“Why not just tell Pia that you’ve decided you’re Kahuna? ”
“I can’t lie to her. I love her.”
“It’s a harmless lie.”
“Do you lie to Sasha? ”
“No.”
“Does she lie to you? ”
“She doesn’t lie to anyone, ” I said.
“Between a man and woman in love, no lie is small or harmless.”
“You keep surprising me.”
“My wisdom? ”
“Your mushy little teddy-bear heart.”
“Squeeze me, and I sing Feelings.”
“I’ll take your word for it.” We were only a few blocks from Lilly
Wing’s house.
“Go in by the back, through the alley, ” I directed.
I wouldn’t have been surprised to find a police patrol car or another
unmarked sedan full of granite-eyed men waiting for us, but the alleyway
was deserted. Sasha Good all’s Ford Explorer stood in front of Lilly’s
garage door, and Bobby parked behind it.
Beyond the windbreak of giant eucalyptuses, the wild canyon to the east
lay in unrelieved blackness. Without the lamp of the moon, anything
might have been out there, a bottomless abyss rather than a mere canyon,
a great dark sea, the end of the earth and a yawning infinity.
As I got out of the Jeep, I remembered good Orson investigating the
weeds along the verge of the canyon, urgently seeking Jimmy. His yelp of
excitement when he caught the scent. His swift and selfless commitment
to the chase.
Only hours ago. Yet ages ago.
Time seemed out of joint even here, far beyond the walls of the egg
room.
At the thought of Orson, a coldness closed around my heart, and for a
moment I couldn’t breathe.
I recalled waiting by candlelight beside my father in the cold-holding
room at Mercy Hospital, two years ago this past January, waiting with my
mother’s body for the hearse that would take her to Kirk’s Funeral Home,
feeling as though my own body had been broken beyond repair by the loss
of her, almost afraid to move or even to speak, as though I might fly
apart like a hollow ceramic figurine struck with a hammer.
And my father’s hospital room only a month ago. The terrible night he
died Holding his hand in mine, leaning over the bed railing to hear his
final whispered words fear nothing, Chris. Fear nothing and then his hand
going slack in mine. I had kissed his forehead, his rough cheek.
Because I myself am a walking miracle, still healthy and whole with XP
at the age of twenty-eight, I believe in miracles, in the reality of
them and in our need for them, and so I held fast to my dead father’s
hand, kissed his beard-stubbled cheek, still hot with fever, and waited
for a miracle, all but demanded one. God help me, I expected Dad to pull
a Lazarus on me, because the pain of losing him was too fierce to bear,
the world unthinkably hard and cold without him, and I could not be
expected to endure it, must be granted mercy, so although I have been
blessed with numerous miracles in my life, I was greedy for one more,
one more. I prayed to God, begged Him, bargained with Him, but there is
a grace in the natural order of things that is more important than our
desires, and at last I’d had to accept that grace, as bitter as it
seemed at the time, and reluctantly I’d released my father’s lifeless
hand.
Now I stood breathless in the alley, pierced again by the fear that I
would be required to outlive Orson, my brother, that special and
precious soul, who was even more an outsider in this world than I was.
If he should die alone, without the hand of a friend to comfort him,
without a soothing voice telling him that he was loved, I would be
forever haunted byruined by the thought of his solitary suffering and
despair.
“Bro, ” Bobby said, putting one hand on my shoulder and squeezing
gently. “Gonna be all right.” I hadn’t spoken a word, but Bobby seemed
to know what fears had rooted me to the alleyway blacktop as I stared
into the forbidding blackness of the canyon beyond the eucalyptus trees.