I am drifting in the center of all those tiny hexagons. Is it Boston time or California time? Is it my empty body or Claire Eberhardt’s hungry body or Violeta Alvarado’s, cremated to ash?
Those mysterious faded aqua snapshots of her life are never far from my mind: brothers lined up in a solemn semicircle, Grandma Constanza holding a baby, the parrot. What would it be like to grow up in a house without walls? To sleep on a bamboo mat on bare ground, through a dry season of parched dust and a wet season of steamy rain — to live in a house that is open to it all?
Suppose I made the trip to El Salvador and located the Alvarado encampment? If I walked through that landscape, past male cousins stripping the kernels off dried corn with their fingers, females grinding it in a
• • •
I awake to rain needling the windows, turn over in the bed and reach for the TV remote. My shoulder is feeling better but my lower back is stiff and sore. Channel 9 unfolds on the screen. A strong Pacific cold front is driving sleet and showers along the entire West Coast of the United States. It is thirty degrees in San Francisco, hailstorms during the night. There will be two feet of new snow in Nevada by tomorrow and more storm systems are backed up over the ocean like airplanes at LAX. When I hear there is flash flooding in Palm Springs, I grab the phone and hit two digits for Poppy’s number, which I have stored on speed dialing.
“Poppy? How’re you doing? Staying dry?”
“I just spent a night in the hospital.”
“What happened?”
My grandfather has never been hospitalized in his life. He must have sliced his finger on one of those old- fashioned double-edged razors he has always used along with menthol shaving cream.
“Up around the eleventh hole I had a pain in my gut. They panicked and called an ambulance.”
“Jesus Christ, Poppy.”
“Well it was just a goddamn waste of time. They kept me overnight, couldn’t find anything wrong.”
“It must have been the night I called you,” I gush apologetically, “I was out of town on an investigation, and nobody picked up the phone. I feel terrible that you went through all that alone—”
But he interrupts, “What was so important at four in the morning?”
“I was lonely.” I laugh to take the edge off it, but when he doesn’t answer I feel compelled to explain to the silence. “I was drunk.”
There is a pause, then, “You’re a jerk.”
“Thanks, Poppy.”
His voice is strong, mine is shrunken and weak.
“Do you have a drinking problem?”
“No, I do not have a drinking problem.”
“Then don’t be a jerk, especially on the job.”
His belligerence triggers a sulky rage: “Nobody else seems to think I’m a jerk. They gave me a case that involves Jayne Mason.”
“What’s the case?”
“She alleges a physician got her hooked on painkillers he obtained from Mexico.”
“Did you get to meet Jayne Mason?”
“Interviewed her at length.”
“What was she like?”
“The woman of your dreams, Poppy.”
“We’d get along.”
They probably would. “It’s a prestige case. Came to us through the Director. That’s why I was in Boston.”
“You’d better bust your boiler on it.”
“What do you think I’m doing?”
“And not be a jerk.”
No use. You can’t win. By the end of the conversation with Poppy I am spent. I sit on the edge of the bed naked and shivering, drenched with guilt because I got angry with him, chastising myself for not being there when he went into the hospital, worried about what these abdominal pains could portend … and filled with a new, inarticulate dread as icy as the cold rain.
• • •
I down three Tylenols and some instant oatmeal, pull on jeans and knee-high rubber boots, zip up the parka, tighten the hood, and slosh through the flooded walkways to the freezing cold garage where the Barracuda, standing in six inches of water, refuses to start.
“Stay home,” Rosalind tells me over the phone. “They’re asking federal employees to stay home unless they’re essential to their department.”
“That lets me out.”
She puts me on hold, then comes back on. “Except for you, Ana dear.” She continues, lowering her voice, “Special Agent in Charge Galloway just walked by. He wants you in here.”
An hour later Donnato inches his car along the narrow service road outside my balcony and honks. He must have badged the guard to get inside the complex. The downpour is so intense that just running out from the lobby completely saturates my jacket.
I jump inside and slam the door.
“So the Barracuda finally died.”
“She didn’t die, she just didn’t want to get her tires wet.”
“Why do you drive that wreck?”
“It’s romantic.”
“For the same money you could have gotten a cherry old Mustang.”
“Everybody drives Mustangs. Nobody drives a Barracuda with a scarlet paint job like some old floozy.”
“This is why I worry about you.” He hands me hot coffee in a paper cup. Suddenly I am hungry all over again.
“It smells like a bakery in here.”
“I got you Zen muffins.”
“You did?”
Zen muffins are huge heavy balls of blueberries and fiber that are sometimes the only thing I eat for lunch. It takes an effort to find them and I am touched. The inviting scent of coffee, the fogged windows and the rain outside, our wet overclothes — the way he won’t exactly look at me — slams me hard with the same illicit longing I had sitting in the car waiting to enter the tunnel in Boston, of Donnato and I as real lovers, each moment together part of the continuous invention of our own special world.
But in the next instant I am slammed hard the other way by the impossibility, the “jerkiness” of it, as Poppy would say.
“I should leave town more often,” I observe with wry sadness.
“Yeah, I miss your butt now that you’re on this glamour assignment.”
“Let’s face it: I am glamorous.”
He looks over. “Especially with that hood.”
I unzip it self-consciously. “I brought you back a meatball sub from Boston but left it on the kitchen counter.”
“Very thoughtful.” He is distracted now, backing out carefully, brushing the dark leathery leaves of holly
