Why, why, why hadn’t I thought of a name?
I’m staring straight out at the Jiffy Taco three-course Mex-Italian dinner advertised on an easel outside their front door. It’s a pizza pie made out of cheese and tortilla chips, with rice and beans.
I say, “Bean.” Bean? “Uh, it’s my nickname.” Bean???
For the rest of the day, Bean sits on the bed in the maid’s room at the Bluebonnet. Listening to the decrepit ice machine building up power to drop its jagged cubes into the metal tray, wheezing and rumbling until the ice clatters to rest.
Every time the ice drops, her heart stops.
10
Jack
When I pull into the cul-de-sac, the sun is setting purple, and the flames are out. The air is tinged with smoke, and there’s a light rain of ashes. Two fire trucks are blocking the driveway, an ambulance at the ready, lights flashing, in front of the house.
I leave the car in the middle of the street and sprint between the trucks.
My mother is standing in the front yard smiling, ridiculously calm. Her two settings are overly parental and ridiculously calm. Around my dad, the given was that he controlled everything. Once she got out from under his thumb and into the dullness of desert suburbia, her inner control freak was unleashed—largely on me.
She sees me coming and holds up her hand. “It was the clothes dryer. Lots of fuss about nothing.”
Three different firefighters and our next-door neighbor Mrs. Lasky say, “It wasn’t nothing.” The firefighters keep coming out of the side of the house wearing protective gear, carrying blackened objects to the sidewalk.
The image in my head is Don sneering at me. What I thought were empty, stupid words turn out to be this: someone set my house on fire.
As warnings go, it’s impressive. I’m warned. I want to grab my mom and hide her somewhere. Then I want to burn Don, and I want him to know it was me. I can tell myself, This isn’t who I am, a thousand times, but I still want to do it.
“Laundry rooms.” The firefighter shakes his head. You’d think that up and down the streets of Summerlin, Nevada, dryers were blowing up.
“Too much lint in the hose,” my mom says as if she believes it. “Probably. Did you know that smoke detector batteries can catch fire spontaneously?”
Sure they can. I ask the firefighter, “Can you check this out? Can you find out what the problem was?”
Because there’s no way there was too much lint in that hose unless someone doused it with accelerant and stuffed it in there. This was all set up and ready to launch if I turned down Don.
Someone did this.
I try to calculate how hard it was to make this happen. What skills were required to walk past three Rottweilers and the motion sensors undetected and make a dryer ignite like clockwork when I was driving through the desert, halfway between saying no to Don and pulling into my driveway? This has strategy, planning, and execution so far above Don’s pay grade, it’s mind-blowing.
This demonstrates what I grew up knowing: you can get to anyone, anywhere, anytime if you know what you’re doing.
“It’s not the end of the world, Jack!” my mother says. “You should see your face. If the worst thing that happens to me in my life is I get singed hair, I’m doing fine!”
“You have singed hair!”
Someone set my house on fire when my mother was in it.
I want to stash her in Witness Protection—except we didn’t witness anything, and I’d be ratting out my own brother. She’d never let me rat out Don, even to save herself. If I told her, she’d say I was exaggerating or misinterpreting, anything to avoid seeing reality. I’m the good one, but Don’s the son she’d go to the mat for.
Also, if we disappeared, a bunch of guys who knew my dad would figure that my mom had ratted them out and gone into hiding. They’re cool with her being a lawyer who prosecutes industrial polluters. Poisoning rivers isn’t their line of work. But if we vanished, they’d think we’d turned, and they would find us: Anyone. Anywhere. Anytime.
Witness Protection would be suicide. Calling the police would be suicide. Calling out Karl Yeager would be suicide. Anything but saluting my smug shit of a brother would be a trip to the morgue.
I say to the firefighter, “Aren’t you going to check this out?”
“Don’t worry, kid. No one’s arresting your mom for appliance abuse.” He thinks this is funny.
“Isn’t there going to be an investigation?”
He sighs. “Is there something you want to tell me, son?”
“No, sir.”
New plan: I’m going to find Nicolette Holland.
I’ll tell Don. This girl freaking murdered Connie Marino in the bloodiest possible way. She’s a homicidal cheerleader who crossed Karl Yeager. I’m not letting my mother burn while I stand around watching from the moral high ground.
I’m not saying what I’m going to do when I find Nicolette Holland, but I’m going to keep stalling for time while I figure it out.
11
Cat