Hideaway

  measure niceness was calculated: bunches, bucketsful, gobs. Sometimes, however, Hatch turned away from an unpleasantness that had to be dealt with, rather than risk getting in touch with any negative emotion that was remotely reminiscent of his old man’s paranoia and anger.

  The light changed from red to green, but three young women in bikinis were in the crosswalk, laden with beach gear and heading for the ocean. Hatch didn’t just wait for them. He watched them with a smile of appreciation for the way they filled out their suits.

  “I take it back,” Lindsey said.

  “What?”

  “I was just thinking what a nice guy you are, too nice, but obviously you’re a piece of lecherous scum.”

  “Nice scum, though.”

  “I’ll call Nyebern as soon as we get to the shop,” Lindsey said.

  He drove up the hill through the main part of town, past the old Laguna Hotel. “Okay. But I’m sure as hell not going to tell him I’m suddenly psychic. He’s a good man, but he won’t be able to sit on that kind of news. The next thing I know, my face’ll be all over the cover of the National Enquirer. Besides, I’m not psychic, not exactly. I don’t know what the hell I am—aside from lecherous scum.”

  “So what’ll you tell him?”

  “Just enough about the dreams so he’ll realize how troubling they are and how strange, so he’ll order whatever tests I ought to have. Good enough?”

  “I guess it’ll have to be.”

  In the tomb-deep blackness of his hideaway, curled naked upon the stained and lumpy mattress, fast asleep, Vassago saw sunlight, sand, the sea, and three bikinied girls beyond the windshield of a red car.

  He was dreaming and knew he dreamed, which was a peculiar sensation. He rolled with it.

  He saw, as well, the dark-haired and dark-eyed woman about whom he had dreamed yesterday, when she had been behind the wheel of that same car. She had appeared in other dreams, once in a wheelchair, when she had been laughing and weeping at the same time.

  He found her more interesting than the scantily clad beach bunnies because she was unusually vital. Radiant. Through the unknown man driving the car, Vassago somehow knew that the woman had once considered embracing death, had hesitated on the edge of either active or passive self-destruction, and had rejected an early grave—

  ... water, he sensed a watery vault, cold and suffocating, narrowly escaped ...

  —whereafter she had been more full of life, energetic, and vivid than ever before. She had cheated death. Denied the devil. Vassago hated her for that, because it was in the service of death that he had found meaning to his own existence.

  He tried to reach out and touch her through the body of the man driving the car. Failed. It was only a dream. Dreams could not be controlled. If he could have touched her, he would have made her regret that she had turned away from the comparatively painless death by drowning that could have been hers.

  FIVE

  1

  When she moved in with the Harrisons, Regina almost thought she had died and gone to Heaven, except she had her own bathroom, and she didn’t believe anyone had his own bathroom up in Heaven because in Heaven no one needed a bathroom. They were not all permanently constipated in Heaven or anything like that, and they certainly didn’t just do their business out in public, for God’s sake (sorry, God), because no one in his right mind would want to go to Heaven if it was the kind of place where you had to watch where you stepped. It was just that in Heaven all the concerns of earthly existence passed away. You didn’t even have a body in Heaven; you were probably just a sphere of mental energy, sort of like a balloon full of golden glowing gas, drifting around among the angels, singing the praises of God—which was pretty weird when you thought about it, all those glowing and singing balloons, but the most you’d ever have to do in the way of waste elimination was maybe vent a little gas now and then, which wouldn’t even smell bad, probably like the sweet incense in church, or perfume.

  That first day in the Harrisons’ house, late Monday afternoon, the twenty-ninth of April, she would remember forever, because they were so nice. They didn’t even mention the real reason why they gave her a choice between a bedroom on the second floor and a den on the first floor that could be converted into a bedroom.

  “One thing in its favor,” Mr. Harrison said about the den, “is the view. Better than the view from the upstairs room.”

  He led Regina to the big windows that looked out on a rose garden ringed by a border of huge ferns. The view was pretty.

  Mrs. Harrison said, “And you’d have all these bookshelves, which you might want to fill up gradually with your own collection, since you’re a book lover.”

  Actually, without ever hinting at it, their concern was that she might find the stairs troublesome. But she didn’t mind stairs so much. In fact she liked stairs, she loved stairs, she ate stairs for breakfast. In the orphanage, they had put her on the first floor, until she was eight years old and realized she’d been given ground-level accommodations because of her clunky leg brace and deformed right hand, whereupon she immediately demanded to be moved to the third floor. The nuns would not hear of it, so she threw a tantrum, but the nuns knew how to deal with that, so she tried withering scorn, but the nuns could not be withered, so she went on a hunger strike, and finally the nuns surrendered to her demand on a trial basis. She’d lived on the third floor for more than two years, and she had never used the elevator. When she chose the second-floor bedroom in the Harrisons’ house, without having seen it, neither of them tried to talk her out of it, or wondered aloud if she were “up” to it, or even blinked. She loved them for that.

  The house was gorgeous—cream walls, white woodwork, modern furniture mixed with antiques, Chinese bowls and vases, everything just so. When they took her on a tour, Regina actually felt as dangerously clumsy as she had claimed to be in the meeting in Mr. Gujilio’s office. She moved with exaggerated care, afraid that she would knock over one precious item and kick off a chain reaction that would spread across the entire room, then through a doorway into the next room and from there throughout the house, one beautiful treasure tipping into the next like dominoes in a world-championship toppling contest, two-hundred-year-old porcelains exploding, antique furniture reduced to match sticks, until they were left standing in mounds of worthless rubble, coated with the dust of what had been a fortune in interior design.

  She was so absolutely certain it was going to happen that she wracked her mind urgently, room by room, for something winning to say when catastrophe struck, after the last exquisite crystal candy dish had crashed off the last disintegrating table that had once been the property of the First King of France. “Oops” did not seem appropriate, and neither did “Jesus Christ!” because they thought they had adopted a good Catholic girl not a foul-mouthed heathen (sorry, God), and neither did “somebody pushed me,” because that was a lie, and lying bought you a ticket to Hell, though she suspected she was going to wind up in Hell anyway, considering how she couldn’t stop thinking the Lord’s name in vain and using vulgarities. No balloon full of glowing golden gas for her.

  Throughout the house, the walls were adorned with art, and Regina noted that the most wonderful pieces all had the same signature at the bottom right corner: Lindsey Sparling. Even as much of a screwup as she was, she was smart enough to figure that the name Lindsey was no coincidence and that Sparling must be Mrs. Harrison’s maiden name. They were the strangest and most beautiful paintings Regina had ever seen, some of them so bright and full of good feeling that you had to smile, some of them dark and brooding. She wanted to spend a long time in front of each of them, sort of soaking them up, but she was afraid Mr. and Mrs. Harrison would think she was a brownnosing phony, pretending interest as a way of apologizing for the wisecracks she had made in Mr. Gujilio’s office about paintings on velvet.

  Somehow she got through the entire house without destroying anything, and the last room was hers. It was bigger than any room at the orphanage, a
nd she didn’t have to share it with anyone. The windows were covered with white plantation shutters. Furnishings included a corner desk and chair, a bookcase, an armchair with footstool, nightstands with matching lamps—and an amazing bed.

  “It’s from about 1850,” Mrs. Harrison said, as Regina let her hand glide slowly over the beautiful bed.

  “English,” Mr. Harrison said. “Mahogany with hand-painted decoration under several coats of lacquer.”

  On the footboard, side rails, and headboard, the dark-red and dark-yellow roses and emerald-green leaves seemed alive, not bright against the deeply colored wood but so lustrous and dewy-looking that she was sure she would be able to smell them if she put her nose to their petals.

  Mrs. Harrison said, “It might seem a little old for a young girl, a little stuffy—”

  “Yes, of course,” Mr. Harrison said, “we can send it over to the store, sell it, let you choose something you’d like, something modern. This was just furnished as a guest room.”

  “No,” Regina said hastily. “I like it, I really do. Could I keep it, I mean even though it’s so expensive?”

  “It’s not that expensive,” Mr. Harrison said, “and of course you can keep anything you want.”

  “Or get rid of anything you want,” Mrs. Harrison said.

  “Except us, of course,” Mr. Harrison said.

  “That’s right,” Mrs. Harrison said, “I’m afraid we come with the house.”

  Regina’s heart was pounding so hard she could barely get her breath. Happiness. And fear. Everything was so wonderful—but surely it couldn’t last. Nothing so good could last very long.

  Sliding, mirrored doors covered one wall of the bedroom, and Mrs. Harrison showed Regina a closet behind the mirrors. The hugest closet in the world. Maybe you needed a closet that size if you were a movie star, or if you were one of those men she had read about, who liked to dress up in women’s clothes sometimes, ’cause then you’d need both a girl’s and boy’s wardrobe. But it was much bigger than she needed; it would hold ten times the clothes that she possessed.

  With some embarrassment, she looked at the two cardboard suitcases she had brought with her from St. Thomas’s. They held everything she owned in the world. For the first time in her life, she realized she was poor. Which was peculiar, really, not to have understood her poverty before, since she was an orphan who had inherited nothing. Well, nothing other than a bum leg and a twisted right hand with two fingers missing.

  As if reading Regina’s mind, Mrs. Harrison said, “Let’s go shopping.”

  They went to South Coast Plaza Mall. They bought her too many clothes, books, anything she wanted. Regina worried that they were overspending and would have to eat beans for a year to balance their budget—she didn’t like beans—but they failed to pick up on her hints about the virtues of frugality. Finally she had to stop them by pretending that her weak leg was bothering her.

  From the mall they went to dinner at an Italian restaurant. She had eaten out twice before, but only at a fast-food place, where the owner treated all the kids at the orphanage to burgers and fries. This was a real restaurant, and there was so much to absorb that she could hardly eat, keep up her end of the table conversation, and enjoy the place all at the same time. The chairs weren’t made out of hard plastic, and neither were the knives and forks. The plates weren’t either paper or Styrofoam, and drinks came in actual glasses, which must mean that the customers in real restaurants were not as clumsy as those in fast-food places and could be trusted with breakable things. The waitresses weren’t teenagers, and they brought your food to you instead of handing it across a counter by the cash register. And they didn’t make you pay for it until after you’d eaten it!

  Later, back at the Harrison house, after Regina unpacked her things, brushed her teeth, put on pajamas, took off her leg brace, and got into bed, both the Harrisons came in to say goodnight. Mr. Harrison sat on the edge of her bed and told her that everything might seem strange at first, even unsettling, but that soon enough she would feel at home, then he kissed her on the forehead and said, “Sweet dreams, princess.” Mrs. Harrison was next, and she sat on the edge of the bed, too. She talked for a while about all the things they would do together in the days ahead. Then she kissed Regina on the cheek, said, “Goodnight, honey,” and turned off the overhead light as she went out the door into the hall.

  Regina had never before been kissed goodnight, so she had not known how to respond. Some of the nuns were huggers; they liked to give you an affectionate squeeze now and then, but none of them was a smoocher. For as far back as Regina could remember, a flicker of the dorm lights was the signal to be in bed within fifteen minutes, and when the lights went out, each kid was responsible for getting tucked in himself. Now she had been tucked in twice and kissed goodnight twice, all in the same evening, and she had been too surprised to kiss either of them in return, which she now realized she should have done.

  “You’re such a screwup, Reg,” she said aloud.

  Lying in her magnificent bed, with the painted roses twining around her in the darkness, Regina could imagine the conversation they were having, right that minute, in their own bedroom:

  Did she kiss you goodnight?

  No, did she kiss you?

  No. Maybe she’s a cold fish.

  Maybe she’s a psycho demon child.

  Yeah, like that kid in The Omen.

  You know what I’m worried about?

  She’ll stab us to death in our sleep.

  Let’s hide all the kitchen knives.

  Better hide the power tools, too.

  You still have the gun in the nightstand?

  Yeah, but a gun will never stop her.

  Thank God, we have a crucifix.

  We’ll sleep in shifts.

  Send her back to the orphanage tomorrow.

  “Such a screwup,” Regina said. “Shit.” She sighed. “Sorry, God.” Then she folded her hands in prayer and said softly, “Dear God, if you’ll convince the Harrisons to give me one more chance, I’ll never say ‘shit’ again, and I’ll be a better person.” That didn’t seem like a good enough bargain from God’s point of view, so she threw in other inducements: “I’ll continue to keep an A average in school, I’ll never again put Jell-O in the holy water font, and I’ll give serious thought to becoming a nun.” Still not good enough. “And I’ll eat beans.” That ought to do it. God was probably proud of beans. After all, He’d made all kinds of them. Her refusal to eat green or wax or Lima or navy or any other kind of beans had no doubt been noted in Heaven, where they had her down in the Big Book of Insults to God—Regina, currently age ten, thinks God pulled a real boner when He created beans. She yawned. She felt better now about her chances with the Harrisons and about her relationship with God, though she didn’t feel better about the change in her diet. Anyway, she slept.

  2

  While Lindsey was washing her face, scrubbing her teeth, and brushing her hair in the master bathroom, Hatch sat in bed with the newspaper. He read the science page first, because it contained the real news these days. Then he skimmed the entertainment section and read his favorite comic strips before turning, at last, to the A section where the latest exploits of politicians were as terrifying and darkly amusing as usual. On page three he saw the story about Bill Cooper, the beer deliveryman whose truck they had found crosswise on the mountain road that fateful, snowy night in March.

  Within a couple of days of being resuscitated, Hatch had heard that the trucker had been charged with driving under the influence and that the percentage of alcohol in his blood had been more than twice that required for a conviction under the law. George Glover, Hatch’s personal attorney, had asked him if he wanted to press a civil suit against Cooper or the company for which he worked, but Hatch was not by nature litigious. Besides, he dreaded becoming bogged down in the dull and thorny world of lawyers and courtrooms. He was alive. That was all that mattered. A drunk-driving charge would be brought against the trucker wit
hout Hatch’s involvement, and he was satisfied to let the system handle it.

  He had received two pieces of correspondence from William Cooper, the first just four days after his reanimation. It was an apparently sincere, if long-winded and obsequious, apology seeking personal absolution, which was delivered to the hospital where Hatch was undergoing physical therapy. “Sue me if you want,” Cooper wrote, “I deserve it. I’d give you everything if you wanted it, though I don’t got much, I’m no rich man. But no matter whether you sue me or if not, I most sincerely hope you’ll find it in your generous heart to forgive me one ways or another. Except for the genius of Dr. Nyebern and his wonderful people, you’d be dead for sure, and I’d carry it on my conscience all the rest of my days.” He rambled on in that fashion for four pages of tightly spaced, cramped, and at times inscrutable handwriting.

  Hatch had responded with a short note, assuring Cooper that he did not intend to sue him and that he harbored no animosity toward him. He also had urged the man to seek counseling for alcohol abuse if he had not already done so.

  A few weeks later, when Hatch was living at home again and back at work, after the media storm had swept over him, a second letter had arrived from Cooper. Incredibly, he was seeking Hatch’s help to get his truck-driving job back, from which he had been fired subsequent to the charges that the police had filed against him. “I been chased down for driving drunk twice before, it’s true,” Cooper wrote, “but both them times, I was in my car, not the truck, on my own time, not during work hours. Now my job is gone, plus they’re fixing to take away my license, which’ll make life hard. I mean, for one thing, how am I going to get a new job without a license? Now what I figure is, from your kind answer to my first letter, you proved yourself a fine Christian gentleman, so if you was to speak up on my behalf, it would be a big help. After all, you didn’t wind up dead, and in fact you got a lot of publicity out of the whole thing, which must’ve helped your antique business a considerable amount.”

  Astonished and uncharacteristically furious, Hatch had filed the letter without answering it. In fact he quickly put it out of his mind, because he was scared by how angry he grew whenever he contemplated it.

  Now, according to the brief story on page three of the paper, based on a single technical error in police procedures, Cooper’s attorney had won a dismissal of all charges against him. The article included a three-sentence summary of the accident and a silly reference to Hatch as “holding the current record for being dead the longest time prior to a successful resuscitation,” as if he had arranged the entire ordeal with the hope of winning a place in the next edition of the Guinness Book of World Records.

  Other revelations in the piece made Hatch curse out loud and sit up straight in bed, culminating with the news that Cooper was going to sue his employer for wrongful termination and expected to get his old job back or, failing that, a substantial financial settlement. “I have suffered considerable humiliation at the hands of my former employer, subsequent to which I developed a serious stress-related health condition,” Cooper had told reporters, obviously disgorging an attorney-written statement that he had memorized. “Yet even Mr. Harrison has written to tell me that he holds me blameless for the events of that night.”

  Anger propelled Hatch off the bed and onto his feet. His face felt flushed, and he was shaking uncontrollably.

  Ludicrous. The drunken bastard was trying to get his job back by using Hatch’s compassionate note as an endorsement, which required a complete misrepresentation of what Hatch had actually written. It was deceptive. It was unconscionable.

  “Of all the fucking nerve!” Hatch said fiercely between clenched teeth.

  Dropping most of the newspaper at his feet, crumpling the page with the story in his right hand, he hurried out of the bedroom and descended the stairs two at a time. In the den, he threw the paper on the desk, banged open a sliding closet door, and jerked out the top drawer on a three-drawer filing cabinet.

  He had saved Cooper’s handwritten letters, and although they were not on printed stationery, he knew the trucker had included not only a return address but a phone number on both pieces of correspondence. He was so disturbed, he flicked past the correct file folder—labeled MISCELLANEOUS BUSINESS—cursed softly but fluently when he couldn’t find it, then searched backward and pulled it out. As he pawed through the contents, other letters slipped out of the folder and clattered to the floor at his feet.

  Cooper’s second letter had a telephone number carefully hand-printed at the top. Hatch put the disarranged file folder on the cabinet and hurried to the phone on the desk. His hand was shaking so badly that he couldn’t read the number, so he put the letter on the blotter, in the cone of light from the brass desk lamp.

  He punched William Cooper’s number, intent on telling him off. The line was busy.

  He jammed his thumb down on the disconnect button, got the dial tone, and tried again. Still busy.

  “Sonofabitch!” He slammed down the receiver, but snatched it up again because there was nothing else he could do to let off steam. He tried the number a third time, using the redial button. It was still busy, of course, because no more than half a minute had passed since the first time he had tried it. He smashed the handset into the cradle so hard he might have broken the phone.

  On one level he was startled by the savagery of the act, the childishness of it. But that part of him was not in control, and the mere awareness that he was over the top did not help him regain a grip on himself.

  “Hatch?”

  He looked up in surprise at the sound of his name and saw Lindsey, in her bathrobe, standing in the doorway between the den and the foyer.

  Frowning, she said, “What’s wrong?”

  “What’s wrong?” he asked, his fury growing irrationally, as if she were somehow in league with Cooper, as if she were only pretending to be unaware of this latest turn of events. “I’ll tell you what’s wrong. They let this Cooper bastard off the hook! The son of a bitch kills me, runs me off the goddamned road and kills me, then slips off the hook and has the nerve to try to use the letter I wrote him to get his job back!” He snatched up the crumpled newspaper and shook it at her, almost accusingly, as if she knew what was in it. “Get his job back—so he can run someone else off the fucking road and kill them!”

  Looking worried and confused, Lindsey stepped into the den. “They let him off the hook? How?”

  “A technicality. Isn’t that cute? A cop misspells a word on the citation or something, and the guy walks!”

  “Honey, calm down—”

  “Calm down? Calm down?” He shook the crumpled newspaper again. “You know what else it says here? The jerk sold his story to that sleazy tabloid, the one that