One of Us (31 page)

Then the plane bucked again, but this time no one yelped. Out the window I saw that the lights I'd noticed earlier were a lot closer now. Too close. Either the plane was crashing, which seemed unlikely, or something was coming up to greet us.

I tried to call out—to whom or what, I'm not sure. The sound made it out of my throat, but died before it had traveled an inch. The light was changing in the cabin, reminding me of the way it had been in Hammond's study: But this sure as hell wasn't caused by something you could buy in Radio Shack.

I heard the faintest whisper of a scream. Helena. Nobody else in the cabin seemed to have noticed what was going on. She had, and she was afraid.

I looped my arms around her and held on, pushing against the weight of the air, my lips against her ear and telling her everything would be all right. My vision started to come apart, as if someone had turned the brightness all the way up and everything but shadows was leeched away.

Then I couldn't even see the shadows anymore, and everything was gone.

PART THREE

BECOMING VISIBLE

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

I got most of it in a stunned instant. The rest roared in to support it seconds later, like film of someone erasing a picture, but run backward. It came like hands hammering on an opaque glass door, as soon as the world turned to white:

LAURA WAS FIFTEEN when Ray Hammond entered her life. She lived with her parents in a big house that backed onto a wood, just above a steep but shallow valley that led down to a stream. The nearest neighbors were a hundred yards down the canyon—the Simpsons, whom her dad liked but her mom did not. Laura didn't have any strong feelings either way about the senior Simpsons, but she didn't much like their son, who was ugly and whose eyes made it clear whenever they met that he would much prefer it if she were naked. Her father worked down in the city and made a lot of money. He was comfortably built and laughed a lot. Monica Reynolds was very thin and went to the gym every day, one of those scary women who stay on the step machine for an hour, climbing with murderous concentration, before standing in front of a mirror and lifting tiny weights about a billion times. Laura went with her to the gym once, and thought her mom looked more like a machine than the equipment she was using. When she wasn't losing nonexistent weight, Monica was painting the walls. Even though her bedroom had been done only the previous year, her mother was planning on doing it again. Laura liked it the way it was: The walls were a swirl of sea colors, blues and greens and purples. When she told her father she didn't want it changed. Daddy just shrugged and then told her a joke.

Every day when Laura got home from school she would dump her bag and books in the kitchen and make herself a sandwich. The sandwiches were generally pretty boring and majored on salad and low-fat cheese: Her mother didn't approve of meat, chocolate, or anything else that was fun to eat. Laura was quietly impressed at the way her father managed to keep his weight up, and could assume only that he went absolutely ballistic at lunchtimes.

She would grab her sandwich and go out back, slipping through the fence and walking into the wood. It was only a patch of forest, nothing magical, and she rarely pretended it was. You didn't need to. It was just nicer to be there than in the house, surrounded by the smell of paint and swatches of fabric and color charts where all the colors looked the same. She took a path down to the stream and she would sit and eat her sandwich listening to the water and watching the little water bugs do their stuff. It was a mystery to her why they bothered to do anything. They were hardly alive long enough to make it worthwhile, and their brains were too small for them to remember anything that they'd done. Kind of like some of the characters in the afternoon soaps, except the bugs didn't have plastic surgery. After an hour or so her mother would call her in to bathe. Her mother's voice carried. There was never any problem hearing it, even on the days when it was a little less clear than usual.

Laura was pretty, and did well in school. She had her mother's cheekbones mitigated by her father's grin, and she could do both English and math. She had plenty of friends, and her parents got on okay most of the time. Everything was fine, just another one of those lives that everybody has until a certain point, until the hold goes on the picture, and everything turns to noise.

One day the Reynolds house got burgled, and Ray Hammond was the policeman who came to investigate. He was capable and reassuring, and he had a very nice manner. He stood in the living room taking notes and making everybody feel better about what had happened—even Laura's mother, who'd previously been pitching a fit even though not much had been taken and most of it had belonged to her husband anyway.

They never got the stuff back, but they did see more of Ray. He got along well with Laura's dad, and came over some evenings to sit on the back porch and drink a beer. Laura would hang around on the edges and listen, and often Monica would be there, too. Ray and Laura's dad were actually pretty similar: two men who'd found what they liked doing, and who wanted to go on doing it without too much fuss. But Ray was a little younger, of course, and sometimes Laura's mother asked why he wasn't trying to make a name for himself, take the sergeant's exam or get transferred out of the Sheriff's Department into the LAPD. At first Ray just laughed and said life was too short: But after a while he didn't, and sat quietly instead, with a thoughtful look on his face.

Laura was, of course, an expert on Ray's facial expressions by then. She was at that age, and Ray had one of those smiles and one of those winks. Ray didn't look like he was undressing her the whole time. He looked like the kind of man who would take you out to dinner to a place you could wear a nice dress and have waiters pretend they were glad that you were there. He wasn't like the boys at school, turned mute or obnoxious by their hormones, oozing needs so rank you could smell them at ten yards, their faces turned foxlike and calculating except in the eyes, which were always scared. Ray looked like he knew who he was, and that's the kind of person you want to want you—at any age, but especially when you're young.

But he was much older, of course, and didn't really notice her at all, and Laura spent that spring in eddies of agony. Ray dropped by a lot, and talked to her father and mother. Sometimes he asked her how she was doing at school and seemed to listen to her clunky answers. Laura ferried beers and emptied the ashtray: Her mother didn't like smoking as a rule, but tolerated it in Ray. Laura wasn't surprised by this. Principles are principles, and healthiness is all very well when you're old, but you had only to watch Ray light up and take that first deep pull to understand that smoking was not only very grown-up, but also extremely clever.

Life went on. It wasn't like the introduction of Ray Hammond into their world changed everything. Her mother still supervised painters, her dad still went to work and came back with his clothes smelling of pizza. Laura did her homework, hung around with her friends, went to parties. A TV season came and went, the air got warmer, and the water bugs patiently progressed through their life cycle. But running like a dark, rich thread throughout everything else were Laura's feelings, emotions she could feel were making her older—shaping her mind like a plane on freshly cut wood.

Love and death are very similar. They're the times in your life when you most want to believe in magic, when you yearn for some symbolic act or retrospective edit that can change the world you find yourself in. I know this all too well. When the cat Helena and I owned died, I went out walking on the beach by myself a couple of nights later. Helena was at home, perched on a sofa still liberally covered with hair from a creature that wasn't alive anymore. We'd comforted each other as much as we could, and we both knew that time was the only thing that would make any real difference. Words, as usual, were only words; they never led to anything like peace. I stood and looked out at the sea, and the sight of infinity made things seem a little better for a while. But I knew that as soon as I turned away, the small things would close in again. Then I happened to look down, and saw a few pebbles strewn around me on the sand. For a crazy moment I had a half-notion that time could be made concrete, and that perhaps there was another way it might make a difference. If each of the pebbles could be made to mean a second of time, and I collected five, perhaps I could somehow use them to change the last five seconds of our cat's life, to give him the opportunity to do something other than dart blindly in the path of a car. Feeling like an idiot, but not caring because there was no one to see and nobody would ever know, I scooped up five pebbles. I don't know why just that many: It was a number that popped into my head. I squeezed them in my hand and tried to use my mind, just as when I was a kid and spent whole evenings giving myself headaches trying to influence the flip of a coin. Please, I prayed, to Whomever It Concerned: Let these stones save that life.

When I opened my eyes, nothing had changed, but I couldn't seem to throw the pebbles away, and I slipped them into the pocket of my jeans. They're still together somewhere, in the ornamental box Helena had given me. When I ran from LA after the Transvirtual episode, I got Deck to go over to the house and collect my stuff. It's all in storage somewhere, and the pebbles lie dry and forgotten, not meaning anything except to me.

Laura Reynolds tried the same kind of things, but for a different reason. She wrote letters with kisses at the bottom and hid them in special places; she watched the skies and made pacts with clouds; she used her charm to get a handful of cigarettes from a boy at school and smoked them by herself down by the stream. She felt like a river, powerful but trapped in an underground cavern, nosing inexorably for the fissure that would send her gushing up into the sun.

One day she found it.

Ray was in the area after sorting out a fender-bender half a mile down the road. He stopped by on the off chance someone was home, but there was no reply at the door. Laura's mother was out consulting with one of her stable of what her dad called "posterior designers." Dad was still at work. Ray had just come off duty, and the day was very hot, and he really liked the idea of a beer: So he decided to hang around, wait for someone to show up.

He sat in the back for a while, and heard a sound from down in the canyon. At first he ignored it. Then he wondered if it was an intruder or some kind of animal, and decided to go check it out.

What he saw as he moved quietly down the side of the valley was neither of those things. Laura was sitting on a flat rock in the middle of the stream, staring down at the water and inexpertly smoking a cigarette. Unbeknownst to him, she was also repeating his name to herself in a complex rhythm, and just beginning to feel a little foolish about it.

Then she looked up and saw Ray, and despite everything that happened to her later, every numb disappointment and bitter evening, after that moment she never quite stopped believing in magic. In some ways that was the worst thing: a perpetual expectation that was never fulfilled again. And in the rest of his life, until she shot him fourteen years later, Ray Hammond never again quite saw anything like the sight of Laura sitting there and turning to look up at him.

"What are you doing here?" he asked, feeling awkward. It came out too professional, like he suspected her of planning a B and E.

"Waiting for you," she replied, and instantly felt like an utter moron. It had sounded much better in her head.

He laughed, and suddenly it was okay. "No, really."

"Watching the bugs. Stomping on them every now and then."

"You shouldn't do that." He smiled sardonically. "All God's creatures are sacred."

Laura knew he'd been raised religious, but that he didn't set much heed by it now. "What, even
that?
" She pointed out the fat, slothful bug that lived under the next rock and that won her "ugliest creature in the stream" competition every day without fail.

Ray peered at it. "Possibly not that one," he agreed. "Could be a representative from the other side."

He squatted down, lit a cigarette, and they talked awhile. Laura seemed somehow different to him when her parents weren't around. Older, more distinct. She told him about the stream, and the things that lived in it. He listened, and laughed, and after a while offered her a cigarette from his pack. As she leaned into his cupped hands to light it, a line was crossed and something was sealed.

Then they heard the distant sound of a car pulling into the driveway up above. Ray said good-bye politely, flicked his butt in the water, and went off to be with a grown-up.

Laura kept the soggy butt in a box in her bedside table, and bided her time. Over the next few weeks it occurred to Ray occasionally to swing by the Reynolds place a little earlier than had been his habit, and he usually found Laura down there on her rock. After a while, if he didn't, he'd sit there and wait. They talked about stuff, and looked at the light, and sometimes she made him a little uncomfortable by how close she sat.

Uncomfortable because he knew there was one thing that he must absolutely not do.

There is a moment everybody knows. A moment that is so ordinary, so commonplace—and yet is the culmination of a long and complex chess game for those involved. After walking miles across uneven ground, you suddenly come upon a road. You sit at slightly different angles from each other, the alteration maybe no more than a single degree; and eye contact goes a little skewed, gaze being used for something more than just seeing. People seem less separate from each other, and especially you from them.

Finally one afternoon they kissed, and the kiss went long, and when Laura heard the sound of her mother's car up above, she moved her hands over Ray's ears so he wouldn't leave. Once two people's lips have touched, the relationship between them can never be quite the same again. They didn't kiss the next time, but they did the time after that. Ray didn't ask her about school anymore. Laura knew what she wanted to happen, and how slowly it should progress.