Edge (19 page)

PLEASE WAIT TO BE SEATED
. Three people were ahead of me, shuffling along to a side table where they had a good view of Highway 80. Someone turned a chewing face in my direction. I was still cold. It was a mistake to come in here, all these eyes, and these weathered faces.

Half the coffee shop must be looking at me by now. I found an empty place at the counter. My wallet was jammed with crumpled money. The currency was stuck and would not respond to my spastic attempts to pull it out.

“Coffee, hon?” said the waitress.

I nodded, please.

She poured the Farmer Brother's brew fast, a method I admire, throwing the coffee into the mug all at once. But I rarely drink coffee, thinking of it as a drink for people so addicted the caffeine has little effect. She set a glass crammed with ice on the counter, and I drank until the ice made a noise when I sucked it.

“Are you okay?” asked the waitress. Concerned—interested, even. But there was a hint of criticism, too.

“Do you have Cobb salad?” I asked.

I could have gone to the men's room but I didn't want to see my face. I left before my order arrived, leaving money beside the knife and fork.

THIRTY-FIVE

They polish the floors of a hospital with a machine that glides. The operator clings to a handle like a power lawn mower, the newly buffed floor shining. He sets out little signs,
WARNING, WET FLOOR
, a swath of light where the machine has passed.

Maybe I expected someone to stop me, so early in the morning. Maybe I expected the institution to be closed, forgetting that it never shut down, open twenty-four hours a day. Visiting hours, I was thinking.
Come back later
. People would look at me and know there was something wrong.

But they ignored me, the woman with the clipboard, the bald man on the phone. I passed by like someone who wasn't there.

Maybe I took a wrong turn, distracted by a Pepsi machine, thirsty again, no coins in my pocket. I was lost in a room of weight machines. Over by the window was a big yellow spa, Olympic size, a brand I had never seen before.

“I took it easy on the garlic,” she was saying. “Perla said it might cause gas.”

The door was open but I knocked anyway. The sound turned Sofia into a statue, Woman with Spoon. She was holding a Tupperware bowl on her lap, and a long stainless steel spoon was dripping onto the floor. Dad had a napkin on his front, sitting in his wheelchair fully dressed, the same pants I had picked out for the hearing.

“Zachary, Florence is frantic,” Sofia said at last. It was rare for Sofia to refer to my mother by name, not
your mother
or
she
.

I had interrupted something between husband and wife. I considered leaving. Maybe the weird sensation I was experiencing was hunger.

“She got home around midnight and you were nowhere,” Sofia was saying.

I made a show of calm, finding a chair, the metal legs stuttering against the floor tile. I didn't sit down yet, my knees feeling stiff and unreliable. “Minestrone for breakfast?” I asked. My words came out hoarse, leathery.

“Call your mother,” said Dad.

A drop of soup had stained the baby blue napkin tied around his neck. I located a chair in the corner under a pile of professional journals, some of the mail he was getting around to at last.

“Don't bother sitting down,” he stage whispered. “Go call Flo,” he said, the respirator forcing him to pace his words. “And tell her you're all right.”

Sofia looked away, blushing a little, maybe embarrassed to be suddenly a part of a family fight.

“You make it with ham hocks,” I said. I knew how I sounded. I was buying time, making conversation. “Cook it two or three days. I had it once, remember? That time Dad and I came back from the Marin headlands cold and wet. We had captured a rare butterfly, the Muir hairstreak, in a grove of giant cypress. I thought your soup was the best stuff I had ever tasted.”

She smiled at the compliment but didn't put much energy into it, her mind on other things. “I didn't bring the right spoon,” she said. “This one keeps dribbling.”

His pants needed to be ironed. The room had a stale, medicine smell, a smell like plastic, a TV fresh from the store.

“You're not,” he said, waiting to get in rhythm with the breath machine, “going to sit there like that.”

My dad had no right talking to me like this, especially in front of Sofia. In a minute or two, I told myself, I would get a paper towel and wipe the drops of minestrone off the floor.

Dad gets this expression on his face, a silent shout. This was my dad's usual style, Mr. Agreeable until he gets impatient. Sometimes you hope people will evolve, and they don't.

I left the room, and this time people saw me, lowering a clipboard to say something, looking up from the waxing machine. It didn't matter. I was leaving. Outside I hurried across the parking lot, like a man I read about once who had caught himself on fire and couldn't stop power-walking out of town as fast as he could, keeping a few steps ahead of the pain.

But I did stop, finally, and watched a sea gull pecking at a squashed wrapper on the sidewalk, spearing it, taking it away. If I make a video someday it will be about flies and vultures, how we shouldn't hate them. A man wiped his windshield with a towel, tilting his head to catch the angle of light off the glass. Cars started up, exhaust feathering into the cool morning.

Until I die I will remember: I stepped out of the shadow while Steven Ray McNorr unzipped his pants and peed, a long, steaming arc into the hedge beside the driveway.

He never saw me. He took his time, shook himself off and tucked himself back into his pants. It took a while, the zipper snagging. Then he slammed the truck door. He had trouble finding the right key, while I watched with the .38 in my hand.

And couldn't use it.

THIRTY-SIX

“They are going to be here in forty-eight minutes,” Mom said. She was already dressed in something flowing and red, her thinking being that shades of scarlet were going to be her color from now on. She had begun using dye on her hair.

“They can see me the way I really am,” I said. I was on my knees, pulling weeds. Wet soaked into my pants from the moist soil, and something about the smell of lawn was satisfying.

“Try, Zachary. Please.”

With the arrival of the winter rains, the nutrients my mother had been scattering for months began to take effect, and everything that was a part of the lawn grew abundantly, including the weeds. Front lawn, back lawn, I was on my knees filling a cardboard box with crabgrass, devil's grass, dandelions, and cockleburs. Then I had to rake the clawed places in the lawn, and when I was done I saw all those unnamable weeds in the seams of the sidewalk and dug them out with the point of a screwdriver.

“I don't want him to see it like this,” I said.

“You aren't even pulling weeds at this point, Zachary. You're scraping moss.”

Bea had loaned me one of her books, three hundred pages on the theory of personality. I was beginning to feel that maybe I was a classic introvert in a world that would not shut up. I had promised Bea that she could meet my dad.

Dad was able to read, despite my earlier fears. I sent him Email almost every day, using a new computer Mom scrounged from her office. Dad was fitted with an attachment for his glasses, an infra-red point he used to direct a keyboard on a computer screen. He was beginning to write about the creature he had always loved. “Ten percent of the earth's biomass consists of the nation of ants,” his first chapter began. I could tell this was going to be one of his best books. He could only work on it for an hour or two a day before he got too tired.

“Finish up, go in, and wash your hands,” my mother was saying. “I mean, just a suggestion. And put on some pants that don't have what looks like green snot on the knees.”

Now that my father was out of danger, Perry's messages tended to be about glaciers, wolves, and how the mother grizzly's milk is twenty-five percent fat. Over Easter he was coming to the Bay Area with his dad, arranging to sell their old house. We were planning a hike to see the tule elk herd at Point Reyes.

“I didn't want to wear heels,” she said, trying to be patient with me, and wanting me to hear the effort in her voice and appreciate it. “But these flats are too Little-Bo-Peep. Don't you think?”

It was my dad's first visit since it happened. It was his first visit anywhere, aside from a few hours watching television at home with Daniel. He had shaken off two bouts of pneumonia during the last four months, and was on a new antibiotic. Sofia was trying out their new van with a hydraulic lift. I had bought a sheet of half-inch-thick all-weather plywood and put it down over the front steps as a ramp for his chair. Mom and I had spent the morning rearranging furniture and working wrinkles out of the carpet.

When I swept off the sidewalk, I saw that there was really nothing more for me to do. I wondered what it was going to be like to have him here. I wondered how painful it would be for him, the stairway, the back garden. Sometimes I woke at night and couldn't sleep thinking about him, straight through until dawn.

Why hadn't Mom planted some shrub that flowered this time of year? The begonias along the stepping-stones to the house looked pathetic, drunk with winter weather.

I washed my hands. It wasn't a simple matter, getting the dirt out of my nails, soaping and rinsing, and then thinking: maybe I should have showered. But by then there wasn't enough time. I put on navy blue pants and a blue chambray shirt. Then I took it off and put on a cream white shirt with blue checks, something Dad hadn't seen before. I kept glancing at the digital clock in the bathroom, the travel clock on the dresser, the heirloom pendulum timepiece tick-tocking on the bookshelf in the living room.

Five more minutes.

Sofia promised they would be on time, but how could they keep their word with traffic on the bridge the way it usually was?

“I think I should wear that Peruvian hand-crocheted Pima cotton thing,” I could hear Mom saying. “And those sterling and tagua nut drop earrings.”

“No, you look great already,” I said.

“Or pearls,” she was saying.

Of course they would be a little late. And Dad might want Sofia to take a detour so they could take a look at where he used to buy milk and beer when he lived on this side of the Bay. He might take her by the playground where I had thrown up from playing on the swings too long, five years old and no concept of motion sickness.

Mom had met with her lawyer, Billy Brookhurst, considering a civil suit against McNorr. The lawyer took her out to dinner, took her to the opera, but in the end he said the case wasn't strong enough. At first I drove by the McNorr residence once or twice a week, slowing down. The last time I passed the place there were red and yellow tricycles on the front lawn, and a plastic baseball bat.

“Make sure the coffee table is all the way at the end of the room,” Mom was saying. “Are you sure the kitchen door is wide enough?”

“I measured it,” I said. A week ago, and this morning, using both a ruler and a steel power tape. The doorways were all wide enough for his chair.

My mother has a talent for anxiety, the way some people have beautiful voices, or a sense of humor. She even gets me worrying, her nerves contagious, like yawns.

I put all my weight on the plywood ramp, balancing. The ramp was steady. I rehearsed it in my mind, how I would push him up the ramp into the house, talking all the while, so neither of us would be self-conscious. I would mention the bonsai tree I was thinking of buying, how the dwarf maple had lost its leaves, just like the full-sized trees all around.

He would ask for the scientific name of the maple, speaking in that practiced whisper, and I wouldn't know. He would ask, What kind of a botanist are you going to be if you can't master a few Latin names, sounding upbeat, but making his argument felt. He would tell me the garden looked good, even if it didn't, keeping a hold on my feelings.

They were late.

It wasn't sunny, it wasn't cloudy. A neighbor kid was yelling, not in pain, not in anger, just making noise. I walked out to the curb like a person going somewhere far away, just as soon as his ride came around the corner.

About the Author

Michael Cadnum is the author of 35 books for adults and young adults. His work—which includes thrillers, suspense novels, historical fiction, and books about myths and legends—has been nominated for the National Book Award (
The Book of the Lion
), the Edgar Award (
Calling Home
and
Breaking the Fall
), and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize (
In a Dark Wood
). A former National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellow, he is also the author of award-winning poetry.
Seize the Storm
(2012) is his most recent novel.

Michael Cadnum lives in Albany, California, with a view of the Golden Gate Bridge.

All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 1997 by Michael Cadnum

Cover design by Drew Padrutt

ISBN: 978-1-5040-1975-0

This edition published in 2015 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.

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New York, NY 10014

www.openroadmedia.com