Acts of God (10 page)

Once while she was trying to win her lawsuit against the hunters, I sat with her in the courthouse waiting room and she said to me, “I used to believe that everyone made his or her own destiny. Now I just believe in fate.”

“What's the difference?” I asked her.

“Big one,” she said. “I know this man. He was walking down a street in Seattle. He had his whole life planned out. He was on his way to law school, engaged to a girl he'd known since college. They even had a house picked out on some island in Puget Sound. Then, suddenly, as he's walking down the street, a steel beam from a construction crew falls off a roof and lands right at his feet, just at the tip of his toes. Another half an inch and he would have been a dead man.”

“So,” I said.

“So he broke up with the girl, forgot about the house and law school. He's a rancher in Wyoming, married an Indian he met out there. He forgot about his so-called destiny and decided to just do whatever the hell he wanted.”

That's what Shana told me she did. Never went back into the classroom; changed her life. She told me that now she preferred this line of work. She liked showing people in and out of houses where they might live, homes they might buy. She liked having the keys to so many homes, this entry into strangers' lives. She even hinted that she sometimes prowled in rooms, dug into drawers.

I must admit that I had come to enjoy it as well, since a year earlier her business was doing so well that she asked me to take over seasonal rentals and time-shares. I enjoyed the jingle of keys in my pocket, the access it provided. Though I can't say I did any prowling, I peered farther into a closet than I needed to, opened drawers I might just as well have left shut. But the fact is, such searches always disappointed. I never found the secrets, the hints of hidden lives I wanted to believe were there, and in recent months I'd stopped looking. Mostly things are what they are; that's the lesson having keys in my pocket taught me.

Now Shana gave me a few rentals to check out, make sure they were in good order before we took clients there.

“Okay, I'll do that, then I have some film to pick up and errands to do. Let's say I get back here at around three?”

Shana said that was all right with her and she handed me the lists of apartments to check on.

“Shana, can I ask you something?”

“Sure.”

“You know, your house, it sits out over the ocean, right?”

“Yep, median tide is right under our living room.”

“Well, is it insured?”

“Sort of. Under the Fair Plan. But the truth is, if it got washed out to sea, I'd never recover its value.”

“That's what I thought,” I said, giving Shana a little nod as I headed out the door and she waved back with her crooked arm.

My first stop was the seashell house, which was done entirely in seashell decor. Seashell pillows, cowrie shell artwork, abalone lamps, scallop curtains. It rented well to retirees who may or may not have discovered the porno the wife (the only interesting thing I'd ever uncovered in one of those houses) kept under her clam-shaped dressing table. It was spotless, as always, when I arrived, and I made a quick walk-through, rubbing my fingers along the mantel to see if we needed to send in the Polish cleaning crew.

I stopped at the tchotchke apartment which had knickknacks everywhere that could not be touched. It was the kind of place I loved; if I'd let my nature for collecting things run wild, I'd have lived in a house like that, with a million ceramic dogs and glass goats. Cruise-ship memorabilia was everywhere. An alleged life preserver from the
Titanic,
a crystal goblet from the
QE2.
On one shelf was a collection of cereal-box prizes. The people who lived here were control freaks and I had to be sure that every bear and cat was in its exact place. The husband had handed me a grid when I got this account, showing me where everything should go. Once, just to see if they noticed, I messed things up a bit—put some ceramic poodles where the
QE2
goblet was. They noticed right away.

My last stop was the Mitchell place. The Mitchells put away all their cotton sheets and terry-cloth towels and had polyester for the renters and slipcovers on everything. I didn't know why anyone rented that one, and almost everyone who did went out and bought their own linen. Invariably the renters complained.

Everything was in tiptop shape, ready for the new season. I called Shana to report in and told her I'd be back the next day to take care of some paperwork. On my way home I stopped for groceries at the food co-op, where Ted and I each put in three hours a month and got great prices on organic produce, and finally at Photofax for the film from the reunion I'd dropped off a few hours before. When I got into the photo place, I fumbled through my wallet but couldn't find my ticket.

“I'm sorry,” I told the man behind the counter, who knew me since Photofax did all our film, “I can't find my ticket. It must be in my car. It's Winterstone.”

He poked around in his box of film that had just been processed and handed me a thick envelope, thicker than I thought it would be. Then I drove home with the trunk full of groceries and the film.

*   *   *

When I pulled up in front of my house, the young man who had planted himself there a few days before was back. This time he had a notebook and pen in his hand as if he were waiting for his teacher. I shook my head when I saw him, but there was something rather sweet in his thin, sandy hair, his cheerless face.

He was probably close to Ted's age, but he looked so much like a boy as he stood there in his glasses and a red sweater, chinos and All-Star Converse monochrome sneakers. I couldn't help feeling he was trying to make a good impression.

I gave him a dirty look as I pulled up, but he rushed over to my car. “Mrs. Winterstone, please, may I speak with you?”

I got out, threw open the trunk, and he stared at the bags of groceries. “I've been away for a while.” I stood back and stared at him. “What is your name?”

“I'm Bruno. Bruno Mercedes. I have a letter here that Francis Eagger wrote to my father. They carried on quite a correspondence over a number of years, yet they never met. My father, he was a minister, and he and Mr. Eagger exchanged letters about religion. You know, Mr. Eagger was a deeply religious man, as well as a nature poet.”

“No, I didn't know that.” So why did he drink himself to death in our kitchen? I wanted to ask Bruno Mercedes. Instead, as I scooped up the film and the blanket, I said, “Bruno, would you help me carry my groceries inside?”

I may as well have been asking him to carry pieces of the cross, the Holy Grail. Bruno reached into my trunk, clasping a brown bag of raw vegetables and rice cakes, another of cereals and paper products. These were not heavy bags, but the boy shook under their weight.

He followed me like a disciple toward the house. He knew, and I knew, that I wasn't asking him to carry these because I couldn't carry them myself. I was asking him to do this so I could invite him inside without actually asking him to come in. I wanted to know what it would be like to have someone like Bruno Mercedes, a devotee, a believer, and a potential boarder, inside my house. Or the former house of Francis Eagger.

With a hushed silence Bruno entered the living room. I heard him sigh and then he said, as if he would fall over, “Where should I put these?”

“In the kitchen,” I said, pointing the way.

I paused in the den to toss the blanket over the chair near the hearth, then followed behind as Bruno made his way into the kitchen, where he put the bags down on the counter and then took a deep breath. “Can I see the rest of the house?”

I led him first down the narrow corridor into Jade's room, which faced the woods. It was a simple room and she'd hardly changed a thing since she was a girl. She still had dolls on the top shelf, a collection of shells, Sierra Club calendars, flip tops that she'd been stringing together since she was about five years old. A doll collection nailed to the wall. A large mural on the opposite wall she had painted in shades of gray and brown that had something to do with U.S. intervention in Central America. Little wizards holding crystal balls sat on her desk. A stained-glass rainbow hung from a string, casting rainbows around the room.

When Bruno nodded solemnly, we moved into my room, which was small, with just a double bed and dresser, but it looked out to the sea. There were no pictures on the wall, no photos on the dresser. There weren't even books on the bedstand. It was odd, seeing my room with a stranger standing beside me, and I thought how stoical and barren it looked, as if the person who lived here had moved away years ago.

We paused before Ted's door and the words inscribed on it, “Clato Verato Nictoo,” which I gazed at each time I stopped by the door. Bruno paused, hesitating with me as well. He read the words carefully, then nodded. “Do you know what they mean?” I asked him.

“Not exactly,” he said, “but I know what they come from.”

“You do? What?”

“They are the instructions that needed to be repeated in
The Day the Earth Stood Still.
Clato Verato Nictoo is what you need to tell the robot to keep it from destroying the earth.”

“Oh, and what happens?”

Bruno shrugged. “I don't remember, but I think no one tells this to the robot and the earth gets destroyed.”

“So this wards off destruction?” Bruno nodded as we entered Ted's room. I hesitated to show him the room, which had a view of the mountains and was papered wall to wall—those precious stone walls that Francis Eagger had built—with James Dean, Bogart, grunge-rock groups (Loose Screw, Nervous Breakdown Number III). His father procured these posters for him—it was the one perk, as far as I could tell, that came from having Charlie as his father. On his dresser was a Kurt Cobain shrine. His bookshelves were lined with
Vampires of the Masquerade
books and assorted other volumes of horror. But the view into the hills was spectacular and it was not lost on Bruno.

In the living room Bruno's hands touched the cold stone walls. He ran his fingers over the exposed wooden beams. At the bookshelf he examined the feathers, pine cones, and shells, giving me a querulous look. “I collect things,” I said. “It's a childhood habit.”

When we completed the brief tour, Bruno followed me back into the kitchen. “Mrs. Winterstone, I can't thank you enough. I can't tell you what it means to me to see this view—this vista—where he wrote ‘The gods rage against me and I can do no more but hope and be humbled by what crashes below, against this fragile shore.'”

“So, Mr. Eagger was a religious man?” I said, curious now to know more about him.

“Yes, he believed, well, not in organized religion, but he believed in a certain power. The power that made this landscape.”

“I'm a realist, Mr. Mercedes. I believe that oxygen and various elements and our relation to the sun…”

Bruno Mercedes sat down in the breakfast nook and stared out to sea. “It doesn't matter what you believe, Mrs. Winterstone. It's what you feel. What you feel sitting right here. People spend too much time thinking about what they think. Francis Eagger invites us to feel. I like the feel of this place, just like I like the feel of walking on pine needles and looking at a great painting and hearing a piece of music I haven't heard before or seeing a rainbow or having a friend ask me for help. It means there's something bigger than me out there in this world. And yet I can still be a part of it. I can embrace it and it can embrace me. Do you understand what I am saying?”

I looked at this young man with thin, sandy hair and glasses, sitting in my breakfast nook. There was something slightly sad and lost about him. “Yes, I do understand.”

“This place should be a temple. A sanctuary.”

“It is my sanctuary, Mr. Mercedes.”

“Please call me Bruno.”

“Well, then, call me Tess.”

He nodded. “Mrs. Winterstone … Tess, if I could just spend a little time absorbing this place, taking this in. You see, my dissertation is on the religious inspiration in his poems and I believe that the correspondence he carried on with my father—”

“Your father knew him?”

Bruno hesitated, as if he had gone farther than he intended. “Not exactly, but my father was a minister and they wrote letters over two decades.… It is a long story, but my parents and I did not speak for many years. We had, well, a falling-out. Eagger had a similar falling-out with his parents, only his lasted a lifetime.”

“And yours?”

“In a sense Francis Eagger brought us back together. I became interested in him and then my father shared these letters with me. That was the beginning of our reconciliation.” Bruno coughed, looking away. He didn't seem to want to tell me any of this, but had felt he had to. He sensed perhaps that it was his way into my house. I felt badly, as if somehow I had forced him.

“Bruno, make yourself at home. I'll just unpack the groceries, do a few things.” I watched him as he sat in the breakfast nook, staring out to sea. Then he opened the small notebook he had brought with him and began taking notes, leafing through a tattered book of the collected poems he pulled from his knapsack. I put away groceries, tossed out dead lettuce. Bruno seemed content looking at the views, touching the stone walls, so I opened the package of photographs from the reunion.

There seemed to be more pictures than I remembered taking and as I opened it, I saw why. The first picture was of the side of a building. The second of an empty room. The third of a table and chair in that room. There was a picture of a refrigerator, a stove, a toilet. Then a suitcase in the room. There was a picture of a cot, more chairs. Chinese food on the table. Plates.

Then people began appearing slowly in the pictures. First one person—a college-age girl with straight, sandy hair—sat at the table, then another. A mother appeared, a father. They were fairly ordinary-looking with brown hair, dark eyes. More people entered the frame. An older woman wore braces. A man had his hair combed across a bald spot.