IN EVERYONE’S LIFE there are people who stay and people who go and people who are taken away against their will.
Todd’s mother worked out a deal for Ezra. The legal system had refused to see that opening a door was the same as closing one. Ezra pled guilty, got eight months in a minimum-security prison in Vallejo. Todd’s mother said that he would serve five if he behaved himself. It cost him his job, which he had cared a lot about. It cost him any shot at the CIA (or maybe not, what do I know? Maybe it was just the résumé padding they’d been waiting for). No apartment manager I’ve ever had since has put his whole heart into it the way Ezra did. “The secret to a good life,” he told me once, “is to bring your A game to everything you do. Even if all you’re doing is taking out the garbage, you do that with excellence.”
I went down on visitors’ day—this was after Christmas—so he’d already been there about a month, and they brought him out, in his orange jumpsuit, to where we were allowed to sit on opposite sides of what, in another context, I would have called a picnic table. We were warned not to touch and then left alone. Ezra’s mustache was gone, his upper lip as raw as if the hair had been ripped off it like a Band-Aid. His face looked naked, his teeth big and leporine. It was clear his spirits were low. I asked him how he was doing.
“It ain’t the giggle that it used to be,” he said, which was reassuring to me. Still Ezra. Still Pulp Fiction.
He asked if I’d heard anything from Harlow.
“Her parents came up from Fresno, looking for her,” I said. “No luck, though. Nobody’s seen her.”
In the days after I’d told Lowell that Harlow never talked about her family, she’d given me the following information: three younger brothers, two older sisters. Half brothers and half sisters, if you wanted to get technical.
She’d said that her mother was one of those women who loved being pregnant but wasn’t much for long-term relationships. A hippie-chick, earth-goddess thing. Each of Harlow’s siblings had had a different father, but all of them lived with their mother in a falling-down house on the outskirts of town. Two kids back, they’d run out of room, so some of the fathers had transformed the basement into a warren of bedrooms, where the kids lived a largely unsupervised, Peter Pan sort of life. Harlow hadn’t seen her own father in years, but he managed a small theater company up in Grass Valley, so he’d give her a job after graduation, no problem. He was, she said, her ace in the hole.
The similarity of Harlow’s basement to my long-ago tree-house fantasies had struck me, except that you had to descend to enter Harlow’s Never-Never Land. (Which would be a significant difference—recent studies suggest that people behave with more charity if they’ve just gone upstairs and less if they’ve just gone down—if studies like that weren’t just an enormous pile of crap. There’s science and there’s science, is all I’m saying. When humans are the subjects, it’s mostly not science.)
The basement and the tree house shared another trait: neither was real.
Harlow turned out to be an only child. Her father read gas meters for PG&E. This is a surprisingly dangerous job, because of the dogs, if not a glamorous one. Her mother worked at the local library. When I run the world, librarians will be exempt from tragedy. Even their smaller sorrows will last only for as long as you can take out a book.
Both her parents were tall but stooped, curled over their torsos in exactly the same way, as if they’d just been punched. Her mother had Harlow’s hair, only short and practical. She wore a silk scarf around her neck and under that, on a long silver chain, an Egyptian cartouche. I could just make out the hieroglyphic of a bird. I thought how she’d dressed carefully to come and talk to the local police, to see me, see Reg. I imagined her at her closet, deciding what you’d wear to go learn something about your child that just might break your heart. She reminded me of my own mother, though they weren’t alike in any other way except for the heartbreak.
Harlow’s parents were afraid Harlow had been kidnapped and who knew what else, because it wasn’t like her not to phone when she knew they’d be worried. They were, each of them, fragile as blown glass, afraid she might be dead. They tried to get me to think about that without them having to say it aloud. They suggested that Ezra might be accusing her, might have staged the whole primate action, in order to cover up something much more sinister. She would never, never miss Christmas, they said. Her stocking was still hanging on the mantel, where they said it would stay until, one way or another, she came home.
They’d insisted on taking me out for this conversation, so we were at Mishka’s, drinking coffee in the quiet of the early days of winter quarter, hardly another customer in the place, the grinding of the beans the only significant noise.
I was drinking my coffee, anyway. Theirs sat untouched and getting colder by the minute.
I told them I had no doubt that Harlow was alive, that she had, in fact, returned to our apartment the day after the monkey business to get something she’d left there. Even though I hadn’t seen her for myself, I had evidence, I told them, she’d left me clear evidence, and that was as far as I got. Her mother made a sound—something halfway between a gasp and a shriek—inadvertent, but loud and high-pitched. Then she burst into tears, grabbed my hands, upsetting our cups.
She herself took the worst of that. I suspected her lovely blouse was done for. “But it’s just not like her,” her father said over and over again as we were mopping up the mess. “Breaking in somewhere. Taking things”—meaning monkeys, I assume; I’d said nothing about Madame Defarge—“taking things that don’t belong to her.”
I wondered if we were talking about the same person. Nothing seemed more like Harlow to me.
But no one is easier to delude than a parent; they see only what they wish to see. I told Ezra some of this. He was too depressed to be interested. To my surprise, the need to touch him—something I’d certainly never felt before and probably felt now only because it was forbidden—began to overwhelm me. I wanted to stroke his arm, finger his hair, ruffle up some spirit. I sat on my hands to prevent it.
“Where did you think the monkeys would go?” I asked him.
“Wherever the hell they wanted,” he said.