corner of her mouth. Why can I remember this and not, precisely, the rest?
“Fungus. On your lip.”
She wipes it off. She turns the smile dial down to 45 percent. This is not good news. I see the condensation on her water glass, the damp stain on the red tablecloth, the cracked empty shell of the fortune cookie on the small white plate. In the corner of my eye, I see the waiter with the left ankle limp plodding our direction with the cookie’s replacement.
“Boy?” I know what she means and I can’t believe it.
“You’re having a son.” She’s up to 70 percent but the eyes still glisten.
“I thought we weren’t going to. .”
“You know I’m more organized than that.”
I know she is. Of course she was going to find out. But I’d have thought it would be a joint decision. It’s not like her to find out without me. The limping waiter nears, extending the white plate with care befitting royalty. My majestic woman, my queen mother, deserves nothing less.
“That’s amazing. Amazing. Amazing! I will immediately get baseball mitts and have someone teach me how to teach him to throw a slider. I peaked out at curveball. Though you know that you shouldn’t learn to throw junk before the age of one. It can hurt development of the wrist.”
The waiter sets down the second fortune cookie in the middle of the table. Polly eyes it and dials it back to 28 percent. For Polly, this is a frown. She reaches for the cookie and covers it with her hand.
“What? Is he. . is the boy healthy?”
She picks up the cookie. She cradles it. “Completely. Gestating beautifully. Five months of crinkly perfection, currently snarfing sixteen pounds of digested lemon chicken.”
“Then we should drink. I’ll drink for three.” I look at her face, looking at the cookie. “What’s the other shoe? Drop it, already.”
“Nat, we’ve always been. .” She’s still looking down. “Different kinds of people.”
My heart drops a thousand feet from the apex of news about my unborn son. “So. And?”
“There are lots of different ways to raise a family.”
I’m frozen. I don’t want to ask her what she means. I want time to stop. That’s because I know Polly. And I know that she doesn’t bring subjects up for discussion. By the time she raises a serious issue, she’s already figured out how to resolve it. Whatever she says next is going to make me very unhappy.
She looks down into her hands. With two thumbs, she cracks the second fortune cookie. We look down at it, stunned by what we see there.
“I’m so sorry.” Her smile has dipped below zero.
“What?” This I whisper aloud. In the present. “You’re leaving me.”
Standing in the closet, I open my eyes. Then close them again. I can’t seem to remember how the rest of the conversation goes. I close down and I look at the cookie she’s opened and I can’t believe my eyes either.
I hear a noise. It’s coming from the present. I open my eyes. The closet door swings open. I see a burly former Sandy Vello, the very-much-not-dead reality-TV wannabe, holding a rifle.
I say: “What did I do wrong?”
42
“Journalist?” I very nearly laugh when Sandy says it because it sounds like she opened the closet and saw a totally random animal species, maybe armadillo.
She steps forward, gun very much aimed at my chest. She’s half in darkness, dimly lit across half her face by the moonlight peeking through the slatted shades.
“You packing?”
I assume she’s asking me if I’m armed and again, despite the myriad forces working against me, I also nearly laugh at her deliberate and dramatic language. She’s playing to a nonexistent audience.
I hold up my hands, surrendering.
“I can’t risk that you’re armed. Turn around.”
I do so. I feel her left hand pat my pants pockets, front and back. I like my chances if I whirl around and tackle her at the knees. She’d be unable to shoot me given the angle and size of the weapon. For that matter, I’m not sure she has the willpower or desire to shoot me, or anyone. She’s a narcissist, not a killer. But narcissists have extraordinary powers of rationalization.
“Don’t think about it. I’m well within my rights to shoot you.” She smacks the butt of her rifle against the back of my head. The blow is meant as more of an admonition than an effort to knock me unconscious. But it’s a sufficient surprise that I buckle against the shelves and start sliding to my knees. I blink, orient.
Instant message to self: don’t underestimate Sandy.
“Journalist. Where am I now? Isn’t that the story you said you were doing?”
“I can help you, Sandy.” I’m still facing away from her. My hands brace loosely against a pile of neatly folded sweaters. I pull myself up.
“Where I am now is pointing a gun at your back. That’s where I am. You can quote me.”
At rifle-point, she marches me to the dining room. She watches me closely as she moves to the other side of the table, turns a chair around so that she’s straddling it, sits. She rests the rifle on the dining-room table, finger laced through the trigger.
“We printed out pictures of Donovan and pasted his picture on the tree and Clyde taught me to shoot.”
“Donovan?”
“Stop playing stupid. I’ve never bought that act from you.”
Donovan. The guy from the reality-TV show.
“Clyde says I’m the best shot he’s ever seen for a beginner. He says I’ve got the kind of focus that could’ve made me a sniper.”
“I can help you,” I repeat.
“I don’t want any press. And I’m not just some volunteer teacher, a guidance counselor at juvy. And if you print that, I’ll come after you with lawyers. This is a stepping-stone.”
I look at her, trying to make sense of the situation. Does she have any idea what she’s involved with?
“You work for the men from China. You’re supposed to test me,” she says.
I shake my head. “Which men?” I see Sandy’s index finger tighten on the trigger. It’s a good reminder of the reality I face. Under other circumstances, I might be able to manipulate Sandy, but she’s pushed well beyond her limits. She’s got red skin around her eyebrows and at the edge of her hairline-without a doubt where the fire at the learning annex singed her. She’s likely plenty scared, or should be. Scared plus narcissistic equal danger.
“Look at my arm, Sandy.”
I start to push my jacket up on my left forearm. My captor lifts the rifle. I hold up my hands, surrender. I explain I want to show her my own wounds. I remove my wool gray jacket, lay it on the floor. I hold up my arms, palms down.
“You need to do forearm curls,” Sandy says.
“It’s my own fire damage.”
The hair on the back of my hands has been singed to curly nubs. I brush my left forearm, causing some of the dried brush to flake away.
I start to talk.
I explain that I’d come to talk to her more at the annex, arriving just in time to see her nearly engulfed in flames. Obviously, I was beyond piqued, so I looked back through my notes, found her references to Clyde and then tracked down his house.
She fairly interjects any number of plausible objections, such as why I would have then smashed her car and snuck into the house.
“I’m a freelance investigative journalist.”
“Bullshit.”
“I got a tip that something strange was going on at PRISM.”
