Other Resort Cities (11 page)

“Zack is missing,” I say. “So is the girl with the sunburst.”

“Skylar,” Del says.

“Yes,” I say, “that was her name. She came around quite a bit, and then when Zack left, well, I guess it became uncomfortable for her. She liked Joanne’s roses. I saw her outside smelling them one morning.”

“Jason,” he says, “we’ve been through this before. I want to help you, but you have to let me. The police just want to talk to you. That’s all.”

“You have helped me,” I say. “I couldn’t have accomplished everything here without your help. Have you taken photos for your portfolio? I can’t imagine that I’m the only person in America who wants a Starbucks in their house. I saw on MTV that Tommy Lee has a very small one, but he also has a stripper pole, which I think is excessive. It’s about comfort and customer service, and you’ve really accomplished that. I just can’t get any decent help.”

Del rubs at his eyes with the palms of his hands. When we were kids, our mother admonished Del to never do that, because she said it led to bags under the eyes, loose skin on the cheeks, and a general hangdog appearance. It never stopped him, and I’m proud to say he looks nothing like a hangdog.

“Zack and Skylar have been dead for two years,” Del says. “You need to wrap your mind around that.”

“Have you noticed,” I ask, “how the house seems to be sagging?”

“Are you hearing me, Jason?”

“Perhaps I should just have my bedroom removed. I’ve found that I spend most of my time in here anyway.”

“In five minutes,” Del says, “a police officer is going to come to the front door, and I’m going to let him in. You’ll have two options then: you can tell him where Joanne is or you can go to jail, and if you go to jail, they’re going to want to ask you questions that you’re not going to want to answer. They’ll talk to Carolyn eventually, which will then lead to other questions about things you’ve lied about. Do you want that, Jason?”

“She’s in Burma by now,” I say.

“Good,” Del says. “Now we’re getting somewhere. What is she doing in Burma?”

I tell Del all about the fighting, the plane tickets, the calls already placed to the police. I tell him that sometimes people you love disappear and that, through no fault of your own, they stay gone. And sometimes they reappear. I tell him that Zack and Skylar certainly are not dead, that they were both here not a week ago, and that after they left, that’s when I noticed things really starting to get weird around here with the foundation of the house. I tell him that I might move. I tell him that I might just try to get back into medicine. I tell him to get the orders from the men at the door, to find out if they want hot drinks or cold, if they would like pastries, if they would like to take a seat while I get busy making them whatever they’d like. And when Del steps away from the counter to open the door, I tell him to have a great, great day.

I
t’s midnight and Terry Green is parked in front of the entrance to Sawtooth Mills, a new gated community in Scottsdale that boasts “325 planned homes in five luxurious models.” In the backseat of his Ford Explorer, Terry’s two young children, Seth and Liza, are asleep. He looks at them in the rearview mirror and tries to remember the night each was conceived. With Seth, he’s pretty sure it was the night he came home from work early, surprising his wife, Polly, with a bouquet of roses, a bottle of red wine, and tickets to
Cats
. God, how Polly loved that Andrew Lloyd Webber crap. She used to listen to the soundtrack from
Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat
like those kids in lowered Hondas bumped rap music: the bass turned thick and dusty, the treble just a hint in the background. They did it right there on the kitchen floor. He remembers walking to the bathroom to clean up and finding an old Cheerio stuck to his ass. Seven years later and he still can’t recall a single box of Cheerios ever consumed in his home. The Case of the Immaculate Breakfast Cereal, Polly called it.

About Liza, well, that’s more difficult. Terry has always tried not to think about the specifics. Why burden yourself with all that shit? There’s no choice. Your wife is
pregnant, you take responsibility. Terry conjures the perfect instance that might have created his cherished five-year-old daughter. He pictures a perfect Sunday morning. He imagines sunlight filtering through plantation shutters and casting slim shadows over their entirely white and blue denim bedroom. Polly wakes him with a subtle kiss on the lips and then rolls over on top of him, the ringlets of her hair hanging over her naked breasts. They make slow, passionate love to each other, their bodies in perfect sync. And when they are finished, they walk hand in hand to the kitchen. They drink orange juice out of glass mugs. They read the
New York Times
, sharing a laugh over the crossword puzzle question that always seems to appear each Sunday—
Spanish Gold
—and then they make love again on top of the
New York Times
, their bodies damp with newsprint when they’re done.

And maybe that’s how it happened, Terry thinks. He hopes, really. Liza should be the product of love and not whatever emotion he and Polly devolved into.

Terry reaches under the passenger seat and pulls out the bolt cutters, then steps out of the car quietly so as not to wake the kids. It’s their first night in Arizona, and Terry thinks he might like to live here one day. He likes the way the stars look in the dense heat of summer. They remind him of a piece of blown glass Polly won at a parking-lot carnival in Walnut Creek. Back when they were kids. It was black with specs of gold and silver and white, and at night, in Polly’s bedroom, they’d place a flashlight behind it, and the entire room would become the Milky Way. What were they then? Sixteen? Seventeen? It should have just stopped right then. One night, one of them should have just said, “Enough,” and
then they would have gone on to different lives. They would see each other at a high school reunion, and maybe they’d feel a pang of regret for what was, or what could have been, or what they told themselves they’d never be.

There’s a three-inch-thick padlock on the gate to Sawtooth Mills, but the developers or on-site realtors haven’t bothered to lock it. Developers and realtors are very trusting people. How many must get murdered every year? He checks his watch and figures they have eight hours, tops, before they’ll need to be back on the road. Nine hours if they really want to press it, but after what happened yesterday in Las Vegas, Terry knows he can’t settle for mistakes. He’s never thought of himself as a violent man, but the more time he’s spent running, the more he’s envisioned hurting people who stand in his way. His mother used to tell him that what you let your mind dwell on, you become, though Terry never believed that particularly. Nevertheless, Terry thinks that he’d prefer not to be one of those men who get used to the sight of blood. That’s a choice. That’s something you can control.

Terry shoves the gate open a few feet, enough for his SUV to squeeze through, and then slips back into the driver’s seat. He looks in the rearview mirror and sees that Seth has stirred awake.

“Where are we?” Seth says, his voice dripping with sleep. Terry has been keeping the kids calm by giving them sips from a bottle of cherry-flavored codeine cough syrup he found in a sales office in Winnemucca.

“Home for the night,” Terry says.

“Real home or fake home?” Seth says.

Terry thinks about just turning the car around and heading for the police station in Phoenix. He thinks about dropping the kids off with a note that says he’s sorry, that he didn’t mean to do anything wrong—but the one thing he can’t reconcile with that scenario is that he doesn’t feel sorry. To feel sorry would be to admit that there was a choice in the matter, and that, Terry knows, is simply not the case.

“Fake home,” he says.

 

After putting both kids to bed—Seth in the football-themed room, with the life-sized poster of Peyton Manning and his offensive line standing guard over the football-shaped bed like Christ and his disciples (except Christ never looked so alive, at least not in Terry’s opinion), and Liza in the Strawberry Shortcake room, its walls covered in pink wallpaper, dozens of stuffed animals and dolls perched comfortably atop the bed—Terry goes back out to the front gate and locks the padlock, figuring that alone will buy them extra time if they need it.

What a perfect neighborhood this will be, Terry thinks. The developers were sparing no expense, what with the redbrick walkways that spiral around the houses and head off toward the luxurious green spaces. He notices that instead of regular streetlights they’ve installed faux lanterns, like alongside Main Street at Disneyland, and that there are benches beneath every third one, alternating back and forth across the street. Terry imagines Seth and Liza riding their bikes down the street at dusk while he sits on one of the benches chatting with a neighbor.

It’s likely that this neighbor would be about Terry’s age and that sometimes they’d talk about work—Terry likes
to think that he’d be a fireman in this new life and that his neighbor would be something a little less exciting, like a pharmacist or the owner of a sporting goods store—and that sometimes they’d talk about taking both of their families out to the river to ride Jet Skis to get to know each other a little better, seeing as they lived right on the same street, and that there might even come a time when they’d vacation in Hawaii together.

Terry wonders how long it has been since he’s had a real conversation with another adult. Not a conversation about the weather, or about traffic, or about how he’d like his burger cooked, but about life, about dreams, about the future, about the past, about what happens when you wake up one morning and decide to kidnap your children and then can’t undo the action, in fact don’t even want to undo it, because your love is what they need in their lives right now—though of course you know you’ve fucked them up for the rest of their lives, that their potential for success as adults, their potential to live in a neighborhood just like this, shrinks with every passing second.

Once back inside the house—the sales flyer says that it’s the Palmetto model, 2,500 square feet, four bedrooms, three baths, a great room, a den, a living room, and a pool-sized backyard for just $525,000!—Terry makes his way to the master bedroom and unfolds himself across the California King, flicks on the flat-screen television and watches the fuzz, and wishes (for not the first time) that life was simpler, like when he was a kid, when everyone got the same thirteen channels and that was fine. Who needed eight hundred channels of Food, HGTV, and Discovery? Wasn’t it enough just to have the moving pictures tell a story? Wasn’t it enough to have a cop, a robber, and a conclusion all in one hour?
The good won, the bad lost, and the credits ran. Who were the good guys and bad guys on the Food Network? All these
decisions
, Terry thinks, have made it nearly impossible to be bored anymore.

Terry figures that he spent half of his childhood bored. His mother worked across the bay in San Francisco, so each afternoon after elementary school he’d park himself in front of the TV at home to watch reruns of
The Monkees
and
Lost In Space
and
The Courtship of Eddie’s Father
. He can’t recall a single favorite episode of any of these programs, which he finds troubling. All that time he spent with Micky Dolenz and the Space Family Robinson and Bill Bixby and there’s nothing he can conjure in his mind to fill the void of the snowing (handsomely wall mounted!) flat screen. What he does remember, though, is a sense of vacancy. What did he do for all those hours between when
The Courtship of Eddie’s Father
ended and his mother came through the door carrying boxes of take-out Chinese? He knows that’s when he began imagining what the people in the other houses on his court were doing, what they were eating, what shows they were watching, and sometimes he thought about sneaking into their houses to watch them, often going so far as to walk around the court peering into windows, inhaling the smells of cooking macaroni and cheese, catching the flickering blue image of local newsman Van Amburg, a man he considered, in retrospect, more of a parent figure to him than his own misplaced father.

Since all the houses on the court were exactly the same inside, save for the two-story model which was exactly the same only in the downstairs, Terry even knew where he’d hide
if given the opportunity: beneath the stove-top was a huge cabinet that everyone kept their pots and pans in, but it was such a huge cabinet that it actually took a dogleg left toward the sink, creating a large cubby just big enough for a child to fit in. He could sit right there all night and no one would ever know.

His childhood is a period of time Terry recalls as being filled with a lingering sense of nausea, as if he were always on the precipice of retching, aware even then that something just wasn’t
right
in his head. Normal kids don’t think about peeping on other families. Normal kids don’t suffer from ennui. Terry knows Seth and Liza will never have that problem.

He sets the alarm on his cell phone for 6:30 AM, though of course he knows he’ll never sleep that late. He hasn’t slept more than four hours in a night in nearly a month, but he can’t be too careful, he can’t get too comfortable, which is why he chooses to get back up and put his shoes on before finally closing his eyes.

 

Snatching Seth and Liza was remarkably easy. He called Polly and told her that he’d like to take the kids out to dinner so that she and her boyfriend, Landon, could have a quiet night to themselves. Originally, that was all he wanted to do, though as time has passed, Terry has come to believe that he’s been priming himself for this kind of decisive action for years.

“Why are you being so nice?” Polly asked.

“Shouldn’t we start acting like adults?” Terry said.

“That’s your problem, Terry,” she said. “You’ve always acted like an adult. That’s what ended it, you know.”