T. Parker - Summer Of Fear

"And what do you think now, Russ, about taking what isn't offered?"

"I haven't changed my position on that. Some things, you fight too hard to get them, get ruined in the war."

"You never had to fight for Isabella, did you? She offered you everything you wanted. Handed it right over to you, all of it, all of herself."

"Yes, she did."

"How did you choose to deal with that? Wasn't she bargaining with a diluted currency?"

"I loved and honored her in every way I could."

"Oh, Russell, you were a lucky man to find her."

"I've always known that."

"I'm so sorry for what happened to her. Will she ever be okay… ever?"

"No."

"Russ, do you believe in miracles?"

"No."

"What is it you hold on to late at night, when the devil’s grabbing at your soul?"

"His throat." "Do you feel anything tender inside at all?"

"Tenderness would unravel me."

My agonies were storming their walls. Was I powerless to stop them, or just unwilling? I heard a wild ringing in my ears.

"Do you want to die?"

"Sometimes. Then I think. There has to be more to life than a desire to be taken out on a stretcher."

"Is it really that bad?"

"I may just be exhibiting some sorry-ass version of brinksmanship. I've never considered myself cut out for this task-kindness just doesn't come easily. I don't know how much longer I can take care of her. I dream of tumors growing in my balls and lungs."

"What do you want?"

"A job where I wear a shirt with my name on it. A straightforward life."

"Really, I mean. Strip away all your self-pitying horseshit, all your writerly loop-the-loops, and what is it you truly want?"

"For the people I love to stop dying."

"There, Russell. I can believe you now. Why does it take you so long sometimes to admit the truth?" The air whipped through the windows. "Pull over," she said.

I braked and signaled and crunched off onto the shoulder. When the car finally stopped, the dust blew forward and swirled in the headlights. We were between the towns, on a bluff that opened to the sea. Down on the beach, wavering white ribbons rushed and retreated. My heart was in my teeth.

Amber got out, shut her door, and walked over to the bluff edge. I followed. The smell of sage mixed with the salt air, each intensified by the heat. Amber waited until I caught up with her, then took my hand. We walked the perimeter of the bluff, stopping where a deep gash opened into the abyss. The face of the cliff was back-cut, too steep for me to actually see, and as my gaze followed its invisible plane, I continued to see nothing but darkness until the sand below focused in my view, pale acreage studded with sharp rocks exposed wholly now by the low tide. The sand at the waterline shone as if lacquered The ringing in my ears was so loud, my eyes began to blur, had never in my life-except for those three hellish days with Izzy in a Guadalajara hospital, where her tumor was diagnosed-felt so fragile, so ready to disassemble.

To my heartache was then added shock when Amber turned me toward her on the edge of this bluff high over the sea and offered her lips, wet and parted, to my own.

There was nothing exploratory in this act, nothing of negotiation or the art of the deal. No, this was a kiss as pure as sacrifice. It was an offer of everything. She blew the breath her lungs deep into my own as, two decades ago, she had: often done, always to the wilding of my blood.

I have a clear and permanent memory of what happened next. First, a breeze came off the sea, oddly cool in the static heat, and it struck my face directly. (How it got around Amber face-locked so close to mine-I cannot explain.) And as it pushed cooly against me, I felt what seemed like the total contents of my mind-thoughts, precepts, memory-being lift out and carried away. The Zapruder film is no more graphic than the vision I had, eyes closed, of everything inside me departing to join this fresh and unlikely breeze. But there was no violence to it. Rather, what was inside me simply stepped out and, like a child hand in hand with a grandparent, walk away.

Second, I remember the pink cotton material of Amber dress bunched up on the small of her back, clutched in one my hands, and the pure soft heat of her legs pressing against my trembling own, the forward bend and toe-strained perch her, the lift of her dark brown hair in that breeze, a black even darker than the ocean beyond us, the brace of my fingers on her belly. And I remember, too, that we hardly moved-no great histrionics here-because every tiny motion, every fractional of contact was an agony of pleasure I could barely stand. The tremors deep within Amber were all the movement we required.

Last, I remember where we ended up, though not how we got there. The logistics of the transition are not hard to imagine. I was lying in the dirt, amidst the fragrant sage, staring straight up through Amber's hair to the sky. Her back was still to me. My arms were wrapped around her, my left locked in her right armpit, my right still open against her stomach, holding tight. My legs were spread and her rump rested deep between them, where-I noted-we were still very much connected. Her heart beat hard against the bone of my left elbow. We were both breathing fast. My butt hurt. I was, for the moment, blessedly opinionless.

But as quickly as my thoughts had departed, so they came scampering back, like rabbits to the hole. There they huddled, frightened, buck-toothed, ashamed. They curled together, hid their faces. They confessed. I closed my eyes again and imagined a fig leaf the size of the heavens. But I did not loosen my grip on Amber; if I had traded everything for this, then I was not about to give it up. I was the monkey caught in a trap because he's unwilling to release the bait from his greedy fist. I was even ready for the electric chair, but I would clutch this treasure to my lap, lodged so high and deep inside her that I could feel the bottom of her heart, until the straps claimed me.

Or not. Because along with the searing reentry of my conscience came the cooling waters of reason-all that keep the soul from self-immolation. For a moment, a terrible storm of contradiction began to form inside me, but it passed. I was no longer fit to battle myself. I had won and I had lost. I released my grip on Amber Mae and worked my nose into the aromatic crook behind her ear. I gently drove myself into her, to lessening effect. Very deeply, I sighed.

"Don't speak," she said. I did not.

"That was a gift," she whispered.

"It certainly was. Thank you."

"It wasn't from me. I just delivered it."

"Who do I send the thank-you note to?"

"Isabella. We talked."

Driving back down Coast Highway toward my home was a journey of silence and bad conscience. Yes, I owned my secret life now, the very one I was hoping to begin on that awful night of July 3. But what a price to pay. I felt as if I had overdrawn my emotional accounts, that there was no way to finance this latest, wildest of expenditures. It was a perfect correlative to my actual financial quandry, the thought of which sent me further into a dismal spiral. What would I do when the bills came due? I became sullen and remorseful. And surprisingly-perhaps not-I found myself longing for the bed I used to share with Isabella, for the proximity of even her absence, for the darkness of the room in which we had loved each other and would, with some helpful nudge from the fates, love each other again.

Worst of all was my knowledge that Grace had almost certainly been in Amber's room on that night. Martin Parish had not been lying, after all. A thought came to me: What if Martin and Grace had planned this together? What if Martin had cajoled and helped to terrify Grace, perhaps even hired the men to burn her, used all his considerable influence as Grace's former stepfather to widen the already-gaping chasm between mother and daughter? He could certainly have done so. But to what end? Vengeance for Amber throwing him over? Doubtful. The money due him in Amber's will? Possible. A chill fingered through me as another scenario presented itself: What if Martin and Grace were secret lovers, planning to marry each other's fortunes when Amber was gone? Could this explain Grace's many absence, her frequent phone conversations, her evasiveness? Yes, but so, then why had Martin sworn to seeing Grace on the July 3? Was it as simple as self-protection, having been surprised by a unforeseen factor-myself? A simpler explanation might have been this: Grace's arrival at Amber's was every bit as coincident as my own, and Parish, latching onto an opportunity to throw my curiosities a monstrous curve ball, admitted Grace's untimely entrance to me for the sake of pure confusion. But the overriding question was this: If Martin and Grace had been there together planned the murder together, and killed the wrong woman together, why was Parish building a case against his own accomplice and turning it over to the DA? It made little sense. Had I heard Karen correctly?