Part 25 (1/2)

Sirens and running feet and the endless yap of Cesar are breaking the air. Neighbors are appearing in their bathrobes, coming to stand in shocked cl.u.s.ters in the street.

I hear running feet behind me, and a man and then a woman come to the gate and yell words. The man says, ”Put it down.” And the woman says, to me, I think, ”Ma'am?... Ma'am? Are you shot?”

My mother has Pawpy's old gun pointed down between her feet, threatening only the flower bed I've ruined. I see one of Thom's big boot prints in the center of the churned earth.

”It's fine,” my mother says to the police behind me. ”I'm finished.”

She sets Pawpy's gun down carefully on the porch edge, and the man cop comes running through the gate to grab her and turn her and chain her bad hands.

The woman kneels beside me. ”Is any of this your blood?” she asks. She is searching my body.

”I need to go to the hospital,” I say.

She says, more frantically, ”Is this your blood?”

”I think my mother roofied me,” I say.

The woman cop grabs my shoulders, says insistently, ”Is any of this blood yours?”

I lift my hand to touch my face in wonder, and it comes away smeared in red.

”No,” I tell her. ”I think I lived.”

n.o.body is more surprised than me.

EPILOGUE.

I STEP OFF THE BART train and hear the doors swish shut behind me. I've come to understand the train system here, very quickly. It's easier to take them than to risk losing the parking place I finally scored for the Bug on Belgria Street. I walk back toward my mother's house in the fading Cali suns.h.i.+ne. The salt air is getting chilly on my bare arms and my toes. Ivy's boots have been taken away. They are in separate plastic bags in an evidence locker somewhere downtown. I've bought myself a pair of walking sandals. STEP OFF THE BART train and hear the doors swish shut behind me. I've come to understand the train system here, very quickly. It's easier to take them than to risk losing the parking place I finally scored for the Bug on Belgria Street. I walk back toward my mother's house in the fading Cali suns.h.i.+ne. The salt air is getting chilly on my bare arms and my toes. Ivy's boots have been taken away. They are in separate plastic bags in an evidence locker somewhere downtown. I've bought myself a pair of walking sandals.

I see the ”bull daggahhh!” shouter coming down the road toward me, his wild braids sticking up in a haggle from his head wrap. He is a local fixture, and I have come to feel a strange affection for him.

”Hey, Walter,” I call to him. He grunts, but he has no message for me today. As I pa.s.s, he stops and unzips, turning to pee in Mrs. Delgado's rosebushes. I don't so much as blink. The Berkeley att.i.tude seems to be that everyone has to pee somewhere, and I am going native.

Perhaps he is leaving a message for Gretel in the only language she can read. Later I'll come out walking with her, and I'll pack a soft lunch-peanut-b.u.t.ter sandwich, some fudge, a ripe banana-in case he is still around.

I reach the fence around my mother's house. All along the outside edge of it there are bunches of flowers, six or seven of them, in various states of decay. It's like a shrine where someone died, but I don't think they are for Thom. I find them there a couple of mornings a week. I leave them be until they are unquestionably dead, then clear them to make room for the new ones.

Parker is sitting on the porch steps, swamped in dogs. He waves as I come in the gate, and all four come galloping to greet me, my own Gret leading the charge. I wade through them, patting heads and scratching ears. Even Cesar has decided to be glad to see me. I ease myself down and sit on the other side of the stairs. The dogs station themselves between us, like a herd of furry chaperones.

When I was in the hospital, Parker was my first and only visitor. I fell asleep in the ambulance, my mother's potent antianxiety and sleeping meds still in my system, but he was by my bed with field daisies and a worried face when I woke up.

”So it's Rose,” he said. ”Not Ivy, huh?”

”They're both plants,” I told him, yawning. ”But I'm a flower, as it turns out. Next time, you should bring me candy.”

He grinned at me, an easy upturn of his lips, and I smiled back at him and thought, Not now. Not even soon. But there is going to be a next time. Not now. Not even soon. But there is going to be a next time. I was glad to learn he'd missed seeing the carnage in his yard. By the time he got home from his job, it was down to yellow tape, some stains, and a tech in a jumpsuit who told him what had happened and where to find me. I was glad to learn he'd missed seeing the carnage in his yard. By the time he got home from his job, it was down to yellow tape, some stains, and a tech in a jumpsuit who told him what had happened and where to find me.

”How is she?” he asks me now.

”Good,” I say. ”Jail is not a bad place for an agoraphobic. Where's she gonna go, right?”

It took a long time, almost a week, before they'd let me come sit in a plastic chair and see my mother through a wall of gla.s.s. She told her lawyer not to bother asking for bail.

”Did you tell her I'm going to come see her on Wednesday?”

I nod. ”We met with her lawyer. He's still hammering out details with the DA, but he told us where he thinks they'll end up. She'll take the deal.”

”Second degree,” he says, and whistles out between his teeth. ”That's a lot of years.”

I shrug. My mother has left me again, but we are both fine with it. She seems to think that we are even. Me, I have a different take.

I tell Parker, ”She doesn't care about the time, if the DA will agree to send her to a jail that's close enough for her friends and me to visit. Neither side wants to go to trial. A case like this, when the deceased is... not the world's best citizen, the jury could spook and let her go. On our side, we don't want them to put first degree on the menu. Juries are crazy.”

”I don't think they could get first,” Parker says.

I shake my head, less certain. They found me on the lawn, after all, newly baptized in my husband's blood. Three neighbors saw my mother gun him down execution style, putting one through the back of the head. More came running when they heard the shot. Only Lilah, that loyal little liar-pants, was close enough to see he was an imminent threat, and she oversold it. The Thom she invented was screaming that he'd come to kill me, slas.h.i.+ng at the air with a mysterious vanis.h.i.+ng knife.

My medical records have helped, my mother's lawyer told me. My old nemesis, that yogurt-breathed nurse from the Amarillo ER, was beyond delighted to give a statement. But Thom was unarmed and only walking slowly toward me, according to the neighbors. My mother did not call a warning or ask him to stop. Not even Lilah thought to invent that.

Most d.a.m.ning of all, some vigorous cop or another checked phone records. He found the late-night call to Thom's home made from the West Branch Berkeley library's outside pay phone. There was a quarter in the change case with my mother's perfect thumbprint on it. The DA seems to think that proves premeditation, and a jury might believe it. It's not a risk her lawyer cares to take. Not in a death penalty state.

The DA does not know that it was never my mother's plan to kill Thom Grandee. Her own lawyer doesn't know it. Her silence on the subject tells me she believes that I don't know it, either.

But I've seen through her. If my mother planned to kill him, Thom Grandee would have died before I ever heard them fighting. My mother called 911 with the cordless phone. She had the connection open, the phone hidden on the chair seat under the reading table, before he even walked into her house.

My mother planned a murder all right, but not my husband's. Killing Thom was useless to her. If he was dead, there was still no guarantee that I would stay. The only murder my mother ever planned was her own.

Her lawyer played the 911 tape for me. It's pretty clear to me that she is goading him. She's telling him I'm being hidden by the Saint Cecilias, saying in loud, smug tones that they took me away on a private boat and he'll never find me. She is careful to clearly state his whole name for the 911 operator several times, even once calling him ”Thom Grandee of Amarillo, Texas.” She's identifying her killer, right before the fact, in case he leaves before the police arrive to catch him with her body. The 911 tape ends as I come down the stairs. She landed on the phone and accidentally broke the connection when Thom shoved her over the table.

Her plan is clear to me, though: Thom goes to jail forever. I am free to walk. She is free to never see me leaving.

Her only mistake was in underestimating his travel time. She should have given me more Ativan. I woke up and interrupted before he had time to kill her.

Parker waves his hand in front of my face, saying, ”Where'd you go?”

I blink and shake my head. ”I was just thinking,” I say. ”I want to put a lemon tree in the backyard.”

He laughs. ”You can try. But I doubt it will survive the amount of dog pee it is sure to be subjected to.”

My mother's lawyer finds it strange that I am still living here in this apartment, after what I witnessed. He doesn't understand that I've shared s.p.a.ce with living violence for most of my years on this earth. I sleep just fine with the ghost of it in the yard. Besides, this is the least I can give her, a mental picture of me living in her house, filling up that empty hole of a room.