Hey Nostradamus! (20 page)

“Meaning?”

“Reg, Jason and I once discussed this. Sometimes I think God is like weather-you may not like the weather, but it has nothing to do with you. You just happen to be there. Deal with it. Sadness and grief are part of being human and always will be. Who would I be to fix that?”

“I forget that sometimes. Me, of all people. I take things too personally.” He went quiet again, then: “How are the boys?”

“They're downstairs, wasted on sugar. Kelly from next door gave them KitKats, and I could just throttle the woman.”

Reg was fishing here. “Reg,” I asked, “would you like to come over for dinner? It's five o'clock already.” He paused just long enough to make a dinnertime call seem casual. And
so he's coming tonight for dinner, around eight, and I just heard one of the twins crying downstairs…

Saturday afternoon 6:30

Sometimes I think the only way to deal with turbocharged kids is to give them even more sugar and lock them in a room with a TV set. As I know zilch about kids, this is my first (and last) means of coping, and it seems to work just fine.

I was setting the table when I heard a cartoon bird character on the TV squawk-and suddenly I was back on my first official date with Jason. I thought I'd jot it down here quickly.

The day after we met, Jason and I were headed to look at birds in the pet shop at Park Royal-he was thinking of buying a pair of sulfur-crested cockatiels-but in the store I had a rapid-onset itching fit, allergies, and I had to get some cortisone for my elbows. I work as a court stenographer and am somewhat in public all day, so my skin needs to be in relatively okay shape, and lately my eczema has been a real problem.

So we were standing at the counter at London Drugs when I burst into tears. Jason asked me what was wrong, and I told the truth, which was that it was the most unromantic beginning of a date with the most lovable guy I'd ever met. He told me I was being silly, and gave me our first kiss, right there in line-up.

He didn't get any birds, but he did buy me three small, anatomically correct rubber frogs, the size of canapés, who soon became Froggles, Walter and Benihana, three more characters for our imaginary universe.

I must be coming across as a basket case here. Frogs and giraffes and…Well, we all create our private worlds between us, don't we? Most couples I know have an insider's secret language, even if it's just their special nicknames for the salt and pepper shakers. After a while, our characters were so finely honed that they could have had their own theme parks in Japan, Europe and the U.S. Sunbelt, as well as merchandise outlets in the malls. After his life of silence, I think that our characters were Jason's liberation.

And now I think I have to start preparing dinner. God bless Barb's copper-bottomed pots and her spice rack of the gods.

Saturday night 10:30

Okay, Barb's housekeeper will be in at 8:30 tomorrow to clean up the battlefield. I really ought to have known better than to put the twins at the same table as Reg, who's too old and too set in his ways to be comfortable around young children. He tried to keep it together for my sake, but the twins tonight would have worn out an East German ladies' weight-lifting coach circa 1971. They were
monsters
. In the end I caved in and gave them Jell-O, then packed them off to watch TV. Barb is going to have my head on a block for teaching them such bad habits.

The good part was that once the kids were bundled off, Reg relaxed and got a bit drunk and picked away at his fettuccine. Jason always told me Reg never drank, but then Jason didn't see his father for so many years…. In any event, Reg drank white wine, not red, and then tested my
grounding in reality by bringing out a
cigarette
and smoking it as if he'd been born to the task.

“Smoking now?”

“Might as well. Always wondered what it was like.”

“What is it like?”

He chuckled. “Addictive.”

“There you go.”

I bummed a cigarette from him and smoked for the first time in twenty years and got the nicotine dizzies. I felt like a schoolgirl. When you conspire with someone like Reg, you feel as if you're committing one serious transgression.

Soon enough the conversation turned to Reg's sorrow about his lost boys-Kent the minor deity and his awful senseless death, and then Jason, but after three months there's simply no new ground to cover. I had the feeling that what we were discussing tonight is almost exactly what we'll be discussing in a decade.

Reg became morose. “I just don't understand-the most wretched people in this world prosper, while the innocent and the devout get only suffering.”

“Reg, you can spend all night-and the rest of your life, for that matter-looking for some little equation that makes it all equate, but I don't think that equation exists. The world is the world. All you can change is the way you deal with what's thrown your way.”

Reg sloshed around the last bit of wine in his glass, then knocked it back. “But it's hard.”

“It is, Reg.”

He looked so damn sad. Jason quite resembles his father; I almost wonder if they'd be analogs of each other, but tonight there was something new in his face. “Reg…?”

“Yes, Heather.”

“Do you ever have doubts about…the things you believe in?”

He looked up from his glass. “If you'd asked me that a decade ago, I'd have turned purple and cast you out of my house-or whatever house we were in. I'd have seen you as a corrupting influence. I'd have scorned you. But here I am now, and all I can do is say
yes
, which doesn't even burn or sting. I feel so heavy, I feel like barbells. I feel like I just want to melt into the planet, like a boulder in a swamp, and be done with everything.”

“Reg, I'm going to tell you a story, okay?”

“A story? Sure. What about?”

I couldn't believe I was saying the words, but here I was. “About something stupid and crazy I did last week. I haven't told anyone about it, and if I don't tell someone I'm going to explode. Will you listen?”

“You always listen to me.”

I twiddled a noodle coated with cold Parmesan cheese, and said, “Last week I phoned Chris, down in California.”

“He's a good boy.”

“He is.”

“Why did you call?”

“I wanted to-
needed
to-ask him a favor.”

“What was it?”

“I asked him to give me the names and addresses of the people who made the closest match to Jason in the facial profiling index.”

“And?”

“And…there was this one guy who lives in South Carolina, named Terry, who's about seventy-five years
old, and then there was this other guy, Paul, who lives down in Beaverton, Oregon, near Portland. A suburb.”

“Go on.”

“Well, it turns out this Paul guy has a long but minor record-a few stolen cars-and he got caught fencing memory chips in northern California.”

“You went down there to meet him, didn't you?”

 

 

Oh, Heather, you knew it wouldn't be a good thing
.

I drove down I-5 to Beaverton, an eight-hour trip in migraine-white sun, my sunglasses forgotten back on the kitchen counter. In Washington state my body started to unravel: my elbows began crusting with eczema just north of Seattle; by the time I reached Olympia, I felt as if my arms were caked in dried mud. I cried most of the way down-I wasn't a pretty picture. People who drove past me and saw me at the wheel must have said to themselves,
Boy, sometimes life is rough,
and they'd be glad they weren't me.

I found a chain motel on the outskirts of Portland and spent an hour in a scratchy-bottomed bathtub, listening to teenagers party one room over. I was trying to rinse the road trip out of my body, as well as build up the courage to go knocking on this Paul guy's door. I was expecting him to inhabit a mobile home that listed on three wheels, with a one-eyed pit bull and a girlfriend armed with a baseball bat and incisors loaded with vinegar-and this was pretty close. I mean,
what
was I
thinking
? I'm just this broad who comes out of nowhere, who knocks on this guy's flaking red-painted front door in the dead-yellow-lawn part of town at 9:45 at night. When the door opened, I was struck dumb, because there before me was Jason-but
not
Jason-hair too
dark, maybe a few years older, and with bigger eyebrows, but it seemed like his essence was there.

“Uh, can I help you?
Ma'am?
”

I sniffled. I hadn't planned for this moment, and the resemblance to Jason stopped me cold, even though it was the reason for my mission.

He said, “Okay. I know what this is. You're Alex's cupcake looking to get his leaf blower back. Well, tell that cheap bastard that until I see my cooler chest and all the beer that was in it, he's not gonna see his leaf blower.” Paul's voice was higher than Jason's; no similarity there.

“I-”

“Huh? What?”

“I don't know anybody named Alex.”

“Okay, then, lady, who are you? Because I've got
Jurassic Park III
on pause, and if I start watching it again right now, I'll have just enough time to finish before Sheila gets back from Tae Bo.”

“I'm Heather.”

Paul looked back at the TV and zapped it off with the remote.

“Heather, do I know you or something? Wait-are you Sheila's crazy half-sister? Just what I need. She said you were in Texas for good.”

I couldn't speak, because I was looking at Jason hidden somewhere not far beneath Paul's bone structure.

He said, “So what's the score here? I stopped dealing years ago, so don't even try me there. And if you're here for money, you're at the wrong place.”

“I'm not here for anything, Paul. I'm not.”

“Yeah. Right.”

“No-” I hadn't given this part any real thought, or rather, I'd assumed it would be magic and not need any planning.

“I'm waiting.”

I said, “My boyfriend's been missing for three months now, and I don't know what I'm going to do, I miss him so much, and I'm so desperate, and I was able to tap into the government's database of criminal faces, so I did, and I found yours, because you're the one closest to him, and I came down here to-” I lost it here.

“You
what
?”

I was crying and looking at the ground where the dead yellow lawn met the concrete. “I came here to see if you were like him.”

“Are you out of your tree, lady?”

“I'm not ‘lady.' My name is Heather.”

“
Heather,
are you out of your tree?”

I was choking and even more of a mess.

“Heather, sit down. Jesus.”

I sat down. He leaned against the railing and lit up a cigarette the same way Jason did. “You can really do that-just go into a computer and find the person who looks like you?”

I honked my nose. “Welcome to the future. Yes. You can.”

“
Whoa
.” He spent a moment obviously contemplating the social ramifications of analogs. I was realizing what a mistake this had been.

“So,” he said, “do I?”

“Do you what?”

“Look like him. Your boyfriend.”

My body, drained of stress, went limp. I was already driving back up the coast in my head. “Yeah. Pretty much. Not quite twins, but with different hair, three months of dieting, and some tweezers, you could pull it off.”

“Huh.”

“I should go.”

“No. Don't. I'll get you a beer.”

“I'm driving.”

“So?”

I didn't argue. Paul went into the house and brought me back a can of something and opened it for me. Chivalry. To be honest, I wanted to see his face again. He'd had acne as a teenager, he'd spent too much time in the sun, he had twenty extra pounds, and he had a Celtic cross tattooed on his left shoulder, but it was all mesmerizingly Jason-ish.

“He dumped you?”

“
No
.”

“Sorry. I've gotta ask these things.”

We looked at each other.

“So tell me where it is you're supposed to go to find your twin?”

“Your analog.”

“Huh?”

“That's what you are. You're an analog of my boyfriend.”

“So where do I go to find my analog?”

“You don't. I just fluked out. I have a friend of a friend who works in the place where the facial data's stored.” He sat down beside me-too close beside me-on the crumbling concrete front steps. He touched the small of my back and I jumped out of my skin, at which point a black martial-artsy club smacked him on his forehead. It was Sheila.

“You stinking son of a dog-”

“Sheila-this isn't what it looks like.”

I ran for my car, and luckily Sheila ignored me. Paul still must have a goose egg on his forehead, and I doubt Sheila's ever going to believe his story. On the other hand, Reg thought it was kind of funny, which made me feel better.