Читать книгу The Talker - Mary Sojourner - Страница 10

FAT JACKS

Even with the divorce and all, even with his kid Jacob living on the other side of town most of the time, even with losing his latest job and not finding the new one for five months, Davy was starting to have a few decent moments. Being a night shift Security Engineer wasn’t all that bad. The building was peaceful, the other engineer quiet and friendly. Sophieann didn’t come on till eight, so for three hours he had the place to himself. All he had to do was cruise the building, key in the couple dozen checkpoints and then sit in the tiny office keeping an eye on a computer screen.

Sometimes in the little room with its cool metallic air, the blue-green light of the computer screen, the corners of the room murky and silent, he would pretend he was in a submarine. He would imagine that luminous creatures drifted through the gloom outside and that the red and green and blue lights were signals of their presence. He would hope that they were friendly and not at all hungry. He would tell himself that Safe and Serene Security Systems was a doorway you might see on a re-run of The Twilight Zone, something you might stumble through in a dream.

Spring evenings, he would take his dinner break outside on the marbleized steps. The desert twilight would go pearly. He would stare off into the vastness of the Rio Rialto Office Park, aware that the birds had stopped their sunset noises. No planes would fly overhead and the whine of I-10 would fade clean away. An impossible silence would fall over the city’s edge.

Davy would open his cold yogurt soup or sesame spinach wrap or Canton chili noodles. He was taking a course in vegetarian gourmet cuisine, as his ex-wife’s shrink had suggested. “Something new,” the shrink and Lisa had said. “A way to take care of yourself. A way to move on.”

He would take a bite of his dinner and look out past the black wrought iron fence, across an acre of parking lot. Slowly the mass of the abandoned building to the south would begin to shimmer. For less than a minute, the sleek black stone would reflect the twilight. He could imagine he was looking into a great, curved and empty mussel shell. The deep silence would seem not only possible, but necessary, and the building’s transformation reasonable and essential.

It was just that sort of thinking that had lost him his real job as a computer salesman. It was just that sort of thinking that had sent Lisa out the door. And it was just that sort of thinking, she loved to point out, that was causing her to tell her lawyer and the shrink that she didn’t want Davy seeing her kid more than twice a month.

“Mystery building,” she said. “Mystery brain’s more like it. Meaning, Davy, that your brain is a mystery to me and I could care less to solve it. Jacob needs grounding now.”

Davy cared very much to solve the mystery of the building. It was the Inc. That was all that was left of the glittering stone letters on the long side that faced the Interstate. He wondered what they’d taken away. They’d left no clue. They’d removed the letters with the same attention to detail they’d brought to the parking lot, the grounds, the stone and glass of the building and how the desert light fell on it and lured the eye.

One skinny dead tree rose in front of the big smoked-glass doors. They’d set a floodlamp at the base of the tree, planted some lush ground-cover and set sprinklers there. At dusk, breezes stirred the dust and the little tree became a ghost in the cloudy light.

Sometimes Davy walked along the Inc. fence, past the little tree and giant doors, then back to the trimmed Bermuda grass of Safe and Serene. There the fence stretched away to the west. Sighting down the black iron stakes, he watched I-10 shimmer. At sunset, the drivers on the Interstate might think they were looking at a wall of fire. If he could hold onto this job, he might be driving into work some December evening, look over and surprise himself. He might feel the sweet spooky lurch of “Where am I? What’s happening? This might be awful, but it could be new!” It was something to work for.

Lisa hadn’t liked his weird goals. She was about Safety. He was about Surprise. The two of them were Maturity vs. Fun, Planning vs. Spontaneity, What Works vs. Weird. He had seen the words in capital letters when they fought, like chapters in one of the how-to books Lisa tried to get him to read. Of course, it hadn’t been that way at first. Of course, they’d promised each other that wouldn’t happen. Of course, it had. And that was a mystery he couldn’t have cared more to solve. Even if he had a clue.

Nobody seemed to know what mystery or what business-as-usual the Inc. had held, if it had ever held anything or anybody. There was a service entrance to the east, big enough for five eighteen-wheelers to dock. There was a garage for at least another dozen trucks. The parking lot was bigger than all of Villa Encanta, the trailer park Davy lived in. It was always then, right when he was considering the comparative size of the Inc. parking lot and Villa Encanta, that he would feel his gut knot. He would realize he was hanging on the iron fence so tight the metal edges bit into his hand. He knew unfairness and bitter consequence and how the universe was clenched around him, sharp and fixed in concrete as the iron stakes.

He’d been awarded the travel trailer, half the CDs and old tapes, all the National Geographic collection and two plates, bowls, cups, forks, spoons and knives. All that really mattered was that he’d been granted Jacob, every other weekend for forty-eight hours. They would see how things went before Lisa and her lawyer decided about Easter and Xmas and other national holidays. It would depend on whether or not Davy was finally ready to face reality. They would see how the job went. Maybe a few classes at a community college to show he was thinking about the future. The gourmet vegetarian course didn’t count.

Lisa had driven over the morning after they signed the papers. They’d made love for the first time in a year. She’d gone fierce and soft the way he loved, waited till he finished, jumped up and disappeared into the john. She came out glum and naked. While he watched her from the bed, she opened a beer and chugged it down.

“Don’t eat me with your eyes that way,” she said. “You make me feel weird.”

She pulled on her clothes. When she went out the screen door and as usual, didn’t bother to latch it, Davy had figured that was all she wrote. But just as he started to throw back the damp sheet, he’d seen the door open and her hands setting their senile cat, Ray Cooper, on the carpet. By the time Ray C. got his bearings, Lisa’s pick-up was crunching out over the gravel drive.

Davy discussed all this with Sophieann, Security Engineer 1, in those peaceful hours between eight and midnight. “Jacob awarded to me part time?” he said. “Like I was getting some kind of half-ass prize?” They talked about everything, what men want, what women want, marriage and why bother, Sophieann’s arrangement with her boyfriend, Larry the Fake Chicano, and her pure terror at the thought of Larry’s possible departure.

“We don’t have anything solid,” she said, “not even a magazine subscription—or a cat.”

“It doesn’t matter,” Davy said. “Lisa and I started out with all of it, a kid in the oven, one of those Hollywood production weddings, Ray C., who wasn’t senile at the time, and a joint National Geographic subscription. It made no difference.”

“Why’s the cat named Ray C.?” Sophie said. “Not to change the subject.”

“Ray Cooper,” Davy said, “is the best drummer in the British Isles. Lisa and I used to care about stuff like that.”

Sophieann sighed. “Seems like Larry and I don’t agree on much. But he’s got some definitely interesting ideas about things.”

Davy waited. He’d had his fill of Larry’s interesting ideas. There’d been the run-of-the-mill ones like a Jewish left-wing conspiracy being responsible for Larry not being able to find a job. There’d been the entrepreneurial ones like Davy investing in Larry’s chasing UFO sightings in Nevada. Larry would need a truck, a big one, and video equipment and lots of gas money.

Sophieann stared into the computer screen. Her face was eerie and beautiful in the flickering light, her dark hair picking up little festive Christmassy glints. Davy thought of a tropical fish in one of those black light tanks. He liked that he could see her beauty and know that they were strictly on the friendship track. They’d discussed that right off and said how their hearts were tied up at the moment and probably would be for a long time.

“Larry says it’s Mafia in that empty building,” she said.

“No way,” Davy said. “Not in Phoenix.”

“Excuse me,” Sophieann said, “1976? That reporter that got blown up with a car bomb? Larry says The Boys are everywhere. Bullhead City, Lake Havasu, we’re just a hop, skip and a jump. Larry knows.”

“Whaaat,” Davy said. “What does he know. He plays a little poker, he loses a few bucks over in Laughlin. That makes him Senor Juice?”

“Hey,” Sophieann said, “people talk at those tables, they say things, Larry listens. And watch that racist Senor stuff, gringo!”

“Gringo yourself,” Davy said. He was getting sick of chicano Larry and his inside track on things. The guy’s mom’s mom’s mom had come up from Sonora and his dad had been a trucker passing through on his way back home to Iowa. Larry was the kind of dude who stuck a big magnetic Guadalupe on the dashboard of his truck and hung a pair of electric blue fuzzy dice around its neck. He talked constantly about going back to his family in Sonora. And he wore a trucker hat that read Don’t touch my chingaderas. Davy figured the hat was to cover up the fact that Larry’s hairline was the only part of him heading south.

“Peace,” Sophieann said. “But you watch. Next thing you know there’ll be all these snake-eyed guys in great suits around, you get my meaning? You know, where afterwards you’re not sure you really saw them?”

“Sophieann,” Davy said, “you’re straight from Ponca City, Oklahoma. You’re twenty-six. You go to business college days. When did you ever see a Mafia to know one?”

“Movies,” she said. “Not just Al Pacino flicks or The Sopranos. Real documentaries. I feel quite informed on this. You wait and see.”

“What documentaries?”

“On PBS. That building is a tax write-off. They build it, it stands empty, they lose money, they write it off. That was in The Family: Behind the Scenes. That was PBS, Davy. They don’t lie.”

“The Mafia doesn’t pay taxes,” he said. “But I sure will. Lisa’s going to make sure of that.”

“Ah,” Sophieann said, “now it’s getting interesting. Hold that thought. I gotta key in.”

“Jesus, Sophie,” Davy said. “Where’d you learn that? Lisa’s shrink always says, ‘Hold that thought.’ But it’s always only me that’s holding my thoughts.”

“Everybody says it,” she said. “Just hold it. We’ll tear those biotches apart when I get back.”

Bitch hung in the air like a bad smell. A red light flickered on the monitor board where a green light was supposed to be. Davy hit a key and things went back to normal. Bitch. It amazed him that it was one thing if he thought it about Lisa and another if somebody used the word about her. It roused him to a dumb chivalry. It made him want to say, “You don’t understand, you didn’t know her the way I did.” Sometimes he thought he’d seen her with the same goofy magic with which he saw the Inc. In a certain light, at certain times, with his mystery brain.

He never got used to the hour before Lisa dropped Jacob off. It was partly four cups of coffee, partly that no matter what he did with the trailer, it was too small, too bare and too grown-up. They were fixing up a room, he and Jacob, cruising garage sales, checking the toy bins at Goodwill, beginning to cover the walls with Jacob’s drawings, making space for Jacob’s birds. The birds were another story. They were doves. Lots of them. And they were totally invisible to the ordinary, meaning non-Jacob, eye.

Davy set a box of frozen Danish on the shelf. Ray C. scouted it from the floor, but he was cross-eyed and always missed his jump by humiliating inches, so he just sat there, giving Davy long, tragic, visually-impaired looks. That was another draw-back to the trailer. Ray C. was having a last surge of senile and improbable lust. Davy figured the phenomenon was like the old guys he saw around Phoenix, the sagging fellows in their pastel pants and white shoes, their tautly held-together, somewhat younger wives on their arms. He felt that same sorrow and affection for Ray C. that he felt for those old guys. No way he’d kick him out.

Jacob liked to have a second breakfast. They ate whatever he wanted, which was always a raspberry Danish, glass of milk and bag of nacho chips. Davy checked the cupboard. He had enough nacho chips for all of Larry’s mythical Sonoran relatives. He poured himself another cup of coffee and waited for Lisa’s truck to roll in over the gravel.

Two mourning doves on the telephone wires were setting up their liquid ruckus. They made him think of love, of how silky Lisa’s skin could be. Consequently, they made him mad. Besides being consistently late bringing Jacob over, she’d somehow become maddeningly desirable to Davy. Once he’d known it was over, he’d gone from limp disinterest to a steady readiness that tormented him day and night. He called it “The Phantom.”

The Phantom wanted Lisa. It wanted only Lisa. It had demonstrated this on the one mutually unfortunate date Davy had attempted. Her name had been Claire. She’d been nine years younger and she had never encountered an unwilling member before. She’d been the one that cried and Davy’d been the one to console. He hoped it wasn’t going to become a theme. Only The Phantom knew.

He opened the chips and ate one. You could taste the chemicals. The cooking course had taught him that. He closed the bag. The clock jumped one minute. Lisa was an hour late. The doves had shut up and gone wherever doves go in the brutal heat of a Phoenix noon. He called. The answering machine told him she was out, but she did want to know who called and have a nice day and, uh, if it was Brad, would he please meet her at the pool at three. Davy set the receiver gently down. Lisa hated people who hung up without talking. He called back five times and hung up five times. He knew how to change her message from remote. He didn’t do that. He wanted her to hate him and want him. He didn’t want her to think he didn’t have any class.

He heard Jacob before he saw him.

“Davy, Davy, we’re here!”

Davy opened the door. Lisa’s truck was already gone. Jacob stumbled toward him. He wore his little turtle backpack so his hands were free to safely carry the doves’ cardboard box up the steps. The old fake Indian blanket was draped across the top of the box. That was the signal that the doves were in there. Later Jacob and Davy would take them to the side fence for the first time and let them go. You could only do that at sunset. You could only do that when it was almost too dark to see.

“Davy,” Jacob said, “I got tons of them this time. Mom said it was okay to let them loose here.”

Jacob didn’t call Davy “Dad” anymore. Lisa had been working on him. Maybe there was a move in the future, one of those legal kidnappings guys get to live through. Maybe there was even a new candidate for “Dad.” Somebody safe, somebody mature, somebody named Stephen or Charles or Brad.

Davy took the box. It weighed almost nothing. But that was how doves were, Jacob said. You couldn’t hardly feel them because they were almost always flying around in there. And they were gray and that was a light color.

“Davy,” Jacob said, “I’m pretty hungry. I could eat some breakfast now. I caught almost all these doves this morning before Mom even waked up.” He pulled himself up into a chair. “You can put the doves next to me,” he said. “I like to hear them while I eat. They’re not plain ordinary doves, you know. They’re rock doves!”

Davy set the box on the end of the table. Jacob picked up the blanket’s corner and scattered something inside. “It’s their seeds,” he said. “Springtime, you got to give them more than just left-over nacho crumbs.” He tugged the blanket firmly over the box. Ray Cooper cruised hopefully around his chair.

“No way, Ray,” Jacob said. He moved the doves closer and dropped a nacho chip on the floor. “Besides, these birds taste like clouds.”

Next day Sophieann came in late. She sat next to Davey and kept her shades on. “How’d it go with Jacob?”

“Same old, same old,” Davy said. “Unbearably good. And this time, we let the doves go. Lisa hasn’t let him bring them over till now.”

“Sweet,” Sophieann said. She sounded tired and a little sad. “What was it like? Letting them take off?”

“Jacob waits till the sun’s down, till there’s practically no light left in the sky. He says they like gray light. He lifts up the blanket and he talks to them in dove talk. He coos. He really sounds like doves. Then I have to close my eyes because it scares them if a human being is watching. I hear him pull the blanket off the box. He says, ‘You go home now.’ Then he starts to giggle. I have to wait till he says ‘Okay,’ then I can open my eyes.”

“I have to ask,” Sophieann said. “I just have to. Did you see any doves?”

Davy paused and tried to look cosmic. “I did.”

“What? What did they look like?”

“They looked like doves. They were on the telephone wire, in that scraggly palm. There were even a few sitting on my neighbor’s roof.”

“Get out.” Sophieann punched him in the arm. “What happened then?”

“We went in and played checkers. He beat me. I wasn’t even letting him win.”

“That makes two of us,” Sopphieann said and took off her shades. “Put on the desk lamp.”

Her right eye was swollen shut. The skin around it was purple and green. She glared at Davy, then looked down. “Scumbag,” she said. “Sold my CD player. Lost every penny. He doesn’t even have to drive to a casino anymore. There’s a card club in the strip mall. The big man lost three hundred and change and came home and decided I was the reason for his bad luck. I am not a chee-ca-na. I am not one of his people.” She winced. “So I said, ‘Okay man, I’ll talk Spanish.’ And I said, ‘Chinga tu pinche madre’ and he slammed me good.”

“Oh shit,” Davy said. “Real dumb, but real classy.”

Sophieann grinned. “Ouch,” she said. “Whoa, my face hurts. He’s gone. All the way. Took him five minutes to pack. I was grateful we didn’t have a joint magazine subscription—or el gato.”

“Sophieann,” Davy said. He started to say more, but she set her hand on his arm, put her shades back on and stood.

“I’m going to key in,” she said. “When I come back, I want to talk about it. And I want to talk about some other things too. Like why don’t you fight dirty to get Jacob. And why do you let him call you Davy? Your name is Dad, your name is David Jacob Martin. Like mine is Sophieann Elizabeth Jones, not puta or mama or you dumb broad. It’s time we didn’t forget that!” She bowed. Davy applauded.

“How about if I go out for donuts while you’re gone?” Davy said. Sophieann dropped five bucks on the keyboard. “You fly,” she said, “I’ll buy.”

If you got the cream-filled or frosted donuts at Nuts for Donuts, they had a special, fourteen for the price of twelve, so Davy went a little overboard. He ate three chocolate creams on the way back to work. What Sophieann had said about getting Jacob and about being called Dad had left a hollow in his gut. The donuts descended, settled in and did the job. By the time he pulled into employee parking, he was out of his mind on sugar. He sat a minute to slow things down.

He looked out into the cool Milky Way of his headlights. He could see every blade of grass, sandstone pebble and chalky splash of bird-shit. He could see the fence spikes and their shadow on the Inc.’s parking lot. He had a half-dozen deep thoughts so fast he missed them. He was only a little surprised when three jackrabbits hopped cautiously into the light. They were huge. When they turned their faces to the light and froze, he saw their yellow eyes, slanted and mysterious, like the old magician’s in one of Jacob’s picture books.

Davy turned off the headlights. Everything went black, then gray, then lit by a brilliant full moon. The Inc. fence was a perfect series of brushstrokes against the pale grass. The jacks hunkered down and ate. Their backs, their ears, their bent powerful haunches were silvered, moonlight rippling along their fur like water.

Davy wondered if Sophieann was back in the room. Was she hungry? Worried? He didn’t want to scare her, but he didn’t want to be anywhere but where he was.

“Dad,” he whispered, “a.k.a. David Jacob Martin. He decides to stay where he is. He could open the door. He could get out with the donuts. But David Jacob Martin will not scare those jacks away. He won’t. He doesn’t move.”

A week later, Sophieann came for dinner. She wasn’t that crazy about gourmet vegetarian which, along with frozen raspberry Danish, nacho chips and milk in a glass with a warrior reptile printed on its side was David’s menu, so she brought a steak and they grilled it on the hibachi on his little patio. David made a salad with romaine, good olive oil, lemon juice and chunks of blue cheese. They sat in the gathering dusk to eat.

Sophieann said, “I saw you that donut night sitting out in the car. It was kind of weird.”

David put a steak sliver in his mouth and sighed happily. “No more vegetarian,” he said. “So, how was it weird?”

“When I came out, you were sitting there totally still like you were stoned or something. Those bunnies didn’t move. Finally, you waved out your window and hollered, ‘You go home now.’ And they didn’t budge.” She picked a lemon seed out of her salad. “Of course, I wondered if they could. Those are some fat jacks. Those are some serious chubbettes.”

“Chubbos,” David said. “Give the dudes among them some respect.”

She laughed. While he grilled the steak, he told her about the Davy business finally getting to him, about being thirty-five and looking twenty, about the vegetarian cooking actually being a big deal because till Lisa left, he’d never put together a full meal in his life. Lisa hadn’t let him. He guessed that women’s lib had passed him by, and Lisa only got the ladies’ magazine parts, the parts where you dressed up and went to work and the kid was in day care and you came home and did everything your mom had done even better than she had and got pissed off at the unfairness of it all.

“So, David, what are you thinking you’ll do about Jacob?” Sophieann said.

“I don’t know,” David said.

“You could maybe learn what to do? From some other guys with the same problem?” Sophieann had a funny gleam in her eye. It worried him. Lisa had gleamed like that the first time she came back from the therapist.

“Meaning?”

“Meaning I started going to this group over at a wellness center—all women. We talk about our lives. There are guy groups too.”

“I’m not into that godstuff,” David said. “Don’t you have to have a higher power or something like that?”

“Nope, this is different, but excuse me, I do have a higher power.”

“You told me you were a born-again nothing. Who’s your higher power?”

“Madonna,” she said. “She’s old school, but if I was in trouble, I’d want her watching my back.”

“Wait a minute,” David said. “You can’t have a pop star for a higher power.”

“You have rabbits. Jacob has doves. Case closed.”

“Man,” David said. “Maybe I ought to get a higher power. Lisa’s turned up the heat.”

“Time to fight dirty,” Sophieann said.

“Just hear me out,” David said. “There’s nothing definite yet, but Lisa wants to discuss something with me at the therapist’s. Jacob’s all of a sudden talking about those California doves. He’s pretty sure they’re all different colors. They live right by the ocean, right near Grandma Raines. And he thinks those California doves might even know how to speak human.

“Lisa called and said, ‘We have to talk, but I can’t for a few days.’ Man, I hate it when somebody says ‘we have to talk,’ and supposedly can’t make time for it right away.”

Sophieann looked up. There were the black shapes of birds along the telephone wires. They were silent and still.

“Oh, dude,” Sophieann said. “I wish I had an answer. Maybe all we’ve got for sure is those birds up there right now, the fat jacks, all your sea monsters floating around Safe and Serene, Jacob being such an amazing kid, you, me, Ray Cooper here. None of us hating each other. All of us just trying to get by.”

“I’m not sure about Big Ray C.,” David said and put him in her lap. “He’s just trying to stay alive.” Sophieann scratched Ray behind the ears.

They sat together, the three of them scarcely moving, one of them purring, with the birds quiet above them, till the silver thumbprint of moon had dropped out of sight.

It was all very simple. Jacob would be with his mother for the school year and alternating major holidays, Davy would get him for the summer. They’d work out something fair for child support since Lisa earned more than Davy. It was really a good sign that Davy was holding on to his job.

Jacob was adjusting nicely to the idea of the move. In his crayon pictures, he’d started to color the doves purple and blue and red. Sometimes they had little balloons coming out of their mouths, saying “Her comes Jacob. Sunflower sedes are gud. We’re going to go hom to the oshin.” The only thing that seemed a little strange to Lisa and the shrink was that Jacob kept putting a big black office building in the picture. Sometimes he even wrote its name in the title: Mistere Bilding or Rock Doves, Inc.

“Did you take him there?” Lisa asked. The shrink leaned forward, eyes alert, a patient smile on her lips.

“A few times,” David said. “I thought he should see where his father worked. I mean, near there. You know.”

The shrink nodded. “These days when so much is in upheaval, it’s good for children to know that what Mom does is important to her and what Dad does is important to him.” She nodded again. Lisa stared at her. The shrink tapped Lisa’s hand. “There’s no sense in running those old family patterns, is there? Remember? What we talked about? All those one-parent families when you and Davy…”

“David,” he said.

“…when you and David were kids. All those supposedly intact families, with no real dad at all, all those dads gone off to some mystery job and not fully present at home.”

David wanted to agree with her. But, way inside he heard Sophieann. She’d said, “My dad, that poor sonofabitch—by the time he made it through the kitchen door, it was long after dinner. It was all he could do to keep his head out of his plate. The wells were running out and he was double-timing to try to get ahead a little.”

David stood. The shrink glanced at her watch. “Ten more minutes, David.”

“I’m done,” he said. “I don’t like what’s been decided. In fact, I think it sucks. But the judge has already made the decision. I don’t have much choice.”

Lisa stared at him. He saw that she was tired and possibly scared. She glanced down at her hands.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “Davy, it’s just that…”

“You might be sorry,” he said. “I’ll give you that and if you are, stop calling me Davy. My name is David and tell Jacob it’s time to call me Dad. Grant us that little bit.”

David didn’t wait for a reply. He left the room. He drove a long way before he let himself pull the car into a far corner of the Basha’s parking lot. He waited till he was sure he was alone and no one could see him. Then at last he cried.

Lisa brought Jacob to the door. He carried the box in himself and set it on the kitchen table. The Indian blanket was stapled on three sides, taped shut on the fourth.

“He wanted to be sure they didn’t escape,” she said, “so he could let them loose to live near you.” She looked at the refrigerator and studied Jacob’s drawings. “Mystery building,” she said. “Oh Davy, do you think it’s inherited?”

“I hope so,” he said. She turned to go and stopped.

“David is what I meant to say,” she said. “I’ll try to remember. I told him you’d explain it to him. About your name. About Dad.” She kissed Jacob on the cheek and patted his butt. She reached out to shake David’s hand.

“Wait,” he said. “Why this change? What made the difference? Something about me? You got your way?”

“Oh David,” she said. “Who knows? Who fucking knows.”

The next time David and Jacob sat outside in the aqua twilight, with the smell of the neighbor’s tamales floating in the air, the sound of hip-hop thumping in off the street, Jacob held the box in his lap and said, “Dad, you can keep your eyes open. You can watch the doves take off. You will love it. It will be so good you will laugh yourself sick.”

He peeled back the tape and peeked inside. David moved a little closer.

“Goodbye,” Jacob said. “Goodbye Pikachu and Long Feather and Freddy Krueger. It’s time to fly.” He held up the box.

“Pull off the blanket, Dad,” he said. David tugged. The blanket slid to the ground. There was rustling, there was the faintest whisper of feathers moving, of wings ruffling in the air. Jacob giggled.

“There they go, Dad,” he said. “They’re going home.”

Saturday night, David and Jacob drove over to keep Sophieann company at work. He’d packed a spinach and feta cheese salad, nacho chips, steak fajitas and a raspberry-chocolate torte. He wore his new Security Engineer 2 shirt, the one with David embroidered on the pocket.

Sophieann let Jacob wear her special Safe and Serene hat. They watched the computer lights flicker. They heard the sea monsters drifting and bumping outside. David told Jacob the monsters’ names. One was Pikachu and one was Long Fins. He wasn’t sure about Freddy Krueger. He didn’t think there was anything in the ocean that dumb and mean. He told them about the immense weight of black glittering water pressing in on the tiny room and how they were safe, the way the walls held strong, the pressure stayed steady and they had all the air they needed. Jacob told them about Pikachu and Long Feather, how they could fly in water and might be flying toward them right that minute, maybe even bringing them sunflower seeds. The Freddy Krueger dove had flown south.

“Probably has family in Sonora,” Sophieann said.

“You guys stand up side by side.” She flicked on her flashlight and held it under their chins. “You two are soul brothers,” she said. “You got those big mystery brains.”

“No,” Jacob said, “he’s my dad. I’m his kid. That’s how it’s always been. That’s how it’ll always be. He told me that. So did my mom.”

They finished off every crumb of the raspberry-chocolate torte. David kept feeling tears salty in the back of his throat. He and Sophieann cleared things away. Jacob disappeared. They found him curled up in the brown velvet Reception Seating Module nearly asleep. David sat down and pulled Jacob into his lap. “Could you stay awake a few minutes more?” Jacob nodded. “I want to show you something. It’s really good.” David cradled Jacob in his arms and stood. Sophieann opened the door and did the fancy dance you had to do to keep the alarm from going off.

Jacob laughed. “That’s so we can breathe water,” he said. David stepped into the alien glow of the security lamp and walked on out into the darkness near the fence. He hunkered down, Jacob a feather in his arms. Jacob looked out across the Inc.’s lawn.

“Bunnies,” he said. “Big fat bunnies. Zillions of them.” He slipped out of David’s arms and crouched next to him. “They look like ghosts,” he said.

“Listen,” David said.

Jacob leaned forward. “I can hear them, Dad,” he whispered. “They’re chowing down.” The biggest jack glanced at them. His jaw went still.

“Where do they live?” Jacob said.

“Guess,” David said.

Jacob looked up toward the Inc’s flood-lamp beaming out into the dark. The spindly tree seemed a glowing crack in the black face of the building. A little jack sat up, her long paws dangling in front of her. They heard her sniff the air. She twisted and dropped to her haunches.

“She’s going,” Jacob said. “You go home now,” he whispered. The jack hopped a few steps and paused. “Go home now,” Jacob said and giggled. The jack startled and began to go. She was a shadow in the dark, a leaping in the light. When she came to the ground-cover just outside the Inc., she stopped and sat. Jacob waved once. The jack disappeared into the shadows. Jacob snuggled into David’s chest. “She was all shining,” he said. “Like magic. Dad, I’ve got a question.”

“Shoot,” David said.

“Do they have magic bunnies in California?”

“Maybe not magic,” David said carefully, “but these jacks will always be here.” Jacob burrowed in closer, his breath warm against David’s throat. “Good.”