SUMMER of FEAR (6 page)

"Do you have your subject y-yet?"

"No. I'm still thinking about fiction."

"I think you'd be a fine fiction writer."

"I'm tempted and worried at the same time. Before, I've always had
the story there for me. In fiction, I'd have to make it up."

Isabella thought about this for a long minute.
"But that way, it can end how you want it to. The hero can get the girl
and the good guys can shoot the bad guys. And you wouldn’t have to visit those
terrible men in p-prison."

She asked for seconds. I served them up in the kitchen and started back
outside. Around the house, Isabella wore baseball caps to hide the nakedness of
her head. I liked her head the way it was—its smoothness and humility, its
honesty— I liked it a whole lot better when it had Isabella's rich black hair.
Coming up on her from behind with the plate, I stopped for just a moment,
rocked for the millionth time by how it had changed. She looked like a little
man sitting there, a fan perhaps, her cap tilted at a jaunty angle as she
looked off into the west hills. I could see the line of her cheek, her fork
held midair and not moving. God I love you, I thought. God, help me love more.
God, do something good for her or I'll cut your heart with a chain saw and feed
it to Black Death.
So Jah seh.

I put down the plate, sat, drank. "Things are starting scare
me," I said. The wine was beginning to talk. "Nonfiction seems like a
terrible thing to try to capture. Who wants to. There's no order. Killers prey
on people at random. Good people like you get sick."

"Nature is cruel," said Isabella. "I quit trying to
figure out why a year ago. But if you wrote ffiction, you could change that.
The killer could get a brain tumor. The hero's wife could be beautiful and
slender and have long black hair and help him solve the crime. She could cook
for him. At night, she could take him to bed and love him. She wouldn't be a
two-hundred pound bald whale."

"You're not a whale—"

"I look like one. I look in the mirror and I can't believe it's
me."

"You'll lose the weight when you get off the steroids, not your
fault."

"No wonder you drink so much. I would, too, if I had to look at
me."

And there sat Isabella in her wheelchair, a once-beautiful woman racked
by medicine and cancer, tears running down her face and off her chin. The
neurologist had warned us about mood swings caused by drugs.
Swing
is
not the right word.

I knelt down beside her and put my head in her lap. The Fourth of July
fireworks show started down on Main Beach and I could see the bright blossoms
unfolding in the sky, followed by the distant thud of the launcher. I kept
seeing Amber's head in the red explosions.

For a moment, I thought about Amber and Isabella together, about how
different they were and how different— opposite, really—were the things that
had led me to love each of them. What had drawn me to Amber was her mystery,
her odd lack of substance, her absolute aloneness in the world. She rarely
spoke of her family, and not once in the years we were together did I ever meet
her parents or her sister, who lived, Amber said, in Florida. She told me once,
with that natural, unforced arrogance she wore so well, that her sister—Alice,
I think it was—was the only woman in the world prettier than she was. There was
some feud between them that had ended in estrangement, but Amber's details were
not forthcoming. She never called anyone in her family; never wrote; never
mentioned missing them even around the holidays. Her family name was actually
Fultz, which Amber changed to Wilson as soon as she was old enough. I wanted to
protect her. I wanted to give her connection. I always believed that I could
fill that huge emptiness surrounding Amber Mae. What I didn't understand until
much later was that she never wanted it filled.

Years after that, when I met Isabella's family for the first time, I saw
the difference in bold relief. There was a closeness there, a strong sense of
interconnectedness, a blurred set of borders where she left off and her
parents—-Joe and Corrine---began. And where Amber was alone and vague and fore-molting one skin for another, Isabella was positioned firmly with her people,
forthright, and quietly content with them and with herself. As I fell in love
with Isabella, I plunged gratefully into that pool of connection, wondering
sometimes why I had be so taken with Amber's solitude and secrecy.

And while I sat there on the deck with my head in Isabella's lap, I was
proud of her, and of myself for having had the good sense to marry her.

"When you go downtown at night, do you look at other g-girls?"

"No. I think about you."

"Then why do you go?"

"I need to be away sometimes."

"That hurts me more than anything else. That you need to get away
from me. Remember how it used to be when we were always together?"

"It can be that way again. We'll have that
again."

"But you need to get away from me and I understand. I know you have
to dress me in the morning when you wish you were writing, and you do all the
shopping and errands, and you clean up after me. And you do the c-cooking at
night and the dishes. And you don't have a social life anymore because I don't
want people to see what a pig you have for a wife. And I know I don't like our
friends to come over. And I know you wanted babies, Russ—because I wanted them
even more than you did. And I know now when you Iook into the future, all you
can see is me getting w-worse. I can’t stand the look on your face sometimes.
It's so full of regret and hate. It scares me."

I drank more. "It's not you I hate, Iz. It's the sickness. It’s not
our life I regret. It's all the things we wanted to do."

"I wish I could change it. I've tried so better to get hard. I
mean—"

"I know. You're doing everything you can,
baby."

Her speech was deteriorating more rapidly. She stroked my hair for a
long while. The fireworks burst open in colors, lobbed fading comets down
toward the hills. Fresh ones wobbled upward through the darkness, leaving
smoke trails. Coyotes yipped from some unspecified distance, their cries
bouncing madly around the night. I looked out to the hillsides and followed the
outline of Our Lady of the Canyon—one of Isabella's favorite formations. At
night, two hills running one behind the other became a pregnant woman lying
supine against the sky; the sandstone became her hair, the oak stands became
her breasts, and the lights of the city spraying up from between her legs
became a soft glow in the place her genitals would be. Isabella had named her.
You couldn't even see her during the day. Isabella had even named the sound the
wind made—or was it the cry of some misplaced animal?—a keening moan that
issued from deep in the canyon on some nights. She called him the Man of the
Dark.

"Our Lady of the Canyon looks nice tonight," I said. Her
sobbing stopped. She drew a deep breath and I felt it shudder back out of her
chest. "She's watching the show, too."

It is hard to describe what I felt then, kneeling beside Isabella's
chair. Have you ever known helplessness while someone you love is suffering?
Have you ever cursed God for what He has done? Have you ever felt your heart
throbbing with so much love and rage that they get mixed up and you can't tell
one from the other?

Well, let me tell you this: No matter how deep my own despair was, I
knew it was nothing compared to hers; knew that I could only follow her so far
out on that gangplank she was being forced to walk over deep black water.
Isabella was the one it was happening to. Isabella was having this nightmare.
Isabella—no matter how I felt or what I said—was in this alone. And she knew
it.

"I'm done
with my little outburst," she said finally. "What for
d-dessert?"

By nine, I had
done the dishes, gotten Isabella undressed and into bed, and almost finished
the wine. My heart was beginning to beat faster. I could feel the motion coming
on. I imagined breeze blowing against my face, objects racing past. I was a
unfettered spirit, rushing with the wind down Laguna Canyon. I was a thing
without conscience. I was free.

I kissed Isabella good night.

"Don't stay out too late," she said. "Don't smile at an
big-titted blondes."

"No. I'll be good."

I drove back down
to South Laguna and parked a hundred feet short of Amber's solitary mansion. It
looked just as it had the night before, the one faint light coming from deep
within. Reuben Saltz had not gone into the bedroom. No, of course not. He had stood
in the entryway, called out to her, heard nothing, maybe climbed halfway up the
stairs before the creeping dread of being in someone else's home uninvited
turned him back.

I took a drink from the flask.
With all my love, Isabella.
A
voice inside told me to get out of there, go back home to all that love,
preserve myself. But the voice was faint, drowned by alcohol. Yes, I wanted
that love, but I wanted more. I wanted that other world now, the world of
speed, the world with no history and no conscience. I got my gloves from the
trunk and put them on.

Down the sidewalk, through the gate, along the stepping-stone walkway,
around the corner of the house and onto the patio. The same half moonlight of
the night before, a fraction, gradient brighter, maybe.

The glass door was shut and the screen door was pulled tight. I put my
finger to the mesh—the flap gave, then closed

But neither was locked. Because you can't lock them from the outside, I
thought, because whoever has been here since last night didn't want to be seen
going out the front. Reuben?''

I slid open the doors and stepped in. I went to the stairway and
climbed. On the landing, I stopped for a moment to receive whatever silent
messages the house might be sending. A voice told me again to leave. I crushed
that voice by walking straight to Amber's bedroom door. I felt the vein
pounding in my fore head. I reached inside and flipped on the light.

The bed was made up.

The walls and mirror were clean.

There was a throw rug where I had last seen Amber.

Amber was gone.

Something from hell welled up inside me, rode along with my blood. I
felt a tremendous withering—as if my cells were trying to retreat, shrink,
cover themselves. I could smell something strong, and it took me just a second
to realize what it was Fresh paint.

I stood beside the new rug, knelt down, and lifted. A stain very faint,
so faint that it vanished when I stepped away and looked from another angle.
Was it just a shadow? I arranged the rug over it—just as it had been.

I realized I was scarcely breathing. In the bathroom, I turned on the
light to look in the mirror at my own sweating yellow face. The eyes belonged
to someone I'd never met and wouldn't want to.

That was when the door slammed shut behind me and I felt the hard steel
of a gun barrel jammed into the base of my skull.

"Turn around. Real slow."

I knew the voice. It went with the face. My forehead felt as if it were
ready to explode. I turned very slowly, open hands edging up. "Hello,
Marty," I said.

"Monroe."

Martin Parish's face looked worse than mine did. His breath smelled like
gin. He was wearing a pair of underpants and that was all.

"Nice outfit," I said.

"You're under arrest for, for, uh..."

"For what, Marty? Put down the gun."

"Breaking and..."

I reached up and, purely on speculation, cupped the gun barrel away from
my face and walked past Marty Parish, back into the bedroom. When I turned to
look, Marty was standing in front of the mirror, hands to his side, shoulders
slumped, and an expression of absolute bewilderment on his face.

"B and E shit," I said. "If you're going to arrest me for
anything, it ought to be for the murder of Amber. But then you'd have to
explain what you were doing here tonight—and last night, too. I saw you,
Martin."

Parish turned to face me. He had the look of a man whose eyes are only
looking about one foot into the world. "This is not what it appears. You
don't understand what you're seeing."

I had to smile. "What the fuck
am
I
seeing, Marty?"

"I didn't do it. I swear to God, I didn't do
it."

"Who did?"

"I swear to God, I don't know." He lifted up his gun—a .44
Magnum with a two-inch barrel, a stupidly big gun, I have always believed—and
studied the end of it. In a flash, I thought, He's going to shoot himself. But
he let his hand drop to his side again. There are few sights in life as vividly
unsettling as a drunk man in his underwear with a gun.

"Where are your clothes, Marty?"

"Under the bed."

"Under the bed."

"Yeah. I was..."

The brief silence swirled with implications so bizarre, could hardly
keep up with them. "Put them on and let's get out of here. I think maybe
we need to talk."