CHIMERAS (Track Presius) (30 page)

CHAPTER 35

____________

Friday, October 24

“Where did you hide it?”

He frowns, startled by her sudden rage. “Where did I hide what?”

“The gun,” she hisses. She no longer cares to hide her feelings. She feels the danger, like claws drawing near and closing around her throat. She wakes up in the middle of the night unable to breathe. Her medications no longer work to quiet the erratic firing of her neurons. Everything is falling apart. The woman she dreaded, her rival, is still alive. She followed her car the night before.
If the loser won’t do it, I will
, she thought. Headlights off, she pulled behind her parked vehicle and waited. Nothing happened, though. The woman she was after never came out of the house.
The bitch
. She considered snatching the gun and walking in there. Recklessly.
What the hell, everything is going to the dogs, anyways
. At least the satisfaction of seeing her heart ripped open. But the glove compartment was empty. The weapon she’d left inside was gone.

Her husband stands in front of the dresser mirror and completes the half-Windsor knot of his necktie. He thrives on little details like this. She watches the nimble movements of his fingers as if hypnotized. Intimacy no longer means anything to her, and yet this part of his routine—the knotting of his necktie in the morning, as he checks that the dimple sits right at the center of the knot—feels like a private snippet of his life. Something she can still steal away from him. And make it hers.

“Where’s the gun?” she demands.

He turns, his eyes blankly staring past her. Oh, she hates him for belittling her in such subtle ways.
You’re nothing to me
, his eyes say.
Nothing
.

“You’re getting too emotional about this,” he replies coldly. “I don’t think a weapon in your hands would be a good idea right now.” He picks up his briefcase and walks down the stairs.

How can you do this to me? After all these years
. She throws her arms around his back, shrieking. He clutches the banister and jerks backwards, sending her slamming against the wall. She hits her head and wilts on the carpeted stairs. A photo tumbles down from the wall.

“Don’t you ever do that again!”

“Madam?” a voice calls from downstairs.

“Everything is okay, Lucia, go back to work,” he says, adjusting his jacket.

He walks away. She hears the door downstairs close behind him, the garage open, the car pull out and vanish.

Tears run down her cheeks. Not pain. Humiliation.

How can he belittle me like this
?

Cluttered by tears, her eyes rest on the fallen photo frame. Through the jagged line of a wounded glass, a girl beams in her glittery leotard. Azure, her favorite color, although you cannot tell from the black and white picture. Her arms are stretched out, her posture calculated and yet natural, perfectly at ease on the balance beam. She’s just completed her exercise and now she smiles confidently at the camera. Proud of herself.

What happened to you
? she cries staring at the photo.
What happened to your dreams
?

CHAPTER 36

____________

Friday, October 24

Traffic spread apart and then reunited along the intricate three-dimensional network of ramps and junctions of L.A.’s cemented arteries. A uniform, relentless flow. Green signs and overpasses glided above us, while intersecting lives swept by our side: a hand pressing the mobile to the ear; a cigarette clinging to manicured fingers; the bobbing head of a teenager wrapped in his own world of deafening drums and screeching electric guitars.

I stared out the window, the vehicles sailing by a parody of human life. Individuals trapped in their own box, shielded from the outside noise and pollution. They all had their destination, their plans, their solitudes masked by busy schedules and frantic work hours—the few social interactions filtered through small mirrors bearing the warning “Objects may be closer than they appear.”

You better keep your distance if you don’t want your little world to be crushed
.

“It’s almost Halloween.”

“Hm-mmm.”

“I miss patrolling on Halloween night.”

“Hmm.”

“Kinda fun with all the kids running by the cruiser, yelling, ‘Trick-or-treat, smell-my-feet,’ and guffawing at my face as I pretend to be scared.”

Hands on the steering wheel, Satish turned to look at me. My eyes remained glued to the window.

“Did you call her?”

“No.” And I wasn’t going to attach any justification to it. We passed a pick-up truck with a rattling fridge strapped to the deck, the blanket wrapped around it flapping angrily in the wind.

“We should make sure she got it.”

I heaved a sigh of frustration, reached for the phone, and dialed.
She’ll never pick up
. Every unanswered ring hit my eardrums like nails on a blackboard.

Hang up, Ulysses. She’ll never pick up
.

I heard the click followed by silence.
Hurt, voiced by a million unspoken words.

I inhaled. “Hey, listen—Did you get the tank?”

Seconds hammered by. “It’s here.” Glacial.

“Did you take a peek inside?”

“No.”

I turned to Satish, placidly driving along. “We’re under a little pressure,” I said.

“Pressure?” Diane replied, raising her voice.
It’s going to come down now
. “Get yourself here, Track,” she hissed, “and explain yourself to my face. Let’s see if that puts a little pressure on you. And don’t you tell me you got a callout because I already checked.”

The dropped line beeped into my ear. “Okay,” I mumbled for Satish’s sake before closing the phone. I hoped he hadn’t deciphered any of the metallic squeaks coming out of the wireless gadget.

“She’ll look into it,” I added, hoping it would finally close the matter. Satish nodded, drove silently for a few more miles, and then asked, “Still scratching your ass on that rocky bottom and finding it comfortable, Track?”

I forced a laugh out of my mouth, though it sounded more like a squeak. “Actually, I think I took the elevator to paradise but the ride turned out to be too fast.”

Satish smiled. I tapped the cell phone against the window and groaned. “I belong in hell, Sat. Not heaven.”

“Don’t we all, Track?” he replied. “Don’t we all.”

*  *  *

In Greek mythology the power of life and death was in the hands of the three Fates. The existence of every mortal being was a thread: Clotho spun it, Lachesis decided what length it should get to, and Atropos cut it when the time came.

I saw them that day, in Chris Hopf’s hospital room, one of Cox’s leukemia patients. By the windowsill, the three monsters played with the boy’s thread of life, pulling and tugging and teasing it with the blades of their scissors. The strand wasn’t made of fibers. It was composed of two coils held together by four molecules. Some of the molecules were feebly connected, and whenever Atropos’ scissors lingered in their proximity, they trembled as if about to lose their grip. They reminded me of pearls strung on a worn out thread: soon the time comes when they finally break free and spill on the floor, bouncing off in all directions like children at the end of a school day.

Joseph and Melissa Hopf had already lost their first child to leukemia. Two months after burying the nine-year-old girl, six-year-old Christopher, their second child, fell ill with the same disease. Wrapped in white hospital sheets, blue eyes sparkling from underneath hairless brows, Chris stared at the mobile of paper airplanes hanging from the ceiling while his mother read Sendak’s
Where the Wild Things Are
. More books lay on the bed next to him: a children’s space encyclopedia, a book about the planets, another about astronauts. A family of teddy bears sat on the night stand, each one holding a get-well card. All around, flashy wallpaper with red-nosed clowns broke the dullness of the gray linoleum floors. A vain attempt to make the room look child-friendly when in fact it lacked the essence: a child’s smile.

“Hi, Chris,” Satish said, drumming his knuckles against the door. “How are you feeling today?”

The boy stared from above a hospital facemask and squeezed his mother’s hand. I read awareness in his expression, a young man trapped in a child’s body. He knew what lay ahead. He’d seen it in his sister.

I don’t believe in destiny. I believe we have choices in life. And yet, looking into the boy’s eyes, sparkling with youth though sunken into a scrawny little face, no bangs brushing down his forehead, I couldn’t help but feel a profound surge of loathing.
Somebody sealed your fate, Chris, before it had even been written. They yanked your thread off the Fates’ hands and meddled with it, snatching your dreams away
.

Mrs. Hopf closed the book and sent an interrogative glance to her husband, standing by the window. Mr. Hopf had a long face with sharp edges, and flat cheeks studded by old acne scars.

“Is this a bad time?” I asked, showing the LAPD badge.

Chris’s eyes bulged at the sight. “Can I see it?” he asked, stretching out a hand and exposing small flowery bruises on the inside of his arm.  

*  *  *

“I want to be an astronaut when I grow up,” Chris’s voice came from behind his blue mask. His fingers traced the reliefs on Satish’s badge. “Detective would be pretty cool, too.”

Seated at the edge of the bed, Satish smiled. “When I was your age, I dreamt of becoming a plumber.”

The boy’s eyes widened. “A plumber?”

Satish chortled and his voice trailed off in one of his stories.

Outside the door, the usual coming and going of visitors, nurses, and medical staff populated the corridors; trays of IVs and medications traveled from one wing to the other; white coats carelessly discussed dinner plans over histology results and patient charts; an old lady in a fluffy pink robe stared at us for a few minutes before resuming her random cruising of the hallway, faithfully followed by a rattling IV pole.

Across from the nurses’ station, sitting nervously at the edge of a blue chair, Mrs. Hopf whimpered and covered her mouth with one hand. By her side, her husband clasped his head and growled like a wounded animal. He sprang to his feet, paced furiously back and forth for half a minute, and then slammed both fists against one of the windows, resting his forehead on the glass pane.

Hopf held still, hands and forehead glued to the window. “So it’s all my fault,” he muttered. “All my children went through, all my goddamned fault.”

I shifted uncomfortably. “No, sir. But I do need your help to ensure the ones to blame get the punishment they deserve.”

“But you said it’s for a murder investigation. Not for deceiving us.”

“Correct. It’s a caveat—”

Hopf turned away from the window and glared at the ceiling, at the gods dwelling in the skies, cruel fates who gave him the power to know and to choose.

Just one bite from the tree of knowledge and you will die
. 

“I wanted the very best for them. I wanted their life to be a dream. They got a nightmare instead.” He shook his head and looked at his wife. She opened her mouth as if about to say something, but never did, her parted lips hanging in an open question mark. “Do you know what it is like to spend days, weeks, months, by your child’s side in a hospital, Detective? Time no longer exists. The life you used to have, dictated by morning commute, work, meetings, lunch hour—it’s all gone. A deception. A mirage of what it used to be before you realized how futile it all was.” He sighed, his voice cracked with pain.

What he said next came out of his mouth in a low drone, the eulogy of a mourning father. “When an emergency breaks, time spins out of control. You feel the hours irreversibly slipping out of your fingers, like a handful of sand you want to hang onto and yet the more you squeeze, the more it falls through. And when you finally open your fist, there’s only a few grains left on your palm.

“There are moments when time flows as viscous as glass, and even though you know it’s moving, you can’t really see it. Time mocks you, Detective. It makes you simmer in pain, with its stubborn unwillingness to progress forward when you want it to, and its swirling out of control when instead you want to hold it back. The joy you felt at some point has vanished, like a fluttering butterfly setting on your finger. It shows you her beauty, and for a moment you think, it’s here, right here, I have it, it’s mine. And one second later it’s gone and it will never come back. You had it, but the one moment was elusive, so ephemeral you can’t stop but wonder, was it real? Or did I just dream of it?”