Moments after they took their seats again, the first boom exploded. On the sound Sam leaped out of Ford’s lap and into his father’s. And Spock leaped off the ground and into Ford’s.
Safe, Cilla thought, while lights shattered indigo. Where they knew they’d always be safe.
“GOOD?” Ford asked as they drove down the quiet roads toward home.
“Very good.” Amazingly good, she realized. “Beginning, middle and end.”
“What are you going to do with that thing?” He glanced down at the clock.
“Thing?” Cilla cradled the rooster in her arms. “Is that any way to speak about our child?” She patted it gently. “I’m thinking the barn. I could use a clock out there, and this is pretty appropriate. And I like having a memento from my first annual Fourth. It’ll be way too late in the year for a cookout when my place is done. But after today, I think I’m going to plan a party. A big, sprawling, open-house-type thing. Fire in the hearth, platters of food, flowers and candles. I’d like to see what it’s like to have the house filled with people who aren’t working on it.”
She stretched out her legs. “But tonight, I’m partied and festived out. It’ll be nice to get home to the quiet.”
“Almost there.”
“Want to share the quiet with me?”
“I had that in mind.”
They glanced at each other as he turned into her drive. When he looked back, the headlights flashed over the red maple. “What’s that hanging-”
“My truck!” She reared forward, gripping the dash. “Oh, goddamn it, son of a bitch. Stop! Stop!”
She was already yanking off her seat belt, shoving at the door before he’d come to a complete stop behind her truck.
Loose clumps of broken safety glass hung in the back window. More sparkled in the gravel, crunching under her feet as she ran.
Ford had his phone out, punching in nine-one-one. “Wait. Cilla, just wait.”
“Every window. He smashed every window.”
Cannonball holes gaped in the windshield, erupted into mad spiderwebs of shattered glass. As the cold rage choked her, she saw her headlights had been smashed, her grille battered.
“A lot of good the alarm did me.” She could have wept. She could have screamed. “A lot of damn good.”
“We’re going to go in, check the alarm. I’m going to check the house, then you’re going to stay inside.”
“It’s too much, Ford. It’s just too damn much. Vicious, vindictive, insane. The crazy old bastard needs to be locked up.”
“Hennessy? He’s out of town.”
“He’s not. I saw him tonight, at the park. He’s back. And I swear to God if he could’ve used the bat or pipe or whatever he used here on me then and there, he would have.”
She whirled around, riding on the fury. And saw in the car’s headlights what Ford had seen hanging from a branch of her pretty red maple.
Ford grabbed her arm when she started forward. “Let’s go in. We’ll wait for the cops.”
“No.” She shook off his hand, crossed from gravel to grass.
She’d been six, Cilla recalled, when they marketed that particular doll. She wore her hair-a sunny blond that hadn’t yet darkened-in a pair of ponytails tied with pink ribbons above her ears. The ribbon sashing the pink-and-white gingham dress matched. Lace frothed at the white anklets above the glossy patent leather of her Mary Janes.
Her smile was as sunny as her hair, as sweet as the pink ribbons.
He’d fashioned the noose out of clothesline, she noted. A careful and precise job, so that the doll hung in horrible effigy. Just above the ribbon sash, the cardboard placard read: WHORE.
“Optional accessories-sold separately-for this one included a scale model tea set. It was one of my favorites.” She turned away, picked up a whining, quivering Spock to hug. “You’re right. We should go inside, check the house just in case.”
“Give me the keys. I want you to wait on the veranda. Please.”
A polite word, Cilla thought. How odd to hear the absolute authority under the courtesy. “We know he’s not in there.”
“Then it’s no problem for you to wait out on the veranda.” To close the issue, he simply opened her purse, pulled out the keys.
“Ford-”
“Wait out here.”
The fact that he left the door open told Cilla he had no doubt she’d do what he ordered. With a shrug, she stepped over to the rail, nuzzling Spock before she set him down. No one had been in the house, so there was no harm in waiting. And no point in arguing about it.
Besides, from here she could stare at her truck, brood over the state of it. Wallow in the brooding. She’d felt so damn good the day she bought that truck, so full of anticipation when she loaded it up for her trip east.
The first steps toward her dream.
“Everything’s okay,” Ford said from behind her.
“It’s really not, is it?” Some part of her, some bitchy, miserable part of her, wanted to shrug off the comforting hands he laid on her shoulders. But she stopped herself.
“Do you know how it felt to me today? Like I was in a movie. I don’t mean that in a bad way, just the opposite. Little slices and scenes of a movie I actually wanted to be part of. Not quite there yet, still pretty new on the set. But starting to feel… really feel comfortable in my skin.”
She drew in a long breath, let it out slowly. “And now, this is reality. Broken glass. But the odd thing, the really odd thing. That was me today. It was me. And this? Whatever this is directed at? That’s the image, that’s the mirage. The smoke and mirrors.”
FOREST LAWN CEMETERY
1972
The air sat hot and still while the smog lay over it like a smudge from a sweaty finger. Graves, housing stars and mortals alike, spread, cold slices in the green. And all the flowers, blooming tears shed by the living for the dead.
Janet wore black, the frame within the dress shrunk from grief. A willow stem gone brittle. A wide black hat and dark glasses shaded her face, but that grief poured through the shields.
“They can’t put the stone up yet. The ground settles first. But you can see it, can’t you? His name carved into white marble, the short years I had him. I tried to think of a poem, a few lines to have carved, but how could I think? How could I? So I had them carve ‘Angels Wept.’ Just that. They must have, I think. They must have wept for my Johnnie. Do you see the angels that look down on him, weeping?”
“Yes. I’ve come here before.”
“So you know how it will look. How it will always look. He was the love of my life. All the men, husbands, lovers, they came and went. But he? Johnnie. He came from me.” Every word she spoke was saturated with grief. “I should have… so many things. Can you imagine what it is for a mother to stand over the grave of her child and think, ‘I should have’?”
“No. I’m sorry.”
“So many are. They pour out their sorry to me, and it touches nothing. Later, it helps a little. But these first days, first weeks, nothing touches it. I’ll be there.” She gestured to the ground beside the grave. “I know that even now because I’ve arranged it. Me and Johnnie.”
“And your daughter. My mother.”
“On the other side of me, if she wants it. But she’s young, and she’ll go her own way. She wants… everything. You know that, and I have nothing for her now, not in these first days, first weeks. Nothing to give. But I’ll be there soon enough, in the ground with Johnnie. I don’t know when yet, I don’t know how soon it comes. But I think of making it now. I think of it every day. How can I live when my baby can’t? I think about how. Pills? A razor? Walking into the sea? I can never decide. Grief blurs the mind.”
“What about love?”
“It opens, when it’s real. That’s why it can hurt so much. You wonder if I could have stopped this. If I hadn’t let him run wild. People said I did.”
“I don’t know. Another boy died that night, and the third was paralyzed.”