CHAPTER NINE
ONE
TWO
What I do first is go to Vauxhall’s house.
This is after I’ve dropped Belle off and after she told me that she forgave me for being so rude to her. This is after she told me that she knew I was just trying to process it all and probably just need a good night’s sleep. This is, of course, after she said, “You just call me when you’re ready to get back into it. Just think of me as your mentor!”
At Vauxhall’s all the lights are off. She is asleep. It is nearly one in the morning.
I have no idea how it got so late, but I need to see her right now. I walk over to her window and tap on it lightly. She doesn’t respond, so I tap harder. And I call out, kind of whisper yelling, “Vaux! Wake up, Vaux!”
There is a rustling behind the blinds. A soft light comes on.
Her face, all puffy with sleep, appears at the window, like a gorgeous spook show. When she sees me she grins and pulls the window up and open. Then she leans out, my Juliette, and asks, “Do you know what time it is?”
“This is important,” I say. “It’s crazy the stuff I’ve found out.”
“And what stuff would that be?” She is so cute the way she asks it.
“Jimi. This whole thing is him, him setting it up, and it’s ugly, Vaux.”
She puts on a sad face. It’s not acting.
I switch gears. “Come with me for a drive,” I say.
“Now?”
“Yeah. Right now. Jump into some clothes. Come on.”
Vauxhall shrugs, disappears back inside. I back away and watch a lone red car navigate slowly through a distant intersection. A dog barks. Leaves fall. Weather. Then Vauxhall reappears, jumps out of her bedroom window in jeans and a dark hooded sweater.
THREE
We drive to Stapleton Airport.
The streets are empty.
There’s this side road where the apartments edge the runways. I park there, right at the end of the street, with the hood of the car up against a chain-metal fence. We lie on the hood of the car. It’s hot but feels good.
“We need to talk more about Jimi,” I say. “I need to tell you what I learned about him. It isn’t good, Vaux. What he’s done is-”
Vaux shushes me with her index finger, soft on my lips. “Later,” she says. “Please? Just for a few minutes.”
“Okay.”
I calm down. A little.
Lying there, we’re looking up at the sky and counting stars. Vaux points out a blinking light. One so distant it fades in and out of existence with every blink.
“Satellite,” she says.
Still watching the sky, she says, “My dad worked on satellites. Engineer. Did mechanical stuff for recon satellites like the Corona, later ones. My dad, I told you he killed himself, right?”
I say, “No. At Oscar’s party, you just mentioned he’d died.”
Vaux says, “He got laid off from his job, some bullshit company reorganization. Couldn’t get work after that. He just kind of collapsed into himself. You really would have liked him, Ade, before, when he was working and happy. He had such a great sense of humor. Self-deprecating. My dad came from a religious home, Grandpa was a rabbi, but we didn’t keep Shabbat or keep kosher or anything.”
Looking at Vaux, at her looking up, I tell her I’m sorry, that I wish I could have met him. I tell her that he must have been an amazing person. I say, “Judging by you, an incredible person.”
She says, “A funny story, he once put a prayer into one of the satellites. Tiny, on this sheet of thin silver metal. Took him a few weeks to etch it. Prayer was the
I look over at Vaux and want to kiss her. Soothe her the same as a prayer.
Without turning to me, Vaux says, “I got my smile from my dad.”
A few seconds later we’re surrounded by the unmistakable rumble of an airplane. I mention to Vaux that she should brace herself. The growl of the jet’s engines gets louder and louder. She takes my hand. Squeezes harder and harder as the noise of the plane comes closer and closer.
Squeezing until it’s on top of us.
And really, it almost is. The plane passes maybe a few hundred feet over us. For a few seconds, there on the hood of my car, we’re bathed in the red and white blinking lights of the plane as it glides overhead. Our hair blown wild by the rush of it. The car shaking. And then it’s over. The plane lands half a mile away.
Vaux says nothing but she smiles.
“Cool, huh?”
“You bring all your girls here?”
“Only the ones I think I’ll get lucky with.”
“Ha.”
“You must have some spot you take the boys? Your little nest?”
“I was never that practical. You bring that Belle girl here?”
“Belle?”
Vaux makes a face. “Yeah.”
“No. We weren’t like, you know.”
“Serious?”
“Right.”
Vaux says, “Okay.” Then asks, “So what did you discover out there?”
“There’s this whole world of people like us, Vaux. All of them with different abilities. All of them addicted and all of them lame. A world of losers who spend their days reading crystal balls and looking for lottery numbers. None of them is-”
“Did they help you?” Vaux interrupts. “Did they show you how to stop it?”
“Maybe. I’m getting closer.”
“Do you feel good about it?”
“Yeah. Underneath the bullshit, I think so. But Jimi, he’s known about these people too. He’s been to see them, asking them questions, getting his future-”
