The bathroom featured a single window at which the shade was currently raised, but the space remained meagerly illuminated because the glass was frosted and because the incoming sunlight was filtered through the graceful limbs of a metrosideros. The silhouettes of leaves fluttered on the pane.
In the mirror above the sink, my reflection was little more than a shadow. Even if I switched on the light, I would not have had a clear look at myself, because the single bulb in the overhead fixture was of low wattage and had a peach tint.
Only rarely have I seen my face in full light.
Sasha says that I remind her of James Dean, more as he was in
I myself don’t perceive the resemblance. The hair is the same, yes, and the pale blue eyes. But he looked so wounded, and I do not see myself that way.
I am not James Dean. I am no one but me, Christopher Snow, and I can live with that.
Finished with the lotion, I returned to the bedroom. Orson raised his head from the armchair to savor the coconut scent.
I was already wearing athletic socks, Nikes, blue jeans, and a black T-shirt. I quickly pulled on a black denim shirt with long sleeves and buttoned it at the neck.
Orson trailed me downstairs to the foyer. Because the porch was deep with a low ceiling, and because two massive California live oaks stood in the yard, no direct sun could reach the sidelights flanking the front door; consequently, they were not covered with curtains or blinds. The leaded panes — geometric mosaics of clear, green, red, and amber glass — glowed softly like jewels.
I took a zippered, black leather jacket from the coat closet. I would be out after dark, and even following a mild March day, the central coast of California can turn chilly when the sun goes down.
From the closet shelf, I snatched a navy-blue, billed cap and pulled it on, tugging it low on my head. Across the front, above the visor, in ruby-red embroidered letters, were the words Mystery Train.
One night during the previous autumn, I had found the cap in Fort Wyvern, the abandoned military base inland from Moonlight Bay. It had been the only object in a cool, dry, concrete-walled room three stories underground.
Although I had no idea to what the embroidered words might refer, I had kept the cap because it intrigued me.
As I turned toward the front door, Orson whined beseechingly.
I stooped and petted him. “I’m sure Dad would like to see you one last time, fella. I know he would. But there’s no place for you in a hospital.”
His direct, coal-black eyes glimmered. I could have sworn that his gaze brimmed with grief and sympathy. Maybe that was because I was looking at him through repressed tears of my own.
My friend Bobby Halloway says that I tend to anthropomorphize animals, ascribing to them human attributes and attitudes which they do not, in fact, possess.
Perhaps this is because animals, unlike some people, have always accepted me for what I am. The four- legged citizens of Moonlight Bay seem to possess a more complex understanding of life — as well as more kindness — than at least some of my neighbors.
Bobby tells me that anthropomorphizing animals, regardless of my experiences with them, is a sign of immaturity. I tell Bobby to go copulate with himself.
I comforted Orson, stroking his glossy coat and scratching behind his ears. He was curiously tense. Twice he cocked his head to listen intently to sounds I could not hear — as if he sensed a threat looming, something even worse than the loss of my father.
At that time, I had not yet seen anything suspicious about Dad’s impending death. Cancer was only fate, not murder — unless you wanted to try bringing criminal charges against God.
That I had lost both parents within two years, that my mother had died when she was only fifty-two, that my father was only fifty-six as he lay on his deathbed…well, all this just seemed to be my poor luck — which had been with me, literally, since my conception.
Later, I would have reason to recall Orson’s tension — and good reason to wonder if he had sensed the tidal wave of trouble washing toward us.
Bobby Halloway would surely sneer at this and say that I am doing worse than anthropomorphizing the mutt, that now I am ascribing
Anyway, I petted and scratched and generally comforted Orson until a horn sounded in the street and then, almost at once, sounded again in the driveway.
Sasha had arrived.
In spite of the sunscreen on my neck, I turned up the collar of my jacket for additional protection.
From the Stickley-style foyer table under a print of Maxfield Parrish’s
With my hand on the hammered-copper doorknob, I turned to Orson once more. “We’ll be all right.”
In fact, I didn’t know quite how we could go on without my father. He was our link to the world of light and to the people of the day.
More than that, he loved me as no one left on earth could love me, as only a parent could love a damaged child. He understood me as perhaps no one would ever understand me again.
“We’ll be all right,” I repeated.
The dog regarded me solemnly and chuffed once, almost pityingly, as if he knew that I was lying.
I opened the front door, and as I went outside, I put on the wraparound sunglasses. The special lenses were totally UV-proof.
My eyes are my point of greatest vulnerability. I can take no risk whatsoever with them.
Sasha’s green Ford Explorer was in the driveway, with the engine running, and she was behind the wheel.
I closed the house door and locked it. Orson had made no attempt to slip out at my heels.
A breeze had sprung up from the west: an onshore flow with the faint, astringent scent of the sea. The leaves of the oaks whispered as if transmitting secrets branch to branch.
My chest grew so tight that my lungs felt constricted, as was always the case when I was required to venture outside in daylight. This symptom was entirely psychological but nonetheless affecting.
Going down the porch steps and along the flagstone walk to the driveway, I felt weighed down. Perhaps this was how a deep-sea diver might feel in a pressure suit with a kingdom of water overhead.
2
When I got into the Explorer, Sasha Goodall said quietly, “Hey, Snowman.”
“Hey.”
I buckled my safety harness as Sasha shifted into reverse.
From under the bill of my cap, I peered at the house as we backed away from it, wondering how it would appear to me when next I saw it. I felt that when my father left this world, all of the things that had belonged to him would look shabbier and diminished because they would no longer be touched by his spirit.
It is a Craftsman-period structure, in the Greene and Greene tradition: ledger stone set with a minimum of mortar, cedar siding silvered by weather and time, entirely modern in its lines but not in the least artificial or insubstantial, fully of the earth and formidable. After the recent winter rains, the crisp lines of the slate roof were softened by a green coverlet of lichen.
As we reversed into the street, I thought that I saw the shade nudged aside at one of the living-room windows, at the back of the deep porch, and Orson’s face at the pane, his paws on the sill.
As she drove away from the house, Sasha said, “How long since you’ve been out in this?”
“Daylight? A little over nine years.”
“A novena to the darkness.”
