The sirens got louder. Were they coming here? Was it possible? Bass notes of his heart thrumming in his chest, he peered past a scruffy acacia tree toward the street.
He closed his eyes as the sirens receded. His breathing once again functioned. As he stood trying to blend into the overgrown juniper bush beside the railing, a memory hit hard.
They had moved to Downey in September, so he began school toward the beginning of the year for a change, at least one small relief. Still, the strain of his first day at a new school had worn him out. After getting off the bus, he had walked home fast, looking forward to a haven from yet another new place and all new people, making for the first yellow house with faux brown shutters he came upon. He had walked inside the unlocked door, raised his head, and confronted a nightmare.
Here stood their new place, but wacky, the kitchen on the left instead of right, his mother’s furniture, always lightweight so that you could move it easily, replaced by leaden-looking antiques.
Shocked, he couldn’t move anything except his eyes for a minute. Here stood his home, reversed. His present life, overhauled in a day. Unfamiliar furniture. Strange portraits on the walls: a man with a mustache, babies in dresses. At first he had shifted his books from one hip to the other, as if adjusting their weight could shift things right, but the setting remained deviant, looking-glass unreal.
Had his mother moved without him?
Left him behind?
She could move very fast but even she couldn’t make a house with a garage on the left into one with a garage on the right. Logic should have kicked in about then, that he had stepped into an identical house with a reversed house plan, on the same street, a few doors down from his own house. He didn’t belong at his new school. He didn’t belong here. Where was his home? Lost like him.
His eight-year-old self had stood with the door open behind him for a long time that afternoon, lawn sprinklers fizzing all around the yards behind him. Where was he? They moved so much, he didn’t know. He had walked into someone else’s house and now, unsettled, he doubted everything. Was this the right street? Had he gotten off the school bus at the wrong stop or taken the wrong bus entirely? How would he find their house? He didn’t know.
Although of course eventually, probably only a few minutes later, he did find his house, this house he was watching now, a few doors away.
The sirens faded but persisted, fretting, chronic complainers, echoing off the million tons of asphalt. They congregated somewhere nearby, weaving closer from different directions like a bunch of tired kindergartners assembling for snack time. Ray caught a whiff of smoke between hits of smoggy air. The engines were en route to a fire, nearby, upwind, but not near enough to concern him. Good. Maybe the commotion would keep the police busy, too.
Ray pulled back behind a juniper bush to give himself a minute to organize his keys, putting aside the ones he had already tried, just in time, as it turned out, because across the street, a woman with a blanketed baby snuggled up against her poked her head outside, examining the sky for smoke, sniffing. She stayed for only a few seconds before ducking back inside. She never even looked toward Ray.
If the police came-but don’t worry about them. Stay loose. Taking advantage of the neighborhood din, he continued sticking various keys in the lock a few times, then twisted the handle to the door, which slipped open with oily smoothness. He stepped inside the familiar foyer, closing the door behind him quietly, and listened.
Nothing stirred in the living room. He moved toward the dining area, reluctant to turn on a light. Was everyone gone? He didn’t know for sure. He stood for a long time listening, hearing only the creaking of an old house. While he listened, he looked in dismay around the room, experiencing some of the disorientation he had felt that first day of school when he went into the wrong house.
This house, their house, was all wrong. His mother had arranged the couch in front of the brick fireplace, giving the long room some balance and a focal point.
Hearing nothing, feeling excited, agitated, he took one end of the unfamiliar leather couch and hauled it, then the other end, until the couch was in position.
Better. But the two chairs needed to come in, and the coffee table, abandoned across the room, also needed a better home.
There. In the darkness, he remembered what it felt like to live in this house. He liked watching television in his bedroom. He loved the big backyard, with its yellow crabgrass, that he cut every other Saturday. He liked the way his mom had been at this house. She had a job in the back room of a florist shop. She liked the people there, and came home from work cheerful most days.
They had lasted seven months here.
In this house, his mother had hidden things behind some molding in the small back bedroom they had used as a den, where the L-shaped hallway turned.
The doorway to the hall was mercifully open, so he stepped into its murk, too nervous to use the small flashlight he had tucked into a pocket.
Feeling his way along the wall, he walked down the hallway, approached the room slowly, silently, and put his hand on the door frame. The door was open. An empty room awaited him. He went inside, needing only a few moments to complete his mission.
He found it behind the molding, another small plastic rectangle, shocks running up his hand when he touched it. Still playable?
Back into the dark hallway-
A light flashed on in the master bedroom to his right. “Who’s out there?” a quavering female voice yelled from inside. “I’ve got a gun!”
“Don’t shoot!” he cried. “I’m going!”
A blast whipped through the closed door to his mother’s old bedroom, splintering the wood trim beside him.
When the front door wouldn’t open, he crashed through the window.
9
A t work on Wednesday morning, Ray felt strangely alive. He had been shot at, broken through a window, escaped with a few scratches. He had obtained another prize.
Martin had greeted him this morning with what might be mistaken for warmth by an observer, but what Ray understood to be a kowtow. “Hey, you look like a guy who could use some TLC.”
“I’m fine,” Ray had said, not touching a nick from some glass on his cheek that felt particularly painful.
“Like a bum somebody beat, who walked away.” Ray waited for him to ask if Leigh had come home yet, but Martin knew better. He watched silently as Ray turned into his office.
Odd how, considering the recent brawl between them, the partnership between Ray and Martin continued to operate. Ray supposed you could put it down to the years of practice they had at suppressing their personal problems at work.
Hair flyaway, pulling at a blouse that didn’t quite cover her firm belly, Denise popped her head into Ray’s office and reminded him to remember to take his laptop home. Her husband was a former linebacker at UCLA and even Martin hadn’t dared to attempt a come-on, not that she would ever bow to his facile charm, something Ray had always admired about her. “I attached the Antoniou presentation on an e-mail. Tomorrow’s so crucial.”
Ray nodded.
“Are we ready?” she nervously asked.
“We will be.”
Her intrusion snapped him back. Along with whatever Denise had cooked up, he had drawings, schematics, and calculations to assemble. He organized his desk, feeling as immortal as a teenager, and as reckless. His work never stopped. For the first time in a long, long time-since he had built his own house-he was doing exactly what he wanted to do on a design.
All because he had said to hell with it.
Although it could come to nothing. No way to tell yet, while they were still in the fantasy phase of the Antoniou project. Strange how it took a crisis to make a person not give a damn, and therefore do some of his best work ever.