The Big Kahuna (Fox and O'Hare #6)(47)

Afterward, she lay in my arms, the heft of her body against mine a comfort I hadn’t known I needed. Immediately I felt myself drifting to sleep, but was brought back from the edge of slumber when she went into the bathroom. Minutes passed. From outside came the call of an animal in pain, perhaps a rabbit caught in the wire fence that bordered the backyard. But when I heard the sound again, I realized it was coming from the bathroom. I knocked on the door, but she wouldn’t answer. I called her name. Still she wouldn’t answer.





Nora




What was it about him that had tempted me? A friend from years ago, barely distinguishable in my memory from others in the high school band, yet so different now that he almost seemed like a new person. But he was a good listener, had sought me out, tried to console me, and perhaps that was all it took. Was this, too, a part of grief? Just as the question formed in my mind, something loosened in my heart, and the tears came. They flowed so fast it was as if a dam had been broken inside me. I muffled the sobs with my hand, but he must have heard me, because there was a knock on the door and a moment later the knob turned and he was inside the bathroom. I bit my lip, though it only made the tears come faster. “It’s okay,” I managed to say after a minute. “You can go now.”

“I’m not going to leave you like this.”

For a long while, he stood in the bathroom, holding me. When the tears finally stopped, he got a glass of water from the kitchen and waited for me to drink it. I felt relieved by my outburst, it had been a long time coming, yet embarrassed that it had happened in front of Jeremy. I looked around the bathroom for a shirt or a robe, but there was only a hand towel hanging from the bar on the wall. As if sensing this, he put his arms around me again.

“Why him?” I whispered. “Why?”

“There is no why,” he said softly. Then he took my hand and led me back through the mess of discarded clothes and rumpled sheets on the floor. “Come back to bed.”

My eyes were swollen, my nose was stuffy, my face flushed. How sexy, I thought. What am I doing here? What is he doing here? He should have left by now. But he lay beside me, his fingers tracing circles on my back. There is no why, he’d said. There was no reason, no explanation, no deeper meaning. Just bad luck. I listened to the beating of his heart in his chest. What a fragile thing a heart was. So easy to fool. To break. To stop on impact in a darkened intersection. “There has to be a why,” I said.

“Not necessarily.” He’d been raised Catholic, he said, and was taught that sin was punished and virtue rewarded. Good things happened to good people, bad things to bad people. Even when his mother died, he’d continued to believe this because another thing he’d been taught was that adversity was a test. But then he went to war, and lost all belief. One minute this guy Sanger was telling him about the kind of roof shingles he wanted for his house back in Jackson Hole and the next he had no hands to wave in the air anymore. “I couldn’t understand it. I couldn’t figure out why he’d been maimed and I still had my hands, even though I was standing right next to him. That’s when I started to realize that some things couldn’t be explained. It was just chance. It couldn’t be argued with. There’s no reason or order to it.”

This wasn’t enough for me. To believe that my father’s death was just an unfortunate accident meant that I would have to forget everything else I knew about my hometown. Discount the arson, erase the small insults, untether the hit-and-run from the time and place in which it happened. I couldn’t.

Outside, a mockingbird trilled. “It’s getting late,” he said. “Try to get some sleep.”

But I couldn’t sleep, and he held me until the curtain grayed with dawn and the roosters in the neighbor’s yard began calling to one another. Then he got up and got dressed and came to say goodbye to me, kneeling by the side of the bed like a man at prayer.





Efraín




I was leaving Kasa Market the following week, my arms weighed down by groceries and my thoughts on the game I wanted to watch once I got home, when Guerrero stuck his foot out and made me trip. I landed in front of the notice board, limes and lemons rolling all around me, chips crumbling to pieces in their bag. I pushed myself up, and there was his picture, on a poster. We stood together, he and I, staring at his likeness and at the number beneath it, so big I didn’t need my glasses to read it. Twenty-five thousand dollars. Imagine what you could do with that much money. All you have to do is call. “I’m not going to call,” I said, bending down to pick up two limes from beneath the candy rack. By some miracle, the carton of eggs looked undisturbed, but when I opened it to check, I found that one was broken. “See what you made me do?” I asked.

This is nothing, he said with a laugh.

I didn’t know if he meant that an egg was nothing or that he could do a lot more to me than make me trip and fall at the grocery store. I thought of asking him bluntly whether he was threatening me, but I was afraid of what he might say in return. I wasn’t prepared for a fight. In the end, I ignored him, and continued picking up my groceries from the floor. I had to pull myself together. This was all in my head anyway. I needed to get home to my wife and children, try to go to bed early, get some rest for a change.

Look. This is the detective’s name. Write it down.