The Timer Game
Grace chafed her hands together under the thin wool blanket and shifted on the backseat of the patrol car. ‘I’ve already gone through it. I gave my preliminary statement. I’m coming in tomorrow to sign it.’
‘Grace.’ Sid Felcher, her crime lab boss, sighed heavily and swiveled in the front seat, his face oily. It wasn’t his squad car, it belonged to the detective who’d taken her statement, but Sid had climbed into the front seat when the detective had gone inside the meth house, and now he rested his arm along the top of the seat as if he were polishing the leather with his forearm.
‘Another study just released, found it on the Internet, two biggest stressors for supervisors. Causes ulcers, heart attacks, groin injuries.’ He raised his eyebrows and they inched together like furry mating caterpillars. ‘Well?’
‘Sid, I need to call Katie. I need to go home.’
‘We already took care of that, remember? She’s fine, your daughter’s fine. Okay, so the answer is, ta dah!’ Sid waved his hands expansively. His nails were bitten. ‘Two main stressors for guys like me, poor working-class schmos just trying to make a living, is having to discipline, take action, against a subordinate. That means you. Huge stressor, stroke city. Other one is having to deal with the public, explain what the subordinate did that was so wrong we’re going to have to apologize for about a million years and maybe even pay big bucks to get things straightened out.’
This couldn’t be happening. Even with Sid at his most dysfunctional.
‘Sid, in case you forgot, he had a butcher knife.’
‘But he wasn’t swinging it, right? I mean, not at you. Just that little side-to-side thing, you said, but not actually at you.’
She sat back in the seat. ‘Is there something I don’t know?’
‘Grace, be more specific. What you don’t know could –’
‘About what just happened,’ she interrupted. ‘Is there something I don’t know?’
‘Like what?’
‘Like have they ID’d him?’
He hesitated a beat too long. ‘Whoever it was, it was a human life.’
She felt rage surge under the exhaustion. ‘Are you suggesting I did something wrong shooting a man with a butcher knife who had just killed a drug agent, a sergeant detective, and a uniformed cop?’
‘Whoa. I’m not suggesting anything, Grace, I’m just passing the time, sharing a survey I downloaded from Yahoo.’ He grinned. His gums were receding.
‘I need to go home.’ She pressed her fingers into her temples, fighting the impulse to bite him.
‘See, this is what they call a critical incident.’
‘I know what a critical incident is,’ Grace snapped.
A man darted out of the house and under the police tape, Paul Collins from Trace. Bags sagged under his eyes, heightening his resemblance to an aging basset hound on speed. He lumbered toward his car, face grim and an evidence kit clenched in his hands.
‘Thing is, another study.’ Sid unwrapped a toothpick and massaged his gums. ‘Some shooters, they get permanent emotional trauma, they go a little cuckoo, they visit la-la land and never come back.’
He sucked noisily on the toothpick and twirled it. His lips were wet.
‘Supervisors – we’re responsible, I’m responsible – as your boss, like it or not. I mean, I don’t take you in, get your head examined, you could sue me for mondo moola, retire to Florida, you and your kid, how old is Katie now? Two?’
‘Five this Saturday. She’s already in kindergarten.’
‘Even better. Closer to college.’ Sid fished car keys out of his Hawaiian shirt pocket and jangled them. ‘See, the thing is, you don’t have a choice.
Nobody wants to see a shrink, ever, fillet out their personal life, spill their guts to some stranger with a clipboard. I wouldn’t. Who would? You’d have to be crazy.’
He grinned at his little joke.
‘So the way it comes down, the department policy is, you have to go whether you want to or not.’
‘You haven’t answered my question.’ She shifted in the seat.
‘Which was?’
‘Who’d I shoot, Sid?’
Sid looked out the window and stared at the sky. Grace saw it seconds before she heard it, the heavy whup whup of rotor blades. A helicopter.
In Guatemala, they’d brought the girl in on a stretcher, off a helicopter. Same sound.
The wind was picking up and it hurled loose trash across the yard. A palm tree tilted crazily back and forth like a metronome.
‘Yeah, actually. They have an ID. Eddie Loud. Mean anything?’
She shook her head.
The helicopter circled and landed delicately in the flattened grass. Grace stared at the man in the passenger seat.
It was a California U.S. senator. Albert Loud looked older than his pictures, haggard, the lines around his mouth deep grooves, his nose hooked and ridged. He stared at her without comprehension.
‘I’m getting you out of here. Sit tight.’ Sid raised his voice over the roar of the blades. Senator Loud was crouching and running away from the slowing rotor blades, toward the meth house, a phalanx of officers crowding around him, keeping the press at bay.
‘Why is he here?’ Her head felt light. ‘What’s going on?’
In front of her on the lawn, the reporters turned, eyeing her. It only took a split second. They wheeled, lunged at her.
‘Holy shit.’ Sid pulled her out the other door, gripping her arm in the blinding flash of lights and clamoring reporters. ‘Head down!’ he screamed. ‘Head down.’
She ducked and he pushed her through the tangle of cords and microphones.
‘He’s here, Grace,’ Sid barked, as they burst onto the street and ran for her car, ‘Senator Albert Loud is here because it was his son back there. You killed his son.’
THREE
She pulled into the driveway and her headlights revealed her house in pitiless relief, like in a police lineup. Hers was the ratty one in the middle, squeezed into a row of minimansions.
The house on the right belonged to a retired osteopath and his wife. Blocky pink stucco, gated and electronically locked, with a metal fence spiking into iron bulbs every few feet. Nobody came in or out of that house. Even the mailman used a cement slot built into the fence.
The house on the left cascaded in white cubes amid designer palms. A stoop-shouldered attorney Grace’s age lived there, with a blond wife and two kids in private school uniforms. She’d hear them in the back sometimes through the natural barrier of high succulents that separated their properties. At night, the motor in their swimming pool gargled like an old man.
On her house, the dormer window flaked, the front door bulged with moisture, the second step leading to the door splintered and sagged. Even the trees looked bad. Leathery and overgrown, they shed gray leaves like molting birds onto the green tar paper roof of the garage clamped onto the left side of the house.
She watched as a squirrel darted across the front yard and sprinted along the splintery picket fence, diving into a shrub under the bay window. The bay window hung over a yard she was too tired to tend, the window made of cramped squares of glass leaded and soldered, looking as if it had been assembled by some parsimonious contractor cousin of Dickens – please, sir, may I have one more pane of glass, sir, a little larger, if you please, oh, you’re too generous – flanked by two narrow windows that actually opened, providing some relief in the summer when she sat in the living room and contemplated her life.
Not much relief, considering what she had to work with. Cramped, untidy, spilling with dog hair and scraps of paper, vagrant Cheerios and missing shin guards wedged under sofa cushions. Home.
Not that she could complain. From the street it looked like a broken-down fire hazard, but inside, her home held an amazing secret. She had no illusions about ever being able to afford a new roof or granite countertops in her lifetime. It was enough, plenty, more than enough that the house sat on an actual beach in a section of San Diego in Point Loma called La Playa, and that the back of the lot faced out over the harbor and gently tilting sailboats, while across the water the glass and chrome towers of downtown San Diego twinkled on the horizon like small crystal boxes.
Only thirteen homes shared the beach that had once been a staging area for seamen melting tallow. They were whalers, Portuguese immigrants transplanted from the Azores, sturdy soldiers of fortune who rode the seas and started a tuna empire. They’d all lived together; their kids had gone to Cabrillo Elementary and they’d shopped at family-run stores and eaten at small restaurants clustered along Rosecrans, the main thoroughfare. Now the fishermen had moved a few blocks inland, and real estate along La Playa beach had skyrocketed.
She’d never sell, despite increasingly clamorous offers from Realtors and sometimes people just out for Sunday drives. The view always calmed her, but it wasn’t only the view that made Grace fight so hard to stay there. The house was all she had left of her dad.
Thoughts crashed. She turned off the ignition and sat in the dark. Once, her dad had taken her alone to Lake Morena to catch fish. He made his living doing that, in deep waters, but this was vacation, and he was spending part of it with her. She’d crawled eagerly into the boat. Six years old, still small enough so the wooden sides seemed high. He’d heaved the boat into the water and jumped in after her, her hands clamped around a tin can of worms. That was her job, he’d said, keeping the can safe while he climbed into the boat. He plunged his hand into the black soil and pulled out a worm. It glistened plump gray and magenta, pulsing in his hand. It was the most magnificent thing she’d ever seen. Her dad’s other hand flashed into his tackle box and in the same fluid motion pierced the creature with a hook. Blood spurted and it thrashed, trying to get away. Her throat closed in fright. It was alive just like she was. It had blood and it hurt. She burst into tears and begged him to take her home. She didn’t mean for it to die, she whispered.
And now she’d put a bullet through a man’s skull. Several bullets. There had been a fence next to Eddie Loud, and the force of the gunfire had splashed it with bits of brain and flesh and blood. The raw stink of fresh meat had hung hotly in the night air.
Now she couldn’t seem to get that smell out of her nostrils. Heavily, Grace stepped from the car and locked the door. She could hear them inside as she went down the service alley on the right side of the house. Helix banged against the porch screen door, whining.
She unlocked it and Helix bounded toward her clattering on his fake leg, tail wagging in a frenzy of doggie devotion. He was a mix, a mongrel stray, part shepherd and collie, hit by a car as a puppy and left to die. Grace had rushed him to the vet, who’d informed her that fixing him up would cost the equivalent of a small developing country’s entire gross national product. Grace had made the mistake of going into the death chamber to say a weepy good-bye. Five minutes later she was scheduling the operation that had saved his life.
‘Some alarm system.’ Grace scratched him behind his ears, and he rolled over and yipped. She rinsed off her Tyvek suit and filled the sink with water and bleach, spying a discarded pizza carton tucked behind the wastebasket. Helix followed her through the kitchen, his doggy nails clicking across the linoleum like a flamenco dancer.
The calamity of being a parent was that there was no off switch, no time-out for personal disaster. Schoolwork still called, lunches had to be packed, reprimands administered. Her head pounded.
In the family room, Katie was belting out a country western song, standing on the piano bench wearing a pink flowered nightie, Mickey Mouse ears, and cowboy boots, almost dwarfed by the Gibson she was strumming. Her fingers were so tiny she only played the bottom string of the chords. Lottie stood crouched over the piano, banging the rhythm, her silvery blond head moving in time. She was wearing orange vinyl hot pants and white go-go boots with tassels and a vest with beads that shimmied as she moved.
‘No, honey,’ Lottie interrupted, ‘that’s a C chord you’re playing; it’s a G.’ She broke into song, demonstrating, ‘We don’t share the same time zone …’
Katie focused, nodding, tried it again, her voice clear and treble. ‘We don’t share the same time zone … you’re not my phone-a-friend … and all the special features I like best you never do intend …’
Lottie nodded, banging out the chords with force. ‘That’s right, kid, milk it, honey.’
Helix bounded across the carpet and skidded into Lottie. He still had trouble stopping properly.
‘For Pete’s sake. How’d he get out …’
Grace smacked the empty pizza carton against her thigh and Lottie snapped her mouth shut.
‘Busted,’ Katie said.
Lottie guiltily banged the lid down on the piano. Katie turned toward her mother to plead her case. She froze on the bench, staring.
‘Mommy, are you okay?’ Katie’s voice was small, and too late, Grace remembered her face.
At least Katie hadn’t seen her on TV. Lottie’s idea of television news was watching psychic pets find missing jewelry.
‘I’m fine.’
‘Your jaw is all purple.’
‘I just had a little accident, but I’m fine. That’s not what I want to talk about. What I want to know is …’ She lifted the pizza carton as if she were signaling the ships in the bay beyond the sliding glass door. ‘What is this? Lottie?’
Grace waggled the carton at her and Lottie sneezed.
‘You know I’m allergic to that dog.’
‘Answer the question.’
Other people had mothers who wore suits and went to the Wednesday Club, where they drank tea and listened to lectures on Quail Botanical Gardens. Grace’s mother was still in her midfifties, with a smooth, unlined face, stuffed into a pair of hot pants so tight that her rear looked like two cantaloupes squeezed into a plastic bag.
‘You weren’t supposed to see that pizza carton,’ Lottie said.
‘You know she had pizza for lunch. Lottie, you promised you’d fix her a real dinner. Something with vegetables in it.’
‘It’s rude to call your mother Lottie,’ Lottie said. ‘It’s not respectful. Is that what you want your daughter to call you when she grows up?’
‘Latte?’ Katie squealed. ‘You want me to call Mommy Latte?’
‘Sure, like one of those coffee drinks,’ Grace said.
‘It’s not like you’re a Roller Derby queen.’ Lottie’s eyes traveled over Grace’s face. ‘A mud wrestler. Look at you. What did you do? Walk into a wall? You know, you can’t spend your life running through jobs like they were a pair of hose.’
‘We’re not talking about my face or career choices. We’re talking about dinner.’
‘Jeez, Grace, lighten up,’ Lottie said.
It was like having two kids, only one of them could drive and order take-out. ‘Where’s your homework, Katie?’
‘A four year-old child –’
‘Five,’ Katie said. ‘I’ll be five on Saturday.’
‘A five-year-old child in kindergarten shouldn’t be expected to do homework,’ Lottie said. ‘You should change schools. I bet you’d like more recess, wouldn’t you, honey?’
‘So where is it?’ Grace repeated.
Katie said brightly, ‘Grandma’s taking me to Disneyland for my birthday.’
‘You’re having a party on your birthday,’ Grace said. ‘You’re not going to Disneyland.’
‘Not right then,’ Lottie said. ‘Of course, not then. I have to miss her party, I told you. Terrell and I are going out of town.’ She leaned down toward Katie and cooed, ‘And that’s why I’m taking my sweet little sweetums to Disneyland upon my return. I personally know one of the dancing dwarfs, who’s prepared to give us a behind-the-scenes tour of the Magic Kingdom.’
‘Goodie,’ Katie cried.
‘You did make her do her homework, right?’ Grace pressed a finger against her temple. A vein throbbed.
Lottie pulled on her lip.
‘The one thing I asked you to do.’
Lottie shot her a wounded look and fiddled with her hair. Her bracelet clanked. It was fake turquoise that looked like gobs of used chewing gum. ‘We were getting around to it.’ She opened her mouth, threw back her head and sneezed. ‘That dog. I mean it.’
‘When, Lottie? It is now after eight on a school night and all you’ve done so far is pump up my child on caffeinated soda and yellow grease.’
‘Grace, you’re just not fun anymore. You need to work on your people skills.’
‘I want you to sit, Katie.’ Grace’s voice was icy calm. ‘I want you to sit at this desk and not move until you finish your homework. Is that clear?’
Katie stomped to the desk.
Grace yanked open a drawer and got out Katie’s stationery. It was pink and orange and had psychedelic ponies gamboling. She positioned a purple crayon in her daughter’s limp hand.
‘This is fun,’ Grace said. ‘We’re having fun learning about the mail. You send this to somebody, you get something back. You’re going to like it.’ It sounded like a threat.
Katie started to whimper. ‘You can’t make me.’
‘Oh, for Pete’s sake,’ Lottie protested.
‘I don’t have anybody to write to!’ Katie burst into tears and put her head down, dampening the stationery.
‘Write to Clint, honey,’ Lottie said, ‘he’d be happy to have you –’
‘She is not writing to Clint,’ Grace said, and Katie wiped her eyes and raised her head, interested at this turn of events.
‘Who’s Clint?’
‘She’s not writing to some hick singer who shellacs his hair until it’s the size of a turkey rump.’
Grace couldn’t believe she was having this conversation after the day she’d had, except that it was with Lottie, so it made sense. In the kitchen, the phone rang.
‘Hick!’ Lottie said in a hushed, stricken voice. Her unnaturally violet eyes brimmed with tears. ‘I want you to know Clint’s hosted the first hour of the Grand Ole Opry seventeen times, and I mean the first hour that’s broadcast, too, not the one that warms everybody up. Not even George has done that.’
‘She’s not doing it,’ Grace said.
‘How do you spell Clint?’ Katie asked.
‘Katie, enough. And Lottie, would you please get that phone?’
Grace waited while Lottie stalked out of the room, muttering about personal maid service.
‘Remember that girl Mommy told you was her friend when she was in high school?’
Katie shook her head.
Grace reached around Katie to rifle through the desk.
‘We haven’t gotten a pumpkin and you promised. We never do anything.’
Novels made it look easy. Heroines, they had a kid, they had problems, the kid got farmed out for long stretches, just dropped conveniently out of the story, while the heroine – always taller and skinnier than in real life, too, it wasn’t right – got herself out of trouble in some plucky way and came back to the kid and the kid was relaxed and happy and clueless about how close her mom had come to being turned into roadkill.
‘Nothing fun. I’m just a little kid. I’m supposed to have fun.’
‘You’re having a party Saturday.’
From the kitchen, Lottie sneezed and trilled into the phone, ‘Hello? Helllooo?’
‘And no goodie bags ready yet either. None. Not one.’
‘Oh, good, here.’ Grace pulled out her address book and started thumbing through it. It was slow going. Somehow, she’d mixed up the R’s with the S’s. ‘Well, Mommy had a friend named Annie and she grew up and got married, and they had a kid and he lives on a farm in Iowa and that’s who you can send your drawing to. And you can tell me what to say, if you want, and I’ll write it down.’
‘And a costume. You said you’d make one this year. You promised.’
Grace had. Months ago it sounded like a fine idea, she just couldn’t remember why. In the kitchen, Lottie banged down the phone, cursing.
‘You promised and you forgot. Just like you forgot to take me to see the panda baby at the zoo.’
‘The panda baby was sleeping, Katie.’
‘You promised and we didn’t.’
Katie had the instincts of a pit bull. She just lunged and clamped hold, dragging Grace back over every thing she’d promised and failed to deliver. Grace would be on her deathbed and Katie would kneel and clasp her wizened hand and stroke the purply veins, lean in close and murmur, ‘You promised popcorn and we were out.’ Then Katie would pull out a list of wrongs, and it would be on one of those long computer paper rolls, and she’d settle in for a nice, long chat.
Death would be a relief. Grace kept looking through her address book, ignoring the expletives coming from the kitchen. ‘He’s nine. A Cub Scout, I think.’
Her finger stopped. ‘There. Here it is. His name is Dusty Rhodes. He’ll enjoy getting a lovely drawing from you.’
‘No, he won’t. He’s a boy.’
Nobody ever told her it would be this hard. This constant and this hard. ‘They have animals and he has a paper route and he’s nine,’ she repeated. ‘Or ten. Anyway. That’s who you can send your letter to.’ She block-printed out the address onto the envelope.
‘I could write to Daddy.’ It hung there. Grace looked at her. Katie stared at her hands. Katie tried lots of things to get out of what she didn’t want to do, but never the trump card, her dad.
Grace had created this longing in this small, beautiful girl, this empty space that nothing filled. She’d promised herself she’d be better than Lottie, and she’d turned around and created the same ache in Katie that she’d had, growing up.
‘We’ve been through this, honey,’ Grace said gently. ‘Remember? Daddy died before you were born. It has to be a real letter. Not one to heaven.’
‘Tell me again.’ Katie stood up and Grace settled into the chair and pulled her onto her lap.
Katie’s eyes were a rich brown, a Portuguese color that spoke of sailing ships and rough seas and High Mass said in lonely places.
‘We loved each other very much.’
‘Uh-huh. Jack. You met him at a Padres game. They were playing New York.’
‘Right. We got pregnant and were going to get married, which is not the right order to do things in, and I don’t want you doing it that way either, but I’ll still love you no matter what.’
‘Only there was a car crash. That’s what happened.’
‘That’s what happened. And he would have loved you, honey.’
‘A lot.’
‘Over the moon. That’s what he would have been, having you as his daughter.’
Lottie appeared in the archway. ‘Wrong number. He hung up.’
‘You’re sure it was a he?’
‘I could tell just the way he breathed it was a he. I know how men breathe, Grace.’
‘So this Dusty kid,’ Katie said. ‘That’s a silly dilly stupid name.’
Grace glanced uneasily toward the phone, her thoughts elsewhere. ‘What? Try and leave that part out, Katie.’
An hour later, Lottie mercifully gone, Grace finished the carton of yogurt she was eating standing up. She bent down and kissed her daughter on the forehead.
Katie’s hair was a curly cloud on the pillow. Her favorite doll nestled in her arms, a Katie doll built to look like her, an extravagant birthday present Grace had given her for her fourth birthday. It had a recorder inside, so that Katie’s voice came out in short staccato sentences that Katie periodically changed. The voice was so lifelike that Grace sometimes thought it was Katie herself and dropped whatever she was doing to answer, much to Katie’s great amusement, which made Grace want to permanently injure the Katie doll’s vocal cords in any one of a number of unfortunate accidents.
Katie’s eyes were closed, along with the doll’s. They were dressed in matching pink nighties, caramel-colored hair tangled in wild manes, dark long lashes against pink cheeks. On the vanity lay the drawing, smudged and crinkled with violent splotches of color. It appeared to be a giant smiling orange head floating over a pink and orange lake. Katie had dictated a short message to go along with it.