Chapter 26
Frank heard the sound of thunder, but didn’t open his eyes. The sound reminded him of the B-52 Stratofortress his father had flown taking off. On mornings like this, when he was still groggy, he sometimes wished his father would not return. Then he would to full awareness and realize he shouldn’t make such a wish.
He reached across the mattress to find Anna’s warm, comforting body, but touched nothing except the sheets. She must have gone to the bathroom. He listened for the sound of a flushing toilet or a running sink. Instead he heard only rain thumping against the roof. Maybe he should get up to check on her. But five years of marriage had taught him to respect a woman’s privacy in the bathroom.
The sound of the rain reminded him of a trip to
He knew he should get up and go find Anna, but his body didn’t want to cooperate. Sex after so long had left him with a full-body ache. When he got back to
Where had she gone? If she had gone to the bathroom she must have fallen in, as his mother liked to say. Maybe she had gone out to Zeke’s for some coffee or to call the hospital about the old man. Just as well, he supposed. She might want to have another go-around in bed. He didn’t know if he could take it at the moment.
If she had gone out, at least it would give him a chance to clean up. Then she wouldn’t have to learn about his foul morning breath until they got back to LA. But he would rather have her lying next to him so he could kiss her first thing in the morning.
He opened his eyes and saw the pad of stationary on the pillow. Pain raced along his spine as he sat up in bed to stare at the text written in a looping script remarkably similar to her mother’s handwriting. He picked up the stationary to read it again and again, though he already knew the source of the words.
He couldn’t think of anything he had done to make her run away. They had fallen asleep in each other’s arms. She had tears in her eyes. Tears of joy he assumed at the time. She must have known then. Why? What had he done?
He dropped the note on the pillow and rolled out of bed. He had to find her, but he didn’t know where to begin. How long ago had she left? Where would she go? He checked the clock on the nightstand. Only two-thirty in the morning. She couldn’t have too much of a head start. The only place she would go now would be
As he found his pants and cinched up his belt, he imagined her arriving there alone. An eighteen-year-old girl from a small town with no money and a head full of dreams in the big city for the first time. A talented girl, yes, but one vulnerable to the charms of sleazy con men. They wouldn’t hesitate to prey upon her idealism to take what little money she had.
He saw an infinite number of grim scenarios. He saw her lying in a filthy avenue within six months, either with a heroin needle in her arm or some scumbag humping her for a hundred bucks. He saw her dirty and broken, searching garbage cans for a few scraps of food. He saw her as nothing more than a chalk outline and a pool of blood. Another young girl in search of fame killed before she could find it. She would get her thirty seconds on the evening news and then everyone would forget her. Except him.
Wherever she had gone, he would find her; he wouldn’t take twenty-five years this time. He would find her and make her explain why she had gone. Then he would do whatever it took to make her forgive him. He wouldn’t lose her the way he had lost Vera. He couldn’t.
[SPLICE!]
He walked along the streets of Little Mesa with no direction or purpose. He had lost another woman he loved. As he looked back on his time in the town, he tried to figure out how this had happened.
Maybe he hadn’t been happy before, but he had been content at least. He had a successful career, enough money to support himself and
If only he hadn’t seen that newspaper article. Then he never would have known about Vera’s death. Never would have come to Little Mesa. Never would have met Anna. Certainly he wouldn’t be walking in the rain at four-thirty in the morning.
He stuffed his hands in his pockets and passed by the front window of Zeke’s Café. A homemade sign informed him the restaurant would not open until noon due to the ceremony at Vera’s park. As he went along the silent front windows of shops along
Amazing. An entire town so devoted to one woman. Even he had thrown away a chance at happiness with Anna for the sake of Vera. She had torn out his heart twice now and yet he couldn’t find it in himself to hate her the way Anna and Esther did. If only his research had turned up something conclusive. Then he could have proved Vera’s death to himself and Anna. He might have convinced her to stay then.
He came to the retirement home and the golf course where Anna had fled after that first night. He thought of her standing there in that ill-fitting dress, her hair covering all but a sliver of her face. Such a strong girl; he supposed she needed to be after losing her mother and suffering under Esther’s brutal parenting. Much stronger than he had ever been.
The rain began to taper off as he walked along the eighteenth green. Of course the groundskeeper had wiped out every sign of her presence. He looked for a stray cigarette butt anyway, some tangible evidence to keep to remind himself of that night. When he found nothing, he continued rambling through Little Mesa. Every now and then he saw a car pass by and made sure it was not the silver Taurus with Anna at the wheel.
She wouldn’t come back. She had too much life ahead of her. Too many goals left to achieve. Why had she bothered to waste so much time on an old fart like him anyway? A beautiful young woman deserved someone better. Someone handsome and rich and who wouldn’t call her by her mother’s name in bed. Not much to ask for really.
After she became a big star in
He came to
He had done it to himself. He had stolen Vera’s journal from Mrs. McAllister’s and given it to Anna. He had found out about Vera’s reckless adventures and told her daughter. He had uttered the wrong name in bed. He had offered her the keys to his car and apartment, giving her a way out. What a fool.
Now that the rain had stopped, he looked around the stage and managed to find some dry clothes at the bottom of a pile. They wouldn’t fit him, so instead he used them as towels to dry himself off. He shivered as a breeze ran over his body and promised himself to stop by Zeke’s when it opened for some coffee. He would even settle for tea with Mrs. McAllister.
He walked along the crater. To think a big hole in the ground could become the center of so much controversy. Meteor festivals. Mexican slave laborers. Alien crash landings. A woman plunging to her death. All because of a hole.
In his career he had seen much larger craters and canyons. He had explored almost every inch of the
He leaned against the handrail and then looked around to make sure no one else was around. He climbed over the handrail and stood on the edge of the crater, looking down into the black abyss. Had Vera seen the same thing and felt such emptiness and loneliness that she had simply let herself fall?
He closed his eyes and rocked back and forth. So easy really, to just let himself go. That would solve all his problems. No more worrying about Anna or Vera. He would die alone now anyway, what difference did it make whether he did it now or waited another thirty years?
He stepped back and opened his eyes. If he died now and Anna learned about it, she would blame herself just as he blamed himself for Vera’s death. He didn’t want to put her through the same anguish and grief. Not when she had just begun a new life.
He saw a flash of light coming from along a wall of the crater. The light moved up the side of the crater at a steady pace and as it came closer, he made out the shape of a man attached to the light. Frank went over to where the climber emerged from the crater.
The man wore a black jacket and pants, both covered in mud, and a belt loaded with archaeological tools. “Mr. Jue, I presume.”
“Do I know you?” Jue wiped the mud from his face, although the skin underneath was almost the same color.
“Just a friend of a friend.”
“You knew Vera?”
“How’d you know?”
“Why else would you be standing here on the day of her big ceremony?”
“Good point.” Frank reached in his pocket for a cigarette and offered one to Jue, but he declined. “Find anything yet?”
“A lot of mud and rocks.”
“Still no little green men?”
“Not yet.” Jue took off his helmet and ran a hand over his bald head. “The rain snuck up on me before I could get very far. Maybe next time.”
“Your friends at the Astronomical Society said you’d disappeared.”
“I did. But I thought I’d have a little ceremony of my own for Vera. We spent a lot of time together down there in those two weeks before she died.”
“Why did she go into that crater? She was never the conspiracy theory type.”
“You’re her friend. Why do you think she’d do it?”
“I don’t know. She was always the most responsible person I knew. She wouldn’t let me come over until the kids had gone to bed.”
“I think she did it because she liked the adventure of it,” Jue said. “There was always something in her wanting to break out. Some part of her that never grew up.”
“I need to know what happened that night.”
“I thought you might.” Jue dropped his tools to the ground and sat on top of the handrail. Frank leaned against the rail and at last heard what took place that night.
They had gone down into the crater just after midnight. Roberto had taught Vera how to repel down the side of the crater, but she still took over twenty minutes to reach the bottom. When she got there, she laughed and said, “Better late than never, right?”
“I thought I’d have to come up there and get you.”
“It’s hard. I’m not as young as I supposed to be.”
“That sounds like a good excuse.”
“You have a baby and we’ll see how spry you are, Mr. Macho Man.” She punched him in the arm hard enough that he winced. “So what are we going to do tonight?”
“I’ve got a good feeling about this formation over here.”
“Is that how they taught you to do it in college?”
“If we had a permit to dig legally I could have all sorts of equipment brought down. Until then, we’ll have to do it the old-fashioned way.” He gave a pick-ax to her and took another for himself. They went over to the spot he’d indicated and began to carve away the ancient rock.
As she worked, Vera talked about her daughter. “I don’t know what to do with her sometimes. She just keeps getting bigger and bigger. I try to get her to go outside and exercise, but she won’t do it. All she wants to do is sit around watching movies.” She stopped in mid-stroke and stared thoughtfully at the wall. “I suppose most of it is my fault. When she was a baby I watched movies just about all day. Maybe I set a bad example. Did you ever have any kids Roberto?”
“One. He’s about Anna’s age now. I haven’t seen him in a long time though.” Eleven years ago Alisha and William had disappeared. He remembered only waking up to a blinding white light. The next morning, they were both gone. He looked for her and their son for the first two years and came away with nothing. Then he gradually lost hope in ever seeing Alisha or William again. Every time he swung the ax, he hoped to find some evidence linking the crater to the visitors who had snatched away his family in the night.
“That’s too bad. If only I could get Anna to come down here to work off some of that belly. I suppose she would just complain the whole time.”
“There’s nothing wrong with her weight. Let her get as big as she wants. The important thing is you still have her.”
“You’re right. But I don’t know how she can be happy that way. The other kids are always making fun of her. It’s so hard anymore to find clothes that fit and she won’t outgrow in a couple months. If she went outside more she would be happier.”
“She’ll go outside and lose the weight when she wants. If she wants. You need to enjoy this time with her. A couple more years she’ll be a teenager and then a woman.”
“You’re pretty smart for someone digging in a crater for aliens.”
“Must be all that education.” They smiled at each other in the light from their helmets. Then they heard a rumble coming from above the crater. Roberto signaled for Vera to douse her light and they stood together in the darkness, waiting to see if the noise went away. When he saw a flash of lightning, Roberto knew the sound they’d heard hadn’t come from a truck. “We better get up top before it rains.”
He went first and made it up the side of the crater before the first drops of rain fell. Then he called for Vera to relax and began pulling her up. By the time she reached the top, a light mist gave way to a drenching downpour. He helped her out of the safety harness and shouted, “We’ll have to come back tomorrow.”
She didn’t leave. Instead, she looked up at the rain and began to laugh. She began to dance. Not a mad jig, but a slow waltz along the edge of the crater. Roberto wanted to shout for her to be careful, but he couldn’t. He could only watch her dance. Her every movement had such grace and joy. She had the carefree expression of a child.
Something came over her face as she continued to dance along the edge of the crater. A look of pain and loss as she wrapped her arms around an imaginary lover. She mumbled a single word, but over the sound of the rain and thunder he couldn’t hear what she said.
Then a flash of lightning followed by a scream and she was gone. Roberto shined his light down into the crater, but he couldn’t see her. He called down to her, but got no answer. By the time he repelled down to the bottom of the crater, it was too late. Blood oozing from the back of her head mingled with a pool of water formed by the storm. Her eyes stared up into the sky and her mouth had frozen into a smile. As though she had seen something beautiful in those final moments.
“Then it was an accident,” Frank said. “She fell.”
“Did she?”
“You don’t think so?”
“I don’t know. Her face just before it happened…she looked so distraught.”
“Did you tell that to the police?”
“I told them almost everything I told you.”
“They ruled it an accident.”
“Then they sealed the records.” Jue jumped down to the ground. “The mayor came to see me the day after Vera died. He very politely and subtly offered me ten thousand dollars to leave town.”
“You took the money?”
“I was going to leave anyway. Everything I saw reminded me of Vera. I couldn’t stand it. So I figured I may as well take their money and let them think they’d gotten their way.”
“I don’t understand. There’s no proof she committed suicide. They ruled it an accident. Why the cover-up?”
Jue shrugged. “For the same reason they wouldn’t let me dig in that crater. They’re afraid of what they might find.”
“What do you think happened?”
“Does it matter? Everyone believes what they choose. Even if I find a living, breathing alien in that crater there will still be some people who believe it’s all a hoax. They’ll still believe we’re all alone in the universe. It’s their choice.”
“So why bother?”
“I’m a scientist. I try to stay objective and look for evidence. What people choose to believe from that is up to them.”
Frank looked out over the crater, at the place where she had died. He imagined her dancing along the edge, with her arms around someone. He closed his eyes and felt her arms around him with the rain falling all around them. He heard her laugh and smelled the perfume coming from her hair. When he opened his eyes, the first orange shades of morning began to color the sky and Roberto Jue had disappeared.
And Frank had decided what to believe at last.
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