R ay drove the Porsche straight from his mother’s to Stokes Avenue in Downey, a distance of about fifteen miles. He took it at a steady sixty-eight, not wanting to attract any official attention. It was almost ten.
The internal pressure that had got him onto the freeway made him feel fresh and energetic. He felt exultant, actually, because he knew that he was doing the one thing that would relieve his misery and need. His mother’s cake, far too rich, had left a metallic echo in his mouth. Pineapple always tasted that way to him, like someone had sprinkled aluminum shavings onto fruit. He never had the heart to refuse his mother’s food-she made the offerings with so much love. He didn’t even like sweets anymore, but he tried at her house.
He hadn’t expected Esmé to tell him the truth. Stubborn at times as she was about changes to her precious house, she had a temper as volatile as his own and the same sense of privacy. But now-the tape-
He burped several times, checked his mirrors for patrol cars, and sped up. They had lasted only seven months in Downey before he came home one afternoon from school to find his mother tight-lipped and packing. He packed his two allotted boxes and drove with her to the next identical place a couple of towns over. He went to another school a lot like the old school, and there was a new bully, messed-up math courses that repeated what he already knew, the usual mountains to climb.
Revisiting these scenes felt like playing with an aching tooth, painful but irresistible. Maybe if something made sense, if he could understand-what?
Was his life simply a random series of events strung together but ultimately unrelated? Or did the series add up to something meaningful?
This red-haired girl on his doorstep tonight-what a time she had picked to decide to make up with Leigh. He hoped she would go home and get laid and forget about them.
He turned on the defroster to clear the ocean fog off his windshield.
“So where is she now?” he had asked Leigh once, referring to Kat.
“No idea. Sometimes people you care about get lost,” Leigh said. She sat on the rug in front of the fireplace in the great room, drying her hair, wearing her pink satin robe. She had given Ray a present that day, a silver-trimmed comb from the thirties. They had been married three months, and he thought he knew her well by then. She had married him on the rebound and he didn’t care because he knew-knew in his gut as well as his head-that she loved him anyway.
“That’s it?”
“No, that’s not it, but-off-limits, Ray.”
Kat’s timing couldn’t have been worse. She had the look of a crusader. She hadn’t liked what Ray Jackson told her.
Well, what else could he have said?
He took the off-ramp he had noted on the map, got lost, and had to pull over to figure out his way, stopping on a street like a million streets in L.A., lined with a row of dingy lookalike tract homes built in the early sixties, one-story houses with one tree in front, a wide driveway, and a double-car garage like almost all the houses he and his mother had rented long ago. In the daytime, relentless California sun would keep the shrubs and lawns brown-tinged, and the few living trees struggling for height. At night, residents hid behind blinds, too tired to socialize with their neighbors after fighting the traffic home.
He found his place on the map and negotiated his way out of the maze of replicant streets. Cruising past the gas stations and the chain-store strip mall that passed for a downtown, he took a left and slowed. The trees on Stokes Avenue had grown a lot-there had only been new twiggy things to protect the bare lawns from the hard sun when he lived there.
The house, a new color, paler, looked about the same, and good news, showed no lights in its windows. He parked several houses away. As soon as he stepped outside the Porsche he started worrying about the dark clothes, realizing he looked just like a criminal scoping the place out.
Do it fast. He rattled around in his pocket, searching for his keys, striding swiftly up the open walkway and onto the small porch. He tried key one. No luck. Key two. Nothing.
Sirens started the neighborhood dogs howling. For one electric second, Ray feared they were coming for him, so he stopped what he was doing, slowed his breathing, and listened. He stood frozen below an aluminum overhang by the front door, grateful for the cover. Fog rippled through the warm night air like steam.
The sirens got louder. Were they coming here? Was it possible? Bass notes of his heart thrumming in his chest, he peered past a scruffy acacia tree toward the street.
He closed his eyes as the sirens receded. His breathing once again functioned. As he stood trying to blend into the overgrown juniper bush beside the railing, a memory hit hard.
They had moved to Downey in September, so he began school toward the beginning of the year for a change, at least one small relief. Still, the strain of his first day at a new school had worn him out. After getting off the bus, he had walked home fast, looking forward to a haven from yet another new place and all new people, making for the first yellow house with faux brown shutters he came upon. He had walked inside the unlocked door, raised his head, and confronted a nightmare.
Here stood their new place, but wacky, the kitchen on the left instead of right, his mother’s furniture, always lightweight so that you could move it easily, replaced by leaden-looking antiques.
Shocked, he couldn’t move anything except his eyes for a minute. Here stood his home, reversed. His present life, overhauled in a day. Unfamiliar furniture. Strange portraits on the walls: a man with a mustache, babies in dresses. At first he had shifted his books from one hip to the other, as if adjusting their weight could shift things right, but the setting remained deviant, looking-glass unreal.
Had his mother moved without him?
Left him behind?
She could move very fast but even she couldn’t make a house with a garage on the left into one with a garage on the right. Logic should have kicked in about then, that he had stepped into an identical house with a reversed house plan, on the same street, a few doors down from his own house. He didn’t belong at his new school. He didn’t belong here. Where was his home? Lost like him.
His eight-year-old self had stood with the door open behind him for a long time that afternoon, lawn sprinklers fizzing all around the yards behind him. Where was he? They moved so much, he didn’t know. He had walked into someone else’s house and now, unsettled, he doubted everything. Was this the right street? Had he gotten off the school bus at the wrong stop or taken the wrong bus entirely? How would he find their house? He didn’t know.
Although of course eventually, probably only a few minutes later, he did find his house, this house he was watching now, a few doors away.
The sirens faded but persisted, fretting, chronic complainers, echoing off the million tons of asphalt. They congregated somewhere nearby, weaving closer from different directions like a bunch of tired kindergartners assembling for snack time. Ray caught a whiff of smoke between hits of smoggy air. The engines were en route to a fire, nearby, upwind, but not near enough to concern him. Good. Maybe the commotion would keep the police busy, too.
Ray pulled back behind a juniper bush to give himself a minute to organize his keys, putting aside the ones he had already tried, just in time, as it turned out, because across the street, a woman with a blanketed baby snuggled up against her poked her head outside, examining the sky for smoke, sniffing. She stayed for only a few seconds before ducking back inside. She never even looked toward Ray.
If the police came-but don’t worry about them. Stay loose. Taking advantage of the neighborhood din, he continued sticking various keys in the lock a few times, then twisted the handle to the door, which slipped open with oily smoothness. He stepped inside the familiar foyer, closing the door behind him quietly, and listened.
Nothing stirred in the living room. He moved toward the dining area, reluctant to turn on a light. Was everyone gone? He didn’t know for sure. He stood for a long time listening, hearing only the creaking of an old house. While he listened, he looked in dismay around the room, experiencing some of the disorientation he had felt that first day of school when he went into the wrong house.
This house, their house, was all wrong. His mother had arranged the couch in front of the brick fireplace, giving the long room some balance and a focal point.
Hearing nothing, feeling excited, agitated, he took one end of the unfamiliar leather couch and hauled it, then the other end, until the couch was in position.
Better. But the two chairs needed to come in, and the coffee table, abandoned across the room, also needed a better home.
There. In the darkness, he remembered what it felt like to live in this house. He liked watching television in his bedroom. He loved the big backyard, with its yellow crabgrass, that he cut every other Saturday. He liked the way his mom had been at this house. She had a job in the back room of a florist shop. She liked the people there, and came home from work cheerful most days.
They had lasted seven months here.
In this house, his mother had hidden things behind some molding in the small back bedroom they had used as a den, where the L-shaped hallway turned.
The doorway to the hall was mercifully open, so he stepped into its murk, too nervous to use the small flashlight he had tucked into a pocket.
Feeling his way along the wall, he walked down the hallway, approached the room slowly, silently, and put his hand on the door frame. The door was open. An empty room awaited him. He went inside, needing only a few moments to complete his mission.
He found it behind the molding, another small plastic rectangle, shocks running up his hand when he touched it. Still playable?
Back into the dark hallway-
A light flashed on in the master bedroom to his right. “Who’s out there?” a quavering female voice yelled from inside. “I’ve got a gun!”
“Don’t shoot!” he cried. “I’m going!”
A blast whipped through the closed door to his mother’s old bedroom, splintering the wood trim beside him.
When the front door wouldn’t open, he crashed through the window.