“I’m concerned that I have not punched you in the fucking throat.”
“You love her,” Dr. Gloria said. “Maybe you should admit that.”
“Why, exactly, did I want you to come back?” I turned back toward the car and was surprised to see that it was more than a football field away, American or Canadian rules. Rovil leaned against the fender, gazing out at the landscape, watching me but pretending not to. When I started walking back he casually got back inside the car.
Minutes later I dropped into the front passenger seat. “Sorry,” I said to him. “Mexican food.” He nodded as if he believed me and handed me a bottle of water. I drank half of it in two long swallows.
We zipped along the white road for several minutes. The air-conditioning triggered something in my body, and another tide of sweat swept out of me. I felt like I was being wrung out: cell walls rupturing, epidural levees crumbling, veins—
“Now you’re being melodramatic,” Dr. Gloria said.
A figure appeared ahead of the car, walking toward us in the middle of the road. It was a man, wearing shorts but naked from the waist up, tall and broad with a big gut. A floppy hat obscured his face.
Rovil slowed the car. We stopped when the man was perhaps thirty yards from us. He stopped walking and peered at the darkened windshield.
Rovil glanced at me.
“Yeah,” I said. “It’s him.”
I got out of the car again. Dr. Gloria alighted by the side of the road.
“Edo,” I said.
Edo Anderssen Vik stood up straighter. “Lyda?” He took off his hat. “Lyda Rose!”
I walked toward him. Behind me, Rovil got out of the car.
“And Rovil?” Edo said. Again completely surprised. “This is amazing!” A bad thought occurred to me: Edo was not only God-drunk, he was afflicted with Alzheimer’s.
He stepped toward me, arms wide for a hug, and I stepped back. Edo dropped his arms, confused, the hat forgotten in his hand. His round gut looked permanently red; his chest was covered by a mat of white hair.
Rovil moved up and shook Edo’s free hand. “How are you doing, Mr. Vik?”
“Rovil, please, you’re not an intern anymore. Call me Edo.” He looked from Rovil to me, still grinning. “What are you doing here?”
“We got your text,” I said.
He frowned, not understanding. Then he glanced up. He listened for a moment, then nodded. Someone was speaking to him from the sky.
“Ah,” he said. “Of course.” He looked back the way he’d come, then said, “The house is just down the road. Lyda, will you walk with me? It’s less than a mile.”
I said to Rovil, “I promise to be good.”
“I’ll follow in the car,” he said.
“Closely,” Dr. Gloria told him, but of course he couldn’t hear her.
* * *
We walked for a while, Dr. Gloria trailing me like my maid of honor, the car creeping along behind her.
“You’re a hard man to find,” I said.
Edo laughed. “I suppose so.”
“We’ve been trying for weeks,” I said. “We even tried to see you in Chicago, but Eduard cut us off.”
“He did?” Edo looked upset. “But of course. I suppose he’d be very upset if he found out you were here.”
“So he’s not home.”
“Oh no. He and his wife left last night for Amsterdam.” He smiled. “Nick of time, eh? Otherwise … whoosh. He’d run you off.”
“What’s he so afraid of?”
He thought for a moment and said, “A few years ago I was in my car, and I saw a man by the side of the road. It was very cold out. He was holding a cardboard sign that said HUNGRY. Just that one word.” He shook his head as if seeing it for the first time.
“I felt that hunger myself, Lyda. I felt like I was starving, that I was going to die. Is it like that for you? I could feel his weakness, how cold he was. I told the driver to stop. I gave the man my jacket. I took off my shoes. Then I gave him my wallet, and a smartcard that had access to my accounts. I even tried to give him the car!”
He chuckled. “My driver tried to stop me, but what could he do? I was his boss. In any case the man was too frightened by me to accept the car, or my clothing. He took my card, though.” He laughed again.
“My son heard what happened. The driver told him. Eduard took away my access—to my money first, then my company, then to anyone I used to work with. I kept trying to help people, give them what they needed. I couldn’t be trusted, he said. If I fought him, he would have me committed.” Edo shrugged. “Given my history, I knew this was no idle threat, eh? And I couldn’t afford to let that happen. So we moved out here. Oh, I travel when necessary. But Eduard only lets me see a few members of the board, and key customers who insist on meeting me, and I must follow the script. Because if I don’t—”
He stopped suddenly and put a hand to his face. He was overcome with some intense emotion: sadness, grief? I couldn’t tell. Something in the Numinous had made Edo into an empathic wreck. No wonder his son had isolated him.
I said, “‘Give everything to the poor and you will have treasure in Heaven.’”
“I’m sorry?” Edo said. His cheeks were wet with tears.
“The Bible story,” I said. “Rich man, the eye of the needle…?”
He still didn’t know what I was talking about. What kind of know-nothing god possessed him? “The rich man goes away sad,” I said. “He loves money too much to get into Heaven.”
Edo nodded. “Sounds like my son.”
The sun beat down. I could barely breathe, but Edo seemed to soak it in. During the trial he’d described his god as a great pulsing ball of light and heat, a flame that surrounded him but did not burn him. He was his own burning bush.
We eventually reached the compound. There were three buildings: a sprawling, two-story Spanish-style house; a four-bay garage; and, farther back, another adobe-walled building that could have been a guest house or offices. Rovil parked the car in the circle drive.
Edo stepped up to the front door, then realized I wasn’t following.
“I should have told you,” he said. “I was afraid.”
“You were afraid? Of me?”
“I was afraid you’d take her away.”
He opened the door. After a moment I followed him in. The foyer felt like an icebox. A dark-haired woman appeared from a far doorway and stopped, startled to see someone with Edo. She was even more surprised when Rovil stepped into the doorway. “Mr. Vik, how did—?”
“These are friends of mine,” Edo said. “Esperanza, this is Lyda Rose and Rovil Gupta.” Somewhere in the distance was a bass beat of music, and I was ninety percent sure that I wasn’t imagining it.
Esperanza nodded at us, then handed Edo a white towel and a sport shirt. “Sasha’s still in her room?” Edo asked her.
Dr. Gloria put a hand on my elbow. I became aware of the tightness in my chest, my tripping heartbeat.
Edo tugged the shirt down over his gut. “This way.” He led us into a vast, airy room. The ceiling slanted up to a peak thirty feet above us. A huge stone fireplace filled one wall, and a staircase led up to a railed balcony and the second-floor rooms. The sturdy furniture, I was pretty sure, had been constructed from the hulls of eighteenth-century battleships, then upholstered in buttery, deep-brown leather that could only be obtained from cows fattened on foie gras.
“Tell Rovil,” Dr. Gloria said. “This is how you decorate a house.”
Edo led us through an archway to a long corridor. The door at the end of the hall was ajar. The music blared from there, a heavy funk beat under a massive horn section. It sounded like a New Orleans marching band that had added a rank of synthesizers.
“Ten years old, and already a teenager,” Edo said, grinning. I could barely hear him. My eyes were fixed on the wedge of sunlight spilling from that door. A shadow flickered there, and I sucked in my breath.
Edo reached the door and pushed it open. The room was large and bright with windows on two sides, the desert sunlight blasting in. A skinny girl with a wild nimbus of red-brown hair danced in the corner of the room where the windows met, her back to us. She wore a lime-green T-shirt, multicolored tights, and a Hawaiian grass skirt. In front of her stood a large easel with a rectangle of white paper bigger than she was, three feet wide and four tall. The easel’s tray was full of liquid paints in shallow plastic cups. She held a paintbrush in each hand like drumsticks, dancing and painting at the same time, her little booty shaking that skirt, hands swiping and stabbing at the paper, throwing down colors.