But he didn’t return the salute; he just stood there looking at her, perfectly still for the longest time. Then he arched his neck to the darkening sky and released a second, even more sinister howl.
When he walked away, she began to run.
•••
“YOU MUST’VE HEARD HIM,” SHE said. “It was almost triumphant.” She was standing in the kitchen with the guys now, still panting a little, the snow still melting on her jacket. Ben was sautéing onions in a battered wok, while Michael, under Ben’s occasional instruction, was dicing a Japanese eggplant at the kitchen table.
“Triumphant?” asked Michael.
“You know. Like a coyote celebrating a kill.”
Michael rolled his eyes. “I should never have told you that.”
“You’re stoned,” she said dismissively, having noticed his vaporizer on the refectory table. It must have been the very first thing he’d unpacked. She turned to Ben instead. “You heard it, right?”
“Sorry.” Ben tapped the scalloped yellow vent over the electric stove. “This thing roars like a blast furnace. Are you sure he was howling at you?”
“He was looking at me, and he was howling like a werewolf. He did it the second time, I think, just so I could see that he was doing it.”
Michael looked up from his dicing. “You should probably take it as a compliment.”
“Really,” she said with murder in her eyes. “A compliment.”
“Sure.”
“Remind me not to hire you at a rape crisis center.”
“When have you ever worked at a rape crisis center?”
“Hang on.” Ben held up his hand like a crossing guard, silencing Michael, before turning to Mary Ann with an appeasing smile. “You should know . . . howling is fairly common around here.”
“What do you mean?”
He shrugged. “A lot of bikers stop at the saloon. They’re just tourists like the rest of us, but they can get a little . . . piggy sometimes about women. Some of them. Up until a few years ago, they were stapling bras to the ceiling of the saloon.”
“Lovely,” she said.
“To be fair,” said Michael, “it was the women who did the stapling. It wasn’t like a gang rape or something. They were totally in on the gig.”
“Who told you that?” asked Ben.
“Bernice.”
“Bernice?”
“From the county office. The one who makes that ugly shit with yarn.”
“Oh, God, yeah.”
Mary Ann was annoyed by this diversion, since it was clear now that her scary episode had yet to be taken seriously. “This guy seemed way too old for a biker.”
“You haven’t seen our bikers,” said Michael.
“Your bikers?”
“He thinks he lives here already.” Ben had turned to wink at her as he stirred the onions. “We humor him as much as possible.”
“Anyway,” she went on, “he wasn’t coming out of the saloon. He was coming out of the store.”
“Right,” said Michael. “Where he’d just bought a couple of Sara Lee chocolate pies because he’d already gotten hammered at the saloon.”
“Okay, smart-ass, then what?”
“What do you mean?”
“Gimme the scenario, Mouse. He spots me crossing the street in a fucking snowstorm . . . this silver-haired fifty-seven-year-old woman—”
“C’mon,” grinned Ben. “You know that men still notice you.”
“No . . . I don’t . . . I don’t know that at all.”
“Well,” said Michael, “you still have your teeth. That counts for a whole lot around here.”
She laughed in spite of herself. Then, because Michael had never once looked up from his chopping during this exchange, she yanked a glove from her pocket and hurled it at him. It fell short of his smirking face, which was what she’d been aiming for.
“She’s thrown down the gauntlet,” said Michael.
“That’s right, you little turd.”
“Look who’s picked it up.” Ben was now pointing to Roman, who was prancing triumphantly out of the room with the five-fingered treat in his jaws.
Michael went after him, laughing. When he was out of the room, Ben shoehorned in a moment for just the two of them. “Don’t take it personally, Mary Ann.”
“Oh, I don’t. I’ve known him too long for that.”
“No. I mean . . . the howler. It probably wasn’t about you at all.” Ben cast his eyes toward the window, toward somewhere-out-yonder, then lowered his voice as if somewhere-out-yonder might be listening. “There’s meth in them thar hills.”
She nodded soberly. “So tell me again why you love this place.”
He smiled just enough to reveal that beguiling gap between his teeth, the gap she’d explored vicariously when she’d first imagined Ben and Michael in the throes of sex. The thought of that made her squirm, knowing them as she did now, but she had definitely gone there, semi-incestuously, in her head.
“We’ll get an early start in the morning,” he said. “You can see for yourself.”
Chapter 20
Look Again
It was twilight when Shawna returned to Anna’s flat. Jake met her in front and led the way down the passageway past the furred antlers of the air plants on the wall of the house next door. This sliver of green offered only a dim echo of the garden Anna had presided over on Barbary Lane. Shawna remembered that paradise well—and how wildly her heart would race as she ran across the courtyard to show Anna her latest treasure: a rock, a seashell, an ivory elephant her dad had bought her in Chinatown.
Her heart was racing now, for entirely different reasons.
And the “treasure” in her knapsack was anything but.
“She’s expecting you,” Jake told her. “She’s been looking forward to it.”
Shawna almost apologized for disrupting Jake’s afternoon tryst, until it occurred to her that he might not want to discuss it, whatever the outcome had been. How easy could it be to be him? If Jake was shy, it was mostly because he’d been burned in his search for a man who would love (and desire!) the man he wanted to be. Shawna’s own appetites were catholic—as she liked to put it in her blog—but her body and her gender had never warred with each other. Even when wearing a strap-on and pounding her sweet hippie boo into his futon, she’d never felt like anything but a girl.
Maybe that was why she loved coming here. Not just because of Anna, though Anna’s loving counsel had certainly been part of it, but because both these singular souls, by their very existence, challenged Shawna’s comfortable assumptions about what it meant to be male or female. They compelled her, if only temporarily, to live in the genderless neutrality of the human heart.
Jake was leading her to the backyard, she realized.
“What’s happening here?” She had just spotted a whimsical wooden structure she didn’t recognize, an enclosed gazebo with a pointed roof.
“I guess you haven’t been here for a while.”
“Well . . . a month or so, I guess.” She knew Jake hadn’t meant to make her feel guilty, but she had gone there anyway, all on her own. A month was too long to risk at this stage of Anna’s life. Anna deserved better from a member of her “logical family”—Anna’s pet term for her chosen brood—logical, that is, as opposed to biological.
But Anna was still there, bundled up in a black fur blanket, looking like a dowager empress trying out a brand-new throne. Shawna leaned down and kissed her cool, dry cheek. “So soft and cozy,” she said, caressing the blanket.
“It’s not real,” said Anna. “Don’t fret.”
“I did wonder.”
“Don’t be silly. Jake got it for me at the Pottery Shed.”
“Barn,” said Jake, winking at Shawna.
“Did you do this all yourself?” asked Shawna, perusing the gazebo with genuine admiration.
Jake shrugged sheepishly. “Don’t look too close at it.”
“No, Jake. It’s a total work of art.
”
He was actually blushing, she realized. “I’ll leave you two to talk,” he mumbled, before tromping back to the house.
Shawna pulled off her backpack and set it on the floor with unnatural care, as if it contained a nest of sleeping rattlesnakes. She perched on the edge of the chair and took Anna’s hand as she cut to the chase: “I just lost someone,” she said, as unhysterically as possible. “It hit me kind of hard. I need to talk to you about it.”
Anna winced in sympathy. “Not the young man on the unicycle?”
This made Shawna smile. Anna had referred to Otto as “the young man on the unicycle” ever since she’d seen him perform one sunny afternoon at the Now and Zen Fest in the park. “No, he’s perfectly fine,” Shawna assured her. “I just left his place.” She wondered if Anna had remained benignly ignorant of Otto’s name because she’d somehow divined that Shawna wasn’t serious about him—at least not serious serious.
“This was someone I didn’t know well,” Shawna explained. “She was homeless. We saved her life, I think, for a little while . . . so it was hard to see her go.”
Anna nodded. “Of course.”
Shawna told the story from the beginning: that first day under the freeway, the eye-catching MAMA sign, Shawna’s inexplicable bond with Leia, the obsessive search that led to Cossack Alley, the knife attack, the ambulance ride to the hospital, the flesh-eating disease, the monstrous strangers who had rented Alexandra as a child.
“Unthinkable,” said Anna.
“That’s the word,” said Shawna.
“So they never . . . took off the leg?”
Shawna shook her head. “She was adamant about it . . . and it was too late, anyway. She was too far gone.”
“When did she die?”
“Last night. Late. I should have been there.”
“No, dear. You did well. You were the angel who took her home.”
Briskly, with a lopsided smile, Shawna brushed away a tear. “They asked me if I wanted her things. I didn’t even know she had things.” She picked up her knapsack and removed the revelatory item she’d brought with her: a Star Wars lunch box so rusty and battered that Princess Leia’s face was all but obliterated. “She kept her cash strapped to her leg—and the knife, of course—but this is where she kept her memories. The guy who was guarding her cardboard box brought it to the hospital this morning.”
Shawna opened the lunch box and removed one of the photos, holding it out for Anna to examine. “She worked in the East Bay for a while. That’s the Fabric Barn, I guess, judging from those bolts of cloth.”
“Lovely,” said Anna, and she wasn’t just being gracious. The young woman behind the counter was a stunning brunette with a sparkling smile. When Shawna first saw the photo, it had taken her a while to connect this Alexandra with the wretch she’d met under the freeway, but there had been no denying that it was the same person. It pleased Shawna that Anna would never know anything but this version of the woman, that Alexandra’s beauty was still intact in the eyes of someone who had never known her.
“And here she is as a little girl,” said Shawna, trying to sound matter-of-fact, because this image, the one with “me” inscribed crudely on the back, was the one that was flooding her mind with nameless dread. The photo had lost all its colors except orange and green. Little Alexandra was wearing a dirndl and standing alone at a window. She wasn’t smiling in this picture; she looked completely miserable, in fact.
“She looks like Heidi,” said Anna, choosing to focus on the dress.
“Look again.”
Anna pulled a pair of reading glasses from the depths of the fur-free blanket and maneuvered them, shakily, onto her face. “She doesn’t seem happy, does she?”
“Look at the background. That’s Alcatraz, right? And look at that railing outside the window. And that little plywood terrace.”
Anna nodded but said nothing.
“It’s the pentshack, isn’t it?” This was their common term for the studio on the roof of 28 Barbary Lane. Anna had rented it out to tenants, but Shawna had been allowed to play there whenever the place was empty. It had been her secret castle in the sky.
“Well, it’s certainly Russian Hill,” Anna conceded. “But it can’t be the pentshack.”
“Why not?”
Anna shrugged. “Because there were never children living there.”
Shawna looked at her. “Maybe not living there.”
It didn’t take long for this darkness to find its way onto Anna’s face. “Oh,” she murmured.
“Didn’t my father live there?”
Silence.
“He was seeing Mary Ann, right? She used to sleep over there sometimes. Before they got married and adopted me. He told me so himself.”
“Well . . . yes, but it was also the TV room for a long time, so . . . dear, I hope you’re not suggesting—”
“No, of course not!” Shawna snapped. “I’m just trying to figure this out!” She was starting to sound like a waterboarder at Guantanamo, so she returned the snapshot to the lunch box and softened her tone considerably. “Sorry. My nerves are kinda frayed.”
Anna’s wheels seemed already to be turning. “When was that taken?”
“I’m guessing late seventies. Maybe a little earlier.”
“Why are you guessing that?”
“Because she looks to be about seven or eight, and the coroner said she was barely past forty when she died. If that.” Shawna was trying hard to absorb this fact herself, reckoning with the bitter truth that Alexandra had only recently achieved middle age. “Plus,” she added, “the photo has that orangey seventies look.”
Anna was no longer listening, just blinking into the distance, engrossed in some flickering old movie of her life. After a moment she said: “Mr. Williams.”
“What?”
“He lived in the pentshack for about six months. He was a private detective. My wife—my ex-wife—hired him to track me down and spy on me.”
“Did you ever see him—?”
“—with a child? No. Never. He was a mean, conniving little man . . . he tried to blackmail someone . . . that I was seeing at the time and had grown very close to, but I never saw any evidence that . . .” Anna’s words trailed off feebly.
“But he might have been capable, right?”
Anna nervously rearranged the folds of her throw. “I can’t imagine anyone being capable of that. Much less under my roof.”
“What happened to him?”
“I don’t know. He got very drunk one Christmas Eve, and he never came back.”
“Ever?”
Anna shook her head slowly. “We called the police after a week or so, but nothing came of it. I always assumed he skipped town once his cover was blown.”
Anna’s crime-fiction lingo made Shawna grin.
“What?” asked Anna. “That’s what they say, isn’t it?”
“That’s what they say.”
Anna regarded her with grandmotherly concern. “I hope you’re feeling better, dear. You had me worried.”
“I just don’t understand, that’s all.”
“Understand what?”
“Why the universe hands me such random shit.”
Anna’s smile was inscrutable. “Sometimes the universe has a slow day.”
NOT LONG AFTER DARK, BACK at Otto’s cramped studio in the Crocker Amazon, Shawna provided her own coda to the saga that had consumed her for weeks.
“I’ve asked them to give us the ashes,” she said. She was lying naked on Otto’s futon, her head resting on the warm slab of his chest, trying to find her way back to the ordinary and the beautiful.
“Cool,” he said. “What do you wanna do with ’em?”
“I thought we could take them to the headlands when the weather gets better. Or maybe the park. Stow Lake or something.”
“Totally.”
They were both silent for a while as she rode the rhythm of Otto’s heart, drugged by his ripe, cedary essence. It was
raining now, so hard she could hear it, and there were fat droplets, like beads of mercury, rolling down the security bars in the window.
Otto said: “I have to tell you something.”
She thought she’d heard guilt in his voice. “Oh, yeah?” she said, bracing herself for another unpleasant surprise, another shitstorm out of nowhere.
He pulled her closer until she was straddling his leg like a koala on a tall, skinny tree. Finally he said: “I went to see Alexandra last night.”
She was infinitely relieved. “That’s it?” She had planned to stop by the hospital herself, but she’d already committed to a reading at “Writers with Drinks” and hadn’t wanted to disappoint her friend Charlie, who hosted the event. “Why is that something you have to tell me? That’s wonderful, Otto. She had company before she died.”
“I dunno . . . you were sort of funny about it before.”
“Funny about it? I asked you to be part of it.”
“Yeah, but . . . just me.”
It took her a moment to get it. “You took Sammy, you mean?”
“Yeah.”
Of course he’d taken the monkey. Sammy was Otto’s envoy, the purest and deepest expression of his heart. It shamed her to think that she’d denied him the use of that silent language. She scooched her hand up his leg and cupped his junk, loving its silken familiarity, the reassurance of her own puppet pal. “Was she aware of you?”
“I don’t know. Maybe.”
“She wasn’t when I was there.”
“I think she may have smiled once.”
“Well, that’s good.”
“Whatever.”
“No. It’s good, baby.”
“It was good for me,” he said.
Chapter 21
An Old Familiar Impatience
“Why is the water yellow?” Mary Ann asked, wrinkling her nose.
It was barely nine a.m., and the three of them were standing on the edge of the hot springs that Ben had been raving about since breakfast. It was not what she’d imagined. It looked like a smallish suburban swimming pool, complete with a blue-painted bottom. Only it didn’t look blue in the least, it looked green, because of that disgusting water.