The Survivor (21 page)

As he entered, Casper barreled toward him, claws scrabbling against the hard floor. Janie swung through the doorway—“How’d it go?”—her face almost collapsing with relief when she read his expression.

He’d just set down the grocery bag and suitcase when Cielle descended the stairs, Shithead Jason at her heels. Nate did a literal double take at the husky kid before turning to Janie.

“She told him everything,” Janie said. “And they think he’s staying here.”

“You what?” Nate spun to his daughter. “You told your
boyfriend
? This is life and death, Cielle.”

Shithead Jason held up his hands calmingly, the picture of maturity. “And I am here for whatever you need, bro.”

The muscles of Nate’s left hand were contracting, and he did his best to shake out the knot forming in the meat of his palm. “Cielle, you need to—”

“
What?
Keep it a
secret
? You guys haven’t.
You
told Pete, and look how
that
turned out. So why can’t
I
tell someone important to
me
?”

“No one should know about this,” he said.

“No, Nate. It’s just that you want to make all the choices. Who to tell, who not to.” She drifted down the final steps, on tilt. “
You
said I could make my own choices. Well, this is my first. And his.”

She reached back for Jason, who took her hand and swallowed hard, his Adam’s apple bobbing. He’d removed his small gauge earrings, leaving hole punches in his lobes through which Nate could see the sides of his neck.

Janie turned to Nate. “You told a
fifteen-year-old
she could make her own choices?”

“Not exactly,” he said.

They were arrayed around the entryway like enemy tanks in a clearing, everyone ready to pivot and fire.

“I’m staying with her,” Jason said. “That big guy comes back, I’ll kick him in his Justin Bieber.”

“You don’t understand,” Nate said. “These men, they don’t care about anything. They are perfect terrorists. You need to stay away from this for your own safety.”

“Far as I’m concerned,” Jason announced grandly, “they can all go suck a bag o’ dicks.”

“Okay,” Janie said. “Great. Thanks.”

A rush of fury, burning Nate’s throat with the words: “You think this is a fucking joke? Some kind of video game? Do you guys have any concept of—”

Cielle reddened. “I know what’s best for me.”

“Your inviting him here proves exactly how little you know what’s best for you.”

Cielle stormed upstairs, towing her boyfriend. Jason paused, pointing across at Casper. “By the way, the dog’s showing his lipstick. I’m just sayin’. It’s a little gross.”

Cielle took up the slack, yanking him around, and then they were up and the bedroom door slammed, leaving Nate and Janie and an aroused Rhodesian ridgeback.

“Put that thing away,” Janie said to Casper, who rose and padded off. She rubbed her eyebrows with thumb and forehead, muttering something unintelligible.

Nate’s skin was tingling—the aftermath of the outburst. He looked at Janie. “What?”

“She’s not
seven,
Nate. She is fifteen. You can’t just pick her up and throw her over your shoulder. She has to be part of this. We need her to
cooperate
.”

He tamped down a flurry of objections. “Okay,” he said. “Okay. What do we do about it?”

“Absolutely nothing for fifteen minutes.”

He followed her into the kitchen. Unfolded the divorce papers and dropped them on the island. “I brought these. You just need to countersign and mail them in.”

The leak beneath the sink
drip-drip-dripped.

Janie cast a weary gaze at the papers. “Thanks.” She slid them off the marble, letting them clap to the side of her leg, and trudged over to her study, which was more of an alcove off the kitchen.

Nate found his tools and the little box in the back of the pantry and dropped a new washer in the flanged tailpiece of the kitchen drain to stop the leak. After tightening everything up, he brought the mortar bag down from the garage cabinet and reseated the loose brick on the porch. Janie worked quietly at her desk the whole time, and Nate found a familiar calm in their separate but harmonized routines. As he came back in from the front yard, he noticed a few spots of Pete’s dried blood on the kitchen floor, which he cleaned up with a wet paper towel silently so Janie wouldn’t turn around and notice. Finally he walked over and knocked gently on the wall behind her. When she pushed back on the rolling chair, he saw that she had out a calculator and a stack of bills.

She traced his gaze and said firmly, “Late bills are not a problem. They’re a welcome distraction.”

He nodded reluctantly. “Has it been fifteen minutes?”

“It has.”

She rose, and they headed side by side up the stairs. Jason’s deep voice was audible from the hall. “I wish I had like
ninety-seven
senses so I could love you with more of them.”

And Cielle: “You are so lame. That’s like a double trampoline bounce of lameness.”

“Don’t be a bitch.”

Nate opened the door sharply without knocking. The kids were sitting on the floor, their backs to Cielle’s bed. Jason played with a Zippo lighter decorated with a skull and crossbones, flicking open the lid, snapping it shut.

“I don’t like the way you’re talking to her,” Nate said.

“Dude—you seen the way she talks to
me
?”

Janie’s voice, strained thin enough to break: “Just … go home, Jason. Cielle will call you later.”

He shrugged and lumbered out.

Cielle examined her cuticles.

Janie sat next to her and Nate against the adjoining wall. They looked at each other, united by parental helplessness. Janie made a gesture:
You first.

“Look,” Nate said. “About Jason—”

Cielle said, “I
love
him.”

“I know, honey,” he said. “And colors are bright, and music is subversive, and when you see him, he puts a hum in your chest. I
know.
And that’s how it should be. But it isn’t safe right now. I am one move away from extracting us from this mess, and we can’t have any complications in the mix.”

“He’s not a
complication,
” Cielle said.

Janie reached for her but thought better of it. “I know you think you know everything right now. What decisions you want to make.”

Cielle’s fists were at her temples, and she flung her hands, sending out flares of maroon-streaked hair. She glared at Nate. “You don’t like Jay because he’s more creative than you.”

“No,” he said. “I don’t like Jason because he’s not
human.
I wasn’t either at his age. ”

Cielle went back to her cuticles. Silence. Just beyond her line of sight, Janie regarded Nate imploringly.

He gritted his teeth. “Okay. Look, I’m sorry—”

Cielle’s head snapped up. “So he can stay?”

“No.”

Cielle sank her chin beneath the frayed collar of her oversize sweater. “He could help if those guys come back.”

“What’s he gonna do? Scare them off with his music?”

With a sleeve bunched over her fist, she wiped her nose forcefully, as if to tear it off. “You don’t get it.”

“No.” His voice was low, but hard as stone. “You don’t get it. We could all get
killed,
Cielle. Him included. How you gonna feel if he winds up with a bullet in his chest?”

Her expression shifted abruptly, the wrinkles smoothing from her forehead. Reality slapping her. For a moment he thought she might start crying, but whatever twinge of guilt he felt was drowned out by the roaring necessities at hand.

His phone vibrated in his pocket, breaking the silence. He stood with some difficulty, stiff from myriad bruises, and checked the ID.

Janie read his face and said, with all-too-familiar disappointment, “Work.”

He pulled the phone open. “I can’t,” he said into it.

Sergeant Jen Brown sounded unimpressed with his opening salvo. “Pregnant woman raped and stabbed to death in Griffith Park a few hours ago. Picnickers just found the body.”

“I can’t.”

“Husband’ll be home from work any minute. Doesn’t know a thing yet.”

“I can’t.”

“He’s on the Westside, ten minutes from your door. If you don’t go, I’ll have to send Ken.”

Nate’s head was bent, his neck tightening up, the heat of Janie’s and Cielle’s gazes boring through his back. Ken Nowak serving a death notification to a man who’d just lost his wife and unborn child—Nate’s chest cramped at the thought of it. He did his best to stand still, to avoid squirming, to try to hold the course.

Instead he heard himself say, “Last time.”

Janie blew out a soft breath of disappointment, and Cielle’s head snapped away to face the wall.

He hung up, defeated, and turned to face them. “Look, I won’t be an hour. It’s an impossible one. This guy—”

Janie waved a hand. “I understand. Go ahead.” She slumped back down next to Cielle.

Nate lingered a beat, but neither seemed interested in kick-starting this particular argument. He didn’t blame them. Trudging downstairs, he breathed in the fragrances of the house—carpet cleaner, the lingering afterscent of a honey candle, a trace of ash from the fireplace. A faint rain tapped the roof, and the refrigerator hummed. He patted the dog on the head and stepped out onto the porch.

Halfway down the walk, he paused.

He turned around, gazed back at his house, at the square of his daughter’s window. There was a movement at the curtain, and then Janie and Cielle appeared, looking down at him. Something inside him swelled and broke, and he felt weak and emancipated all at once. Squinting against the flecks of rain, he stood for a time, night air crisp at the back of his throat, staring up at them, them staring down, the three of them motionless and silent as if the slightest movement would shatter this unspoken dialogue.

Then he pulled out his phone and dialed.

Jen answered gruffly.

“I’m not going,” he said. “I’m taking some time off.”

“Ken left for home already. What if I gave you an order to handle this?”

“Then I’d tell you what you can do with your order.”

A long silence, punctuated only by Jen’s breathing. He could have sworn he sensed her mouth shape into a smile on the other end.

“Hear that crackling?” she said. “Must be hell freezing over.”

He hung up and started back inside. His head was bent against the drizzle, but with each step home he felt the warm gaze of his wife and daughter overhead.

Chapter 25

Cielle’s scream shattered Nate’s sleep, and he bolted up from the couch, slamming his knee into the coffee table. For a moment he had no bearings—apartment or house? nightmare or real?—but then he snapped to awareness, clawing his way past the furniture toward the stairs.

Casper followed him up, two steps at a time, lunging as if fording water. Janie swung out of the master, nearly colliding with Nate at the landing, and then parents and dog were hurtling toward Cielle’s door. They found her backed as far as she could get from the window, turned sideways as if trying to burrow through the wall.

“What is it?”

“Are you okay?”

Cielle was shuddering beneath her T-shirt and boxers. A fall of dark hair covered one eye, the other wide and glossy. Her mouth opened, but no words came out. She lifted a hand and pointed to the window.

Shoulders lowered, Casper slunk four steps toward the window and issued a growl seemingly too low even for his deep chest. Janie moved to Cielle and Nate toward the bare pane, setting each foot down slowly, heel to toe. He paused beside the dog, who hummed with menace, a stone grinder rumbling.

Four more cautious steps brought Nate to the sill. There lay the front yard, twin ellipses of mowed grass split by the snake of the front walk. The sturdy magnolia, its wrinkled, elephantine trunk dark with rain. Planters brimming with subdued lavender and juniper. And beyond, the wide street, the friendly façades of Craftsmen and Cape Cods looking on, observers at a parade. This panorama he knew in his bones, each lineament traced in memory, the curves and shapes of a cherished photograph. Comfort exemplified.

Except.

A dark figure stood centered on the patch of grass directly beneath Cielle’s window. From the shadowed head, huffs of cigarette smoke rose, beaten flat by the rain. The face tilted up at the window. Legs confidently spaced. The man did nothing more than stand and smoke, but his presence there, at this hour, was invasive, horrifying. Large boots sank into the saturated sod—sod Nate himself had rolled onto the primed soil a few months after moving in. The sight pinballed around his insides, striking nerves at random, playing fears too primal to be named.

“I got up to pee and…” Cielle’s words flared off.

“What is it?” Janie’s breaths were audible.

Keeping his gaze locked on the dark oval of a face, Nate said, “Yuri.”

The phone’s ring sounded like a scream, scaring Cielle into a yelp. After the second ring, Nate found his legs again and unburied the cordless from a sea of decorative pillows on the futon.

Mrs. Alizadeh’s voice seemed to arrive from a different dimension.

“No, no,” Nate said, moving back to the window. “Everything’s okay. Yes, it’s me. I’m back at the house again.” Across the street, through the diaphanous silk of the old woman’s bedroom curtains, he could make out her silhouette, down to the apprehensive curl of her shoulders. The two of them, like prisoners on their respective second floors, terrorized by a man on a lawn. The ridiculousness of this broke through his alarm, fired the breath in his throat. “It’s probably just some lookie-loo, tracked me down after the whole bank thing. You heard about the bank thing?”

“No,” Mrs. Alizadeh said. “I did not.”

“Better just to ignore whoever it is,” Nate said.

“He’s scaring me. I will call 911.”

“That’s not necessary.”

“I do not like this, Mr. Overbay.”

“I’ll take care of it,” Nate said.

He hung up, threw the phone at the futon, and started for the door.