table. 'You said he's on the bird streets?' he asked.
'Blue Jay or Oriole, maybe.'
'An asshole like Conner probably put title of his new house in the name of a living trust or whatever to make him harder to track down. But someone always fucks up. DirecTV or DMV registration or something goes in his name. Wait for me outside.'
I went out and sat in his lawn chair, wondering what he thought about when he contemplated the same view. Finally he emerged.
With great ceremony he handed me the crayon drawing, an address now scrawled on the reverse. He snickered. 'Nice part of town your boy took up in.' He waved me out of his chair. 'I'll ask around a bit about Conner, see if anything comes back.'
Something about actually having the address made me uneasy. As a movie star, Keith Conner seemed like fair game, but of course that was bullshit. Digging into his life was invasive. And the past two days had retaught me the meaning of the word. My actions--and my motives--gave me sudden pause. But I folded the paper into my pocket anyway. 'Thanks, Punch.'
He waved me off.
I took a few steps to the car, then turned. 'Why'd you help me out? I mean, with everything you were saying about calling in favors?'
He rubbed his eyes, hard, digging with his thumb and forefinger. When he looked up, they were more bloodshot than before. 'When I had the kid in the minute and a half before I fucked it all up and Judy lowered the boom on custody, that time he got jammed up in school? You helped him. That book report.'
'It was nothing.'
'Not to him it wasn't.' He trudged back to his lawn chair.
When I pulled out, he was just sitting there motionless, watching the facade of his house.
My apprehension grew on my way home, rising with the altitude as I crawled up Roscomare in evening traffic. All the lights were off at the Millers'. I pulled in to the garage next to Ari's white pickup, then went back and checked the mailbox--lots of bills, but no DVD.
I let go a breath I hadn't known I'd been holding. Don and Martinique were minding their own business, our mailbox was clear, and all was momentarily right with the world.
When I opened the front door, an alarm screeched through the house. I started, dropping my briefcase, papers sliding out across the floor. A door shoved open upstairs, and a moment later Ariana thumped down the stairs, wielding a badminton racket. Taking note of me, she exhaled, then jabbed at the keypad by the banister. The alarm silenced.
I said, 'Lawn party?'
'It was the first thing I could grab in the closet.'
'There's a baseball bat in the corner. A tennis racket. But badminton? What were you gonna do, pelt the intruder with birdies?'
'Yeah, and then he'd slip on your papers.'
We took a moment to smirk at our feeble reactions.
'The new code is 27093,' she said. 'The new keys are in the drawer.'
Tonight, if I wanted to check the property, I'd have to remember to turn off the alarm before going outside. We stood there looking at each other, me with papers across my shoes, her with a badminton racket at her side. Suddenly awkward.
'Okay,' I said cautiously. Her implicit ultimatum from last night hung between us, clogging the air. I knew I had to say something, but I just couldn't land on it. 'Well, good night,' I offered lamely.
'Good night.'
We regarded each other some more, not sure what to do. In a way the strained politeness was even worse than the standoff atmosphere that we'd been inhabiting these past months.
Defeated, Ari forced a smile. It trembled at the edges. 'Want me to leave you the racket?'
'Given the size of his hands, I think it would just aggravate him.'
She paused by the banister and punched in the alarm code to rearm the system. A moment later, through the open bedroom door, I could hear rerun-reliable Bob Newhart.
Even after the door closed, I stood at the bottom of the dark stairs, looking up.
Chapter 14
I slept fitfully on the couch again, rising for good when the morning light once more accented the futility of semi-sheer curtains. Swiftly, I got up and raced to the front of the house, anxious to see if another DVD had been folded into our morning paper. I yanked the door open, forgetting about the alarm until I heard the blare of it in my skull. Racing back to the pad, I turned it off. Ariana was at the top of the stairs, hand pressed to her chest, breathing hard.
'Sorry. Just me. I was checking outside for . . .'
'Is there one?'
'I don't know. Hang on.' The front door was still open. I jogged across to retrieve the newspaper and searched it, dropping rumpled sections all over the foyer. 'No.'
'Okay,' she said. 'Okay. Maybe this whole thing'll just blow over.' She reached out, knocked drywall superstitiously.
I had my doubts, but so did she. No need to say it.
We moved through the morning routine on autopilot, tamping down panic, doing our best not to pause and acknowledge the threat hanging over us. Shower, coffee, brief polite exchanges, mariposa from the greenhouse. Orange again. I wondered what to make of that.
After checking my pseudo-security footage of the porch and walk, then repositioning the camcorder in the lady palm, I hurried out, eager to keep moving. Once again I stood in the garage, the slanted sheet of sunlight through the open door capturing the trunk of my car, the wedding dress peering out at me through the clear side of the plastic bin. For the first morning in recent memory, I didn't want to sneak around to watch my wife. It took me a moment to figure out I was afraid. Afraid that she'd be crying, and maybe more afraid that she wouldn't.
I climbed into the Camry, reversed out into the driveway. Cars whizzed behind me, the morning commute well under way. On bad days it could take me five minutes to back out onto Roscomare. I tapped the wheel impatiently; I had a full schedule of classes in front of me. And the piece of paper on the passenger seat had Keith Conner's address scrawled on it in Punch's hand.
Movement next door caught my attention. Don strolling to his driveway-parked Range Rover, talking into a Bluetooth earpiece. He was focused on his conversation, gesturing, as if that would help drive home his point. A moment later Martinique came running after him with his forgotten laptop carrier. She wore workout clothes, spandex to show off the new body. It was practically her uniform; the woman worked out four hours a day. Don paused to take the laptop. She leaned forward to kiss him good-bye, but he'd already turned to climb into his truck. He pulled out, taking advantage of a break in traffic I'd been too distracted to notice. Martinique stood perfectly still in the driveway, not looking after him, not heading back to the house. Her face was surgery smooth, expressionless. Her eyes moved, just slightly, focusing on me, and I could tell that she knew I'd watched what had just transpired. She lowered her head and walked briskly inside.
I sat for a long time, the beat-up dashboard looking back at me. My eyes pulled again to the paper in the passenger seat with the address. I flipped it over so Punch's kid's crayon drawing was faceup. A big, sloppy sun, stick figures holding hands. A heartbreaking picture, primitive and wistful.
I put the car in park, climbed out. When I came in, Ariana was sitting where she always sat when I left, on the arm of the couch. She looked surprised.
I said, 'I have spent six weeks trying to find any way not to be in love with you.'
Her mouth came slightly ajar. She lifted a shaking hand, set her mug down on the coffee table. 'Any luck?'
'None. I'm fucked.'
We faced each other across the length of the room. I felt something budge in my chest, emotion shifting, the logjam starting to break up.
She swallowed hard, looked away. Her mouth was quivering like it wanted to smile and cry at the same time. 'So where's that leave us?' she asked.
