again, as had happened so many times in the last two months, his mind betrayed him with a vision of the nails and his wife and son.
He watched a neighbor’s cat licking its rear foot in a patch of sunlight on the courtyard bricks.
His felt his heart laboring and he admitted to himself that telling this story was far more difficult than he had thought it would be. Where he had hoped to find some moments of fond memory, he found the awful truth instead. The truth he thought would set him free.
Then Stromsoe admitted another truth to himself – he was feeling worse each day, feeling farther from shore. It was like swimming against a tide. Wasn’t he supposed to get closer?
He was astonished again, almost to the point of disbelief, that he would never see Hallie or Billy as they were, only as they had ended.
God put them there for reasons we don’t understand.
‘Maybe we should take a walk on the beach while we talk,’ said Susan.
They came to the ocean at Fifty-second Street and turned south. The sun was caught in the clouds above Catalina Island like an orange suspended in gauze. The stiff breeze dried Stromsoe’s left eyelid and the pins in his legs felt creaky as old door hinges. The skin graft on his left breast tended to tighten in the cool evenings. He pulled up his coat collar and slipped on his sunglasses.
He told Susan about taking Hallie into his little college apartment in Fullerton and getting her off the drugs. And about how he had escorted her into court to testify in Mike’s robbery trial, traded mad dog stares with Tavarez, how Mike’s mother sobbed after the sentencing, and how Mike nodded to them – a courtly, emotionless nod – as he was led back to his cell.
‘Do you mind?’ Susan asked, taking a small digital camera from the pocket of her jacket.
‘Okay.’
She set her notebook in the sand with the pen clipped to the rings, and started snapping pictures. ‘I’d like some candids of you and Hallie and Billy too. From your home.’
‘Okay,’ he said.
Okay, because their story must be told and their pictures must be seen. Okay, because Tavarez can’t take away their stories or their pictures. Or my memories. Ever.
‘I know it hurts,’ said Susan, ‘but face the sun, will you? It lights your face beautifully.’
He faced the sun, his right eye shuddering with the brightness and his left eye registering nothing at all. Susan circled him, clicking away. He turned to face her and he began talking about their wedding and their life while he went through the Sheriff’s Academy, about their attempts to have a child and the doctors and tests and doctors and tests and the sudden presence of another life inside Hallie, detected by a drugstore pregnancy test on what was probably the happiest day of their life together until then.
Billy.
They walked on, then stopped to watch the sun dissolve into an ocean of dark metallic blue. To Stromsoe none of it looked like it used to. He wondered if this would be the last time he’d walk this beach. That would be okay. That’s why he listed the house for sale. The world was large. A new home can be a new life.
‘When Mike ordered the bomb, was it intended for Hallie and Billy, or just you?’
‘Just me.’
‘Why does he hate you so much?’
‘I loved Hallie and spent my life trying to put him in a cage.’
There was Ofelia too, and what happened to her, but that was not something he could tell a reporter.
‘You accomplished both,’ she said. ‘You won.’
Stromsoe said nothing.
They started back across the sand toward the houses. Stromsoe looked at the beachfront windows, copper in the fading light.
‘Thanks for everything,’ she said. ‘For telling me your story. I know it hurt.’
‘It helped too.’
‘If you need a friend, I’ll be it,’ said Susan Doss.
‘Oh?’ He glanced at her and saw that she was looking down. ‘I appreciate that. I really do.’
‘What I mean is, this is me. This is what I look like and this is what I am. And I think you’re wonderful and brave and loyal and I’d be proud to be your friend. Maybe more. I’m sorry to be clumsy and insensitive. I think my moment is right now and if it passes I’ll never see you again.’
He looked at her, not knowing what to say.
‘Plus, I get four weeks’ paid vacation, great medical, and good retirement. I’ve got good teeth, strong legs, and an iron stomach. I’m relatively low maintenance.’
He smiled.
‘And I only look clean-cut.’
‘I can’t.’
They came to the street and headed toward Stromsoe’s house.
‘I talk too much at the wrong time,’ she said. ‘It’s a problem.’
‘Hallie was the same way.’
‘You’re a beautiful man.’
‘You’re a beautiful woman but I can’t.’
‘I understand, Matt.’
Susan lightly held his arm until they came to the house. She waited in the living room while Stromsoe chose a framed picture from the spare bedroom wall: Hallie, Billy, and him on the beach, not far from where he had just watched the sun go down, smiling back at the stranger they’d asked to take the shot.
She looked at the picture then at Stromsoe. ‘You’ll find all this again. Somewhere, someday.’
He wanted to tell her it was impossible, but saw no reason to belittle her opinion.
One thing Stromsoe knew for certain about life was that things only happen once.
Later that night he packed and loaded the car. It didn’t hold much, but he got his bare necessities, the bag with Hallie’s jewelry, and the one with Billy’s things.
He cooked canned stew and drank and limped through the house again as the memories collided with one another and the waves roared then hissed against the beach.
He signed a power-of-attorney form down-loaded from the Web and left it on the kitchen table with a check for five thousand dollars, made out to Dan Birch.
He’d call Dan from wherever he was tomorrow, explain the situation.
