by Ann Packer
“Who died?” Penny said. “Oh, my God. Not Grandpa. Oh, don’t tell me, don’t tell me this happened the day after we left!”
Sierra looked up. She had an ordinary small nose and an ordinary bow-shaped upper lip and an ordinary high hairline, but her features, especially her clear green eyes, were arranged in such a way as to make her extraordinarily lovely. Perhaps it was the sweep of her jawline or the openness of the space between her eyebrows, but she was a thirteen-year-old who turned heads, a child so pretty that the word itself seemed to need a new definition.
“Assassination,” James sang. “Assassina-aytion is making me wait, it’s keeping me wayayayayaytin’.”
“James!” Rebecca exclaimed. “Don’t.”
“What?” Penny said.
“In San Francisco,” Robert said. “The mayor and another guy were killed. Shot. You didn’t hear?”
“What do you mean?” Penny said. “Leo Ryan was shot. He was a congressman.”
“Mom, today,” Robert said. “They were shot today.”
“It was an assassination,” James added proudly.
“No,” Penny said. “That can’t be right.” She recalled the few seconds of radio she’d heard in the morning. “I’m positive. I heard something on the radio, and they mentioned Jim Jones—they were just going over all of that again.”
“They thought it was related at first,” Rebecca said. “But it wasn’t.”
Penny pulled a chair away from the table—she pulled it all the way to the wall before she sat down. She shook her head with disbelief. “What is Sierra doing here?” she said at last.
“Staying with me,” Ryan said, speaking for the first time since Penny had entered the room.
“I’ll be quiet,” Sierra said without lifting her head.
“But it’s nearly dinnertime.”
“Mom,” Rebecca said, and Penny didn’t persist.
It was nearly dinnertime, and she went to the refrigerator. She no longer had the energy to cook anything, let alone something the children would protest, and she sorted through the food that was already there, that had been there since last Wednesday. She took out bread and potatoes and cream cheese and an old head of romaine lettuce. Her mother had insisted she bring home the leftover turkey, and she pulled that out as well, opening the foil to find little other than scraps and a single unappetizing wing. But she found some cranberry sauce and some stuffing and some frozen peas, and she thought that on a night like this simple was better anyway.
Sitting next to Ryan and Sierra, James felt the song coming back. “Rebecca,” he whispered.
She’d been watching their mother, and she turned to look at him.
“Assassination,” he sang softly.
She shook her head, but her voice, when she spoke, was not the one he was expecting. Gently, she said, “Shhh, it’s okay.” Then she actually smiled a little and gave him nice eyes and said, “It’ll be better when Dad gets home.”
“I’m not trying to be mean,” he said softly. “What’s the word?”
“What word?”
“Instead of ‘assassination.’ In the song.”
“Anticipation,” she said. “But I don’t like that record anymore.”
It was puzzling to James that she was being so nice to him. He said, “Do you still like Carly Simon, though?”
“Not as much. Now I like Stevie Nicks. Want to know something funny? Fleetwood Mac’s album is Rumours and Carly Simon’s, my favorite, was No Secrets.” She sat back in her chair and waited, and James, who had no idea what he was supposed to say, nodded seriously as if he understood.
Sierra lifted her head. The side of her face that had been pressed against Ryan’s back was pink and bore a crease from a wrinkle in his shirt. She was so pretty that Robert almost couldn’t look at her. At least she wasn’t Ryan’s girlfriend.
His own girlfriend had reacted strangely to the news from San Francisco. Happy that they’d recovered from their first fight, he’d found her at lunch and was shocked first when she told him about the murders and even more so when she said, “Well, it’s been a while, right? We’re probably overdue.” Once he found his voice and asked what she meant, she said, as if it were perfectly obvious, “Kennedy in ’63, King in ’68, another Kennedy in ’68. It’s been ten years if you don’t count Squeaky Fromme and Sara Jane Moore trying for Ford in ’75. Which you shouldn’t, since they didn’t actually get him.” Robert nodded to show he knew all about the history but was dumbfounded by . . . what? Her coldness.
He watched his mother now, putting oddball food in bowls. “Wait,” he said. “We’re having leftovers?”
“No complaints,” she said. “Next person to complain cooks the whole meal.”
The children dispersed to other rooms. Left to themselves, Ryan and Sierra stretched out on his bedroom rug with their fingers laced behind their heads, a pair of stargazers. His right elbow touched her left elbow. At the end of the school day, they had stood in the parking lot and waited for their rides. He had told her first thing in the morning, before the news came, about his crepe at the Magic Pan. In the parking lot he told her the rest, about how he had seen the very building where the shootings had taken place, how he kept thinking about it, the columns, the arches, the giant dome. Somewhere inside that building there were two pools of blood. His ride came first, and Sierra told the mother driving that she was supposed to go home with him. At the Blairs’, she called her mother and explained that she and Ryan had work to do together. “Later” was her answer to her mother’s question about when she would come home. “This is important.”
Sierra reached for his hand and kissed his fingers. “Your hand tastes like dirt.”
He rolled onto his side and scooted forward. “Your ear tastes like . . .”
“What?”
“I can’t remember what it’s called.”
He kissed her ear and the part in her hair and the inside of her elbow. She kissed his fingers and his neck. They lay on the floor with the door open, kissing experimentally—not to find out how it was to kiss, what kissing felt like; they would do that and much more over the next few years. No, that first day it was to discover and name all the smells and tastes available in the other, until now unknown despite all the years they’d been friends. The door was open, and the others wandered by, and still they kissed.
• • •
Most days Bill tried to leave the clinic by six, but today had been busy with sore throats and influenza, and the terrible news from San Francisco seemed to have slowed his staff, who paused to discuss it and tune in to the news when they got the chance. He was half an hour behind with his last patient, a two-year-old with thrush, and didn’t get to his car until after six-thirty.
Driving home, he heard Dianne Feinstein’s voice, a replay of her shaky announcement of the shootings. He wondered how his children had heard the news. He’d noticed a trend toward an abrupt and premature dissemination of information at schools, without an attendant plan for monitoring or responding to the students’ reactions. Somehow, upon hearing the first reports from Guyana, he’d had the presence of mind to be glad the news was arriving on a weekend, with his children at home.
He parked next to the station wagon and stood for a moment in the cold air, thinking about how he might help the children. Penny was in the kitchen, her back to the doorway. “I’m home,” he called, but she didn’t turn around. At breakfast, neither of them had mentioned his evening visit to the shed.
He went to his bedroom closet, where he took off his coat and tie.
Rebecca and James appeared in the doorway. “Oh,” he said at the sight of them, and heat swept into his face.
Rebecca said, “Dad, are you crying?”
He shook his head and held open his arms. James came running, but Rebecca stood where she was. He wrapped his arms around James and stroked his head.
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br /> “What?” Rebecca said. He hadn’t turned on the bedroom light, so she was silhouetted against the bright hallway behind her. She was fifteen years old and nearly five-eight.
“Happy to see both of you.”
James pulled back and looked up at him. “Dad, did you hear? Two guys were killed in the city.”
“I did.” Bill looked across the room at Rebecca. “You found out at school?”
She nodded. “It’s not related to Guyana. They thought it was, but it’s not.”
“Yes, I heard that.”
At dinner, the six of them took their usual places and Sierra sat on a chair brought in from the mud pantry—a chair that in recent months had been used mainly by Gina. Ryan pulled it so close it touched his own chair, and throughout the meal he held her hand as he ate, avoiding the foods on his plate that would have required him to drop her hand so he could use a knife.
James spent his talking time describing his newfound affection for Fleetwood Mac, Rebecca’s current favorite band. He’d made a study of the album cover and spoke passionately, if not entirely convincingly, about how much he liked the picture of the bearded man with the ponytail holding out his hand for the blond lady.
Ryan said he wanted Sierra to stay as late as possible. After that he fell silent.
“I wonder,” Bill said, “if you’re remembering that we drove past city hall yesterday. After the Magic Pan. Did you tell Sierra about the Magic Pan?”
Sierra looked at Bill with her pond-green eyes. “He told me everything.”
No one spoke. Robert didn’t like the fact that she was sitting in Gina’s chair. He wished it had occurred to him to bring Gina home—but what if she’d started up again about it being time for an assassination?
“I don’t know if I want to take my turn,” Rebecca said. “I kind of do and I kind of don’t. I had a normal day. Normal except that—but that’s sort of ‘How did you like the play, Mrs. Lincoln?’ I had a pop quiz in chemistry. I tutored lower-level math at lunch.”
“You don’t have to say ‘lower-level,’ ” Robert said. “Obviously it’s lower-level. You couldn’t exactly tutor your own level.”
Rebecca hesitated. In fact, she could and sometimes did tutor her own level. She decided against saying so. “Mrs. Emory said something interesting in English. She said Harvey Milk is more important than Mayor Moscone.”
“That is interesting,” their father said. “Did she say why?”
“Because he’s a homo,” James said.
“James,” Robert said.
“He is,” Rebecca said. “There’s nothing wrong with it.”
“I didn’t say there’s anything wrong with it,” Robert said. “I’m telling him not to use that word.”
“Wait a minute,” Penny said. She was tired of the conversation, tired of being in the kitchen—tired, period. She wanted to get back to her studio but then remembered, with abrupt dread, Bill knocking on the door last night.
“What?” said Rebecca, who technically still had the floor.
Penny set down her fork, rattled. She strove to remember the conversation. “Can you really say one person is more important than another?”
“I imagine,” Bill said, “she meant more important historically.”
“She did,” Rebecca said. “She said Mayor Moscone was just a mayor, but Harvey Milk was a homosexual supervisor.”
James burst out laughing. “Who did he supervise? ‘I’m going to make sure you do a good job being a homosexual!’ ”
“James,” his father said a little sternly. “Supervisor is a job in city government.”
Embarrassed, James fell back on the tactics of an earlier time and blew a wet raspberry at the table.
“Never mind,” Rebecca said. “I’m finished.”
“Are you sure?” her father said. “Robert?”
“Oh, that’s right,” Ryan said suddenly, looking up at Robert. “Did you break up with Gina?”
Irritation washed through Robert: he had forgotten his ill-advised announcement of the night before. What could he have been thinking, telling his family he was considering breaking up with Gina? Now he would have to worry that one of them—James—would tell her. He was glad he hadn’t invited her to dinner. “Do you mind?” he asked Ryan.
“So you didn’t break up with her?”
“No.”
“Wait, you were going to break up with Gina?” Penny said.
“This might not be dinner-table conversation,” Bill said.
James smirked. “Why, because it’s about lovey-dovey stuff?”
“It’s about private stuff.”
“Not so private he didn’t tell Ryan about it,” Penny said.
“He told all of us,” Rebecca said. “Last night. Except you. You were in the shed.”
“I was working!” Penny said. “And it’s not ‘the shed.’ It’s my studio. No one,” she went on, “seems to realize how hard it was for me to see my father so sick. Not even you,” she added, looking at Bill. “And you know just how sick he is!”
“How sick is he?” Robert said.
“No sicker than a month ago,” Bill said. “We just know a little more about it now.”
James said, “What do we know?”
“Blood tells stories. So does urine. When someone like Grandpa feels tired, we can look at his blood and urine for hints as to what might be going on.”
“But I thought he was tired because of his congested heart failure,” James said.
“Congestive,” Robert said.
“He is,” Bill said, “so that makes it harder to recognize additional issues. A few weeks ago, Grandpa found out his kidneys aren’t doing their job very well. Remember how your kidneys filter out waste products? When the kidneys aren’t working, the waste stays in your blood, and that makes you feel sick. Sicker.”
“I don’t want Grandpa to die,” James said. He thought about the noise he’d made Friday afternoon, pounding on Ryan and screaming, and for an instant he saw himself falling into line: a soldier stepping back into the march, hup-two-three-four. But this vision was no match for all the distress and confusion inside him, and he leaped from his chair and rushed at Ryan again, fists flying. “You said he’d be okay,” he shouted. “You said, you said.”
Penny screamed, Sierra tried to shield Ryan with her body, and Bill got up and wrapped his arms so tightly around James that James couldn’t move.
“Shhhh,” Bill said, his lips at James’s ear. “Shhh shhh.”
“Unbelievable!” Penny shouted. “James, go to your room!”
“The boy is upset,” Bill said. Arms still wrapped tight, he crouched behind James, whose considerable strength was now devoted to backward kicks against his father’s shins.
“No no no no no,” James cried. “No!”
Bill braced himself, lifted James from the floor, and carried him out of the kitchen.
“Well, I think this meal is over,” Penny said. “Dishes into the dishwasher, please.” She carried her plate to the sink. Surveying the open containers on the counter, the dirty spoons and condiment jars, the empty milk and the crumb-encrusted half-stick of butter, she put her face in her hands and began to cry.
“Your mom,” Sierra said softly.
Ryan held her hand tighter.
“What should we do?”
He led the way to the sink and patted Penny’s shoulder; after a moment Sierra joined in. Penny shook her head and cried harder. “Never mind,” she sobbed. “I’ll do the dishes. You guys go, okay?”
They headed to the living room, followed by Robert and Rebecca. “Sierra,” Rebecca said, “your mom should probably come pick you up.”
“Half an hour,” Ryan said.
He lay on the couch with his head in Sierra’s lap. James had attacked him twice in four days, and though he couldn�
��t have put it into words, Ryan believed James had chosen him because he wouldn’t fight back. The upset Ryan felt now was not defensive but protective. As Sierra stroked his hair, he fell into a waking dream in which he was Congressman Ryan and James had shot him, and he was Mayor Moscone and James had shot him, and he was Harvey Milk and James had shot him, and in each of the three scenarios he rose up from the fallen and bloody body, himself again, and embraced James, who dropped his gun and wept. Ryan wrapped James in a tight embrace that squeezed the violence out of him.
Down the hall, Bill and James were sitting on James’s bed. James had calmed down, and they were paging through a picture book of California, looking at places they might go once they began bicycling together. A two-lane highway in the Sierra foothills caught James’s eye, golden fields on both sides, the road itself dipping behind hills and then rising into view again. “I want to go here,” he said.
“It’s very pretty.”
“If I don’t do anything wrong can we go for my birthday?”
Bill hesitated. It was so much harder with your own child: he wanted to discourage bad behavior, but he also wanted to provide an out, a refuge from total failure—a point of view James could adopt about himself if or when he did something wrong. Yet James couldn’t be allowed to hurt Ryan; less for Ryan’s sake than for his own.
“You know why I think you were mad?” Bill said.
“Why?”
“Because you’re worried about Grandpa.”
James considered this. “Maybe I was mad at Grandpa’s kidneys.”
“That’s a good way to look at it.”
“And his heart.”
They looked down at the picture in the book.
“Can we?” James said.
“Sure.”
“I’m glad Robert didn’t break up with Gina.”
“I am, too.”