he doesn’t. A short, frustrated intake of breath: “Okay. Anyway. Your phone’s here. Call me. I’m home.”
Dial tone. Silence. Jack closes his eyes again. Cell phone. Fuck. Goddamn it. Shit.
He imagines the Hope Ranch house, sun through the French doors, Tory standing in the middle of the cavernous ballroom, holding Jack’s cheap Nokia like it’s some kind of radioactive waste, his eyes dead, pretty and mean in the way married money will spoil the flesh and rot the soul. When Tory’s short fuse is lit, the slender muscles of his neck will tighten and relax, tighten and relax.
Wondering about Jack’s fucking phone.
Jack could have left it. That’s possible. Not yesterday, but Tuesday, when he was last up there, helping Tory clean out the Montecito garage before the old house went on the market. But two days had passed. Tory is right. It’s inconceivable Jack wouldn’t know his phone was gone.
A dull, tingling, vacant rolling dread gathers in Jack’s chest, slow crawling, connected to nothing, borne of the boy’s unknown, the boy’s unknowable, and the immutable yearning for acceptance by that which can never give it. Tory was Jack’s event horizon, and, once inside his gravitational pull, falling into the black hole was a certainty. That they have remained friends is as baffling to Jack as the compressed planes of his halved vision. And what has happened with Hannah is so primal that Jack knows, has known from the beginning, it would, must, inevitably catalyze a spectacular meltdown.
Jack doesn’t, however, regret what he’s done.
His mind calculates. If he’d left the phone at Tory’s on Tuesday, not today after fucking Hannah (twice) at noon and then telling her the affair was over—if he’d really left the phone on Tuesday while cleaning the old house and discovered it missing when he got back to L.A. and didn’t know where it was or where he’d left it and wasn’t patient enough to retrace his steps since he was, say, waiting for a call from his agent—couldn’t Jack simply have replaced it? Visit a T-Mobile store, buy a new calling plan, get the free RAZR. After all, Jack had been talking about giving Verizon the shitcan for months because he kept losing the signal on Olympic between Roxbury and McCarthy Vista, a vortex of wireless cross-cancellation so frustrating that a few of Jack’s other actor friends had stopped driving the Olympic corridor altogether.
Jack has a new phone. Which is why he didn’t realize (or care) that the old one was at Tory’s. Which explains everything except why it was in the master bedroom. Well, Rosario could have found it and put it there, not knowing whose it was, which works, until Tory asks Rosario—
• or Jack could just talk to Hannah and she—
• no, talking to Hannah would—
• talking to Hannah wouldn’t—
• talking with Hannah, Jesus—
• but, nevertheless, the thing with the new phone is solid. Who the hell knows how it got upstairs into the bedroom (if that was, in fact, where Tory found it)? Jack will go out now and get a new one, go right to the store, now, and get a new one—
• or just go—
• go—
• gone.
And Tory? Tory, after racking the cordless house phone in its cradle, will cross his cavernous foyer and hurry up his wide stone staircase, past the broken remains of Jack’s Nokia along the baseboard of the upstairs hallway not far from the dent in the hand-trowelled plaster where it hit and exploded after Tory fastballed it from the bedroom, their grand white master bedroom, where everything is slightly in disarray, women’s clothes scattered, bed unmade, the single golf tee Jack missed and Tory will find, under the bed, behind the corner of the duvet.
He’ll walk to a carved set of double doors salvaged from some foreclosed Oaxacan hacienda, and open them, to stare inside at the Italian marble tile tomb his wife modestly calls their master bathroom. Faint pink tendrils swirl in the tepid water of the massive tub each time another drop plummets from the flat-mouthed Italian spigot.
And like a commuter looking at a traffic accident from a passing car, Tory’s expression will never change. He’ll pull the tub drain, use the fluffy white bath towels to wipe the basin, drop the same towels on the marble floor and mop up the motley pattern of overlapping, bloody-wet shoeprints the EMTs left in the course of their recent visit, using his foot to push the towels around.
On the antique dresser is the teak brush from Fiji that Tory’s mother gave him for his tenth birthday. Tory will brush his hair, worried that it seems thinner than yesterday, possibly irritated by the prospect of early male pattern baldness when Jack’s hair is, no question, healthier and thicker and in no danger of leaving. Tory will brush his hair serenaded by the vacant thrum of the tub draining.
Jack, however, will only know that Tory called.
one
The merciless heat.
The whine of tires on asphalt, growing louder, louder, louder, loud.
A blue belly lizard charges up out of a rivulet creasing the pebbles of the shoulder, skitters to the broken line of white paint that splits the black road in two. It cranes its neck, head jerking up and down, jowls flaring, its tiny heart pumping wildly, its eyes narrow slits of fierce darkness and abject fear. The girl who sent the lizard running walks past, feet scuffing pebbles, her path taking her tight along the shoulder of the road. She doesn’t see the lizard. She’s fourteen, overheated, not really pretty yet, sundress, spandex, Day-Glo zinc oxide striped on her nose and cheeks like war paint.
Her icy blue eyes squint to study the horizon, hopeful, behind egg-shaped sunglasses. The heat comes up through the soles of her Converse All-Stars and sears her feet. She shifts the small Hello Kitty backpack to her other shoulder and takes a swallow from her big bottle of purified water.
Mechanical bumblebee sounds buzz from her backpack. Reaching to a side pocket and finding a flip phone, she has to cup her hand and shade the screen to read the text:
heyyyysup?
The salutation and question. Small fingers flick across the keypad of the phone and text back:
ssdd.
Same stuff, different day.
She senses the car behind her before she hears it. She turns around, legs still pushing her east.
What seems only a mirage—a dazzling black cartoon car—suddenly materializes out of the shimmering puddle of heat distortion on the highway horizon and hovers over it, growing quickly larger. Blaring rock-and-roll music from open windows, the car, a Buick sedan, races forward, at, then directly over and past, the blue belly, its life spared by a miracle of time and place.
The lizard tumbles wildly in the wake of the car, fifty, sixty feet down-highway. Its tail separates from its body, a useless tactic of survival that here only serves to cheat the creature of future mobility, and probably hasten its surrender to the food chain.
Thumb out, the girl watches the Buick whip past her, tossing her hair and dress around. No brake lights, it’s not stopping. She
