Daphne nodded. "That's right. If you don't want to do what Grammar wanted you to do with it."
"As in, she told me about it, and didn't tell them. Why is everybody going east out of L.A. on a Sunday afternoon?"
Daphne nodded. "She knew they've got plenty of money already, and that's why she told you. Her — last wishes." Last wishes was a good phrase.
"I'll think about it. It might not be gold. Though — wow, look at that," he said, his finger tapping the windshield. An old Lockheed Neptune bomber was flying north over the freeway ahead of them, its piston engines roaring. Its shadow flickered over a patch of cars a mile ahead.
"There must be fires in the mountains," Daphne said.
"It's the season for it. We'll probably—" He paused, and glanced at her. "You're worrying about me," he said. "And it's not to do with money. I — can't quite get the reason, just a sort of image of me, and worry like some kind of steady background music." He peered at her again. "What about?"
Daphne shrugged and looked away, embarrassed that he had caught her thoughts. "Just — everybody leaves you. Your dad ran off and then your mom died in a car crash, and Mom died two years ago, and now Grammar." She looked at him, but he was watching the traffic again. "I'm not going to leave you."
"Thanks, Daph. I won't—" He stopped. "Now you're shocked. What did you see?"
"You think your mother killed herself!"
"Oh." He exhaled, and she sensed that he was finally near tears, so she looked out the side window at a railway bridge over a shallow arroyo. "Well, yes," he said, with evident control, "I — now you mention it — I think she did. I'm sorry, I shouldn't have — I guess she just couldn't handle it, foreclosure on the house, got arrested for being drunk in public — after my father—"
Daphne had to stop him or she'd start crying herself. "Why were you on your guard," she interrupted, "when Uncle Bennett and I mentioned broken clocks?" Her own voice was quavering, but she went on, "I said the time wasn't right on her VCR in the shed, and he said something about a broken clock, and both times you thought for a second that we meant something else."
Her father took a deep breath, and managed a laugh. "It's hard to explain. Ask your aunt Moira sometime, she grew up there too."
Daphne knew he'd say more if she didn't say anything, so she stared out through the windshield, looking past the cars surrounding them. This far east of Los Angeles there weren't housing tracts around the freeway, just two rows of tall eucalyptus trees. A railway line paralleled the freeway to the south, and occasional farmhouse-looking buildings were scattered across the foothills to the north; the mountains beyond the foothills were brown outlines in the summer smog.
"Okay," her father went on at last. "Grammar — what, had no respect for time. You know the way she carried on sometimes, as if she was still a teenager, like going to Woodstock; and she'd plant primroses in midsummer, and they'd thrive; food got cold real quick sometimes even though she just took it out of the pan, and other times it stayed hot for hours; well, a long time. It never surprised her. Maybe she was just pulling tricks on us, but time didn't seem to work right, around her."
A big blue charter bus swerved into their lane ahead of them without signaling, and her father hit the brake and tapped the horn irritably. He didn't mind if people cut him off, even rudely, as long as they used their blinkers. "Dipshit," he said.
"Dipshit," Daphne agreed.
"I know all this sounds weird," her father said. "Maybe us kids imagined it."
"You remember it. Most grown-ups forget all that kind of stuff."
"Anyway," he went on, "the Kaleidoscope Shed — one time Moira and I, when we were about eight and ten, found our initials carved in one of the boards of it, though we hadn't done it; and then a year or so later we noticed that they were gone — the board didn't even show a scratch — and we'd got so used to them being there that we carved 'em in again. And when we stood back and looked at it — I swear — what we had carved was exactly what had been there before. Not copied, see, but the same exact cuts, around the same bumps of wood grain. And then a year or so later they were gone again."
""Were they there today?"
"I honestly forgot to look. I might have, after your 'time's wrong' remark, but then Bennett showed up."
Daphne was watching the back of the blue bus ahead of them; it was speeding up and then slowing down. Under the back window, in a blocky typeface, was lettered HELIX. "Why did you call it the Kaleidoscope Shed?" she asked.
"I should get away from Felix here, he's probably drunk," her father said. "Okay, sometimes the edges of the shed, the boundaries from wherever you were looking — rippled. And the shed made a noise too at those times, like a lot of wooden wind chimes or somebody shaking maracas. And sometimes it just looked less decrepit, for a while."
He pressed the brake and signaled for a lane change to the right, shaking his head. "She couldn't stand it when my dad left — the police said she was drunk when her car went off the highway, and I don't blame her for that, I don't blame her for killing herself — my dad drove her to it, by abandoning her with two little kids and no money."
Daphne had known his thoughts were still on his mother even before he abruptly switched topics. She tried to blank her mind, but her father picked up her reflexive thought anyway.
"True," he said, "she abandoned us too. But she sent a note to Grammar, asking her to take Moira and me in, raise us, if anything ever happened to her. A couple of weeks later was the car crash. See, she entrusted us to her mother-in-law, she at least made some provision for us, not — not like him."
Daphne couldn't help asking — her father so seldom talked about all this. "What became of him?"
"I think he sent Grammar some money, the year he left. 1955. She got some, anyway. So he must have known where we were — but aside from that money, nothing. He'd be nearly sixty now." Her father's voice was hoarse and level. "He — I'd like to meet him someday."
Daphne was dizzy with the vicarious emotion, and she consciously unclenched her jaw. It was anger as bitter as vinegar, but Daphne knew that vinegar was what wine turned into if it was left to lie too long, and she knew, though her father might not, that his anger was baffled and humiliated love, longing for a fair hearing.
"I always—" he began. "Grammar never seemed to wonder what had become of him, so I always figured she knew. He was her son, and — and she did treat me and Moira as her own children, loved us, after my mom dumped us on her." He thumped the clutch down and shifted up to second, though a moment later he had to pull it back down to first again.
"It is hard to understand why people kill themselves," he went on quietly, as if to himself. "You look at the ways they do it — jump off buildings, shoot themselves in the mouth, pipe carbon monoxide into an idling car in the garage — what terrible last moments! I'd just eat a bunch of sleeping pills and drink a bottle of bourbon, myself — which probably shows I'm not a candidate."
"Portia ate hot coals," Daphne said, relieved that the cramp of aching anger had passed. "Caesar's wife. That's pretty dumb — I always wondered why they named a car after such a dumb person."
Her father laughed, and she was pleased that he had known she was joking.
"You're looking at it like killing yourself, though," she said. "The way they do it, real suicides, is like they're just killing a person. Throwing somebody off a building is a rotten way to kill yourself, but it's a fine way to kill a person."