“Is that fair? Bringing her into this mess?”
“She’s already in it. Not what we’re planning for Julia, not yet, but she has to be told. So about gettin’ involved, we’ll have to let her decide. Now let’s get over there.”
We arrived at the Sierra Sky Apartments at 6:10. The sunrise was an orange glow above the eastern mountains when we climbed outside stairs to the second floor and paused at the door to number twenty-three.
“You sure about this?” I asked Ma.
“No. But it isn’t very damn often that I’m sure about anything, so let’s do this, see how it goes.”
I rang the bell.
Waited.
Rang again.
A light came on inside, then an outside light. Seconds later, the door opened and Sarah was there in a robe, staring at us.
“Oh, no,” she said. “What . . . ?”
“We need to come in,” Ma said quietly.
Sarah looked terrified as Ma went past her. I put an arm around Sarah’s shoulders, got her away from the door, then closed it behind us. Ma took one of Sarah’s hands. “Jeri . . . It’s Jeri,” she said. “She . . . she . . .” Then Ma started to bawl all over again.
Sarah let out a little cry and started to fall. I took part of her weight, then suddenly had to take all of it when she passed out.
I picked her up and carried her into a bedroom I’d never seen before. A queen-sized bed was rumpled, covers thrown back. I set Sarah down and pulled the covers over her.
She only stayed out for a minute, then her eyes popped open. She tried to sit up. “Jeri . . . Jeri, she’s not . . . oh, please, no—”
Ma sat beside her. “She’s . . . gone. Allie is, too.”
Tears almost splashed out of Sarah’s eyes. Her lips quivered and she started to wail. Ma did her best to keep her from making too much noise. She held her—didn’t say a word, just held her, which was all anyone could do. I stood there like an ox, feeling useless, which of course I was.
It took twenty minutes before we could talk to Sarah and start to get things under control.
“I . . . I have to go to the bathroom,” she said. She got up, went through a door, closed it. Ma went over and opened it, went inside. They came out a few minutes later, Sarah still in her robe, eyes red, still snuffling, and Ma guided her back to bed. Ma took Sarah’s robe as she got under the covers again. I stood there and watched all of this, still feeling perfectly male and useless.
“You two are gonna have to trust me right now,” Ma said. She looked at me and said, “Get into bed and hold her, Mort.”
“Ma—”
“I don’t have time for a big discussion. I know what I’m doing. Take off your jeans and that sweatshirt and get in. I want to see two people with arms around each other in twenty seconds or I’m gonna kick some big tall PI ass all over this room, and I mean it.”
So I stripped down to underwear and got in bed with Sarah and held her. As soon as her arms were around me, she was crying again and I was, too. It barely registered that she was naked, something of a first for me.
Ma gave us a moment, then said, “Okay, I’ve got things to do. It’ll take me a while, at least two hours, probably more like three. When I get back, I’ll let myself in, and if I don’t see you two right where you are now, there’s gonna be hell to pay. You two need each other. You need someone to hold on to. I’ve got another reason for you to stay together, but no time to get into it. When I get back we’ll talk turkey, but right now this is what you need, so stay put.”
She left.
What I learned is that holding another human being is a way of sharing life. Ma left us like that to make us know we weren’t alone in the world, that our lives still meant something because we could give and receive comfort with another human being. It wasn’t sex. It had nothing to do with sex. It was human contact—skin on skin—and it kept us from slipping away. I think if Ma could have been in there with us, she would have, but Ma was tougher than we were. And, like she said, she had things to do. I wasn’t tough. I didn’t know how near I was to death, but suddenly I felt that Sarah was keeping me from sliding over an edge into a place from which I would never return, never be able to reach Julia. And maybe I kept Sarah from sliding over that same dark edge. This was a nightmare that wouldn’t end. There was no end to it because Jeri was dead and that was impossible.
So we held each other and cried and shared the only contact that made sense right then, someone warm, breathing in your arms, keeping you going, and Ma, the toughest person I’ve ever met, did what needed to be done.
She left the house and drove all the way to Fernley, to the house on Old Aspen Road, approached the place with a .38 police special in case Julia was there. She checked the house, then went into the garage and found my gun where I’d dropped it in the dirt. The gun was a loose cannon, no pun intended. Its serial number would put me in the thick of all this. The police would connect Bye with the house since it was
