“Except me. I always tell you what I think.” Duncan set the bottle into the ice bucket, placing the towel next to it.

“And what are you thinking now?”

“That I’ll prepare lunch.” His lips barely revealing a smile, Duncan left.

Coltrane felt the champagne bubbles touch the tip of his nose when he sipped.

“I see you also brought…” Packard gestured toward the Nikon that hung from a strap on Coltrane’s shoulder. “‘To stop time,’ you said.”

The change of subject threw Coltrane off.

“I asked you why you became a photographer. That was your answer. Then you added, ‘Things fall apart… And people die.’”

“Yes.”

“Who?”

“Excuse me?”

“Who died?”

12

COLTRANE LOOKED AT THE FLOOR.

“My question makes you uncomfortable?”

“… Yes.”

“At my age, I find that it saves time” – Packard paused to catch his breath – “if I ask new acquaintances to tell me the most important thing I need to know about them.”

“A lot of people don’t like to be reminded of the most important thing about them,” Coltrane said.

The oxygen hissed.

“Was it a sister?”

The champagne suddenly had an acidic edge.

“A brother?”

Coltrane set down the glass. “My mother.”

“I see.”

“And my father.”

“When you were young? My own parents died when I was young. Not far from here. In a boating accident off Santa Catalina.”

“Yes, when you were sixteen.”

Packard didn’t seem surprised that Coltrane knew any detail of his life.

“My parents died when I was eleven,” Coltrane said, “although really both of them were dead a long time before – it just took several years to work it all out.”

Packard frowned.

“My father beat my mother.”

Packard didn’t move, didn’t speak. If he had reacted in any way, Coltrane would have ended the subject right there. But Packard seemed to sense Coltrane’s ambivalence. The old man’s presence was hypnotic. As the silence lengthened, except for the hiss of the oxygen, Coltrane found himself wanting to continue.

“My father didn’t beat my mother because he was a drunkard or because he was worried about his job or any of the other excuses you sometimes hear. I never saw him take a drink. He had his own successful business, a chain of dry-cleaning shops that kept expanding every year. Maybe it was work pressures I didn’t know anything about. Or maybe his father liked to beat his mother. Maybe that’s why he did it. Maybe he thought it was normal. For a while, I thought it was normal. I thought every kid’s father beat up…”

Coltrane felt taken back in time. He blinked, coming out of a trance, and picked up the champagne. Regardless of how much the acid of his memories tainted it, he took a long swallow. He felt an odd need to keep explaining, as if Packard, more than anyone else in the world, would understand.

“One night, after my father had given my mother an especially thorough work-over, he did something he’d never done before – he started on me. He knocked out one of my teeth. The next morning, he said he was really sorry and it wouldn’t happen again and I should tell my teacher I’d fallen off my bike and that was how my face got messed up and honest to God he would make it up to me for hurting me. Then he drove off to work. The minute his car disappeared around a corner, my mother rushed me upstairs and helped me throw clothes into two suitcases. Then she filled two suitcases of her own, and I remember all the while she was glancing frantically out the bedroom window, afraid that my father might drive back.”

Coltrane studied the bubbles in his champagne glass. They seemed to get larger. Again he was tugged back into the past. “She must have been planning it for a long time. She kept the garage door closed while she put the suitcases in her car – so the neighbors wouldn’t see. Then she and I drove to the bank. After that, she drove to a bus station and made me wait there with the bags while she left the car somewhere else – at a train station, she later told me, so my father would think that was how we’d gotten out of town. An hour later, she came back to the bus station, and for the next three years we were on the run, stopping in towns across the country, where my mother worked at any job she could find until she had enough money saved to keep running. I later reconstructed the route. From New Haven, Connecticut, to Trenton, New Jersey, to Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, to Youngstown, Ohio, to Sedalia, Missouri, to Boulder, Colorado, to Flagstaff, Arizona, and finally to Los Angeles.”

Very thirsty, he finished the glass of champagne and poured another. He might as well have been drinking water. “We kept changing our names. My mother told me she looked for cash-only jobs, like housekeeping, that didn’t force her to pay taxes and get her Social Security number recorded in a government computer. She told me if we didn’t leave a paper trail, if we didn’t try to get in touch with friends and relatives back home, my father wouldn’t be able to find us. I still don’t know how…” Emotion tightened Coltrane’s throat. “One afternoon after my mother picked me up from a library where she always told me to wait after school till she was done with work, we went to get an ice cream cone, just one – we couldn’t afford two. Then we took a bus to the trailer where we were living, and when we went in, we found my father sitting on a stool at the kitchen counter, playing solitaire.

“As calm as I’d ever seen him, he got up, sighed, pulled out a gun, said, ‘Togetherness is next to godliness,’ and shot my mother in the face. Just like that. When my father made up his mind to do something, he was unstoppable. I felt as if somebody had slammed hands against my ears. The inside of my head was ringing, but somehow, I thought I heard my mother moan as she fell. Maybe I was the one moaning. I felt wet, sticky stuff all over my face. The next thing, my father pointed the gun at me. He gave me a funny little frown, looked at my mother’s body, looked at me again, shook his head, and blew his brains out.”

When Coltrane lifted his glass to his lips, he realized that it was empty once more. “They told me I didn’t speak for a year.”

13

COLTRANE BRACED HIMSELF TO CONTINUE. Packard’s intensely sympathetic gaze was eerily compelling, urging him on.

“After my grandparents flew to Los Angeles to get me, after they packed up the clothes and things that my mother and I had in the trailer, after they took care of the bills and arranged for the bodies to be transported back to Connecticut, after all the legal technicalities were out of the way and I went to live with them in New Haven, I couldn’t remember what my mother looked like. I used to spend hours at a stretch, hiding in the basement, trying to remember her face, but all that came to me was the image of her blood splattering when my father’s bullet hit her. I desperately wanted to remember her voice, but all I heard in my mind was the sound of the shot. That was my reality, not what was going on around me in my grandparents’ house. I must have eaten and slept, bathed and dressed and watched television and gone to school, but the images and sounds I actually experienced were in my memory.

“I had no idea of time passing. Eventually I found out it was a year later when I heard someone crying in a room above me while I hid in the cellar. A fog seemed to clear as I crawled from behind the furnace and made my way upstairs, following the sobs through the kitchen to the living room, discovering that they belonged to my grandmother. She was hunched forward on a chair, her face in her hands, sobbing so hard that tears dripped through her fingers and landed on the clear plastic sheets that protected photographs in an album lying open on the coffee table.