Read Online Mendocino Fire by Elizabeth Tallent - Free Book Online Page B

wishing he could get the boys back. If he only had his boys here, asleep in their beds, he would know how to begin to set the rest of his world right. He would start with the sleep of his children and work outward.
    When he comes back into the bedroom, Jade continues to scrawl her legal pad with corporate-attorney trickery, reasons radioactive well water is good for you, maybe, and if not that, then some other bullshit David or someone like him will have to contest, and with nothing left to lose, he lets his anger show. “What did you do with it?”
    She takes off her glasses, folds them, sets them on the nightstand. He might be some witness she’s treating to this stilted performance whose essence is her offended disbelief. “How did we get here?” When he doesn’t answer she says, “You wanted it gone. You told Susannah things started going wrong when it came into the house.”
    â€œWhen did you talk to Susannah?”
    â€œI called her to ask what was up last night. Why she rushed off. How your face got hurt.”
    â€œWhat did she say?”
    He’s invested this question with telltale anxiety, and she frowns. “She said to ask you.”
    â€œTossing the ball around, and Shane threw a wild one. It looks worse than it is.”
    She regards him gravely. “Also she wanted you to know Nina called. From Paris. She’s flying home and she intends to take Edmund back with her. Evidently I’m not to be trusted with either child.”
    â€œBut the boys have never been apart.”
    â€œIt looks like they will be, now. Because I’ll make them say bedtime prayers for the health of Dick Cheney. I’ll knit them little American flag sweaters, and mock Darwin.” She shakes her head. “When you didn’t come home, and you didn’t call, and your cell went right to voicemail, I couldn’t just sit here stewing, could I? I followed your map. That road is awful, it took me an hour each way, but I thought things would calm down if you knew the rug had gone back where it came from. ‘Evil.’ Susannah said you said, ‘Evil.’ You’ve been so irrational about the rug.”
    What he wants to say: The whole world could have gone on lying. Gone on fucking up weather and watersheds and the marrow of little kids’ bones, and I could have stayed steady, I would have been able tobear it, day after day, as long as there was you, here in our house, you to come home to, you whole and sane and beautiful and telling me the truth. What he says, keeping his tone even: “Can you see why that bothers me? You should have waited to talk to me, we could have decided together how to deal with the rug. That’s how people who trust each other behave.”
    â€œNo, something needed to be done . You can trust me to see things as they are, and to act. You were used to such com pliance , with Susannah. After her, Nina, Shmina, who from everything you say and despite her supposed feminist credentials was basically this mouse . Now there’s me, and, right, you and I don’t know everything about each other, and we never will, and what matters is how—you’re leaving? David?”
    The road unwinds before him in moonlight, rough as ever, and he takes its curves too fast, absorbing the adrenaline hit whenever a clump of cholla looms in the headlights, or a redoubt of sandstone. Once a coyote ghosts across the road, and the station wagon fishtails to a halt, swallowed in its own dust. The wipers squeal, clearing the haze, dirty rivulets rippling horizontally as David picks up speed, the desert laid out for him in luminous swipes, loss a particular taste in his mouth, a rising bitterness he can’t swallow away, his heartbeat manic, though it had been calm enough while he stood listening to Jade. There are no boys in the car to heed the warning, but David lectures. Careful, careful. You’ll get there. You’ll find it. It was