6
PETER CLIMBED INTO the Suburban, tossed the bag with the spud guns onto the backseat, and drove out onto Chapman Avenue again. Just before Amanda and David went off to Hawaii last week, David promised to send postcards. It was his first plane trip, complete with a ride in the airport limo, and so he was going to send the first card from the airport. Peter had given him a little packet of stamps. No postcards had come, from the airport or anywhere else.
It wasn’t like David to neglect to send the card. Like Amanda, he was organized and responsible to a fault, especially for a ten-year-old. It shouldn’t have taken two days for the card to make it across town.
Regardless of what his marriage had come to, fifteen years of it had made Peter feel necessary, and the feeling was something he couldn’t lose overnight. He had told Amanda that he would look at the front brakes on her Honda while she was gone. He couldn’t have her paying a hundred fifty bucks for a brake job, not for something that took thirty minutes and a twelve-dollar trip to the Pep Boys.
The banners at Selman Chevrolet whipped on their lines, blowing straight out toward the ocean, and a big tumble-weed, freed at last from whatever lot it had grown up in, rolled across the Tustin Avenue intersection, only to be knocked to pieces by a pickup truck gunning away east, toward the foothills.
Instead of stopping at the Pep Boys for brake linings, Peter crossed the intersection and turned right on Monterey, pulling up to the curb outside the house. The house now rather than his house. Each day brought new revelations. Just out of habit he was tempted to haul out the lawn rake and clean up the windblown leaves and papers that choked the flower beds.
Through the open window of the Suburban he could hear the distant growl of a lawnmower, and he could see that the girl down at the corner house on Maple was washing her car in the driveway. Weekend mornings in the suburb— the smell of bacon and coffee through an open kitchen window, kids playing on the sidewalk, the hissing of lawn sprinklers. Maybe you had to get away from it to see it all clearly again.
He climbed out of the car and walked up onto the porch. The blinds were drawn across the front windows. He knocked but he could tell straight off that the house was empty. They were in Hawaii. They wouldn’t be home for a week. He had known that but had knocked anyway. It wasn’t his house anymore and he couldn’t just walk in uninvited, even when he knew the house was empty.
He headed up the driveway into the backyard, found the back door key inside a hollow plastic rock in the flower bed, then stepped up onto the back porch to let himself in. Amanda’s cat, Tully, appeared out of nowhere and darted up onto the porch, brushing against his leg and purring loudly. A neighbor was feeding it, but it was used to having the run of the house. Peter stooped to pet it, then blocked the door with his leg and slipped inside. If he let Tully in he’d be chasing the cat around the house all morning.
“Relax,” Peter said to it. “You’ve only got a week to go and you’re back in. For me there’s no end in sight.”
He closed the door behind him. The house smelled and sounded empty, nothing but dusty echoes. With no idea what he was looking for, he wandered from the service porch into the kitchen. A glass pitcher half-full of lime Kool-Aid sat on the kitchen table alongside two nearly empty glasses, a plate speckled with cookie crumbs and a single broken Oreo, and a dealt-out deck of playing cards.
Crazy Eights. It was David’s favorite game, and the three of them had played countless hands of it, drinking green Kool-Aid and eating Oreos, arguing off and on about the wisdom of dunking the Oreos in the Kool-Aid and whether you ought to unscrew them first and eat the center and then dunk either half separately, so that you seemed to have two cookies instead of one. Suddenly hungry, he opened the cupboard and searched for the open package of Oreos, but he couldn’t find it.
How could it still be going on without him? Peter was a part of it, part of the ritual. It was Peter who had always made the Kool-Aid.
Well, now somebody else was making it. He carried the glasses and pitcher to the sink and rinsed them out. He could play out that part of the ritual anyway. It wasn’t like Amanda to leave dirty dishes on the table—an open invitation to ants.
He went out into the dining room and then into David’s room, which was almost appallingly neat. Books and toys were carefully arranged on the shelves that Peter had built when David was—what? Two? He sat at the foot of the bed, looking around at the posters on the wall and at the airplane models and sets of high-tech building blocks. Over one of the headboard bedposts hung a wooden heart on a string. Peter and David had cut it out on the band saw five years ago, when David was on his Oz kick. The only sign of disorder in the room was that the closet door stood open, blocking some of the sunlight that shone through the window.
Peter gave the wooden heart a shove, so that it swung back and forth like a pendulum. It dawned on him that he was chasing ghosts, driving like crazy out of the hills in order to wander around the empty house. What did he expect to find? A clue to what? Outside, the wind blew past the lonesome willow tree in the yard, making the branches sway. He sat daydreaming for a moment, nearly hypnotized by the easy dance of the slender willow branches.
Then, in a rush, he was struck with the uncanny notion that he had seen this very same thing before—early this morning. Except that his predawn hallucination had been even more real, if that were possible, with its kitchen sounds and smell of charcoal smoke. Now, except for the swishing of branches beyond the window, all was quiet, and the only smell in the air was the faintly dusty odor of a closed-up house.
He was looking at the tree from the same angle, from underneath, looking up at the silver-white undersides of the leaves. It was a different season and a different wind, and the shadows were wrong, but what he had seen that morning had clearly been a view of the backyard willow tree as seen through David’s bedroom window, through David’s eyes. It had been something almost telepathic, like a borrowed memory—David’s memory.
The wind picked up outside now, and the sunlit willow branches flailed away, showering the air with leaves. He stood up. It was time to go. There was no use drowning himself in memories and regrets.
He stepped across and swung the closet door shut. Sitting behind it, where it had been hidden by the open door, was a piece of canvas luggage. It was David’s overnighter, the zipper open, the bag full of the clothes that he should have taken to Hawaii.