Out at Night. Susan Smith Arnout

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СКАЧАТЬ time he opened his office door and motioned her in, she was herself again.

      He stood uncertainly, as if wondering whether to hug her, and Grace pretended to dig through her bag. She dropped into the chair across the desk from him, and when she looked up, he was seated.

      He looked smaller, somehow, diminished. His shirt had a button loose and he needed a shave. “Thanks for coming.”

      “Did I have a choice?” She folded her arms.

      He studied her a long moment. “I don’t think there’s anything I could have done that would have changed it.”

      Grace looked away. The walls were devoid of personal touches except for a framed photo of a much younger Pete in a SWAT group shot, but family photos jammed the top of the filing cabinets behind him. Her eyes settled on a black-and-white of three dark-eyed skinny boys shivering in wet swimming trunks, arms around each other. Her body knew it before it registered in her mind; heat coursed through her and pressed against her eyes. Her dad smiled back, the one in the middle, a tooth missing, squinting at the camera.

      “He always looked up to you.” Her voice caught.

      “When your dad ran off with Lottie—”

      “We were cut out of almost every family gathering, and why? Because he’d married outside the faith? Outside the Portuguese community? Give me a break.”

      “Look, you don’t know how it was.”

      “I know exactly how it was. I lived it. It’s the first story I ever learned.”

      Her dad, Marcos, the middle son and two years younger than her uncle Pete, had impulsively stopped by a bar one night on his way home after cleaning his boat, The Far Horizon. He was twenty-three.

      He’d been at sea for three months chasing tuna, sunburned and exhausted and dry mouthed, and it was his dry mouth that night that had gotten him into trouble he never quite got out of. At least not easily.

      Not until the night he disappeared for good.

      But that night in the beginning, Marcos, the shy, methodical man not given to bouts of spontaneity, blinked in the sudden blaze of the spotlight as Lottie pranced onto the dusty beer-washed stage, shimmying and sparkly, with platinum hair and fishnet stockings, and inexplicably, hours later, he’d decided to drive to Las Vegas with her and get married.

      In the faded photo Grace had of her parents shot in the Temple of Love, Marcos stood up in his reeking, fish-slimed jeans, a glazed and thunderstruck look on his face, mouth gaping open, as Lottie leaned next to him, her spandex top somewhat obscured by the yellow rain slicker he’d given her as a cover-up. Her head was cocked and she had a triumphant smile on her face, but the lines around her eyes and mouth were those of an exhausted woman, as if she’d just landed the biggest fish imaginable after a long and harrowing battle at sea.

      “He was engaged to a Portuguese beauty from a good family,” Uncle Pete said feebly.

      “Well, your wife seems to have gotten over him.”

      “I was comforting her.”

      Grace threw up her hands. “All I’m saying is, this cord was severed long before I ever came into the picture, and you—you were the favorite son, the favored son, the oldest. One word from you and things would have been different. You did nothing.”

      “That’s not true.” He looked pained.

      “I was eleven when Dad died. I spent the rest of my childhood living out of suitcases while Lottie worked the West Coast, playing in countrywestern bands. She dragged Andy and me all over the place.”

      “She never told you? Aunt Chel and I tried to get you. Both of you. Fold you into our bunch. What’s a few more? Your mother wouldn’t hear of it.”

      The blood drained from Grace’s face and her skin felt damp.

      Her uncle stared at her wonderingly. “Jesus. She didn’t tell you.”

      Her heart pulsed in her throat; she could taste the anger. She wondered if he’d told himself that lie so long that he believed it.

      Grace scraped a hand through her hair. “We both know you’re lying.” Her voice was raw.

      She shoved her chair back.

      “I can’t do this. I absolutely can’t do this, so if this is what it is, I’m out of here.”

      “You will sit.” His voice was low.

      As a child he’d scared her. He scared her still. In her father’s eyes, she’d hung the moon, a bouncy, luminous pumpkin moon. In her uncle’s, that same moon withered and dried and blew away in a gust of stony fragments.

      The silence stretched. Her uncle cleared his throat. She averted her eyes, hating him. She sat heavily back down in her chair and stared out the window. The field office wasn’t far from the Agua Caliente Indian reservation, and her uncle’s office overlooked a row of date palms and government buildings. The San Jacinto Mountains rose in a cliff of jagged granite.

      “In your mind, this wasn’t my coming in to brief you about my lecture.”

      “What?”

      “This was you, bringing me in for questioning.”

      He looked away. She followed his gaze to a set of Callaway golf clubs leaning against the wall. Dusty.

      “I talked to your supervisor.”

      “Sid? That guy’s a joke.”

      “That’s odd. Because he speaks so highly of you. And—”

      “I can’t believe this—”

      “And, Grace,” he continued calmly, “he’s gotten permission from San Diego Police brass that if you do this job, providing you work with your own shrink, and as long as you don’t screw up and go Waco—”

      “Waco?” she interrupted, outraged.

      “You’re going to be able to go back to work, no harm, no foul. I assume you have your own shrink.”

      “Waco’s not a good example to use, Uncle Pete, since as I recall, it was the FBI who shot up the place like a video game.”

      “Are you in, or not?”

      A silence.

      He smoothed the front of his shirt with his hand.

      You bolt at the first sign of trouble. That’s what Mac had said to her in the Bahamas. The fury she felt washed over her like an acid wave and with it the dull realization that Jeanne was right. In some way she couldn’t quite articulate, finding her way through this tangled maze of old anger she’d trapped herself in with Uncle Pete had everything to do with setting things straight between her and Katie and Mac. It was as if she’d spent five years in a holding pattern, waiting for the letter that had come for her in the Bahamas.

      Waiting for a dead man to call her name.

      Waiting СКАЧАТЬ