Fifteen

It was a good morning, clear and bright, and he sat in bed savoring it, not sure what set this day of his vacation apart, made it different and better than those that preceded it, but something did. The weather? So clear and bright after so much rain. But the day before had been clear as well and he hadn’t felt this quiet elation, this sense of peace.

Then he realized what it was: Penny wasn’t with him. Probably because he’d slept late, but even so, it was unusual of her to be this considerate, or to face his housemates on her own. Maybe she was finally feeling more relaxed and less paranoid around them. He stretched and contemplated the day. It looked good for a hike, or even the beach. Didn’t seem to be any fog, although it wasn’t always easy to guess what was happening on the coast from here in the valley.

He wondered if he’d take her along. Wondered if he wanted to, if he had to, if he’d entered some unarticulated whither-thou-goest covenant with the girl. She seemed to think so, was constantly looking as if a moment’s separation was a betrayal. He couldn’t imagine how their tiny history had been so completely rewritten.

Like the way she insisted on calling him Luke. He didn’t mind all that much, but the others did. They kept their mundane lives separate. They even complained that if she absolutely had to use it, he was Lucan, not Luke. The fact that she didn’t like the authentic, period name made her all the more suspect. Or maybe they’d resent anything she said. He couldn’t pick his way through his mixed feelings about her, and the stew of affection, resentment, confusion, impatience, and worry was forever simmering.

Penny was like the strays he used to bring home, annoying the hell out of his mother and proving her right, time after time—he loved the idea of the dog and hated the unending responsibility. The kestrel, Morgana, was just the right amount of responsibility. He built her a mews and covered the window at night so great horned owls couldn’t come devour her. He showed her a little attention and fed her a mouse a day and she was satisfied.

This time, Penny had trailed him home, and he couldn’t stand the responsibility. Hadn’t signed on for it. He couldn’t wait until she realized it was time to go home, deal with her life and finish high school. It had better be soon.

And then, no girls. He never thought he’d yearn for celibacy, for estrangement from the entire other sex, but the prospect beckoned, clean and uncomplicated.

He stretched and dawdled, looking out the window at the glorious midmorning and at Mr. Oliver’s tidy garden, deliberately fenced-off from the jungly tangle of the rental unit’s yard. Oliver’s flowering cherry tree had burst into purple-pink blossoms overnight, dark limbs full of bell-shaped petals amazing against a backdrop of greens brightened by the recent rains.

He wanted Mr. Oliver’s orderly yard and life. He wanted to worry about tiny problems—thrips and mites and aphids. He wanted to talk to plants and never once have the plant talk back. Maybe he’d aim for it today—plant something, lots of things, so there’d be color all year outside his window.

Except he knew he wouldn’t really do it, wouldn’t see it through the seasons and the grunt work. He wasn’t like Mr. Oliver, not sufficiently attentive or careful and would probably let everything go to seed. He was a procrastinator. Look how he was delaying the downstairs reunion with Penny. She was sure to be pissed. As soon as she arrived with her unanticipated set of assumptions, he’d backed off. Except that night she came up and into his bed. Big mistake. But only that once. That twice. Talk about paying for your sins.

He’d thought to give her a brief time away from sour and oppressive parents. From being a teenager, a high-school senior with all the extra pressures of that year when your entire future bears down at you top speed. That was all, breathing space. God knows he wasn’t ready for another relationship, especially not with an hysteric. If he ever dated again, he’d look for an emotionless cow of a girl. He was sick to death of histrionics and had been even before Penny Redmond appeared.

Penny’s overdramatic denunciations of her life and family were juvenile, but she felt everything so passionately; she was so needy. He knew firsthand that families could be unbearable. The difference was that he had a better sense of self-preservation than she did. He hadn’t chucked high school and run away. He’d taken his time and their money until he finished college—they worried about how it would look to their friends if they refused to send him on to higher education, and he cynically played on that—so that when he left, he had the means to be independent and the break was clean and final.

But maybe the day he met Penny, when she’d stopped to admire his car outside the yogurt store, maybe that day he hadn’t felt completely independent. With Yvonne ranting to everybody about how he’d destroyed her life, maybe he’d been ripe for being admired. Pathetic, but probably true, because for the life of him, he couldn’t figure how else he’d gotten into this mess.

And then Penny, suddenly seductive, acting as if his offer of refuge translated into a request that she come live with him and be his love, not merely share space. She treated his insistence that he wanted instead to protect her, give her a little time, as if he were insulting her.

He felt sorry for her parents, if this was the way she handled whatever she didn’t like.

And last night was the worst, the dispute about the goddamned gold heart. Such a stupid thing. He knew she was right. The thing was a worn out piece of costume jewelry, worth nothing, even as evidence. But it was the principle of the thing, his stubbornness about her stubbornness. They were a really bad combo.

Later, when they were alone in his room, she’d cried that everybody treated her like an infant, with him as prime offender. It was all a jumble to her and a mess to him. Her fault. His.

You’d think she’d move out if life here was unbearable. That’s what she’d done about her real home. No such luck.

She had no place to go. He knew that, but it only made matters worse.

He pulled a sweatshirt and jeans on, uncovered the kestrel and promised her a delicious mouse, then used the bathroom, where somebody had left globs of spit-out toothpaste in the sink again. He stared at the gelled dribbles. They weren’t dirt, hair, or scum. Toothpaste didn’t interfere with anything and shouldn’t annoy him. But it did. It was one more way in which what he wanted, needed, and deserved wasn’t allowed him.

He heard himself with horror. When had he become this testy asshole? Maybe he was this way about everything, including Penny. He’d try harder. After all, he was older, out of college, employed, and she was none of those things. He went downstairs filled with benign resolve.

He didn’t see her, or anybody. Gary and Toto had left hours ago for their jobs, and since Alicia wasn’t in her office, she was probably out with a client. He peeked around the corner, to the enclosed porch where Kathryn sat peering intently at a screen. It was her machine, and when she occupied that space, her office as well, but otherwise—which was most of the time—the entire household could use the room and the computer. Those times that Kathryn worked at home, she was wrapped in a virtual Do Not Disturb sign and she was not to be considered here at all.

Back in the kitchen, he took a mouse out of the freezer, putting it on a paper towel to defrost. Even that made him think of Penny with irritation. Sleeping in a room with a creature who tore up and ate little mammals upset her. The speed with which Morgana devoured her mouse disgusted Penny. The fact that most times, Morgana left the mouse’s nose uneaten revolted her. When he bought crickets as a special treat for the bird, Penny shuddered and gagged. But none of this made her go to the living room couch.

Penny insisted she could love the bird, if only it didn’t have to eat. Typical of her logic.

He made coffee and oatmeal and luxuriated in the absence of people. It was how it should be with only the finches on the live oak breaking the silence.

Maybe Penny had been pulled outside by the lure of Oliver’s tree or the chippering yellow-bellied birds. Or she’d gone to “his” spot up and around the hill. She’d loved it when he’d shown it to her, a deep-set channel, now a fast-moving stream lined with redwoods and ferns. On such a day, it would be magic to sit in its dappled shadows.

He glanced at the front page of the Chronicle. Nothing much and nothing at all about the skeletons. Good. He wished he’d never poked that stick in the dirt. All it really meant was that Toto’s uncle, who’d let them use his pasture, was furious. He’d been hassled by the police and had his field chopped up and made hazardous for his cows. The normally placid dairy farmer had banned them for life.

He finished breakfast and thought about going to the beach, taking advantage of this weather before it dissolved into more rain. The water would be way too cold, but hearing and seeing it, reading, maybe running the beach sounded like a full vacation packed into a day.

He’d leave now, while Penny was gone.

He added his dishes to the collection in the sink, took the pitiable mouse corpse upstairs with him, and, after he put on a sweater as padding, fed her on his fist. There, in a matter of two, three minutes, he’d made the creature happy. She didn’t scream protests about his going off without her as he changed into bathing trunks under his jeans, and prepared to leave. He was going to stick to birds from now on.

Back around sundown, his note said. He could almost taste the clean sea air, hear the silence broken only by the waves, the muffled human noises if, indeed, anybody else was around, the seagulls and the sea lions who floated near shore, people-watching, and he felt muscles from neck to ankles unclench.

Outside, he took a deep breath of the fragrant air, but almost instantly felt it whoosh out of him. He looked again at the empty gravel drive, the spot closest to the garage.. He’d left his car there—so that he wouldn’t block anybody, so nobody would need to wake him up with a request for either his presence or his keys because the car had to be moved.

Good thinking, except it was gone. As were all the others’, except Kathryn’s, so it wasn’t as if somebody’s car had broken down and his had been used in the emergency.

Too bad about never interrupting Kathryn. He stormed in and stood by her computer while she waved him away with one hand. Finally when pages flipped out of the printer, she looked up. “What?” she asked.

“My car. It’s not out there.”

She blinked, readjusting from appointments and contracts to him. “She took it.”

“She? Who?”

“Who the hell you think? Your cookie.”

“Penny?”

Kathryn shrugged and pulled off her glasses to rub her eyes. “You didn’t give the okay?” She put her glasses back on and looked at her printer. “Guess not.”

The room, Kathryn, the computer—everything dissolved into blank emptiness. She’d moved in on his life and taken it over, every bit of it, without asking, without permission, without basic human decency. “Where was she going?” he asked, his voice unfamiliar and hoarse. “Where did she take it?”

Kathryn looked back from the stream of papers coming out of the printer and regarded him quizzically. “How would I know? She said she had things to take care of and that she’d be back in a while. She had your keys. I thought for sure you knew.” She shrugged. “That was two hours ago.”

“Okay,” he said. “Okay. She went to the police, about the heart she found.”

“Doubt it.” Kathryn stood up, checked the time and pulled a sweater off a peg on the wall. Despite her comfortable natural padding, she was always chilly and everybody had stopped making fun of her about it. “Unless she had some kind of conversion experience. Last night she was crazed about not doing anything in person with the police, or was I delusional? Did I fantasize that incredibly boring and infantile performance?”

“Then to those ladies she baby-sat for?” He knew he was being ridiculous.

Kathryn shrugged again. “Did you write her script?” She rolled her eyes. “The girl can’t make up her own words and say what’s obvious.” She looked at her watch and gathered the newly printed pages, put a clip around them and slipped them into a leather briefcase that was the most elegant item in Kathryn’s mundane wardrobe. When she created her garb, however, she went crazy with ornaments. “Listen,” she said, “I have to go. I’m supposed to have this at the office in half an hour.”

He still felt literally stunned, as if Kathryn had thwacked him with the news. He nodded, and moved away, signaling that he wouldn’t hassle her anymore. And then he remembered. “Wait—I bet I know where she went, and you—your office is in Sausalito, isn’t it?”

“No,” she said. “They moved it last night.”

“I mean—could I have a lift? You can drop me off on Bridgeway, anywhere.”

Kathryn sighed, nodded, and gathered up her papers before turning off the printer. “I don’t know when I’m coming home. There’s a meeting—”

“Doesn’t matter, don’t worry. If I don’t find my car, I’ll get home on my own. Buses and stuff.” Whatever happened, she’d already ruined his goddamned day.

“Then I’ll see you in a couple years, the way the buses run, but it’s your call.”

“I’ll take the lift.” He didn’t know, couldn’t tell if it would relieve or enrage him to see his big yellow hearse parked where he now suspected it would be.