start to fall to the ground. The door itself looks lightly peppered with buckshot and punctured on the far right, just above the handle, with a hole the size of a baby’s fist.
I slide to the ground and peer through the legs of the dining-room chairs at the doorway. No movement. No fallen body. The whole thing feels both violent and almost comical; melodramatic Sandy Vello makes her last, loud stand.
“Call 911,” Sandy orders.
There’s a pause, then a sound from the outside, the buzzard making some kind of noise near the front door. Hurt? Taking aim? Suddenly, an object flies through the shattered window. It’s making a wailing sound, like an alarm.
“Bomb!” Sandy yells.
I flatten myself and cover my head. I think: Isaac. I see an image of my crinkly baby. Pink, then pale, then blue. Not breathing. What’s wrong with him? He’s so still. I’m paralyzed. Is this how it ends?
I hear footsteps. They’re coming from the outside, shuffling, maybe down the stairs. Definitely down the stairs. Our attacker in full escape; I thought he said he’d protect me.
I look up. I can’t help myself. I should be retreating. I should cover my head but, impulsively, I look up. I peer at the object that flew through the window. The supposed bomb on the floor, between the entrance to the house and the dining-room table. It’s small, wailing like an alarm clock. And it’s not a bomb. Not even close. It’s a cell phone. Not just any cell phone. I know it. I bought it. It’s the cheap-ass Motorola phone I put on the seat of the black Mercedes.
“Not a bomb,” I yell. “A phone. A diversion.”
“What?”
I get an idea. I pull on my sneaker and say: “It’s just a cell phone with the alarm going off. He’s getting away.”
“Fleeing like a little girl.” Triumphant.
“Not if you get a shot at him from the front window.”
She doesn’t respond.
“Sandy, what’s to stop him from going back to his car and getting some actual bomb, or whatever, a gun?”
She starts moving. Peering between the refinished legs of the table, I see her feet churn toward the front of the house. My cue to move. I slink around the back end of the table. I lift my head to see her absorbed, pushing aside a rocking chair that sits beneath a square window at the front of the narrow house. I snag one of the Jugglers from the countertop. Sandy sets down her shotgun, then looks back at me. Just before she sees me, I lower the Juggler and lift my phone. Into it, I shout, “Intruder.” I mouth to Sandy: “911.”
Sandy turns back to the window. She opens a lock on the side and begins to turn a crank at its bottom. Her hand slips, betraying nerves. I can imagine the collision in her brain of neuro-chemicals and ego, the ego compelling her to show her moxie, the chemicals urging her to fall to the floor and remember she’s not a super-secret spy but a physical-fitness devotee caught up in something well beyond her resolve.
The window pops open. I start moving quickly to the door. I reach it and twist the door handle, my silent hopes answered when it turns, unlocked. Sandy lifts the rifle, fumbles it, and seems to hear my movements behind her. My own mordant curiosity-some preternatural inquisitiveness that the Witch would say borders on a death wish-prompts me to pause and see what Sandy decides to do, rather than duck from the window. She starts to raise the weapon in my direction, then hesitates. I do not. I step into the darkness.
Keeping my head down, I fly down the wooden stairs slippery with night, trying not to fall and pretending I may not get shot. Within seconds, I’m on the ground, beside the garage. Then:
Sandy’s pulled the trigger. I look up the side of the house. I’m nearly directly below her, but slightly around the corner of the house. I doubt she’s aiming at me. The angles don’t work. So what, or who, is she aiming at? I peer across the road into the mini-forest. Tall trees, dense, underbrush. No movement. I’m guessing Sandy isn’t shooting at anyone at all. She’s announcing her presence.
And doesn’t she have to reload? I sprint across the road into the underbrush, duck beneath a leafy limb, step onto a rock and feel my knee twist. I stumble forward, drop the Juggler, demi-dive after it, find myself lying on the ground, my head nestled beside a puddle.
I pause. I wait for the pulsing pain to pass. I listen. Silent night. I picture Polly, teary-eyed, holding the fortune cookie, and Isaac, pale in the delivery room, chaotic sounds and nurses and doctors circling, a cacophony of shouting but, for me, everything going terribly silent. My baby boy born, Polly prone on the delivery bed, pale, my dreams on the cusp. Something’s gone terribly, terribly wrong.
I stand. I don’t look back. I stop listening. I don’t care. Shoot me, Sandy, if you will. Capture me, buzzard, if you can.
I sprint in the direction of my car, then stumble, sprint, stumble, sprint, the Juggler somehow in my hand, slippery, the grainy brain images in my pocket.
I reach the Audi. I climb into the car. I whisk it in a tight circle. I pull up to the metal gate, step out of the car, open it, am about to climb back into the car when I hear it. Rustling. To my right, in the darkness and trees. I see it, don’t I? An angry red light. It’s the tip of a cigarette, ten feet deep in the trees, held head-high. I flash on an image from a few hours earlier; a packet of cigarettes in the front seat of the car of the buzzard. In the present, I don’t bother to strain to make out the face behind the cigarette-or to discover if I’m imagining things or not. I drop into the driver’s seat and I gun the car, fishtailing through the gate, then swerving more as I pull a hard left onto the main gravel road.
Seconds later, I pass the house, again without incident. I’m free. Has the buzzard sprung me? Or taken pity?
I pull out my cell phone and, numb-fingered, dial, my brain bursting with questions and theories, not just about the Juggler and the conspirators behind it, but about the reasons my life fell apart. My cozy dream shattered, in a moment over an empty fortune cookie, the pieces strewn over the last agonizing nine months. The phone rings. I picture Faith, the compassion of a nurse, nubile movements of a dancer, the fraudulence of a stage actor. Still, I’m feeling something. It’s deep. It’s affection, a genuine crush. It’s the first time I’ve felt it, maybe that I’ve felt anything, since. .
My thoughts are interrupted when a man answers my cell.
I say: “I have what you’re looking for.”
45
From his groggy silence, I infer skepticism. Maybe I’m projecting. I actually don’t have what he’s looking for. Not all of it. But I have a reasonable bluff. “Brain images,” I say. “And the Juggler.”
“Tomorrow night.”
“Now!”
“Too late.”
The dashboard clock reads 12:30.
“Then I’ll go to the police.” Another bluff.
“I’ll call you back.”
The tires jitter. I’ve moved too far right and I’m sloping down on the slanted edge of the gravel road, pointed at the stump of a once proud redwood. I swerve left. Righted, I gun the car and I exit the rural subdivision, leaving behind Clyde’s fixer-upper, Sandy, maybe Buzzard Bill, a mess of clues I’m starting to connect, I hope.
When I hit the paved road, I take a sharp left. I’m headed in the direction of Highway 280 North, and home. As I reach the highway, the on-ramp appears to split into two unfocused ghost images. For an instant, I can’t tell which of the two ramps is the one that leads me home and which is a blurred vision borne of exhaustion that will lead me to slam my car into the wall.
I pull the car hard to the left. I need sleep. Now. I cross under the highway interchange, still not seeing any
