It occurred to me I should take a picture with Mimi’s phone, too. So I fished it out of my pocket and snapped the photo, and then I did something unfathomable. I scrolled through her list of contacts. It was the same kind of awful impulse that makes people inventory bathroom medicine cabinets when they’re using the facilities at someone else’s house. Until that moment I’d always considered myself above that kind of thing. But there I was, my eyes flicking down the list, past several Drs. This and That; Emergency Room, two listings; Home; and Hospital, a few selections there, too.
Had she handed me her own personal cell phone or one she’d gotten as a free bonus gift with a year’s subscription to Accidents Waiting to Happen Weekly? Where were her people, the Ellens and Eds, Dianes, Dicks and Sheilas most of us carry around in our pockets in case we really, really need to tell someone we’re in line at the grocery, waiting to pay for cat food? Or had she deleted the names of anyone who mattered to her, anticipating my snoop through her connections when I never would have suspected something like that of myself?
I spun through the entire list. I told myself I’d come across Mr. Vargas’s name at the end of it, and that finding his name would validate me, the only person in the world Mr. V. trusted enough to send to M. M. Banning’s aid.
There it was. Isaac Vargas. And after that, one more name. A name I’d heard before. Xander.
“What are you doing?” Frank asked. He’d materialized at my elbow. I was so startled I dropped the phone.
“Nothing,” I said. “I was just taking a picture of you with your mother’s cell phone. Look.” In one movement I picked the phone up and exited Mimi’s address book, feeling hugely relieved to have something as innocent as Frank’s photograph to show him.
Frank studied the picture. “I look like the Little Prince,” he said. “My mother and I used to look at that book together when I was a kid.”
“Of course you look like the Little Prince,” I said. It was something I’d noticed when I’d worked in the kindergarten. On the day kids brought their favorite books to class, you could see the Pippi Longstockings and Cats in the Hat and Corduroy Bears coming from a mile away. Bedtime Story as Destiny, I used to call it. And here we had another case in point: Frank, a snappy little dresser given to mood swings, scarves, and non sequiturs, just visiting our world from a small, eccentric planet of his own.
Me? Harriet the Spy. Of course.
( 6 )
BACK IN THE car we decided to try the freeway for the full-on traffic experience, driving toward the jagged cluster of downtown Los Angeles with the mountains propped up behind it like cardboard scenery. Though the “driving” I was doing felt more like being parked in Omaha at the Seventy-Second Street Wal-Mart, waiting for the store to open for its post-Thanksgiving Day sale. The freeway was so packed it was hard to believe there could be anyone left driving cars anywhere else in the world.
“In the winter it doesn’t get very cold down here in the Los Angeles Basin but that far mountain is covered in snow,” Frank said, leaning forward between the seats to point it out to me.
“Fascinating. But listen, Frank, gentlemen don’t point. Although I guess it’s all right to point at mountains. Mountains don’t have feelings like people do.”
“You aren’t supposed to point at people? How else are your eyes supposed to find them?”
“Not that way. Nobody likes to look up and see people pointing and staring.”
“Yes. That I know from firsthand experience.”
“Have you ever been up there to play in the snow?” I asked.
“Up there? No. I can see it from my school. Just before winter break they truck snow in from there and spread it on the playground for our Winter Festival. It’s more convenient that way.”
And to think I’d been surprised people had their drinking water delivered. “That sounds like fun,” I said. “Back in Omaha, we have to get our snow the old-fashioned way. Falls on us out of the sky.”
“Here, when the hills are on fire the ash falls like that, like snow. Or the mashed-potato flakes they use in movies as a stand-in for falling snow. Last summer there was a huge brushfire and no wind so this giant mushroom cloud of smoke hung in one place on the horizon for a week.”
“Like an atom bomb mushroom cloud? That sounds scary.”
“Exactly like that. Except it wasn’t scary. It was in the Valley.” Frank said “the Valley” as if it were a world away instead of a few freeway exits. “Did you know that Einstein’s one regret—you know Albert Einstein, don’t you?”
“Mr. E equals mc squared? Everybody knows him.”
“They do?”
“Not personally. Since, you know, he’s dead.”
“Yes, as of April eighteenth, 1955. Einstein’s regret was that he signed the letter a scientist named Leo Szilard wrote to Franklin Roosevelt in 1939 warning of the danger of the Nazis inventing a nuclear fission bomb many linked to the secrets unlocked by Einstein’s famous equation. That bomb would be capable of unimaginable carnage. Einstein, who was a pacifist, felt the letter Szilard wrote also linked him to the creation of the fabled Manhattan Project—”
“That’s the one where the scientists tried to invent more affordable apartments in New York City, right?”