Nora Jane (17 page)

When Nora Jane came to, the helicopter pilot was on top of her, Freddy was doing something with her arms, and people were
moving around the room. A man in a leather jacket was holding the twins. “They’re going to freeze,” she said. “I want to see
them. I think I died. I died, didn’t I?” The pilot moved away. Freddy propped her body up with his own and Sam tucked a blanket
around her legs. “The ambulance is coming,” he said. “It’s okay. Everyone’s okay.”

“I died and it was light, like walking through a field of light. A fog made out of light. Do you think it’s really like that
or only shock?”

“Oh, honey,” Freddy crooned into her hair. “It was the end of light. Listen, they’re so cute. Wait till you see them. They’re
like little kittens or mice, like baby mice. They have black hair. Listen, they imprinted on my black cashmere coat. God knows
what will happen now.”

“I want to see them if nobody minds too much,” she said. The man in the leather jacket brought them to her. She tried to reach
out for them but her arms were too tired to move. “You just be still,” the pilot said. “I’m Doctor Windom from the Sausalito
Air Emergency Service. We were in the neighborhood. I’m sorry it took so long. We had to make three passes to find the clearing.
Well, a ground crew is coming up the hill. We’ll take you out in a ground vehicle. Just hold on. Everything’s okay.”

“I’m holding on. Freddy?”

“Yes.”

“Are we safe?”

“For now.” He knelt beside her and buried his face in her shoulder. He began to tremble. “Don’t do that,” she whispered. “Not
in front of people. It’s okay.”

Lydia began to cry. It was the first really loud cry either of the babies had uttered. Tammili was terrified by the sound
and began to cry even louder than her sister. Help, help, help, she cried. This is me. Give me something. Do something, say
something, make something happen. This is me, Tammili Louise Whittington, laying my first guilt trip on my people.

I
T WAS THE WORST ARGUMENT
they had had in months. Nora Jane almost never argued with Freddy Harwood. In the first place she thought he was smarter
than she was and in the second place he always went rational on her and in the third place there were better ways to get what
she wanted. The best way was to say she wanted something and then not mention it for a week or two. All that time he would
be arguing with himself about his objection and in the end he would decide he didn’t have the right to impose his ideas on
any other human being, not even his wife. Freddy had not gone to Berkeley in the sixties for nothing.
The Greening of America
and
The Sorcerer of Bolinas Reef
were still among his favorite books. Once a reporter had asked Freddy to name his ten favorite books and he had left out
both those books because this was the nineties and Freddy was famous in the world of publishing and independent bookstores
and he didn’t want to seem too crazy in public. If someone had asked him the ten things he regretted most, leaving
The Greening of America
and
The Sorcerer of Bolinas Reef
off his list would have been right up there with the butterfly tattoo on his ankle.

“It doesn’t matter what you take,” he said out loud. “It’s none of my business.”

“You don’t care what I take?”

“All I said is that sociology is a pseudoscience and you’re too good for that kind of mush. I didn’t mean you shouldn’t take
it. I should never have asked what you are going to take. I’m embarrassed that I asked. All I care about is that you be home
by three so the girls won’t come home to an empty house.”

“You don’t want me to go to college. I can tell.”

“I want you to go to college fiercely. I wish I could quit work and go with you. My biology is about twenty years behind the
field.”

“Freddy.” She climbed down off the ladder. She had been putting up drapes while Freddy read. She was wearing a white cashmere
sweater and a pair of jeans. She was wearing ballet shoes.

“You wear that stuff to drive me crazy,” Freddy said. “If they sold that perfume Cleopatra used on Caesar, you’d wear it every
day. How can I let you go to college? Every man at Berkeley will fall in love with you. Education will come to a grinding
halt. No one will learn a thing. No one will be able to teach. It’s my civic duty to keep you at home. I owe it to the culture.”
He pulled her across the room and began to dance with her. He sang an old Cole Porter song in a falsetto voice and danced
her around the sofas. One thing about Nora Jane. She could move into a scenario. “Where are the girls?” she asked.

“In the den doing homework. I told them I’d take them down to Berkeley to get an ice-cream cone when they were finished.”

“Meet me in the pool house. Hurry.” She smiled the wild, hard-won smile that worked on Freddy Harwood better than all the
perfumes of the East.

“Yes, yes, yes,” he answered, and let her go and she walked away from him and out of the room and down the stairs and across
the patio to the guest house beside the swimming pool. She went into the bedroom and took off her clothes and waited. In a
moment he was there. He turned off the lights to the pool with a switch on the wall. He locked the door and lay down beside
her and began to make love to her.

It was Freddy’s theory that the way you made love to a woman was to worship every inch of her body with your heart and mind
and soul. This was easy with Nora Jane. He had worshiped every inch of Nora Jane since the night he met her. He loved beauty,
had been raised to know and worship beauty, believed beauty was truth, balance, order. He worshiped Nora Jane and he loved
her. Ten years before, on a snow-covered night in the Northern California hills, he had delivered the twin baby girls who
were his daughters. With no knowledge of how to do it and nothing to guide him but love, he had kept them all alive until
help came. Nora Jane had another lover at the time and no one knew whose sperm had created Lydia and Tammili. The other man
had disappeared before they were born and had not been heard from since. It was a shadow, but all men have shadows, Freddy
knew. Where it was darkest and there was no path. This was Freddy’s credo. Each knight entered the forest where it was darkest
and there was no path. If there was a path, it was someone else’s path.

Freddy ran his hand up and down the side of Nora Jane’s body. He trembled as he touched her small round hip. I cultivate this,
he decided. Well, some men gamble.

A
FOUR-YEAR-OLD BOY
named Zandia, who was visiting his grandmother in the house next door, had been trying all week to get to the Harwoods’ heated
swimming pool. He didn’t necessarily want to get in the water. He wanted to get the blue and white safety ring he could see
from his grandmother’s fence. All these days and his grandmother had not noticed his fascination with the pool. Perhaps she
had noticed it but she hadn’t given it enough weight. She trusted the lock on the gate, and besides, Zandia was such a wild
little boy. He could have four or five plans of action going at the same time. His latest fascination was with vampires, and
Clyda Wax, for that was his grandmother’s name, had been occupied with overcoming his belief in them. “Where did you ever
see a vampire?” she kept asking. “There is no such thing as a vampire, Zandia. There are vampire bats. I’ll admit that. But
they live in caves and they are very stupid and blind and I could kill a hundred of them with a broom.”

“They would fly up and eat your blood. They can fly.”

“I’d knock them down with the broom. They are blind. It would be easy as pie. I’d have a bushel basket full of them.”

“They’d fly up and stick to the trees. What would you do then?”

“I’d get a giraffe to eat them.”

“But giraffes live in Africa.”

“So what? I can afford to import one.”

“What about Count Dracula? You couldn’t kill him.”

“There isn’t any Count Dracula. There’s just that vulgar, disgusting, imbecilic Hollywood trash that you are exposed to in
L.A. I shudder to think what they let you watch down there. Did the baby-sitter show it to you? Did the baby-sitter tell you
about vampires? Vampires are not true. Now go and play with your Jeep for a while. I want to rest.” Clyda closed her eyes
and lay back on the lawn chair. She didn’t mean to go to sleep but she was exhausted from taking care of him. She had volunteered
for one week. It had turned into three. He had been up that morning at five rummaging around in her kitchen drawers. “When
your mother comes to get you I’m going to a spa,” she said sleepily. “I’m going to Maine Chance and stay a month.”

As soon as he saw she was asleep he walked over to the fence and undid the latch. He pushed the latch open and disappeared
through the gate. There it was, shimmering in the moonlight, the swimming pool with all its chairs and the red rubber raft
and the safety ring. He walked under the window of the bedroom where Nora Jane and Freddy lay in each other’s arms. He walked
around the chairs and up to the edge of the water. He bent over and saw his reflection in the water. Then he began to fall.

* * *

“Something’s wrong.” Nora Jane sat up. She pushed Freddy away from her. She jumped up from the bed. She tore open the door
and began to run. She got to the pool just as Zandia was going under. She ran around the edge. She jumped in beside him and
found him and they began to struggle. She pulled and dragged him through the water. When she got to the shallow end she pulled
him up into the air. Then the lights were on and Freddy was in the water with her and they lifted him from the water and turned
him upside down and Freddy was on the mobile phone calling 911.

“How did you know?” they asked her. After it was over and Zandia was in his grandmother’s arms eating cookies and the living
room was full of uniformed men and Tammili and Lydia had seen their naked parents performing a miracle and were the most cowed
ten-year-old girls in the Bay Area.

“I don’t know. I don’t know what I knew. I just knew to go to the pool.”

“You’ve never even met this kid?” one of the men in uniform asked.

“I’ve seen him in the yard. He’s been in the yard next door.”

Later that night, after Zandia and his grandmother had been walked to their house and Tammili had been put to bed reading
The Voyage of the Dawn Treader
and Lydia had been put to bed reading a catalog from
American Girl
and they were alone in their room, Freddy had opened all the windows and the skylight above the bed and they had lain in
each other’s arms, awed and pajamaed, talking of time and space and life at the level of microbiology and wave and particle
theory and why Abraham Pais was their favorite person in New York City and how it was time to take the girls to the Sierra
Nevada to see the mountains covered with snow. “We need to do something to mark it. Plant some trees at Willits. Lay bricks
for a path.”

“You could rearrange the books in the den. It’s such a mess in there Betty won’t even go in to clean. It’s unhealthy to have
that many books in a room. It’s musty. It’s like a throwback to some other age. It doesn’t go with the rest of the house.”

“Go on to sleep if you can.”

“I can. You’re the one who doesn’t sleep.”

“We should both sleep tonight. Something’s on our side. I never felt that as strongly as I do right now.” He patted her for
a while. Then he began to dream his old dream of building the house at Willits. The solar house he and Nieman had built by
hand to prove it could be done and to prove who they were. Our rite of passage into manhood house, Freddy knew. The house
to free us from our mothers. In the recurrent dream it was a clear, cold day. They had finished the foundation and were beginning
to set the posts at the sides. The mountain lions came and sat upon the rise and watched them. “You think I’m nuts to go to
all this trouble to make a nest,” he told the lions. “Well, you’re wrong. This is what my species does.”

In that magical house Tammili and Lydia were born and sometimes Freddy thought the house had been built to serve that purpose.
To make them so much his that nothing could sever the bond. So what if one or both of them were Sandy George Wade’s biological
spawn? So what if maybe Tammili was his and Lydia was not? So what in a finite world if there was love? Freddy always ended
up deciding.

Next door, it was Zandia’s grandmother who couldn’t sleep. She was talking to Zandia’s mother on the phone. “You just come
up here tomorrow afternoon as soon as they finish shooting and spend the night. He’s lonely for you. Four-year-old boys shouldn’t
be away from their mother for this many days.”

“I can’t. We have to look at rushes every night. It’s the first time Sandy and I have had a chance to be in a film together.
I’m a professional, Mother. I have to finish my work, then I’ll come get him. There’s no reason you can’t hire a baby-sitter
for him, you know. He stays with baby-sitters here.”

“He almost died, Claudine. I don’t think you understand what happened here. You never listen to me, do you know that? You
only half listen to anything I say. The child almost died. Also, he is obsessed with vampires. Who let him see a movie about
vampires? That’s what I’d like to know. I’m taking him to my psychiatrist tomorrow for an evaluation.”

“All right then. I’ll send someone to get him. I thought you wanted him, Mother. You always do this. You say you want him,
then you change your mind in about four days.”

“He almost drowned.”

“Could we talk in the morning? I’ll call you at seven.”

Claudine hung up the phone, then went into the bedroom to find Sandy. He was in bed smoking and reading the script. He put
the cigarette out when he saw her and shook his head. “Where have you been?” he asked. “What took you so long?”

“Zandia fell in a swimming pool and Mother’s neighbor had to fish him out. They’re acting like it was some sort of big, big
deal. God, she drives me crazy. This is the last time he’s going up there. From now on if she wants to see him she can come
down here.”