The Kaleidoscope (14 page)

“It’s sweet you’re protective of him. You are a good friend, Harry.” Pepper crawled in her small tent. Glenda curled up just outside the flap.

Harold sat near the fire, wondering if the man was already a bear’s dinner. He stirred the coals in the small fire. A bullfrog, nature’s musical theater he’d heard somewhere, started its evening song. He leaned against a boulder still warm from the day’s sunrays. His lids grew heavy until he woke with a start when a truck backfired nearby. The fire had dwindled to coals, so he crawled into his own bag to zip up against the chill. He was dozing again when noises from beyond a stand of mountain laurel had him fully awake.

It was Morrie. Harold breathed a sigh of relief. Glenda whoofed once, then her tail thumped when she recognized the man. Morrie zipped himself into his own bag, and soon his snoring drowned out the toad’s lament.

****

“Harry?” Pepper whispered, touching his arm. “You awake?” He squinted. It was still dark, the stars bright overhead. Pepper nudged him again. He fumbled with the bag’s zipper. “I can’t sleep,” she whispered. “Keep me company to the little girls’ room?” He allowed her to grab his hand and pull him up when he’d freed himself from the cocoon. The night was chilly, and he reached for his jacket. Morrie’s snore rose above the still night.

When they were a few yards from the tent, Pepper giggled. “He’s quite the freight train. I cannot sleep with all that noise. Hold Glennie for me?”

Leash in hand, he waited outside the concrete block restroom, listening to the crickets and thrums of distant music from a party in the distance.

She came out and took his elbow. “Let’s take a walk and gaze at the stars.” Without waiting for a reply, she tugged him into the night.

They moved away from the circle of campsites, toward a crop of boulders. The moon hadn’t yet appeared, and Pepper’s flashlight flicked back and forth. She stopped and hoisted herself up, patting the spot next to her on a reasonably flat shelf in the granite. The stars were as pinpricks into another universe Harold imagined so unique, so disparate from anything in earth’s vocabulary even the most learned scientists or philosophers couldn’t fully describe them. A physics professor of his had once compared it to a caveman having no ability to comprehend the technologies our generation takes for granted. What was beyond the stars? The granite ledge bit into his backside. He shifted to a more comfortable spot.

Without warning, Pepper yipped, returning a distant coyote’s calls. Harold almost fell off his rock.

“What do you think they’re saying?” Pepper could always make him smile. She spoke to Glenda, and after a few tries, coaxed the dog to sit with her head just below Pepper’s dangling feet. “I have decided to accept the job offer, Harry.” She dropped back until she was lying on the granite, her face to the heavens. “You still owe me a shooting star.”

Was she speaking to God, or to him?

“I’ll do my best.” A ridge poked his shoulder blade, and he patted the surface, searching for a more comfortable position. He’d grown fond of Pepper, and her announcement didn’t so much surprise as sadden him. Dropping off misdelivered mail to her, hoping she’d invite him into her apartment after work, catching her smile in the lobby as she hurried past with an armload of lawyerly-looking paperwork—he would miss her. That unidentifiable scent he still couldn’t name, but he’d never forget her.

“I want your happiness, Harry, and if you think Georgia is the one, then I support you in trying to get her back.” Pepper sighed. “But I have to say you’re an enigma. I have no idea if she’s really best for you, or what goes on inside your head for that matter. Most of the time.”

Just the way he liked it.

“What do you really want from life? I mean, what happens after Georgia comes back and you get this promotion? Are you going to be happy then?”

Something about the cloak of darkness assuaged his resistance to revealing himself. “I want to prove to my wife that I’m not a loser. So yes. Then I will have reached my goal.” And proven I’m nothing like my father.

“That’s a funny way to say you’re still in love with her.”

He rolled that challenge around in his head. “What’s wrong with it?”

“Shouldn’t you be missing her? Shouldn’t your body ache to be close to hers again? What’s the point of proving something to her? It’s like you’ve set her as one of your goals. You’re giving someone else control over your own joy, Harry.”

“No, I’m not. If that’s what it takes.”

“Who says she wants you to prove anything? And what happens if you’re wrong? Why don’t you write one of your computer programs to see what will happen? What do you call it, a simulation?”

“That’s not how it works.” He almost laughed, but he didn’t want to hurt her feelings. What some people thought about computers and their capabilities. “When she left me, she complained that I’d become complacent. I took her for granted.” He was beginning to resent the probe. “I expect her to come to her senses soon. The job promotion is my way of showing her I’m listening to what she wants.”

He heard a soft snort from Pepper’s side of the rock. “What she’s trying to do is make you over into something she wants.” Pepper swung an arm over, propped her head on a hand. He could only make out the outline of her long neck and angular shoulders in the dark.

“Isn’t that what love is?”

“Is it? Is love having to prove yourself to someone?”

Harold tried to recall Pepper ever mentioning a marriage, or even a lover.

She rolled back flat against the bedrock. The moon, like an actor waiting for the curtains to draw wide suddenly appeared center stage, its light washing the valley. With his eyes already adjusted to the dark, he could see her body’s shapes and shadows, the light reflecting off her smooth skin. “When my first diagnosis came back positive, I was in the middle of planning a wedding.” She sounded so matter-of-fact the implication almost didn’t register.

“Wedding?”

“It’s so true, Harry. When a life-threatening illness happens, they say that people usually react in one of two ways. They either draw closer and try to help…”

Harold sensed what was coming and didn’t want to hear, but knew he should ask anyway. “Or?”

“Or they run. Lex didn’t exactly run, but he checked out emotionally. So I did us both a favor and called it off.” She tugged on the hem of her blouse, a gesture Harold had noticed her doing before, but now realized why she was doing it. She was self-conscious about her body.

“What a jerk.”

She smoothed and shifted something under the fabric. “Me or him?”

“Him, of course.”

“No. It’s okay. It’s how he was wired. I couldn’t make him be something he wasn’t already, and he couldn’t even look at me after…I couldn’t face a lifetime of that.”

Something fluttered overhead, its wings beating the still air. “People can change.”

“But they can’t become something they’re not. He couldn’t face life wondering if I was going to continue to fall apart. Waking up every day to a broken body, slashed and gashed.”

Harold couldn’t imagine not finding Pepper attractive. She had tried to make it a joke, but he couldn’t bring himself to laugh with her.

“And I must apologize to you.” She faced him again.

“For what?”

“I push you beyond your comfort zone.”

“Don’t apologize. I kind of like it.”

“I’m just being another Georgia.”

That set off alarms he didn’t realize existed. “No, you’re nothing like her. You’re…”

“I’m what?”

“Please, when you push me toward…she—” He stopped, realizing he was talking himself out of something he
thought
he wanted. “No one’s really done that for me since…”

A plane, high overhead, split the starry heaven in two, blinking, winking down at them. “Since when? What were you going to say? Were you going to tell me what the ’scope showed you? Something about me? About Georgia?”

She wasn’t giving up. He imagined tossing the ’scope into the brook that flowed past their campsite, riding it bronco style all the way to the Pacific where he’d sink to the bottom, away from everyone he’d disappointed, everyone whose dreams he’d drowned in his own unimaginative, uninspiring dull presence of being. The coward’s way out of facing life’s unknowns.

“So far it’s had nothing to say about Georgia.”

“So it did show you something!” She elbowed him in the ribs. “Tell me!”

He’d never tell. But he needed to say something to satisfy her curiosity. He considered sharing something he’d never trusted anyone with since Georgia.

“When I was little,” he started, still unsure how much to say. Pepper would expect him to show emotion, but he had ceased shedding tears long ago. “I think I was about three, maybe four, my mother came home from work, and found my dad passed out on the couch. Not that unusual. I think I usually went to day care of some sort, but for some reason I was home that day, maybe sick or something. They started arguing and I ran to hide in my closet.”

When he grew silent, Pepper wrapped her hand around his. “Glenda hides in my closet when she hears thunder. Closets are safe and comforting for pets. And scared little boys.”

“I hated when they argued. That’s the last memory I have of him. My grandma burned all his pictures. I think I have a vague image of him, but for all I know I’m remembering the mailman. But that’s why I don’t like to speak of them. Of him.”

She squeezed his hand. “Do you have any nice memories we could use to replace all the bad ones your grandma gave you?” When he didn’t answer, she began humming to herself, scanning the stars.

“What about your family?” He recalled their brief conversation in the park with Morrie.

“I was born a twin, but she was stillborn. We were late life, change-of-life babies. Both my parents are gone now.” Her arm lifted, and she pointed. “Somewhere in the heavens, I have a sister, and I speak to her sometimes.”

That’s why she needed to believe in an afterlife. Harold didn’t know what to say. “No aunts or uncles?”

“Nope.” She stroked Glenda’s fur with a toe. “Glennie’s my earth family now.”

Her tail thumped the hard ground.

“What about your genius for numbers, Harry? Was that something you got from your mom and dad?”

All of a sudden, a happy memory worked its way to the front of the line. “I did like to poke around in my dad’s shop. His workbench was covered with things a little boy likes. Rocks, metals, all sorts of power tools. I could touch them, but never move them from their place.” Harold stiffened. “If he caught me near them he’d rage. ‘Hands off, that’s delicate!’ My grandma said he was always working on one invention or another. She called him a dreamer, a schemer. She told me he wanted to make a million dollars, but that he’d never amount to anything. That he was irresponsible and certifiable.” The happy thoughts disintegrated into disappointment.

The bones of Pepper’s thumb pressed into his flesh. “That must have been hard to hear about your own father.” Her phone burred, and the screen lit her face as she read the message. She slid it back into her pocket. “Sorry.”

The spell was broken, and Harold hurried to repress the painful memories. An exercise he was quite good at. “I’m going back to bed. Back to bag as it were.”

“You can’t keep running away from yourself like this,” Pepper protested. “You should confront what’s hurting you, or it will eat you up and spit you out. Ignoring it won’t work. It’s your cancer, Harry.”

“Talking about what he did only reawakens what I’ve spent my entire life getting over.” He slid off the rock and headed for the camp, convinced no one could ever understand the damage his father had done.

If Pepper knew the entire truth, she’d agree with him, but he wasn’t going to tell her the rest of the horrid story.

Chapter Thirteen

“Did you have any luck?” Harold awoke to Pepper’s question, but he couldn’t hear Morrie’s reply. She was cooking something on a portable grill set up on the end of the picnic table. There followed a few minutes of conversation, but from their tone Harold could tell Morrie wasn’t encouraged.

Then Pepper spoke of last night’s conversation. “I decided to accept the offer, Morrie. I’m giving notice at the firm. The ’scope has given me clarity.”

Harold tried to convince himself it was for the best. When Georgia came back, she wouldn’t approve of his friendship with Pepper anyway.

“Bacon and eggs?” Pepper offered Harold a fried egg on a plastic plate when he joined them.

“Thanks.”

Morrie was perched on a folding stool balancing a metal dish on his lap.

All the sites around them had filled up overnight, and the line of cars and trucks kept a steady hum as if they were still in LA. Harold sat at the picnic table, the boards damp from dew. The greasy egg tasted surprisingly good.

“Morrie was just telling me he got a couple nibbles on his cousin’s last known whereabouts.” Pepper sipped coffee from a tin mug. “So today, we’re all about solving the mystery of where’s Morrie’s cousin. Is that all right with you?”

Harold would have rather taken that hike, or even one of the bus tours. But the purpose of the trip was to find the cousin. Pepper glanced around, but he didn’t say anything. He didn’t want to sound like a jerk. “All right.”

Morrie set his plate on the table. “Someone at the park office heard my questions last evening, and told me about a popular end-of-season party every winter where a lot of the hikers go to celebrate. If he was around then, someone might have seen him. It’s a good lead.” He showed them a crude sketch of a map in pencil on a piece of paper from the kind of pads they have in hotel rooms. He caught Harold’s eye. “We can find out who was there and see if anyone recognizes his picture.” Morrie had brought along a picture he hoped might lead to them finding his cousin.

Pepper straddled the bench. She scooped up a forkful of eggs. “It gives our little trip a spirit of adventure, right, Harry? First we’ll do some sightseeing, and then we’ll see if we can track him down.”

While he waited in line at the bathroom, Harold wondered if their search would turn up anything. It seemed like quite the long shot. When he stepped inside, he was glad of one thing. He’d remembered to bring rubber flip-flops for the community shower.