We heard a clatter of feet and overlapping conversations coming down the stairs: The church ladies had arrived.
“My cue to leave,” I said.
“Bye, McGuff.” He folded me into an embrace. “See you at Bartolinis’ party tomorrow?”
I remembered to ask him to say a rosary for Mark while the hungry ghosts were being consigned back to hell. He promised that he would, but he would do so in the church.
On the drive back to Berkeley, I tried to calculate how many times over the last few days I had been called honey, dear, or in Father John’s case, child. Just two weeks earlier, the senior network producer who was my boss had suggested that it might be time for me to have a little tuck taken under my chin and maybe a little nip in my eyelids. In the TV world where I worked, I was an old lady, over forty. Among my mom’s friends I was still a kid. The reality was both and neither, I thought.
There was a good shoe store in Berkeley on Shattuck, catty-corner from Beto’s deli. I found a big enough space to park Mike’s pickup truck in a public lot off College, suffered through a few comments about the environmental irresponsibility of driving such a big vehicle-people in Berkeley feel quite comfortable about sharing their opinions-and walked over to Shattuck.
I was in luck. The perfect pair of shoes-high-heeled silver sandals-was displayed in the front window of the store. At least, they were perfect until I tried them on. I could hardly walk in them, much less dance. I settled instead for practical, medium-heeled black sling-backs. The dress was long. Who’d see the shoes? Besides, I might actually be able to wear the black shoes again.
The next errand on the list was getting in some basic supplies for house guests: eggs, milk, juice, bread. As I left the shoe store, I noticed that the ragged man-face shrouded by the hood of his stretched-out sweatshirt-who had been curled up on the bench in front of Beto’s deli when I arrived was now upright, pacing back and forth.
Since the Summer of Love in the 1960s, Berkeley has been a magnet for street people. Old hippies, hippie wannabes, tokers and tweakers, musicians and purveyors of tie-dye garb and handmade bongs, professional panhandlers and various other folks who have slipped away from the bonds of the nine-to-five world, hang out in the city’s parks and set up stalls along the streets. Generally, they are a harmless and colorful element of local daily life; a street festival every day.
The man pacing around Beto’s store, however, did not seem harmless to me. He seemed agitated, as if on the verge of something. I dialed Beto’s mobile phone to give him a heads-up.
“It’s okay, Maggie,” Beto said. “Why don’t you cross the street and talk to him?”
“Who is he?”
“It’s Larry Nordquist. He’s been out there since yesterday afternoon. Someone told him you’ve been coming by, so he’s out there waiting for you to show up.”
I’d only had a quick glimpse of him the day before, a face peeking around the garden gate. With his head covered, I did not recognize him. I was still staring at the pacer-Larry-when he caught my reflection in the deli window. I took a breath, steeled myself, and began to cross the street. He stopped dead, watched me for a beat or two. And then he took off running.
Beto stood in the open deli door, watching.
“What was that about?” I asked as I walked inside with him.
“Larry is making amends to people he thinks he’s harmed,” he said, taking his place behind the refrigerated cases. “At any rate, he’s trying to.”
It was just past eleven o’clock and the store was still fairly quiet, the lull between the breakfast and lunch-time storms.
“Which one of the Twelve Steps is making amends?” I asked.
“I don’t know.” Beto picked up two plates, piled salad greens on them and topped both with hefty scoops of curried chicken salad. “At least he’s working on his problems. When he came in yesterday to make amends with me, he told me he needed to make amends with you, too.”
“Guess he changed his mind.”
“He said with you it would be harder.”
Beto handed the plates across to me. While he gathered forks, napkins and hard rolls, I carried the plates to a table.
“I’m not sure he was sober when I talked to him,” he said, taking the seat opposite mine. “I don’t know if it was alcohol or something else, but he was on the verge of freaking out the whole time.”
“Was he apologizing about that fight when we were kids?”
His mouth was full so he answered by toggling his head back and forth, meaning yes and no. He reached around and pulled two bottles of bubbly water out of a drinks cooler.
“What did he say?”
Beto winced. “It wasn’t so much the fight, as the day it went down. Do you remember?”
“Who could forget, Beto?”
“Well apparently that’s what’s been on Larry’s mind. No statute of limitations on guilt, huh?”
“What does he think connects the two?”
“He told me that after the fight he was still plotting what he was going to do to us next when he heard about Mom. He was afraid we’d think he was the one, you know, who did that to her. So he took off for a while.”
“I never thought Larry had anything to do with it,” I said. “Did you?”
He flushed bright red. “When Dad told me Mom died, I thought I was being punished for fighting. Major bad karma.”
“Ah, Beto.” I covered his hand with mine.
He patted my hand and smiled gamely. “What? Don’t you like your lunch?”
“Almost as special as your pastrami.”
He laughed. “Then eat it.”
After a few quiet bites, he said, “I got lots of counseling, Maggie. Your mom referred us to a child psychologist who wanted me to reason my way through my feelings. How do you reason your way through something like that? Father John told me that I needed to believe that Mom was happy in heaven, sitting next to God. That just pissed me off, because if she was sitting around anywhere being happy, I thought she should be with me and Dad in our house.”
“Perfect kid logic.”
“You know who really helped the most?”
“Who?”
“The Buddhist priest Mom got to know in the refugee camp,” he said. “He told me that Mom’s spirit was really angry because of the way she died. That made total sense to me, because, like I said, I was pretty pissed off, too. Then he told me I could comfort her by making fresh offerings to her every day. He told me she was always close by. That was the answer I liked the best, and that’s the one I picked.”
“Makes sense,” I said. “I asked Father John to say a rosary for my brother, Mark. But this year I think I’ll burn some offerings for him, too.”
“Cover all the bases, Maggie.” He laid his fork across his empty plate and leaned back in his chair, content, smiling. One of his staffers came and took the plates away.
“You know,” he said, “Mom started that Hungry Ghosts celebration in our backyard because when the refugees first got here after the war, none of the local Buddhist temples followed the Vietnamese lunar calendar. Think of all those ancestors left behind in Vietnam, all those people who died in the war and never had a proper burial. All those unhappy hungry ghosts who could come through and cause mischief if they weren’t taken care of. The problem was, the Gates of Hell open and close a whole month earlier in Vietnam than they do in China and Japan. Way too late to deal with pissed-off ancestors.”
“There are Vietnamese temples around now,” I said. “But you still have the celebration in your backyard.”
“Of course we do. That’s where Mom is.”
The store was getting busy.
“I’ll be sure to say hello to her tomorrow,” I said, rising. “Thank you for lunch.”
He put his arm through mine and walked me to the door. “Talk to him, Maggie.”
“That’s up to him.”
As I walked back toward the lot where I parked Mike’s truck I glanced at a shop window and spotted Larry following me from across the street, staying several yards behind me. It was creepy. He had to know where I was going, so why dog my steps if he wanted to talk to me? I stopped and turned to face him. But he ducked into an open doorway and I wasn’t about to chase him down. Instead, I got back into the truck and headed for the closest supermarket for some staples.
No one was behind me when I pulled into Mom’s garage and closed the door. I thought immediately about the person who had aggressively pushed on the locked back gate when Evie Sanchez was with me, and then the break-in. Both times, whoever it was had run away. Larry both times? Possibly. Father John said he was resourceful. Stymied by the locked gate and possibly the thorny bougainvillea on the trellis beside it, maybe he had found another entry point. But why? If he, or anyone, wanted to talk to me, he could knock on the front door.
Before going upstairs to make beds for weekend guests, I made a circuit of the downstairs, taking care that every door and window was securely locked. When I left the house to meet Jean-Paul, I double-bolted the front door. Striding to the downtown BART station, my bag of evening clothes slung over my shoulder, I saw no one lurking, but I was still wary. I regretted turning down Jean-Paul’s offer to pick me up in a car.
Funny, I thought, during all those years that Isabelle stalked me I remained completely oblivious to her and any peril she might have presented. So why, when no one was there, was I feeling as spooked as I was? It wasn’t Larry; I didn’t think he intended harm, even if it was he who broke into the house. Maybe it was all the talk about hungry ghosts. Or was it that I had been sleeping in my old bedroom for the last several days knowing that I had yet to pack away the monsters that lived under the bed? In any case, for the weekend, Jean-Paul and I would be using the room across the hall.
When I came around the curve in the street and caught the first glimpse of Beto’s driveway, I knew what at least one source of my discomfort was. I had seen that damn picture of Mrs. Bartolini’s battered corpse.
On an ordinary Monday morning, in a peaceful neighborhood, a monster had slipped through our veneer of safety and created mayhem. Was he still among us? Had he been inside my house the night before?