That done, I glanced at my watch. Ten-twenty. Bobby’s physical-therapy regimen was parceled out into daily stints, while mine was set up for Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fri—
days. It was possible he was still at the gym. I closed up the office and went down the back steps to the lot, where I keep my car parked. I headed toward Santa Teresa Fitness, gassing up on the way, and caught Bobby just as he was coming out of the building. His hair was still damp from the shower and the scent of Coast soap radiated from his skin. Despite the facial paralysis, the crippled left arm, and the limp, something of the original Bobby Callahan shone through, young and strong, with the blond good looks of a California surfer. I’d seen pictures of him broken, and by comparison, he now seemed miraculously whole, even with the scars still etched on his face like tattoos done by an amateur. When he saw me, he smiled crookedly, dabbing automatically at his chin. “I didn’t expect to see you here this morning,” he said.
“How was your workout?”
He tilted from side to side, indicating so-so. I tucked my arm through his.
“I have a request, but you don’t have to agree,” I said.
“What’s that?”
I hesitated for a moment. “I want you to go up the pass with me and show me where the car went off.”
The smile faded. He glanced away from me and launched into motion again, moving toward his car with that lilting gait. “All right, but I want to stop by and see Kitty first.”
“Is she allowed to have visitors?”
“I can talk my way in,” he said. “People don’t like to deal with cripples, so I can usually get anything I want.”
“Spoiled,” I said.
“Take any advantage you can,” he replied sheepishly.
“You want to drive?”
He shook his head. “Lets drop my car off at the house and take yours.”
I parked in the visitor’s lot at St. Terry’s and waited in the car while he went in to see Kitty. I imagined she’d be back on her feet by now, still pissed off, and raising hell on the ward. Not anything I wanted to face. I hope to talk to her again in a couple of days, but I preferred to give her time to settle down. I flipped on the car radio, tapping on the steering wheel in time to the music. Two nurses passed through the parking lot in white uniforms, white shoes and hose, with dark blue capes that looked like something left over from World War I. In due course, Bobby emerged from the building and hobbled across the parking lot, his expression preoccupied. He got into the car. I flipped the radio off and started the engine, backing out of the slot.
“Everything okay?”
“Yeah, sure.”
He was quiet as I headed across town and turned left onto the secondary road that cuts along the back side of Santa Teresa at the base of the foothills. The sky was a flat blue and cloudless, looking like semigloss paint that had been applied with a roller. It was hot, and the hills were brown and dry, laid out like a pile of kindling. The long grasses near the road had bleached out to a pale gold, and once in a while, I caught sight of lizards perched up on big rocks, looking as gray and still as twigs.
The road twisted, two lanes of blacktop angling back and forth up the side of the mountain. I downshifted twice and my little VW still complained of the climb.
“I thought I remembered something,” Bobby said after a while. “But I can’t seem to pin it down. That’s why I had to see Kitty.”
“What kind of thing?”
“I had an address book. One of those small leather-bound types about the size of a playing card. Cheap. Red. I gave it to someone for safekeeping and now I have no idea who.” He paused, shaking his head with puzzlement.
“You don’t remember why it was important?”
“No. I remember feeling anxious about it, thinking I better not have it in my possession because it was dangerous to me, so I passed it on. At the time-and I remember this part clearly-I figured I could retrieve it later.” He shrugged, snorting derisively. “So much for that.”
“Was this before the accident or afterwards?”
“Don’t know. I just remember giving it to someone.”
“Wouldn’t it be dangerous to whoever you gave it to?”
“I don’t think so. God.” He slid down on his spine so he could rest his head on the back of the seat. He peered through the windshield, following the line of gray hills up to the left where the pass cuts through at the crest. “I hate this feeling. I hate knowing I once knew something and having no access to it. It’s just an image with nothing attached to it. There aren’t any memory cues so I have no way to place it in time. It’s like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle with a whole hunk knocked off on the floor.”
“But how does it work when you forget like that? Is there any retrieving the information or is it just gone?”
“Oh, sometimes it’ll come back, but usually it’s blank … like a hole in the bottom of a box. Whatever used to be there has spilled out along the way.”
“What made you think of it in the first place?”
“I don’t know. I was looking through a desk drawer and came across the red leather memo pad that was part of the same set. Suddenly, I got this flash.” He fell silent. I glanced over at him and realized how tense he was. He was massaging his bad hand, milking the fingers as if they were long rubber teats.
“Kitty didn’t know anything about it?”
He shook his head.
“How’s she doing?”
“She’s up and around. I guess Derek’s going over to see her later on… .” He paused. We were reaching the crest of the hill and a muscle near his left eye had started to jump.
“Are you going to be all right with this?” I asked.
He was staring intently at the side of the road. “Just up here. Slow down and pull over if you can.”
I checked my rearview mirror. There were three cars behind me, but the road was narrowing from three lanes to two. I eased over to the right and found a gravel shoulder where I could park. The bridge, with its low concrete guardrails, was about ten yards ahead. Bobby sat there, staring to his right.
Where the road descends from the summit, the whole valley opens out, hills sweeping back as far as the eye can see to a range of lavender mountains pasted against the rim of the sky. The August heat shimmered in silence. The land seemed vast and primitive, looking as it must have looked for thousands of years. In the distance, live oaks dotted the landscape, as snaggy and dark and hunched as buffalo.
There’d been no rain for months and the vista seemed chalky and pale, the color washed out.
Closer to us, the roadside dropped away into the treacherous canyon that had nearly marked Bobby’s death nine months ago. A length of metal railing had been replaced, but where the bridge began, there was still a chunk of concrete missing.
“The other car started ramming us from behind just as we came over the rim of the hill,” he said. I thought he meant to continue, so I waited.
He walked forward a few feet, gravel crunching under his shoes. He was clearly uneasy as he peered down the rocky slope. I looked back over my shoulder at the few cars passing. No one paid the slightest attention to us.
I studied the scene, picking out one of the scarred boulders I’d seen in the photograph, and farther down, the raw, jagged stump where a scrub oak had been snapped off at the base. I knew the Santa Teresa police had swept the area clean of debris from the accident, so there was no need to whip out a magnifying glass or creep around picking fibers from the underbrush.
Bobby turned to me. “Have you ever been close to death?”
“Yes.”
“I remember thinking, This is it. I’m gone.’ I disconnected, I felt like a plant ripped up by the roots. Airborne.” He stopped. “And then I was cold and everything hurt and people were talking to me and I couldn’t understand a word they said. That was in the hospital and two weeks had passed. I’ve wondered since then if that’s how newborn babies feel. Bewildered like that and disoriented. Helpless. It was such a struggle to stay in touch with the world. Sending down new roots. I knew I could choose. I was barely attached, barely tethered, and I could feel how easy it’d be just to let go like a balloon and sail away.”