Neither she nor Allen invited Ed to stay for dinner.
That evening, they sat at the end of the point to watch the sun set. Rae leaned her back against Allen; he rested his chin on her shoulder, breathing in her fragrances of lemon, sweat, and sawdust.
“What have you been working on?” he asked her.
“It’s a surprise.”
He tightened his arms around her, nipping at her neck with his teeth. “We have ways of making you talk,” he warned.
“A bed,” she told him.
“What, no more mattress on the floor? How can I call myself a hippie if I sleep in a bed?”
“When did you ever call yourself a hippie?”
“You have a point.”
“Are you really finished?” she asked, so abruptly that he knew it had been riding her mind.
“I am. I told Alice that I would think about coming back on what you might call the board of directors, if they had either a board or directors. But I didn’t even promise that. I’m afraid you’re stuck with me underfoot. How about you? Don’t you have to be away this summer?”
“A couple of weeks in July when the book comes out, I’m holding workshops in Pennsylvania and Santa Fe. And then there’s Japan the end of August. Have you thought any more about coming with me?”
“I might. I was there in sixty-eight, but I never got out of Tokyo.”
“You’d like it. Of course, you’re welcome to come along to the July workshops as well.”
“Massage your aching shoulders at night and comb the glue out of your hair?”
She laughed. “Or you and Ed could do your Baja trip. Would July be too awful there?”
“Hot but not unbearable.”
With the unspoken agreements, Rae nestled her back more fully into his embrace, and his body responded with an amiable discomfort. He nudged his hips forward against her, and she laughed, deep down in her throat, a sound like the purr of a big cat. His arms pulled her to him. Think of it, he told himself, not for the first time, a man has to reach retirement age before he falls in love.
Not the least part of his pleasure was knowing the happiness it brought to Rae as well. The real reason, he suspected, that Rae Newborn, world-renowned woodworker and three-times would-be suicide, was flying around the world so much was to prove to herself that she could. She originally had come to these islands to rebuild her life, following great loss and a catastrophic mental breakdown. She seemed, at last, to be succeeding.
Which was—although Allen would do nothing that might make her suspect it—another reason that he had to get out of the kidnap business. Maybe the most valid reason of all. As Allen saw it, if a man became involved with an emotionally fragile woman, if he allowed her to lean on him even a little, then he had no right to threaten her tenuous stability by putting his own freedom and safety at risk. Rae had lost a husband and child already; losing Allen to a prison sentence might sink her for good. For the present, she needed him more than the children did. He had spent twenty-six years helping others; now, he was here.
They sat wrapped up in each other as the sky flared through its spectrum from fluorescent orange to indigo blue. When the light was nothing but a blue glow in the west, they rose and went back to the house.
For the next two months, Allen set about the creation of a new life. The island, Sanctuary—Folly—was the last piece of solid land before the international border, with neither neighbor nor electricity. In the past, the house that Rae’s hands built had hidden Allen from the world’s view. Now, there was no longer a reason for him to be invisible.
The week after he came home, Allen made an overnight trip to Seattle to fetch the pickup from the airport parking lot. He cleaned it out, ran it through a car wash, and sold the camper top to one place and the truck itself to a used car dealer. Back at his apartment, he sorted out some clothes and drove out of town a ways to fetch an order of woodworking supplies for Rae. Then he spent the afternoon putting together the documents of Jamie O’Connell’s case, making printouts of the boy’s original emails and burning CDs of the recordings, ending with a photocopy of the boy’s letter to his father and Allen’s own report on Jamie’s state of mind. He went out to the local mail service and sent one set to Alice, stashing the other in his own storage locker. Back in the quiet apartment that evening, he gloated at the empty fax machine and the dark computer, then picked up the phone.
The number hadn’t changed since they were kids, when the prefix had been an abbreviated word instead of three numbers. It rang twice, and then his brother’s voice said, “Hello.” It was a man’s voice, filled with years and authority. Allen had forgotten; for a moment, he couldn’t think of anything to say.
“Who is it?” Jerry asked, half-irritated, half-suspicious: He was, after all, a cop. Allen felt a sudden urge to hang up, lest his brother find out everything he’d been doing all these years, and be faced with the necessity of arresting him. Jerry would do it, too.
“Hi, Jer,” he forced himself to say. “It’s Allen.”
Now it was Jerry who went silent. Allen couldn’t even imagine what was going through his brother’s mind; the last time he’d called home had been four years before, when he’d been in a desolate state after hearing that one of his rescues had gone back to her husband, and that within the week, she and her child were dead. Allen of course had been unable to tell his brother why his mood was so grim, and he knew Jerry suspected he was back on drugs or booze; the conversation had not been a success.
“You probably thought I was dead,” he told the silent receiver.
“I wondered.”
Well, at least Jerry hadn’t hung up on him. “No, I’m fine. Really well, in fact. Jerry, I’m thinking of moving back to the islands.” Not, he was careful to say, “coming home”—he couldn’t see living with Jerry again, even if he could bear to live under the same roof as their father, and he didn’t want to give Jerry the impression that the threat existed.
“When?”
“Soon,” he said. He didn’t quite know how to tell Jerry that he had already moved back, that he was, in fact, living with a woman whom Jerry had at one time shown considerable interest in. Take it slowly, give him one idea at a time to chew on. Some things, like Allen’s work and the fact that he’d been using the Sanctuary cave under Jerry’s nose for years, might have to be passed over entirely. “I have a place in Seattle right now. Any chance you might be coming to the mainland, we could have a beer, or dinner?”
The offer of neutral ground went down well. “I don’t have a lot of free time,” Jerry’s voice told him. “You know how crazy summer is—but I do have a meeting there on Tuesday. That any good?”
The relief of his brother’s acceptance was so huge, it kept him from responding.
Jerry took his silence as something other than relief. “Doesn’t have to be then, why don’t you give me a call when—”
“Tuesday’d be great. Will you have time for dinner?”
“So long as I catch the last ferry out. Where and when?”
Allen started to say the name of his favorite place, then choked back the words. Better to go somewhere they didn’t know him than to risk troubling his brother with the fact that he’d been in the area for years. “How about I ask around, let you know?”
“Fine. Call me back and leave me a message, here or at the office.”
“I’ll do that,” Allen said, although something in Jerry’s voice told him that his younger brother suspected he wouldn’t call. “How’s Dad?”
“He’s Dad. What can I say?” Long ago, Jerry had gone through a period of resenting mightily the chronic adolescence of their unreconstructed hippie father, his multiple wives (each one younger and blonder than the last), and his benign neglect of his two sons. The old man still went his blithe way, certain that the world loved him, knowing that his many sisters would stand in and do parental duty for him. John’s just hopeless was the family’s oft-repeated verdict, but now Jerry seemed more willing to accept th
e affection with which the rest of the clan said the phrase, and leave behind the condemnation. In fact, that was what he did now: “He’s just hopeless. You want to know where he and Number Six are?”
“Six? What happened to Five?” The woman whom the whole family called Five had been a thirty-year-old barefoot but extremely successful pot grower from northern California, who the last time Allen had heard was supporting Hopeless John in the style, and in the high-grade cannabis, to which he was accustomed.
“Well, she sort of got herself arrested. And before you ask, no, I didn’t have anything to do with it. She divorced him so the lawyers couldn’t get ahold of what money he has left, and he’s now living in a solar-powered underground house in New Mexico. You know, where the cactus grow?”
Ah, thought Allen. Cactus; as in Carlos Castaneda; cactus as in peyote buttons. “He is truly hopeless,” he told his brother. Shared knowledge of the eighty-year-old hippie they called Dad broke the ice, and they exchanged inconsequentials for a while before Jerry said he had to go. Allen hung up, content with the beginning.
There was one more piece of business to take care of before he could leave the city. He booted up his computer and sent a short encrypted email, and later that night went to one of their meeting places for a talk with Alice. She nodded once at his brief explanation of why he could not continue to stick his neck out for her, then nodded again when he told her that if he was satisfied that he could be thoroughly insulated legally, he might be willing to talk about becoming a scout for the organization, with an eye to expanding their havens overseas. All the ifs and caveats he attached to his agreement seemed to trouble her not at all—assuming that she even heard them—and she merely nodded a third time when he told her that she would have to wait until October to talk further. An outsider would have thought her unconcerned about whether he took the job on or not, but Allen knew her well enough to suspect that she was, very secretly, pleased.
He retreated home to Folly the next day, his own man for the first time in his life.
Dinner with Jerry the following Tuesday was surprisingly warm and easy, and afterward, Allen came back to the islands publicly. His first time out was an effort; walking openly and undisguised down the streets of Friday Harbor after twenty years of avoiding just that, he felt like some underground creature violently jerked into the light of day. He kept wanting to obscure his face with one hand, or buy a hat with a wide brim. The first half-dozen times old friends and schoolmates did a double take, followed by exclamations of astonishment and the inevitable “Where on earth have you been?” questions, he had to stifle the urge to break and run. By July, the urge was still there, but was fueled less by panic than by the agonizing boredom of answering the same questions over and over again. Allen Carmichael could be a person again; retirement had a lot going for it.
Before Rae went away for her July workshops, Ed took the Orca Queen down to Baja; Allen caught a plane an hour after Rae’s left and flew down to meet him, for ten days of warm water, Mexican beer, philosophical musings, abstention from razor blades, and old-time rock and roll. The two men reluctantly pulled anchor and turned north, working their way up a thousand miles of coastline to Seattle, leaving just enough time before Rae’s plane got in for Allen to shave his beard, get a haircut, and change his clothes for those that didn’t stink of fish and good times.
Life was good. So good, Allen found himself bracing against the return of the dreams: In the past, letting down his guard had opened him up to the green eyes of Flores, the dripping fingers of deRosa, the shiny black visage of the lieutenant from hell. But July merged into August, and the nightmares stayed away. And when he went down one day to the cave under the island, the hideaway where he had stashed maybe a dozen families over the years, the cots and equipment were only mildly reproachful, and the stones held nothing but the sound of water.
The only thing to haunt him was the dark gaze of a twelve-year-old boy in Montana. It was difficult, walking past a phone booth in Friday, not to stop and punch in Rachel Johnson’s number, a persistent urge that had never happened to him before. He was even tempted to call Alice and ask if she’d heard anything about the boy. He did not, because she would be alarmed at the sign of attachment, and rightly so: Countertransference was a dangerous thing in the business he had just left.
So he did not call Rachel, and he did not contact Alice; he did not even go onto the Internet to follow San Jose’s search for the missing boy. He would cut the cord here as he had all the others, and if the cord did not wish to be cut, well, he would pretend it had been. He had a life to live; with a bit of luck, and no interference from errant knights on Fordback, Jamie would be doing the same.
For two months, Allen worked at constructing his new life. It was an unfamiliar position he found himself in, retooling his mind so that the first thought each morning was of Rae, or fishing, and not new techniques of spiriting an abused woman from her husband, or how to arrange a safe house in one of the many places across the country where they had none.
He was not one of “them” anymore. He might be, peripherally, in the future, but not for the next few months. The next months belonged to him, and to Rae. And so throughout that summer he lived on the island called Folly with his beloved madwoman, and he saw his brother from time to time and once even their father, and he had long talks with Ed, and he tried to tell himself he really wasn’t bored and he was not in the least worried about a slim, dark-haired boy in Montana.
But when the letter came the third week of August, Allen knew that he had only been waiting for the other shoe to hit the boards above his head.
Chapter 22
Jamie tried, he really did. He wouldn’t exactly say that he’d got used to the smell of animal shit, and the sound of the cows and roosters jolted him out of sleep when it was still night outside, and the constant press of people and talk made him jumpy—even the milk the family drank was weird, tasting too . . . alive for him to swallow except if it was icy cold. But he felt he had honestly made an effort. And the endless work on the farm was a revelation, just how much labor went into putting a meal on the table and a roof over a family’s head when you had to do it yourself. If the country’s industries went under tomorrow—if the oil wells ran dry or a bomb froze all the world’s machines at once—by the next day about ninety-nine percent of the population would be starving or freezing or both. Except for people like his new family.
Were the rest of the world to vanish, the only thing these people would notice would be that Jeopardy disappeared from the television and the sugar bowl would go empty. And no doubt Pete would soon have sugar cane planted and Rachel would construct a board and invent topics for family Jeopardy games around the kitchen table. The pantry looked like some kind of health-food supermarket, they had their own gas pump and electrical generator, and shopping once a week was more for entertainment and luxuries (corn flakes, bananas, and the Sara Lee cheesecake Pete adored) than from anything resembling necessity.
Rachel even made a lot of the family’s clothes—not jeans or underwear, not that he’d seen so far, but all kinds of shirts and dresses and things. He didn’t know anybody did that, but there she’d sit, bent over the whirring engine of the shiny black sewing machine stitching together unlikely shapes cut out from the cloth she’d bought in town (at least she bought that!) and somehow making them come together in a shirt that fit his cousin’s shoulders as if they’d been born together, or a wodge of multicolored scraps that turned inside out and made a puffy pillow. Once she’d embarked on a series of long, long seams on some patterned cloth that Jamie had told her he didn’t mind too much, and produced a set of curtains for his new room. Sometimes when he woke up in the morning, up in the white-walled room at the very top of the house, the light was just coming through those curtains, and he just stared and stared at them, like they were the most wonderful thing in the world, magic or something. If he hadn’t been there when they were made, he wouldn’t even have noticed them, or if he had, he
’d have thought, how hard could they be to make, really, just curtains?
The day she’d made them, Rachel had known he was standing in the doorway watching her—not that she said anything, just did that little humming thing she did under her breath like she was singing with the whirring machine. But when she got to the end of one of those seams that seemed to go on for ten minutes, she lifted the cloth, clipped the threads, and asked over her shoulder if he wanted to try. Of course he said no, but somehow she’d talked him into it, maybe because they were alone in her sewing room, and so he sat down at the machine and held the cloth down in front of his chest like she had, then eased his sneaker down onto the foot pedal. The machine leapt into life and whirred madly, biting furiously at the fabric and jerking it around so much that in an instant the flat metal foot was sewing air. He dropped the cloth and snatched his foot from the pedal, and he would have abandoned the attempt except that Rachel was already standing close behind him, her cheek resting against the side of his head and her arms pushed through his, and she was telling him to put his hands in front of hers on the seam and press down his foot. He didn’t want to, really, felt so nervous he thought his throat would close up, but he didn’t want to look like a jerk or a coward, so he’d gripped the edge of the cloth like she did, and pressed down gingerly with his shoe. The little machine jerked to life alarmingly, but with her hands in control, the cloth stayed in a straight line. After a minute he began to relax, and then it was kind of fun, seeing the needle blur up and down, and the thread feed through the guides in a series of continuous jerks, and the cloth steer itself through like magic. The flowered cloth of the dress that Rachel wore had brushed his arms, and she smelled warm, more like one of the cows (although he’d never tell her that) than any woman he’d ever met, because she didn’t use perfume and deodorant and stuff, just soap. And the long seam came out a little wavy, but smooth enough by the end, even after she let her fingers go and he was guiding the cloth through all by himself.