False Memory

familiar half bath behind her.
    When she looked into the reflection of her blue eyes, her heart raced anew, for in a fundamental sense, she had become a stranger to herself. This shaky woman who was spooked by her own shadow, who was stricken by panic at the prospect of confronting a mirror... this was not Martine Rhodes, Smilin’ Bob’s daughter, who had always gripped the reins of life and ridden with enthusiasm and poise.
    “What’s happening to me?” she asked the woman in the mirror, but her reflection couldn’t explain, and neither could the dog.
    The phone rang. She went into the kitchen to answer it.
    Valet followed. He stared at her, puzzled, tail wagging at first, then not wagging.
    “Sorry, wrong number,” she said eventually, and she hung up. She noticed the dog’s peculiar attitude. “What’s wrong with you?”
    Valet stared at her, hackles slightly raised.
    “I swear, it wasn’t the girl poodle next door, calling for you.”
    When she returned to the half bath, to the mirror, she still did not like what she saw, but now she knew what to do about it.

    4
    Dusty walked under the softly rustling fronds of a wind-stirred phoenix palm and along the side of the house. Here he found Foster “Fig” Newton, the third member of the crew.
    Hooked to Fig’s belt was a radio—his ever present electronic IV bottle. A pair of headphones dripped talk radio into his ears.
    He didn’t listen to programs concerned with political issues or with the problems of modern life. Any hour, day or night, Fig knew where on the dial to tune in a show dealing with UFOs, alien abductions, telephone messages from the dead, fourth-dimensional beings, and Big Foot.
    “Hey, Fig.”
    “Hey.”
    Fig was diligently sanding a window casing. His callused fingers were white with powdered paint.
    “You know about Skeet?” Dusty asked as he followed the slate walkway past Fig.
    Nodding, Fig said, “Roof.”
    “Pretending he’s gonna jump.”
    “Probably will.”
    Dusty stopped and turned, surprised. “You really think so?”
    Newton was usually so taciturn that Dusty didn’t expect more than a shrug of the shoulders byway of reply. Instead Fig said, “Skeet doesn’t believe in anything.”
    “Anything what?” Dusty asked. “Anything period.”
    “He isn’t a bad kid, really.”
    Fig’s reply was, for him, the equivalent of an after-dinner speech:
    “Problem is, he isn’t much of anything.”
    Foster Newton’s pie-round face, plum of a chin, full mouth, cherry-red nose with cherry-round tip, and flushed cheeks ought to have made him look like a debauched hedonist; however, he was saved from caricature by clear gray eyes which, magnified by his thick eyeglasses, were full of sorrow. This was not a conditional sorrow, related to Skeet’s suicidal impulse, but a perpetual sorrow with which Fig appeared to regard everyone and everything.
    “Hollow,” Fig added.
    “Skeet?”
    “Empty.”
    “He’ll find himself.”
    “He stopped looking.”
    “That’s pessimistic,” Dusty said, reduced to Fig’s terse conversational style.
    “Realistic.”
    Fig cocked his head, attention drawn to a discussion on the radio, which Dusty could hear only as a faint tinny whisper that escaped one of the headphones. Fig stood with his sanding block poised over the window casing, eyes flooding with an even deeper sorrow that apparently arose from the weirdness to which he was listening, as motionless as if he had been struck by the paralytic beam from an extraterrestrial’s ray gun.
    Worried by Fig’s glum prediction, Dusty hurried to the long aluminum extension ladder that Skeet had climbed earlier. Briefly, he considered moving it to the front of the house. Skeet might become alarmed by a more direct approach, however, and leap before he could be talked down. The rungs rattled under Dusty’s feet as he rapidly ascended.
    When he swung off the top of the ladder, Dusty was at the back of the house. Skeet Caulfield was at the front, out of sight beyond a steep slope of orange clay tiles that rose like the scaly flank of a sleeping dragon.
    This house was on a hill, and a couple miles to the west, beyond the crowded flats of Newport Beach and its sheltered harbor, lay the Pacific. The usual blueness of the water had settled like a sediment to the ocean floor, and the choppy waves were many shades of gray, mottled with black: a reflection of the forbidding heavens. At the horizon, sea and sky appeared to curve together in a colossal dark wave which, if real, would have rushed ashore with enough