Wendy Hornsby - The Color of Light

“I never thought Larry had anything to do with it,” I said. “Did you?”

He flushed bright red. “When Dad told me Mom died, I thought I was being punished for fighting. Major bad karma.”

“Ah, Beto.” I covered his hand with mine.

He patted my hand and smiled gamely. “What? Don’t you like your lunch?”

“Almost as special as your pastrami.”

He laughed. “Then eat it.”

After a few quiet bites, he said, “I got lots of counseling, Maggie. Your mom referred us to a child psychologist who wanted me to reason my way through my feelings. How do you reason your way through something like that? Father John told me that I needed to believe that Mom was happy in heaven, sitting next to God. That just pissed me off, because if she was sitting around anywhere being happy, I thought she should be with me and Dad in our house.”

“Perfect kid logic.”

“You know who really helped the most?”

“Who?”

“The Buddhist priest Mom got to know in the refugee camp,” he said. “He told me that Mom’s spirit was really angry because of the way she died. That made total sense to me, because, like I said, I was pretty pissed off, too. Then he told me I could comfort her by making fresh offerings to her every day. He told me she was always close by. That was the answer I liked the best, and that’s the one I picked.”

“Makes sense,” I said. “I asked Father John to say a rosary for my brother, Mark. But this year I think I’ll burn some offerings for him, too.”

“Cover all the bases, Maggie.” He laid his fork across his empty plate and leaned back in his chair, content, smiling. One of his staffers came and took the plates away.

“You know,” he said, “Mom started that Hungry Ghosts celebration in our backyard because when the refugees first got here after the war, none of the local Buddhist temples followed the Vietnamese lunar calendar. Think of all those ancestors left behind in Vietnam, all those people who died in the war and never had a proper burial. All those unhappy hungry ghosts who could come through and cause mischief if they weren’t taken care of. The problem was, the Gates of Hell open and close a whole month earlier in Vietnam than they do in China and Japan. Way too late to deal with pissed-off ancestors.”

“There are Vietnamese temples around now,” I said. “But you still have the celebration in your backyard.”

“Of course we do. That’s where Mom is.”

The store was getting busy.

“I’ll be sure to say hello to her tomorrow,” I said, rising. “Thank you for lunch.”

He put his arm through mine and walked me to the door. “Talk to him, Maggie.”

“That’s up to him.”

As I walked back toward the lot where I parked Mike’s truck I glanced at a shop window and spotted Larry following me from across the street, staying several yards behind me. It was creepy. He had to know where I was going, so why dog my steps if he wanted to talk to me? I stopped and turned to face him. But he ducked into an open doorway and I wasn’t about to chase him down. Instead, I got back into the truck and headed for the closest supermarket for some staples.

No one was behind me when I pulled into Mom’s garage and closed the door. I thought immediately about the person who had aggressively pushed on the locked back gate when Evie Sanchez was with me, and then the break-in. Both times, whoever it was had run away. Larry both times? Possibly. Father John said he was resourceful. Stymied by the locked gate and possibly the thorny bougainvillea on the trellis beside it, maybe he had found another entry point. But why? If he, or anyone, wanted to talk to me, he could knock on the front door.

Before going upstairs to make beds for weekend guests, I made a circuit of the downstairs, taking care that every door and window was securely locked. When I left the house to meet Jean-Paul, I double-bolted the front door. Striding to the downtown BART station, my bag of evening clothes slung over my shoulder, I saw no one lurking, but I was still wary. I regretted turning down Jean-Paul’s offer to pick me up in a car.

Funny, I thought, during all those years that Isabelle stalked me I remained completely oblivious to her and any peril she might have presented. So why, when no one was there, was I feeling as spooked as I was? It wasn’t Larry; I didn’t think he intended harm, even if it was he who broke into the house. Maybe it was all the talk about hungry ghosts. Or was it that I had been sleeping in my old bedroom for the last several days knowing that I had yet to pack away the monsters that lived under the bed? In any case, for the weekend, Jean-Paul and I would be using the room across the hall.

When I came around the curve in the street and caught the first glimpse of Beto’s driveway, I knew what at least one source of my discomfort was. I had seen that damn picture of Mrs. Bartolini’s battered corpse.

On an ordinary Monday morning, in a peaceful neighborhood, a monster had slipped through our veneer of safety and created mayhem. Was he still among us? Had he been inside my house the night before?

Jean-Paul was on the sidewalk in front of the French consulate, watching for me. He came to meet me, smiling his shy, upside-down smile, holding his arms wide for me to walk into. I put my arms around him and offered my face for les bises , the kiss on either cheek, plus the third for close friends and lovers that is the standard French greeting.

He was dressed for the evening in a beautifully tailored silk tux, minus the jacket.

“You’re gorgeous,” I said. And he was.

“I’ve missed you.” He kept his arm around my waist as he led me inside to the guest apartment where I was to change; I clung to him. Looking down into my face he asked, “All is well?”

“All is well. You’re here.”

While I dressed, he lounged across the guest bed, looking as gracefully elegant as a panther, talking to me as I transformed myself from bedraggled commuter to evening butterfly. Or dragonfly, as it were.

Mom had sewn a piece of felt into the shoulder seam of the black dress as an anchor for the dragonfly brooch so that it wouldn’t pull the delicate fabric. Jean-Paul watched me engineer the placement of the brooch, as I had watched Mom do the same.

“Beautiful,” he said.

“The brooch?” I said.

“No, chérie , the woman who wears it.”

I stretched out beside him, curling myself into the contours of his body. “I’ve missed you.”

“I am afraid,” he said, kissing the side of my neck, “that if we don’t get up from here right now, we will not get up at all. And, sorry to say, we will be greatly missed.”

We weren’t in a hurry about it, but we did get up, and we left. A driver named Rafael, who doubled as a security guard for the San Francisco consul general, ferried us to the de Young Museum of Fine Arts in Golden Gate Park. At the door we were greeted by the museum people, the staff from the Georges Pompidou Center in Paris that had accompanied several of the Matisse works, and the chocolatier who was underwriting the event as a way to announce the opening of his first American shop, a confectionary in the Ferry Building on the Embarcadero; commerce and culture wed.

Before the invited guests arrived, we were given a brief tour of the reception preparations and the exhibit. The museum’s main concourse had been transformed to represent a street in Montparnasse, with faux sidewalk cafés and shops, and a street musician playing an accordion. The terrace at the far end of the concourse, where dinner would be served, had become a Parisian garden bistro, lit by candle light. As we walked through the special exhibits gallery on the lower level, I turned to Jean-Paul and asked, “Where is your San Francisco counterpart?”