“Then what, how?”
She flashed that irresistible dimpled smile, patted my shoulder, and said, “You know what happened back there, sweetie.”
“But I don’t. I’m mystified. Who were those nine children and then those five older people?”
“Sleep on it, Oddie. Then you’ll wake up knowing.”
“What if I don’t wake up knowing?”
“Then ask your Mr. Hitchcock if he knows them.”
I brooded on that awhile. Then I said, “With all your resources, why didn’t you put together a rescue for those children?”
“For heaven’s sake, sweetie, you are part of my resources.”
“Oh.”
As she took the westbound entrance ramp to the I-15, I said, “Where are we going now, ma’am?”
“I’m taking you home.”
“That’s a long drive, ma’am. We’re both too tired for it.”
“Oh, I never sleep anymore. I don’t have time for sleeping, too much to do.”
“Well, I’m wiped out.”
“You sleep, my dear chauffeur. I’ll wake you when we get there.”
I closed my eyes, almost drifted off, then opened them and said, “Problem, ma’am. You picked me up along the highway. You don’t know where I live.”
“I’ll figure it out, child. Don’t you worry yourself.”
Vegas rapidly fell away behind us, and the Mojave night lay vast and starry.
“The people who owned the house where we took the kids,” I said.
“I thought you were asleep.”
“Did they just happen to be near enough that you drove there? Or if this had happened in Oklahoma or New Hampshire, or Georgia, would there be other people like them, in other houses that feel so … good as that one felt?”
“Some places I might have had to drive farther, but people like them are out there, sweetie. They’re out there everywhere.”
Later, driving with one hand, Mrs. Fischer shook me half awake, worried because I had been crying in my sleep.
“It’s all right, ma’am,” I assured her. “I was crying because it was so wonderful.”
And because it was so wonderful, I slipped back down into that dream of dogs and children and beautiful people who met my eyes and knew me in full, knew me and did not reject me.
Thirty-nine
HALF AN HOUR AFTER DAWN, I WOKE AND FOUND THAT we were cruising the street on which I lived, for the time being, with Annamaria and Tim, the boy we had rescued from the creepy estate named Roseland, in Montecito. Mrs. Fischer parked at the curb in front of the picturesque cottage with the roof draped in yellow bougainvillea.
I sat up straighter in my seat, stretched and yawned.
As she switched off the engine, Mrs. Fischer said, “How do you feel, Oddie?”
“Starved. I need a big pile of breakfast.”
“First you need a shower, dear, so the rest of us will have the stomach to take breakfast at the same table with you.”
“Sorry, ma’am. Excess sweating is one of the negatives about being a man of action.”
We got out of the Mercedes, and looked up at the power lines from which the fitful wind raised an eerie but not unpleasant sound.
I escorted Mrs. Fischer away from the front door and along the brick walkway at the side of the cottage. I wanted to see the ocean and then enter the house by way of the back porch.
As we stood on the beach, the sky far to the east might have been by Tiffany, lemon light as clear as colored lamp glass, but most of the heavens were lost to an overcast. Steel-wool clouds scoured northward. With no western sky to lend it color, the sea churned deep gray. Wind swept the whitecaps off the waves and, by contrast with that sparkling foam, gray water became black.
“ ‘When the wind blows the water white and black,’ ” I quoted.
As Mrs. Fischer surveyed the vast Pacific, the singing of the power lines sounded like the serenade of mermaids, not the sirens whose songs lured sailors to their death on rocks, but the voices of mermaids who loved the sea and loved the land and yearned for one when they had only the other.
Under my sweater, the tiny silver bell that I wore around my neck rang softly, though I stood quite still.
Annamaria must have seen us arrive. She appeared beside Mrs. Fischer, and each of them at once put an arm around the other’s waist. The three of us enjoyed the wind for a while, the sound and motion of the water, the timeless face of the enduring sea.
Then Annamaria said, “Thanks for bringing him home, Edie.”
“For a little while,” Mrs. Fischer said.
I wondered if I would ever fully understand the true and hidden nature of the world. Perhaps it didn’t matter. I had learned enough about it that, for this sweet moment at least, I knew true joy for the first time in more than nineteen months.