The Color of Light (2 page)

“The woman used to lurk around me.”

“Your bio-mom?”

“Isabelle,” I said.

“Isabelle,” he repeated. “Your dad withheld information from the police to protect Isabelle?”

“More likely he was trying to protect me and Mom from whatever Isabelle might do.”

“And Doc Nussbaum helped him?”

I nodded. “He understood the stakes.”

“So, you were adopted?”

“No,” I said. “You know the story by now. Dad had an affair with a graduate student when he was in France working on a project. And,
voilà
, me.”

“The student was Isabelle?”

“Yes.”

“And your mom, meaning your father's wife, raised you?”

“What can I say? She's a saint.”

Kevin
tsk'
d. “Your dad is the last person I would ever suspect of fooling around. The way he used to watch me, jeez, like he thought I was up to something.”

“You
were
up to something,” I said. “You were trying to get into his daughter's pants.”

Kevin blushed at that. He looked over his shoulder and around the room where, nearly three years after his death, my father's presence still hovered. Leaning close to me, Kevin whispered, “Was your dad always out there, watching you? Us?”

I shuddered at that awful notion, thinking about some of the stupid stunts we pulled as kids. Fortunately, the statute of limitations had run out on even the worst of our transgressions.

“He couldn't possibly have been out there all the time,” I said. “I think someone tipped him off whenever she was in the country so he could keep an eye on me.”

“She? Your mother?”

“Isabelle,” I said.

“He was afraid Isabelle would snatch you?”

“Among other things,” I said. “When my dad took me away from her, my arm was in a cast. Dad had a restraining order against her.”

“Did she ever try to kidnap you?”

“Not that I'm aware. But she did lurk,” I said. “In the strongbox where I found the film I showed you, there were a dozen more film reels, and she is on every one of them.”

“You are a big snoop, Maggie,” he said, laughing. “You couldn't resist seeing what was on the old reels so you went out and had them converted to digital so you could see them, didn't you?”

“Occupational hazard I guess, just like you, Mr. Detective,” I said, feeling no chagrin. “What would you have done?”

“Exactly what you did. If I could squeeze the processing fees out of the department budget.” Kevin glanced toward the television. “Is
she
on that film?”

“She is.”

“Show me.”

I hesitated before restarting the disc where we left off, with Larry Nordquist running away down the street and his pals quickly dispersing.

My little group, triumphant, reassembled and continued on toward school. When we crossed the next intersection, a busy commercial street, Dad stopped following us and remained focused instead on the front of a neighborhood pharmacy. Behind the reflections of the street on the shop's front windows, people can be seen moving around inside the store. Someone—a silhouette—stands inside the door, looking out. After we passed by, the door opened and a slender woman—Isabelle—stepped outside. She watched us for a moment before she began to follow in our direction. Suddenly, she stopped and turned as if someone had called to her. Her face registered alarm at first, and then great pleasure when she must have seen that it was Dad who called out to her. Seeing her face light up chilled me; Dad did have that restraining order for good reason.

“That's her?” Kevin asked, moving forward for a closer look. “Your real mother?”

“The woman who gave birth to me, yes. But she wasn't my
real
mom.”

“Can you zoom in on her?”

“Not very much.” I paused the last frame and enlarged it until the image dissolved into a disorganized mass of pixels. “The film stock Dad used has low resolution. There isn't much that can be done with it.”

“Did you ever meet her?”

“The only time I ever spoke with her was the night she died. But I didn't know who she was until later.”

He cocked his head to study me. “Why weren't you going to show her to me?”

“Because she is not germane to the issue at hand.” I hit Stop and watched Isabelle's scrambled image fade to black.

“
Germane
? Give me a break. I only went to San Jose State, not to Cal like you and your egghead friends.”

“You chose to go to State because you thought you wouldn't have to work as hard.”

He conceded the truth of that, a cocky grin on his face as he rose and crossed to the television. “I wanted to play football, but I didn't want to get hurt. Those guys at Cal are big.”

He ejected the disc. “I need the original film reel, too.”

“Thought you might.” I went to the desk and took it from the ­drawer.

“Copies, too, please.” He held out his hand.

“You have the only one.”

“Yeah, sure.”

“It's true,” I said. “When the TeleCine technician at the San Francisco affiliate of my network made the digital conversion of the original Super 8 reels yesterday, he burned one disc each and downloaded the files to the Cloud.”

“I have no idea what you just said.”

“I can access the film from any computer, anywhere I can get Internet. But there is only one disc. So far.”

“God, I feel like a dinosaur.”

I was ready to say good-bye—I had work to do—but he began to walk a slow circuit around that very familiar room, probably for the last time, looking at pictures on the walls, books in the cases, various little mementoes my father kept around where he could see them. Reminders of a good life.

One beautiful spring afternoon, Dad sat down on a bench in the backyard for a little nap, and never woke up again. My mom stayed in their big old house in Berkeley, alone, until late this spring when I persuaded her to move closer to me and my college-age daughter, Casey, in Southern California. In early summer I had spent a few days with her in the house where she and my father had lived for half a century, the house where they raised my older sister and brother, and where they brought me when I was very young, helping her to decide what she wanted to take with her to her new apartment. The rest she left for me to deal with; the task was too huge for her, too fraught. So, there I was, spending a July week—maybe two—stirring up dust and occasional ghosts buried among the family's accumulated treasures and detritus as I cleared out the place for the next tenant, the university's housing office; the University of California, Berkeley, where my father taught, and my alma mater, was only a few blocks away.

Kevin lingered beside the leather sofa set in a niche among bookshelves. It was on that couch during the summer before my senior year in high school, on the night before Kevin left for college, that I surrendered to him that which Sister Dolores of Perpetual Sorrows, the morals and standards officer at the convent high school where my parents stashed me, referred to as my most precious jewel. Or as Kevin called it, my cherry.

Running a hand over the arm of the sofa, a wistful smile on his face, Kevin asked, “What are you going to do with the sofa?”

“I don't know yet.”

“If you're going to dispose of it...”

“I can just see you dragging that home to your wife. How would you explain it?”

“Did I tell you we're not—”

I put up my hand to stop him. “I'm seeing someone, Kevin.”

“Mrs. Nussbaum told me.”

I laughed. “I don't know why anyone in this town bothers with the Internet when we have an information resource like Gracie Nussbaum.”

“You gotta love Gracie.” He flashed a smile that was so full of sweetness that I remembered why I had once found him so irresistible.

He picked up a small framed photo of the two of us in high school, flicked something off the glass and turned it to face me. “Your prom or mine?”

“Could have been either,” I said, walking over for a closer look. “Since we went to different schools I wore the same dress to both.”

“May I?” He had already slipped the picture into his pocket before I nodded assent.

I saw the grin that suddenly lit his face, but I didn't see his move coming. There was an arm around my shoulders and one under my legs and when I had re-established a relationship with gravity I was prone on the sofa with Kevin's substantial bulk atop me.

“Clever move, Kev,” I said, pushing against his chest. “What's this about?”

There was the strangest look on his face, as if he were more surprised than I was about the position we were suddenly in. Ages ago, when we were dating, he thought that particular maneuver was just awfully funny. But he wasn't smiling as he gripped my side in his big hand and gently squeezed my rib cage as if he were checking a tomato for ripeness.

“Don't you dare tickle me,” I said, batting his hand away. “I hated it when you tickled me.”

“Yeah.” His hand relaxed but he didn't remove it. He didn't smell the way I remembered, no Brut, no pepperoni—more like shampoo and scotch. “It's just... God, you used to be such a bag of bones.”

“And now I'm fat?” I shifted sideways until I was out from under him, wedged on my side with my back against the back of the sofa. He relaxed, stretched out facing me.

“Jesus, no,” he said. “It's just... You have more substance than you used to have. I wasn't expecting it.”

“Funny thing, buddy,” I said, giving him a nudge. “Last time you flipped me over your shoulder I was seventeen years old. A little girl. I'm all grown up now.”

“That's the thing of it,” he said, brow furrowed as he searched my face for something. Was he counting lines in my crow's-feet? “We were golden back then, weren't we, Maggie? Golden.”

“You were a good boyfriend, Kevie.” I combed my fingers through his mussed hair. It wasn't as thick as it once was, or as dark; the furrows made by my fingers exposed a lot of pink scalp and silver streaks. “Every Friday night, except during football season, you put on your letterman's jacket, borrowed a car and drove down to pick me up from school. You were handsome and smart and fun, and I was the envy of everyone in school.”

“Everyone include the nuns?”

“Especially the nuns. You were a nice Catholic boy.” I propped myself up on an elbow and looked down at him. “But that was then.”

“Just for old times' sake, how about we get rid of all these clothes and have one more bare-assed roll around on this big sofa?”

“Might be interesting,” I said, struggling to sit up; he gave me an assist. “But it's a real bad idea.”

“Sometimes, though, don't you wish you could go back?”

“Not for a minute,” I said, straightening my shirt. “I'm in a pretty good place right now, not perfect but pretty good. It took a lot of work to get here. I don't want to go back.”

“What if you could, though, knowing what you know now?”

“Same answer.” I swung my legs over his hips and pushed against him, trying to get to my feet. Instead of giving me a hand, he disentangled himself from underneath me and scooted around until he was sitting upright next to me. I stood and held out my hand to him. “I'd probably just make a whole new set of mistakes. Besides, when we were kids, if we knew half what we know now, we would have ended up in Neuropsychiatric. No thanks. To tell you the truth, some of the big secrets from back then, I wish they had just stayed secret.”

He looked up from checking that the Beretta affixed to his belt was secure. “What secrets?”

“The truth about my parentage for one,” I said. “And I could have lived the rest of my life without seeing that photo of Mrs. Bartolini.”

“You could be right, but I look around at the way things are now and I wonder if the whole world has gone to shit. I mean, tell me honestly, what do we have to look forward to?”

“Kev?” I took his face between my palms. “Why don't you do what other guys our age do when they feel this way? Go buy yourself a Maserati.”

He finally smiled. “On a cop's salary?”

“Then have a messy mid-life fling with a twenty-two-year-old blonde.”

“Already tried that.” His face colored. “Didn't work out so well.”

“Could that be the reason you and the wife aren't...?”

“That's part of it.”

I shook my head. “Kevin, Kevin, Kevin.”

“This guy you're seeing,” he said as he tucked in the front of his dress shirt and pulled his jacket straight. “It's serious?”

“It could be,” I said. “Too soon to say. But I don't want to do anything that might muck it up.”

“Let me know if it doesn't work out,” he said, checking his watch. Suddenly, he was the cop again. “I have to get back to work.”

“Me, too.” I looked around the room at all the laden bookshelves that needed to be sorted and packed up. “You'll let me know what you find out about Beto's mom?”

He grew still, looking down at me with his cop face on. He was at least eight inches taller than me so I had to lean back to look up at him.

“I need to know, Maggie,” he said, the heel of his hand resting on the butt of his gun. “Who did you invite over to see that film? Your friend or a cop?”

“I'm not sure.”

“When Beto asked me to look into his mom's case again, I warned him that he might not like what I found out, especially if it implicates his dad in some way,” he said, watching me closely. “Mag, what if my investigation turns up something that points to
your
father?”

“I'd like for you to tell me. As a friend.”

“We'll see,” he said. “We'll see.”

After Kevin left,
the house felt hollow, as a house does when all of its inhabitants have moved away. I didn't count myself among the missing because I hadn't lived there for a very long time. If I had left some essence or emanation anywhere, I thought it would be at my own house down south.

I went back to the task of cleaning out Dad's big old mahogany desk, the undertaking that had been interrupted the day before when I found the films locked away in a bottom drawer.

A man's desk is a very private zone. Who knows what you might find there, besides a random crime scene photo or films of the owner's former paramour, and various other things a man's widow might prefer not to learn about her late spouse? That's why Mom had left the job for me. And rightly so.

I found that Dad had kept a neat file of his correspondence with Isabelle, my natural mother, after she relinquished custody of me. These weren't love letters, far from it, at least on his part. But seeing them would have been a painful reminder to Mom of Dad's infidelity, though my very existence must have been daily proof enough that it had occurred.

Because it might be useful to me as Isabelle's estate wound its way through the arcane French probate system, I set the file in a box with other things I found in the desk that I wanted to keep: handmade cards from my brother and sister and me, an old address book, a few family photos, Dad's passport, an old wallet molded to the contour of his rear end by years of use. In the wallet I found an unfilled prescription for blood pressure medication, some expired credit cards, his faculty identification card and about fifty dollars in cash, which I stuffed into my own pocket.

Other than that, most of what I found was old pens, tangled paper clips, university stationery yellowing at the edges, and endless scraps of paper with indecipherable hand-scribbled notes and calculations; Dad, a physicist, doodled in mathematical formulae. I pulled out the top drawer, and as I dumped its odds and ends into a trash bag I could almost hear Dad's voice in my ear:
I think there's still some good use to be found in that red pen; One day when you need a paper clip, you won't have one.
I felt him so strongly that I actually turned my head to check behind me. Nothing there except dust motes floating in the sunlight streaming through the garden windows.

I was disappointed Dad wasn't there because I had so many questions to ask him. About Isabelle, certainly, but after seeing his little movie, it was the events of the day that Mrs. Bartolini—Tina—died that I needed to have explained frankly.

There are things that happen when we are children that sit restlessly on our shoulders for the rest of our lives and affect the way we venture about in the world. For me, the first of those events was the loss of my older brother—my half brother—during combat in Vietnam when I was very young. The second of course was the murder of Beto's mother a few years later. I began to understand at a tender age not only how fragile and precious life is, but also the randomness with which life can be stolen away.

Our parents, our teachers, Father John the parish priest—all the adults in our lives—sheltered us, as they saw fit, from the grim details about the hows and whats of Mrs. Bartolini's passing. Like the real scoop on the mechanics of sex, we were left with little more than ­rumors and our naive imaginations to figure out what happened to her.

The word
murder
alone conjures up vivid pictures in the mind of a ten-year-old, but when I was ten, a sheltered little shit, I was so ignorant of the ways of the world beyond the protective bubble of my neighborhood that I could not have comprehended what was done to Mrs. Bartolini in the process of her dying even if someone had seen fit to tell me.

The squeaking of the back gate's hinges interrupted my ruminations. I went over to the windows to see who was there.

Toshio Sato, my parents' longtime yardman, pushed his cart of tools along the uneven brick walkway, stooping from time to time to snip faded roses from the flower border. For as long as I could remember, Mr. Sato had mown and edged half of the lawns on our street every second Monday, starting at the top of the hill and working his way down.

Mr. Sato stopped, took off his broad-brimmed straw hat and wiped inside the sweatband with a big white handkerchief. With his hat off, I could see that his thatch of black hair had become little more than feathery white wisps, but his back was still straight and his step was strong. For a man with his eightieth birthday in his rearview mirror, he looked very good.

Watching him, it occurred to me that he was only one of many grown-ups who routinely moved in and around our house and our neighborhood when I was a child, and to whom I generally paid scant attention. Other than Mr. Sato, there had been the dry cleaning deliveryman, Vera who cleaned our house twice a week and sometimes baby-sat me, Dad's students and colleagues, Mom's piano pupils, various friends and others. I wondered how many people also had access to the Bartolini house?

Taking the filled trash bag with me, I headed outside to speak with Mr. Sato. When I opened the back door, I startled him.

“Oh! It's you, Maggie.” He patted his chest to show his heart was pounding.

“Sorry, Mr. Sato,” I said, pausing on the porch steps. “Did I scare you?”

“Little bit, yeah.” He pointed to his ears and shook his head. “Don't hear so good no more. Your mom, she lets the door slam so I know she's coming.”

“I'll remember to do that,” I said, walking down the steps so that he didn't need to crane his neck to talk to me. “How have you been?”

“Every day I find myself on this side of the grass and not under it, I think that's gonna be a pretty good day.” He put his hat back on as he cocked his chin toward the flourishing vegetable patch growing in the sunny back end of the yard. He and Mom had planted it early in the spring before she went south to be near me during her knee replacement surgery and recovery. Before she decided to move down permanently. “Garden looks real good this summer. Too bad your mom's missing it.”

“Thanks for keeping it up since she's been gone,” I said. “Any ideas about what to do with all that zucchini?”

He laughed, shaking his head. “This time o' year, everybody's got too much zucchini. Gracie Nussbaum tried to give hers to the food bank, but they wanted some certificate from the Department of Ag about pesticides or something. Berkeley's one crazy place, eh? Even the poor people eat organic.”

My eyes filled as I looked around the yard. Mr. Sato and Dad shared a love for roses and arguing politics; Mom grew herbs and vegetables. Roses and vegetables were planted in beds in the sunny south end of the yard. The shadier north end was a cool green lawn ringed by curved flower borders planted in the colors of the rainbow. And in the order of the colors of the rainbow: violet first, next indigo, then blue, a line of green, edged by yellow, then orange, and climbing the fence, vivid red bougainvillea. Dad, a physicist, planted the borders with the help of my older half sister and brother, Emily and Mark, fraternal twins, as a way of explaining to them the optical spectrum when they were taking their first physics classes. Later, Dad did the same exercise with me, this time planting flower borders on either side of the driveway in rainbow bands of color to explain the color spectrum of visible light to me. I still remember, though it has never come up in conversation since Dad's lessons in the garden, that what we perceive as green has a maximum sensitivity—color perception—at about 540 terahertz. If I was, or am a nerd, I came by it naturally.

As a family, we spent a lot of time in the yard. I was glad when Mom decided that the house was too much for her to keep up alone, and that she was now living near me. But we would both miss that garden.

“So,” Mr. Sato said, face averted while I composed myself. “University gonna take over here, huh?”

“Yes,” I said. “They're leasing the house for visiting faculty to use. The housing officer is coming by this afternoon to look around. Do you want me to ask her to continue with your service?”

“Oh, hell no.” He snorted, waving off the idea. “I retired ten, maybe twelve years ago. I'm living with my big-shot son and his family over in Menlo Park with all the other dot-com big shots. He's so rich he hired his own Japanese gardener. No, honey, I just been coming over here to hang out with your mom and look after my roses.”

He took off his hat again and wiped the sweatband, a habit more than a necessity, I thought; it was a pleasantly warm day.

“Everything changes,” he said, casting a glance around. “Was a time I took care of half the yards on this street. Now most o' the houses are full of strangers—you kids all grew up and went away—and some Mexican guy mows the lawns.”

We both turned when we heard the squeal of the gate hinges. Standing side by side, we watched in silence as someone pushed it open enough to peer around. I don't know who was more surprised when a man's face appeared, he or us. The newcomer froze, staring, but Mr. Sato acted quickly, grabbed a long-handled garden fork out of his tool cart and aimed the business end of it at the man.

“How many times you gotta be told?” he said, advancing a few feet closer to the gate. “You quit coming in here, buddy.”

“But I—”

The man took a half step further in, seemed confused or conflicted, or maybe he wanted to plead his case for being there. He looked weedy in frayed jeans, his brown hair pulled back from a receding hairline into an untidy ponytail. If I were homeless, I might find a yard with a nice garden full of food to be a good place to hang out, and I, too, might want to argue about being turned away.

When the man stayed his ground, not speaking, just staring, Mr. Sato pulled out his mobile phone. “You want me to call the cops again?”

“No, don't,” he said, holding up his hands as he backed out the gate. “I'm going.”

“Persistent bastard,” Mr. Sato muttered as the gate latch snapped home. He put the fork away and rooted around in his cart for something. Search successful, he held up a hefty padlock for me to see. “I brought you this. Pest control.”

I followed him to the gate and watched him attach the padlock. When it was secure, he handed me a pair of keys on a wire ring.

“Thank you.” I put the keys into my pocket.

“Lock or no lock, watch out for that guy,” he said. “I don't know what his deal is, but he seems bound and determined to hang out here. I've shooed him away a couple times. When I saw you come out the back door just now, I thought at first it was that asshole and he'd moved right in.”

“You called the police on him?”

“Last week, I sure did,” he said with righteous conviction. “I saw what kinds of mischief that knucklehead was capable of when he was just a punk kid. Who knows what he might do now?”

“You know him?”

The question surprised him. “You didn't recognize him?”

I shook my head.

“That's the kid you made cry that time. Remember?”

Impossible. “Larry Nordquist?”

“That's him,” he said, thumping me on the back. “I pulled his dad's crabgrass out of half the lawns on Euclid. He didn't control his kid any better than he did his weeds.”

“Mr. Sato, can I offer you a cup of coffee? I'd like you to take a look at something.”

“I was hoping you'd ask. Your mom makes a good cup of coffee.”

“She taught me how.”

He followed me into the kitchen and helped me move some boxes off the table so there was room for us to sit. While he stirred cream and sugar into his coffee and chose a few cookies from the tin of shortbreads I offered him, I downloaded the film I had shown Kevin onto a laptop. When it came up, I paused it and turned the monitor toward him.

Mr. Sato took a pair of reading glasses out of his pocket and scooted his chair closer. “Whatcha got? One of your TV shows?”

“No. One of Dad's old movies.”

“Hah!” He snorted again. “Your dad, crazy with that little camera, following you all ovah the place.”

I was surprised: “You saw him?”

“Oh, sure. He had me watching for that girl. The French one. Me and the Nussbaums.”

“Did you ever see her?” I asked,

“Oh, sure. Every time I see her, I go tell Al, he chases her away for a while.”

“I didn't know.”

He leaned forward, tapping my hand with a crooked finger as he grinned like a conspirator. “That was the idea, honey.”

I took a breath; he took two more cookies and refilled his mug, perfectly comfortable in that kitchen.

“So, what'd you want me to see?” he asked.

I hit Play and the images began to move.

“Look at all you kids,” he said, smiling. “Whole buncha little trouble­makers, huh? Played hell with my flower borders, runnin' all over the place.”

When the parade of girls passed a house where a gardener was mowing a lawn, I hit Pause again.

“Is that you, Mr. Sato?” I asked.

“Let's see, now.” He adjusted his glasses on his nose and peered closely. Grinning, he said, “Looks like my truck; good truck, that one. Looks like my hat, too, so I'd say probably the handsome guy under the hat was me.”

I fast-forwarded to the first frame that showed Tina Bartolini and Beto.

The sound he made when he saw them was something between a sigh and a groan. He said, “Poor little boy, lose his mother so young.”

“Mr. Sato, Dad shot this movie on the same day Mrs. Bartolini died.”

Eyes on the monitor screen, he sat back in his chair, nodding. No questions, no argument. No surprise.

“You took care of the Bartolinis' lawn, too, right?” I asked.

“For a while. But one of the guys I had working for me said something that the lady didn't care for. She was a very fine-looking lady, you know? Can't blame a man for noticing, but whatever he said he shouldn't of. I didn't blame Big Bart for hiring someone else. A cousin or something.”