Free Fifty Mice: A Novel by Daniel Pyne Page B

they’re not passing, they’ve slowed, stopped, several bulls blocking his forward progress on the road.
    The fog eases unexpectedly: blue sky, sun, Jay shades his eyes, looks back the way he came. Now Avalon is gone, carpeted by the graywhite cloud, but he can back through the motionless herd; switches the lever on the cart and it bleats an irritating meeeeeeeeeeeeeeepthat causes the buffalo to grunt and shift and he weaves reversing through them, tires slipping on the soft gravel that shoulder the road, finally finding traction on the blacktop where he’s swallowed again by the mist.
    Jay stops here to get his bearings. The wind picks up and the fog dissipates again for fifty yards in every direction and the bleary sun settles into the rimy southwestern sky and bleeds away, and the buffalo are gone.
    Somewhere a prop plane engine whines as it hurries away from the island.
    From his vantage point on this plateau, Jay can look east to the mainland, the curve of Long Beach and San Pedro and Portuguese Bend; Palos Verdes lumps darkish up out of the grayblue wind-chopped sea but melts into the grayblue blur of city that, save the sprinkling of early lights, melts into the grayblue eastern sky as if there are no borders between heaven and earth, now or then. Jay tries to remember what the city looks like when it’s clear. He can’t. He’s not surprised by this.
    More shrill beeping as he turns the cart around, slots the lever back to forward, and begins his retreat back into an Avalon now nested deep in the Pacific winter’s four-o’clock shadow.

| 8 |
    GINGER’S VOICE, SWEET, DISTANT, SINGS:
    Pack up all my care and woe—
    —here I go
    singing low.
    Bye, bye, blackbird.
    Jay is stretched out on the lumpen tweed sofa, with a leopard-print Snuggie as a comforter; he stares into the darkness and listens:
    Where somebody waits for me
    sugar’s sweet
    so is she
    bye, bye, blackbird.
    She sings every night. The mental picture Jay has of Helen and Ginger in the high poster bed is borne of the glimpse he got into the bedroom as he shuffled down the hallway from the bathroom tohis sofa: Helen clutching a well-worn, plush white stuffed mouse, curled small against the pillows, Ginger in an oversize blood-red Cal State Northridge T-shirt with socks still on her feet. Her face slick with tears.
    No one here can love or understand me.
    Her voice falters.
    Oh what hard luck . . . stories . . .
    She stops. The house is quiet for a while. Jay can hear his pulse in his ears, steady. Then, so softly her voice is a mere tracing on the darkness:
    . . . 
light the light
    I’ll arrive . . . late tonight . . .
    Helen must be asleep. Jay pictures Ginger, motionless, afraid that if she moves she might wake the girl up. Her gaze is like nothing he’s ever seen in a woman, what he and Vaughn call quarterback eyes—in the zone: dead calm, scary focused, stripped of emotion despite the frequent unexplained spill of tears. Calculating and distant and confident and cold.
    Is she crying now? Is she watching the up and down of her daughter’s breathing? Does she ever worry it will stop?
    What does she not want to remember?
    The light cast into the hallway from the bedroom snaps off.
    The hush of night. Crickets. Distant roll of the ocean surf on the stoney beach.
    •   •   •
    T hen, a child’s screaming.
    He’s dreaming. His sister.
    Cara?
    No.
    The lamplight behind the sofa flicks on, and Jay, squinting painfully, wonders how long he’s been asleep, or if he’s been asleep at all. A child’s screaming, not a dream. He stares stupidly at the luminous face of his watch, coiled on the coffee table. Little hand on the two. The screams are coming from the bedroom, staccato, hysterical. Jay gets up, his leg still asleep, and thumps down the hallway to the bedroom doorway, past which he can make out, in the ambient light from behind him, Helen, thrashing, screaming, still asleep but eyes wide open, mouth gaping, wild with