future. A two-bedroom condo with an airliner-sized kitchen and a single bathroom was not the ideal spot for entertaining mutual families, so she had prepared herself for the inevitable division of time between the end of November and the beginning of January: Thanksgiving in one location, Christmas Eve in another, Christmas Day at a third, and New Year's Eve together at home alone in front of the artificial fire, with fruit and champagne. Only, that wasn't how the holidays played out because Eric told her the painful story of his estrangement from his parents: about the hunting accident that had caused the estrangement and what had followed that accident.
“I tripped and the gun went off,” he confessed one night in the darkness. “If I'd known what to… I didn't know what to
“I'm so sorry,” she'd said and she'd pulled his head to her breast because his voice had broken and his body trembled and he clung to her and she wasn't used to a man showing emotion. “Your own brother. Eric, what a horrible thing.”
“He was eighteen. They tried to forgive me. But he was… Brent was like the crown prince to them. I couldn't take his place. I drifted off eventually. Just a bit at first. Then more and more. They decided to let me. It was best for us all. We couldn't get over it. We couldn't get past it.”
Charlie tried to imagine what it had been like for him: growing to adulthood and then toward middle age and always knowing he'd shot his own brother. They'd been birding, out at dawn at the edge of the desert where the doves wintered. They'd hunted birds from childhood, first with their father and then- when Brent was old enough to drive-on their own. And on their second such trip together, the worst had happened.
“They probably forgave you years ago,” she'd said to her husband loyally. “Have you tried to contact them?”
“I don't want to see it in their eyes. The looking at me and trying to seem like there's nothing beneath that look but love.”
“Well, there's not hate beneath it.”
“No. Just sorrow, which I put there. Being dumb. Being slipshod. Not holding the gun right. Not watching my feet.”
“You were only fifteen,” Charlie protested.
“I was old enough.”
They had a right to know that he was dead, however. So even though Charlie had no idea where Marilyn and Clark Lawton lived, she determined she would find them and give them the information. She knew that Eric would want it that way. The very fact that he had a virtual gallery of family pictures told her that he had never stopped feeling the aching loss of a place in his parents' hearts.
She went to these pictures the day after his funeral, lightheaded and sore-muscled after the trauma of the past week. The grieving tightness in her throat was still there-had been there since the night Eric died-and so was the sickly, feverish sensation she'd had for days. She couldn't remember how it was to feel normal any longer. But things had to be done.
The pictures were in the living room, standing like deliberate, intrusive thoughts at intervals among the books on either side of the fireplace. She knew who every individual was because Eric had told her several times. But he'd identified most of them by first name only, which wasn't helpful in the present circumstances: Aunt Marianne at her high school graduation, Great-Aunt Shirley with Great-Uncle Pat, Grandma Louise
Not that she had expected them to be near. She'd hoped for that, but at the same time she'd already realized that hunting trips taken by teenaged boys to the edge of the desert suggested a town not far away from a place even more arid than the LA suburb where she and Eric had bought their home.
She got out a map of California and considered beginning her search in the south, right at the state border. She could call information for every town that sided the slice of land that was Highway 805. But she got not much farther than Paradise Hills before she reconsidered this painstaking approach.
She went back to the pictures and took them down. She carried them into the kitchen and set them carefully on the granite counter. They were all old pictures, the most recent being Brent at seven, and some of them were tintypes assiduously preserved.
Still, sometimes, she knew, families made note of the subjects of photographs and the locations where the pictures had been taken as well. And if that was the case with Eric's family pictures, there might be a clue as to the current whereabouts of his relatives.
So she eased off the back of each of the frames, and examined the reverse side of the photographs. Only two provided writing. A delicate hand had written
Charlie sighed and began to reassemble the frames and their contents: glass, photograph, cardboard filler, and velvet-covered backing. When she got to the Lawtons' wedding picture, however, she discovered that something besides the glass, the photo, the filler, and the backing had been put into the frame. Perhaps it was because the more recent the photo, the thinner the paper on which it had been printed. But the wedding picture had required something extra to fill up the space between it and the backing. This something was a folded paper, which unfolded turned out to be a blank receipt. Printed at the top of this was
Charlie got out her map again. A shot of excitement and certainty flashed through her when she found Temecula at the edge of the desert, sitting alongside another desert freeway, as if waiting for her to discover its secrets.
She didn't go at once. She planned to head out the very next day, but she awakened to find that the tightness in her throat had become a burning and the soreness in her muscles had metamorphosed into chills. It was more than simply exhaustion and grief, she realized. She'd come down with the flu.
She felt resignation but very little surprise. She'd been running on nerves alone for days: with virtually no food and even less sleep. It was no shock to find herself become a breeding ground for illness.
She forced herself to the drugstore and prowled the length of the cold-and-flu aisle, blearily reading the labels on medicines that promised a quick fix for-or at least temporary relief from-the nasty little bug that had invaded her body. She knew the routine: lots of liquids and bed rest, so she stocked up on Cup of Soup, Cup of Noodles, Lipton's, and Top Ramen. As long as the microwave worked, she would be all right, she told herself. Eric's family could wait the twenty-four or forty-eight hours it would take for her to regain her strength.
Thus, it was two days later when Charlie set out for Temecula. Even then, she did so in the company of Bethany Franklin. For although she felt somewhat buoyed by the forty-eight hours of bed rest interrupted only by forays to the refrigerator and the microwave, she didn't trust herself to drive such a distance without a companion.
Bethany didn't like the idea of her going at all. She said bluntly, “You look like hell,” when she roared up in her pride and joy, a silver BMW sports car. “You should be in bed, not traipsing around the state looking for… who're we looking for?” She'd brought a bag of Cheetos with her-“absolute nectar of the gods,” she announced, waving the sack like a woman flagging down a taxi-and she munched them as she followed Charlie from the front door into the kitchen. There, the family pictures stood where Charlie had left them. Charlie took up the photo of Eric's parents, along with the receipt from Time on My Side.
She said, “I want to tell his family what happened. I don't know where they are, and this is the only clue I have.”
Bethany took the picture and the receipt as Charlie explained where she'd found the latter. She said, “Why don't we just phone this place, Charles? There's a number.”
“And if Eric's parents own it? What do we say?” Charlie asked. “We can't just tell them about…” She felt tears threaten, again. Again.
“No. You're right. We can't do it on the phone. But you're in no shape to cruise up and down freeways. Let me
