The God Patent (35 page)

Ryan watched Dodge waddle down the hall. Then he walked slowly up the stairs. He felt as though he’d been living on a desert island and a rescue ship was steaming into shore.

He sat at his desk and stared across the valley. Katarina came in, and out of habit, he started bouncing ideas off of her. He’d have to go to Texas and turn himself in, but he was sure to please the court. He could even be there for Sean’s sixteenth birthday. After all this time, it was hard to imagine.

Katarina asked, “So, you movin’ back?”

“Naw, I don’t think so.” He liked Petaluma, and once he was legal, he could buy a house right here and get a real job without worrying about a deadbeat-dad agent tracking him down. “California’s spoiled me. I’ll fly Sean out every month, what the hell, every week. I’m no longer poor.”

Katarina was working on path integrals at the whiteboard. She’d figured out how Feynman had derived the rules for QED within minutes of reading the book Emmy had lent her. Ryan still hadn’t figured it out. He tried to focus on her but was too distracted. What would his ex-wife do when he got cleared? Would
moving to Texas help Sean? Eventually, he looked back over and Katarina was gone. She’d left the door open with Emmy’s book on the floor.

Kat had gotten bored, not so much with the math as with Ryan. She left the door open so he wouldn’t hear her leave. Back in her apartment, it smelled like her mom—that weird cotton candy perfume she wore. These days, the only way Kat could even tell if her mother had been home was by the occasional twenty-dollar bill she left on the counter. It suited Kat just fine.

She slumped down in the old wooden chair in front of her table. Her father had painted the table pink, and the paint was flaking off. She remembered him saying that it would peel, but by the time it did, she wouldn’t be a little girl anymore and would want another color anyway. She liked the pink just fine, though, and sort of liked the way it peeled too. She took her notebook from under the mess of makeup. A little card fell off the table. She leaned over and picked it up. It was the stupid poem that Alex had given her last week. The Ace—more like The Ace of Liars, The Ace of Mean, The Ace of Two-timing Pricks.

She hurled the note at the garbage can, but it floated to the floor under the table next to a dirty cereal bowl. Why did he have to dump her? It was that whore Marti. She’d always wanted him. It was the only reason Marti had pretended to be her friend.

Kat stared at herself in the mirror. She wouldn’t cave in to the sob that was clutching at her throat. She evaluated the image in front of her the same way she would evaluate an integral equation. No wonder he broke up with her—the pimples on her face, her flat chest, dorky hair, and her mother’s ugly jawline. She hated the image looking back.

She coughed, turned away from the mirror, and opened her notebook to the first Feynman diagram she’d worked all the way through. That guy Tran had been so impressed. It had all seemed so separate from the cliques at school, so above who was dating whom, who was fucking whom, and who was getting high with whom. But now it seemed like it had been written by another person. She slumped over the notebook, resting her face in her hands. She wanted to go back to Ryan’s apartment, but he’d ignore her, all caught up thinking about his son.

It wasn’t like she hadn’t known this day would come.

She stared at the picture of her father, took it down from the wall, and held it so that she could see her image in the mirror next to his. They had the same forehead and the same nose, but she had her mother’s lips. She wondered if he had been good at math—probably so, and probably a lot better at it than Ryan. The yearning feeling of missing her father shadowed her heart, a feeling so much a part of her that she realized something weird. She didn’t really miss her father at all. The thought was uncomfortable, and she immediately denied it to herself. She raised the picture again and said to her mirror image, “I am who he was.” But that scared her too.

Who was she kidding? She hated her father.

She tossed the picture into the corner next to the overflowing trash can, grabbed her purse, and ran downstairs. She just had to get out of that place; anywhere would be better. Anywhere she could get away from all this crap that was her pointless life.

Ryan hustled down the hill. An extra-large crowd was gathered outside of Skate-n-Shred—Broken Skeg was playing, and in the years since Ryan had landed in Petaluma, they’d acquired
a following. Some of their songs had sold in the thousands on iTunes. It would be a busy night, and the thought of hanging with the kids maybe for the last time was bittersweet. Ryan walked his circuit, flushed a handful of stoners out of the alley, recommended that graffiti be written on the “huge pieces of plywood that we provide for it, not the damn bricks,” and reminded several dozen teens that “cigarette smoke contains carbon monoxide.”

When he passed the ticket booth, Ryan asked Dodge if he’d seen Katarina. Dodge said she was inside.

The theater was packed so tight that they had to move some of the skate ramps out into the alley. It seemed like a fight broke out every ten minutes and always on the opposite side of the building from Ryan. They broke up as soon as the kids saw Ryan’s irritated smirk. He thought he saw Katarina a couple of times, but he never had a chance to check in with her.

At the end of their set, Broken Skeg’s “roadies” broke down their equipment. “Roadies” at Skate-n-Shred? Ryan headed backstage to see what else Broken Skeg had graduated to. A particularly large boy stopped him at the door leading upstairs to the dressing room. As Ryan began to explain the situation to the thug-starter-kit, he heard a siren.

“Oh shit!” Ryan brushed past the kid, up through the dressing room to an emergency exit. The door was open and clogged with aspiring musicians looking out from the fire escape. Ryan pushed between them onto a landing. A police car was directly below. Ryan tried to gauge the situation before descending the stairs, but the flashing blue and white lights did nothing to illuminate the scene. Ryan worked his way down the fire escape between teenagers. The usual smell of the alley was augmented with a familiar scent.

A scent that had once been an intimate companion of Ryan’s—burning methamphetamine.

With none of the cloying qualities of burning leaves, meth smoke dissipates quickly. The cops must have caught them lighting up.

At the bottom of the stairs, he struggled through the crowd to a police officer who was guiding teenagers away. Two other cops were shaking down five teenagers against the brick wall right under one of Katarina’s dragon murals. There was a small pile of paraphernalia behind the cops. The pile grew as the officer pulled vials, baggies, and pipes from the pockets of the teenagers.

The cop working crowd control approached Ryan. “Where is Nutter? If he’s not here in one minute, we’re going to shut you down.”

“Oh no.” Ryan said, but not in response to the cop. “Oh no. Oh, Katarina, no…” The cop grabbed his arm, but Ryan shook him off and rushed forward.

The cop called from behind. “She related to you?”

Ryan said the first thing that came to mind: “She’s my daughter!”

Katarina was spread against the wall sobbing. Seeing her helpless and humiliated dislodged something in his heart. He had to stop it. He wanted that cocky kid back, the one who’d said, “My friends call me Kat. You can call me Katarina,” the day they met.

It got worse.

At first, Ryan thought she was wearing a very short skirt that had been hiked up, maybe by the cops while they searched her. In the blinking lights, it was hard to tell, but then it was too obvious. She was naked from the waist down. Ryan turned away. The image froze in his mind, and he feared it would never go away.

In a strong, solid voice that easily carried over the commotion, he said, “Katarina, I’m right here.” Then he scanned the alley. The adrenaline edge slowed time and his eyes followed the police-car lights. He ran to the side of a Dumpster and grabbed Katarina’s skirt, her little black purse, and boots. A flashlight lit on him, and the cop who had just searched Katarina said, “Drop that—now!”

Ryan tossed the skirt to Katarina’s feet and dropped the purse and shoes. “Let her put on some clothes.” He held his hands in front of him.

The cop picked up Katarina’s skirt.

Ryan felt a huge rush of guilt. What had he done? The image of that check being waved under his nose rushed back. Was the world so cruel? Did he have to trade one child for another?

“You’re her father?” The cop broke Ryan from the trance.

“Yes. I’m her father.” As the words came out, Katarina’s head snapped around. Trails of mascara ran down her face, but her eyes sparkled. Even from the ten feet that separated them and with the poor lighting, Ryan could see the size of her pupils. Her beautiful emerald irises were crowded away, meth’s certain signature.

Before she spoke, Ryan knew what she would say. All the hours they’d spent together working and laughing, struggling with the great concepts, trying to comprehend the universe, collapsed in that instant.

Katarina screamed, “My father’s dead!”

The cop said, “We have to process her. You can pick her up in a few hours. Give your name and phone number to Officer Dorsey.” He finally handed Katarina her skirt.

Dorsey was the cop who had been doing crowd control, and now he was working a clipboard, taking down information from
the teens. After Katarina pulled on her skirt, the cop handcuffed her. As he led her to the squad car, Ryan reached out and grabbed her shoulder. “It’ll be okay, Katarina, I promise.”

“Fuck you.”

The cop pushed her into the car.

Ryan mumbled to himself, “Don’t say
fuck
.”

R
yan didn’t know where to look for Katarina’s mother. How do you search for a ghost?

He sprinted to the box office. Dodge was counting money. Ryan told him that Katarina had been arrested. “How can I get Katarina out of jail?”

“Bring her father back to life,” Dodge said. “Kid’s lost, McNear, nothing you can do.”

“Katarina is in jail!”

“That might be what she needs.”

“Dammit, Dodge, do you hear yourself?” Ryan pushed Dodge’s chair away from the desk and stepped in the gap, pointing with his index finger. “Are you kidding? Where can I find her mother?”

“Even if you find Jane, she won’t come.” Dodge pushed Ryan’s finger away. “You understand? When Jane finds out, she’ll just get on her bike and ride away.”

Ryan stared at Dodge. His stomach felt empty, and the adrenaline was fading away, leaving acid behind. Dodge was right. Katarina arrested, Katarina smoking meth, Katarina having sex—it was way too much for Jane. “You’re a lawyer. What can I do?”

“Lie.”