two-lane street, sloping toward flatter land, revealed no suspicious vehicle following in his wake.
A languid breeze had uncoiled from the east. With a thousand times a thousand silvery-green tongues, the tall eucalyptus trees whispered to one another.
He looked up to the single window of the learning room. When he was eight years old, he had spent twenty consecutive days there, with an interior shutter locked across that window.
Sensory deprivation focuses thought, clears the mind. That is the theory behind the dark, silent, empty learning room.
Mitch’s father, Daniel, answered the doorbell. At sixty-one, he remained a strikingly good-looking man, still in possession of all his hair, though it had turned white.
Perhaps because his features were so pleasingly bold—perfect features if he had wished to be a stage actor—his teeth seemed too small. They were his natural teeth, every one. He was a stickler for dental hygiene. Laser-whitened, they dazzled, but they looked small, like rows of white-corn kernels in a cob.
Blinking with surprise that was a degree too theatrical, he said, “Mitch. Katherine never told me you called.”
Katherine was Mitch’s mother.
“I didn’t,” Mitch admitted. “I hoped it would be all right if I just stopped by.”
“More often than not, I’d be occupied with one damn obligation or another, and you’d be out of luck. But tonight I’m free.”
“Good.”
“Though I did expect to do a few hours of reading.”
“I can’t stay long,” Mitch assured him.
The children of Daniel and Katherine Rafferty, all now adults, understood that, in respect for their parents’ privacy, they were to schedule their visits and avoid impromptu drop-ins.
Stepping back from the door, his father said, “Come in, then.”
In the foyer, with its white-marble floor, Mitch looked left and right at an infinity of Mitches, echo reflections in two large facing mirrors with stainless-steel frames.
He asked, “Is Kathy here?”
“Girls’ night out,” his father said. “She and Donna Watson and that Robinson woman are off to a show or something.”
“I’d hoped to see her.”
“They’ll be late,” his father said, closing the door. “They’re always late. They chatter at each other all evening, and when they pull into the driveway, they’re still chattering. Do you know the Robinson woman?”
“No. This is the first I’ve heard of her.”
“She’s annoying,” his father said. “I don’t understand why Katherine enjoys her company. She’s a mathematician.”
“I didn’t know mathematicians annoyed you.”
“This one does.”
Mitch’s parents were both doctors of behavioral psychology, tenured professors at UCI. Those in their social circle were mostly from what academic types recently had begun to call the human sciences, largely to avoid the term soft sciences. Among that crowd, a mathematician might annoy like a stone in a shoe.
“I just fixed a Scotch and soda,” his father said. “Would you like something?”
“No thank you, sir.”
“Did you just sir me?”
“I’m sorry, Daniel.”
“Mere biological relationship—”
“—should not confer social status,” Mitch finished.
The five Rafferty children, on their thirteenth birthdays, had been expected to stop calling their parents Mom and Dad, and to begin using first names. Mitch’s mother, Katherine, preferred to be called Kathy, but his father would not abide Danny instead of Daniel.
As a young man, Dr. Daniel Rafferty had held strong views about proper child-rearing. Kathy had no firm opinions on the subject, but she had been intrigued by Daniel’s unconventional theories and curious to see if they would prove successful.
For a moment, Mitch and Daniel stood in the foyer, and Daniel seemed unsure how to proceed, but then he said, “Come see what I just bought.”
They crossed a large living room furnished with stainless-steel-and-glass tables, gray leather sofas, and black chairs. The art works were black-and-white, some with a single line or block of color: here a rectangle of blue, here a square of teal, here two chevrons of mustard yellow.
Daniel Rafferty’s shoes struck hard sounds from the Santos-mahogany floor. Mitch followed as quietly as a haunting spirit.
In the study, pointing to an object on the desk, Daniel said, “This is the nicest piece of shit in my collection.”
17
The study decor matched the living room, with lighted display shelves that presented a collection of polished stone spheres.
Alone on the desk, cupped in an ornamental bronze stand, the newest sphere had a diameter greater than a baseball. Scarlet veins speckled with yellow swirled through a rich coppery brown.
To the uninformed it might have appeared to be a piece of exotic granite, ground and polished to bring out its beauty. In fact it was dinosaur dung, which time and pressure had petrified into stone.
“Mineral analysis confirms that it came from a carnivore,” said Mitch’s father.
“Tyrannosaurus?”
“The size of the entire stool deposit suggests something smaller than a T. rex.”
“Gorgosaurus?”
“If it had been found in Canada, dating to the Upper Cretaceous, then perhaps a gorgosaurus. But the deposit was found in Colorado.”
“Upper Jurassic?” Mitch asked.
“Yes. So it’s probably a ceratosaurus dropping.”
As his father picked up a glass of Scotch and soda from the desk, Mitch went to the display shelves.
He said, “I gave Connie a call a few nights ago.”
Connie was his oldest sister, thirty-one. She lived in Chicago.
“Is she still drudging away in that bakery?” his father asked.
“Yes, but she owns it now.”
“Are you serious? Yes, of course. It’s typical. If she puts one foot in a tar pit, she’ll never back up, just flail forward.”
“She says she’s having a good time.”
“That’s what she would say, no matter what.”
Connie had earned a master’s degree in political science before she had jumped off the plank into an ocean of entrepreneurship. Some were mystified by this sea change in her, but Mitch understood it.
The collection of polished dinosaur-dung spheres had grown since he had last seen it. “How many do you have now, Daniel?”
“Seventy-three. I’ve got leads on four brilliant specimens.”
Some spheres were only two inches in diameter. The largest were as big as bowling balls.
The colors tended toward browns, golds, and coppers, for the obvious reason; however, every hue, even blue, lustered under the display lights. Most exhibited speckled patterns; actual veining was rare.
“I talked to Megan the same evening,” Mitch said.
Megan, twenty-nine, had the highest IQ in a family of high IQs. Each of the Rafferty kids had been tested three times: the week of their ninth, thirteenth, and seventeenth birthdays.
After her sophomore year, Megan had dropped out of college. She lived in Atlanta and operated a thriving dog-grooming business, both a shop and a mobile service.
“She called at Easter, asked how many eggs we dyed,” Mitch’s father said. “I assume she thought that was funny. Katherine and I were just relieved that she didn’t announce she was pregnant.”
Megan had married Carmine Maffuci, a mason with hands the size of dinner plates. Daniel and Kathy felt that she had settled for a husband beneath her station, intellectually. They expected that she would realize her error and divorce him—if children didn’t arrive first to complicate the situation.
Mitch liked Carmine. The guy had a sweet nature, an infectious laugh, and a tattoo of Tweety Bird on his right biceps.
“This one looks like porphyry,” he said, pointing to a dung specimen with a purple-red groundmass and flecks of something th
at resembled feldspar.
He had also recently spoken to his youngest sister, Portia, but he did not mention her because he didn’t want to start an argument.
Freshening his Scotch and soda at the corner wet bar, Daniel said, “Anson had us to dinner two nights ago.”
Anson, Mitch’s only brother, at thirty-three the oldest of the siblings, was the most dutiful to Daniel and Kathy.
In fairness to Mitch and his sisters, Anson had long been his parents’ favorite, and he had never been rebuffed. It was easier to be a dutiful child when your enthusiasms were not analyzed for signs of psychological maladjustment and when your invitations were not met with either gimlet-eyed suspicion or impatience.
In fairness to Anson, he had earned his status by fulfilling his parents’ expectations. He had proved, as had none of the others, that Daniel’s child-rearing theories could bear fruit.
Top of his class in high school, star quarterback, he declined football scholarships. Instead he accepted those offered only in respect of the excellence of his mind.
The academic world was a chicken yard and Anson a fox. He did not merely absorb learning but devoured it with the appetite of an insatiable carnivore. He earned his bachelor’s degree in two years, a master’s in one, and had a Ph.D. at the age of twenty-three.
Anson was neither resented by his siblings nor in any slightest way alienated from them. On the contrary, if Mitch and his sisters had taken a secret vote for their favorite in the family, all four of their ballots would have been marked for their older brother.
His good heart and natural grace had allowed Anson to please his parents without becoming like them. This achievement seemed no less impressive than if nineteenth-century scientists, with nothing but steam power and primitive voltaic cells, had sent astronauts to the moon.
“Anson just signed a major consulting contract with China,” Daniel said.
Brontosaurus, diplodocus, brachiosaurus, iguanodon, moschops, stegosaurus, triceratops, and other droppings were labeled by engraving on the bronze stands that held the spheres.
“He’ll be working with the minister of trade,” said Daniel.
Mitch didn’t know whether petrified stool could be analyzed so precisely as to identify the particular dinosaur species or genus. Perhaps his father had arrived at these labels by the application of theories with little or no hard science supporting them.
In certain areas of intellectual inquiry where absolute answers could not be defended, Daniel embraced them anyway.
“And directly with the minister of education,” Daniel said.
Anson’s success had long been used to goad Mitch to consider a career more ambitious than his current work, but the jabs never broke the skin of his psyche. He admired Anson but didn’t envy him.
As Daniel prodded with another of Anson’s achievements, Mitch checked his wristwatch, certain that he would shortly have to leave to take the kidnapper’s call in privacy. But the time was only 5:42.
He felt as if he had been in the house at least twenty minutes, but the truth was seven.
“Do you have an engagement?” Daniel asked.
Mitch detected a hopeful note in his father’s voice, but he did not resent it. Long ago he had realized that an emotion as bitter and powerful as resentment was inappropriate in this relationship.
Author of thirteen ponderous books, Daniel believed himself to be a giant of psychology, a man of such iron principles and steely convictions that he was a rock in the river of contemporary American intellectualism, around which lesser minds washed to obscurity.
Mitch knew beyond doubt that his old man was not a rock. Daniel was a fleeting shadow on that river, riding the surface, neither agitating nor smoothing the currents.
If Mitch had nurtured resentment toward such an ephemeral man, he would have made himself crazier than Captain Ahab in perpetual pursuit of the white whale.
Throughout their childhood, Anson had counseled Mitch and his sisters against anger, urging patience, teaching the value of humor as defense against their father’s unconscious inhumanity. And now Daniel inspired in Mitch nothing but indifference and impatience.
The day Mitch had left home to share an apartment with Jason Osteen, Anson had told him that having put anger behind himself, he would eventually come to pity their old man. He had not believed it, and thus far he had advanced no further than grudging forbearance.
“Yes,” he said, “I have an engagement. I should be going.”
Regarding his son with the keen interest that twenty years ago would have intimidated Mitch, Daniel said, “What was this all about?”
Whatever Holly’s kidnappers intended for Mitch, his chances of surviving it might not be high. The thought had crossed his mind that this might be the last chance he had to see his parents.
Unable to reveal his plight, he said, “I came to see Kathy. Maybe I’ll come back tomorrow.”
“Came to see her about what?”
A child can love a mother who has no capacity to love him in return, but in time, he realizes that he is pouring his affection not on fertile ground but on rock, where nothing can be grown. A child might then spend a life defined by settled anger or by self-pity.
If the mother is not a monster, if she is instead emotionally disconnected and self-absorbed, and if she is not an active tormentor but a passive observer in the home, her child has a third option. He can choose to grant her mercy without pardon, and find compassion for her in recognition that her stunted emotional development denies her the fullest enjoyment of life.
For all her academic achievements, Kathy was clueless about the needs of children and the bonds of motherhood. She believed in the cause-and-effect principle of human interaction, the need to reward desired behavior, but the rewards were always materialistic.
She believed in the perfectibility of humanity. She felt that children should be raised according to a system from which one did not deviate and with which one could ensure they would be civilized.
She did not specialize in that area of psychology. Consequently, she might not have become a mother if she hadn’t met a man with firm theories of child development and with a system to apply them.
Because Mitch would not have life without his mother and because her cluelessness did not encompass malice, she inspired a tenderness that was not love or even affection. It was instead a sad regard for her congenital incapacity for sentiment. This tenderness had nearly ripened into the pity that he withheld from his father.
“It’s nothing important,” Mitch said. “It’ll keep.”
“I can give her a message,” Daniel said, following Mitch across the living room.
“No message. I was nearby, so I just dropped in to say hello.”
Because such a breach of family etiquette had never happened previously, Daniel remained unconvinced. “Something’s on your mind.”
Mitch wanted to say Maybe a week of sensory deprivation in the learning room will squeeze it out of me.
Instead he smiled and said, “I’m fine. Everything’s fine.”
Although he had little insight into the human heart, Daniel had a bloodhound’s nose for threats of a financial nature. “If it’s money problems, you know our position on that.”
“I didn’t come for a loan,” Mitch assured him.
“In every species of animal, the primary obligation of parents is to teach self-sufficiency to their offspring. The prey must learn evasion, and the predator must learn to hunt.”
Opening the door, Mitch said, “I’m a self-sufficient predator, Daniel.”
“Good. I’m glad to hear that.”
He favored Mitch with a smile in which his small supernaturally white teeth appeared to have been sharpened since last he revealed them.
Even to deflect his father’s suspicions, Mitch could not summon a smile this time.
“Parasitism,” Daniel said, “isn’t natural to Homo sapiens or to any species of mammal.”
Beaver Cleaver would never have
heard that line from his dad.
Stepping out of the house, Mitch said, “Tell Kathy I said hi.”
“She’ll be late. They’re always late when the Robinson woman joins the pack.”
“Mathematicians,” Mitch said scornfully.
“Especially this one.”
Mitch pulled the door shut. Several steps from the house, he stopped, turned, and studied the place perhaps for the last time.
He had not only lived here but had also been home-schooled here from first grade through twelfth. More hours of his life had been spent in this house than out of it.
As always, his gaze drifted to that certain second-story window, boarded over on the inside. The learning room.
With no children at home any longer, what did they use that high chamber for?
Because the front walk curved away from the house instead of leading straight to the street, when Mitch lowered his attention from the second floor, he faced not the door but the sidelight. Through those French panes, he saw his father.
Daniel stood at one of the big steel-framed foyer mirrors, apparently considering his appearance. He smoothed his white hair with one hand. He wiped at the corners of his mouth.
Although he felt like a Peeping Tom, Mitch could not look away.
As a child, he had believed there were secrets about his parents that would free him if he were able to learn them. Daniel and Kathy were a guarded pair, however, as discreet as silverfish.
In the foyer now, Daniel pinched his left cheek between thumb and forefinger, and then his right, as if to tweak some color into them.
Mitch suspected that his visit had already more than half faded from his father’s mind, now that the threat of a loan request had been lifted.
In the foyer, Daniel turned sideways to the mirror, as though taking pride in the depth of his chest, the slimness of his waist.
How easy to imagine that between the facing mirrors, his father did not cast an infinity of echo reflections, as Mitch had done, and that the single likeness of him possessed so little substance that, to any eye but his own, it would appear as transparent as the image of a spook.
18
At 5:50, only fifteen minutes after he had arrived at Daniel and Kathy’s house, Mitch drove away. He turned the corner and traveled a quick block and a half.
Perhaps two hours of daylight remained. He could easily have detected a tail if one had pursued him.
He pulled the Honda into the empty parking lot at a church.
A forbidding brick facade, fractured eyes of multicolored glass somber with no current inner light, rose to a steeple that gouged the sky and cast a hard shadow across the blacktop.
His father’s fear had been unfounded. Mitch had not intended to ask for money.