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  “This guy we’re so busy tailing,” she said. “He’s something special, huh?”

  “Yeah,” I informed myself as much as her. “He is.”

  “So, then, this guy”—she was choosing her words with a lot more care than normal for my mega-hyper sister—“this guy . . . is he like Mike?”

  “What? You think I’m trying to—”

  “Incest? No. I just mean, is he, well, like Mike?”

  “No!” What was she driving at? Why bring up Mike, now of all times? This conversation was going from bad to worse. I looked three cars ahead and a lane over at Guthrie, one hand on the wheel, his arm out the window, his silly ponytail flapping in the wind. She couldn’t be right. I was not, subconsciously, trying to replace the brother I’d adored and lost. So, how was Guthrie different? “Well, when you explained something to Mike, it was like he was the one person who truly understood, and cared. He was endlessly patient—”

  “Are you kidding? Mike, the kid who couldn’t wait to be older? He begged Mom to get him into first grade early. He wrote up a new ‘birth certificate’ in crayon with a fake date.”

  “He did start early, though, didn’t he?”

  “Hardly because of that! Dad had done a favor for the priest and . . .” She shrugged. “Bad idea because now all his friends were a year ahead, so he really wanted to be older. When driver’s license time came he just about drove Dad crazy—surely he knew someone, there had to be some way, some angle—But, it’s Guthrie I’m asking about. So, what’s the scoop?”

  “Similar, yeah, but he’s not Mike. He’s all stuntman, a guy’s guy. Everybody likes him because he’s so into the gags and he’ll take any chance this side of death. I mean sensible chances.”

  She shook her head. “Why? I’ve asked you before, repeatedly, and you’ve never given me a good answer. So this guy, what is it about looking into the void as a career choice that attracts him?”

  “He’s shifting left. Can you—”

  “He’ll be sorry. Trust me.”

  I didn’t. If only I’d insisted on driving, burned hands be damned. I eyed his back, as if my gaze were some kind of virtual leash. “I can’t say for Guthrie, but for me it’s the next best thing to meditation.”

  “Pretend-meditation?”

  I shrugged. “In zazen the idea is to be aware of everything without judging. Just noticing, not being the center of the noticing, you know?”

  “Hmm.”

  “It’s really hard. You’re aware, then you’re aware you’re aware, then you’re thinking about that, and soon you’re thinking about dinner and sex.”

  “In that order?”

  “But when you’re doing a balance gag forty feet about the street, it’s easy. No wandering mind; you’re focused, totally at one with everything you’re doing but also with everything that plays into it. You’re not thinking about the wind; the wind is part of the whole gestalt of the gag, and so are you. When you get to the other side, you’re high.”

  “I felt like that when I did the surgery rotation.”

  “Right. It’s not meditation, but it’s, well, clear.”

  “Damn!”

  A car shot across our lane to the left-hand exit. Brakes screeched. Traffic stopped in all lanes but Guthrie’s. The black convertible sailed right on.

  “Catch him!”

  “How? Fly?”

  If only I were driving! “Cut left. Go!”

  She rumbled left. Brakes squealed. A horn blew long and loud. But we were moving and Guthrie was still in sight.

  “Good work, Gracie!”

  She grinned. “He’s heading for the Marina. He’ll be in city streets. We’ll get him there.” She was leaning forward, looking lane to lane, checking the rearview.

  As soon as we crested the hill, I saw the fog blowing thick from the Golden Gate. “Keep close. Don’t lose him!”

  “Not to worry.”

  Was Guthrie like Mike? The very thought made me squeamish, but I forced myself to deal with it. “Okay, here’s the thing. When Guthrie turns up, he’s totally focused on happy-to-see you, I mean me. But then we have the kind of weekend you don’t want to consider in light of your brother. When we’re talking, it’s about the business, about gags he did, gags we could make better. Really focused. Hey, he’s going to cut left.”

  “Where’s he going at this hour? The Golden Gate?”

  “Or the Palace of Fine Arts?”

  “I’ve just about burned out my engine chasing him over the bridge and across town so he can feed the swans?”

  There were only two cars between us now as we headed into the area of narrow streets and few outlets. The Palace of Fine Arts would be a good place to talk to him, a good, calm, bucolic spot for him to be in when he called Jed. It had been designed by Bernard Maybeck for the 1915 Pan Pacific Exposition and appeared to be a Greco-Roman temple. Maybeck had made it to crumble. But he hadn’t counted on San Franciscans loving it too much to let it go. So, it had been restored early on and again in 2009. I’d catch up with Guthrie at the lagoon in front. It’d be quiet.

  But it wasn’t quiet, not hardly. Despite the fog, the street in front had been closed off and there seemed to be some kind of party or rally going on, spreading from the park lawn in front of the lagoon into the street. “No way we’re going to get through here.”

  “Where’s your guy? I can’t believe this. I lost him!”

  “No! You can’t—”

  My phone rang. I shrugged—this little venture was shot anyway—and answered it.

  “Darcy?”

  “It’s him!” I mouthed to Gracie.

  “Darcy . . .” His voice was muffled under the crackling of the phone, but still I could hear his hesitation.

  I waited.

  “I need to ask you something.”

  He was a jump-in guy; he never foreshadowed comments like this.

  “Okay?”

  “I don’t want to do this on the phone. I need to be with you. It’s a big step.”

  What, dammit? Spit it out! “Okay. I live above the Barbary Coast Zen Center on Pacific by Columbus. Why don’t you meet me in the courtyard?”

  “How fast can you get there?”

  5

  “SLIDE OVER, GRACIE.”

  “You can’t drive. Your hands—”

  “I’ll use my elbows.” I pulled the driver’s door open. “Move!” I didn’t even feel pain when I grabbed the gear knob and smacked it into reverse, did a three-point over the curb, and cut back through the warren of the Marina.

  Gracie braced her hands against the dashboard. “This isn’t a set; it’s a city street. Slow down. What the hell did he say?”

  “He wants to ask me something—needs to do it in person!”

  “Interesting.”

  I glanced at her but didn’t say anything. I couldn’t. Instead, I concentrated working out the fastest route across the city. Suddenly it struck me that Gracie wasn’t saying anything either. I sneaked a peek at her. She looked like Guthrie’d sounded on the phone, like she had something stuck in her throat she couldn’t cough up. “What?”

  “This guy’s important to you, right? Even if you’ve never mentioned him to me. It’s obvious.”

  “Yeah.”

  “You haven’t been excited like this, not over a guy, not since you moved back here anyway. You’d be happy if he stuck around?”

  I nodded. “I guess that’s true. I would.”

  “So, Darce, how many months till he’ll be gone, like all the others?”

  I gasped. I heard the sound before I realized it came from me. “Who the hell are you to talk—divorced and back living with Mom.” It was a low blow.

  But not low enough. “I’m one who knows, and so are you. Don’t let this be the same old routine. You’ve got to give this thing—this guy—a chance.”

  “I intend—”

  “You intended every time you met a guy, right?”

  “Yeah, but—”

  “No, listen, there�
��s only one way to make the change. You have to get past Mike. We all do. For the lot of us, time stopped when Mike left. We went on and found things we could escape into, careers that don’t give you time for extra thought. With your job, your mind wanders and, bang, you’re dead, right? All of us, we look like we’ve moved on, but emotionally, we’re all still sitting in Mom’s living room waiting for the phone to ring or Mike to walk back in. And Mom, it’s worse for her. Darce, it’s got to stop.”

  “What do you mean?” She sounded like she’d rehearsed in front of a mirror. It scared me.

  “We have to give it one last shot—all of us, throw everything into finding Mike. The difference is . . . that this needs to be the final search.”

  “Final, like what? Like the next time we get a lead, we blow it off? Are you crazy? What’re we going to tell Mom then—‘Oh, I heard Mike’s living in Toronto, but it’s too late to bother now?’”

  Grace put a hand on my arm. It was shaking. Or I was. I slowed down so I missed the light, sitting there while cars shot across in front.

  “Of course, after this we’ll never ignore a lead. But then there’ll be a difference: we’ll admit the lead probably isn’t going anywhere. We’ll track it down, all right, just not with the desperate belief Mike’ll be there. What I mean by the final search is, we pull out all stops, and if we don’t find him, we admit to ourselves Mike’s not coming back.”

  “That he’s . . .” I couldn’t bring myself to say it.

  “Dead.”

  “No! I can’t do that. No. I can’t believe you’re saying this. Maybe you didn’t care as much—”

  “Darcy, stop! You’re a Buddhist. You’re supposed to deal with life as it is, with what’s real, not live in your own illusions, right? Mike is where he is. Your being desperate to have him back doesn’t change that. It only screws up your life. Maybe he’s living in Stockholm or Tashkent and he doesn’t intend to come back. Maybe he’s . . . well, any of the places we’ve endlessly considered. And maybe the most likely thing is true, that he didn’t come right home that Thursday because he got killed then. Something happened to make him dead. That’s reality, and we have to deal.”

  The light changed. I focused on traffic, shot through the light as it was turning. Mike had been my buddy. Grace had had Gary; I’d had Mike. The rest of them were all so much older—they’d been teenagers when I was a toddler. Only Mike had been my real family. She didn’t understand. There was no way I could abandon him. “I’ve spent most of my life searching for him. I don’t even know what I’d be without . . .” Without Mike? Without the search? I didn’t even know what I meant. “What does Gary think? You talked to him, right?”

  “It’s taken him three wrecked marriages, but he gets it. He’s got to be able to move on.”

  “And John?” I asked desperately. Surely, John, the cop, wouldn’t close the case on his own brother.

  “I haven’t gone around lobbying for this. But I know how things are for every one of us, and for Mom. Look at her: she still lives in that ramshackle house; she never goes anywhere for more than a day; she always answers the door no matter how late—because she’s afraid he’ll show up once and then disappear again, and she couldn’t forgive herself for missing him.

  “Darce, Mom’s got a chance now. Her friend Jess has got a timeshare in Hawaii in January—the whole month of January. Mom could go, instead of freezing here.”

  “Wow!”

  “She’s over seventy. She’s spent the last twenty years waiting for a knock on the door that never happens. A chance like this, it may not come again. She can’t give this up to sit home waiting for the call that’s no more than a dream.”

  It was a moment before I could get out the words: “And if we do this and”—I swallowed hard—“the result is . . . bad? Then—”

  “Then . . . then, it’ll be even more important for her to get away, to not sit in that house knowing he’s . . . he’s never coming back.

  “Here’s the thing, Darce: you’re the one who was closest to Mike, the one most destroyed by his disappearance. We all watched you tough through it. You had to wall everyone out; it was the only way you could deal, we knew that. You think no one noticed? We all noticed, especially Mom, but she insisted you had to handle things your own way.”

  I didn’t dare look at her. We’d held back all these years; if we let go—

  “So—” Her voice caught. “So, it’s your call. The final search won’t happen unless you say so.”

  It was a moment before I could say, “And if I do?”

  “It will.”

  We were two blocks from the zendo. I pulled over to the curb, got out, and strode off before she could say anything else. If I tried to say anything, I’d lose it entirely and everything I’d managed to control all these years would flood out. I needed to get inside and sit facing the wall, watching my breath until the barrage of thoughts became just thoughts again, until I could see what was extra and what was reality. How could I ever say Mike was dead? If there was the slightest chance—

  Reality! Gracie hadn’t said to ignore chances. But no way could I make the decision for everyone. Reality—she didn’t mean that either.

  I turned the corner onto Pacific, walking fast past Renzo’s. I wasn’t surprised that Gracie was sitting in her car outside the zendo when I walked up. I knew, as if I’d known for a long time and hadn’t realized it, that she was right. As if I’d already mentally gone through all my protests, already done all my grieving for Mike. “Every moment we are born; every moment we die,” Leo had said in his last dharma talk.

  She’d already rolled down the window.

  I said, “Okay. Do what you have to.” Then I turned and walked into the courtyard. Behind me I heard her pull away.

  I sat on a wooden bench in the semi-dark, oblivious to the damp cold. And by the time Guthrie arrived, I’d forgotten he was coming.

  He walked up behind, lifted me off the bench, and pulled me against him. It was as if he was allowing me time to shift out of my barely conscious blame of him for the prospect of giving up my beloved brother. Reality! Dammit, deal in what’s real! Reality was his warm, firm body against mine. I turned, ran my fingers behind his neck, and guided his head down to mine. He pulled me tighter against him, kissed me hard. And when he eased out of the kiss, he still held me there. I felt both great closeness and great distance.

  Was it coming from him, or was it me?

  After a moment, he asked, “Is this it, your Zen place?”

  That sure wasn’t the question I’d been expecting.

  “The zendo?” I said, pulling myself together. “Yeah.”

  “The priest lives here, too?”

  “Right. Our rooms are upstairs. They’re really too close together for me to—for privacy.”

  “Is he here now?”

  “I don’t think so, but still I don’t—”

  “Do Buddhists have confession? Absolution?”

  Huh! Boy, had I been misreading his intention here! “You mean like Catholics?”

  He nodded.

  “Why?”

  “I’m asking for myself.”

  I slid my hands off his back and caught his in mine; despite the pain from my burns it seemed vital not to lose our physical connection. “We have a Bodhisattva ceremony, but it doesn’t cleanse you of your sins; in fact, what we say is: ‘All my ancient tangled karma, from beginningless greed, hate, and delusion, I now fully avow.’ You’re not cleansed, but admitting your part in the chain of events is, in its own way, cleansing.”

  When he didn’t respond, I added, “Things are as they are. When you stop trying to pretend otherwise, things are clearer, and also easier. But you shouldn’t be dealing with the assistant; you ought to be talking to the abbot.”

  “The guy who’s not upstairs?” For the first time since he’d gotten here, he sounded like his normal, ironic self, for whom nothing was ever make it or break it, except when it came to work.

  “Leo should be
back by ten. I’m sure he’ll see you if that’s what you want.”

  “But it won’t make any difference.”

  Even in the dim light I could see how edgy he looked, as if he’d been piloting a getaway car instead of merely driving across the Bay Bridge. “Then just what would make a difference?”

  He slid his hands free. “I don’t know.”

  “Guthrie, what is going on?”

  “I can’t—”

  “Tell me. You say you’re near to loving me.” I shot a glance at his face, wary for a flinch that would show me he hadn’t really meant it, but he stayed steady. “So, trust me. I’m near to loving you and whatever you tell me isn’t going to change that.”

  “You don’t know.”

  “I don’t know events, but you and I, we’ve been close ever since we first laid eyes on each other. I do know you. There’s something we share—I can’t put it into words, but with you I’m at home in a way I am with no one else. There’s a reason for that and it’s beneath the surface of who you are. I’m not about to give that up. No event is going to change it.”

  He slipped behind me and wrapped his arms around me again. The warmth of his body felt good but when he spoke, I understood why he didn’t want to look at me.

  “I did . . . something . . . a long time ago. I didn’t give it any thought, not then. Now, it’s always with me.”

  So that was why he understood my own preoccupation. “If—”

  “No! It doesn’t matter about the absolution. Some things are beyond that.”

  I pulled loose. “Not true. Things change. All things. And you don’t know how that’s going to affect you. But look, Leo—the abbot—will be back in forty-five minutes. Let’s walk up to North Beach and get a drink or some pizza. I’ll leave him a note so he’ll expect you.”

  It was a moment before he said, “Okay.”

  As we headed out of the courtyard I felt more like I was leading him than walking with him. I ached to ask what he could have done that left him in this shape, and yet I knew not to.

  “The ceremony,” he said as we turned onto Columbus toward the cafes of North Beach, “when do you have it?”