Life Sentences (28 page)
Roy was speeding up the side of
the canyon while an LAPD air unit circled above him, big blasts of candle-power
from its spotlight striking him in the eyes and nearly blinding him. He
kept a firm grip of the wheel as he took the next hairpin turn, feeling
the helicopter's rotor blades shuddering against the hood of his car.
He twisted through a cloud of dust, tunneling deeper into the woods and
looking for any hot spots where the swirling flames and thick black smoke
might drive the chopper away. Over the next rise, the road fell steeply
downhill, and Roy hung on tight while his front wheels lost their grip and
started to slide. He tapped the brakes, slowing the car to a more reasonable
speed, his heart thumping just ahead of him. At the bottom of this hairy
descent was a paved road.
Roy got onto a remarkably smooth
two-lane byway and quickly accelerated to eighty, heading north. He listened
to the steady hum of the blacktop and looked out his window at the sky.
The chopper was gone. The stars were mostly hidden behind a layer of smoke.
The asphalt had a pleasant cadence and rhythm. He turned on the radio,
and the jazz music held him with its kinetic, spiraling energy. He basked
in the full-throated richness pulsating out of the car speakers, then remembered:
This is Dad's favorite album
.
He could feel his father's unnatural
energy like a spray of static electricity inside the car. "How's it
goin
', Roy Boy?" The voice was exceedingly
familiar to him, but the signal was faint. His flesh crept as he recalled
the conversation they'd had seventeen years ago.
"You think I liked being married?"
his father said. "Do you think I liked being chained to that crazy woman?
Your mother used to lie there like a petrified dog
turd
.
Is that what you want in your life, Roy?"
"No, Dad."
"Huh?"
"I said no."
"Think about it very carefully."
On the day of Linda
Hildreth's
funeral, hundreds of people had shown up
to pay their respects; half of them were complete strangers to eight-year-old
Roy. After it was over and everybody had gone home, when it was just Roy
and his dad inside the empty house, his father had said, "You
hungry?"
Roy spun around and stared into
the empty hallway. "Dad?"
"In here," his father said.
"Grab a seat. Dinner's ready."
Roy followed the sound of his voice
into the dining room. On the sideboard was an impressive array of liquor
bottles-tequila, vodka, bourbon, rum, Scotch. Two places had been set
at the antique dining table, and Roy recognized the polished chrome
utensils that his mother rarely used, the lit candles, the bone china
plates heaped with mashed potatoes and expensive cuts of steak.
"How are you, son? You
okay?" his father said from the doorway. Benny
Hildreth
was a tall, slender man with brown hair and brown eyes, impeccably groomed.
He had his look down-mustache, Rolex, sharkskin suit, very seventies.
"Yeah, I guess." Roy
shrugged and dipped his finger into the mashed potatoes, tasting butter,
salt and pepper.
"I sold off that World War I
collection. Got a good price for it, too." His father reached for
a pack of cigarettes next to the beveled-glass ashtray on the sideboard,
shook one out and lit it. He paused to enjoy the taste, then said,
"Imported ale. Want one?"
"Yeah, sure." Roy followed
him into the kitchen, then glanced at the wine rack. "I'd rather have
some of that."
"Ooh. Classy." His father
wiggled his eyebrows at him, and Roy laughed. Benny selected a bottle of
Chablis, filled two long-stemmed glasses and handed one to Roy. "Bottoms
up," he said with a grin.
"Peas on earth…"
"… and good tall women."
They lifted their glasses, clinked
them together.
Roy took a sip, then watched the
sky's reflection in the infinity pool outside their kitchen window.
The wine tasted sour, like tainted grape juice. He didn't like it.
"Dad?" he said.
"Yeah, son?"
"If you knew you were going
to die soon, and you could only make one phone call, who would you call
and what would you say?"
His father reached into his pocket
and took out
bis
wallet. He removed the picture
of Roy's mother and said, "I'd call your mother and tell her what a
cunt she was." He tossed the picture into the wastebasket.
"C'mon. Let's eat," he said.
The memory faded, a tapestry of
cobwebs settling for a moment into a perfect imitation of his father
before it teetered and fell, scattering in the diffuse light.
Now the LAPD air unit swooped out
of the night sky, nosing down until it was almost on top of him. It made
big looping turns in the air, its rotor blades whipping up clouds of dust
so thick that Roy could barely see where he was going.
He pulled a U-turn in the middle
of the road and headed in the opposite direction. He had to find another
fire road, fast, or he'd never get rid of them. After two miles of frantic
searching, he took a sharp right onto a hard-packed road that snaked up
into the woods. He drove for miles with the whine of the rotor blades
ringing in his ears. Good-size rocks banged against the wheel wells, while
the road gradually degraded to dirt and the kicked-up dust cocooned
him in a yellow haze.
He was surrounded on all sides
by
cracklifig
flames. These trees had survived
centuries of lightning strikes, but now the fire would spread swiftly
through the dry woods. Even the upper reaches of the old-growth ponderosas
were on fire. The chopper followed him until the fire grew so intense
it had to lift away. It banked wide to the east, then circled in a steady
northbound ascent.
Roy drove deeper into the burning
woods, until the roar grew deafening and the steering wheel became almost
too hot to touch. When a blistering heat radiated into the car through
his rolled-down window, he hit the brakes. He put the Chevy into reverse
and stepped on the gas, but the rear wheels spun around uselessly. He
eased his foot off the accelerator, then slowly turned the steering wheel
from side to side as he reapplied power. The car reared back, then dropped
down into the sand wash.
It was no use. The vehicle was
stuck.
He got out and shielded his face
with his hands. Behind him, the wind-fueled flames blew brilliant yellow
gusts from one side of the road to the other. In front of him was a dirt trail,
well maintained and fairly free of underbrush. Covering his head with
his shirt, he made a dash for the trail, then broke into a sprint.
The Chevy went up with a whoosh behind
him. Roy glanced back in time to see the LAPD air unit hovering above the
burning wreckage, tracking this major heat source on its infrared
scope. He heard a loud bang, and a bright orange ball of flame shot into
the air and rocked the chopper sideways. Even from a distance, Roy could
feel the blast of hot, sticky air.
He turned and ran full tilt, the sound
of the rotor blades gradually fading into the distance. Reality fell
away. After about a mile, he couldn't hear anything anymore.
He came upon a road that was well
graded and passable by automobile. He paused for a moment, then crossed
the road barefoot and stood on a rocky cliff over-looking the foothills
of East Los Angeles. Sporadic fires swirled through the sparsely populated
area, isolated fires that rivaled the stars in their lonely, twinkling
beauty. He could see the entire panorama of the night sky-moon, stars,
planes, choppers. Slurry bombers swept down to unload their cargo, and
news helicopters hovered like hummingbirds, their blue beams crisscrossing
through the smoke. When the air tankers dropped their slurry, it fell vertically
onto the fire like rain from the belly of a thunderstorm.
Roy took a deep breath and got
back on the road, heading north. Hate kept him going. Hate kept one foot
moving in front of the other. All-consuming hate. He walked until the
concrete knot of Los Angeles had faded from memory.
Jack fumbled for a handhold in
the wildly carved limestone, cursing and stumbling, while high overhead
the moon wore a yellow ring. He hugged the inner edge of the canyon and
paused to catch his breath. The uphill climb was slow going. He reached
for a sandstone slab, then slid a few feet down the wall of rock, yelling,
"Shit!" as he descended. These gravel-strewn ridges were difficult
to surmount. The loose pebbles gave little grip. The cracked limestone
crumbled and splintered as he attempted to regain his footing.
It took him over an hour to inch
his way up the inner canyon, clinging to rock formations in a difficult
and steep ascent. His breathing grew labored as he hoisted himself up
over the top of a granite ledge, striated with colors like the growth
rings on a tree. He lay there for a few minutes before he struggled to
his feet and stood on shaky legs.
The moon was bright enough to read
by. Less than forty yards away was a road. Jack licked the salt off his lips
and took several painful breaths. It hurt to swallow. He touched the
lesions around his throat, wondering if there might be any underlying
neck injury. A person could survive manual strangulation, only to
die from complications a few days later.
He crossed the dry
creekbed
, where an ashen salamander slithered past
his feet. The air smelled of soot. Blackened sagebrush edged up to the
footpath. He didn't have his cell phone with him. He didn't have his gun.
He probably didn't have a career anymore. He had fucked up royally.
He could hear a car coming and tried to holler for help, but nothing came
out of his parched throat. Just a hiss. Just a wheeze.
He hobbled toward the road, only
twenty yards away now, feeling dangerously dehydrated. He waved his
arms in the air, but the next car drove past without stopping or even slowing
down. He heard a droning sound and turned to look at the foothills and
beyond. Distant choppers made dizzying orbits as they dredged the night
sky, their spotlights sweeping through the smoky air. They buzzed like
bumblebees, each note spun into dissonance by the gusting wind.
His index finger was badly bruised
and swollen. "Thank you, thank you." That finger had saved his life
tonight He'd managed to slip it underneath the steel chain and alleviate
some of the pressure on his windpipe. At least he was alive. How lucky
was that?
Lucky, yes. But he wasn't exactly
elated. Roy had beaten him. Roy had deceived him. Roy was still out there
with Jack's car, Jack's gun, Jack's cell phone. Jesus. He could feel his career
circling the drain.
He limped along an erosion ditch
and approached the road. Another car would be coming soon. He would
stand and wait for it.
1.
Daisy was back in her old childhood
room, the one with the cobwebs in the corners and the Golden Books on the
pine shelves, the very room where she'd once plotted her escape from Edgewater,
Vermont, population 12,000. It was early in the morning, and she lay in
bed with the covers pulled up to her neck, so chilly for mid-April. Just
down the hallway was the sleeping baby. They'd put his crib in the guest bedroom,
since it was easier for Daisy and her mother to take turns that way. Meanwhile,
she shared her old room with Anna's ghost.
She studied the too-small closet
and cracked vanity mirror, the other twin bed pushed into the opposite
corner. Gathered around the headboard were Anna’s Raggedy Ann and
Andy, a harem of
Barbies
, an army of Troll dolls.
Dolls that talked. Dolls that burst into song when you pulled their strings.
Wonder Woman, Spanish flamenco dancer, Madame Alexander, too many
eerie dolls' eyes staring at Daisy from across the room. Watching her accusingly.
Where's Anna? What have you done with
our mother?
She closed her eyes, not wanting
to look at them, not wanting to think about Anna anymore. She felt stuck
in a time warp, with Anna's final hours playing over and over inside her
head. Every morning she felt it-the seizure grip of fear. She'd fight the
morning's first light, bury her head in her pillow and try to run away from
the truth, but the truth would always catch up with her eventually, spinning
her like a centrifuge. Her heart would race and her body would drag like
an old tire hooked to a fishing line, and she would move reluctantly,
exhaustedly, into the light of another day.
It helped to have the baby to take
care of. His needs were so immediate, so urgent, there was hardly any
time to grieve.
Noah Hubbard
. The
name had just popped into her head. Maybe because this baby, with all
his genetic baggage, was sailing into unknown territory. During the
day, she walked around doing the things that had to be done, pretending
to be okay. She put on a false face for the baby's sake, for Lily's sake,
but every so often the grief would slam into her and she would just have
to sit down. Anna's funeral was in three days. Arrangements were being
made with the help of Lily's friends. They knew all about such things, these
intrepid old ladies.
Outside, a pair of mourning doves
kept cooing back and forth. Daisy liked the way the light fanned out across
the rug. On the floor beside the bed was a stack of poor-quality photocopies
of Anna's phone bills and recent credit card transactions. Daisy had
spent half the night trying to piece together her sister's life in L.A.
She'd gotten maybe three hours of sleep altogether. Jack was back in Los
Angeles, recovering from his injuries. He'd been suspended from the
department pending an internal investigation into his alleged misconduct.
He'd called her late last night to say that he would be flying out to Vermont
in a few days. "
Hildreth
knows where you
work," he told her bluntly. "He knows where you live. He knows where
your mother lives. Keep your doors locked, Daisy. I've informed the
local police about the situation, and I'll be there soon. But first
I've got some business to take care of." His words sent shivers slithering
down her spine, but more important, she missed him. She wanted him nearby.
At the foot of the bed was the
girls' old Scrabble board game. Last night Daisy had tried to make an
anagram out of END 70, just as
Hildreth
had been
an anagram for
Dr. E. H. Hilt
. She'd
played around with the letters
E-N-D
but only came up with
DEN
and
NED
. Next she'd turned the zero into
the letter
O
and got:
ENDO
DEON
DENO
EDON
EDNO
NODE
DO EN
DONE
Done?
Had Anna
done
something? Was she
done
?
Done 7?
Was Anna trying to say that she was
done, done, done, done…
seven times? Was that the hidden meaning
behind the message? It made no sense. Daisy gave up.
Now a plunking sound interrupted
her thoughts. Strange sounds often emanated from the old house-groaning
water pipes, hissing radiators, sheets of snow sliding off the roof in
the wintertime, the floorboards expanding and contracting. Years
ago, Mr. Barsum had painted the girls' hardwood floor dark green for some
inexplicable reason, and Anna used to joke that the floor was a river
and their beds were two life rafts, and she would fall off her bed onto
the floor, crying, "Help me!" And Daisy would have to rescue her
from the raging river all over again.
Outside the leaky bedroom windows,
Holsteins grazed in the alfalfa fields and
gackles
settled like fat black leaves on the tree branches. April was usually a
lime-green tribute to spring, but everything had arrived a little late
this year. During Vermont's long winter months, the snow would slowly accumulate,
layer upon layer, until huge drifts reclined against the sides of buildings,
burying the cars and trash cans under a dirty white blanket. By mid-February,
the mailman would have to dig the mailboxes out with his gloved hands.
The house was always gray and icicled in the wintertime, heat from the
radiators melting peepholes in the frosted windowpanes. But now that
spring had finally arrived, the snow would melt rapidly, and the
meltwater
would flow downhill and turn the ditches
into miniature streams. Daisy could hear the
meltwater
now-that lively cascading sound, like the tinkling of many bells.
She reached for the bottle of sleeping
pills on her bedside table. Dr.
Slinglander
had
prescribed them for her. She couldn't eat, couldn't sleep, could barely
choke down the tea her mother was constantly bringing to her. She was tempted
to take two pills and knock herself out, but that would only make tonight's
sleep more elusive. She herded the impulse back into a dusty corner of
her brain while Anna's final words replayed inside her head:
I thought it would bring me peace, but it
didn't. End 70 is a gift for you. You '11 find out when you get there.
Now she heard footsteps on the
stairs and a rustling sound outside her door, accompanied by a soft
knock.
"Enter at your own peril,"
Daisy said as if she were twelve again.
Her mother stepped into the room
as tentatively as if she were entering a shrine. "How'd you sleep?"
she asked.
"Not so great. Noah woke up
a bunch and…" Her voice trailed off.
"Me, too," Lily said quietly.
"Breakfast is ready."
"No thanks, Ma."
With a long-suffering sigh, Lily
crossed the room and tugged on all the window shades, letting them rattle
upward so that sunlight filled the room and gradually took the chill
out of the air.
"Don't," Daisy groaned,
covering her head with her pillow.
"I made your favorite. Sausage
and eggs."
She could smell the tantalizing
combination of sizzling maple sausages, hash browns and green peppers
wafting up the staircase, her mother's idea of heaven. "I'm not
hungry," she said. "But thanks."
Lily paused at the window to take
in the sight of the budding burdocks in the front yard. "Well, I guess
spring is officially here."
Daisy tossed her pillow aside.
"And five billion years from now, the sun will expand into this red
giant that's going to burn our planet to a cinder. So enjoy it while it
lasts."
Her mother scowled. "And you
know this how?" "Eight years of higher education and the loans
to prove it."
"You can't go on like this,
you know. Not sleeping. Not eating. Are you trying to starve yourself to death?"
"Maybe," she said. Through
her bedroom windows, Daisy could see the utterly blue, utterly empty
sky.
"You're just trying to get my
goat," Lily said irritably.
"Your goat? Exactly where is
this goat located, Ma?"
Lily's light-colored hair fell
in wisps around her temples and cheeks, and her smile was broad but faded.
The colors that composed her seemed to merge with the old wallpaper; she
was like a once-colorful sundress that had been washed too many times.
The back of her beige dress was wrinkled, and she wore running shoes and
athletic socks as if she were about to dash around the block a few times.
A thought so alien it made Daisy giggle.
"What's so funny?"
"Nothing."
"All right. Fine." Lily
frowned at the pink tissue bunched in her fist. They'd run out of white
tissues because of the baby and were down to their last box of pink,
perfumy
ones, the kind that made Daisy sneeze.
"What's all this?" Lily kicked the paperwork on the floor with
the toe of her running shoe. "Don't mess it up, Ma."
"Were you up all night reading
again?" She picked up a book on chaos theory and held it at arm's
length. "Wow." She squinted. "Either my eyesight's getting
worse, or my arms are shrinking."
"Mom?" Daisy said, feeling
a nervous jump in the pit of her stomach. "Remember Wednesday when
I took the baby to the doctor's office?"
Lily put the book down.
"Yes?"
"I paid to have him tested."
"What for?"
"I got him genetically screened
for
Stier-Zellar's
."
Lily pursed her lips. "All
right. And what if he tests positive? What if he turns out to be just like
Louis?"
"Ignorance isn't going to save
us, Mom" Daisy told her, sitting up and crossing her legs on the bed.
"We can't stick our heads in the sand. We've got to find out."
"Oh God." She sat heavily
on the edge of her daughter's bed. "I can't go through it again, Daisy.
I'm sorry."
"Nobody's asking you to."
"Oh really? Who's going to
raise him, then? You?"
She honestly hadn't thought about
it. DNA was a book with a beginning and an end. There was the book of Daisy.
The book of Lily. The book of Anna. The book of Noah. It would take only
one gene-one sentence in Noah's book-to seal his fate. We all had glitches
in our DNA, hereditary predispositions. Changes in the sequence of
a gene could change the action of a protein, just like a single misplaced
word could change the meaning of a sentence.
"What are we going to do? Put
him up for adoption?" Lily said, the anger sitting on her face.
"Who in their right mind would adopt a child with
Stier-Zellar's
?"
"I just assumed-"
"What? That I'd do all the
child-rearing?"
Daisy hadn't thought about an alternative.
"I mean it, Daisy…"
"Mom. We don't have the results
back yet. And besides,
Stier-Zellar's
is an
autosomal
recessive condition."
"In English, please."
"Anna's father wasn't an obligate
carrier, but you are. Anna was never tested, but we can assume that her
risk of being a carrier is about one in three. That's fairly low. And the
chances of the baby's father being a carrier are extremely remote,
maybe one in a thousand. Anna was clinically unaffected by the mutated
gene, which means that out of the remaining possibilities, there's
only a zero to thirty percent chance she inherited the mutation from
you."
"What if you're wrong? What if
Roy
Hildreth
just so happens to be a carrier,
too? What then?"
"Even so," Daisy said
calmly, "if both parents are carriers, there's only a twenty-five
percent risk. It's not a
gimme
, Mom. You need two
mutations for the disease to manifest itself."
"Well, that's all very impressive-sounding.
But if Noah turns out to have that awful disease, I'm not going to be the
one to take care of him. I mean it, Daisy. I never want to go through
that again."
"There are new therapies,
Mom. New treatments. We could get him into clinical trials right
away."
"But that's not a cure, is
it?"
"Not yet," Daisy admitted.
She didn't know what she was going to do. The baby occupied every waking
second of every hour of their day. She and Lily took turns bottle-feeding
him, changing his diapers, burping him, bathing him. It was a humbling experience,
at times exhilarating, at times exhausting. He woke up, looked around,
went back to sleep. He woke up, screamed a lot, went back to sleep. He woke
up, looked around, pooped in his diapers and went back to sleep. He couldn't
stop drooling. His drool was everywhere.
"I did it once. I won't do it
again." Lily stood up. "And neither should you."
"Mom?"
"What?"
"Do we know anyone in Boise,
Idaho?"
"What?" Confusion spread
across Lily's face. "No. Why?"
"American Falls doesn't ring a
bell?"
"No." There was a brief
pause. "Why, sweetie?"
"I've been looking through
Anna's credit card records. She went to Idaho last September, but she
told people she was coming home for two weeks. She hasn't been home in
ten months, has she?"
"No, she hasn't." Lily sighed,
her hands clasped in front of her like a disapproving schoolteacher's.
The way she scowled reminded Daisy of all the times her mother had sat in
judgment of her decisions and choices. "Does it matter?" she
asked.
