T. Parker - Laguna Heat

“Joe did?”

“He did. It’s conspiracy, pop. Conspiracy to commit murder. Do you understand what that means?”

In his confusion, the reverend was a cop for a moment. “More than one person planning, arranging, or intending to bring about the—”

“Not that, pop. Do you understand what it means to you? If I take Joe for conspiracy?”

Wade leaned forward, as if the news to come should be told in secret. Later, Shephard remembered thinking that it was at this instant his father finally broke. Wade slowly shook his head. The evening breeze stirred his father’s hair, much as the breeze on Isla Arenillas had stirred Mercante’s.

“It means that if Joe goes for conspiracy, he’s going to take you with him. Everything you just told me. Colleen, Burton in your car. Everything.” Shephard heard his own voice trembling, and he fought to control the heaving of his heart. And then, in a moment of clarity that all of his previous thoughts had failed to bring to him, Shephard knew what he should do.

No, he thought. Never. I can’t do that to him.

Wade stood up and put his gloves back on. Behind him, the sun had nearly touched the horizon, and the island of Catalina lay balanced like a gray body on the rim of the ocean. The water danced in crimson. It will be better this way, Shephard thought, as his father moved toward the rose bushes. It has to end somewhere, why not here, while something remains.

“What are you going to do?” Wade asked. He had picked up a pair of pruning shears and was nudging them into a thick bush near the center. “Come here, son. Come here.” There was a new tone to his voice, a tone that Shephard hadn’t heard in years. Ten, he wondered? Twenty? “Tommy. Get the other gloves. In the garage, far wall.” As Shephard walked off to the garage, he recognized the difference. It fit with the walls of the house, the flowers, the same carpet and wallpaper he had always known, the smell of his father’s breakfasts cooking on Sunday mornings. It wasn’t Wade the lawman; it wasn’t Wade the man of God.

He got the gloves off the wall and returned to the rose hedge. Wade’s head was angled down at a bush that he seemed to be inspecting in some minute detail.

I can let him be, Shephard thought. After all this, I can let him be.

But the feeling inside him was not relief, only surrender, and it was the first time he could remember ever giving up on something he truly cared about. The thought of Datilla going free brought a sick lump to his throat.

“Put the gloves on, Tom, and go through these bushes after the dead branches. The wind was pretty hard on them this time. All in all, roses are pretty hardy flowers, but sixty miles per hour off the desert is just too much. The little branches didn’t make it. The big ones are okay.”

Sure, Shephard thought. I know that voice.

Then Wade had turned away and was working silently, pruning the limbs, tossing the outcasts into a neat pile on the lawn. Shephard looked out and watched the last sliver of sun dunk behind the island. Wade turned and stared at him.

“What are you going to do, Tommy?”

Shephard could not answer the question. He fiddled idly with a branch.

“I ran a little experiment on these roses years ago,” Wade said as he clipped. “When I planted them. The ones to your left I just stuck in the ground that was here when your mother and I bought the house. Then I went to the nursery and found out the proper way to plant roses. Got mulch, vitamins, a book about it, the whole shot. The ones over there I planted with all the knowledge of just how to do it. Well, when they grew up and started giving us flowers, guess what? The ones on the left grew better. The flowers weren’t any bigger and there weren’t any more of them, but they were shaped better. They were tighter, brighter, more believable.” He stood back and made a show of studying the roses on the two sides. “So much for the mulch, I said. And from then on I just stuck them in the ground without the additives and let them go. Careful to keep the pests away, of course.”

He shot his son a smile, one that Shephard hadn’t seen in years, one that went with the voice. Not the cop, not the reverend, but just the man, and the father. Uncluttered, unforced. Believable.

“Tommy, if you don’t take Joe, I’ll be deeply ashamed of what I raised. You wouldn’t for a minute entertain that idea, would you? Because when you’ve done that, I can take myself and plant me in some real soil. I think it’s time for that. It’s not too late for me to quit living the lie, but it’s much too early for you to start. You have my blessing.”

After a brief time in which Shephard decided to let a half-dead branch stay on the bush, he felt his heart settle and a new balance spreading inside. He thought of Jane. At the cove again, tonight.

“Thank you,” he said.

They worked after dark amidst silence and small talk, and when the roses were in order, Shephard went home.

The moon appeared an hour later, low on the horizon, dangling strings of light over the water at Diver’s Cove. Shephard and Jane crossed the sand barefoot and worked their way north past the tidepools, which shone up at them like mirrors. As they walked toward the cave, the waves that lapped at Shephard’s feet seemed to nibble away at everything that had happened to him in the last few days, just as they had done the first time he walked the shore with Jane. A week ago, he wondered, or a century? The memories seemed to be inching out of him: the three shots cracking through the early morning in the Hotel Cora; Datilla’s bitter confession; Wade’s enfeebled, then rejuvenating voice. Even before they found the cave and stripped naked in the glow of the flashlight, he could feel relief and forgetfulness pouring in.

The stitches in his side brought him sharply back to reality.

“Ouch,” Jane said, running her fingers over them for the hundredth time. “Sure you want to do this?”

“This is where I got to know you, chum. I’ll never get tired of that.”

This time they undressed each other, eagerly. She came close and put her arms gently around him.

“How are you?” she asked.

“Let’s talk later,” he said, wondering about Tim. Would it do any good to tell her?

They waded together through the rocks, and when they were knee-deep in the rolling waves, they dove under. The first wave thumped him as he went under it, stinging his side. He came up and saw Jane pulling through the water ahead of him. Another wave, another thump, but he was closer to her now and each time he brought up his head for air he could hear her laughing.

Silver shoulders, silver arms ahead in the moonlight. When he came up even with her, she was still laughing, but it didn’t seem to be the right time to ask why. Later, he thought.

And the farther out they swam, the less things back on shore seemed to matter: absurdly, what was ahead of them was suddenly more important than what was behind, although he knew that it was just the Indicator rocks, the Inside Indicator coming up not far ahead and somewhere behind it the Outside Indicator where Jane said all real lovers go. They passed the first rock side by side and neither of them stopped to pay it any attention.

Good God, he thought, she laughs so well it’s like music, or even better; must be hard when you swim.

It was all he could do to keep up, right then left, a sting in his side with each stroke. Saltwater must be good for gunshot, he thought, or maybe that was just an old wives’ tale. No need to tell her about Tim, at least not tonight. Then they were even again and he kept up, right then left, right then left, heading for the Outside Indicator.