Ashes (23 page)

“Look, asshole,” Steve said. “You may be Richard’s new best friend, but you’re flyshit to me. Understand?”

Sean made no move, stood holding the plate of brownies. But he let the mask slip, just a bit. He looked over the mask’s edge, gave Steve Wickersham a steady look. His voice was not loud but careful, measured, and very cold. “Take your hand off me.”

“What if I don’t?” Steve asked. “What are you gonna do?”

He let the mask slip away entirely and gave Steve a smile that the late and unlamented Henry Connolly would have recognized.
What am I going to do? Oh, try me, Steve. I know in my gut you pulled the trigger in L.A., you killed all those people and hurt Jennifer. Give me an excuse and you’ll find out what I can do. Ask your late friend Henry Connolly. Ask that arms dealer in Turkey, the one whose hobby was hooking little girls on smack and putting them to work in his brothel. What was left of him you could fit in a shoe box. Find out, Steve. I really want you to.

Less than a minute, thirty seconds at the most the mask was down. It was enough. Steve let go of his arm and backed away as much as he could without revealing fear. Steve seemed about to say something; his throat worked but no words came out.

Sean turned and walked to his van, as he did so he heard Eddie’s reedy voice. “Holy crap, Steve. Did you see his
eyes?”

He didn’t linger to hear more. He set the plate of brownies down carefully so it would not spill, got in his van and drove away.

M
onday afternoon. Jennifer drove to pick up Matthew Tally from school; then they’d head back to the library for their first tutoring session. Despite Gene’s confidence, Mr. Bradbury’s encouragement, and a weekend spent boning up on remedial reading, she was one big jitter. Her knuckles were white on the wheel as she drove, and though she tried to believe it was driving through the rain that set her on edge, she didn’t fool herself. She was used to foul-weather driving by now, had adapted very well for a Los Angeles émigré. No, might as well tell the truth. It was the tutoring session that twisted her nerves. And why not? It was easy for Mr. Bradbury to say she’d do fine.
He
was smart,
he
knew how to help people. She was just Jennifer Thomson, nothing special, former receptionist and current assistant librarian, 2.7 GPA from a second-rate community college. Exactly the sort of person to trust your child’s literacy to, no question about that.

She threaded her way through the maze of cars, parked, and got out. The rain drummed on her umbrella as she craned her head about, looking for Matthew. She was awash in a sea of children, all of whom seemed to be clad in bright yellow rain slickers and hats with the occasional red or blue coat thrown in. In the end, it was he who found her.

If Matthew was nervous as she, he didn’t show it. “I like your car,” he said as she maneuvered out of the parking lot. “It looks like something from
Tron.”

“I haven’t seen that in years,” she said.

“Dad got me the video for Christmas last year. And the first Harry Potter movie too. I’m gonna ask for the second one for my birthday.”

“And when’s that?”

“March 20th.”

“Not too far away.” She let Matthew chatter on about
Tron
for the rest of the drive, only half listening. Partly she was focused on the driving, mostly she was remembering March 20th of last year. A Sunday. She’d been up late the night before, at the movies with some friends who’d all made themselves scarce after the bombing when it was “just too weird to be around you now, Jen, sorry.” She’d woken, made coffee and a blueberry-and-banana smoothie. Frittered away the day, doing halfhearted housework. Spent the evening eating cold leftover pizza, watching “ER” reruns and mooning over George Clooney. All the while blissfully ignorant that in less than 24 hours she would have a front-row seat at mass murder, that if not for a broken photocopier she would be ashes now. Last Christmas, the ghostwriter had asked her how it felt to dodge a bullet, or rather, a bomb. “A relief,” she’d said, but that was a lie. There was no relief, only a constant wondering why she’d made it. Only the task of earning that grace, or luck, or whatever it was. Only waiting for the other shoe to drop, for fortune to reverse and even out the balance of things.

“Miss Thomson?”

She blinked. Realized that she was parked at the library, just sitting behind the wheel thinking things over. How long has she been doing that?

“Miss Thomson?” Matthew said again. “You OK?”

She smiled. “Fine. Just spaced out there for a minute.”

They got out of the car and, as if a switch had been thrown, Matthew’s chatter ceased. She knew it for what it was, nervousness. Jennifer resolved to not let her own doubts show; she got hot chocolate for the two of them, and they sat down to the books.

* * *

S
he dropped Matthew off at his house an hour later. The Tally house was close by the harbor, as Gene had said. A small house, not unlike her own. An old pickup truck was in the driveway. The truck had a ladder rack, just beginning to show rust spots here and there, and a boxy thing in the pickup bed that she assumed was a tool chest. Gene had mentioned that when the fish weren’t running, he did boat repair, got car engines running again, that sort of thing. He’d offered to do any household fix-it chores if she got tired of salmon as payment for Matthew’s tutoring. She was thinking of asking him to look at her bathroom sink, which drained far too slowly and made odd gurgling sounds sometimes.

“Thanks, Miss Thomson,” Matthew said as he got his book bag.

“Call me Jen. See you tomorrow,” she replied. “Same bat time, same bat station?”

He nodded and gave her a smile, ran through the rain to his front door. She watched for him to make it inside, saw his silhouette against a spill of light from the open door. As she was getting ready to drive away another silhouette, a taller one, appeared in the doorway, then made its way out onto the walk. Gene emerged out of the gloomy drizzle. She rolled down the window.

“Hi,” he said. He was bareheaded in the rain but it did not seem to bother him. Most likely he was used to all kinds of weather. She caught the scent of the harbor from him, ocean and rain and diesel smoke.

“Hello.”

“How’d it go?”

“OK. We’re still finding our way.”

“All right. Well. If there’s anything I can do.”

“I’ll let you know.”

Jennifer wished that Gene had his son’s eyes. She could read Matthew’s eyes. Gene’s were like the sky, or like the ocean. She saw the surface, but no deeper. Was he happy she was tutoring Matthew? Resentful? Did he still see her as Miss California, an emissary from the same state that had brought him beautiful, hateful Becca? No, most likely not that last, he would not have entrusted Matthew to her if he thought so. But what did he think? And why did she care what he thought?

She didn’t know, and decided it didn’t matter. Helping Matthew was what mattered.

* * *

F
riday evening she dropped off Matthew, exchanged hellos and remarks about the weather with Gene. She accepted a plastic grocery bag containing four large salmon fillets, each sealed in a freezer bag with the date written on each bag in permanent marker.

As she pulled into her driveway, Suzanne came outside and waved. “The mailman left some packages for you. I brought them in so they wouldn’t get rained on.”

“Thanks much. Are they from Land’s End?”

“Yeah. More towels?” Suzanne asked as she handed several flat packages over the fence.

Jennifer shook her head. “Clothes. Pants and stuff mostly. I’ve put on a few pounds lately. Need to run my ass around the block a few times.”

Suzanne shrugged. “If it makes you feel better, I think you look great. No offense, but you were starting to look kind of peaky back around Christmas.”

Jennifer had never, to her knowledge, been described as “peaky” before but she took Suzanne’s meaning clearly. “Gene gave me some salmon, sort of payment for helping tutor Matthew. You and Bill want to come over tomorrow night? I’ve got a recipe I’ve been wanting to try.”

“We’ll be there.”

Jennifer went inside, tossed the boxes on the couch. She’d deal with those tomorrow. These last few days of tutoring Matthew she’d been getting an idea, and she needed to spend a night doing some research to see if her hunch was the right one. She made an omelet for herself and a bowl of Friskies for Pete Puma. Pete, no fool, disdained the Friskies and followed her into her office, hoping for some of the omelet. As she fired up the Mac she ate and tried to fend off Pete, eventually giving in to his begging, knowing that she’d most likely be cleaning up cat barf in the morning. Between Pete Puma and Matthew Tally, she was becoming quite the sucker for a pair of big vulnerable eyes.

Online now, her omelet eaten, she began searching. She had come to realize that Matthew
could
read. But not well, and not quickly. And something else was going on. Today she’d asked him to write something, just copy a sentence out of one of the books, and noticed that he used b’s instead of d’s and vice versa, swapped letters around making strange not-quite palindromes. She thought of an old boyfriend from high school, with a button on his jacket that said
Dyslexics untie!

She supposed she could have talked to Mr. Bradbury. But she wanted to do this on her own, see if she could not just nail down the problem, but find a solution as well.

After a couple hours online she was heading out to the kitchen for a coffee break when the phone rang. “Hello?”

A familiar whiskey voice: “Jennifer, it’s Amber.”

“Hi, Amber. How are you?”

“Fine, considering. Did you get my message about the problem with the book?”

“Yes, I did.” The book had been delayed. There were two other books about the bombing on the market already, not survivor’s stories but “what really happened” exposés, both crackpot affairs as far as Jennifer could tell (one of them blamed the bombing on fanatical Scientologists). But no publishers were willing to take her book yet. “I’m all right with that.”

“I’m really sorry. I’m sure we’ll be able to get it out before the end of the year. But I wanted to let you know that the movie will be on in March.”

“Sounds great,” Jennifer said. She didn’t bother to tell Amber that she’d never see the movie, she was in another country now. Now that the movie was actually made and no longer just a possibility, Jennifer found the idea creepy and fascinating in equal measure. Against her better judgment she asked, “Who’s playing me?”

“A girl who used to be on ‘Buffy the Vampire Slayer’.”

She tried to envision it, couldn’t. “That’s fine. Talk to you soon, Amber.”

She hung up, made a cup of instant, and went back to her computer. Pete Puma curled up in her lap and went to sleep. She clicked and scrolled and read far into the night, until she could comprehend no more information. By the next morning, she had a plan she thought would work.

* * *

J
ennifer sat across from Matthew. “I have something you might be interested in.” She reached into her tote bag and took out a hardcover edition of
Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone.

Matthew’s eyes got wide, as she’d guessed they would.

“You liked the movie? Well, the book is ten times better, trust me.” Jennifer smiled. “And it’s yours. Just one thing.”

“What’s that?”

“You have to read it to me. Out loud. And when we’re done, it’s yours.”

Matthew shifted uncomfortably in his chair, much as she’d known he would. It took a week’s tutoring and a weekend of research but she thought she knew what the problem was. Matthew had dyslexia. His problem wasn’t that he couldn’t read — it was just slow for him, he was left behind in the dust of his classmates. Her weekend research had found that many dyslexics could read, they just needed more time, needed to take it one word at a time. Slow and steady. If she could help give him confidence in his abilities, that would be half the battle.

She told him some of this. “Just take it one word at a time. Don’t rush it. Say the word, see if it sounds right the way it looks to you. If not, we’ll figure out how it should sound.”

Matthew said nothing.

“What do you think?” she asked.

He swallowed, nodded. She saw fear in his eyes: of failure, of disappointment, of being left behind in school. “OK,” he said, and reached out for the book.

Brave boy. She felt her heart swell with pride as if he was hers.

* * *

T
here were red construction paper hearts in the school windows when she picked up Matthew. Hearts sprinkled with glitter, bordered with lace, dappled with paint. The fourth graders had possession of the library on Valentine’s Day, and she found chalky candy hearts with messages like
Be mine
and
Oh you kid
off in the corners of the stacks for the next few days.

Cindy sent her a small bouquet of white and red carnations. Jennifer was enormously pleased, for it was one more valentine than she’d expected to get, even if it was from her sister. But she did get another. Matthew handed a red glittery paper heart to her, shyly said, “Here,” and then ran up the walk to his house.

“So you’ve got a suitor then?” Cindy asked on the phone that night.

“Not hardly. He’s eight years old. This is ‘crush on the teacher’ time I think.”

“Hey, get them while they’re young! But seriously, is this the kid you’ve been tutoring?”

“Yes, that’s him.”

“Well, you said his dad’s single. Who knows?”

Jennifer snorted. She didn’t think Gene even
liked
her. “Doubtful, Cin. Our conversations haven’t gone beyond how Matthew’s doing and how about that weather. As my boss says, ‘There is no there there’.”

“I think that was Gertrude Stein, actually.”

“Well, knowing Mr. Bradbury he probably met Gertrude Stein at some point. Probably played poker with her and Ernest Hemingway in some Parisian café."

Cindy laughed. “Jen, I have to tell you, you sound so different.”