Amber regarded me with an odd look of pity but also with an exaggerated expression of pain, behind which I sensed some kind of victory. She stopped in the doorway of the bedroom. For a moment, tired as I was-or maybe because of it-all I could do was behold her form before me, the shape of her space, the hang of her dress, the slight tautness of the material at her stomach and chest, the straightness of shoulder, the droop of hair.
"Let's have it," I said.
"It's from the dumpster outside. We found a wastebasket liner like the one in the bathroom-tied up and stuffed down around other people's things. I pulled out about five handfuls of pink-stained tissue, and these were there."
Chet came forward and gave me the small white bag.
A little covey of fingernails scratched down into the corner and when I tilted it back the other way, they slid to another. Some wobbled on convex backs. They were uniform, off-whit nearly opaque. Fakes. Remnants of pink polish remained on a few of their edges, just shadings really, as if the paint had been removed with solvent. I counted them once, moved them around, counted them again, moved them some more, and counted them a third time.
"Nine," I said.
"Nine," echoed Chester. "There're a few others things in there you should see."
They led me to the bathroom. The door to the cabinet under the sink stood open. Amber knelt down and pointed to a package of new, blank acrylic fingernails.
A terrible weight settled on me. My heart was wooden, mechanical, huge. My legs felt shaky and my ears were ringing. "What about polish?" I asked, hardly recognizing my own voice.
"They're all in that basket on the counter," said Amber. "Take your pick."
I took up the basket and looked in. I shuffled the bottles around. There were six shades of pink. I removed the Baggies from my pocket, spilled the vacuum-cleaner nail onto the cobalt blue tile of Grace's counter, flipped it upright. A color called Rosebud looked close. I painted my left middle fingernail with it, blew it dry. If there was a difference between the pink on the fake and the pink on my finger, I couldn't see it. Neither could Amber, an expert on such matters, whose face had gone pale, almost cadaverous in the harsh bathroom light. Chet nodded along gloomily.
"Martin planted the one at Amber's," I said but the feebleness of my conviction clearly wavered in my voice.
"No," said Chester. "If so, he'd have kept these nine, not thrown them out."
"Then he planted all ten," I protested.
"Not logical, Russell. He needs either the one from the vacuum or else these, in his possession. If he did place the nail at Amber's, he certainly would have absconded with these by now. It supports his case against Grace. The tenth nail establishes the match."
"My daughter was in my house," said Amber.
My own voice sounded to me as if it were traveling across continents. "There will be an explanation. This isn't what it looks like."
We spent the next hour searching Grace's apartment for more proof that she had been in her mother's room on the night of July the third. She had done an exemplary job of either hiding it, or taking it somewhere else.
"We've got one more stop to make," I said.
We let Amber do the knocking on the door of Brent Sides's apartment, identify herself, and ask to come in. Chet and I stood against the wall so he couldn't see us through the peephole His lumpy briefcase sat at our feet.
When we followed Amber in, Sides's sleep-heavy eye went wide. All he had on was a pair of boxer shorts. His hair was a mess. He had a carving knife in his hand.
"Mr. Monroe." He blushed and set the knife on the counter. "Sorry. I was just dreaming about the Midnight Eye getting in here."
"Just us, tonight."
"Mr. Sides. This is Mr. Singer, Orange County Sheriff' Department. We need to talk."
He gaped momentarily at Chester's badge, then at Amber recognizing her face-as would nearly any man in the country- without being able to place it. He blinked.
"Wanna sit?"
"No. I want you to tell me which part was the lie."
"Which part of what?"
"Of what you told me about you and Grace. You told me a lot, Brent, but there was one thing you made up. You made it up because she asked you to, and because you love her."
"No, man. Everything I said was true."
I stared at him, not wanting to hurt him, although certainly I was willing.
"There's been a murder, Brent. Grace is in terrible trouble. You don't understand that trouble, but you love my daughter. So do I. You have ten seconds to tell me what your lie was. If you don't, I'll make you wish you had, then you will, anyway."
He looked to Amber, the softness of appeal in his eyes.
"You really should talk with Mr. Monroe," said Chet. "Unless you would feel more comfortable in an interrogation booth at County."
"Please, Brent,'.' she said.
Sides glanced at me again, then sat in a director's chair in front of the TV. His back was to us. I could hardly hear his voice when he finally spoke.
"We weren't together on July the third," he said. "I worked and came home. I don't know where Grace was. I was afraid to ask."
"Why was that?" I demanded.
"Oh… you know."
"I don't know. Why were you afraid to ask where she'd been?"
"Because of the way she… looked."
Clarity came to me at that moment. Of course. It would account for everything we hadn't found in the last hour of searching Grace's home. It would account for her showing up at Brent's house late that night, after her deed was done.
"You weren't with her that night, but you saw her. Right?"
He nodded.
"How did she look, Brent?" Amber asked him gently.
"Uh… real scary, like. And she smelled."
"Like what?"
"Like she was terrified, like, or had just been close to something real bad."
Brent turned then to face us, adjusting the director's chair in our direction in disconsolate little jerks. He looked at each of us in turn, then down at the carpet. "I tried to help. I'm not complete idiot, though. You all should know that I'd do anything for her. Almost anything. I don't know where she was. But know she was scared."
Chester looked up at me with the same ambivalent expression that always came to him when he'd nailed someone. A moth spiraled out of the patio light and landed on the screen
Sides excused himself to the bathroom.
I stepped outside and smoked. I was watching the smoke rise and vanish into the air. I was thinking back to a time some years ago, just after Isabella and I were married, when we talked about selling the house and moving out of the county for good. We'd talked about other places: northern California, Hawaii Mexico, Texas. What had made us decide not to go? We told ourselves, finally, that family was most important-Joe and Corrine, my mother and father, even, in some indefinite way, the promise of proximity to Grace. We told ourselves that we had everything we wanted right here: a house and a little land, clear air coming off the ocean, and no need to get out in the hellish rat race that commenced each morning on the roads that ran just a few miles from our private, isolated stilt house of an Eden. We had told ourselves that we could take on the world from our perch, defend our citadel and live our lives with whatever happiness and purpose we could bring to bear. We braced out selves for success. But what had made us wonder in the first place? What had made us doubt? We did not confess it then but I am certain Isabella suspected-deep in her heart, as did I-that this life of ours was not to continue, that some dark actuality, far off in the future as it may have been, had already brushed us with the shadow of its terrible outstretched wings. Perhaps this was the moment when the first cell metastasized in Isabella's lovely and loving mind. We will never know. But I do know that all I could think of that night, leaning against the rough wall of Brent Sides's apartment, was that we'd somehow made the wrong move, that we'd have been so much better off somewhere else-somewhere without cancer and Midnight Eyes and Martin Parishes and daughters so battered by bad fortune that the very cores of their futures were uncertain as the smoke from my cigarette, which continued to rise into the darkness.
Chet joined me on the patio.
"Texas," I mumbled to myself.
Chester Fairfax Singer, an unhappy spirit whose last effort for the side of innocence had revealed nothing more, probably, than just another exercise in the brutal, the stupid, the desperate, the eternal, studied me from behind his thick glasses.
"They say San Antonio is very nice," he offered. "May I ask you, where is your daughter at this moment?"
"My house. With Dad. Give me a day with her, Chet."
"Yes. One day."
Amber and I drove back to Laguna without saying a word to each other. But I was aware of her, acutely so: I could locate the precise plane-just beyond my right shoulder-where the perimeters of our heartaches met. We shared a common border. It buzzed like a power line.
Amber said the first words of our trip just as I was about to turn off Laguna Canyon Road onto my street.
"No, Russ. Keep going. Drive fast."
"Why?"
"Because I asked you to."
I eased back into the fast lane of the deserted road and pressed down the accelerator. The power of the V-8 seemed to start behind, then pick us up and take us with it. We were guest of velocity. We rode it through the curves, eucalyptuses rushing past the windshield like fence pickets. We gorged ourselves on distance. Amber rested her head on my shoulder and wrapped both her hands around my arm. And what a surge of remembrance shot through me: We had been here before, hundred times, a thousand years ago. I had forgotten how much Amber loved this motion, how she melted into it, how it calmed her. We used to drive too fast together, just for fun. The speed relaxed her, released her. I could smell the sweet dank odor of her hair and the light perfume of her breath when she sighed. You may not forgive, but you will understand that my craving for Amber came rising with all the power of an incoming tide.
The city appeared, was gone. We hit Coast Highway eighty, raced through four green lights and a final red before settling into the open four-mile stretch to the next town. The Pacific glittered to our left. The moon presided. A trailer park vanished behind us, quickly as a road sign. The center divider on the highway blurred. To our right, the hills moved by with steady precision.
"I have a confession to make," whispered Amber.
"Make it."
"First, can I tell you how I feel right now? I feel dead. I believe that Grace was in my house to kill me. I feel like she accomplished what she wanted. I feel tainted and stupid and black. I feel like I've wasted everything that's been set on my table. Every single thing that could have turned out good."
"I'm sorry. I do, too."
"What do you think it was, specifically, that we did wrong?"."Everything. But I think we did the best we could, with the tools we had."
"Is there any consolation in there?"
"Not much that I can see."
"Is there consolation in anything else?"
"In tomorrow, maybe. At least we can tell ourselves that."
"Gad, Russ, tomorrow's here."
"There is that problem."
"Won't this thing go any faster?"
"Oh yes."
The digital speedometer pegged at ninety-nine, but the car sped crazily on. Horn blasts followed our passage, fading quickly. For a moment it seemed possible, and somehow imperative, that we overtake the pools of our high beams shooting steadily before us. Hope impossible is the purest hope.
"I confess that I dream of you often," she said. "It's not always your body or shape, but I know it's you. The first time I saw your car parked outside my house, you know what I did? I parked outside yours the next night, down the hill, where you wouldn't see me. I felt like a teenager. Did you?"
"Yes."
"Do I surprise you?"
"You don't sound like the Amber I used to know."
Her head was still on my shoulder and her hair blew against my face.
"Twenty years is a long time, Russ. I am changing. The reason I asked Alice to come out was to try to know my family, to offer some love in that direction. I tried to explain that to you.
I'm not going to stop until whoever killed her is in jail and paying for what they did-even if it's my own daughter."
"That's a tough way to turn a life around. Maybe you should start with something on a little smaller scale." I hear the sarcasm in my voice and wished it wasn't there.
"I've been studying my Bible, giving lots of money to charity. I'm trying to feel the pain of others, not to judge them. I'm thirty-nine years old, Russ. That's old enough to know when something's missing."
"I understand what you mean."
"I made a list of every regret I could think of, and what I could do about them. Until tonight, I thought there would be a way to find my daughter again. I guess that's one regret that won't ever be fixed, by me at least. I'll try, though, I'll try to reach her."
"There may be time," I said, and the thought came me that Grace might be spending a lot of that-time-in lockup.
"I did not have her tortured, Russ. I don't know what could have put that in her mind. But I want you to believe me I'll confess to anything and everything under the sun. I was terrible mother. But I never hurt her on purpose. Never that.
I shot into the right lane, braked as we approached the first signal in Corona del Mar, fishtailed into a right turn through the green, brought the back end into line, then cranked a hard U-turn to my left. We idled at the signal.
"Was sitting outside my house a way of righting some regret?" I asked.
"No. I never regretted us. I regretted losing us. It was the highest cost of my ambition." "I regretted losing us, too." "I know that. But I do believe you did your part to ruin us. I left, Russ, but you told me to. I'd appreciate it if you'd cop to that. You've had the luxury of me taking the rap for a long time now. Remember the talk we had, sitting on the floor by the fake fireplace that night, after I'd gotten my first contract offer? All the travel I was going to be doing? Do you remember what you said when I asked you what you wanted me to do? You said, ^“ I want you to go, Amber.' The go was loud and clear. I did the dirty work for both of us-I went."
I know. I helped us crash."
And had regretted it, even as the words were coming out that night. I could remember every second of that conversation, even now, as if it was a scene from a movie I'd watched a hundred times. To all the charges that have been brought against the male-pride, stubborness, unwillingness to communicate, selfishness, cowardice, insularity, macho inanity-I will gladly confess. Did I love her then? Certainly. But love is a poor excuse for anything. My sole defense is that I never desired any woman but Amber-at least not enough to act on it-when we were together, and for a truly frightening amount of time afterward. I was hers. Even when I began to take other lovers, I was hers. Until, that is, I stumbled on Isabella Sandoval sitting under a palapa amidst the sweet Valencias of the SunBlesst Ranch and my heart, so long detained, fled straight away to her.
"How could you let me go without a fight, Russ?" Amber whispered quietly.
Only time had given me the answer. If she had asked me this during one of our parting frays, I'd have told her she wasn't worth it. And she would have believed, because at that time I retained the ability to hurt her-she had not grown beyond me, yet. But that would not have been the truth.
^ 44 I thought then," I said, "that it was dangerous to take what wasn't offered. That I couldn't coax a love out of you that wasn't there to begin with."
"Afraid it would vanish?"
"Yes, in the end. Afraid of the collateral damage, too."
"Meaning what?"
"Meaning the love I felt for you."
The light finally changed and I gunned the car back toward Laguna. I maintained a more prudent double-digit speed. To the west, the ocean was an endless plain of black.
"And what do you think now, Russ, about taking what isn't offered?"
"I haven't changed my position on that. Some things, you fight too hard to get them, get ruined in the war."
"You never had to fight for Isabella, did you? She offered you everything you wanted. Handed it right over to you, all of it, all of herself."
"Yes, she did."
"How did you choose to deal with that? Wasn't she bargaining with a diluted currency?"
"I loved and honored her in every way I could."
"Oh, Russell, you were a lucky man to find her."
"I've always known that."
"I'm so sorry for what happened to her. Will she ever be okay… ever?"
"No."
"Russ, do you believe in miracles?"
"No."
"What is it you hold on to late at night, when the devil’s grabbing at your soul?"
"His throat." "Do you feel anything tender inside at all?"
"Tenderness would unravel me."
My agonies were storming their walls. Was I powerless to stop them, or just unwilling? I heard a wild ringing in my ears.
"Do you want to die?"
"Sometimes. Then I think. There has to be more to life than a desire to be taken out on a stretcher."
"Is it really that bad?"
"I may just be exhibiting some sorry-ass version of brinksmanship. I've never considered myself cut out for this task-kindness just doesn't come easily. I don't know how much longer I can take care of her. I dream of tumors growing in my balls and lungs."
"What do you want?"
"A job where I wear a shirt with my name on it. A straightforward life."
"Really, I mean. Strip away all your self-pitying horseshit, all your writerly loop-the-loops, and what is it you truly want?"
"For the people I love to stop dying."
"There, Russell. I can believe you now. Why does it take you so long sometimes to admit the truth?" The air whipped through the windows. "Pull over," she said.
I braked and signaled and crunched off onto the shoulder. When the car finally stopped, the dust blew forward and swirled in the headlights. We were between the towns, on a bluff that opened to the sea. Down on the beach, wavering white ribbons rushed and retreated. My heart was in my teeth.
Amber got out, shut her door, and walked over to the bluff edge. I followed. The smell of sage mixed with the salt air, each intensified by the heat. Amber waited until I caught up with her, then took my hand. We walked the perimeter of the bluff, stopping where a deep gash opened into the abyss. The face of the cliff was back-cut, too steep for me to actually see, and as my gaze followed its invisible plane, I continued to see nothing but darkness until the sand below focused in my view, pale acreage studded with sharp rocks exposed wholly now by the low tide. The sand at the waterline shone as if lacquered The ringing in my ears was so loud, my eyes began to blur, had never in my life-except for those three hellish days with Izzy in a Guadalajara hospital, where her tumor was diagnosed-felt so fragile, so ready to disassemble.
To my heartache was then added shock when Amber turned me toward her on the edge of this bluff high over the sea and offered her lips, wet and parted, to my own.
There was nothing exploratory in this act, nothing of negotiation or the art of the deal. No, this was a kiss as pure as sacrifice. It was an offer of everything. She blew the breath her lungs deep into my own as, two decades ago, she had: often done, always to the wilding of my blood.
I have a clear and permanent memory of what happened next. First, a breeze came off the sea, oddly cool in the static heat, and it struck my face directly. (How it got around Amber face-locked so close to mine-I cannot explain.) And as it pushed cooly against me, I felt what seemed like the total contents of my mind-thoughts, precepts, memory-being lift out and carried away. The Zapruder film is no more graphic than the vision I had, eyes closed, of everything inside me departing to join this fresh and unlikely breeze. But there was no violence to it. Rather, what was inside me simply stepped out and, like a child hand in hand with a grandparent, walk away.
Second, I remember the pink cotton material of Amber dress bunched up on the small of her back, clutched in one my hands, and the pure soft heat of her legs pressing against my trembling own, the forward bend and toe-strained perch her, the lift of her dark brown hair in that breeze, a black even darker than the ocean beyond us, the brace of my fingers on her belly. And I remember, too, that we hardly moved-no great histrionics here-because every tiny motion, every fractional of contact was an agony of pleasure I could barely stand. The tremors deep within Amber were all the movement we required.
Last, I remember where we ended up, though not how we got there. The logistics of the transition are not hard to imagine. I was lying in the dirt, amidst the fragrant sage, staring straight up through Amber's hair to the sky. Her back was still to me. My arms were wrapped around her, my left locked in her right armpit, my right still open against her stomach, holding tight. My legs were spread and her rump rested deep between them, where-I noted-we were still very much connected. Her heart beat hard against the bone of my left elbow. We were both breathing fast. My butt hurt. I was, for the moment, blessedly opinionless.
But as quickly as my thoughts had departed, so they came scampering back, like rabbits to the hole. There they huddled, frightened, buck-toothed, ashamed. They curled together, hid their faces. They confessed. I closed my eyes again and imagined a fig leaf the size of the heavens. But I did not loosen my grip on Amber; if I had traded everything for this, then I was not about to give it up. I was the monkey caught in a trap because he's unwilling to release the bait from his greedy fist. I was even ready for the electric chair, but I would clutch this treasure to my lap, lodged so high and deep inside her that I could feel the bottom of her heart, until the straps claimed me.
Or not. Because along with the searing reentry of my conscience came the cooling waters of reason-all that keep the soul from self-immolation. For a moment, a terrible storm of contradiction began to form inside me, but it passed. I was no longer fit to battle myself. I had won and I had lost. I released my grip on Amber Mae and worked my nose into the aromatic crook behind her ear. I gently drove myself into her, to lessening effect. Very deeply, I sighed.
"Don't speak," she said. I did not.
"That was a gift," she whispered.
"It certainly was. Thank you."
"It wasn't from me. I just delivered it."
"Who do I send the thank-you note to?"
"Isabella. We talked."