“He loved his dad, too. Tomorrow is the anniversary of Elvis’s own death. I think I’ll try to look him up and tell him how lucky he was from the very day he was born.”
I walked out of the kitchen, out of the house.
He didn’t come after me. I hadn’t expected that he would.
FIFTY-TWO
MY MOTHER LIVES IN A LOVELY VICTORIAN house in the historical district of Pico Mundo. My father had inherited it from his parents.
In the divorce, she received this gracious residence, its contents, and substantial alimony with a cost-of-living adjustment. Because she has never remarried and most likely never will, her alimony will be a lifetime benefit.
Generosity is not my father’s first or second—or last—impulse. He settled a comfortable lifestyle on her solely because he feared her. Although he resented having to share his monthly income from the trust, he didn’t have the courage even to negotiate with her through attorneys. She received pretty much everything that she demanded.
He paid for his safety and for a new chance at happiness (as he defines it). And he left me behind when I was one year old.
Before I rang the doorbell, I brushed my hand across the porch swing to confirm that it was clean. She could sit on the swing, and I would sit on the porch railing while we talked.
We meet always in the open air. I had promised myself that I would never enter that house again, even if I should outlive her.
After I’d rung the bell twice without a response, I went around the house to the backyard.
The property is deep. A pair of immense California live oaks stand immediately behind the house, together casting shade that is all but complete. Farther toward the back of the lot, sun falls unfiltered, allowing a rose garden.
My mother was at work among the roses. Like a lady of another era, she wore a yellow sundress and a matching sunbonnet.
Although the wide brim of the hat shaded her face, I could see that her exceptional beauty had not been tarnished during the four months since I last visited her.
She had married my father when she was nineteen and he was twenty-four. She is forty now, but she might pass for thirty.
Photographs taken on her wedding day reveal a nineteen-year-old who looked sixteen, breathtakingly lovely, shockingly tender to be a bride. None of my father’s subsequent conquests have matched her beauty.
Even now, when she is forty, if she were in a room with Britney, she in her sundress and Britney in that thong bikini, most men would be drawn to her first. And if she were in a mood to rule the moment, she would enchant them such that they would think she was the only woman among them.
I drew near to her before she realized that she was no longer alone. She raised her attention from the flowers, stood taller, and for a moment blinked at me as though I were a heat mirage.
Then: “Odd, you sweet boy, you must have been a cat in another life, to sneak across all that yard.”
I could summon only the ghost of a smile. “Hello, Mom. You look wonderful.”
She requires compliments; but in fact she never looks less than wonderful.
If she had been a stranger, I might have found her to be even lovelier. For me, our shared history diminishes her radiance.
“Come here, sweetie, look at these fabulous blooms.”
I entered the gallery of roses, where a carpet of decomposed granite held down the dust and crunched underfoot.
Some flowers offered sun-pricked petals of blood in bursting sprays. Others were bowls of orange fire, bright cups of yellow onyx brimming with summer sunshine. Pink, purple, peach—the garden was perpetually decorated for a party.
My mother kissed me on the cheek. Her lips were not cold, as I always expect them to be.
Naming the variety, she said, “This is the John F. Kennedy rose. Isn’t it exquisite?”
With one hand, she gently lifted a mature bloom so heavy that its head was bowed on its bent stem.
As Mojave-white as sun-bleached bone, with a faint undertone of green, these large petals weren’t delicate but remarkably thick and smooth.
“They look as if they’re molded from wax,” I said.
“Exactly. They’re perfection, aren’t they, dear? I love all my roses, but these more than any other.”
Not merely because this rose was her favorite, I liked it less than the others. Its perfection struck me as artificial. The sensuous folds of its labial petals promised mystery and satisfaction in its hidden center, but this seemed to be a false promise, for its wintry whiteness and waxy rigidity—and lack of fragrance—suggested neither purity nor passion, but death.
“This one’s for you,” she said, withdrawing a small pair of rose snips from a pocket of her sundress.
“No, don’t cut it. Let it grow. It’ll be wasted on me.”
“Nonsense. You must give it to that girl of yours. If properly presented, a single rose can express a suitor’s feelings more clearly than a bouquet.”
She snipped off eight inches of stem with the bloom.
I held the flower not far below its receptacle, pinching the stem with thumb and forefinger, between the highest pair of thorns.
Glancing at my wristwatch, I saw that the lulling sun and the perfumed flowers only made time seem to pass lazily, when in fact it raced away. Robertson’s kill buddy might even now be driving to his rendezvous with infamy.
Moving along the rosarium with a queenly grace and a smile of royal beneficence, admiring the nodding heads of her colorful subjects, my mother said, “I’m so glad you came to visit, dear. What is the occasion?”
At her side yet half a step behind her, I said, “I don’t know exactly. I’ve got this problem—”
“We allow no problems here,” she said in a tone of gentle remonstration. “From the front walk to the back fence, this house and its grounds are a worry-free zone.”
Aware of the risks, I had nonetheless led us into dangerous territory. The decomposed granite under my feet might as well have been sucking quicksand.
I didn’t know how else to proceed. I didn’t have time to play our game by her rules.
“There’s something I need to remember or something I should do,” I told her, “but I’m blocked on it. Intuition brought me here because…I think somehow you can help me figure out what I’ve overlooked.”
To her, my words could have been barely more comprehensible than gibberish. Like my father, she knows nothing of my supernatural gift.
As a young child, I had realized that if I complicated her life with the truth of my condition, the strain of this knowledge would be the death of her. Or the death of me.
Always, she has sought a life utterly without stress, without contention. She acknowledges no duty to another, no responsibility for anyone but herself.
She would never call this selfishness. To her it’s self-defense, for she finds the world enormously more demanding than she is able to tolerate.
If she fully embraced life with all its conflicts, she would suffer a breakdown. Consequently, she manages the world with all the cold calculation of a ruthless autocrat, and preserves her precarious sanity by spinning around herself a cocoon of indifference.
“Maybe if we could just talk for a while,” I said. “Maybe then I could figure out why I came here, why I thought you could help me.”
Her mood can shift in an instant. The lady of the roses was too frail to handle this challenge, and that sunny persona retreated to make way for an angry goddess.
My mother regarded me with pinched eyes, her lips compressed and bloodless, as if with only a fierce look she could send me away.
In ordinary circumstances, that look alone would indeed have dispatched me.
A sun of nuclear ferocity rose toward its apex, however, rapidly bringing us nearer to the hour of the gun. I dared not return to the hot streets of Pico Mundo without a name or a purpose that would focus my psychic magnetism.
When she realized that I would not immediately leave her to the comfort of her
roses, she spoke in a voice as cold and brittle as ice: “He was shot in the head, you know.”
This statement mystified me, yet it seemed to have an uncanny connection to the approaching atrocity that I hoped to prevent.
“Who?” I asked.
“John F. Kennedy.” She indicated the namesake rose. “They shot him in the head and blew his brains out.”
“Mother,” I said, though I seldom use that word in conversation with her, “this is different. You’ve got to help me this time. People will die if you don’t.”