“I don’t understand it, but I feel as if I just woke up from the longest sleep on record. I’ve got so much energy it’s absurd.”
“Lovely,” she said, snuggling against him.
He put his arm around her, suddenly excited by the warmth of her and by the exquisite perfection with which her supple body moulded to his.
“We’re not going back to the hotel,” she told him.
“What? Why not?”
“I told Mummingford to take us to the airport. We’re flying back to Orange County right away.”
“But I thought… I mean… aren’t we going to… Oh, Del, I want to be alone with you.”
“I’m not going to ask you to consummate until you know all of my secrets,” she said.
“But I want to consummate,” he said. “I want to consummate this morning, as soon as possible, right here in the limo!”
“Have you been eating too much tofu?” she asked coquettishly.
“If we go back to Orange County, we’ll miss our own party this evening.”
“It’s less than an hour flight each way. We have maybe two hours of business when we get there. We’ll make it back with time to spare.” She put a hand in his lap. “With time to consummate.”
In her house on Balboa Peninsula, Del led Tommy upstairs to the studio where she created her paintings.
Canvases were hung on all sides, and others stood in stacks against one wall, at least a hundred altogether. Most of them were exceedingly strange landscapes of places that could never exist on this world, scenes of such stunning beauty that the sight of them brought tears to Tommy’s eyes.
“I painted these by remote viewing,” she said, “but someday I hope to travel there.”
“Where?”
“I’ll tell you later.”
Eight paintings were different from all the others. They were portraits of Tommy, rendered with a photographic realism equal to that with which the landscapes had been painted.
Blinking in astonishment, he said, “When did you do these?”
“Over the past two years. That’s how long I’ve been having dreams about you. I knew you were the one, my destiny, and then last night you just walked into the restaurant and ordered two cheeseburgers.”
The living room in the Phan house in Huntington Beach was remarkably similar to the living room of the Dai House, although the furnishings were somewhat more expensive. A painting of Jesus, revealing His Sacred Heart, hung on one wall, and in a corner was a Buddhist shrine.
Mother Phan sat in her favourite armchair, slack-jawed and pale, having taken the news of the wedding as though she had been hit in the face with a skillet.
Scootie licked one of her hands consolingly, but she didn’t seem to be aware of the dog.
Del sat on the sofa with Tommy, holding his hand. “First, Mrs. Phan, I want you to understand that the Payne’s and the Phan’s could be the most wonderful combination of families imaginable, a tremendous union of talents and forces, and my mother and I are prepared to embrace all of you as our own. I want to be given a chance to love you and Mr. Phan and Tommy’s brothers, and I want all of you to learn to love me.”
“You steal my son,” said Mother Phan.
“No,” Del said, “I stole a Honda and later a Ferrari, and then we borrowed the Peterbilt that the demon stole, but I didn’t steal your son. He gave his heart to me of his own free will. Now before you say anything more that might be rash, that you might later come to regret having said, let me tell you about my mother and me.”
“You bad news.”
Ignoring the insult, Del said, “Twenty-nine years ago, when my Mom and Dad were driving from Vegas to a poker tournament in Reno, taking a scenic route, they were abducted by aliens from a lonely stretch of highway near Mud Lake in Nevada.”
Gazing at Del, his head ringing like a gong with remembered lines of conversation that had seemed like sheer lunacy when she had spoken them, Tommy said, “South of Tonopah.”
“That’s right, darling,” said Del. To Tommy’s mother, she said, “They were taken up to the mothership and examined. They were allowed to remember all of this, you see, because the aliens who abducted them were good extraterrestrials. Unfortunately, most of the abductions are perpetrated by evil ET’s whose plans for this planet are nefarious in the extreme, which is why they block abductees’ memories of what happened.”