are doing out here, the whole sick playbook. It’s the only way you’re gonna outlive your wife.
You may think that these things won’t be admissible in court, fruit of a poisoned tree and all that, but we’re not following strict legal channels here. I’m just a private citizen doing his patriotic duty. Consider it a family matter. As for the old lady, she shouldn’t have tried to cut me—I don’t like to kill senior citizens, not even ghouls like her.
So talk, old man. Speak to your long-lost nephew. Unburden yourself while you still can. I’m giving you five seconds to decide, and then I tape your mouth and flick on the old Zippo. Your next chance won’t be for ten long minutes. Yes? No?
Time’s up.
PART I:
DISINTEGRATING
NICELY
Chapter One
LABOR DAY
Running. The two of them running in the spotlight with nowhere to hide. Dark cliffs above, a dark sea below, and a paved ledge of a road in between. No escape from that insane glare, which follows them like the beam of a giant magnifying glass—a magnifying glass in the hands of a sadistic child—
Blink and it’s broad daylight. Night is replaced by the early morning hubbub of a departure lounge—he’s been daydreaming again. Henry Cadmus is taking his family to Catalina Island to visit his mother.
I’m taking my family to Catalina to visit my mother. I’m just taking my family to Catalina to visit my mother Vicki.
He’s said it aloud a few times already, to people at work and the stewardess on the plane from Chicago, but it still doesn’t sit right.
Hey, I’m only taking my wife and daughter to Catalina Island to visit grandma and do a little sightseeing—what’s so weird about that? That’s better.
Weird?—nothing. The answer is nothing at all. It’s a perfectly ordinary thing to do—just look around the ferry terminal at all the Labor Day tourists and daytrippers with their beach gear. No big deal. So why is his stomach wrung tight as a wet dishrag?
“Bootykins, are you okay?”
“What? Sure—sure.” Henry smiles reassuringly at his wife’s HD camcorder, embarrassed to be caught in a private moment. Ruby is his soul mate, his savior, the light of his life, and even after five years of marriage he’s still blown away by her creative energy as well as her darkly angelic beauty, but right now he could do without her need to compulsively record their lives for posterity, as if in her husband’s personal traumas she sniffs an Oscar for Best Documentary. That’s what he gets for marrying a younger, cooler woman. An artist.
“Just a little jetlagged, I guess,” he says.
“Are you sure that’s all it is?” The camera zooms in close.
Oh come on. It’s his own fault for being a sucker for art. Even before Henry fell in love with Ruby, he had been seduced by her taste in paintings: the walls of her alternative therapy practice were decorated with dark Goya prints, violent and alarming pictures that acknowledged the horrors of life and thus made slightly more bearable his chronic pain. Between the pictures and the candles and the slightly eerie, atonal music, Ruby’s studio was such an immediate relief from the clinical white hell of the VA medical center that Henry had pointed to Goya’s black Sabbath and joked, I think I need a witch. To which Ruby had replied, You’re in luck, cheerfully explaining that she was actually a lapsed Wiccan priestess—a fact later proven by her twining Druidic tattoos and discreet body piercings. Guess I went a little crazy in college, huh?
Henry loves that about her, the casual laughing-off of the awkward past. It is something he would like to be able to do himself, especially right now, when his own idiotic demons are scratching at the door. It is almost time to start boarding the boat. Throwing Ruby an Oedipal bone, he says, “It’s just my mother. The usual.”
“I know, but it’s going to be fine, I promise. I’ll be right there.”
“It’s just weird to have to track her down like this; she’s never done it before, just moved without telling me or anything. Not answering my letters. Obviously she doesn’t want to talk to me.”
“Well, it’s not like you haven’t done the same thing to her,” she says brightly, holding the camera in one hand and their leashed toddler in the other.
“Yeah, but…” He shakes his head as if to disperse the reflexive spasm of guilt that comes with anything having to do with his mother. “This is not like her, though. To