that this is the last time you’re going to be in love. But you’re not that old. You could—”

  Her mother laughed. “Don’t be silly. He didn’t tie me up and drag me off. I’m doing what I want to do. I hope you can accept that.”

  “I’m going to have to, aren’t I?” said Sarah. “Can I at least know where you’re going from here?”

  “I’m going to try to see your brother and then we’ll make ourselves scarce for a while.”

  Sarah looked around. “Are you leaving now?”

  “We’ll be gone in fifteen minutes. First you and I are going to share a piece of lemon meringue pie. It’s a life lesson I learned recently. You never know when you’ll get your next lemon meringue, so now is a good time.”

  Three hours later Brian McDonald walked along the side of his condominium building toward the door. This had been one of the worst afternoons he’d ever had. It had been absolutely insane. When he was a child the McDonalds had always seemed to be a family like everyone else’s, except a little better. That had lasted until he was nineteen.

  Brian had been away at Stanford, working intently to complete a double major in engineering and computer science. He remembered the day clearly. It had been near the end of fall semester. At 5:00 a.m. he was shaken awake by a small earthquake. It was one of those sharp jolts with a sound like a bang. He had been relieved that it wasn’t the kind that sounded like a freight train blasting through walls into his bedroom. He sat up and looked around. It was still not daylight but he could tell nothing had even fallen on the floor. He went back to sleep until seven, when he heard a rumbling in the hallway.

  At first he thought this must be the real thing, the start of the quake that had been heralded by the small foreshock two hours earlier. But then he heard the voices and recognized the rumble as the sound of heavy feet running in the hallway. “Get up, you lazy bastards! The semester is over. The rest of exam week is canceled!”

  His housemates, Serge and Najib, burst into his room with a laptop and showed him the message from the president and the deans. The earthquake had dislodged a chunk of the 1891 Frederick Law Olmsted façade of the chapel. A county official had declared the campus buildings off-limits until they could all be inspected and cleared. It occurred to Brian that the official must have been better at history than science. He knew that the 1906 San Francisco earthquake had severely damaged the campus, but didn’t seem to know that foreshocks before major quakes were rare. But it didn’t matter. The decision forced the university to cancel the last two days of final exam week. Brian got up, changed his plane reservation to leave two days earlier, and stepped into the shower.

  When he arrived home the next afternoon, he thought he’d be giving his parents a surprise. His mother would be out giving a piano lesson and his father would be at the office. Brian took a cab from the airport, walked in the front door of the house, set his suitcase down, and decided to check the refrigerator. He walked toward the kitchen past the open arch of the den—and stopped. On the leather couch in the den his father was having sex with his assistant, Steffie.

&n
bsp; That instant was like the initiation of a chain reaction. He heard himself say, “Dad?” Steffie screamed and disengaged, and then sprinted toward the only exit from the room, pushing past Brian and across the hall to the nearest bathroom. Brian’s father put on his pants with a thoughtful demeanor. Then he and Brian had a man-to-man conversation in the den, staring into each other’s eyes over the pile of Steffie’s clothes on the coffee table.

  Brian’s arrival that day dislodged the last pillar that had been propping up the rickety structure of the family. Chunks fell, hit other parts, and those tore away from others as piece by piece the rest succumbed to gravity.

  It was about ten minutes before Steffie reappeared. She padded out wearing one of his father’s jackets from the hall closet. She snatched up her clothes from the coffee table and went back into the bathroom to dress. Then she reappeared and walked out the front door. She didn’t say good-bye and nobody inquired how she planned to get back to the office. When Brian’s mother came home about two hours later and saw Brian there, she was very surprised. When her husband pulled her aside a few minutes later to talk to her, she had another surprise.

  Brian’s mother, Zoe, had a couple of long stony-faced discussions with her husband. By the end of the second one the divorce had been set in motion. A couple of weeks later the last traces of Darryl McDonald had been removed. Within a month, the house where Brian had been carried home from the hospital after his birth and where he’d been brought up—the place he’d imagined he might inherit someday and retire to after a long successful career—had a big FOR SALE BY COLDWELL BANKER sign erected on its front lawn.

  His father, Darryl, was living in a small sublet condo with Steffie, who had not only been promoted from secret mistress to fiancée, but also artificially matured by being redubbed Stephanie. Because the incident that had precipitated all of this, when Brian had walked into the den, had not dimmed or lost any of its visual clarity for either Brian or Stephanie, their meetings were rare and uncomfortable after that.

  In the years since then, Brian had managed to maintain cordial relations with both of his parents. At first he’d considered himself to be closest to his mother, who represented home, love, and childhood memories. She was the wronged party, and she had always been much more important in Brian’s life than his father, who had been largely a figurehead, absent most of the time. Even in the very uncomfortable and treacherous topic of sex that loomed unmentioned but enormous in the background while the family crumbled, she seemed to be in the right. Zoe had always, at least in his presence, been kind and affectionate to her husband. She wasn’t exactly an ingénue when this happened, but she had taken good care of herself. She hadn’t deserved such outright rejection.

  But he could also feel sympathy for the temptation Darryl had felt around Steffie. In the terrible incident, Brian had not been able to take his eyes off her, and he recalled that she was like a ripe fruit, all plump, perfect, rounded curves and sugary succulence. Even as she had charged into him to push through the doorway, he recalled, her face had been beautiful, like a blushing angel. Brian decided it was a sign of his own maturity to concede that his father was only a weak, mortal human being, and that being tempted did not make him worse than most.

  There was also the fact that the hand that signed the checks to Stanford, and after that MIT, was his father’s. After the initial shock of the divorce wore off, Brian sometimes thought that it was too bad his mother couldn’t have done what millions of other women had done and given her husband time to get over Steffie without doing anything overtly unpleasant and destroying the rest of the family’s sense of well-being.

  The message he’d received from Sarah a couple of hours ago had compelled him to rethink the whole tawdry story. He was beginning to think his mother had lost her mind like a cast-off woman in a Greek tragedy that he couldn’t quite place. She had run off with a man who was practically a stranger, and before she went away to God knew where she wanted to bring this man to see him. It was clear that Sarah was taking this thing seriously, because she hadn’t called, e-mailed, or sent a text. She had hired a process server from the law firm where she had interned to deliver it.

  Brian’s relationship with Sarah had been one of the things that the fall of the house of McDonald had brought down. They had been close as children. She was his little sister, and she had looked up to him. But when the breakup had come, they’d argued. She had sided with their mother and expressed contempt for Brian because he had not gone out of his way to be rude to Stephanie. He had told her that she was a naïve, knee-jerk feminist who, paradoxically, hated women, and was incapable of appreciating the complexity of human behavior. After that they had both been busy with graduate school and law school. And there was no longer a home where they would be forced to see each other on holidays.

  The letter she had sent him by messenger was their first communication in at least two years. As soon as Brian received it he had closed his office door and read it with dread, and then with alarm, and finally despair. Since Sarah had entered law school she had adopted a measured, seemingly reasonable style of discourse. Reading a letter from her was like watching a philosopher walk calmly up a mountain and step off a cliff. Mom has found love. For the first time since we were children, she’s happy. But powerful criminals have a grudge against him, so they have to go away for a while.

  Brian rolled his eyes and let out a groan that he’d been unable to stifle. He sat still for a moment hoping nobody had heard, and then began formulating rhetorical questions. I’m a technocrat, Sarah. I work for companies that sell goods and services to the government. They’re regulated and watched. How could you send me a letter like this at my office? And what about you, Sarah, you overconfident, presumptuous moron? You’ve spent the past two years trying to become a lawyer. Conspiring to hide fugitives is a felony. Even if this guy really were in the witness protection program, he would have to be a criminal to know anything about criminals. How’s that career going to work out for you now?

  He had fumed and fretted for at least an hour and then packed up some work and left the office with everyone else, but he didn’t go home. He drove his Audi all over Irvine and Costa Mesa and the Palos Verdes peninsula for about three hours before he realized he was hungry and stopped for a hamburger. Now he was home, having solved nothing and knowing nothing new except that his mother had lost her mind.

  As he walked up to his dark apartment building he saw two people, a couple, walking along the sidewalk from the visitors’ parking area as though they wanted to intercept him. Here they are, he thought, two FBI agents coming to interview me about my crazy mother. Maybe he could get a job running the IT section of a clothing company or a grocery chain. He stared at the two.

  They walked under a streetlamp, and he recognized the walk, the shape of the shorter one.

  Then he heard the voice. “Brian!”

  His mother. No matter where he might have been—in a blizzard in Antarctica or the bottom of the ocean—that voice would have entered his brain and traveled the thousands of neural pathways it had built early in his life. He walked more quickly to avoid having an illegal conversation in public under a streetlamp, swiveling his head to be sure there were no witnesses nearby.

  He beat them to the door and said, “Wait a second while I get this open.” He pushed the door inward and stepped aside to get them off the steps, and then shut the door behind them. He hurried to his apartment door and let them in.

  He locked the door and said, “Sarah let me know you might be coming.”

  His mother hugged him. He tolerated it, but he couldn’t bring himself to wrap his arms around her as though he approved of her being here.

  She released him. “This is Peter. He’s my—what? Boyfriend seems to still be the only word we have.”

  Hank Dixon stepped forward and held out his hand to shake Brian’s and Brian gave the hand a perfunctory pump and released it. Hank didn’t react to the sudden reversion to the name that had been blow
n, but it told him there must be something to worry about. He watched Brian scurry to the front windows to tug on the strings to be sure the blinds were closed as tightly as possible. Then he folded his arms in front of him.

  Hank said, “Well, I’m sure you two would like to talk, so I’ll leave you alone. I’ll be in the car.” He went out the door and closed it.

  Brian said, “Sarah seemed to think you were afraid you might be followed.”

  “That’s true,” said his mother. “It’s all a problem that goes back a lot of years. The police will take care of it. But for now at least, please don’t say anything to anyone about us.”

  Brian’s mind was slapped backward by the enormity of the gap between his mother’s understanding of this situation and his own. He actually gave an incredulous chuckle. “Oh, I can assure you your secrets are safe. I’ll never say a word about this to anyone.”

  Brian went to lift one of the blinds and watched the man walking toward his car. Brian felt a bit better. He said to his mother: “What exactly is your relationship with this guy?”

  “I know you’ve had girlfriends, Brian. What was your relationship with them? I hope it was improper.”

  “I’m not the one who’s the problem here,” he said.

  “Neither am I,” she said. “I didn’t come to ask you for help or approval. I just dropped by for a brief visit.”

  “For what purpose?”

  “Purpose? You and I haven’t seen much of each other in the past two or three years. I wanted to give you a hug and tell you that your mother loves you before we disappear into the night.” She saw that he wasn’t smiling. “I can see I’ve made you uncomfortable. I’m sorry. I know you like stability and certainty.”