them unless . . . He wanted me to testify that Eric helped me to escape from the police.”
“Stark’s dead. So’s his driver.”
“They’re dead and I’m not?”
Clea stared at Thomas, not comprehending the meaning of his question.
“You were thrown clear,” she explained.
“But we crashed. The car crushed in around us.”
“You were thrown clear. After that the car fell on its back and then the gas tank blew.”
“So the pictures were burned?” Thomas asked.
“Yeah, I guess. Everything burned.”
“I killed them.”
“Don’t be crazy, Tommy. It was an accident. The police think that it was because of dirt on the road. The driver hit the brakes and slid off the side.”
“I grabbed the steering wheel,” Thomas said.
“I would have too, but you couldn’t stop it. You’re lucky that you weren’t killed with them.”
Clea went over to Thomas and kissed him, but in his mind he was still in that careening car, crashing into boulders, counting out the last beats of his life . . .
“ R eal ly ? ” E ri c sa i d that evening when he and Thomas were alone in the hospital room. “He wanted you to testify against me?”
“I think that he planned to marry Raela one day. He said that you stole her from him.”
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“And then you grabbed the wheel and ran the car off the mountain?”
“It was the only thing I could think of. I murdered him, Eric. And I didn’t even lose a leg or nuthin’. And everything burned up; even the steering wheel melted. The pictures all burned. What should I do?”
“What do you wanna do, Tommy?”
This set off a series of thoughts that went all the way back to Thomas’s earliest memories: Eric running fast; Eric laughing out loud; Eric falling and rushing into Branwyn’s arms yelling for her to make the pain go away. He remembered a recurring childhood dream about a wasp as big as a horse chasing him, intent upon stinging him in the chest, in his heart. He ran into a cave that was too small for the hornet to get into, but the enraged insect jabbed its stinger in after him again and again. It stung Thomas in the hand and the leg, in his eye and mouth, but it never got him in the chest and finally it died from all that stinging. That was always when Thomas would wake up, after the wasp had defeated itself. In the dream he never left the cave.
“Tommy?”
“Yeah?”
“It’s not your fault, man. You had to do it.”
In his mind Thomas emerged from the cave. The huge insect lay dying, vibrating its wings in sporadic fits. The stinger had come loose from the abdomen, with the slick entrails following after.
“It’s like nuthin’ makes any sense anymore,” Thomas said to Eric. “Like I fell out of a airplane but then I was okay.”
“What’s wrong with that?”
“It doesn’t make any sense. You’re supposed to die if you fall like that.”
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For some reason Thomas thought about Alicia then. He remembered struggling with the heavy cinder blocks that he and Pedro used to make her tomb. She was dead. She fell over the fence and never got up again.
That a f te rnoon and night Thomas had four visitors.
The first was Clea Frank. She came into his room and sat next to his bed.
“I love you,” she said. “I just came by to tell you that I’m going back to New York to pack, but when I come back we’ll get a place together and you’ll go back to school or whatever you want and I’ll finish my degree.”
Clea kissed Thomas and said something, but he’d been on painkillers and fell asleep, missing her words. He remembered her reassuring tones, though, and he felt that maybe things might be okay.
Wh e n h e woke up again, Raela was standing there.
She gave him a serious look and then sat down next to him.
“Eric told me what happened with my father,” she said.
Thomas didn’t question why his brother would do such a thing. He didn’t utter a sound. He wondered, dispassionately, if the girl had come to get revenge, not because she was angry but because it was the right thing to do.
“He told me about the pictures and his wanting to send him to jail,” she said. “I believe it because that would have been just another day of business for my father. He destroyed people and businesses all the time. He sent men to jail, and then he’d come to my room and tell me how they’d begged 3 1 0
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and cried. He said that he was building a great treasure and that it would one day be mine.”
