Although he could never again wear a badge, Noah carried in his mind a cop’s rope of suspicion, which he now tied in a hangman’s knot. “What answer?” he asked, recalling the Circle of Friends thug with the snake tattoo on his arm and the platitude on his T-shirt.
“Ice cream, of course!” With a flourish, she plucked the lid off the insulated rectangular serving pan that stood on the cart.
Inside the server were vanilla ice-cream sundaes with chocolate sauce, toasted coconut, and crowning maraschino cherries. Wendy was bringing a bedtime treat to her trouble-plagued wards.
Recognizing the sudden hardness in Noah’s demeanor, she said, “What did you think I was going to say?”
“Love. I thought you would say love is the answer.” Her sweet gamine face wasn’t designed for ironic smiles, but she tricked one out of it anyway. “Judging by the men I’ve fallen for, ice cream beats love every time.” Finally he smiled.
“Will Laura want a sundae?” she asked.
“She’s not in any condition to feed herself right now. Maybe if I helped her into a chair and fed her myself —“
“No, no, Mr. Farrel. I’ll distribute the rest of these and then see if she wants the last one. I’ll feed her if I can. I love taking care of her. Taking care of all these special people… that’s my ice cream.”
Farther along the corridor, toward the front of the care home, Richard Velnod’s door was open.
Rickster, liberator of ladybugs and mice, stood in the middle of his room, in bright yellow pajamas, savoring his ice cream while gazing out the window.
“Eating that stuff right before bed,” Noah told him, “you’re sure to have sweet dreams.”
Rickster’s slightly slurred voice was further numbed by the cold treat: “You know what’s a really good thing? Sundays on Wednesday.” At first Noah didn’t get it.
“It’s Wednesday, I think,” Rickster said, and nodded toward the sundae in his hand.
“Oh. Yeah. Nice things when you don’t expect them. That makes them even better. You’re right. Here’s to Sundaes on Wednesdays.” “You turning yourself loose?” Rickster asked. “Yeah. Yeah, I’m leaving.”
With only a wistful expression, Rickster said that being able to turn yourself loose, whenever you wanted to go, was a really good thing, too, better even than Sundaes on Wednesday.
Outside the Haven of the Lonesome and the Long Forgotten, under trellises draped with bougainvillea, Noah took deep breaths of the warm night air. On the way to his car — another rustbucket Chevy — he tried to settle his nerves.
The suspicion he’d directed at Wendy Quail had been misplaced.
Laura was safe.
In the days ahead, if any of Congressman Sharmer’s Circle of Friends couldn’t resist a little payback, they would come for Noah, not for his sister. Jonathan Sharmer was a thug wrapped in the robes of compassion and fairness that were the costume of preference among politicians, but he was still reliably a thug. And one of the few rules by which the criminal class lived — not counting the more psychotic street gangs — was the injunction against settling grudges by committing violence on family members who weren’t in the business. Wives and children were untouchable. And sisters.
The rattletrap engine turned over on the first try. The other car had always needed coaxing. The hand-brake release worked smoothly, the gear shift didn’t stick much, and the clatter-creak of the aged frame and body wasn’t loud enough to interfere with conversation, supposing that he’d had anyone to talk to other than himself. Hell, it was like driving a Mercedes-Benz.
Chapter 24
Brushing without toothpaste is poor dental maintenance, but the flavor of a bedtime cocktail isn’t enhanced by a residue of Pepsodent.
After a mintless scrubbing of her teeth, Micky retreated to her tiny bedroom, which she’d already stocked with a plastic tumbler and an ice bucket. In the bottom drawer of her small dresser, she kept a supply of cheap lemon-flavored vodka.
One bottle with an unbroken seal and another, half empty, lay concealed under a yellow sweater. Micky wasn’t hiding the booze from Geneva; her aunt knew that she enjoyed a drink before bed— and that she usually had one whether or not she enjoyed it.
Micky kept the vodka under the sweater because she didn’t want to see it each time that she opened the drawer in search of something else. The sight of this stash, when she wasn’t immediately in need of it, had the power to dispirit her, and even to stir a heart-darkening cloud from a sediment of shame.
Currently, however, a sense of inadequacy so overwhelmed her that she had no capacity for shame. In this chill of helplessness, familiar to her since childhood, an icy resentment sometimes formed, and from it she often generated a blinding blizzard of anger that isolated her from other people, from life, from all hope.
To avoid brooding too much about her impotence in the matter of Leilani Klonk, Micky loaded the tumbler with two shots of anesthesia, over ice. She promised herself at least a second round of the same gauge, with the hope that these double-barreled blasts would blow her into sleep before helplessness bred anger, because inevitably anger left her tossing sleepless in the sheets.
She had been drunk only once since moving in with Geneva a week ago. In fact she’d gotten through two of these seven days without any alcohol whatsoever. She wouldn’t get sloppy tonight, just numb enough to stop caring about helpless girls — the one next door and the one that she herself had been not many years ago.
After stripping down to panties and a tank top, she sat in bed, atop the sheets, sipping cold lemon vodka in the warm darkness.
At the open window, the night lay breathless.
From the freeway arose the drone of traffic, ceaseless at any hour. This was a less romantic sound than the rush and rumble of the trains to which she had listened on many other nights.
Nonetheless, she could imagine that the people passing on the highway were in some cases traveling from one point of contentment to another, even from happiness to happiness, in lives with meaning, purpose, satisfaction. Certainly not all of them. Maybe not most of them. But some of them.
For bleak periods of her life, she’d been unable to entertain enough optimism to believe anyone might be truly happy, anywhere, anytime. Geneva said this newfound fragile hopefulness represented progress, and Micky wished this would prove true; but she might be setting herself up for disappointment. Faith in the basic Tightness of the world, in the existence of meaning, required courage, because with it came the need to take responsibility for your actions — and because every act of caring exposed the heart to a potential wound.
The soft knock wasn’t opportunity, but Micky said, “Come in.”
Geneva left the door half open behind her. She sat on the edge of the bed, sideways to her niece.
The dim glow of the hallway ceiling fixture barely invaded the room. The shadows negotiated with the light instead of retreating from it.
Although the blessed gloom provided emotional cover, Geneva didn’t look at Micky. She stared at the bottle on the dresser.
That piece of furniture and all else upon it remained shadowy shapes, but the bottle had a strange attraction for light, and the vodka glimmered like quicksilver.
Eventually, Geneva asked, “What are we going to do?”
“I don’t know.”
“Neither do I. But we can’t just do nothing.”
“No, we can’t. I’ve got to think.”
“I try,” Geneva said, “but my mind spins around it till I feel like something inside my head’s going to fly loose. She’s so sweet.”
“She’s tough, too. She knows what she can handle.”
“Oh, little mouse, what’s wrong with me that I let the child go back there?”
Geneva hadn’t said “little mouse” in fifteen years or longer. When Micky heard this pet name, her throat
