This Shared Dream (3 page)

In a belligerent tone, Fenster said, “You need every one of these sprinklers. Maybe more.” It was a threat. He had the power to make Brian’s clients pay much more than necessary for their building, thereby undercutting Brian’s bidding credibility.

“Look at our test results.”

Fenster waved his hand. “Young man—”

At thirty-nine, Brian was indeed younger than Fenster, but quite well seasoned. He’d benefited tremendously from his father’s guidance, and also from his father’s large footprint and reputation as the best fire protection engineer and systems designer nationwide for some years before he vanished. Keeping his expression impassive with difficulty, Brian braced for the inevitable. It came, right on cue.

“Why are you arguing? Your father developed these codes.”

“We didn’t have Tensano then.”
That’s good. Voice calm, reasonable
. “This is a completely new material. It’s been extensively tested. Did you get the files I sent you? We did our own tests too, as usual. I have all that information there. Ignition time, burn time, all that. As you can see, if you’ll take the time, we have worked with the architect to use it extensively—”

“It doesn’t matter.”

“It does matter. Keeping costs down is what fire protection is supposed to do. Reducing costs means that fire protection will become more widespread.”

“Until there is a code upgrade, we go with the code we have.” Fenster stood. His sour expression belied his outstretched hand:
Don’t tell me what my job is, young man.

Brian stood as well, and shook Fenster’s hand. “You’re the boss.”

“Damn straight.”

After Fenster shut the flimsy door, shaking the trailer, Brian leaned back in his chair and put his hands behind his head. That was a wash. Even though he’d kept an even keel this time, he’d lost his temper with Fenster before. That episode kept coming back to bite him. He’d have to think of another approach. It was a delicate matter. In D.C., where many of his jobs were, they used his father’s reputation and work to keep him in check.

If Sam were here—

Brian smiled. If his father were here, he would be quite excited about Tensano and its fire-retardant properties. The difference was that he’d have been able to schmooze Fenster into thinking that less sprinklers was his idea.

Brian shared his father’s unusual height, but was more filled out, his short, sandy hair curly rather than straight and dark. Unlike his father, he was prone to bad-tempered outbursts. He liked to think he was improving on that count.

Time to wrap it up for the day. He wanted, badly, to take a swig from the bottle he used to keep in the bottom drawer of his desk.

But the bottle wasn’t there, now. Couldn’t be. That was all there was to it. A drink now and then wouldn’t send him into a tailspin, but no sense keeping it handy. In his opinion, alcohol was a harmless sedative, one that opened his mind to musical dreaming, during which he doodled on his electric guitar, at home, and in all-day Sunday jam sessions at various hole-in-the-wall blues and jazz clubs in D.C.

Several years ago, Cindy, his wife, had pointed out that with two children to raise he needed less dreaming and more focus—as well as more money than a musician made—and gave him an ultimatum. Stop drinking, get in gear, expand your company, grow up. Or live alone.

After Brian had met Cindy in the Peace Corps in Africa, they managed to get posted together on the little island of Tonga in the Pacific. There, they built houses together and taught. Well, Cindy had done both; Brian was quickly bounced from teaching and put into building, full-time. Cindy could wield power tools, carry lumber, and drive a nail into a roof she was shingling with two strong blows. She could also keep kids in line while teaching them something at the same time. Almost as tall as Brian, Cindy moved with enviable grace in body and in mind. She was just about perfect—except for her maddening ability to almost always be right, and her insistence that he lay off strong liquor.

They’d been married for fourteen years. Together, they juggled her teaching job, his company, and their kids—Zoe, thirteen, and Bitsy, four.

Zoe had wild blond hair, a lovely complexion that tanned easily in summer, and was immersed in music no one else could hear. She obsessively carried a notebook of blank music staffs in which she inscribed her compositions. Just as obsessive was her need to keep a set of broad, music-nibbed markers with her, in an array of hues, for her notes all had colors.

She didn’t talk much.

Zoe had taken over their piano when three, but it was in storage while they lived in a cramped apartment. Just before Brian’s business had scored a marvelous array of projects that took full advantage of his design, contracting, and fire-protection strengths, he and Cindy had found their dream home, a beaux arts gem in the District—sound, but in need of extensive renovation. They figured it would take a year, sold their house to finance the work, and took the first apartment they could find. As soon as they gutted the house, Brian was flooded with accepted bids, the fruit of reputation-building years. It didn’t hurt that he’d assumed the name of his father’s firm, Dance and Associates. Sam had taken him to his jobs when Brian was a teenager, and walked him through all aspects of fire protection, which drew from many engineering and scientific disciplines. When Brian finally got going he had a tremendous head start in skill, practical knowledge, and contacts. He took every new job that came down the pike—a prestigious, challenging office building, or a mundane kitchen remodeling.

Cindy was increasingly anxious to get into their house, and Brian was hardly ever home. Zoe was without her beloved piano and refused to use the electric model they’d bought for her. At least she had her violin, but neighbors’ complaints strictly proscribed her playing hours.

Luckily, Bitsy was forthright, uncomplicated, and happy as a lark no matter where she was. After the difficulties they’d had with Zoe, who’d been diagnosed variously with Asperger’s syndrome (soon discarded), a very high IQ (true, but so what), and OCD (no, just extremely particular about every little thing), Bitsy was somewhat of a relief.

Cindy and Brian were far too compulsive to pull their crew off paying projects to renovate their beaux arts find. Paying projects could vanish overnight, leaving them high and dry and penniless. They were stuck in the apartment.

Cindy worked for the city. She had begun a project called Free D.C. Montessori, and convinced the D.C. City Council that she could get property owners to donate space for Montessori classrooms in return for tax rebates. She had pioneered Pan-Pacific Montessori for the Peace Corps. She had also set up workshops where local people manufactured precise, beautiful Montessori materials fashioned of renewable bamboo, print shops where the artist-created matching cards that ran the gamut of the natural and man-made worlds were made, and created scholarship programs to help train teachers. Just a week earlier, Brian and the kids had watched her on the local cable channel, talking to the D.C. City Council, which wanted to replace the rather expensive Montessori bells with cheap electric pianos.

Every well-equipped Montessori classroom had two sets of twelve bells—two identical-sounding diatonic scales, representing the twelve tones from middle C to high C on the piano. Each bell looked like a six-inch-tall lamp, with a rectangular wooden base, a stem, and a wooden finial holding a hemispheric metal bell perfectly tuned to one note. When gently struck with a small, round mallet, it filled the air with a pure, resonant tone. The bases of one set, the control, were painted white and black, to correspond to piano keys beginning with middle C, and were labeled by note. The bases of the matching set were plain varnished wood. They were not labeled.

Cindy set up the bells at the meeting, the labeled set on one side of the room, the unlabeled set on the other. She then had a three-year-old ring one labeled bell, to which he had to find the match. The boy crossed the room, which took about thirty seconds. During that time, he had to hold the sound of the first bell in his mind. He rang one unlabeled bell, rejected it, rechecked the original, and, after testing four more, found the matching bell. She challenged the board members to do so. The three that tried failed.

“You couldn’t remember the tone for as long as it took to cross the room,” said Cindy. “You missed your sensitive period, obviously. Children who work with these bells often develop perfect pitch.”

“What good would that be?” asked one member.

“We’ll just have to find out in fifteen years when we have a whole lot of young adults with perfect pitch walking around in D.C.”

They all laughed, and gave Cindy what she wanted.

As had Brian. He stopped drinking hard liquor. The alternatives Cindy presented were disagreeable, and he now had to admit that she had been right. He could still be manic, depressed, disagreeable, irascible, and spin out lovely, effervescent skeins of music without the aid of strong drink.

He could still and ever more sharply after discarding his trusty nightcap dream that his plane, struck by Vietcong missiles, plummeted ablaze through jungle canopy, and wake screaming just before the crash.

He had never been in a plane crash. He had never been to Vietnam. Hardly anyone in the U.S. had. Kennedy, in December 1963, had refused to Americanize the war. Yet, the nightmare persisted, real enough for Cindy to regularly shake him awake.

He could still desperately, and ever more sharply, miss his father, and still wonder if he had somehow precipitated his disappearance, though that made no sense. His father had left home years after their mother, Bette, had vanished, presumably in search of her, though he had told no one that he was leaving or when he would be back.

Perhaps Sam had not known.

If only, Brian sometimes thought, he hadn’t lost his temper with Jill that time they’d tried to track Dad down in Germany. But there were more if-onlies that he couldn’t quite pin down, lurking in nightmare and shadows, and even within bright spring days like this. Was his father waiting, somewhere, somehow imprisoned by forces within or without him, for his children to find him, to bring him home? Had he been injured, was he languishing somewhere, brain damaged? Brian sighed, and grabbed his jacket from a hook next to the door.

When Brian stepped out onto his plywood porch, a gust of wind flapped the tie he’d worn for Fenster, much good it had done. As he strode to his black pickup, obstinately and almost proudly powered by gasoline, Brian loosened the tie with one hand. He climbed into the truck, whipped off his tie, and tossed it onto the seat, where it fell across an empty barbecue potato chip bag, empty foam coffee cups, a camera, a hammer, and a pipe wrench, all of which rested on three or four dismembered
Washington Post
s. He turned up the news on the radio and was headed up D Street when his phone rang.

Brian turned down the radio, which was telling him about the election campaign. The story, heavy on history, referenced the 1978 election, when Richard Nixon challenged Robert Kennedy after Robert’s first term, and lost. The two Kennedy brothers, Jack and Bobby, had hogged the presidency for sixteen consecutive years.

“Brian?”

“Hi, honey. What’s up?”

“It’s Jill.” Cindy’s voice, calm yet firm in almost all circumstances, was unusually sharp. “Elmore just had her committed to St. Elizabeth’s.”

“What?”
Brian was silent for a moment. “That sounds like him, doesn’t it? What happened?”

“Not much, really. Instead of riding her bike to the bookstore after class, she rode over to your old house.”

“Halcyon House?” That’s what they’d always called it. The house was close to their apartment, and they’d considered living there instead. But, though Brian never said so, Cindy understood that, for him, it would be like living in a very disquieting past, the past that had caused him to drink to excess.

Cindy continued. “Yes. Her keys were on the porch by the front door, but she broke the front window with a chair. She got cut on the glass, pretty badly. A neighbor called an ambulance.”

“When?”

“Around one.”

“Huh. Fast work, even for Elmore. So, she should have just gone to the emergency room, and now she’s in the nuthouse, courtesy of her own husband.”

“I just can’t figure out why you don’t like Elmore.” Cindy’s default mode, humor, often shaded into sarcasm. “What do you want to do?”

“Are the kids home?”

“I can take them to Delia’s.”

“I’ll swing by and pick you up. Did you call Megan?” Megan was their sister, the youngest of three.

“I tried, but I don’t think she has her phone on.”

“See you soon.”

Brian sighed as he closed his phone. He’d seen this coming. He just hadn’t had any idea of what to do about it.

Megan

MEGAN GETS RILED

March 21, Northern Virginia Suburbs

M
EGAN THOROUGHLY ENJOYED
riding the Metro. She loved surrendering to motion; motion without attention. It gave her two extra hours a day to read.

She read, with great enjoyment, things that few people enjoyed reading: scientific papers. Her field was memory research. Unlike her sister Jill, who had taken years to finally buckle down and finish her doctorate, Megan had gotten on the fast track while still in high school.

Why memory? Because that was all that there was.

Everything that you think is happening now already happened. You’re processing something that happened a few seconds ago. Our reactions are slow. We live among wavelengths. We are wavelengths. Wavelength is all there is. All right, I know I just said that memory is all there is, but now we’re getting down to the physics of it. All the bits and parts of us, the fabulous multiplicity of us, is what I want to know about.

Try using those lines at a cocktail party. She usually just said, “I’m in research.” When pressed, she said, “Scientific.”

Thoughts flowed randomly, which she found stimulating, as the Metro car glided next to, over, and below traffic. She liked the physics of sound, the change in pressure as they went into a tunnel. She liked how quiet everyone was. She liked to look at the clothes people were wearing and think about their lives. The woman sitting across from her, reading the latest literary best seller, carried a canvas bag that proclaimed
WETA
; black high heels were crammed in the top of the bag. She had exchanged them for purple running shoes, because walking, and sometimes running, were a part of using public transportation. Megan was fortunate. Her job did not require much dressing up.