26

“You look different,” said my brother, gazing straight ahead at the road.

“Better than usual, or worse?” I said, trying to make easy conversation.

“For a second there I almost didn’t recognize you.”

“I must look really great.”

“You look good, actually.” He shrugged. “Just a little strange. I’m sorry I mentioned it.”

It was later that morning, and Rick was driving me north at my request. He looked bruised, slightly puffy.

I was still shaken. Burning the feather had been the right thing to do, a final, capping farewell. But I sensed that it might have been a galling insult.

If the Powers existed. Here I was, thinking such thoughts. I needed help.

“Terrible about DeVere,” said Rick.

I went cold.

Rick sighed. “He always looked so sure of himself.”

I heard myself utter the words, “The news stunned me. I’m a little tired—wasn’t really able to sleep.”

“You don’t look tired so much,” said Rick.

“Haunted? Fugitive? Demented?”

He took his eyes off the road and took me in, studying me with a glance, a brother’s glance, both knowing and affectionate. “You look like you could sleep for a week. But on you that’s a good way to look. The rumpled bon vivant.”

I thanked him, a bit of mild sarcasm that made him smile.

I was trembling. I gripped my hands together so he wouldn’t notice.

Rick drove fast, working the little Alfa through its gears. We were heading through wine country, but skirting the more celebrated vineyards. The countryside that whipped past us was nearly Tuscan, the gnarls and stumps of grapevines, intermingled with an appearance that was quite western, men in white straw cowboy hats leaning against pickups, horses nosing grass behind barbed wire.

Rick changed lanes to leave a slow delivery truck, painted to advertise a popular brand of corn chips, far behind us. He took a curve with either careless skill or recklessness, and his tires complained. I wasn’t certain whether Rick drove this car out of special fondness for it, or if it was the last car he owned, all the others sold off—or wrecked. “I’m glad you decided to see Mom,” he said. “Not just because I think it’s a good thing to do.”

It was odd, in my ears, the way he called her “Mom.” It was so casual, affectionate, ordinary. I thought of her as “Mother.” On this day, more than any other, I needed to see my surviving parent. “You want to compare notes on her.”

“I think it’s a good thing you’re going to see her.” He had said this so often that I was beginning to wonder if it were true.

“You think she’s …” I hunted for a kind word, and couldn’t think of one. “Hopeless?”

He gave a tilt of his head. “What made you want to come and see her so suddenly?”

I considered my answer.

“I know I encouraged you to come,” he continued. “But I’m just wondering what made you change your mind.”

There was something about his tone I did not understand. “I worry about her all the time,” I said. “That’s why I can’t stand to see her. To see her makes it impossible to deny the truth.”

“When you’re away from her,” Rick suggested, “you can pretend that she isn’t really so ill.”

Sometimes I find it impossible to use words. They stick to the truth like labels the post office applies to packages, as though a red-and-blue sticker means safe passage. “‘Ill’ is a good way to put it,” I said, and gave no hint of the inner debate I was experiencing, questioning my sanity, the sanity of the world. “Tell me, Rick—do I look like someone who could kill another human being?”

“Sure.”

“I do?”

He laughed at the concern in my voice. “Anybody could be a killer, Strater. What sort of person would you be if I thought you absolutely could not hurt anyone?”

“What’s good about hurting people?”

“It’s horrible to hurt people. A terrible habit to get into. You’re very peculiar today, Strater. Even your voice is different.”

“You think that I’m the sort of person who could kill someone to further his career?”

“I don’t know about that. But you could definitely protect yourself, if you had to.”

“It’s a matter of masculinity, isn’t it? A man is supposed to seem capable of homicide.”

“Doesn’t it say something like that in the U.S. Constitution?” He drove for a while, and then said, adjusting and readjusting his hands on the wheel as he spoke, “You know what people are going to think? Not everyone, but the DeVere people. They’ll think we hired someone to dump DeVere out the window.”

Maybe I did it, I thought. Maybe I am so sick that I could do something like that and not know it. The thought was nauseating. I cranked down the window to let air stream over me.

“Those people who are after me,” said Rick. “The people who are after me for money. My creditors.” He said the last word with what he had intended as an ironic edge. “That’s what they’ll think.”

“It doesn’t matter.”

“These are serious men, Strater.”

“It’ll be all right.”

“It definitely will not be all right. You’re just like Dad—so optimistic I think life ought to slap you around a little. I love you dearly, Strater, but sometimes I think you have no idea what the world is all about. You expect life to be good. It isn’t.”

I let the rolling scenery answer for me, corrals, tractors, the occasional barn. From time to time there was a circling pair of wings high above a rocky creek.

My father had known an ambassador from a Middle Eastern country who enjoyed after-hours blackjack and, at the same time, grew overfond of the wrong set of women. This gentleman, who had visited our family at Christmas over the years, had been found in a canyon in Big Sur punched full of small, twenty-two-caliber holes. My teenage years had been shadowed by only partly apocryphal tales of rich kids who got tangled in drug stakeouts, blackmail capers, wee-hours contretemps with private detectives.

“I’m going to make lots of money,” I reassured him. “Big commissions. We’ll pay your debts.”

“It’s not a matter of money. The DeVere people will want us dead.”

“I’ll arrange things,” I said.

“How?”

I didn’t know how, but my silence seemed to express confidence.

“I don’t want to think about it,” he said. It was his way of expressing gratitude for what he interpreted as my easy attitude. “Look at this scenery. This kind of place makes me happy. It makes me believe in things. I can’t believe the kind of people I’ve ended up dealing with.”

It was characteristic of my brother that when he did deal with philosophical matters he used bold, unmixed colors—mortality, faith. He had the stout, simple diction of many people I knew, the sort of man who has such conversations only while driving fast, or while drinking.

When we approached the Place he began to slow, downshifting, delaying.

It made both of us quiet, the sight of the iron gate swinging inward after a videocam had observed us for awhile. The road was well tended, hills and oaks, and new blue-gray gravel spread on the verge of the road.

My brother and I called it “the Place,” but it was a private hospital for a few patients, the most distinguished being Mother, widow of the man who had served for years on the board of directors. Los Cerritos Sanitarium never displayed its name, nor did it have any of the outward trappings of either a hospital or a prison, except that after a long drive there was a chain-link fence surmounted by a long spiral of barbed wire and then, at the distance of a stone’s throw, another, parallel fence.

It had been part of the deal: we had paid to have the Place made maximum security, or at least as secure as the state hospital for the criminally insane at Atascadero, where the prosecution had been eager to deposit her.

There was a no-man’s land of bare dirt, raked weedless. The fences were tall, perhaps thirty feet high. A security guard waved his clipboard at us. We parked, and sat for too long in the Alfa.

“Dad would like the wisteria,” said Rick, indicating a late winter vine on an arbor, and redwood benches. The cement walks were still new-looking, and the grass had that recently mowed look that left the lawn in a pattern of parallel stripes.

“Do you think Dad would be proud of the two of us?” I asked. “Do you think he would make the point of saying so, if he met us?”

“He’d be proud of you, no question.”

“He wouldn’t try to talk us into something …” The word did not come easily. “Evil, do you think?”

Rick did not answer at once. When he spoke there was a hint of tension in his voice. “Dad made mistakes. But ask anyone and they’ll tell you that he tried to do the right thing.”

“If you saw him—his ghost, an illusion, perhaps, what would you ask him to test him? To see if he was real?”

Rick was thoughtful. “I would never believe that he was real. I just wouldn’t believe it. It can’t happen.”

We both sat silent for what seemed like a long time. Then Rick said, “By the time I reach the parking lot and turn off the engine, I’m always nervous.”

We shook hands with a row of nurses and orderlies. The doctors were at a meeting in Napa, although this was not bad news. For once I wanted to see my mother unencumbered with professional commentary regarding maintenance doses and bedsores.

The new head nurse was Mrs. Lamb. She welcomed us, told us about the new Jacuzzi. She showed us into the library, the patio, the view overlooking the lawn. There were other patients here, in addition to my mother, but I was aware that they had been whisked out of the way. We had phoned ahead, and we were like royalty, people who go through life convinced that the world smells of fresh paint.

“You both look exactly like your pictures,” she said. “I’m so happy to be able to say I saw you at last.”

“How is she doing?” I asked.

“She’s doing just fine.” Mrs. Lamb beamed at Rick, and then at me. She was a plump, pleasant-looking woman, with white teeth. “I think it wouldn’t cause any trouble at all if we let you peek in at her.”

“We want to see her.”

“That’s what I mean—”

“We want to talk to her.”

Her smile brightened. Her teeth, I realized, were false. “That’s going to be a problem.”

I gave her my best tea-party smile. “We insist.”

Mrs. Lamb looked at Rick, as though for support. Rick gave her a smile of his own, and winked.

“It’s a very bad idea,” she said, solemn, subdued. “It might cause complications.”

“Has she been making progress?” I asked.

“Of course she has,” said Mrs. Lamb. “Of course she has been making excellent progress.”

“Then perhaps she will be able to withstand the strain.”

“It was a staff decision. One person can’t alter policy.”

I used my most gentle voice. “We certainly wouldn’t think of asking you to alter policy. That’s out of the question. Perhaps, in this one instance, you could happen to be looking the other way …”

Mrs. Lamb’s face was set, with a lingering smile that now looked spiteful. “It’s families,” said Mrs. Lamb.

I must have looked mystified, because Mrs. Lamb added, “Please forgive me, Mr. Fields. But I’ve seen it so many times. Some people think government is bad. Some people think the police have to be watched all the time. People ought to take a look at the family—the harm it does.”

I softened. “Maybe it’s not such a good idea.”

Mrs. Lamb’s manner was brisk. “No, I think you’re right after all. I’m sorry to have seemed so rude. Let’s all go have a nice long talk with Mrs. Fields.”

“We don’t really have to—”

“Besides, you always get what you want, don’t you?” She was walking away from us, and reached a door. She held it open.

“What does that mean?” I asked.

“That’s what someone said on one of the talk shows. The Fieldses get what they want. A lot of people even admire you for it. Nobody stands in your way.”