ELEVEN

I did what Mom told me to do, leaving her in a motel and driving across the Bay Bridge to Oakland, the traffic a mess. Crews were laboring to re-engineer the bridge and enable it to survive an earthquake of 8.0 or higher on the Richter scale. This meant they had to close off lanes of traffic and stand talking while huge cranes waited, cocked and unmoving. Every time anyone tried to cross the bridge, it was the same—unpredictable. It had been a minor miracle that Rhonda had gotten me to the hospital as quickly as she had, and Mom said she wanted to be close to the hospital and not have to face the bridge if Something Happened.

When I was a little boy I would sit in the car parked in front of the house and pretend to drive. The imaginary landscape outside the car was forest, jungle, desert. The car was an armored personnel carrier, a drift of desert dust in the rearview mirror, dazzling the enemy.

Sometimes even now I liked sitting in front of the house, windows rolled all the way up, listening to the Volvo 960’s sound system. The stereo had been paid for by a loan broker as a Christmas present, before Mom wore him out with her twenty-four-hour-a-day personality. But today I didn’t listen to any music. I sat in the file-cabinet-gray car in the silence, not wanting to go into the empty house.

I unlocked the front door and turned on lights throughout the house, every one I passed, side lamps, floor lamps, even the lamp on the hood over the stove.

I called the hospital. A recording said that all available lines were busy. Don’t think, I warned myself. Just do one thing after another, a smart zombie. When a human female spoke to me, I identified my father as Theodore Madison, the way his name appeared on the cover of his books.

It was a little annoying, this role of my mother’s, Field Marshall to the World; But tonight I took some comfort in doing what she told me. It made me feel less stunned as I stood watering her crookneck squash, yellow grenades among the wandering vines. Her chives luxuriated in the darkness like fine green grass. And don’t forget the pumpkins, she had cautioned, the green gourds sullen beneath the claw-shaped leaves, months away from becoming jack-o’-lanterns. And the star of the show, the tomatoes; I couldn’t forget them.

Mom and I both share a joy in gardening, but her approach is all inspiration and impulse, a hole for her chili pepper plant gouged out of the middle of the lawn, the shriveled green jalapenos abundant but out of place. Her vegetables thrived in messy rows, stuck too closely together, ropy tomato vines struggling out of a tub, green and yellow bell peppers wrestling for space. My beans were neat, long, slender stakes, each bean plant extending gracefully, climbing toward sun.

The lights from the house glittered on the water from the garden hose, the smell of the wet earth rising around me. I turned the water off tight and wound the hose into loops, the way my dad had shown me years before, “so it’s ready when you need it.”

I dragged a suitcase from the closet, a big gray top-of-the-line Samsonite with little brass padlocks on the zipper tabs and wheels on the bottom. She had checked the items off on her smart pink fingernails. Bras, two. Panties, two. That was easy, my mom’s underclothes.

The rest would be tricky. She had asked for a sweater vest, the one she wore around the house, an ethnic-look Greek thing, something she wore when she trowled the dirt in her herb garden. Whatever else I brought I was supposed to remember the slip-ons she had custom made in Lahaina. She was not dressing for appearance.

I stuffed it all into the suitcase and then took it all out again and folded it as carefully as I knew how. Then I leaned against her dresser. She carried a makeup kit wherever she went, but she needed a little tube of medicine in case she got cold sores, which she always did under stress. She needed a container of saline solution for her contact lenses, in case the squeeze tube of Sensitive Eyes she always carried sprang a leak.

“And don’t forget my glasses, in the top right-hand drawer,” in case her contacts fell out of her eyes and got lost. And Ban roll-on, unscented, from the medicine cabinet. “And anything else you know I’ll need.” I found the little silver cross from her nightstand, the one her Aunt Dot had worn during the London Blitz, when a five-hundred pound bomb blew the roof off a church across the street.

I thought I heard a masculine cough in the background, a television laugh track. Ice tinkled in a drink. Rhonda has a set of cocktail glasses she picked up at the Alameda Flea Market, handpainted antique highball glasses, palm leaves, poodles.

I must have said something, because she was adding, “He was on the news. Channel Two. It wasn’t the lead-off story. An Amtrak train ran over some people in Santa Maria, and that space probe they finally got to work. But I kept watching and there it was, Bay author shot.”

My voice was able to get the question out, although the sound was strange, a talking dog.

“No suspects,” she answered my question, a sad dash of irony in her voice, mock anchorman.

The television sound went off at that instant, somebody—maybe one of her boyfriends—listening in the distance, wondering who she was talking to.

Bea was at the front door, a tapping I could barely hear.

She looked up at me in the porch light. Somehow it was important, what she would say now, the words she would choose. The screen door was between us, a new door, replaced a few weeks before, a sheen of silver.

She had a red bandanna tied over her head, Bea the pirate. I opened the screen door to let her in and had to put my hand out to the wall, unsteady. She leaned against me and kept me there, gently pinned to the wall.

“There’s no change in his condition,” I said, repeating what the hospital voice had told me.

She nodded, her bandanna pressed against my chest as though she had foreseen this. For a while silence protected us. “They didn’t come tonight,” she said at last.

I didn’t know what she was talking about.

But one of us had to talk, just to keep time moving along. That was how it seemed: that our actions, our words, were tiny but essential.

She looked up at me, trying to read my thoughts. “The Oil-Towners. They stayed home.”

All of that seemed so long ago, something that had happened to someone else. I was glad to hear about it. It was something solid to consider, a historic event that could be weighed and argued.

“Maybe, when they had a chance to think, they realized that it wasn’t fun any more,” she suggested, like someone offering a tentative theory on the collapse of the French Revolution.

I nodded, trying to think about what she was saying. Bea and I had once been very close, but I had felt distant from her lately. Now I felt grateful for her—not just for her companionship but for her odd, puzzling personality and for the fact that I didn’t have to get to know her, like the doctor, the detective, all these strangers who were suddenly so important.

“I want you to tell your father something,” she said. She had never met my father, although she had seen him at a distance, hurrying to his car.

I must have stared down at her with some tension in my eyes, in my body. Bea was close to saying something rash, something that could change our luck.

“Tell him that reading Prehistoric Future made me cry,” she said. “Especially at the end,” she said. I didn’t want her to continue, but she did. “When he said that even if there were no human beings, life would still be a miracle.”