'You're not.'
'Not yet, anyway.'
'You're not going to be a junkie. You won't let it happen. I won't let it happen.'
'You,' she said. 'You can't sit on my shoulder forever, telling me what's right and what's wrong. Life doesn't work that way.'
'I don't have to. You already know.'
'Tell me what I know.'
'You know you don't have to go back to the club, for one thing. Sex is what went wrong first in your life, and you're selling sex for a living. I mean, Jesus, if Daddy wants into your life-style, it's the wrong life-style.'
'I should learn from Daddy?' She shook her head again, and I could feel her withdraw.
'Daddy's nothing, Daddy's less than nothing. Daddy's just litmus paper to tell you when you're wrong. When the people we should hate cheer up, we're doing something wrong. We should deprive them of that, if only for the simple pleasure of watching their faces fall.'
'That's all what I'm not supposed to do. What
'How the hell do I know? Go to the zoo. Grow a mustache. Go back to computer school. Become Florence Nightingale, work with lepers. Run for Congress. You speak Korean and English; become a simultaneous translator for the U.N. Eat out more often.'
'I can't do those things.'
'When your girlfriend, may her flesh rot from her bones, first suggested you should dance nude, did you think you could do it?'
She lifted her knees and crossed her beautiful arms over them. Then she rested her chin on her arms. 'No,' she said. 'I thought it would kill me.'
'Of course you did. It was unthinkable. But now it's the pain you're familiar with.'
After a full minute, she nodded. 'Learn from it,' she said.
I leaned back. I felt like I'd run twenty miles.
She looked over at me. 'I'm not stupid,' she said.
'Nana. You're probably smarter than I am.'
Her eyes engaged mine and held them. 'Probably,' she said, 'but you're sweet.' She reached out and tried to circle my wrist with her fingers. Her hand was too small. 'I'm through at the club anyway,' she said. 'They'll never take me back now. Let's go home.'
'Home it is.' We eased out into traffic, and she busied herself with her face. When I turned onto Vista she sat back and said, 'Thanks.'
'You're welcome,' I said. 'We're here.' I pulled Alice into the curb.
'Okay,' Nana said with a final sniffle. 'I'm welcome. Well, I've got a hidden agenda. I promise I won't hang around, I won't be embarrassing.'
'Nana,' I reminded her, 'we're home.'
'And you're not going to walk me to the door?' She cupped my chin in her hands and raised her face to kiss me. It was almost a chaste little kiss-not quite, but almost. Minus the tip of her tongue it would have qualified. When it was finished she sighed. 'You're going to let me walk across the courtyard alone?'
Miss Courtney's etiquette class surfaced. 'No,' I said, 'of course not.'
I joined her on the sidewalk, and she slipped her hand into mine. When I took it she gave me a squeeze. 'I'm afraid of the birds of paradise,' she said. 'I really hate birds of paradise. They look like they eat meat.'
I stopped without knowing why. An unseasonal breeze stirred the foliage, the birds of paradise cawed silently, and I felt the skin on the back of my neck prickle. Then I saw the strip of light. 'Nana,' I said, 'did you leave your door open?'
'In your hat. In Hollywood? That's what locks are for, right? Why?'
'Because it's open now.'
She looked, and her grip on my hand tightened. 'No,' she said in a whisper. 'I locked it this morning, same as ever.'
'Stay here. I'll be back in a minute.'
'No way, no way in the world. I'm not standing here alone. Come on, Simeon, let's just leave.'
'Go to the car,' I said, lowering my voice to a whisper. 'Lock the doors and stay there.'
'What are you going to do?'
'I'm going in.'
She swallowed noisily, and I fought the urge to hush her. 'Then I'm going with you.'
It didn't seem like either the time or place for an argument. 'Suit yourself,' I said. 'But stay a few steps back and keep quiet.'
I could feel her behind me as I moved toward the open door. My running shoes made no sound, and neither, surprisingly, did her high heels. At the door I paused for a moment and listened. Either no one was inside or whoever it was was listening too. I lifted my foot, kicked the door open, and jumped to one side, yanking Nana with me.
'Lordy,' she said on an indrawn breath.
The place was a ruin.
Keeping her hand in my left, I reached around with my right and pushed the door all the way open. It slammed against the wall and groaned back toward us a foot or so. At least nobody was standing behind it. I counted my blessings and got as high as one.
'I'm going in.' I squeezed her hand hard enough to make the joints pop. 'You stay right here. If I say come in, come in. If I say anything else at all, run like hell. Get to a phone and call the cops. Got it?'
She nodded, looking past me into the room. I patted her cheek and went inside, hoping that I looked braver than I felt.
The living room was a clutter of junk, trashed objects that had once been possessions. The overhead lights were on, or there wouldn't have been any light at all; both lamps were strewn in fragments across the floor. Pictures had been ripped from the walls and their frames snapped over somebody's knee, probably the same knee that had shattered Amber's arms. Bright shards of light glittered from sharp pieces of glass and mirror. There wasn't a square foot of the floor visible.
The door leading to the hallway was closed. Stepping over the wreckage on the floor as if the crown jewels of England were scattered there, I moved toward it. I put a hand on the knob, counted ten to slow the beating of my heart, and shoved it open.
Blackness. I felt for a light switch. There wasn't one. Either the hallway was unlighted, which seemed unlikely, or the switch was at the other end, a typically dysfunctional example of Hollywood architecture. I was going to have to go in. The small amount of light that filtered in from the living room would be just enough to allow me to see my own blood. Closing my mind's eye tight, I went in.
More junk littered the floor, but otherwise the hallway was empty. The bathroom door yawned open at its far end, and I snapped on the light inside. Nobody behind me, nobody in the bathroom. The destroyer hadn't missed much: even the mirror on the medicine cabinet had been broken. Aspirin, hairpins, and tampons were scattered across the tiles.
That left the bedroom. The door was ajar, and I shoved it, hard. Lights were on, throwing the devastation into sharp, ugly relief.
The bed had been eviscerated. A sharp knife had slit the mattress from top to bottom, and the stuffings had been thrown around the room. The contents of the open closet were strewn around like the random refuse of a tornado.
Across one wall, written on a crooked diagonal in Nana's lipstick, were the words
'I don't believe it,' I said.
I heard a sudden sound behind me and whirled, my hands drawn back and open to blind or kill. I was halfway into the air when I saw Nana. I grabbed the edge of the table to stop myself, and my feet tangled in a blanket and I fell. It was a heavy fall.
'That wasn't your cue,' I said from the floor. 'If you heard that, you should be running by now.'
'And leave you here alone?' She reached down to help me up. All her attention was concentrated on me. She
