“Yes?”
“She took Maman’s pills, huh?”
“Yes.”
Esmail eats his rice and drinks from his glass of cola. He is excited by all this and I can see he is attempting not to allow this to show upon his face. Perhaps I should telephone an ambulance, but what can they do my Nadi is not already doing? And with them may come policemen as well, more trouble, though we have done nothing wrong. I pull the weapon to me once more, rub my fingers across its black plastic grip.
“Becaw uh thouth?”
“Chew your food before you speak, son. I did not understand.”
Esmail swallows, wiping his face with a napkin. “I said, is it because of the house, Bawbaw? Is that why she keeps trying to kill herself?”
There is a grain of rice on my son’s chin. His eyes look directly into my own. I brush the rice from his face and tell to him the truth: “Man nehmeedoonam. I do not know.”
Esmail looks down the corridor to the closed washroom door, then he regards the food upon his plate, the stewed tomatoes and meat, their juices soiling the white rice. “I feel sorry for her. We should have moved, Bawbaw-jahn.”
I take a deep breath, but my patience is not tested. I am simply very tired, tired of all this turbulence in our life. I want peace. I want peace and silence and no more loud emotion. Esmail does not eat. It is as if he is waiting for my response.
“Beekhore,” I tell to him. “Eat.” And I leave the counter bar and return to the washroom door to see if Nadi has finished saving this young woman’s life, has perhaps even caught it in her own two hands.
I N CORONA THE FOG WAS SO THICK THE STREETLAMPS ABOVE THEsidewalk appeared only as dim approximations of light, and as Lester drove slowly by the beach shops and boutiques on both sides of him, he could only just begin to make out the square glow of their windows. In the ten blanketed miles from Montara only two cars had passed him going in the opposite direction, and one had the heavy axle rumble of a half-ton truck, the other the high-rpm whine of a small foreign car. But no Bonneville. He kept picturing Kathy at the storage shed in San Bruno, all of her possessions there. Maybe she’d loaded more things into her car and then was too spooked by the fog to drive. There was no phone at the camp for her to call. She might be at Carl Jr.’s a mile down the road waiting for the air to clear, or she might have gone inside the truck-stop bar. Lester’s stomach grew hot at this image of Kathy, sitting alone in that dark place full of independent truckers coming off days on the road alone, men who wore their loneliness on their shirtsleeves like a badge in need of a polish. And despite himself, Lester began to imagine one of the younger ones—maybe a lanky kid from San Diego or Phoenix—buying her a drink, or more, asking her for a dance. And he felt almost queasy at this, like a high school kid desperate over his first crush. He was ashamed of feeling this way, and he knew then he wasn’t completely sure he trusted Kathy, did he? Under the right circumstances, would she give herself to someone else as completely and quickly as she had to him? But again, he felt ashamed of himself. Right now everything was floating completely out of proportion. Nothing felt grounded or real. There was no proportion at all.
He would drive to San Bruno and look for Kathy there. It was practically their entire geographical frame of reference. If she wasn’t at the storage shed or the truck-stop bar or the El Rancho Motel, then he would try Carl Jr.’s on the other side of the freeway. And if that didn’t pan out he’d drive south to Millbrae to the Cineplex, where she could possibly be at the movies. Ahead of him in the fog, Corona’s main street ended at the base of the hills and the intersection for the turn to Hillside Boulevard and San Bruno. The blinking yellow traffic light above was so obscured it looked to Lester more like a silent pulse. Kathy would not be at her stolen house up in the hills but the colonel would, and there was no crime in cruising slowly by; he was off-duty and out of uniform.
Lester downshifted and drove straight through the intersection to Bisgrove Street. The fog thinned slightly as he acclerated up the hill past the partially lighted shapes of houses on his left, the dark woods on his right. His blood seemed to be moving faster, his senses heightened. He rolled his window down and could smell the ocean, the faint scent of something else in the salt water, his fingers after being with Charita, both of them fourteen against the sun-dry fence behind the lumberyard, the way she let him put his hand down her jeans into her underpants, and Lester had only heard of the hole there, never even seen a picture, and he kept rubbing the coarse hair over her pubic bone, waiting for it to open up into what was supposed to be there. They were kissing and his erection was bent inside his pants and she kept arching her back till finally his fingers slipped lower and inside the warm, wet answer to his own question. And there, near the top of the hill, in the light from the floodlamp over the front door, was Kathy’s red Bonneville parked behind the colonel’s white Buick Regal as if it had always been there. The colonel’s light cast out over the small yard and made the low mist covering the ground appear almost like snow.
Lester pulled the car over onto the soft shoulder against the trees. For a moment he didn’t move, just sat there and looked at the house, his confusion so stark he didn’t feel relieved so much as he did hurt that Kathy had left him out of this, whatever this was, as if it were a party of close friends to which he hadn’t been invited. Through the front window came the light from the kitchen, and Lester saw what looked like a teenage boy sitting at the counter eating. Low on the floor in the front room were candle flames Lester could see just the tops of, but no Kathy, nor colonel, nor his wife.
Lester was out of the car and across the road before he was even aware of his own movement. He ran bent over toward the relative darkness of the driveway and Kathy’s Bonneville. He cupped his hands to the glass of the passenger’s window and looked inside, though he had no idea what he was searching for, maybe more proof this was really Kathy’s car, and of course it was. In the shadowed light that lay across the front seat he could see her worn canvas pocketbook. It was open and her wallet was open too, a five-dollar bill pulled halfway out like she had taken others in a hurry. And there was something on the floor of the passenger seat, something dark: it was his gun belt, half unrolled, the holster facing up, empty. A low tremor turned on inside him, and Lester glanced back at the house, then opened the passenger door. He smelled gasoline, the interior light coming on, the ignition buzzer too, so he closed the door quietly, pushing against it until it clicked shut, and he crouched low against the car, his heart beating in the cheeks of his face, his legs suddenly too light to hold him. Could she have gone in there with his gun?He heard voices coming from around the corner of the house and at first he thought they were outside and he was preparing himself to bolt right to them or away. But they were a bit muffled, more the sounds you hear from an open window, and he stepped onto the grass off the driveway and followed the voices to a light coming from a shower stall window eight feet above the ground. Lester kept his back to the clapboards. He could hear the colonel’s voice, his and a woman’s, both of them speaking Persian in some kind of heated exchange, though Lester couldn’t be sure it was heated because all Middle Eastern conversations sounded that way to him, like something very important was always at stake. But where was Kathy’s voice? Where was she?
Then their talking stopped and Lester heard a soft moan. The colonel’s wife began speaking shrilly again but Lester was already running to the rear door of the house. There were tall hedges around the backyard and he shouldered himself between them, the branches scratching his nose and cheek, and he stepped up onto the concrete slab and peered inside the kitchen. He could hear his heart beating in his breath. The boy stood at the end of the counter watching whatever was happening down the hall and Lester could see a small section of the sofa in the candlelit living room, but his eyes were drawn to the flowers on the counter behind the boy, three pots of marigolds, ferns, white and red roses, others he couldn’t name, and there was his service pistol, lying flat on a napkin next to one of the green-foil-covered pots. On a napkin.Like it had just been cleaned.Lester’s confusion was black airless space. He could hardly breathe and he had to move.He gripped the doorknob and gave it a slow turn, but it was locked. He could step back and put his fist through the glass but by the time he got his hand around the knob the colonel or the boy or who knows who else could have his own pistol trained on him. More movement came from inside the house, and Lester could hear the colonel and his wife arguing. The boy was still looking down the corridor, his long arms at his side, his mouth opened slightly. Then Lester heard a muffled thump come from down the hall and he stepped back and kicked in three window panes, the broken glass and splintered wood skittering across the clean linoleum floor of Kathy’s kitchen, the boy jumping back so far he lost his balance and knocked over the short lamp near the couch. Lester got his hand around the inside knob, his fingers fumbling with the lock mechanism as he kept his eyes on the boy, who seemed momentarily pinned against the lamp table. The knob turned, the boy straightened and disappeared down the hallway, and Lester was in the kitchen, moving quickly through the smells of cooked meat and brewed tea and old flowers. He slipped on a glass shard and fell forward into the Formica countertop, grabbing his pistol and still-loaded magazine, pushing the clip into the handle, then pulling back once on the slide and sending one into the firing chamber, thumbing the safety off.