Cold Springs (3 page)

She was crying now. No control over the tears. She had to get inside before she broke down completely.

“I'll be back in a minute,” she told Mallory. “You want to listen to the radio?”

“No thank you.”

“Sure. Listen. Good song.”

She left on the music, and got out of the car. She imagined her dad's voice,
This isn't over, Katherine. I want to talk about this when I get home.

And Katherine felt that frantic, just-before-the-darkness smile tugging at her lips.
Ephemeral, Daddy. It means dying too soon.

The cold turned her breath to steam as she hurried up the porch steps.

John Zedman fucking loved it.

Just walking through the locker area, the housing commissioner, the supervisor from District 1 and the head of the biggest construction company in town had gone out of their way to shake his hand.

Last year? Same auction. Same John Zedman. But would they talk to him? No way.

It'd been as if the smell of burning ferry engines—the aura of grease and fried pistons that came home on John's father every day from the Embarcadero wharf—still lingered on John's tuxedo, an unwanted odor that came from his pores, straight through the $500 cologne, announcing,
I am not a member of your club. I do not have your cell phone number. My wife does not lunch with yours—she only teaches your kids.

That last part was what John hated the most. Because these people—the hell what John thought—to them, there was absolutely no difference between a teacher and a maid. Consuela from Guatemala. Ann Zedman from Laurel Heights. Whatever. You work with my kids, hold their future in your hands? So does my housekeeper.

No matter how John tried, the other parents had always looked at him through the lens of his wife's job, not his. To even see him, they had to make a conscious effort. Saying hello to him was not something that occurred to them, the way he had to think to say hello to the school custodian.

But not tonight. Tonight the richest guests were introducing themselves, telling him that they were remiss in scheduling that lunch. Surely they'd talked about it—when was it, last month?

And John smiled, knowing they were full of shit, but loving it.

Three months since John Zedman made his first million-dollar commission, and he'd been on a roll ever since. He would wake up at night, go to the bathroom, stare at the new Buddy Rhodes concrete counters, the gold sink fixtures, and he would tell himself, “You're a millionaire. You're a goddamn millionaire, John Boy.”

This week, with a $1.2 billion redevelopment deal in the bag, well, John Zedman had arrived. He was never going backwards. His daughter would never know the smell of grease and burning axle rods.

He walked through the banquet room, and every step was on air.

He thought about his old neighborhood, the south side of Potrero Hill. Most of the smarter guys, the ones who lived past eighteen, had all joined the Army or the mob. John had come close to choosing between those paths himself. Even getting where he was today—he'd done some rough things. He'd taken care of problems, some of them recently.

He wondered what the mayor would say if he knew John was carrying right now—the weight of a .22 tugging at his tuxedo coat like a child's hand, nagging for attention.

John had to smile.

Fuck it if he'd made some mistakes. Made some enemies.

He'd been talking to some of his friends at the polo club—they said you could buy a bodyguard, ex–Mexican military, for a couple hundred a month. A friend of a friend had this number. And damn it, but John was liking the idea of a guy behind him, a little muscle to make people sweat. Hell, everybody had bodyguards these days. The Baptist preacher downtown, the local radio talk show host.

It wasn't about being nervous. Not at all. It was about showing your influence. Making a statement.

Twenty feet out, John saw the dilemma coming—Chadwick standing alone by the cash bar, and beyond him, chatting with the city comptroller, was Hays MacColl, biggest developer on the Peninsula, one of the movers and shakers behind the China Basin waterfront.

John needed to walk past Chadwick, give him a smile and a punch on the shoulder maybe, and go talk to MacColl. Test the new power.

Chadwick was looking forlorn. Goddamn, but put a powdered wig on the guy, and he could be George Washington—that same square jaw, that look of sad dignity. John figured it was some kind of genetic karma that the guy taught American history—like people evolving to look like their dogs. Chadwick was the right height, too—six foot eight. John had never thought of himself as short, until he became friends with Chadwick. Then, by comparison, people had started to call him “the shorter guy.” Soon, he was a little man.

He should walk past.

The Chadwicks had been their friends . . . well shit, Ann and Chadwick since high school. All of them, socially, since Ann hired Chadwick, back in what—'82? The same year Katherine had started kindergarten downstairs.

The friendship had been nothing but trouble ever since. Like business and friends, education and friends didn't mix. You teach their kids, you see how they raise them—it changes your perspective. Like, Katherine. Christ. John hated himself that he'd let Mallory stay at their house, even though it would've hurt Chadwick's and Norma's feelings if he hadn't, sent the message that he didn't trust his daughter with theirs.

So? It was true. Katherine was trouble. John dreaded letting her baby-sit. What he dreaded more, his little Mallory following in her footsteps—being at the same school with Ann, having Chadwick as her teacher someday. That couldn't be healthy. Laurel Heights had good prestige, sure. But it wasn't the only show in town. If he could just get Ann to quit, he could put Mallory in Burke, or Hamlin—someplace safe, ordinary.

It wasn't as if John hadn't done his best to be Chadwick's friend. How many guys would do as much as he had? But Chadwick and Norma were bad for them. And what the hell was that carnivore crack earlier? Shit.

He was primed to walk past Chadwick—fuck the consequences. What had he been thinking, getting sentimental? It had been his idea that they go out together after the auction tonight, have some drinks, get the old friendship back on track. He hated that maudlin streak in himself. It was a weakness he always had to suppress.

Then Chadwick locked eyes with him, gave him that forlorn smile, that weary but affectionate look John's dad used to give him coming home from the Embarcadero every night, and it was like a window into a world that John had spent his whole life trying to escape. Despite himself, John stopped, leaned against the bar.

“Here's the man,” he said.

“Lost our wives, again.”

“Nah,” John said. “Can't lose mine. She's always on stage.”

Sure enough, there Ann was, applauding and smiling as the auctioneer drove up a bidding war between two families over the beautiful third-grade ceramic whatever-the-fuck-that-was their kids had made.

Hays MacColl drifted off through the crowd with a young lady in tow, and the moment of opportunity passed.

“Norma?” John asked Chadwick.

“Around somewhere.” Chadwick shook his head. “Thought I could make some sense out of things, John. I thought a few days away . . .”

“Hey, man,” John said. “I'm sorry.”

And he was sorry. Honestly. God knows, he and Ann had their differences. They were as mismatched as Chadwick and Norma. But if John was constant about one thing—it was marriage. He'd seen what divorce did to a man, what it did to his dad when his mom had left them. No. Not for John Zedman. His kid would not grow up like that. It was another kind of mirror John saw in Chadwick—and he didn't like it.

Chadwick passed him the auction program. Three more items—the trip to Barbados, a weekend in Aspen and the kindergarten quilt. John had to be there for that, of course. Mallory had made one of the panels—a picture of a horse, naturally. Always a horse. He had to join the frenzy of bidding to turn a week of kindergarten finger-painting into hard cash.

“You still want to go for drinks after?” Chadwick asked. “Little cold out there.”

John realized he'd been scanning the crowd, probably looking like a dog on a leash in the park, ready to bolt. Chadwick gave him the sad eyes, telling him it was okay to leave. Go ahead. But John saw the apprehension there, too, and he knew that Chadwick—the tall one, the one who could wrap a grown man around a pole—needed him.

Whatever else he was, John was a man of action. He did not spend his time vacillating over what to do. If he made a mistake, he didn't waste time grieving over it.

Without him, Chadwick was a mass of indecision, whether it was about his wife, or his daughter, or their plans tonight to relive their first outing as a foursome, so many years ago, when they'd gotten drunk on Veuve Clicquot and wandered through Pacific Heights, singing “When I'm Sixty-Four” in the dark until the old ladies in the mansions started yelling at them, using words old ladies in mansions weren't supposed to know.

John Zedman wasn't afraid of living.

He imagined taking out his .22, right here in the middle school area, making Chadwick pale with fear.

There's nothing to be afraid of,
he would tell Chadwick.
Johnny will take care of everything.

The idea made him smile.

He said, “Why wait? This round's on me.”

Twice, Mallory had dreamed about the house. Each time the metal vines on the walls started moving like hair, and the dark doorway opened like a mouth. It would start to inhale, pulling Mallory toward it, trying to bring her inside.

Mallory shivered. She breathed into her hands and tried to capture the warmth, but that just made her palms sticky.

A song was playing on the car radio—men with funny voices, singing that they were going to come back home from five hundred miles away.

Mallory didn't like the song, but she didn't want to touch Katherine's radio. She was afraid she'd make the music even louder.

When Katherine finally came out of the house, talking to somebody on the porch, Mallory started bouncing in her seat, willing her to hurry.

She liked being with Katherine, the way she liked the spinning teacup on the carousel or her daddy dipping her upside down. But Mallory didn't have bad dreams about the spinning teacup. She had bad dreams about the yellow house with the dark door and the metal vines.

Katherine slid in the driver's seat. She smelled like smoke. She had a brown lunch bag, and Mallory asked what was in it, because she was hungry.

“Medicine,” Katherine told her.

“Are you sick?”

Katherine smiled. “Let's get back home, Peewee.”

“Why do you like coming here, Kaferine? I don't like it.”

Katherine laid her hands on the steering wheel. She seemed to be feeling it for a special vibration. “I had to say goodbye to somebody, sweetie. I had to tell them something. I don't expect you to understand, okay?”

“We won't come here anymore?” Mallory asked hopefully.

“No,” Katherine said. “Our little secret. Okay?”

Katherine squeezed Mallory's knee, her fingers biting like ice. Mallory felt so relieved tears welled up in her eyes. The house seemed to be looking at her, waiting for her to promise.

“Secret,” Mallory said.

She promised she would never tell anyone about the house. Never in a million million years.

Norma Reyes was worried about the girls.

She wanted to call Katherine, make sure everything was all right. She wanted to pull her daughter straight through the phone line—kiss her forehead, pinch her cheeks, tell her,
M'hijita, I am on your side. I am not mad anymore.

But she couldn't be the first to suggest calling. That would prove something to Chadwick—a lack of trust in Katherine, an admission that things were as bad as he believed they were.

He never approved of how she dealt with crises, and the crises always happened on her watch, because everything was Norma's watch. Twenty-four hours a day.

Norma had learned to be defensive—to play down Katherine's problems, because if she didn't, Chadwick would fly off the handle. Not emotionally. Never emotionally. But he'd get worked up with some crazy idea—like the therapy. Like medication. Like sending Katherine to
pinche
Texas. He would bring home educational manuals and the flavor-of-the-week child psychology book and make up a game plan to fix their daughter like she was some broken carburetor.

Qué cacada.

And he wondered why she hadn't been anxious to tell him about the heroin.

Now here they were, on the school playground, freezing their asses off, she and Ann sitting at the base of the play structure, watching their husbands teach each other karate like a couple of drunk idiots. John was laughing, the kindergarten quilt he'd paid $7,500 for draped over his shoulders so he looked like an Indian chief of the Crayola tribe.

Everyone else had left except the cleaning crew and a few staff members, who were putting their classrooms back together inside.

The wood plank under Norma's butt felt like an ice block. The paper lanterns above them dripped icicles. Inside, the night custodian Juan Carlos was blaring Frank Sinatra Christmas carols while he ran the vacuum cleaner, sucking up the booze and pâté crackers the parents had trampled into the classroom carpeting.

This was not fucking quality time. They would have to leave soon or freeze to death, but who was going to be the first to admit this idea was a failure? Who was going to break down and confess that they were nervous and unhappy and just wanted to go home?

Somewhere along the line, Norma's life—her marriage, her friendship, even the way she raised her daughter—had become a game of chicken. She and Chadwick were barreling along at top speed, pretending they weren't on a collision course, trying to be the last to flinch.

“You sure there's nothing I can do?” Ann asked.

What Norma heard:
You need help because you're a failure.

Maybe that wasn't Ann's fault. She had the same tone of voice Chadwick did—steady and calm, bleached of emotion so you had to guess her feelings.