Free Fear itself: a novel by Jonathan Lewis Nasaw Page A

comfortable.”
    “How about the kitchen?”
    “Ideal,” said Pender. “My mother always said the kitchen was the most important room in the house.”
    “Where did you grow up?”
    “I’m an Appleknocker,” he replied; then, receiving a blank look: “Cortland. Upstate New York. And you?”
    “Right here.”
    “You mean Carmel?”
    “I mean right here, this house.”
    “No kidding? That’s unusual, this day and age.”
    “Tell me about it,” said Dorie. “My friend Simon, in Berkeley, is the only other person over fifty I know who still lives in the house he was brought up in.”
    As he followed Dorie down the hallway toward the kitchen, Pender found himself mentally humming the first few bars of “Something in the Way She Moves.” Over fifty, he said to himself: you’d never know it from this angle.

5

    Like his sister, Simon Childs was almost always ravenous. Unlike Missy, however, Simon had his looks to consider. And he liked to maintain that hungry edge: satiety led to boredom; boredom led to the blind rat.
    Sometimes he overdid it, though—his lean belly was rumbling by the time he reached Monterey. With nearly an hour to kill before nightfall, he decided to treat himself to a crab feast on Fisherman’s Wharf. Window table at Domenico’s, otters, seals, and sea lions providing the entertainment, dramatic lighting courtesy of the setting sun.
    It didn’t come cheap—fortunately money had never been a consideration for the heir to the Childs Electronics fortune, especially after his trust fund kicked in at age twenty-one, leaving him enough money to smoke, snort, pop, tweak, and inject himself half to death in a vain attempt to stave off the blind rat.
    But again, Simon was lucky: unlike most addicts, he figured out it wasn’t working before it killed him. And luckier still, he had something that did work—the fear game. He still enjoyed weed, whites, and wine, as well as the occasional milder psychedelics such as MDA or Ecstasy, and a rainbow array of downers and sleeping pills that were as necessary to him as oxygen, but for the most part, fear was Simon’s drug of choice. Other people’s fear, that is—he liked to think of himself as fearless.
    Simon lingered over coffee and dessert until the last of the color was gone from the sky. He tipped his waiter well, but not lavishly enough to make himself memorable, and stopped into the Wharf’s General Store on his way back to the car to buy a cute little sea otter for Missy’s stuffie collection.
    Then it was time to get to work. Simon drove south to Carmel and parked the Mercedes downtown, where it would be less conspicuous, leaving himself a ten or fifteen minute walk uphill to Dorie’s house, where he and Missy had stayed when they came down for a visit in late June. The three of them had explored the Aquarium in Monterey, driven down the coast to Big Sur, and on their last day, toured the lighthouse in Pacific Grove, where the docent had given Missy the honor of striking the big bell with a wooden mallet—seventh heaven for the old girl. She had earned it, though: the trip was her reward for having been left alone with her attendant for a week while Simon was in Chicago.
    All the excitement and exertion, however, had nearly proved fatal to Missy. No more road trips, her doctors had ordered when she was released from the cardiac unit at Alta Bates. Only by putting her on a regimen of quiet and diet, they said, could Simon count on another year or so of his sister’s company. And as always, they assured him that a heart transplant was out of the question—Down syndromers her age weren’t even on the protocol.
    Four months later, it still made Simon furious to think that a donor heart would go into the garbage before they’d put it into Missy’s chest. But this was no time for anger, he reminded himself as the roof motor whined and the top of the Mercedes closed out the stars. With forced calm he hung the temporary handicapped placard