At LAX, I took a cab to Santa Monica. I got the driver to stop fifty yards short of the house, and I walked the rest. When I arrived, I found a boy in the yard outside, playing in an orderly fashion.
“Hey,” I said.
He looked up, checked me out. Didn’t say anything.
“Uncle Jack,” I added.
He nodded, head to one side, as if conceding the truth of my observation but failing to find that it rocked his world.
I walked past him up the path and knocked on the door. It opened immediately, as I’d expected. This kid’s mother wasn’t going to be letting him mess around in the yard in the early evening without keeping an eye out.
“Well, how about that?” she said, hands theatrically on hips. “You don’t see a Whalen for months, then bang—a full house. Must be some kind of astrological thing, right? Or biorhythmic? Is a comet due?”
I felt tense. Amy’s sister was hard work at the best of times. “How are you, Natalie?”
“Still not a movie star and a bewildering ten pounds heavier than I’d like, but otherwise in an acceptable place for my culture and type. I told you on the phone you missed Amy, right? Like, hours ago?”
“We’re meeting later. Just thought I’d stop by and say hi, since I’m in town.”
She looked at me dubiously. “I’ll alert the media. You want coffee while you’re doing this hi saying?”
I followed her inside. There was a big pot ready and waiting in the kitchen, as always when I’d visited Natalie’s house. It was one of the few points of congruence between the sisters.
She handed me a large cup, filled it. “So. Amy didn’t say you were gracing the area.”
“She doesn’t know. It’s a surprise.”
“Uh-huh. Tangled web you guys weave. Speaking of which, is it just me or has big sis been acting a little wacked recently?”
“In what way?” I said, careful to keep my voice flat.
“She drops by here today with no notice, then asks me if I have tea. Well, of course I have tea. I am the homemaker from hell, but I do try, and Don likes it first thing. Tea, I mean. But Amy? Tea? That’s a new one.”
“She’s been drinking it some recently,” I said. “Maybe she’s doing a campaign on it.”
“Okay. So I’ll tell Mulder and Scully to stand down. But here’s item two: Any idea what the date is?”
“Of course,” I said, reaching for it. “It’s…”
“Right,” she said. “Given a couple seconds, you could name the month and maybe even the day. That’s not what I meant. That’s Man Time. I’m talking Woman Time. In my people’s calendar, it’s Annabel’s Birthday Plus Six Days.”
“Annabel,” I said. “Your Annabel?”
“She was twelve last week.”
“Your point being?”
“Whalen card and gift conspicuous by their absence.”
“Christ,” I said. “I’m sorry. I—”
She held up her hand. “Jack, you couldn’t name my daughter’s birthday if your life depended on it. Mine either, or Don’s. You probably have your own written on the palm of your hand. So how come we always get cards?”
“Because Amy knows.”
Natalie drew a checkmark in the air. “Not just birthdays. When Don and I got married. When Mom and Dad died, their wedding anniversary. She lives the family chronology. Year in, year out, she gets the job done.”
“Did she mention this when she—”
“That’s the thing. She stops by without warning, drinks her tea, goes upstairs, comes back down, kiss-kiss, good-bye. She’s exactly the way she always is, which is mainly a sweetie, also slightly killable—but she neglects to mention forgetting her niece’s birthday, which by now she must have realized she’s done.”
“She went upstairs?”
“To her old room. It’s Annabel’s now.”
“Did she say why?”
Natalie shrugged. “Amy’s what—thirty-six this year? Maybe it’s a memory-lane deal. Gather up the past before the Alzheimer’s really kicks in.”
“You mind if I go take a look?”
“I already did. She didn’t touch anything, far as I can tell. Why would she?”
“Still…”
Natalie cocked her head to one side, and you could tell immediately how the boy in the front yard had acquired the habit. “What’s this about, Jack?”
“Nothing. Just intrigued.”
“Go nuts, Detective. Annabel’s at band practice. Second on the right.”
I left her in the kitchen and went upstairs. The second door along the hallway was slightly ajar, and for a moment I remembered Gary Fisher’s dream so clearly that I hesitated. But then I pushed the door open.
It would have been different in detail when Amy lived here, naturally. Posters of different bands. Merchandising goods associated with different movies that had now probably been remade twice. Otherwise it was archetypal.
It’s strange being in the childhood space of someone you love. Knowing her now is not the same as having known her before, and that pre-you person will remain a stranger even if you go on to die hand in hand. It’s odd to imagine someone so much smaller and younger, to see the shapes and angles through which she learned about the world. You hear echoes. You cannot help but wonder whether she now always feels most comfortable in spaces of similar size or height, or if the bedroom you share with her adult incarnation feels wrong to her for not having a window in that same position. You picture her sitting on the edge of this bed, feet neatly together, staring into the future with the acquisitive and slightly alien gaze of the child.
It didn’t take long for me to notice something Natalie couldn’t have been expected to spot. The room was in flux—it had been neat recently, and it would be again—and objects and clothes and bits of furniture were strewn around. But the rug that covered the center of the floor was at precise right angles to the bed, with no wrinkles at any point. I doubted that Annabel had left it this way.
I moved the wooden chair off it, flipped it up. Nothing to see except floorboards that had been painted shabby-chic white at some point in the last ten years. I went to the other end, did the same. Thought I’d drawn a blank but then looked closer at the end just under the bed. I went down on my knees and felt beneath the frame, close to where it butted against the wall.
It was tight, but a small section of board could be levered out. Underneath was a dusty gap, an ideal child’s hiding place. It was empty now, but I didn’t think it had been that way when Amy arrived.
Natalie was standing by the kitchen window, cradling her coffee in both hands and watching her son in the yard.
“So?”
I shrugged. “Like you said. Memory lane.” I caught something in the way she was observing the boy. “Everything okay?”
“Sure. Just a…Matthew seems to have gotten himself a little imaginary pal. No biggie. You just wonder what gets into their heads.”
“You asked him about it?”
“Sure. It’s just a friend, he says. They play together sometimes, you hear him talking quietly to himself once in a while. It’s not like we have to set an extra place at dinner. And it’s better than nightmares, for sure. Amy had those super bad.”
“Really?”
“God, yes. One of the earliest things I can remember—I don’t know how old I was, three maybe, four?—was these horrible noises in the night. Like a scream but deeper. Loud, then quiet, then loud again. Freaky. Then I’d hear Dad trudging down the hall. He’d get her back to sleep, but then it would start again an hour later. Went on for a couple of years.”
“Amy never mentioned that.”
“Probably doesn’t even remember. Sleep’s a war zone with kids. Babies especially. Friend of mine’s kid used to push his fingers into his eyes to stop himself from falling asleep. Seriously. Matthew was hell on wheels, too—you couldn’t get him to nap without pushing him from here to San Diego. And he’d wake up in the night four, five times. Like an on-off switch—straight to Defcon Five. You’d be lying there in the dark, house peaceful, baby asleep and all’s well with the world. Then, bang—he’d be wailing like his room was full of wolves.”
“Makes sense. Suddenly you’re awake and alone in the dark with no mom or dad to be seen or smelled or found.”
“Sure—that explains bad waking. But why fight sleep so hard in the first place?”
“Because it wouldn’t have been that way when we lived in caves. The whole family would be sleeping in a pile together, instead of exiling Junior into a room with scary murals he doesn’t understand and inexplicable things dangling from the ceiling. The baby thinks, Fuck this, are you insane ? It’s not safe to leave me alone. So they do the one thing that reliably affects their environment—scream their heads off.”
“You surprise me, Jack. I never realized you were so much in touch with your inner child.”
“Always. It’s the inner adult I keep losing track of.”
She smiled. “Yeah, well, maybe you’re right. But I don’t know. Kids are weird. They pick up TV remotes and hold them to their ears like phones and talk to people who aren’t there. You give them a toy saxophone and they put it straight in their mouths—and blow instead of suck, which is what they’ve done with everything else. They put empty cups to their mouths and go ‘Mmmm,’ and you think, Where did that come from? Have I ever gone ‘Mmmm’? Then one day they stop doing it. It’s how they break your heart. Some unbelievably endearing habit they develop, from nowhere—then bang, it’s gone again. Makes you miss them even when they’re still there in front of you, and that’s part of what loving is about, right?”
Suddenly she stopped, and her cheeks went bright red. I’d never seen Natalie embarrassed before. Wouldn’t have believed it possible, in fact.
“What?”
“I’m so sorry,” she said. “I have been a numb fucking bitch.”
I shook my head. “No you haven’t.”
“But—”
“Seriously. It’s not a problem.”
“But with Amy? How—”
“Everything’s fine.”
“Okay,” Natalie said. “I’m sure it is. She’s pretty tough.” For just a moment, she looked fiercely proud of her sister, and I wished I had a sibling to feel that way about me. “She has been…I don’t know, a little different since, though. Don’t you think?”
I shrugged. “I guess.”
Natalie persisted. “Maybe even before that?”
I looked up at her, surprised, and was disconcerted to find her looking at me, hard, with eyes very similar to her sister’s.
“People change,” I said, dismissively. “They get older. Grow up. May even happen to you someday.”
She stuck her tongue out. “There’s one thing I never understood, though,” she said, leaning on the sink and looking out the window again. Her son still playing sensibly in the yard, staying a statutory six feet from the road, as if a force field operated to keep him within a safe distance of the house. Perhaps it did. Amy wasn’t the only Dyer girl who ran a tight ship.
“What’s that?”
“How Amy wound up in advertising.”
“Things happen. I ended up a cop.”
“I never knew you when you weren’t, so that’s not strange to me. Plus, your being a cop made sense. What happened to your dad, and…You just made sense that way. More than you do as a writer, that’s for sure.”
“Ouch.”
“Say it ain’t so. But Amy, I mean…When she was a teenager, she was always the complete geek.”
I frowned. “Really?”
“You don’t know this? Totally. Forever making something out of weird bits of crap. Poring over books with titles that would make you lapse into a coma.”
“That doesn’t sound like the woman I know.”
“For sure. For years she’s the science-fair queen and poised to do something appallingly nerdy, and then suddenly one day she’s all ‘I want to be in advertising,’ as if it’s ‘I want to be a movie star.’ I didn’t even know what advertising was. She’d just turned eighteen, and she comes out with it at dinner one night. I remember it because the old folks had spent years backing her up on all the tech stuff, giving her rides to clubs, being proud—more than they ever were with anything I did—and then bang, that’s all history. I remember watching Papa across the table as she’s saying all this, seeing his shoulders slump.” She smiled, gaze still on her kid outside. “I was fourteen. First time I ever realized that being a parent maybe wasn’t a complete walk in the park.”
“She ever give a reason? Why she switched?”
“She didn’t have to. She was golden.”
“Natalie…”
She smiled. “I’m just kidding. No, she didn’t. Though I did ask her about it this one time. She said she’d met a guy.”
My heart thumped, once. “Someone at school?
“No. Somebody older, already in the business maybe, though that’s totally a guess. I figured she was attracted to this guy, didn’t work out…but she stuck with it. You know what she’s like. Dogged. Doesn’t matter how long something takes, how long she’s got to wait. Always been a girl with an eye to the long-term view.”
I’d turned to look out the window, though I had no interest in what was outside. I didn’t want Natalie to be able to see my face as I asked the next question.
“Don’t suppose she mentioned the guy’s name?”
“Actually, she did, and the strange thing is, I remember it. Pure coincidence. We’d had this one dog for years, and he’d died like two, three months before. He’d been around almost all my life, and I still missed him really bad. So I guess it stuck in my head.”
“This guy had the same name as your dog?”
“No, sweetie. The dog was called Whooper. Calling a person ‘Whooper’ would constitute cruel and unusual punishment, even in L.A. It was the breed. A German shepherd.”
I had been so prepared for hearing the name “Crane” that I had to check if I’d heard her right.
“The guy’s name was Shepherd?”
“Yep.” She looked blank for a moment. “Funny. Nearly twenty years go by, and you can still miss a damned dog.”
Ten minutes later her husband returned home with a clarinet-toting child. My relationship with Don had always revolved around his getting me to tell cop stories. We hadn’t arrived at a new MO since. His daughter greeted me with grave politeness, as if part of a self-imposed practice regime for interacting with the nearly elderly. I had no idea how to broach the subject of her birthday, and so I didn’t.
Natalie walked me to the door soon afterward. “Been nice to see you, Jack,” she said unexpectedly.
“You, too.”
“Sure everything’s okay with you guys?”
“Far as I know.”
“Well, okay then. So—where are you going tonight? Amy was dressed up mighty nice.”
“It’s a secret,” I said.
“I hear you. Keeping that magic alive. You’re an inspiration to us all. Well, come see us again soon—or we’ll come to you, and you don’t want that. Oh, that was the other thing today.” She laughed. “I thought you guys moved to Washington. Not Florida.”
“What do you mean?”
She held up her hand, fingers splayed. I shook my head, no clue what she was talking about.
“Amy in bright pink nail polish?” she said. “What’s up with that?”
I left not knowing where I was headed, walked down residential streets in soft, midevening air. People parked their cars, drove away, got home or went out. Others stood in kitchen windows, glanced down out of bedrooms, stood watering plants in their yards. I wanted to head up those paths, stand in those kitchens, sit in a big easy chair in one of those living rooms, and say, So—what’s up? Tell me how you live. Tell me all. Other people’s lives always seem more interesting, coherent, simply more real than my own. Television, books, celebrity culture, even plain watching the world go by: all a desire for an existence that has a directness and simplicity we never feel, that seems real and true in a way our own smudged and fractured days never do. We all want to be someone else for a while. Seem to believe, almost, that we already are, that something stands in the way of the lives we were supposed to have.
My phone rang. I didn’t recognize the number. “Yes?”
“Whozis? Who?”
The voice was thick and hard to understand. “It’s Jack Whalen,” I said. “Who the hell are you?”
“This L.T. here. It’s the building, you said.”
“What building?”
“Shit. You told me money.”
I realized who I was talking to. “You’re the guy who was sitting at the café in Belltown.”
“It is. You want what I got?”
“No,” I said. “I’m not involved with that anymore.”
My interlocutor became loudly disquieted. “You a lying mother fucker! You said you had money. I made the call, cop motherfucker.”
“Okay, sir,” I said. “Tell me what you have.”
“Fuck you! How I know you going to pay me?”
“You got me. But I’m not in Seattle right now. So either you give me what you have, and I pay you later, or I put the phone down and block your number.”
He didn’t hesitate long. “It’s a girl, bro.”
“What?”
“She a kid. Come up the street, last night, late, she stand a front the building. Look like she try a key. Don’t work. She go away up the street. She gone.”
I laughed. “You saw a little girl come look at the building, then go away? And you want money for that?”
“You said—”
“Right. Well thank you. The check’s in the mail.”
I ended the call and made a note to block the number when I sat down. In the old days I’d be doing something like that once a week. Giving out my number to people who might have information they would feel more comfortable giving out later, when no one was around—then blocking it when they got to thinking they had a friend on the force who would fix their parking tickets or get their aunt out of jail. I did not miss those people. Black or white, young or old, these baffled, violent men with their unhappy, shouting wives, hermetically sealed off from their dreams by drugs, poverty, and fate—and laziness, too, often, along with short fuses and shorter attention spans and a bitter yearning for the easy life that guaranteed that theirs would be anything but.
I kept walking, and after a time I found myself on Main, passing places like Rick’s Tavern and the Coffee Bean, iBod and Schatzi, Say Sushi and Surf Liquor, environments that had been a casual part of my existence for years. I’d even met Amy in a bar not far from here. I’d been killing an evening with a colleague when a couple of drunks started working a table of women. The deal with a bar’s being cop-friendly is the understanding that—should anyone not realize that the place often contains off-duty policemen and that good behavior is therefore mandatory (for non-cops, at least)—it will be made clear to them. So I got up, walked by the other side of the women’s table on the way to the men’s room, and communicated via a pointed finger that the guys’ attention would be better deployed elsewhere. One looked like he wanted to make something of it, but his friend got the message, and they left without a fight. There was a fresh beer waiting for me on the counter when I got back. So it goes.
Several months later I dealt with a minor collision a few miles away. One car was inhabited by a pleasant man in his early seventies who was profoundly stoned and admitted his culpability even before he fell down on the sidewalk. The other contained a woman I recognized as having been at the table in the bar. She was sober, calm, and cute. She’d never even noticed me in the bar, but she had by the time this incident was sorted out. I was brisk and efficient with the public. She liked that, I guess. As I came to understand, Amy Ellen Dwyer valued the brisk and efficient above most else.
A couple weeks later, I was back in the bar, and so was she. Facial recognition occurred in both parties, and I briskly and efficiently stopped by to say hello. Though hitting on the victims of crime was viewed by many as a key perk of the job, it lay outside my own personal experience and I expected nothing to come of it. The women left while I was out back sharing a joint with the cook, but when I returned to the bar, I found she had left her number with the bartender.
“Call me,” the note said. “Without delay.”
We met up a few days later and had one of those dates where you start one place and then find yourself in another, and then another, not remembering how or why you moved—because the talk just seems to keep coming and this sense of freedom, of not having to stay put to protect your position and mood, seems to be at the heart of the evening. In the end it became kind of a game, each of us suggesting somewhere more obscure or offbeat to go next, until finally we found ourselves sitting side by side on a bench in a very touristy location and realizing that it felt okay because we didn’t feel much like locals either that night, but as if our lives and selves were in the midst of being freshly minted before our eyes. They were.
When you meet someone you love, then you change for good. That’s why the other person will never know or understand the earlier you, and why you can never change back. And why, when that person starts to go, you’ll feel the tear deep in your heart long before your head has the slightest clue what’s going on.
It was hard not to think of that evening now that I was here, and of others that had come after it, good and bad. I dropped down Ashland to Ocean Front, headed up past Shutters Hotel, under the long ramp road from the pier up to Ocean Avenue, then onto the concrete path on the beach itself. There’s a run of buildings just up from there, right down on the sand, some of the earliest houses built in the area. They’ve always looked strange to me, incongruous, faux-English mansions behind fences on the beach, squatting in the shadow of the high bluffs like imps on the chest of someone who sleeps.
The lights on the pier were all on now. I got out my phone and called Amy’s number.
“Hey,” she said. “Sorry I haven’t checked in. Got hung up at Nat’s. Only just left. You know what she’s like.” I didn’t say anything. “How are things back at the homestead? Got the place warmed up?”
“I’m not in Birch Crossing,” I said.
“Oh?”
“I’m in Santa Monica. I flew down this afternoon.”
There was a pause. “And why would you have done that?”
“Why do you think?”
“No idea, hon. Sounds kind of wacky to me.”
“Hardly seen you this last week. I thought it might be nice for us to meet up. Check out the old haunts.”
“Babe, that’s a really sweet idea, but I’ve got like a ton of work to do. Need to get my ducks in a row for the meeting tomorrow.”
“I don’t really care,” I said. “I’m your husband. I’m in town. Come meet me, for coffee at least.”
There was silence for maybe five seconds. “Where?”
“You know where.”
She laughed. “Well, actually, I don’t. Not being a mind reader.”
“So pick a place,” I said. “And be there soon.”
“You’re really not going to tell me where?”
“You choose. And just go there.”
“Jack, this is a dumb game.”
“No,” I said. “It’s not.”