Chapter One
LABOR DAY
Running. The two of them running in the spotlight with nowhere to hide. Dark cliffs above, a dark sea below, and a paved ledge of a road in between. No escape from that insane glare, which follows them like the beam of a giant magnifying glass—a magnifying glass in the hands of a sadistic child—
Blink and it’s broad daylight. Night is replaced by the early morning hubbub of a departure lounge—he’s been daydreaming again. Henry Cadmus is taking his family to Catalina Island to visit his mother.
I’m taking my family to Catalina to visit my mother. I’m just taking my family to Catalina to visit my mother Vicki.
He’s said it aloud a few times already, to people at work and the stewardess on the plane from Chicago, but it still doesn’t sit right.
Hey, I’m only taking my wife and daughter to Catalina Island to visit grandma and do a little sightseeing—what’s so weird about that? That’s better.
Weird?—nothing. The answer is nothing at all. It’s a perfectly ordinary thing to do—just look around the ferry terminal at all the Labor Day tourists and daytrippers with their beach gear. No big deal. So why is his stomach wrung tight as a wet dishrag?
“Bootykins, are you okay?”
“What? Sure—sure.” Henry smiles reassuringly at his wife’s HD camcorder, embarrassed to be caught in a private moment. Ruby is his soul mate, his savior, the light of his life, and even after five years of marriage he’s still blown away by her creative energy as well as her darkly angelic beauty, but right now he could do without her need to compulsively record their lives for posterity, as if in her husband’s personal traumas she sniffs an Oscar for Best Documentary. That’s what he gets for marrying a younger, cooler woman. An artist.
“Just a little jetlagged, I guess,” he says.
“Are you sure that’s all it is?” The camera zooms in close.
Oh come on. It’s his own fault for being a sucker for art. Even before Henry fell in love with Ruby, he had been seduced by her taste in paintings: the walls of her alternative therapy practice were decorated with dark Goya prints, violent and alarming pictures that acknowledged the horrors of life and thus made slightly more bearable his chronic pain. Between the pictures and the candles and the slightly eerie, atonal music, Ruby’s studio was such an immediate relief from the clinical white hell of the VA medical center that Henry had pointed to Goya’s black Sabbath and joked, I think I need a witch. To which Ruby had replied, You’re in luck, cheerfully explaining that she was actually a lapsed Wiccan priestess—a fact later proven by her twining Druidic tattoos and discreet body piercings. Guess I went a little crazy in college, huh?
Henry loves that about her, the casual laughing-off of the awkward past. It is something he would like to be able to do himself, especially right now, when his own idiotic demons are scratching at the door. It is almost time to start boarding the boat. Throwing Ruby an Oedipal bone, he says, “It’s just my mother. The usual.”
“I know, but it’s going to be fine, I promise. I’ll be right there.”
“It’s just weird to have to track her down like this; she’s never done it before, just moved without telling me or anything. Not answering my letters. Obviously she doesn’t want to talk to me.”
“Well, it’s not like you haven’t done the same thing to her,” she says brightly, holding the camera in one hand and their leashed toddler in the other.
“Yeah, but…” He shakes his head as if to disperse the reflexive spasm of guilt that comes with anything having to do with his mother. “This is not like her, though. To just disappear and not tell me. Who knows what kind of crazy scam she’s mixed up with this time—I keep thinking of that phony Mexican property she bought a few years back. By going there we might get stuck bailing her out again.”
“God, this carpet is filthy,” Ruby says, zooming in on Moxie’s black-smudged hands and knees, then panning across the foot traffic of the departure lounge as if to emphasize the parade of filth. The smut underlying the sunny myth of the California Dream. “Maybe your mom’s just trying to show you how it feels to be cut out of the picture. You know what a shock it was to her when you moved away.”
“That was twenty years ago! I’m a middle-aged man, for God’s sake.”
“Not in her mind.” Wrestling the uncooperative toddler, Ruby says, “Some help!”
“Oh, sorry.” He takes the wipes from her bag and goes to work.
“My guess is she’s just giving you a taste of your own medicine.”
“But that’s not fair, I have a right to my own—” Henry stops himself, disengaging from the well-worn groove. His wife is just baiting him anyway, for dramatic purposes. “Hey, whose side are you on?” he asks.
“Just playing devil’s advocate,” Ruby says sweetly.
“Oh, thanks. Thanks, that’s what I need: a viper in my bed. Anyway, I don’t think so. She’s too needy to pull off something like that for long—if she was doing it out of spite, she’d have caved by now and sent me a big ranting letter. You’ve seen her letters; she’s never been one to suffer in silence. This is something new.”
“You know what I think?”
“What?”
“I think you’re jealous.”
“Poopiehead!” Moxie shrieks, straining against the leash.
“Jealous?”
“I think you’re afraid your mom has got her life together and doesn’t need you as much. Maybe she’s found love—or gotten married.”
“Hey, if only. You know how long I’ve been wishing she would do something like that? Take the burden off of me.”
“Maybe so, honeybun—” Ruby sets Moxie back on the floor, turns the camera off, and sits on Henry’s lap, resting her slender bare arms on his shoulders “—but sometimes you can be the eensiest bit judgmental, especially with her. It wouldn’t surprise me a bit if she didn’t want to tell you she had moved in with some old guy because she was afraid of your reaction. I wouldn’t really blame her—you can be pretty hard on her, you know.”
“It’s her judgment that’s the problem, not mine. She makes very bad choices.”
“Maybe so, but it’s her life.”
“Just so long as it doesn’t become our problem.”
During the monotonous, two-hour ferry ride, Ruby wanders the decks with Moxie and that camera, interviewing strangers, while Henry stares absently out the window at the passing waves. This is Ruby’s first trip to California, Moxie’s first boat ride, and they’re excited. Henry is glad for them—why shouldn’t they be? Why shouldn’t he be having fun as well? Just because of something that happened a long time ago—it’s silly.
Feet up on their luggage, half drowsing, Henry has plenty of time to think about things, and what an utterly different experience his first trip to the island had been: like going to another planet, as exotic and beautiful and…he dozes off.
Meat. A supermarket display of raw meat. Rows of ruby-red cutlets, steaks, chops, roasts, sausage, all glistening under fluorescent lights, garnished with sprigs of holly and berries. Going down the refrigerator case, you see something black and bristly on the bottom shelf—a huge boar’s head. Fascinated, heart thumping, you look closer, but your breath fogs the glass; you can’t see. Impatiently wiping it, you find that the head is gone…or perhaps was never really there at all.
Something drips on your scalp. You turn around to see that hideous pig head staring down at you, its long snout wrinkling at your scent. Big yellow teeth, so human, line its drooling jaws. The pig has a man’s body; the body of a butcher wearing a bloody apron and holding up a great, gory cleaver—
Someone bumps the back of his seat, and Henry awakens with a shout.