by Susan Dunlap
Instead I said, not loud, just regular, ‘I don’t even know you.’
FIFTEEN
Every emotion I had swirled through my body, as if a cook was pouring every bottle in the kitchen into a blender. I’d felt like this only twice before. When I admitted to my husband – my soon-to-be ex-husband – that my brother Mike had been missing so long that all logic said he was dead. When I stood at the edge of a forty-foot drop on to a catcher bag I wasn’t sure would hold. Wind hit me in gusts. I couldn’t gauge how far it could blow me off mark. In that moment – 30 seconds to go or give up – fears took on colors. Broken back – Army green. Broken neck – mud brown. Quitter – lumpy yellow. Scorn – maroon. Losing my chance to be a stuntwoman ever again – black. Death – clear. They swam in a sweaty circle, bubbled, lumps swashing lumps, colors mixing in an indistinguishable murk until I couldn’t tell one from the other, could remember what they were, couldn’t think. The swirl took me over, blotted me out. Only it existed.
And then, for one short instant, I hooked my eyes on the mark on the catcher bag, felt the wind ease. And I jumped.
Now, in the near dark, under the heavy evergreen branches, I focused on the spot between my brother’s eyes and I jumped.
More accurately, I said nothing. No lead. No open path to diversion. I waited for him to tell me the truth.
His version of it.
He waited, watching me like a dog does to note your initial shift so he can run ahead and pretend he’s not following you.
You incredible louse! I was shaking so hard I had to jam my teeth together so they wouldn’t clatter. You are the stalker. You!
My body was steaming, my skin freezing, my heart pounding like a sledgehammer. I wanted to hit him for getting into this, to hug him for being OK. Oddly, the thing I felt most was an understanding of Boots’s reaction to his self-absorbed parents.
I waited.
‘I’m sorry,’ Mike said. He sounded sorry.
I’ve heard his impressive ‘sorrys’ – to Dad, to John, to cops when he was doing fifty in a twenty-five zone. He never got a ticket.
I snorted.
‘No, really.’
‘So what? You’ve run me around for two days like a kid’s battery car. If I’d gotten to your place half an hour later I could have been blown up. Did you think of that?’
‘Sorry.’
‘Forget sorry. What the hell is going on?’
The man who’d hunched over the car, the guy in the bulbous down jacket, stretched out of that cocoon into Mike. I’d seen him in disguise before. He’d fooled me before. It’s not just the clothes or a wig, he’d said, it’s the way you move, the way you stand when you’re not moving. People see what they expect to see. They fill in the gaps. More to the point, they don’t see what they don’t expect. And if they’re about to see, you just need to divert them. He was, no doubt, right, but he hadn’t adjusted for me, a sister who had spent years watching him, a stunt double who’d spent years analyzing moves, a stunt coordinator who’d spent weeks watching every minute shift her stunt doubles made. Mike could have fooled the entire rest of humanity, but not me.
He was dressed like a street person. He yanked out a filthy handkerchief and gave an enormous snort into it. An empty snort but, in my mind, even after what he’d just told me, that handkerchief was filled with vile germy green goo.
He unzipped the down jacket, revealing a gray cotton sweater. With the knit cap off, his curly mahogany hair bounced in the wind, seeming to catch light that wasn’t here. He reached around my shoulder to pull me next to him, as he had so often in all the years I’d never questioned him. When we’d walked steps in sync like a regular and upsized version of the same being. People had stared. They’d smiled. We’d smiled back. Me because I was with the brother I trusted. He … I don’t know why.
‘I’m waiting, Mike.’
He pulled back his arm, the look on his face more pained and shocked than Boots’s had been when Heather stepped out of his reach. Boots had merely lost a brief hope. Mike was seeing his skill at managing the world slip away. Yeah, right, Mike! If you can’t deceive the person who most wants to believe in you, what are you, huh?
‘Darce, you weren’t in danger. I was watching you the whole time. When I got off the ferry I hitched a ride back to the city—’
‘With?’
‘A girl.’
‘Who just happened to be heading across the Golden Gate?’
His shoulder scrunched in a little ‘our-secret’ shrug. ‘Not exactly.’
‘I’m not going down that path. Whatever you told her, fine. You being outside the apartment – fine! Chasing me from there to the car, that was you, too?’
‘Well yeah. I wasn’t going to let you wander through the park at night. If I’d realized how much better shape you’re in than me … After you drove off I could barely stumble out of the park.’
‘Yeah, well. You tailing me; that cancels out the last couple days for both of us. You could have just told me what was going on and saved me the hassle.’
He shifted away from me.
‘Which you are going to do right now.’
He tapped his tongue on the roof of his mouth, thinking. And made a tiny clucking sound he mustn’t have noticed. All the years he was missing, I could have found him in a crowded room just by that clucking sound. But I couldn’t let myself think of the past. I was barely holding it together. I braced myself and waited.
‘I’d tell you who was threatening me, why they were – if I knew. If I’d known I’d’ve dealt with it before this. Then, when I had to leave my own place, I would have stayed with Mom. If I’d had a solid lead, I’d’ve told John and let the cops deal. I’d never have involved you. But Darce, I don’t know! Trust me.’
I wish. ‘Tell me what you do know. Now!’
He nodded ahead and broke trail through the brush to a path near the Conservatory of Flowers – one we’d used when we were adolescents, when we wanted to talk, to plan. A ‘need-to-know’ path, safe from unwanted eyes. I followed, my eyes level with the back of his neck, as they had been in the last year before he disappeared. I could have walked beside him, the trail was just wide enough, but he wanted to break trail, I could tell. Because he didn’t want me to catch him concocting his next ‘truth.’
I caught his arm, ready to spin him to face me.
‘What?’
‘Nothing, Mike. I just tripped on something.’
He stiffened. He knew me, too. I’m steady on my feet. Or maybe it was my voice that gave me away.
Things as it is. What did I know? Not what he was thinking. Not what had occurred while he was missing all those years. Or before. Or even since he’d been back. He’d told me someone was threatening him now, but could I even be sure of that?
Things as it is. He had taken over the apartment under Wally. In the bedroom was a Glock. In his living-room drawer were a Giants ticket, a zipper pull, an abalone shell.
A small abalone shell. Too small to be taken legally.
The shell of an illegally harvested abalone. Why had he saved that?
There was a time I would have asked about the gun first and I would have believed his answer. Now I watched him without directly focusing and prepared to gauge his replies as I circled toward what he was hiding. ‘Tell me about the abalone.’
‘What?’
I didn’t even start with the shell in his drawer. ‘When you were diving, in high school?’
‘I didn’t dive. Not more than once.’
‘Yeah, right. Those abalones just crawled into your trunk because they wanted to see the city?’
‘Hey, it’s dangerous up there beyond Fort Bragg. The water’s rough. Waves shoot in, tides pull divers out too far from shore. And it’s cold.’
‘Still, a hundred dollars a pound?’
‘Wasn’t that much back then, but equivalent. You know what that means, little sister? Serious divers don’t fool around. They’re not risking their necks so they can share
with novice kids from the city.’
I nodded. ‘Guys die every year.’
‘Novices. They go too deep, stay down too long. No oxygen – oxygen tanks are illegal. Fish and Game’s all over the scene. Guys come for the day, rent gear; they don’t want to go home empty. Water’s roiling up sand and muck. It’s not so easy to spot abalone down there, particularly if you don’t know what you’re doing. You trying to hold your breath long enough. Just one more crevice. Just a little deeper. Maybe your fin gets caught and you don’t surface. Maybe you get swept out and when you do surface you’re facing a cliff with no way up. Maybe you die.’
‘Your point?’
‘It’s easier to buy from the guys who dive.’
‘At a hundred dollars a pop, or equivalent?’
‘Hardly.’
‘From poachers,’ I clarified.
He shrugged.
Red abalone is strictly protected. The limit is three per day. In a whole season you can take only eighteen in California, only nine in Sonoma County where Mike had been. They have to be nine inches or more. Guys, I’d read, dived with rulers. Abalone is a delicacy. A skilled poacher can make a thousand dollars in two days.
There was a time when Mike would have been furious at men decimating the stock. He—
My breath caught.
Wrong! There was a time when I believed he would have been furious.
I exhaled slowly. Don’t go down that path either. ‘So you knew the poachers. They knew you. Why would they sell to you when they had restaurants and the like waiting for them?’
‘More like a tip. I kept watch; they tipped me in mollusk.’
‘Why …?’
‘Why’d I do it? I was sixteen. Alone on the cliff in the wind, with danger all around me. It was like being a movie hero. I’ll tell you I had a few close calls. One time I was on the cliff and Tam, the guy I was watching for, signaled. His floater—’
‘Floater?’
‘It’s like an inner tube with a slipcover.’
‘Really?’
‘Hey, you gotta keep your catch someplace. You can’t use all your energy swimming to shore with each shell. Besides—’
‘If he stashed them on shore someone would snatch them.’ I was finishing his sentences. Like the old days. We were sailing in words, Mike and me. ‘Some kid like you, right?’
‘Well, yeah. Good car; great engine, and no one knew the back roads better than I did.’ He was grinning.
I remembered that car, a gray Nissan, a pay-me-no-mind car. Mike used to ease up next to some other kid piloting a bright, haven’t-had-its-first-scratch car. The kid would eye Mike with pity, or better yet, scorn, like he was driving his parents’ car. Then Mike hit the gas and whipped by. Us two laughing.
It was the car I’d been in when he drove me past Ethan Kozlowski’s house, me scrunched down, eyes just higher than the window bottom, squinting for a sighting of my heartthrob. Mike laughing at me, but still driving me.
So easy. So very tempting to slide back into these times, the memories that warmed my hopes after he disappeared. And now he was here and we were talking about them together. I loved it.
He knew I loved it.
I froze, focused on the tree ahead, a magnolia, on its salad plate leaves, waxed to a shine even at night. I breathed in slowly.
Under the magnolia, Mike’s shoulders tightened.
Before he could chart the next detour I said, ‘No one knew the back roads better than you. Why was that? All you needed was to get to the drop point, sit on the rocks and watch till there was no more light for diving. Then drive home, tired, maybe in the dark. Hungry, with food waiting to be cooked in the trunk. But you knew all the back roads. Why was that?’
I hadn’t raised my voice but there was something different in my tone. I don’t know whether I recognized that from the sound in my head or from Mike’s reaction, the slightest jolt backwards, as if he was seeing someone else in his sister’s skin.
As if we weren’t us.
There are moments of pure balance when one tiny shift will drop you on either side. I was desperate to leap down the way I’d come, to step in the footprints that had fit my feet so long.
Things as it is.
I stayed still. Then I shifted to the side of reality and stepped down on to its cold, hard ground. ‘Why was that, Mike?’
He made an odd move with his head that I had never noticed for itself before. But now, with nothing else to observe, I realized it was the precursor to my brother’s deciding what character to play.
‘Hey, the truth!’
‘Darce—’
‘Never mind. Let me tell you. There was a time, I remember, when you were still spending whole days in Fort Bragg but you weren’t bringing home abalone any more. Mom waited for your abalone. A couple times she had everything ready when you arrived empty-handed.’
‘She said she could as easily make something or other else.’
‘She said. What was she going to do, stamp her feet and wail?’
‘Hey, I called for take-out. She didn’t have to do anything. And once we went out to dinner, all nine of us. On me!’
I nodded. It had been a great dinner. At a not-inexpensive Italian restaurant. Drifts of memory from that meal wafted through Mike-talk for years after he vanished. All of us Lotts there, everyone on decent behavior. Mom wearing a Navaho pendant Mike had given her for her birthday the week before. ‘You had a lot of money for a high-school boy with no job. Suddenly.’
His head shifted again. Another time it would have amused me to see him oblivious to his tell. ‘Don’t bother whole-clothing about the money. Let me explain where you got it. You were still going to Fort Bragg, not dealing with the divers, because … because you’d found something more profitable. Less dangerous? Oh, OK, not less dangerous. Of course, because avoiding danger wasn’t an issue.’ I was reading him as I went. ‘Dangerous in a different way. And it mattered that you knew the back roads. What could that be? You want me to go on guessing, or do you want to tell me the genesis of these last couple days of my life you’ve co-opted. Of what you insisted was a big threat?’
I thought I saw that neck movement. But it was just the wind fluttering leaves. He wasn’t that bad.
‘That coast up there, Mike, it’s wild, rocky. No matter how many men Fish and Game had, they could never patrol the whole thing. They might as well build a wall like people want to do along the whole Mexican border.’
Now the neck movement.
‘Oh! Easier to slip into the country from the ocean, right? If you’re a big fish with money, right? Particularly if there’s a smart kid like you on land keeping an eye out.’
I will say this for my brother, he knows when to fold. He leaned against the magnolia and said, ‘I learned the tides and the dirt roads. Once I hit the freeway, the old Nissan was next to invisible. I came equipped: portable wipe down, battery hair dryer, cologne that changed a man’s odor from brine to musk. Change of clothes that meant change of nationality. American shoes. A fast boat drops an hombre before sunset. I get a “local” to San Fran in time for a late dinner.’
I asked, though I knew the answer. ‘What kind of men?’
‘Men who could afford to pay.’
‘For the boat?’
‘And me. When I learned what they were making, I figured why not me? I raised my price. They didn’t haggle.’
We were silent a moment, then he said, ‘Does this change how you think of me?’
‘Well, yeah! But, do you mean, do I love you less? I don’t know. Will I still help you now? Yeah.’
He seemed relieved. Like my trust in him really mattered to him.
‘So,’ I said, winding back to my withheld question, ‘what’s going on now? Who’s threatening you? The truth.’
‘I told you the truth.’
‘Mike!’
‘I told you the truth. Why would I lie when I needed your help? I never said I’d stay in Marin. Never said I wouldn’t keep an eye on
you and collaterally the danger to you … and me.’
‘And you conclude?’
‘Zip.’
I wanted to believe him. But who he was and how much I could trust this man was too big a knot to untangle now. ‘Tell me this. Why did you give Adrienne Ferente your gun?’
He stopped, turned and faced me with an expression I hadn’t seen since he’d been back. He looked stunned. ‘I don’t have a gun.’
‘There was a Glock pistol in her lingerie drawer.’
‘Just lying there in sight? Not in a box? Wrapped in a towel even?’
‘Stuck business end in her bra.’
Mike was tapping his teeth, thinking. Not plotting – I knew that look. This one was fitting the pieces together.
‘Like it had been put there in a hurry. Not tossed, but placed. A hurry but not a panic. Like,’ I said, ‘Adrienne’s ride was honking. She realized she had it in her purse and didn’t want to take it.’
‘Lame.’
True. I made a come sign with my hand.
He shrugged.
‘Hey, not good enough! Think. This is escalating fast. Gracie was sideswiped walking to her car—’
He stood frozen. He wasn’t posing or concocting this time. He really was shocked, distressed, and then frightened. ‘Is she … Is she all right?’
‘She says she’s OK, but she didn’t go to work—’ I waved off his attempted interruption. ‘You know I’ve got Gary’s Aston, right? You saw me go get it?’
‘No. I’ve been watching my apartment, not everywhere you go.’
‘Oil on Gary’s garage floor. He kept his footing, but it could have been bad. My point—’
‘I get your point!’ He slumped down on a log and held his head.
I wanted to put my arms around him.
I didn’t.
In a minute he stood. ‘I was an idiot to let this happen, to think I could … It’s over. Stay here. I’ll get the car. Let’s just get out of here and figure out our next move.’ He felt in his pocket and then stuck out his hand. ‘Give me the keys.’
I could have stopped him, but I needed a few minutes to clear my head, to deal with the swirl of emotion that threatened to suck me down. One look at him told me he needed the time, too.