“You let me off the hook too easily.”
“It only seems that way to you because you never let yourself off the hook to any extent at all.”
She closes her eyes and rides in silence for a while. When he glances at her, he sees that she is biting her lower lip. Her cheeks are dry, but her eyelashes are jeweled.
Eventually she opens her eyes and says, “It feels so strange.”
“What does?”
“Not being in control. Not knowing what’s next or where.”
“I’m just a bridge, remember?”
“Troubled water. But you’re . . . more than a bridge.”
“When we’re across the flood, you’ll soon be in control of your life, no less than you’ve always been.”
“Their kind,” she says, “they hate women. They think one dissed them, they’ll never let it go. One day, I go out to the street to check the mailbox, they drive by shooting.”
“Not if they can’t find you. Not if you’re someone other than Nina Dozier with a different past that public records will support through any intensity of investigation.”
This is a different silence, and her hope is almost palpable. Reminded of his power, she says, “You could do that.”
“Just think about what name you might like to be. And one for John. In a week or less, I’ll have birth certificates, valid social security cards, a driver’s license in your new name and on file with the DMV.”
“I owe you so much.”
“You owe me nothing. I had a deep debt to Shelby Shrewsberry, and what I’ve done is pay it back to him, through you.”
About twenty miles north of San Diego, they turn inland from the ocean, toward Rancho Santa Fe, a residential community of mostly large homes and gated estates on significant acreage.
With darkness at its midpoint, the moon is high before them, reflecting its reflected sunlight across rolling hills that become less populated mile by mile, silvering the wild grass that is golden in daylight. Beyond the headlights, trees loom in dim silhouette, the stone pines standing motionless, the palm trees swaying with the dreamy flow of plants that grow in the bosom of the sea. Greater in number and height are eucalyptuses that stand sentinel across the slopes as well as in the vales.
Nina breaks their mutual silence. “What will you do?”
“I’ve already got three identities locked in the system.”
“I don’t mean who will you be. What will you do? What you’ve done for us, in Shelby’s name, isn’t all you can do. There’s more you want to do, I think. Much more. Whatever it is, I can’t even begin to imagine the . . . impact.”
Their conversation has brought them closer to the personal issue that is most important to Michael. He won’t press her further at this point. Until the Internal Security Agency and gangbangers have for certain been put behind them forever, the future is too fluid to be making plans.
He says, “I’ve thought about it a lot—the impact. How do you bring about major change without causing major destruction. Most of those who want to change the world also mean first to destroy it as it currently is and build back on the rubble. They’re narcissists and lunatics. I like to think I’m not.”
WITH SPIDERS I HAD FRIENDSHIP MADE
By the time Michael was nine years old, his mother seldom left their house, and when she did, it was always to make a spectacle of herself. She ranted at a helpless grocery-store clerk about the price of tomatoes, reaching such a peak of indignation that she threw the fruit on the floor and crushed it underfoot. She rose to her feet in a city council meeting and complained about the increase in parking-meter fees, which incensed her in spite of the fact that she had developed a fear of driving and had sold her car; refusing to adhere to a time limit for testimony, she raged at the council members, no epithets too crude for her use, until the sergeant at arms had to forcefully escort her from the chamber. A neighbor had to endure periodic tongue-lashings—as well as answer complaints to animal control—about a pit bull that did not exist.
In the summer before Michael entered fourth grade, his mother developed a terror of spiders. She had never been afraid of them before. Without apparent reason, she insisted that she’d become so allergic to arachnid bites that, if nipped, she would fall at once into anaphylactic shock, be unable to breathe, and die. It mattered not whether the species was poisonous. Years earlier, when Beth had secured their home against Lionel’s animated corpse, which she said wanted to get into the house at night, the credulousness of extreme youth had left Michael vulnerable to her dark fantasies, and he had succumbed to that irrational fear. At nine, he better understood his mother, but initially he couldn’t tell whether her dread of spiders was real or pretense. If she faked it, maybe she wanted to add drama to her life—for she loved drama—or maybe she was psychologically bent to such an extent that she took pleasure in tormenting a child. Eventually, he came to believe both things were true.
When she woke Michael in the night to hurry to her bedroom to kill a spider that had appeared while she was reading to overcome insomnia, or near dinnertime when she fled the kitchen in fear of a scurrying invader, the eight-legged threat would not always be where she’d seen it. An urgent spider hunt would ensue. Find it, Mickey. Find it and kill it. Damn you, Mouse, you little shit, find it, kill it! If the creature were found and squashed to her satisfaction, life could go on after a suitable period of lamentation regarding the death she would have suffered if she had been bitten. On those occasions when the spider couldn’t be found––or never existed in the first place—the failed search was an excuse to attempt to settle her nerves with glass after glass of chardonnay or morbid talk about how suicide by pills would be a better way to go than by suffocating when her airway shut down from arachnid poison. You’ll miss me then. You’ll miss me when you’re alone, boything. Alone because you were too stupid to find it and kill it.
He had done nothing to earn her animosity, with the possible exception of having been born. Even after he became convinced that she enjoyed manipulating him into conceding that her silly fears were legitimate, Michael was frequently exasperated with her, often impatient, indignant that she toyed with him—but he was never able to hate her. Whatever else Beth might be, she was his mother. He could no more love her than despise her, but pity came easily. He wondered if in her childhood she endured something that shaped her into what she was. If she could not strike back at whoever had been cruel to her, she might feel the need to pay her misery forward to her son, as wrong as that might be. Even if by nature Mother was a disturbed person, she was a pathetic rather than an evil figure. Watching her in near perpetual distress, some faked but much of it real, Michael was at times overcome by a tenderness toward her, and by a desire to fix whatever was broken in the woman, though he knew he hadn’t the power to make her right. However, day by day, week by week, year by year, he came to see how he could console her with no risk of becoming like her; he could be amused by her, find sanctuary in his amusement, without disrespecting her. That was not an easy path to take, but he found a satisfaction in it that he could not name until he was much older—compassion, mercy, forgiveness.