A Paper Son (7 page)

It took me several minutes to gather the courage to ease myself back into the water. I walked on shaky legs to the stairway and stepped one foot in, and then the other, my knuckles white on the railing. I descended slowly, one step at a time, until I was up to my waist. I took a deep breath, clutched the metal bar with both hands, and lowered my face through the surface.

The floor fell out from beneath me; the pole turned to vapor in my hands. I pulled my head up so quickly I pulled a muscle in my neck. The stairway reappeared. I jumped back out as if the water was boiling, changed without showering, and headed for home.

“Bye-bye, crazy man,” Doris called out cheerfully as I walked past her.

***

I was so overtaken by the advent of this new mystery that I forgot about the old one, and when I came through my door and saw Eva's pallid figure sitting on my couch with the lights off I jumped and swore. I headed for the kitchen and the bottle of Scotch, feeling her watch me as I walked past.

“You stayed up late last night,” she said.

“Yes,” I said.

“Writing?”

“Yes.”

“Did you kill Bing off?”

“Yes.”

“Can I read it?”

“Yes.”

I half-filled the glass, not bothering with ice. Back in the living room I sat down at my desk. My mind was buzzing; Eva was saying something but I couldn't hear what. “Did you say something?” I said.

“You're no historian,” she said. “I had plenty of time to look around today, and you're no historian.”

“I could have told you that,” I said.

“You did tell me that,” she said. “I just wasn't sure if I should believe you or not.”

“You should,” I said, taking a sip. The whiskey crackled through my head and throat like electricity.

“I found a spare key, by the way,” she said. “So you don't have to worry about that.”

“I wasn't,” I said.

“What's wrong with you?” Eva asked.

“I had kind of a long day,” I said.

“But you're a teacher,” she said.

“So?”

“So you get off work in the middle of the afternoon,” she said. “How could you have had a long day?”

She was leaning back in the couch, her hands folded in her lap, her feet flat on the floor, watching me. I couldn't tell if she was serious.

“Can we review a couple of things?” I asked, feeling my half-formed thoughts about the Y's bottomless pool disintegrating. Its contemplation would have to wait.

“Let's,” she said.

“You didn't come from New York?”

“What does New York have to do with anything?”

“And you don't know my sister Lucy?”

“How would I?”

“Long story. Where did you come from, exactly?”

“Hayes Valley.”

“Hayes Valley, as in, right here in San Francisco?”

“Is there another one?” she said.

“And why is it that you need to stay here?”

“My place got flooded. I told you that last night.”

“I don't think you did.”

“I did. You must not have been listening.”

“So how long do you need to be here?” I said.

“As long as it takes,” she said.

“As long as what takes?”

“You're not much of a listener,” she said.

“Remind me,” I said.

She sat forward. “My uncle Henry.”

I looked around my apartment. “And why do you think that information's here?”

The copy of
The Barbary Quarterly
was still on the coffee table in front of her. She reached out and tapped it with her finger. “Because here is where this came from,” she said. Together we regarded the journal, the sidewalk, the girl and her gaze.

“So we're back to that again?” I said.

“That's all there is,” she said. She leaned back into the couch and yawned. “That, and maybe twenty bucks.”

“And how exactly did you find me?” I sent another crackle of liquid electricity down my throat. Back-to-back afternoons with Scotch weren't my norm, but neither were teacup visions or bottomless swimming pools. If this kept up I'd have to find another coping mechanism.

“You're in the phone book,” Eva said. “My place got flooded, and you owe me.” She spread out her arms. “So here I am.”

Those were the easy questions. When I asked the next one my voice sounded thin and feeble, a faint breeze through my skull. “How did you know Bing was going to die?” I said.

“Because that's what happened,” she said. “The question is: how did
you
know he died? And, again, and more to the point: what else do you know?”

I shook my head. “That's where things stop making sense.”

“Well,” she said, brightly, “it would appear we're now on the same page, anyway. Oh, by the way, your mom called.” She pointed to the corner of my desk, where my answering machine sat. My mom was the only reason I even had a landline—she refused to call me on my cell phone. She was concerned they caused brain tumors, and she refused to be a contributor to mine. I hit the button. “I need you to come pick something up,” she said. “Call me.” Suddenly, getting out of the city and seeing my mom seemed like a great idea. I checked the window. The rain was still falling, but it had lightened a bit. It wasn't rush hour quite yet. I had decent wipers. I'd drive slowly. I stood up and grabbed my keys.

“You're going now?” Eva asked.

“I am.”

“I'd like to come.”

“My mom doesn't really like unannounced visitors.”

“So announce me.”

“She doesn't really like any kind of visitors.”

“I don't like finding my family's history printed up beneath someone else's name,” she said, “but nonetheless, it happened.”

My mom lived by herself in a little nook in the Santa Cruz Mountains, outside the town of La Honda. On those rare days when there was no traffic and the road was dry, it took about an hour to get there. I crept out of the city amid the red splatter of taillights and rain. Eva fell quiet, and all the confusion of the last couple of days descended on me again. My faith in the stability of the materials and liquids that made up my surroundings had been shaken; at any moment the road could turn to ash, the steering wheel to salt. I drove on anyway, hoping things would hold themselves together somehow. I had found a way out of the pool, after all, and I had chased the family out of my teacup. If Eva was a delusion, if she was the embodiment of a voice in my head, well, she wasn't asking for much: corroboration on some plot predictions, some tea, a half-hearted request for a twenty. If her demands got more elaborate I'd re-evaluate.

I called my mom to let her know I was on my way. “I'm bringing someone with me,” I said.

“What the hell, Peregrine?” she said. “That's unacceptable.”

“Sorry, but I didn't have much of a choice.”

“He has a gun to your head?”

“She.”

“She? A girlfriend?”

“No, a woman. She's staying with me for a few days.”

“A girlfriend?”

“No.” I could not say: an old Chinese lady who appeared at my door and accused me of stealing her family's history, and then correctly predicted my next major plot development. “She's helping me with some research,” I said instead.

“Well, you're not coming in, then,” she said. “I'll bring your things out.”

“It's pouring down rain, Mom. We're going to need the pit stop. Besides, I'm positive she will be totally uninterested. She's probably your age. She's Chinese.”

“What does that have to do with anything?” Eva asked.

“Does she smoke pot?” my mom said.

“No,” I said.

“You asked her?”

“No,” I said.

“Ask her.”

“I'm not asking her that. Her interests lie elsewhere, I guarantee it.”

“I don't like it, Peregrine.” She hung up.

My mom grew marijuana and sold it to medical cannabis clubs. She made a decent living, but she worked hard. The entire house but for her bedroom, one bathroom, and part of the living room had been given over to her operation. The other bedrooms housed hydroponic planting beds and tables where she crossbred and cloned plants. Clotheslines ran the length of the hallways, where whole plants hung upside-down at harvest time, drying. In the kitchen she made box after box of cellophane-wrapped cookies, brownies, scones, cinnamon rolls, loaves of banana nut bread, and apple turnovers, all of them tinged a slight shade of green. Constant maintenance chores presented themselves: fans ran too slowly, light bulbs burned out, the filters in the air conditioning and exhaust system needed replacing, temperatures and pH levels fluctuated. The house hummed and pulsated constantly with the automatic comings and goings of servo motors and thermostats, which pulled lights on tracks across the ceilings, regulated temperatures, and flushed and refilled the water in the hydroponic beds. During the harvest season she would develop problems with her fingers, her neck, and her eyes. The air was hot and close and reeked, all the time.

I worried about her. The state of California left her alone, but the Feds were a threat, as was theft. Her outdoor beds, which were scattered throughout the hills, relied on concealment and poison oak barriers to carry them to maturity. And even though her house was tucked into a notch in the hills, a warm day with a breeze could carry the smell hundreds of yards, and anybody with a nose for it who happened to be wandering within a half-mile of her property might catch a whiff and decide to do some snooping. She had motion detectors and automatic lights, but they were primitive, and half the time they didn't function at all. And it was lonely work. She rarely went into town. The only things that kept her from becoming a complete hermit were some aging Santa Cruz hippies in the same business who appeared from time to time to help her out with things, and her delivery routes. These were not without their stresses, either. She had clients from Santa Rosa to Santa Cruz and the circuit took her hours. I was sure that someday her car was going to go out on her, and leave her stranded by the roadside with thousands of dollars of produce in her trunk. At least she kept a low profile—nobody paid much attention to a graying middle-aged Chinese woman in the slow lane in an outdated Prius.

I could never quite understand why she'd chosen this life. After my dad had died and my sister and I had left the house, she could have done anything, anywhere. “You don't even need to work,” I had said to her, on more than one occasion. “Why don't you just volunteer somewhere so you can meet people, and then you can come back home and grow orchids or tomatoes or something.”

“Everybody has to work,” she'd say. “I don't want to meet people. And I can't sell orchids or tomatoes for hundreds of dollars an ounce.”

We exited at Highway 84 and began our climb into the mountains. The woods closed around us and blocked out what little glow remained of the peninsula's electricity. Occasional homes crouched among the trees; light struggled through their windows and lost itself in the rain.

“I can't remember the last time I got out of the city,” Eva said quietly at one point, more to herself than to me. She reached up and touched her window as if she could feel the wet trees through the glass.

The road climbed out of the wooded valley and onto the ridge. Occasionally we caught glimpses of other faraway cars, our counterparts on adjacent hills on their own two-lane roads, headlights held out feebly before them in a wet and immense darkness. The road continued to climb, up and to the west.

My sister Lucy and I had not been raised like this, the children of mountaintop pot farmers. We grew up closer to the bay, just off 101, in a small house with empty walls and hardwood floors and a yard made of gravel and weeds. For the first ten years of my life I remember little but my father's battles with cancer. It was an endless series of remissions and resurgences, treatments and medications, clinics and operations and specialists. He had been a software engineer, part of that first wave of scientists and visionaries who helped lay the foundation for home computing and the emergence of Silicon Valley. We had a spare room completely given over to a mainframe the size of a refrigerator. Our dad spent all his time there, sometimes staying up for two and three nights in a row, sweating, gazing through the monitor into the capabilities and future of his machines. My mom tried to get him to take walks, to get fresh air, to eat healthy foods. She made appointments for him with acupuncturists and herbalists. He ignored all her efforts.

“This is a fight,” she would say to him, carrying away a plate of uneaten broccoli. “You need to think like a fighter.”

“It's not a fight, Pam,” he'd say, rising from the table to return to his work. “It's a race.” It wasn't until later that I understood what he meant.

Our mom worked the community college circuit, teaching biology, botany, natural history, and any other subject in which she could pose as an expert for long enough to get past a hiring committee. She never complained, but I don't think she liked it much. Her schedule changed every semester. We never knew when to expect her. At home her usual spot was the dining room table, with her books and papers spread around her.

Lucy and I constructed our childhood at the feet of these two monoliths, drawing on the backs of the endless strips of serrated paper the computer's printer spit out, or reading beneath the table as our mom worked, listening to the scratches of her pen above us. There was no television, no stereo in the house. “Other families stare at TVs,” she would say. “We converse.” And then she'd tell us not to talk to her because she had papers to correct. The walls were bare but for a few yellowing drawings that Lucy or I had done, tacked beside doorways. We rarely used the yard, and when we did, we didn't know what to do. There were no balls, no shovels. We collected pebbles and threw them at the fence.