“I’ll talk to Cheney.” They talked about her security system.
Bob waited for her in the truck, petting Hitchcock.
“Did you walk him?” she asked through the window.
“Yeah. He took a good long whiz. Must’ve smelled the explosive. He was heading for the beach.”
“Tell me you didn’t go there!”
“I stayed by the truck. The beach was roped off. They’re still cleaning up.”
She slammed the door and got in. “Whew! It’s evil out there!” She unclipped her keys and they dropped onto the floor.
While she felt around for them, Bob said, “You don’t have to worry anymore, Mom. This car’s safer today than most days.”
Finding them, she reached toward the back seat to give Hitchcock the opportunity to lick her wrist and hand.
“You were right about the bad karma,” Bob said. “He followed us here. It’s like, if you accidentally spill your soda on some kid, of course he turns out to be the meanest psycho kid in school, and waits for you after school, gets you back much worse. Know what I mean?”
“What did the police say to you?”
“‘What’s he look like?’ I told them.”
“Bob, do you remember? Was the man in the parking lot wearing a ski mask? Or a floppy hat?”
Bob shrugged. “He was a ways away.”
“Maybe. Bob-” Bob had his arms around Hitchcock’s damp, furry neck, his eyes closed, his cheek pressed against the dog’s ear. Hair pressed flat to his head, ears standing out, Bob looked a bit like a dog himself as he communed with Hitchcock. Nina caught herself thinking, If anything ever happens to that dog-and she knew she was really thinking about Bob. A sharp pain lanced through her right eye.
“Yeah, Mom?”
“How sure are you that the man by the Bronco was the same as the man in the ski mask on the road?”
“I just thought it must be him. I’m sorry, Mom. I just figured, you know. I couldn’t see the man by the Bronco through the rain.”
“It’s okay, honey. I think you saved our lives.”
“Yeah, Hitchie, we saved you.” Bob hugged the dog some more. He did not seem particularly upset by the whole incident.
Nina said, “The world has-it’s changed. It’s not a safe place.”
“It never was, Mom. That’s why we buy good locks and use ’em.”
That night, as Nina lay in her bed reading, Bob knocked and came in and sat down in the wicker chair. He usually stayed up much later than she did and slept as late as he could in the morning, but he asked her to wake him up if he slept through his alarm.
“But tomorrow’s Sunday.”
“The dump takes hazardous stuff on Sundays. We have some things under the house I need to get rid of. Taylor’s garage is full, too. What are you reading?”
She struggled to remember. “A book about the Big Bang. New theories about what the universe looked like in the first few minutes after the explosion. Speaking of big bangs, is any of the material you have been collecting flammable? Or potentially explosive?”
“Only a little.”
“I don’t like the sound of that. Don’t store anything like that under the house!”
“We charge twenty bucks per house to haul away old motor oil, mostly, Mom. We have all the customers we can manage. We’ll put it in the backyard under a tarp if you want.”
“Why do you need money, Bob? You have a new bass. You like your skateboard, and you can’t want new clothes after all the shopping we’ve been doing.”
Bob dropped his eyes to Hitchcock, snoozing on the carpet, and nudged him with his stockinged foot. “I want to take a trip to see my dad.”
Nina put her fingers to her temple, closed her eyes. “You saw him in Sweden a few months ago.”
“I need to go again.”
“You miss him so much?”
“Well, sure, I miss him, but the thing is, I talked to him a couple of weeks ago. He lost his job with the Stockholm Opera Company and he’s back in Germany. He’s having trouble with his hands.”
Kurt Scott, Bob’s father, was a concert pianist who had eked out a living touring Europe for most of Bob’s life. He hadn’t known about Bob’s existence until a few years before, because Nina hadn’t wanted him to know. He had left her, waiting for him, with no word, soon after she learned she was pregnant. That day had become a turning point in her life, and she had polished the memory, along with the grief and rage over being abandoned, for so many years, that even when she learned years later that Kurt had left her to save her life, she had not been able to change her feelings from that day. The memory was encysted in her, permanently, it seemed.
But Bob had no such memories. Since discovering each other, he and Kurt had seen each other several times and developed a close bond that didn’t include her.
Nine felt a now-familiar tugging at her heart. She didn’t want Bob to leave her. It wasn’t Kurt’s fault that his life was in Europe or Bob’s fault that he wanted to see him again, but she didn’t want Bob to go, even for a few weeks. Her life, her routines, were built around Bob. She knew she feared that one day he might go and live with Kurt. Then what would she do? He was her companion, her fellow traveler.
All right, tell the truth. She didn’t want to stay alone in the house, not right now.
She had barely seen Kurt in the years since Bob’s birth. She trusted him with Bob, knew he cared for Bob and had been unfairly deprived of the chance to father him over the years, knew he needed to make up time. But she didn’t see why he had to take Bob away right now, at the start of a new school year, when she had so many plans for them. Okay, she hadn’t made many plans. But she would think some up, right now.
“Now isn’t a good time,” she said.
“I’m not asking you for a ticket or anything, Mom. I’ll pay my own way.”
“I’m thinking we should spend some time poking around the Gold Country on weekends,” Nina said. “Take a car trip up to Idaho to ski. Maybe Uncle Matt and Aunt Andrea and Troy and Brianna would come with us.”
“Troy and Brianna are in school. Like me. Aunt Andrea’s busy with the new baby and Uncle Matt works twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, winter and summer.”
This was more or less true. Troy, her nephew, a few years younger than Bob, had been diagnosed with a learning disability and couldn’t miss school, and her brother Matt’s tow-truck business had started up the day parasailing got too cold on the lake. There would be no big happy family trip to Idaho.
Bob ran his hand through his dark hair. Like Kurt’s, his eyes were a speckled green.
“Did your dad ask you to come?”
“No. But he’d like it.”
Nina wanted to say, But I won’t like it if you leave, but Bob didn’t need any more burdens on him right now. “What’s wrong with his hands?”
“I don’t know.”
“Let’s talk more about it tomorrow night,” she said. “It’s been a hard day. I’ll give your dad a call.”
“Okay. Want to go to Wild Waters in Sparks tomorrow after I finish? They close next week.”
“Sorry, honey. I have a meeting in Placerville.”
“On Sunday afternoon?”
“Drive down with me.”
“No, thanks. I’d rather hang around here with Taylor.”
“Okay. Did you set the alarm?”
“An’ checked the windows good. Are you scared, Mom? I don’t see how he could know where we live, and the police are watching an’ I’m watching. He got what he wanted. He made us afraid. That’s the last of him.”
“I guess so. I’ll be fine. Love you. G’night.”
“G’night.”
She turned off the lamp and shut her eyes, seeing once again Hitchcock’s frantic eyes as he lunged against the window of the Bronco.
6
FOUR-ELEVEN IN THE AFTERNOON. ELLIOTT was just waking up. He crunched through two bowls of crispy cereal, standing at the kitchen counter, back safe at home on Vashon Island. He had gotten in very late from Tahoe and hadn’t been able to sleep until morning because he couldn’t stop thinking about the man in the ski mask.
In the dreary daylight, which highlighted the broken tiles near the toaster, he considered that he was now more than a thousand miles from Tahoe, an eighteen-hour drive. He was safe. Relatively safe.
He went through a box a day sometimes. Boxed cereal might look like pure junk, but actually, the vitamins added later, plus the fact that the cereal had once, a very long time ago, grown in a field and been alive, resulted in a substance that tasted good and also contained all minimum daily requirements. It took almost no time to pour cereal and milk into a bowl. All in all, he wouldn’t eat anything else, except that Pop had surprised them both and turned into a master chef after his mother’s death.
Through the door into the living room Elliott could see the back of his father’s head, the silver hair shaking when he disagreed with the umpire or got excited about a play. The orange-leafed trees outside their picture window, and the fact that his college team was winning, made Pop forget about the MS. Sometimes he did get depressed, though. Then he’d say things like, “El, you’ll be on your own someday.”
But most of the time Pop seemed to feel fine. He ran the house from his wheelchair, he and Gloria the sexy housekeeper.
Someday Pop would be in trouble. Elliott was saving up for that, to make sure he’d have the best care.
Four-thirteen. “Get ’im!” Pop said. “Did you see that, El?”
They still lived in the brick house he’d been born in. For many years, Pop had ferried back and forth from Seattle, where he was a professor of linguistics at the university. He was also a Sanskrit scholar. Even now, those two words sent a shiver of excitement through Elliott. His father knew things nobody else knew, about ancient magical words.
