just disappear and not tell me. Who knows what kind of crazy scam she’s mixed up with this time—I keep thinking of that phony Mexican property she bought a few years back. By going there we might get stuck bailing her out again.”
“God, this carpet is filthy,” Ruby says, zooming in on Moxie’s black-smudged hands and knees, then panning across the foot traffic of the departure lounge as if to emphasize the parade of filth. The smut underlying the sunny myth of the California Dream. “Maybe your mom’s just trying to show you how it feels to be cut out of the picture. You know what a shock it was to her when you moved away.”
“That was twenty years ago! I’m a middle-aged man, for God’s sake.”
“Not in her mind.” Wrestling the uncooperative toddler, Ruby says, “Some help!”
“Oh, sorry.” He takes the wipes from her bag and goes to work.
“My guess is she’s just giving you a taste of your own medicine.”
“But that’s not fair, I have a right to my own—” Henry stops himself, disengaging from the well-worn groove. His wife is just baiting him anyway, for dramatic purposes. “Hey, whose side are you on?” he asks.
“Just playing devil’s advocate,” Ruby says sweetly.
“Oh, thanks. Thanks, that’s what I need: a viper in my bed. Anyway, I don’t think so. She’s too needy to pull off something like that for long—if she was doing it out of spite, she’d have caved by now and sent me a big ranting letter. You’ve seen her letters; she’s never been one to suffer in silence. This is something new.”
“You know what I think?”
“What?”
“I think you’re jealous.”
“Poopiehead!” Moxie shrieks, straining against the leash.
“Jealous?”
“I think you’re afraid your mom has got her life together and doesn’t need you as much. Maybe she’s found love—or gotten married.”
“Hey, if only. You know how long I’ve been wishing she would do something like that? Take the burden off of me.”
“Maybe so, honeybun—” Ruby sets Moxie back on the floor, turns the camera off, and sits on Henry’s lap, resting her slender bare arms on his shoulders “—but sometimes you can be the eensiest bit judgmental, especially with her. It wouldn’t surprise me a bit if she didn’t want to tell you she had moved in with some old guy because she was afraid of your reaction. I wouldn’t really blame her—you can be pretty hard on her, you know.”
“It’s her judgment that’s the problem, not mine. She makes very bad choices.”
“Maybe so, but it’s her life.”
“Just so long as it doesn’t become our problem.”
During the monotonous, two-hour ferry ride, Ruby wanders the decks with Moxie and that camera, interviewing strangers, while Henry stares absently out the window at the passing waves. This is Ruby’s first trip to California, Moxie’s first boat ride, and they’re excited. Henry is glad for them—why shouldn’t they be? Why shouldn’t he be having fun as well? Just because of something that happened a long time ago—it’s silly.
Feet up on their luggage, half drowsing, Henry has plenty of time to think about things, and what an utterly different experience his first trip to the island had been: like going to another planet, as exotic and beautiful and…he dozes off.
Meat. A supermarket display of raw meat. Rows of ruby-red cutlets, steaks, chops, roasts, sausage, all glistening under fluorescent lights, garnished with sprigs of holly and berries. Going down the refrigerator case, you see something black and bristly on the bottom shelf—a huge boar’s head. Fascinated, heart thumping, you look closer, but your breath fogs the glass; you can’t see. Impatiently wiping it, you find that the head is gone…or perhaps was never really there at all.
Something drips on your scalp. You turn around to see that hideous pig head staring down at you, its long snout wrinkling at your scent. Big yellow teeth, so human, line its drooling jaws. The pig has a man’s body; the body of a butcher wearing a bloody apron and holding up a great, gory cleaver—
Someone bumps the back of his seat, and Henry awakens with a shout.
Chapter Two
TERMINAL ISLAND
“Maybe it’s not coming.”
“It’s coming. Be patient.”
“But it’s late!”
“No, my watch is fast.”
“I’m scared. What if it doesn’t come?”
“It’ll come. I promise.”
“You promise?”
“Yes, honey. I promise.”
San Pedro in the ’60s was a railway terminal by the sea, an industrial wasteland in which mile-long chains of freight cars, some with two or three locomotives at each end, clanged slowly along a creosote-smelling harbor front that was the Pacific gateway into America. This