Neil McMahon - Revolution No.9

The coffee water was boiling. He ground up a cup’s worth of French roast, dumped it into a filter, and poured the steaming water slowly through, in stages. The result was strong and bitter, the way he liked it.

He was starting to think about making breakfast when he heard a car door slam outside. There was no reason for anyone to be coming here at this hour.

He stepped to a window away from the kitchen light just in time to see the vehicle’s taillights as it pulled away, leaving a thin white plume of exhaust in the chilly night. It looked like an older-model van, the kind that were popular in the 1970s. Someone was walking toward the house, shouldering a backpack.

Monks got a dizzying lurch in his gut, like when flying and the airliner dropped suddenly in rough weather.

It was Lia.

Sara hadn’t said anything about her coming home. He was quite sure that Sara didn’t know-and that this was a violation of Lia’s probation. He unlocked the door and opened it.

“I knew somebody that was coming up here and I caught a ride,” she said, stepping past him and unslinging her pack onto the floor. “We drove all night.” She seemed neither glad to see him nor surprised. She knew from phone talks with her mother that he had been staying here sometimes, and his Bronco was parked in the driveway. Her movements were jittery and her pupils seemed dilated. He wondered if she had been using meth-another probation offense.

“Welcome home,” he said. “I’ll get your mom.”

Sara was already hurrying down the hall, tying the belt of her robe. She must have heard the car, too. She gave Monks a quick, distraught look, but then put on a big smile as she came into the living room.

The two women embraced, with Sara murmuring, “Oh, baby, it’s so good to see you.” She stepped back, clasping Lia’s shoulders, still smiling but looking perplexed.

“But you’re not supposed to be here,” Sara said.

Lia pulled away. “Don’t start, okay, Mom?” she said sharply. “There’s just no way I can live in that straight world.”

“What are you telling me?” Sara said. “You’re not going back?”

“No way,” Lia repeated emphatically.

Monks stayed in the background, silent. Lia hadn’t been happy about going to Phoenix; but, then, she hadn’t been happy about anything. He waited, expecting Sara to remind her of her probation terms. Leaving Phoenix was not her decision to make.

Instead, Sara said, “Okay, we’ll work it out. What about Joe and Ellie?” Those were the relatives that Lia had been staying with.

“What about them?” Lia retorted.

“Do they know about this?”

“What do you think, they’d have let me go? I told them I was going to spend the weekend at a girlfriend’s.”

Sara sighed. “I’d better call them.”

Monks was taken aback by her swift acquiescence. He told himself that it was none of his business, but that wasn’t true. When he had lobbied to get Lia the deal, he had implicitly staked his word that she would stick to it. And allowing her to stay here would constitute something like harboring a fugitive, even if in a very small way.

But now was not the time to bring it up.

“I was about to make breakfast,” Monks said. “How about it, Lia? You hungry?”

She swung around to face him, with her edgy, defiant gaze.

“Call me Marguerite,” she said. “You know that’s my real name.”

Monks’s relationship with Gail, his ex-wife and Glenn’s mother, had become distant over the years, but it had intensified during the past three months-since their son had once again become a focus of their lives. In fact, they hadn’t had so much interaction since finalizing their divorce.

This afternoon, Monks had agreed to meet her for lunch. There was no news of Glenn, no aspect of the incident that they hadn’t already discussed dozens of times. But she needed to take her anxieties out on Monks, and while he usually received an emotional beating, in a twisted way he got some satisfaction, too. It was somewhat like giving blood.

Gail had a pleasant face and an athletic figure, a little on the big-boned side, like their daughter, Stephanie’s. Her hair was short and gingery, like Glenn’s. She kept herself trim by playing tennis and taking treks to remote places around the globe with her second husband, Sawyer, an environmental-sciences professor at UC Davis. She was intelligent, goodhearted, politically correct, and vaguely hostile to abstract thought.

“I think the police aren’t looking hard enough,” she said.

The fact was that Freeboot, with his illicit wealth, could be anywhere in the world. Monks answered with a noncommittal “Hmh,” chewing on a club sandwich. The restaurant was in Sonoma, at the corner of the old town square. It wasn’t the kind of place that he particularly cared for-it was small and cramped, with a sort of forced chichi ambience, and passers-by gaping into the big plate-glass windows made him feel like an animal in a zoo. But Gail had chosen it.

“Every time the phone rings, I jump,” she said. Her gaze was reproachful, as if he were to blame.

He nodded empathetically. Only since the fire had she confessed that before then, Glenn had been calling her regularly-and that she had frequently wired him money, to whatever bank he specified. She knew that he had moved from Seattle to northern California about two years ago, but he had refused to tell her exactly where. She kept sending money anyway. Monks had long since realized that the relationship between mother and son-especially an only son-was of a profundity beyond his grasp. And he suspected that Glenn’s emotional problems only made Gail’s attachment stronger.

“You don’t think those sheriffs know something they’re not telling us, do you?”

“I don’t see what good that would do them,” Monks said. “But I suppose it’s possible.”

“That’s comforting.”

“There’s nothing we can do about it, Gail. Nothing but wait.”

She picked at her salad and watched him eat his sandwich with a hint of disdain, like a well-bred lady forced to share her table with an ill-mannered serf. When they were courting, Gail had been a fun-loving free spirit. But in the course of their marriage, she had became caught up in the role of a doctor’s wife. By the end, she seemed more interested in their social standing and the square footage of their house than in her sometimes contentious husband.

He accepted the lion’s share of the blame. She had wanted a smooth, stable, affluent life. He had felt the much less reasonable need to rattle cages. He supposed it was a common situation-both partners waking up one day, after a number of years, to find that they no longer recognized the person they were married to, while probably unaware how much they themselves had changed.

“I know you had to leave him there,” she said, suddenly laying down her fork. “But I still can’t believe it.”

He exhaled. This was one of the conversations they had had many times before, Gail always understanding and agreeing with his reasons-above all, the need to save Mandrake-but finally not accepting them. And every time, his own anguish crashed back down on him.

“I’ll take care of the check,” he said, standing.

He had expected her to stay at the table, but she waited for him at the restaurant’s door. She wasn’t yet done with him. Outside, the afternoon was warm with spring sunshine, but he could see the graying line of a fog bank beyond the coastal mountains to the west.

“How are you and your new friend getting along?” Gail asked.

“Just fine.”

“How many is this now, since we split?”

“For Christ’s sake,” he said wearily, “are you keeping a scorecard?” In a dozen years he’d had two semiserious affairs and a few flings. He still wasn’t sure which category Sara would turn out to be in.