Chuck Close was forced to reinvent his approach to painting after an unlucky roll of the genetic dice left him with diminished motor skills. His earlier photorealistic technique was replaced by pixilated portraits he painted with small blocks of color; Close had literally reinvented himself by writing new code.

Jacob Coleridge considered Chuck Close one of the truest American painters in history. And that meant something coming from a man known for hating everything. Even his own family.

Yet he had sliced the eyes out of the painting.

Hardly defending the museum with an axe.

Jake turned off the lights and headed upstairs into the quiet dark.

40

Jake padded softly down the hallway, tiptoeing past his old room—Jeremy’s for now—to the master bedroom. The door was open and Kay was sitting cross-legged on the bed, a massive atlas open on her lap.

“Hey, baby,” she said as she looked up from the tome.

“You’re supposed to be sleeping.” Jake pulled the door half closed.

She snickered. “Yeah. Sure. A cop parked out front and a hurricane coming like some kind of judgment and you expect me to be dead to the world.”

He smiled. “Yeah, I do.”

She closed up the book and eased it over the side of the bed, quietly lowering it to the floor. “If what the radio is saying is true, you wouldn’t believe how big Dylan is.” She pointed at the atlas. “Three whole inches. That’s bigger than most countries, pal.” Kay turned off the light and the room went quickly gray.

The nightlight in the hallway threw a soft glow into the room and his eyes quickly adjusted to the near-dark. He sat down on the mattress to pull off his boots.

It was then that he realized that she had cleared the barricade and made a path to the bed. Even in the gloom he could see that she had cleaned out the old clothes and food wrappers. The sheets were tight over the bed, unwrinkled, and smelled like fabric softener. The room smelled like Pledge. She had done a lot without him and a tinge of guilt made him wish he had never let her come here. “Sorry I’m so late.”

“Did the day end all right?”

What could he say to that? Sure, until I kicked in a wall. At the very least I’ll get billed four grand to repair it, at the worst charged with vandalism and destruction of private property. “No glitches. Not really.” His boot thudded into the carpet. “What did you guys do?”

Kay giggled. “Tonight was a hoot. I had to explain where the bread went when you put it in the toaster and where the toast came from. Jeremy couldn’t figure it out. It was wonderful.”

Jake laughed, and his other boot hit the floor. “Man, I know how he feels.”

“Jake?”

He knew what she wanted to talk to him about. “The man in the floor?”

“I don’t like it.”

Jake wanted to agree with her, to tell her that it made him uneasy, too, like some sort of a bad meal rumbling around in the plumbing. But he didn’t. “He come back?”

“Tonight, when I put him down—”

Jake rolled his eyes. Why did she have to put it like that?

“—he asked if the man in the floor was going to visit him when he was sleeping.”

Jake felt his skin tighten and steadied himself in preparation for a jolt in the engine room. All of the moisture had leeched out of him in one great gust, and his bones were rasping against the suede underbelly of his hide. He turned toward her shadow, now visible in the dark.

“He said that the man in the floor—who he keeps calling Bud—was disappointed in us.” She swallowed. “He swears that the man in the floor is not an imaginary friend. I’m afraid that he’s nuts.”

Jake heard an unvoiced accusation in her tone. After all, the mental illness seemed to be firmly entrenched in his side of the DNA. He stood up and went to the window. The weak glow of the moon was completely gone now and the ocean was putting on its war paint in earnest. The waves were well past small-craft-warning status. “Disappointed? That’s not the word of a three-year-old. He’s trying it out. He’s not nuts. Maybe it’s some kind of coping mechanism.”

“Coping mechanism for what? What’s wrong in Jeremy’s life? You work a lot but so what? So do other fathers. My hours are weird. But he gets time with both of us. Quality time. He’s well behaved and even if the other parents down at the daycare think we’re freaks, we’re loving decent people who do a pretty fucking good job of raising our son.” The accusatory tone was gone, and had been replaced by a defensive one. “We’ve built something great here.”

The windows rattled a little—soft, almost inaudible, squeaks. “I don’t know, baby. Maybe he needs more friends.”

“More friends? I had to cancel three play dates and a birthday party to come out here for two days. He doesn’t need more friends.”

“Maybe he’s tired. I know how I get when I’m tired.” Jake let something that he had never shared with Kay come out. “After my mother was murdered, she used to visit me. You know I don’t believe in ghosts or the afterlife or any of that other religious bullshit. So I know it wasn’t one of those things—I knew it wasn’t really her—but she would come visit me. We would walk on the beach, sometimes sit in my bedroom, and she’d talk to me, listen to what I had to say. She’d answer me, help me with problems. She was there when I went through what I did with my dad. She’s the reason I’m here, pretending to care where he ends up. But it’s not really her. It’s my mind putting her together. Constructing her out of the parts she left behind.” Jake turned back to the bed and he felt his skin shift against his muscles and the frame of bones beneath. “But she seemed so real that it looked like I could reach out and touch her. Her dress rustled, she smelled of cigarettes, I could see eyeliner.”

Kay lifted herself up on her elbows. “You build things with your head. With your memory. That’s why you do what you do.” She paused, weighed her words. “I don’t want you here. You’re going backwards. I can see it in the way you move, the way you talk, the way you are reacting to all of this. It’s like circuits are blowing with all the shit you have to deal with.”

Another point he couldn’t argue with. “You and Jeremy go back to the city and I’ll be back as soon as I can. Maybe I can finish up tomorrow morning, maybe not. But I’m tired. I’m so fucking tired of doing this that I just don’t want to any more. But I have to close this case.”

Kay’s voice came out of the dark. “I don’t want you out here when the hurricane hits, Jake. Your appliance is going apeshit as it is. What happens if you get a bad jolt?”

I die, he wanted to say. “Cockroaches and Keith Richards and Jake Cole.” It was an old joke between them. “Before you can say ‘invisible friend’ we’ll be back in our flat listening to the MC5 and Jeremy will be sleeping in his own bed.”

He could see her clearly now, sitting up in bed, cross-legged in the dim of the half-light, Don’t Hassel The Hoff! riding up her tummy and bunched up under her breasts. Her hair was tied in pigtails and she was grinning.

“What are you grinning about?”

“You always make me feel safe.” She fell back and tugged her little white panties off, rolling them into a knot. She curved her tattooed leg down, yanked the underwear off her pointed toes, and pitched them at Jake. They bounced off as she opened her legs.

A pair of ink pistols crossed over her vagina with the words Tough Love underneath—Jake’s second-favorite tattoo on her body. “Now come here, because you make me horny.”

Jake pulled off his T-shirt, and the ink added to the deep shadow etched into his lean body. As he moved, part of him disappeared, became the background. Kay propped herself up on her elbows, folded herself forward like a cat, and undid the big sterling-and-turquoise buckle on his belt. It snaked through the loops of his Levi’s and he undid his jeans. Then he was naked in front of her and she smiled up at him.