Woke Up Lonely (39 page)

“It’s true,” Larissa said. “Even the man behind the counter was missing a front tooth.”

“And that means he’s a meth head?” Ned said. “I need something from the store”—and he ran out. He needed air. Space. These people were unbearable, and thank God he was not biologically mandated to turn into them when he reached that age when you stop resisting your worst self. Course, it was possible his biological parents had been unbearable, too, but there was no point going down that road.

A bell rang as he walked into the convenience store. He kept his eyes on the floor and matted his hair against his forehead. The guy behind the desk was not a guy but a kid, and he was missing teeth because he was ten.

“Need something?” the kid said.

“Just looking.”

“Lemme get my dad for you.”

“No, no, I’m just leaving.”

But it was too late; the kid was hollering for his dad, who came lumbering in from a back room. “Didn’t I say not to bother me?” But then, seeing a customer, he said, “Well, well! Out in this weather? Brave man. What can I do you for?”

But Ned was backing out of the store, mumbling thanks and trying not to hear the radio, which was live from a Cincinnati hospital treating some of the people from around the Helix House. The place had gone up in flames, but the fallout was minor. Smoke inhalation. First-degree burns.

The guy whistled. “Sorriest thing I ever heard. You been following this mess? House blows up and all four of those hostages are gone. Even the Grand Poobah. Something’s not right.”

Ned looked up for the first time. “All four of them gone?”

“Maybe taken to a new place. What do I know. Radio’s telling me nothing.”

“Is anyone looking for them?”

“You just come out of a coma?
Everyone
is looking for them.”

Ned felt the blood recede from his skin, roll back through his veins, and log his heart, so that it grew tenfold.
Everyone?
He fled the store and, back in the car, told his dad to gun it.

What is tolerable in a person you love? Or want to love so much you will tolerate most anything? If his sister was a meth head running a lab, and if her husband, Phil, and son, Willard, partook of the results—one enjoying them and the other sustaining brain damage no one would notice for months—if they sold meth to local teenagers who marked it up and sold it to kids in Westwood, and if their franchise rivaled for quality what was coming in from Mexico, so that if they weren’t meth heads they might have been rich and put their son in a day care that served arrowroot animal crackers, if his sister’s face was all bone, and the skin was loose and pocked with gore, would he still see in her proof that his life had meaning? Would she still outfit his unconscious with the fabric of their bond so that he could go out and find someone to love romantically? And if she could do this for him, would he be able to prove he was worth it? The car splashed down the road, but the rain was on break.

“Do you at least have a plan for now?” Max said. “Do you know what you’re going to say?”

Ned was looking out the window for street signs. The closer to the mountains they got, the more sporadic the housing and signage, so that even though they were within a mile of her place, it took forty-five minutes to get there. Every time he thought they were close, it was as though a giant hand snaked down his throat, grabbed his lungs, and squeezed. Then when they were lost again, he tried to breathe double-quick. Get it in there, fill the sacs. He was not hyperventilating, but still he felt sick. One more U-turn and he’d lose every meal he’d ever had.

“Neddy, are you all right?” Larissa said. Amazing how well she could dial into his anxiety. A good mom. “How about we go up the road and park above the house so we can just see what’s what?” Giving him a face-saving way out. He said, “If you insist,” though he was relieved and grateful for this woman above all.

The road did not have a shoulder, so Max pulled onto the dirt. Fog was rolling in, dusk too, but they could still see Tracy’s house, which was actually a barn, and the yard, more like nature in a fence. There were tufts of buckwheat and sage and bitter brush laid out across the ground. Cockleburs up to your neck. Ned squinted but could make out nothing of relevance from this distance except a tricycle on its side and two cars in the driveway—a pickup and a town car much like the one whose engine Max was now gunning with impatience.

Larissa reached into her bag. “Here,” she said, and she thrust binoculars in Ned’s hand. “I got them at that philharmonic fund-raiser. They’re opera glasses, really.”

“You always carry around opera glasses?”

She blushed. Ned said, “Oh,” and then started to laugh and then to tear up.

“I was just going to watch for a second,” she said. “Just to see if she looks like you.” She cupped his face. “My sweet boy.”

He swiped at the tears. He was afraid to look through the binoculars, but he looked all the same and instantly regretted it. He hurled them down the slope.

“What?” Larissa said. “What is it?”

He threw his hands in the air and again his mom said, “What?” She looked at the binoculars, some twenty feet below, and calculated the wisdom in retrieving them. She was wearing clogs and had probably not exerted herself in this regard in years.

He sat on the ground. It was wet and shrill with needle grass. “Goddamn it,” he said. “If you hadn’t taken so long at the gas station we could have
beat them.
”

“Beat who?”

“The cops. The feds. I don’t know. I saw a woman in the door, maybe it’s
her,
but I couldn’t get a good look because she was half-inside the house, talking to some jackass.”

Larissa stared down at the car in the driveway but could make nothing of it. “What makes you think it’s the police?”

“Mom, he was in a suit and tie. Look where we are. Everyone’s after me—of course they were going to check in on Tracy.”

“But—”

“Mom, they’re the government. They know everything. And now so does she. I can’t believe it.”

He felt so cheated, he almost could not move. Thanks to the feds, now he’d never know how she had felt in the instant she learned she wasn’t alone in this world, either. Not without blood family. Did the news come as a relief? Would it moor her to the universe and save her life? In receipt of major news for the first time, a face cannot lie.

“Maybe it’s for the best,” Larissa said, and she began to finesse her way down the hill.

Ned had his back to her. “Goddamn it,” he said. “This was idiotic. She’s probably a meth head. Maybe they were coming to arrest her. Let’s get out of here. I’ll call in to work tomorrow and that will be that.” He waited for his mom to hallelujah the plan but heard, instead, a small cry followed by the circus of a body tumbling downhill.

“Ah, Christ,” he said, and he plunged headlong after her, grabbing for balance what he could.

“I’m here,” she said, and she jutted her arm from a bed of sage that, in its congestion, had hidden her whole. “I think I twisted my ankle. Go get your father? He’s waiting.”

“Clearly,” Ned said. The car horn had been blaring through the night for three minutes. If the feds had any sense, they’d hear in the urgency of this horn a sennet for their catch.

“Mom, can you get up?” He took her by the forearms and was shocked at their girth. They were bamboo; she was so frail. She tried to put pressure on her foot but buckled at the knee. “I can’t walk,” she said. “How stupid.”

Ned looked up the hill. The night was livid now, but he could still see in the angle of the hill’s incline no way to get back up together. Unclear, even, if they could get down. He told her to stay put while he went for Max.

“Neddy,” she said, and she grabbed for the hem of his pants. “I’m so sorry. This is all my fault.”

He waved her off and began uphill. The sky crackled, and you could hear the dry ravel and a sound like horse hoofs on cobblestone, which was actually rocks and pebbles and earth caroming down the mountainside.

The only light for miles was a halogen nested in the gable of Tracy’s barn. It guided their way as they picked through the brush.

“We can act like we’re someone else,” Larissa said. She was pendant between the men in her life, and, though the throbbing in her ankle was getting worse, the pendant thing was nice.

“You could help us here,” Max said. “You do have one foot that still works.”

“Or maybe we could just be hikers who lost track of time,” she said.

“Some hikers,” Max said. “The one thing we had to make that story work, and sonny boy throws them down the hill.”

“I got them back,” Larissa said. And it was true; the binoculars were slung around her neck.

Ned kept his eyes on the halogen. What might his sister not like in all this? How about a creepy brother come to her door with the horrible parents who rejected her.

They made it to the outlays of the house, where management started: a gate, a path.

“What now?” Max said, though he got no answer.

There were bighorn in the mountains; they lowed and baaed, and the sound traveled for miles.

They neared the barn. Ned was the first to stop. He cocked his ear. They were twenty feet from a window open a crack. He was about to press on when a child’s voice sniped at the air and decked his parents. They were on their bellies fast. He just stood there.

“Ned,” Max whispered, and he reached for his son’s calf.

“Neddy,” Larissa said, and she reached for the other.

He looked down at them. Max had served in Korea and been awarded a silver star. Larissa had served as a nurse at the Eighty-Fifth Evacuation Hospital in Qui Nhon. They knew how to take cover. A man’s face in the window, and Ned got on his stomach, too. Listened hard. The voice, after all, was his nephew’s. His nephew, Willard. He tried to memorize its timbre. The high notes. The jazz. He’d been told the boy was just over two. He heard running through the house and a man saying, “I’m gonna get you!” and the child shrieking and laughing and yelling, “No no, Dada,” and collapsing on the floor while his mother nibbled his arms and neck, threatening to eat her boy for dinner because he was soooooo tasty.

Ned rolled on his back. So did Max. Larissa, too. They were soaked and filthy and staring at the nimbus overhead. For everything he’d been through, it was hard to imagine it was clouds up there and not a larder of tears.

He went back to listening. This family inside was a miracle. The boy romping through the house, saying: “Willard’s bear. Willard’s shoes.” The parents keeping an eye on him but retreating to the kitchen to talk it over. The man who’d come to see them before? He was a representative from L.A. County’s flood control division saying that if it rained big again, tonight or soon, probably there’d be a debris slide headed right for their barn. The fire season being what it was, the basin uphill was just not basin enough. Tracy saying, “You believe that? I don’t believe that,” and Phil saying, “Me neither,” but both of them watching their son and believing it wholeheartedly.

“He said if there’s rain, we’ll have just twenty minutes before the mountain comes down,” she said.

“I know.”

“He said in ’seventy-eight, there was such a bad flow, all the graves at Verdugo went loose and there were dead bodies upright in people’s living rooms when it was over.”

“I know.”

“Maybe let’s make an emergency bag if we have to leave in a hurry? Sort of like how when I was pregnant, we had that bag ready?”

“Okay, but what should we pack? There’s nothing important in this house but the memory of us in it.” He touched her cheek.

“I’ll grab the pictures of Mom and Dad in the living room,” she said.

“You’d better. Your parents will have a fit if they find out you didn’t save their pictures.”

“Oh, stop.”

They reconvened on the couch, him with the albums and her with a box of miscellany. Will’s first rattle. A corsage from their wedding.

They went through everything, and the hours went by. Finally, they put the pictures and mementos, title to the house, and some insurance papers in a duffel and put it by the front door. Only then did they turn on the radio. A severe storm alert was in effect. Rain imminent.

“I’m scared,” she said. “This house is all we have.”

“I know.”

“I love you?” she said.

“Check.”

Their son came waddling into the living room and mounted the couch. He sat between them.

“Willard’s book!” he yelled. “Oooooh, airplane! Flap, flap!”

“No way,” Tracy said. “Who could fly in this weather? Come on, baby, let’s get your boots. We’re going on a trip!” She picked up her son, who flapped in her arms.

“Flap, flap!” he said.

Tracy smiled. “Silly boy,” she said, though she was wrong. Because not two hours ago, a twin brother had talked his parents into reboarding his Lear jet and racing for the cloud decks off the California coast. The plan? Seed the clouds to make it rain well afield of a ranch on Alpine Way, so that when his sister was spared, Ned would know himself equal in love to whatever the universe could do for her. He set their course, he kissed the sky. And their lives were bound up for good.

Olgo Panjabi, a man sees, hears, feels, and absorbs
as much as he can understand.

Say you had this cult whose impetus to knit people together had turned terrorist—did that mean you forwent the instruments of community the second things got rough? That you divested your cult compound of a way to reach the outside world? If no, then what the hell, the Helix House was a nightmare; it had no cell-phone reception,
no bars,
which was colossal in the extent of its horror for Olgo Panjabi because if he could just get his voicemail, his life would start over. He had a rash, he was scared, but still, this kidnapping in its grandeur was like the Christ birth, a demarcation of time. Whatever had happened before belonged to a different epoch, and what tragedies it sustained were receded into it, among them adulteries committed by his wife. In this new era ushered in by High Event, his wife would come back, she was on her way, he just needed it confirmed by the message on his voicemail.