I can't fully explain why I called Amber Mae Wilson that night. Saturday, the third of July. Yes, I had once been her lover, but that was twenty years ago. Yes, I had thought about her-off and on-for all of those twenty years. Yes, I had been married, happily and without a trace of regret, for the last five.
Maybe it was the dream I had had the night before, which four-year-old Amber Mae Wilson stood on my porch buck naked and said to me, "My name is Amber Mae. I'm three years old. I live in the white house. Can I have a cookie?"
That was a story-a true one, I believe-Amber had told me about herself back when we were in love. I say I believe it was true because it seemed to capture some of Amber's several essences: her boldness, her innocence, her willingness change the facts, her nakedness. But as I came to understand in the two brief years we were together, Amber had always been and always remained in the process of inventing herself. She invented herself to make Amber Mae Wilson-I understand now-someone she could stand to be around. For her, the truth was never static or absolute, never irreversible or binding. It was a wardrobe to be changed as she saw fit.
I called her from a bar that night-a moist, sweltering night-and got no answer, just the machine and message. It was twenty minutes past midnight and I believed I had a mission.
So I drove down to her place in the south of town and sat outside in my car, looking at the wrought-iron gate, the palms illuminated by ground lights, the courtyard behind the gate that featured a fountain in the shape of an airborne dolphin with a stream of water coming out of its mouth. The huge home loomed behind, locked in darkness. It was high in the coastal hills and looked down over the Pacific. She had paid $2.8 million for the place and the 3.5 acres it sat on, as reported in a local paper. The neighbors were hundreds of yards away.
This was the third night in a week I'd been there.
Amber had lived in this house for five years-some kind of record for her, I'm sure. I know for a fact that she had changed the landscaping three times. First, brick walkways and copper weathervanes everywhere, lots of wooden flower boxes-Cape Cod run amok. Next, a xeriscape of drought-tolerants, decomposed granite trails, cactus. Finally, this California-Mediterranean theme. I know all this because my work takes me all over the county. Some things, I can't help but notice.
As I said, the night was unforgivingly hot. I rolled down the windows and laid my head back on the rest. I thought of my wife, Isabella, at home. Isabella, the truest love of my life, who not only taught me love but allowed me to learn it. She would be asleep now. She would be wearing the red knit cap to keep her head warm, in spite of the temperature. The wheelchair and quad cane would be close beside the bed. Her medications would be lined up on a low shelf within arm's reach, each dose contained in a white paper cup, ready to be taken by Isabella in the dark, half-asleep, still stunned by the last ingestion.
Isabella was twenty-eight years old. She had a malignant tumor in her brain. She had been living with it for a little over a year and a half on that night of July 3, when for the third night in a week I sat in my car outside Amber Mae Wilson's home in South Laguna, wondering whether I would find the courage go up and ring the bell on the gate.
You may say, right here, that this Russell Monroe has some explaining to do.
You can't possibly imagine how much.
I can only tell you that then, on the humid, heated night of July 3, I was deeply unwilling to explain anything, most all to myself. I refused to. That would have been contrary to my mission, which was this: I was in the process-I hoped- beginning a secret life.
I opened the glove compartment, took out my flask (slim, silver, engraved to me "With all my love, Isabella"), and drank more whiskey. Isabella. I replaced the flask, lighted a cigarette, laid back my head, and looked out to Amber's courtyard. I tried to banish all thoughts from my mind. I replaced them with memories of Amber, of those days from our youth when the world seemed so ripe for our picking, so pleased to have us aboard. Isn't there always a year or two in everyone's twenties that, when remembered, seem as near to perfect as life can get?
That was when I saw Amber's front door open and shut, and someone moving across the courtyard toward the gate.
It was a man. He wiped something off with a handkerchief before letting the gate swing shut behind him. He walked with his head down and his thumbs hooked into the front pocket of his jeans, the handkerchief balled in his right fist. He turned south on the sidewalk without hesitating, took three steps to the curb, then angled off across the street, let himself into a late-model black Firebird, and drove away
He didn't see me, but I saw him. Oh, did I see him.
His name was Martin Parish. He was the Captain of Detectives, Homicide Division, of the Orange County Sheriff's. He had been an acquaintance, then a friend, then a near friend of mine for twenty years.
Marty Parish was a large man with kind blue eyes and an ardent love of bird hunting.
Marty Parish and I had graduated from the Sheriff's Academy together, winter of 1974.
Marty Parish had introduced me to Amber Mae Wilson at our "commencement" bash.
Marty Parish was the only man that Amber had ever married. It lasted one year, about fifteen years ago. Now he had just left her home after midnight and wiped his fingerprints off the handle of her gate.
I watched the Firebird's taillights disappear in the dark and wondered whether Martin Parish had come to draw from the same well that I had. I always thought Martin was stronger than that. A wave of shame broke over me. For Martin? I wondered-or for myself?
I called Amber's number from my car phone and got the machine again. What an inviting, conspiratorial voice she had!
I took another swig from the flask, set it back in the glove compartment, then rolled up the windows and got out.
Don't do this, said a receding voice inside me- you have no reasons, only a million excuses — but I was already walking toward her gate. It was not locked. The house was dark except for a very minor glow coming from what was probably the kitchen. I knocked, rang the bell, knocked again. The door was locked. I followed a pathway of round concrete stepping-stones around to the backyard. The moon was half full, and in the moonlight I could make out the rolling lawn, the orange trees huddled in a grove at the far end, a pale island of concrete. Steam leak up from the edge of a covered hot tub.
The sliding glass door stood open all the way. The screen door was open about two feet. Open! My heart dropped, but fought to remain thoughtless. Is this how a secret life begin: The drapes were pulled back on their runner. To let in the night air, I guessed: Air conditioning gives Amber headaches. But the screen. Had Marty come in this way? So I pressed against the screen with my fingertip. The slit was six inches long, vertical, just left and slightly above the lock. You could have cut it with a table knife.
Demons began to lift off inside me; I could feel them swirling up through my arteries, coiling along my spine. They felt like sea creatures that live down where there's no light- knife-toothed, blunt-headed, colorless. I could feel the vein my forehead throbbing.
What I did next went against all my training as a police officer, against my instincts as a writer, against the logic of the situation, even against the emotions I felt boiling up inside. Somehow, I lost it. I panicked. I let out the fear. Maybe it was only a nod of respect for Amber Mae Wilson's well-being- would like to believe it was just that.
I jumped inside, found a light switch, flipped it on, and yelled her name.
"Amber."
"Amber."
Amber!
No answer. I charged through all the downstairs rooms-empty. I threw on lights willy-nilly. I tripped over my own feet charging up the stairs, hit my shin on a step, hard. I couldn’t get enough breath. The light seemed arbitrary, beveled with the darkness into treacherous edges, planes, drops. Everything was moving. I crashed into a low credenza in what appeared to be her study. Magazines slipped off the top; the lamp tilted and fell over and the bulb burst with a soft pop.
Amber!
Then I was running down a long hallway toward a half-open door. Paintings on the walls streaked past; the ceiling pressed down low. My heart was working so hard, there was hardly a space between beats. I was inside the door. The switch was just where it should have been. The room snapped to attention with light. Nothing could have prepared me for what I saw.
At first, I thought it was blood. My second thought was a correction: Red spray paint. The biggest words were on the mirrored walk-in closet:
SOJAH SEH
Across the wall over the headboard of the bed:
AWAKEN OR DIE IN IGNORACE
On the far wall:
MIDNIGHT EYE IS RETURN
And everywhere the peace symbols, those hideous sixties ankhs or chicken feet or modified crosses or whatever in hell they were-everywhere, trailing around the room in poorly formed, inarticulate red circles.
Amber lay on the floor by the bed, face-up, her arms and legs spread. She wore a blue satin robe. Her hair-thick dark brown waves-spread out against the carpet. Big pieces of white and pink were scattered through that dark hair, strewn from what I could see had once been her head. And her face! Amber's lovely, ageless, beguiling face-somehow lifted back now, flap-like, hinged on only one side, turned almost down, as if contemplating her own hair afloat in that pond of blood.
In ten years of police work, I had never-
In ten years as a crime writer, I had never-
Never. Not once. Not even close.
I can remember standing there, weight back on my heels, thighs quivering, face raised to the ceiling, mouth stretched open to release a howl that I instead choked dead in my throat. The throttled scream came from deep inside, from my very toes, felt like-a wild discharge that left my eyes throbbing and terrible pain from my stomach clear up to my jaw. The peace symbols swirled around me.
I went to the side where her face was. I turned toward her and, bending low, looked into her dull gray eyes. They were lifeless and remote as old glass.
Never, in ten years-
Reaching out from the red that had settled over me- everything I saw was red, tinged in red, outlined in red, steeps in it, drenched in it-I touched my fingers to my lips, then stretched my hand toward hers. From my mouth to Amber's, a distance it seemed my hand would never cover, how much farther could it be? And what a cold and trembling arrival, fingertip to cool gray lip!
I stood. In the bathroom, I got a handful of toilet paper went back to Amber, and for a moment looked around the room again. I noted the packed suitcases-still open-on the floor beside the walk-in. Where had Amber been going? I force myself to look at her again. Then I knelt, reached out my hand, hesitated, then reached out again, wiping her lips with it. Then the light switch in her bedroom as I turned it off. The other switches, too-all of them, even ones I was sure I hadn't touched. Then the spot where I'd fingered the screen-door flap, the front doorknob, and a few red, dreamlike moments later, finally, the same cold brass handle of Amber's gate that Martin Parish had cleansed.
It was roughly ten thousand miles to my car.
I drove to Main Beach and waded along the shore, soaking myself to the thighs. I jammed my hands in the sand, threw the seawater against my face. I stood there, knee-deep, and scrubbed my arms with the rough, dripping mud. Now what? I could call the cops-anonymous tip. I could call the cops, tell them who I was, and that Martin Parish had killed his ex-wife. I could do nothing, sit back, wait, and watch them go to work. The one thing, though, that I was not going to do-even with the smell of murder in my nostrils-was to admit that I had been at (inside!) Amber Wilson's home, ever. For Isabella, I told myself. For us.
I had one more thought. And though it seemed as dismal a product as my mind had yet rendered, I will confess also to the sizable thrill that accompanied it down my spine and into the chaos of my heart. As I stood there, earnestly grinding my fingernails into the abrading Pacific sand, I realized I might have just stumbled onto the biggest story of my life. Golden material, pure and mine only. Play this smart, I told myself. For here was more than a secret life, more than a diversion. Here upon my platter was the kind of event- event! — that, if handled right, could do more for my career than a dozen secondhand crime books. I knew these people. I'd been there. I felt a little sick to see finally, in all its hidden rapacity, the true face of my own ambition. But at that moment, with the chill of the ocean working its way up my legs and arms, what shame could find airtime in a soul still writhing with the image of pure horror that was Amber's face?
Finally, I went back across the beach to my car in the light of the half moon. Couples walked arm in arm. Lovers kissed on the boardwalk. A dog trotted by.
Sojah seh.
So God speaks.
Suddenly, it hit me how badly I wanted to be home, in bed beside Isabella. The yearning surged over me as if a dam had been blown. Gad, take me back. I drove fast out the canyon, up the winding road that ends at our precarious, stilted horne.
In the kitchen, I checked my knees for blood. I saw none but sprayed them with a stain lifter, anyway. Stripping down upstairs, I threw everything washable into the hamper.
I showered forever-hot at first, then cold.
Isabella whimpered and placed her arm across my chest when I got in beside her. Her face was next to mine and I could smell the breath of sleep from her.
"Your heart is pounding," she whispered.
"It's because of you." She "hmmed." I knew what it meant: a small smile, tender and brief, already drifting back toward the sleep from which it had come.
"It's late, R-R-Russ."
"I only had three."
"Hmm…"
"I love you, Isabella."
"I love you, too."
"I really, truly love you."
"Hmm. You're my h-h-hero."
The pounding in my chest got louder and faster. I remember it getting so big, it finally just picked me up and carried me, with the sound of boots descending steps, down into the detailed silence of dreams.