Deacon was on his crate under the Glendale Freeway at seven in the morning on Christmas Eve, reading.
He did not look up when Thorsen came down the bank. He had a blanket round his shoulders and a fire going in a cut-down oil drum, small and smokeless, and a paperback held up to the light of it. Behind him a heron stood in the shallows of the river on one leg and looked at the water. It was eleven degrees, and the people going past on the bike path above were in gloves and hats and telling each other it was freezing.
Thorsen put the parcel down beside the crate.
It was not much of a parcel. A wool watch cap from Flagstaff. A sleeping bag rated to minus twenty, which he had slept in zipped from Arizona to Lake Superior and had not needed zipped since, because somebody had decided the van should be warm. And a paperback from Split Rock, about the ships that had gone down on Lake Superior.
Deacon turned a page.
“It’s rated to minus twenty,” Thorsen said.
“It’s fifty-two degrees.”
Deacon looked at him then, over the top of the paperback, for a long moment, with the expression of a man who had been a corpsman for twenty-two years and had glued Thorsen’s side together under this freeway, and had views. He looked at the pink seam above Thorsen’s ear where the staples had been, and at the new skin on Thorsen’s fingers where the old skin had come off like a glove, and at the van parked up on the road above the bank.
He went back to his book. Then, as Thorsen turned to go, without looking up: “Keep it dry.”
His mother came out of the house at four o’clock carrying a pot the size of a bucket wrapped in three bath towels, and stopped on the front path, and looked at the van.
“No,” she said.
“Ma.”
“No. Daniel. Your father is eighty years old.”
“There’s a bunk in the back. It’s very comfortable. It’s warm.”
“It’s Los Angeles. Everything is warm.” She came down the path anyway, with the pot held out in front of her like a sacrament, and stood at the open side door and looked in, at the wool packed into the ribs and the plywood floor and the bins in their rows, and the little grey heater under the passenger seat, and the two white boxes above the bunk with their green lights.
“Who did this?” she said.
“A welder. In Minnesota.”
“Hm.” She looked at the clamp on the fuel line, and the bead of sealant round the roof vent. “She knows what she’s doing.”
“I didn’t say who did it.”
His mother turned round and looked up at him with her black eyes, which had seen through every child who had ever told her it did not hurt.
“Your face, Daniel,” she said, and climbed into the front seat with the sarma on her knees.
His father came out last, in his good grey suit and an overcoat he did not need, with his doctor’s bag in one hand and a biscuit tin in the other. He went round to the back and got in through the rear doors, slowly, one knee and then the other, and sat down on the end of the bunk with the bag beside him and the tin on his lap.
“Why have you brought the bag?” Ana said, without turning round.
“You never know,” said Karl Thorsen, “who’ll be short of breath.”
“It’s Christmas Eve.”
“People are short of breath on Christmas Eve. More than other nights. It’s the stairs, and the food, and the relatives.” He opened the tin and looked into it and closed it again. “Paprenjaci,” he said to Thorsen, in the mirror. “Your mother was up at five. Don’t let her give them all to the policewoman.”
Thorsen started the engine. It caught first time.
He drove them up the Harbor Freeway in the low gold light, with his mother in front holding the pot steady through every lane change as though it were full of nitroglycerine, and his father in the back on the bunk, looking out of the rear windows at Los Angeles going away behind him, quite peacefully, the way a boy looks out of the back of a car.
There was a wreath on Denise’s door, on the green door at the top of the steep street in Highland Park, where the parked cars all had their wheels turned in to the kerb.
The door opened before they were up the steps. Denise stood in it in a dark red dress with her hair pinned and her reading glasses on a chain, and she looked past Thorsen at his mother, coming up the steps behind him with the pot, and his mother looked at her, and both of them stopped.
They had talked on the telephone for an hour the morning it ended in Los Angeles, and every Sunday since October. They had never once been in the same room.
“Ana,” Denise said.
“Denise,” said his mother, and gave the pot to Thorsen without looking at him, and went up the last two steps, and the two of them took hold of each other on the doorstep, and held on, and rocked a little, and said things into each other’s shoulders that Thorsen did not hear and was not meant to. He stood on the step below with the sarma and waited. His father came up beside him with the bag and the tin, and the two men looked at the street.
“Six o’clock,” said a voice from the hallway behind Denise. “Six-oh-one. I’m going to let it go.”
Brooks.
The house was hot and loud and smelled of jollof rice.
It was the smell he remembered from eleven Thanksgivings, when Ray had stood at the stove with a wooden spoon pretending to help. It took him by the back of the neck and held him, the way the kitchen at the Point had on the first day.
Denise’s sisters ran the kitchen. Rosa Reyes was laying the table, talking in Spanish to Mrs. Ibarra, from Downey, small and upright in black, with a face that had been carrying something for six years and had only lately been allowed to put it down. Sergeant Dana Whitfield was in jeans and a sweater, without the stripes, standing in the kitchen doorway with a beer, being instructed by one of the sisters on the subject of plantains.
And Mateo, in the corner by the bookcase, in a white shirt and a tie.
It was the tie from the courthouse, two sizes too big, the knot the size of a fist. Mateo saw him looking and lifted his chin.
“It’s lucky,” he said. “I wore it to court. Everybody got held to answer. I wore it to the cadet thing, Saturday, too. At the academy. They took me.” He said it fast, as though it might be taken back if he said it slowly. “You have to keep a C average or they kick you out. And no —” he glanced across the room at Brooks, ”— no hypothetical stuff. Detective Brooks wrote me a letter. She said if I mess it up she’ll arrest me personally.”
“She will.”
“I know.” He grinned, and for a moment he was fourteen. “I’m not going to mess it up.”
Brooks found him in the hallway. She had a small clay pot in her hands, and in the pot was an African violet, with fuzzy dark leaves and one purple flower open on a short stem, and two more coming.
“Five,” she said. “Still five.” She put the pot in his hands. “A new window with a steel frame, I’m told. Your mother tells Denise everything, and Denise tells me.”
They sat down at seven, eighteen of them, at Denise’s table and two card tables pushed onto the end of it with a sheet over the join.
Denise said grace. She said it short, the way Ray had liked it, and at the end she said Ray’s name, and Marcus’s, and Marisol’s, and Tommy Ibarra’s, and Mrs. Ibarra put her hand on the tablecloth and closed her eyes. And then Denise looked down the table at Thorsen’s father, and paused, and said, “And Arne,” quite simply, “and Leonard, and Paul,” and went on, and Thorsen saw his father’s hand go still on the tablecloth, and then go on.
There was jollof, and chicken, and plantains, and his mother’s sarma in the middle of the table where everybody could see it. There was a great deal of noise. Rosa and his mother discovered that they held the same low opinion of the Archdiocese, and were delighted with each other. Whitfield and Brooks argued about the Dodgers. Mateo ate four helpings of rice and did not loosen his tie.
At the end of the table nearest the kitchen, the two doctors and the scrub nurse found each other.
Denise said that she had scrubbed for thirty-one years at Good Samaritan, and his father put down his fork.
“Obstetrics?”
“General. Then trauma. Then obstetrics, at the end, because I wanted to see something come in the door alive.”
“I delivered a baby in the back of a Chevrolet,” his father said, “on Highway 61 in Minnesota, in a snowstorm, in the winter of 1970. I was a second-year medical student. I had a flashlight in my teeth.” He thought about it. “Her brother became the sheriff. He told my son.”
Denise stared at him, and then began to laugh, the deep, helpless laugh that Thorsen had not heard from her since before Ray died; and his mother, who had heard the story about two hundred times, capped it with twins in a lift at Harbor General. They went on like that for half an hour, the three of them, with their heads together, laughing until Denise had to take off her glasses and wipe her eyes, and the rest of the table, which was full of police, listened with the respectful silence of people hearing about a much worse job.
And then his father told the story about the fish.
Somebody asked about Minnesota. Somebody asked, carefully, whether he had been back. And his father, who had been laughing, stopped laughing, and turned his glass slowly round on the tablecloth, a quarter turn, and said:
“Danny caught his first lake trout off the end of our dock when he was six. It was nearly as big as he was. He couldn’t hold the rod. My brother stood behind him and put his hands over Danny’s hands, both of them, on the rod. His hands were so big you couldn’t see Danny’s at all. Just these two big red hands, and the rod bending, and a little boy’s face looking up over the top of them as if —” He stopped.
The end of the table had gone quiet.
His father sat with his hand on the glass. He did not cry. He sat there, eighty years old, in his good grey suit, at a table full of strangers in Highland Park, and looked at the glass, and could not go on.
Denise put her hand on his.
She put her hand over his on the tablecloth and left it there; and after a while his father turned his hand over under hers and held on to it, and his mother, on his other side, put her hand on his back, between his shoulder blades, and the noise of the rest of the table came back up round them, gently, like water closing over a stone.
Thorsen’s phone buzzed in his pocket.
He took it into the hallway. It was a 218 number he did not know, and when he answered it was not a person but a recording, a woman’s voice, unhurried, the same for everybody.
This is a call from an inmate at the Baptism County Law Enforcement Center. To accept the call, press one.
He pressed one.
“Danny.” Nils’s voice, a long way off, with a hard room round it and a door somewhere banging. “It’s me. Kayla let me have the phone. It’s Christmas. I wanted to say it to somebody.”
“Merry Christmas, Nils.”
“Yeah.” A silence. “Yeah. You too.”
“Marie Lacourse said to tell you something. The soup was a kindness. She knew that.”
A long breath on the line. “Okay,” Nils said.
His father had come out of the dining room behind him. He stood in the hallway in his good grey suit and held out his hand for the phone, and Thorsen looked at him, and gave it to him.
“Nils,” his father said. “It’s your Uncle Karl.”
There was a long silence on the line. Thorsen could hear it from where he stood: the hard room, a voice down a corridor, and under them nothing at all. His father stood very still and listened to the nothing. Then he said, low, “I know. I know. I was there too,” and took the phone into the kitchen.
He went out to the garage at nine. It was as cold as Los Angeles got, and he did not turn on the light. The streetlight came in through the little window in the side door and lay across the bench, and it was the same: the pegboard with its outlines in black marker, every tool on it home, the pry bar low on the right on its two hooks, the chair pushed in, the mug and the glasses and the pen at the left-hand end, where a left-handed man had kept them. He took the napkin out of his shirt pocket. It had been in that pocket in two degrees of water at Gull Rock, and Claire had dried it on the stove between two sheets of paper towel and given it back to him in the hospital without a word; the ink had run a little, and it was still legible. He folded it along its old creases and put it back, beside the key with the R that stood up straight. He had told Nils he knew. He didn’t. He knew only that he had come when he was asked, and found out what happened, and that a man had gone into the lake because of what he had found. He thought about Ray at this bench, and about Arne at the bench in the fish house with his big hands over a small boy’s hands on the knife, and, for no reason he could have given, about a heron standing on one leg in the shallows, and a big hand turning his head towards it. Look, Danny. Look there. Don’t move.
He closed the garage door quietly behind him, so as not to wake anybody.
It was a little after ten when his phone buzzed again.
He was sitting on Denise’s front step, on his own, in his coat, with the door shut behind him on the noise and the warmth and his mother’s voice telling somebody something at full volume. Down the hill the city lay spread out under a clear sky in a great flat sheet of lights, all the way to the dark line of the hills, and above it all, very high and very white, there was a full moon.
It was a photograph. No message with it.
Stone Bay, at night, frozen. The ice ran out white and smooth from the shore under the moon, all the way to where the open water began, black, far out, with a thin silver line on it. The birches stood along the shore road like strokes of a pencil. And in the middle of it, on its steel pole, black against the white of the ice, the old red-and-white tug, pointing out at the lake, the way it always had, as if it were waiting for something.
Under it, after a moment, a single word came through.
April.
He looked at it.
He typed April.
He looked at it. Then he sent it.
Down at the bottom of the hill a bus went along Figueroa, lit up inside and nearly empty, with its sign saying a number he could not read. He watched it go along under the streetlights, and round the corner, and away.
Behind him the door opened, and the noise came out, and the warm air, and the smell of jollof rice.
“Danny,” Denise said. “Your mother wants you. Come in, it’s cold.”
It was eleven degrees. He got up and went in.
He had made it.
The End