Time and Trouble

by Gillian Roberts

  So she was a rich girl. Billie could less and less understand the match with Talkman. But Billie completely understood the mother Sunny was trying not to emulate. She’d had one, herself, a million years ago when wisdom was confused with knowing the price tag, if not the value, of the world’s goods. Of course, with the divorce, her mother’s form of intelligence was as worthless as the paste imitations she’d scorned. With the divorce, she stopped trying to know much, except where the next comforting drink was.

  “The amount she cared about that thing was all out of proportion to its actual value is my point.”

  Billie nodded.

  “Wait a minute—Lucas,” Sunny said. “That was it, or Luke. The driver’s name. It just came back to me. First name, I think, so not George Lucas, of course.” Her rich-girl’s silvery laugh filled the room again. “And now I remember—it was because of the car. Because I’d mentioned it. She said Lucas was good with mechanical things. That he’d restored it all by himself—although why anyone would want to, I surely can’t say.”

  Without warning, one of the twins hurled his plate to the floor. “Ryan!” Sunny said, with reproof but no anger. Life amused her. She stood up, retrieved a sponge and cleaned his mess. “Can you believe this is how he signifies being finished? What is our visitor going to think of this family’s table manners?” she asked the baby.

  Lucas somebody. Or somebody Lucas. Good with mechanical things. That narrowed the field to the merely impossible.

  Then who was the Stewart she’d talked to Wesley about? Were they the same? Lucas Stewart? Stewart Lucas? Or maybe she was involved with several males.

  Sunny washed the boys’ faces, sponged off the high-chair trays and plunked an oatmeal cookie in front of each.

  Billie looked at the now-flattened bottom half of the I.J.’s front page. SUPERVISOR PUSHES DRIVE FOR LIGHT-RAIL SYSTEM. HIGH-TECH ATTEMPT TO SOLVE MYSTERY OF MEADOW MOTHER AND CHILD.

  She hated thinking about the people in the meadow. First, the lost child and all the anxiety it provoked, then its presumed mother, and then, awareness that not a squawk or rustle had followed their disappearance. So easy to see just how it could happen that nobody noticed or missed them. Look at what was happening with Penny. People were halfhearted—and then, only when prodded.

  Sunny resettled in her chair at the table. In the background, the anchor listed this year’s Oscar nominations, then listed supposedly surefire nominees who had been slighted—just in case they hadn’t noticed the slight and didn’t already feel sufficiently rotten. Sunny sighed. “Where were we?”

  “Lucas. Good with mechanical things.”

  “Oh, right. She said he was a model-builder, or started out as one. Or did it along with something else, I’m not sure. Sometimes, with the kids around, I get so scattered…but I remember the model-building because I thought she meant tiny trains or cars or balsa-wood airplanes. And she laughed! You know that teenage laugh that just shrivels you?—the one that means you’re so out of it you’re laughable? She said his models were for the movies, for special effects. Spaceships, monsters, robots, airplanes—little things we see on-screen as enormous. They do a lot of it with computers now, though. Still and all, I had no idea there was such a job. It seems so peculiar.”

  “Did she say where he does this?”

  Sunny shook her head again. “Don’t think so. At least, I don’t recall.”

  “Did she by any chance mention ILM? Industrial Light and Magic? The special-effects house. George Lucas’s place.”

  “I honestly don’t know.” Sunny wrinkled her brow, pondering, then shook her head.

  “Do you think he was local?”

  Again Sunny considered this, her perfect upper teeth biting on her perfect lower lip. “I think so, because…well…guess I don’t know that, either. She didn’t say.”

  He had to be, that was all there was to it. It made sense. Besides, the universe owed Billie a break. He had to be local and work at ILM. Billie stood up. “You’ve been really helpful.”

  “You’re being kind. I’m sorry I didn’t pay closer attention.” She, too, stood. The twins howled and the older boy put his hands to his ears. It was a wonder Sunny Marshall could keep track of her own name, let alone her baby-sitter’s crushes.

  “Honestly. I’m more hopeful of finding her now, thanks to you.”

  “I do hope so.” Sunny’s expression clouded. “I’m finding it really hard without her.”

  “One thing,” Billie said when she was near the door. “I keep having the sense we’ve met before.” She didn’t mention the heavy negativity that came with the feeling. “Have we?”

  Sunny looked wide-eyed and apologetic. “Gee, I…I’m sure I’d remember if we had.”

  But they had. Billie was sure. And something bad was a part of it.

  “I know what it must be,” Sunny said. “Bet you were at one of Harley’s fund-raisers, and I was there, too. Bet that was it.”

  Not in this lifetime, Billie thought. Not even if I could afford charity banquets. “Bet you’re right,” Billie said. “And I’ll bet that happens to you all the time.” She was starting to sound like Sunny Marshall. “Well, thanks again.”

  The twins continued to howl as Billie let herself out the door.

  Once in her car, Billie allowed herself a second of elation. She had a name—two names—and that of his likely employer. She had a chance, finally, to find him and through him, Penny.

  And then reality returned. ILM was fortified and impenetrable, its hatches battened against curiosity-seekers. The place might as well be making actual interplanetary weaponry for its degree of paranoia and security. Billie knew this for personal fact, having tried for employment there before coming to Emma. She’d called their job line and found the commercial division needed a production assistant, and figured that “assisting” somebody had to mean they’d explain the job. Therefore, she could do it.

  That was then, pre-Emma, when she still believed she was a quick study and could conquer or fake pretty much anything.

  But she hadn’t been given the chance to bluff her way through. She’d inflated her résumé and pretended an urgency—she was being relocated if she couldn’t find a new position that could keep her here—and still and all, she never got so much as an interview.

  The receptionist let it drop that three hundred people had applied for that minor-league job, including people with a great deal of experience who wanted out of Hollywood and up into the promised land at the end of the rainbow. She strongly suggested that Billie fold her tents and fade away.

  Billie’s choice of new career was determined by the fact that ILM’s talent pool was Olympic-sized, and Emma’s consisted of a tiny puddle near the drain.

  And now Billie, in an ironic twist she didn’t appreciate had to storm the fortress in order to do her alternate job. Why couldn’t Luke work at Safeway? Or Nordstrom?

  Oh, God, she suddenly thought—please let this be for real. Please don’t let it turn out to be a joke. Don’t let the reason her Luke wouldn’t work at Safeway be that he’s really, truly Luke Skywalker.

  Fifteen

  It was a good morning, clear and bright, and he sat in bed savoring it, not sure what set this day of his vacation apart, made it different and better than those that preceded it, but something did. The weather? So clear and bright after so much rain. But the day before had been clear as well and he hadn’t felt this quiet elation, this sense of peace.

  Then he realized what it was: Penny wasn’t with him. Probably because he’d slept late, but even so, it was unusual of her to be this considerate, or to face his housemates on her own. Maybe she was finally feeling more relaxed and less paranoid around them. He stretched and contemplated the day. It looked good for a hike, or even the beach. Didn’t seem to be any fog, although it wasn’t always easy to guess what was happening on the coast from here in the valley.

  He wondered if he’d take her along. Wondered if he wanted to, if he had to, if he’d entered some
unarticulated whither-thou-goest covenant with the girl. She seemed to think so, was constantly looking as if a moment’s separation was a betrayal. He couldn’t imagine how their tiny history had been so completely rewritten.

  Like the way she insisted on calling him Luke. He didn’t mind all that much, but the others did. They kept their mundane lives separate. They even complained that if she absolutely had to use it, he was Lucan, not Luke. The fact that she didn’t like the authentic, period name made her all the more suspect. Or maybe they’d resent anything she said. He couldn’t pick his way through his mixed feelings about her, and the stew of affection, resentment, confusion, impatience, and worry was forever simmering.

  Penny was like the strays he used to bring home, annoying the hell out of his mother and proving her right, time after time—he loved the idea of the dog and hated the unending responsibility. The kestrel, Morgana, was just the right amount of responsibility. He built her a mews and covered the window at night so great horned owls couldn’t come devour her. He showed her a little attention and fed her a mouse a day and she was satisfied.

  This time, Penny had trailed him home, and he couldn’t stand the responsibility. Hadn’t signed on for it. He couldn’t wait until she realized it was time to go home, deal with her life and finish high school. It had better be soon.

  And then, no girls. He never thought he’d yearn for celibacy, for estrangement from the entire other sex, but the prospect beckoned, clean and uncomplicated.

  He stretched and dawdled, looking out the window at the glorious midmorning and at Mr. Oliver’s tidy garden, deliberately fenced-off from the jungly tangle of the rental unit’s yard. Oliver’s flowering cherry tree had burst into purple-pink blossoms overnight, dark limbs full of bell-shaped petals amazing against a backdrop of greens brightened by the recent rains.

  He wanted Mr. Oliver’s orderly yard and life. He wanted to worry about tiny problems—thrips and mites and aphids. He wanted to talk to plants and never once have the plant talk back. Maybe he’d aim for it today—plant something, lots of things, so there’d be color all year outside his window.

  Except he knew he wouldn’t really do it, wouldn’t see it through the seasons and the grunt work. He wasn’t like Mr. Oliver, not sufficiently attentive or careful and would probably let everything go to seed. He was a procrastinator. Look how he was delaying the downstairs reunion with Penny. She was sure to be pissed. As soon as she arrived with her unanticipated set of assumptions, he’d backed off. Except that night she came up and into his bed. Big mistake. But only that once. That twice. Talk about paying for your sins.

  He’d thought to give her a brief time away from sour and oppressive parents. From being a teenager, a high-school senior with all the extra pressures of that year when your entire future bears down at you top speed. That was all, breathing space. God knows he wasn’t ready for another relationship, especially not with an hysteric. If he ever dated again, he’d look for an emotionless cow of a girl. He was sick to death of histrionics and had been even before Penny Redmond appeared.

  Penny’s overdramatic denunciations of her life and family were juvenile, but she felt everything so passionately; she was so needy. He knew firsthand that families could be unbearable. The difference was that he had a better sense of self-preservation than she did. He hadn’t chucked high school and run away. He’d taken his time and their money until he finished college—they worried about how it would look to their friends if they refused to send him on to higher education, and he cynically played on that—so that when he left, he had the means to be independent and the break was clean and final.

  But maybe the day he met Penny, when she’d stopped to admire his car outside the yogurt store, maybe that day he hadn’t felt completely independent. With Yvonne ranting to everybody about how he’d destroyed her life, maybe he’d been ripe for being admired. Pathetic, but probably true, because for the life of him, he couldn’t figure how else he’d gotten into this mess.

  And then Penny, suddenly seductive, acting as if his offer of refuge translated into a request that she come live with him and be his love, not merely share space. She treated his insistence that he wanted instead to protect her, give her a little time, as if he were insulting her.

  He felt sorry for her parents, if this was the way she handled whatever she didn’t like.

  And last night was the worst, the dispute about the goddamned gold heart. Such a stupid thing. He knew she was right. The thing was a worn out piece of costume jewelry, worth nothing, even as evidence. But it was the principle of the thing, his stubbornness about her stubbornness. They were a really bad combo.

  Later, when they were alone in his room, she’d cried that everybody treated her like an infant, with him as prime offender. It was all a jumble to her and a mess to him. Her fault. His.

  You’d think she’d move out if life here was unbearable. That’s what she’d done about her real home. No such luck.

  She had no place to go. He knew that, but it only made matters worse.

  He pulled a sweatshirt and jeans on, uncovered the kestrel and promised her a delicious mouse, then used the bathroom, where somebody had left globs of spit-out toothpaste in the sink again. He stared at the gelled dribbles. They weren’t dirt, hair, or scum. Toothpaste didn’t interfere with anything and shouldn’t annoy him. But it did. It was one more way in which what he wanted, needed, and deserved wasn’t allowed him.

  He heard himself with horror. When had he become this testy asshole? Maybe he was this way about everything, including Penny. He’d try harder. After all, he was older, out of college, employed, and she was none of those things. He went downstairs filled with benign resolve.

  He didn’t see her, or anybody. Gary and Toto had left hours ago for their jobs, and since Alicia wasn’t in her office, she was probably out with a client. He peeked around the corner, to the enclosed porch where Kathryn sat peering intently at a screen. It was her machine, and when she occupied that space, her office as well, but otherwise—which was most of the time—the entire household could use the room and the computer. Those times that Kathryn worked at home, she was wrapped in a virtual Do Not Disturb sign and she was not to be considered here at all.

  Back in the kitchen, he took a mouse out of the freezer, putting it on a paper towel to defrost. Even that made him think of Penny with irritation. Sleeping in a room with a creature who tore up and ate little mammals upset her. The speed with which Morgana devoured her mouse disgusted Penny. The fact that most times, Morgana left the mouse’s nose uneaten revolted her. When he bought crickets as a special treat for the bird, Penny shuddered and gagged. But none of this made her go to the living room couch.

  Penny insisted she could love the bird, if only it didn’t have to eat. Typical of her logic.

  He made coffee and oatmeal and luxuriated in the absence of people. It was how it should be with only the finches on the live oak breaking the silence.

  Maybe Penny had been pulled outside by the lure of Oliver’s tree or the chippering yellow-bellied birds. Or she’d gone to “his” spot up and around the hill. She’d loved it when he’d shown it to her, a deep-set channel, now a fast-moving stream lined with redwoods and ferns. On such a day, it would be magic to sit in its dappled shadows.

  He glanced at the front page of the Chronicle. Nothing much and nothing at all about the skeletons. Good. He wished he’d never poked that stick in the dirt. All it really meant was that Toto’s uncle, who’d let them use his pasture, was furious. He’d been hassled by the police and had his field chopped up and made hazardous for his cows. The normally placid dairy farmer had banned them for life.

  He finished breakfast and thought about going to the beach, taking advantage of this weather before it dissolved into more rain. The water would be way too cold, but hearing and seeing it, reading, maybe running the beach sounded like a full vacation packed into a day.

  He’d leave now, while Penny was gone.

  He added his dishes to th
e collection in the sink, took the pitiable mouse corpse upstairs with him, and, after he put on a sweater as padding, fed her on his fist. There, in a matter of two, three minutes, he’d made the creature happy. She didn’t scream protests about his going off without her as he changed into bathing trunks under his jeans, and prepared to leave. He was going to stick to birds from now on.

  Back around sundown, his note said. He could almost taste the clean sea air, hear the silence broken only by the waves, the muffled human noises if, indeed, anybody else was around, the seagulls and the sea lions who floated near shore, people-watching, and he felt muscles from neck to ankles unclench.

  Outside, he took a deep breath of the fragrant air, but almost instantly felt it whoosh out of him. He looked again at the empty gravel drive, the spot closest to the garage.. He’d left his car there—so that he wouldn’t block anybody, so nobody would need to wake him up with a request for either his presence or his keys because the car had to be moved.

  Good thinking, except it was gone. As were all the others’, except Kathryn’s, so it wasn’t as if somebody’s car had broken down and his had been used in the emergency.

  Too bad about never interrupting Kathryn. He stormed in and stood by her computer while she waved him away with one hand. Finally when pages flipped out of the printer, she looked up. “What?” she asked.

  “My car. It’s not out there.”

  She blinked, readjusting from appointments and contracts to him. “She took it.”

  “She? Who?”

  “Who the hell you think? Your cookie.”

  “Penny?”

  Kathryn shrugged and pulled off her glasses to rub her eyes. “You didn’t give the okay?” She put her glasses back on and looked at her printer. “Guess not.”

  The room, Kathryn, the computer—everything dissolved into blank emptiness. She’d moved in on his life and taken it over, every bit of it, without asking, without permission, without basic human decency. “Where was she going?” he asked, his voice unfamiliar and hoarse. “Where did she take it?”