She parked at the entrance to Wakeland’s cul-de-sac, took a pair of investigation gloves from the hatchback, and walked the darkened greenbelt path, her body charged with adrenaline. It wouldn’t bother her if the coach was dead, honestly, but it would eat her up if Ben had done it. She squeezed between the shrubs and the west wall of the apartment, glancing in the windows; a thin light emanated from a distant room. At the patio, she slipped the gloves on, pushed the key into the lock, and slid the door open, very slowly.
It was quiet inside, reeking of bleach, nothing but the hum of a refrigerator motor rattling from the kitchen. In the living room, she found a knocked-over cocktail tumbler and a dark spill on the carpeted floor. The light was coming from the bathroom, the door half closed, just an incandescent sliver cast against the hallway wall. She pushed open the door, holding her breath, and found a towel on the floor and a spit of blood in the sink but no body, no Wakeland sprawled out on the linoleum.
She checked the bedroom, the master bath—nothing, thank God.
She stood in the hallway, thinking. She wanted to get in here, go forensic on the place. She found empty filing cabinets in the office, a drawer of matchboxes and screwdrivers in the kitchen. She ran her hands between the novels on the bookshelf in the living room and found copies of Penthouse in the guest-bathroom magazine rack. She went back to the bedroom, her heart pounding in her ears with the memory of all Ben had told her. She rifled through the bureau—a few articles of clothing, a watch, cuff links, a couple of birthday cards, a Dulces Vero candy wrapper. She slid her hands inside the heels of leather shoes in the master-bath closet, fingered the chest pockets of two sports coats, and got down on the floor and ran her hand into the dark space in the back of the closet behind the shoe rack. Then her fingers grazed something: the edge of a small cardboard box. It was wrapped in rubber bands, a half dozen of them crisscrossing one another. When she pulled them off and opened the top, she only had to glance at the Polaroids to know what they were, and when she set them aside, feeling dizzy, her back against the wall, she suddenly broke down and let it all spill out of her.
—
FROM WHERE BEN was laid up in Hoag Hospital, he could see the crush of news crews gathered outside in the parking lot. He’d watched the reports from his bed, his photo hovering behind the L.A. newscast anchors on the evening reports; he even made the national networks. Two days after the accident, Emma had read out loud Daniela Marsh’s article about him in the Rancho Santa Elena World News. He had grown up in Rancho Santa Elena before the town had incorporated, when it was still a ranch. He had been a star swimmer in high school. He had been a decorated L.A. detective but returned home to “serve the community.” He had saved a woman from the grips of the Night Prowler, and even though Daniela’s story was full of stock platitudes about the selfless actions of “our men in black,” he enjoyed listening to his daughter pronouncing him a hero. When she said it, he almost believed it.
But the serial was still out there, hero or no hero. Ben remembered the killer staring down at him when he was crushed against the steering column. You can’t get me, the killer seemed to be thinking. This close and you can’t get me. How the killer walked away from the crash, Ben didn’t know. He was like a ghost, slipping through twisted metal untouched. All of the basin was looking for him, from the Colorado River to the Pacific, from Bakersfield to the Mexican border, and all Ben could do was sit here, his hyphemaed eye dilated with atropine drops, his skull feeling like two jagged pieces of a misaligned puzzle.
On Sunday, Rachel came to collect him from the hospital. She parked in the back to avoid the camera crews angling for an interview with the wounded hero, and Ben was forced to sit in the wheelchair like some invalid while Rachel rolled him into the late-afternoon sun. The wind was down now, but the scoured air was an explosion of brightness; even with the sunglasses on, halos of light attacked his vision. On the ride home, the sunlight glanced off windshields and freshly washed hoods, sending bolts of pain through his eye. The socket throbbed, too. They’d doped up the area with steroids to keep the swelling down and prevent the eye from being pushed into the broken socket.
It was strange, this nominal blindness, this helplessness he was forced to endure with Rachel. It was strange to see her next to him, as though in the foggy image of a dream, and when they rolled up the driveway, beneath the still branches of the eucalyptus, among the familiar smells of sun-heated leaves, of dried hay and horse manure, he felt, for a moment, that the past had been erased. There was a kind of hope in being injured, in letting go of pride enough to allow yourself to be cared for. Maybe he should have let it happen years ago; maybe that’s what was missing with them. He never let Rachel take care of him, never allowed her to give that kind of love.
He let her take his elbow as he climbed out of her car, let her press her hand against the small of his back as she led him into his house, and when he got inside, Emma was already in the kitchen, dicing onions and tomatoes, meat sizzling and popping in the pan.
“Fiesta Night,” Ben said when he saw it.
“Sí,” Emma said.
Ben joined her at the cutting board, slicing into a bunch of cilantro, relieved that the rules of Fiesta Night would keep them from talking about the serial, about the boyfriend situation, about himself. He had frightened Emma, Ben remembered Rachel saying last week, enough so that Rachel hadn’t let him see his own daughter. He didn’t want to do that again, didn’t want to be that kind of father.
Emma spooned the beef into a bowl and Ben charred the tortillas. When all three of them sat down together, Ben playing an AM station out of L.A. that broadcast Baja norte?o music, he took a bite of his taco and said, “Ay, caramba! Este taco es muy picante.”
—
AFTER DINNER, EMMA went out to the barn to tend to the horses. Ben grabbed a couple of beers and put on his sunglasses to save his dilated eye, and he and Rachel settled outside on the porch, sitting on metal chairs beneath the sign that declared the house CASA DE LA WADE. Together they watched Emma, brightly lit and beautiful in the exposed light of the barn, comb out Gus’s flanks.
“I blinked and she grew up,” Ben said.
“She’s not grown up yet,” Rachel said. “Her body’s calling the shots, and her mind’s following.”
Emma stood on her tiptoes now to comb down Gus’s withers. Ben remembered her child’s body, the lean, wiry muscles she exposed without embarrassment. “Still in the Garden of Eden” was how he and Rachel described it. The body just the body and not an object of desire or possession. He hadn’t seen her body in five years, knew almost nothing about it now, a normal loss of intimacy that hadn’t bothered him until recently, until this boy. It was a troublesome thought, he knew, and he didn’t really know what it meant to be having it. Maybe all men thought this about their daughters, felt the loss of that particular closeness. He didn’t know.