What did he say? He said nothing, not yet. This was a concept and it was going to take a minute for it to seep in because he hadn’t thought it would go like this, not when he was out at the camp and knew that he’d left his pack behind in the backseat of her car, where it still was, the 151 and all, but right now, in this moment with her there and the dreadlock dog and the light spilling through the windows till his grandmother’s stirring spoon glowed like a wand, a magic wand, he felt so close to calm it was like a spell had come over him. And yet, and yet — there was something there still to keep the wheel spinning, and it was his father, the thought of his father, who’d gone home now, for now, but would be back anytime he pleased and with a new doorway to walk through too.
“You talk to my father?”
“Yeah. I knew him, you know, from school.”
“You talk about me?”
She shrugged. “A little.”
“What did he tell you?”
The dog pulled his front end low to the floor and stretched, the banner of his tail waving as she bent to him to scratch his back, right there in his sweet spot, but what she was doing, whether she knew he knew it or not, was stalling so she could think of what to say next. She straightened up. He was ten feet from her, in the living room still, watching the light. “He said you were going through a rough patch.”
A rough patch. That hit him like a slap in the face and he had to laugh, but it wasn’t like the laughter in the car after they’d stolen the dog back, but more of a noise that caught in his throat as if he’d swallowed something and couldn’t get it out. “Rough patch,” he repeated and laughed again. “Did he tell you about the playground? About my car? About the Chinese? Did he tell you I don’t have a job?”
“No,” she said, and she crossed the floor to him and squeezed his arm at the bicep, leaning in to touch her soft lips to the side of his face. “All he said was you’d hit a rough patch, but I don’t care about that. I like you, you know that?”
He didn’t answer.
“And since I’m here anyway I looked in the refrigerator — which is impressive the way you keep it, neat, neater than mine, by far — and found the hamburger there and the chicken sausage, and since you had all these spices and cans of stewed tomatoes and whatnot, I just figured I’m hungry and I’ll bet you are too. Okay? So let’s have some wine and maybe sit out back for a while and let the sauce cook down. You’re going to like the way I make spaghetti. Everybody says it’s the best.”
She was holding on to his arm still and the light was flowing over the dog where it lay in the rug of its fur on the kitchen floor and the smell of the simmering sauce was tugging at his glands, the salivary glands that looked like trussed-up sacks of tapioca pudding in the illustration in his biology text from school, and another phrase came to him that had nothing niggardly in it at alclass="underline" Go with the flow. He said it aloud, “Go with the flow,” and she gave his muscle another squeeze.
PART IV Mendocino
12
THE WHOLE IDEA OF a vacation, of a travel vacation, was to clear out the cobwebs, put your troubles behind you and come home refreshed. Well, it hadn’t quite worked out that way, had it? As he reminded Carolee every chance he got. His stress level was so high the first week home he had to go to the doctor to check on his blood-pressure medication and see about a refill on his Xanax, which he never took anymore, not since he’d shut the door behind him at the high school for the last and final time. It wasn’t enough that they’d been attacked or that the ship had been delayed in Puerto Limón for a full twenty-four hours while the Costa Rican bureaucrats conferred with the cruise line bureaucrats and the State Department flunkies so that when the boat did finally get to Miami they’d missed their flight to San Francisco or that the flight they did manage to get on was delayed for three hours because of fog on the other end — no, it was the press, the press was the real and continuing plague because they kept the whole thing going when all he wanted was to turn the page and forget about it. They didn’t care what he wanted. They never even asked. They just came after him.
Within an hour of his walking out of that room in the bowels of the ship, even before he and Carolee had got through the first bottle of Perrier-Jouët sent compliments of the captain and delivered by Kristi Breerling herself, his cell began ringing. Exhausted — wiped — and half-drunk too, he wasn’t thinking and just put the phone to his ear and rasped, “Hello?”
A voice came back at him, an unfamiliar voice, distant but clear. A man’s voice. “Mr. Stensen? Sten Stensen?”
“Yeah?”
The voice gave a name and an affiliation and without pausing to draw breath began hammering him with questions, each more inane and intrusive than the last—“What was it like out there? How many of them were there? How do you feel, you feel any different? You are a senior citizen, right — seventy years old, is that right? A war veteran? Did the alleged attacker say anything to you? He had a gun? Or was it a knife?” He tried to answer the man’s questions as patiently as he could, though Carolee was hissing at him to hang up and all he could think of was the cruise line’s slogan—Experience World-Class Indulgence—and wonder how in Christ’s name this reporter had managed to get his cell number, but finally, after a question about his service record—In Vietnam, was it? — he broke the connection even as the call-waiting light flared and he shut the thing off and stuffed it deep in his pocket.
“Who was that?” Carolee demanded.
“I don’t know. Some reporter.”
It was dark out over the water. They’d pulled the sliding door of their private veranda shut to thwart the mosquitoes and whatever else was out there — vampire bats, he supposed. The champagne in his glass had gone warm. He took a sip and made a face — it tasted like club soda with a dash of bitters and no more potent.
Carolee was giving him her severe look, her mouth drawn down and her eyebrows pinched together, a crease there in the shape of a V she’d been working on for sixty-four years now. “You don’t have to talk to those people,” she said.
The glass went heavy in his hand. He could barely hold his head up. “Yeah,” he said, “and you don’t have to swat flies either.”
Of course, part of the problem that first week was that he couldn’t seem to say no. He was a celebrity, an instant celebrity, the story plumbing some deep atavistic recess of the American psyche, and forgive him, because he knew it was wrong in every way, but after the third or fourth interview he began to feel he was only getting his due: Ex-Marine, 70, Kills Tour Thug; Quick Thinking Saves the Day; Costa Rica Tour Hero. If he stopped to think about it he would have been ashamed of himself — he was being manipulated, and worse, glorified not for any virtue, but for a single act of violence that haunted him every time he shut his eyes — but he didn’t stop to think. He’d never been interviewed on the radio before — or on TV either — and that shot up the stress level, of course it did, but he went through with every request until the requests began to trickle off in the wake of newer and riper stories, the mass shooting of the week, the daily bombing, the women imprisoned as sex slaves and all the rest of it.