Kem Nunn - Chance

He had no idea what Lucy must be thinking. They had not spoken in days. And then there was the matter of Carla’s calls. Nicole was not doing well. She had missed another day of school then spent an entire weekend, in direct violation of Carla’s orders, in the company of the new boyfriend Chance had yet to meet somewhere in West Marin, or so it was believed.

Chance invariably learned of such transgressions after the fact, sometimes long after, Carla calling at odd hours, clearly in the midst of some internal stew, suddenly deciding it was time for Chance to do something, yet never clear about what exactly this might be while at the same time rejecting any and all advice he was inclined to offer. At least this was how it felt, the full extent of his current involvement in his daughter’s life.

In the beginning she had spent more time with him. Recent complications had served to make this less than desirable but that was about to change. He would find the place in Berkeley, a house perhaps where she might have her own room. He went so far as to envision the acquisition of a small pet. He would encourage her enrollment in the Berkeley school system. These things were not beyond the pale. It was within his power to make them happen and yet here he sat, with his expensive binoculars, looking for hidden surveillance cameras in the dredges of Oakland. He was racking focus on his new binoculars when Carla called for the second time in as many days.

“Where have you been?” she asked, the rancor evident in her voice.

Chance let the question go unanswered. Married, divorced, it was the same old song.

“Why aren’t you at work?”

“Errands I needed to attend to.”

“For two days?”

Chance brought the shabby building into sharp relief, the Austrian glasses turning stucco walls to a landscape of cracks and crevices, craters worthy of the moon. “Listen,” he said. “Clearly this is a person she needs to stop seeing.” He had taken to searching beneath the eaves.

“Good luck with that.”

“Carla…”

“I’m not going to go around with her chained to my foot.”

“There’s two kinds of pain in life,” Chance told her. “The pain of discipline and the pain of remorse.” He was quoting Big D but only half there, lost in speculation on the mysteries of the human heart. Why had Blackstone kept those few reports in the dated file and why not anything at all of what had most certainly followed? Perhaps, he thought, there were other files on other hard drives—readily assembled should the need ever arise.

“You need to talk to her,” Carla said.

“I have, but yes, you’re right, I will again. In the meantime you need to keep her close.”

“Have you heard anything I just said?”

“What I hear is this, you have a boyfriend and you don’t want to be bothered.” It was, he supposed, a mean thing to say and only half true.

“You’re an asshole,” she told him.

“ Some  one has to pay for it all,” Chance said.

“Right. And that’s what you’re doing, just now?”

Chance of course said nothing. He was thinking about being an asshole and looking for cameras, but the lengthy pause was enough to push yet one more of Carla’s many buttons. “You don’t want to hang up on me,” she said, apparently believing that he had hung up. “Don’t you even think about hanging up on me.”

Chance sighed, loudly enough for her to hear. He was about to speak. He was about to start in on his plans for the new place east of the bridge. He was about to sing the praises of the Berkeley public school system, the proximity of the UC campus, of lecture halls, of concerts beneath the trees, but then failed to do so, the words turning to ashes in his mouth. The problem was, having been here for not more than half an hour, he had just now spotted a woman with short dark hair but looking remarkably like Jaclyn Blackstone exiting the massage parlor in the company of what he could only imagine to be a john and a fair amount of oxygen had just been sucked from the air. “We’ll have to talk later,” Chance said, and ended the call.

The mystery woman’s back was to him. Still, there was something in the curve of her hip and the way she carried herself, leaning upon the arm of the man at her side, even before showing Chance her profile and the high plane of a cheekbone giving her away, the short dark hair notwithstanding. Chance’s heart strokes rattled in his ears. Music spilled from a passing car, a ghetto rumble above a baseline throb. She put the man into some sort of high-end, bloodred sports car parked before a liquor store at the far end of the lot and saw him off before starting back in the direction of the parlor.

Chance went to meet her, as if there were a choice in the matter, across pockmarked blacktop strewn with trash, the sun impossibly bright off such dead neon and stucco walls as bound them in on all sides, sorry storefronts in colors of the Mexican flag before flat asphalt roofs on which coolers the size of small foreign-built automobiles labored against the heat, the whole place smelling of car exhaust, garbage, and spice, ovens working overtime at the Mongolian Grill.

He came at her from an odd angle, quite certain he had not yet been made. She turned only when he called her name then stopped in her tracks, her mouth open, a series of expressions, or rather the possibilities of such, rippling across her features in the time it took to draw a breath. “Oh my God.” Her first words, then once more with feeling, “Oh… my… God…” as with the dawning recognition of some heretofore unimagined truth. At which point the curtain fell and she turned away as if nothing at all had just now passed between them. It was, in the shadowy realm of dissociative identity disorder, as remarkable a performance as one was likely to find. Her hair had been died to a blue black, cut short enough to suggest the androgynous and parted on the left. She was dressed in what he took to be the uniform of a Catholic schoolgirl.

Chance moved to block her passage. She squared off to face him. “I don’t know you, buddy,” is what she said. Her voice was loud and harsh and strange and very nearly put him off stride.

“I think you do,” he told her. He’d taken a position with regard to her affectations and was intent upon maintaining it.

“The fuck do you think you are?” she asked.

“I won’t play this game with you, Jaclyn.” He spoke to her as if to a recalcitrant patient, in his finest authoritarian tone. He might have been wrong but it seemed to him that something flickered in the depths of her eyes, that she wavered momentarily before steeling herself once more. “You need to leave,” she hissed. But the momentary hesitation had been enough. “Got you,” he said.

She turned without saying more and started back in the direction of the parlor. Chance fell in beside her. “I’ve no time for games,” he told her. “Things have happened…”

It was as far as he got for she’d stopped short once more, suddenly shaking her hands as if trying to rid them of some unpleasant and possibly toxic substance, her face crumbling. It was a strange gesture bordering on the hysteric yet it touched him all the same, his bird with the broken wing. “This isn’t happening,” she said.

At which point Chance saw that a burly, dark-haired man in jeans, a black leather jacket over a white T-shirt with a gold chain around his neck, had walked from the front of the massage parlor to stand before it lighting a cigarette. What he felt next was Jaclyn Blackstone’s hand on his wrist, a fearsome grip. “For Christ’s sake,” she said and pulled him into the doorway of the adult bookstore before which they had stopped, its interior all books, tapes, DVDs, and magazines, their lurid covers wrapped in plastic to discourage handling, shimmering in the fluorescent glare. “Tell me something,” she asked. “How insane are you?”