27

The sky was beginning to color to the east.

This had happened rarely in my life—staying up all night, long enough to see dawn. And it had sometimes given me a sense of wonder, and of personal accomplishment—I had been enjoying myself so much that I had forgotten the time. It had also given me the sense of certainty that jet travel can sometimes give, the ability to acknowledge by my own experience that the earth turns.

This growing light gave me no joy. I parked not far from where I had taken the car. I left the key in the ignition, feeling a mix of regret and insouciance. There were no police cars, no emergency vehicles. The street was empty now, the party long over. I hurried through the silent streets, and ran easily through the young orchard, leaves stirring as I passed.

I wiped my shoes carefully, and tiptoed into the house. The sight of my footprints on the kitchen floor startled me, and I squeezed out a sponge from under the sink, wiped the floor, and cleaned my handprint from the wall.

I called his name and heard no answer, and I felt a stab of anxiety. His chair in the library was empty, the old leather impressed with the shape of his head, the weight of his body.

The white plastic cap to a vial of medicine lay like a poker chip on the carpet. A book on blood chemistry, complete with diagrammatic depiction of molecules, hexagons linked to hexagons, was open on the desk. The crust of a sandwich oozed jelly beside an empty coffee cup.

I could create a narrative from what I saw, an order of events. I saw him waking, making himself a sandwich, coffee. I saw him reading, studying, intent. I saw him going down to the cellar, making sure I was still there. I saw him leaving the house in a panic.

He was talking to someone. I was no longer a secret.

I found myself in the cellar. It was no surprise when I found the spade lying on the asphalt tiles. He had prodded my burrow, done a little digging, and discovered my absence.

He had swept the floor at some point, scraps of tile and fragments of broken glass in a neat pile. The glass was reflecting the hint of sunlight, each transparent fragment. I had to leave this place. I couldn’t stay here.

But I had no time.

“I was about to call the police,” said Dr. Opal, startling me. His eyes were bloodshot. He walked slowly down the cellar stairs and leaned against the washing machine in the cellar, his arms folded, a man waiting, in no particular hurry. “When I realized you were gone.”

I didn’t have time to talk.

“I’m not going to be able to keep you here,” he said.

I gazed upward at the underbelly of the house, the flooring overhead, the bedrock outcropping at one end of the basement, supporting the weight of the house. I asked, “Where were you?”

“Your tone of voice could use some improvement, Richard. I’ve never been a big proponent of manners. I’m not that much of a hypocrite. But every now and then I could use a little in the way of courtesy, just a little effort to be civil.”

I wanted to tell him what I had done, and at the same time I knew I never would. But I didn’t hurt Stella’s baby. I never wanted to.

There was so much I could have said. But I had to turn away. I could only shoulder my way into my burrow under the floor. Even here I could feel morning in the timbers of the house. The sun pressed down over the peaks of the roof, a weight, a heavy blanket, and every nail bit a little more deeply into the studs and floorboards, bearing the burden.

Words are only breath when you speak them. They only do harm, bless, question, when they are made of air. When they are kept within they are made of blood, and dark, holding up their many branches like woods of quiet trees.

All that day of darkness I was filled with things to say I knew I would never utter. I curled in the smell of wet bedrock, and waited.

I woke. It was not like the waking of a normal man, that first stirring, drowsiness, perhaps a return to dreams, perhaps a mandatory rising, yawning from the bed.

I was glad to retreat from sleep’s hole.

I stumbled upstairs, across the kitchen, into the broad dining room. It was evening. Dr. Opal leaned on his elbows, his eyes bright, a bowl of something at his elbow, soup, the liquid drained, vegetables stuck to the sides of the bowl.

I sat at the other end of the table. I did not lean forward. I did not want to be reminded of my absence in its polished surface.

“I have some clothes for you,” he said, indicating a dark jacket hanging from a door doob, pant legs trailing on the floor. “Although you look like you don’t really need them.”

“You visited Susan last night,” I said.

His tone was not apologetic. “I needed company.”

“You didn’t mention anything to Susan, did you?”

He put his hand on his soup spoon. “Of course not.”

“She didn’t wonder,” I said, “what you were doing climbing into her bed for comfort at what—midnight? Three in the morning?”

“Even if I mentioned to Susan that I had an old friend visiting me, a nephew, say, getting over a terrible experience, she would not pry.”

“But that’s not what you told her, is it? You didn’t say anything.”

“I asked her for some Benadryl and some codeine, and I went to sleep.” He let me think about this, and then he said, “I don’t like being treated with suspicion, Richard.”

I was right to be suspicious. “I’m sorry.”

He acknowledged my apology with a nod.

“Did you talk to Connie today?”

“She remembered the mirror after a little prodding. She’s had a lot on her mind. She says the mirror was a gift from Rebecca’s brother Simon. After your death Simon called, and with some embarrassment asked to have the mirror back again. He took it with him when he moved to Crescent City, on the coast up near the Oregon border.”

“I know where Crescent City is,” I said. “We all went steelhead fishing there once. You and my father. And me.”

Dr. Opal’s eyes looked bloodshot, but his gaze was steady and he looked like a man who had spent the day making up his mind. “Salmon of some kind,” said Dr. Opal. “Maybe sockeye.”

“It was steelhead. That means the mirror somehow fell into the hands of Rebecca’s family at some point over the years. I wonder how that happened?”

“I wonder why you take such an interest in it,” he said.

I should have paid more attention to this remark, but when I offered no reply, he added, “Connie is pregnant. The laser surgery worked.”

“I’m so happy for her,” I said. It was an automatic pleasantry. I was happy at the news. Surprised, too. Not at Connie, with her intrepid march toward anything she wanted. I was surprised at science, at medicine—that a doctor at Stanford could succeed after all else had failed. I felt a flash of cold envy, too. Toward Connie. Toward Dr. Opal, with his new love, the woman with the ample medicine cabinet and apparently no hesitation in helping him take care of either a party mess or a hangover.

Dr. Opal was watching my reaction carefully. “Steve Fayette is the father.”

I had to laugh. “Steve always had luck.” What I meant was: life had come easily to him.

Something about my response satisfied him. “And the investigation of Rebecca’s death goes forward. They have some leads. I like talking like that—leads. It’s all lab work, you know. Doctors, cops. We all wait around for a lab technician to get off his lunch break.”

“You spoke to Joe Timm?” I asked impatiently.

“After a day of trying and failing. It turns out an old friend of mine was the heart specialist who did Mrs. Timm. Strings were pulled, hints dropped. Timm called me, and told me, just between the two of us, that the San Francisco cops are staking out a duplex in the Sunset District, on Noriega. It’s rented by someone who studied music in Salzburg at the same time Rebecca was there.”

“A musician?”

“A man named Eric Something.” He gave the last word the authority of a surname, so that I misunderstood for a moment.

“You have been busy,” I said, with my old manner, the way I used to speak to him.

“So have you,” he said. His face was alight with suspicion.

“You loved my mother,” I said.

He did not speak for a moment. “Your father was one of those people who are so self-centered they are geniuses of egomania. He could have sold self-esteem, bottled it.”

“He was a good doctor.”

“He had a phenomenal memory.”

“What would my mother want you to do now?”

“Universities have kept secrets before. The University of California and Stanford have both used a degree of tact when it came to nuclear matters. I think I could organize a very fine team of scientists who could help you and at the same time keep you invisible.”

There was the woman at the party, Maura. But I didn’t hurt Stella’s baby. Why would I harm an infant? “All I want is a little more time.”

“Why? What’s going to change?”

“Am I asking for so much?” You know you can trust me.

He closed his eyes. He opened them, blinking. “You’ll stay with me tonight,” he said. “You won’t go out. We’ll play chess.”

I had a shadowy memory, rainy days, various companions getting out the chess pieces, rooting around in the game drawer for a pawn, telling me what a great game it was.

I felt a little sorry for Dr. Opal. I wouldn’t need the clothes he had bought. I wouldn’t need his help, his advice. His love for me was misplaced, so much wasted effort, but I couldn’t tell him this.

“There was always something special about you,” said Dr. Opal.

I stepped to his side, the smell of his soup nauseating me, chicken broth and peas, a strip of egg noodle like adhesive tape on the pale blue bowl. I put my arm around him and I could feel the bones of his shoulders, the thinness of his upper arms though his shirt. How much longer did he have, this wonderful doctor, this man who was out of his depth, now, lying to himself, pretending to be reassured. Did he have ten years of health left? Not even that many, I told myself.

With a chill, I realized what I was thinking.

Lie down, I told him. Lie down and rest.

Emergency vehicles clustered around the house where the party had been held the night before. Uniformed figures stood around, conferring, waiting for technicians. A flash ripped the dark, someone taking photographs of an object caught in the branches of a tree, one arm thrust up from the bundle like a fencer’s lunge.

At first I walked. Taking my time. What did I expect? What was done was done. I liked the sound of that, adolescent finality. I could pretend for an instant that I was free of all responsibility. Then I began to run.