better.
Lots of competing factions. Chaos. And the chaos will get worse
before it gets better.
Now go home. Drop this. Drop it before someone targets You like they
targeted Angela.”
“Is that a threat?”
He didn’t reply.
As I started away, walking the bicycle across the backyard, Toby said,
“Christopher Snow. Snow for Christmas. Christmas and Santa. Santa
and sleigh. Sleigh on snow. Snow for Christmas.
Christopher Snow.” He laughed with innocent delight, entertained by
this awkward word game, and he was clearly pleased by my surprise.
The Toby Ramirez I had known would not have been capable of even such a
simple word-association game as this one.
To Manuel, I said, “They’ve begun to pay for your cooperation, haven’t
they?”
His fierce pride in Toby’s exhibition of this new verbal skill was
ching and so deeply sad that I could not look at hi so toll im.
“In spite of all that he didn’t have, he was always happy,” I said of
Toby. “He found a purpose, fulfillment. Now what if they can take him
far enough that he’s dissatisfied with what he is . . . but then they
can’t take him all the way to normal?”
“They will,” Manuel said with a measure of conviction for which there
could be no justification. “They will.”
“The same people who’ve created this nightmare?”
“It’s not got only a dark side.”
I thought of the pitiful wails of the visitor in the rectory attic, the
melancholy quality of its changeling voice, the terrible yearning in
its desperate attempts to convey meaning in a caterwaul. I thought of
Orson on that summer night, despairing under the stars.
“God help You, Toby,” I said, because he was my friend, too.
“God bless You.”
“God had His chance,” Manuel said. “From now on, we’ll make our own
luck.”
I had to get away from there, and not solely because dawn was soon to
arrive. I started walking the bike across the backyard again-and
didn’t realize that I’d broken into a run until I was past the house
and in the street.
When I glanced back at the Nantucket-style residence, it looked
different from the way that it had always been before.
Smaller than I remembered. Huddled. Forbidding.
In the east, a silver-gray paleness was forming high above the world,
either sunrise seeping in or judgment coming.
In twelve hours I had lost my father, the friendship of Manuel and
Toby, many illusions, and much was overcome by the terrifying feeling
that more and perhaps worse losses lay ahead.
Orson and I fled to Sasha’s house.
Sasha’s house is owned by KBAY and is a perk of her position as general
manager of the station. It’s a small two-story Victorian with
elaborate millwork enhancing the faces of the dormers, all the
gableboards, the eaves, the window and door surrounds, and the porch
railings.
The house would be a jewel box if it weren’t painted the station
colors. The walls are canary yellow. The shutters and porch railings
are coral pink. All the other millwork is the precise shade of
Key-lime pie. The result is as though a flock of Jimmy Buffett fans,
high on Margaritas and pifia coladas, painted the place during a long
party weekend.
Sasha doesn’t mind the flamboyant exterior. As she notes, she lives
within the house, not outside where she can see it.
The deep back porch is enclosed with glass; and with the help of an
electric space heater in cooler months, Sasha has transformed it into
an herb greenhouse. On tables and benches and sturdy metal racks stand
hundreds of terra-cotta pots and plastic trays in which she cultivates
tarragon and thyme, angelica and arrowroot, chervil and cardamom and
coriander and chicory, spearmint and sweet cicely, ginseng, hyssop,
balm and basil, marjoram and mint and mullein, dill, fennel, rosemary,
chamomile, tansy. She uses these in her cooking, to make wonderful,
subtly scented potpourris, and to brew health teas that challenge the
gag reflex far less than You would expect.
I don’t bother to carry a key of my own. A spare is tucked into a
terra-cotta pot shaped like a toad, under the yellowish leaves of a rue