Odd Thomas

that yard."
        I could summon only the ghost of a smile. "Hello, Mom. You look wonderful."
        She requires compliments; but in fact she never looks less than wonderful.
        If she had been a stranger, I might have found her to be even lovelier. For me, our shared history diminishes her radiance.
        "Come here, sweetie, look at these fabulous blooms."
        I entered the gallery of roses, where a carpet of decomposed granite held down the dust and crunched underfoot.
        Some flowers offered sun-pricked petals of blood in bursting sprays. Others were bowls of orange fire, bright cups of yellow onyx brimming with summer sunshine. Pink, purple, peach - the garden was perpetually decorated for a party.
        My mother kissed me on the cheek. Her lips were not cold, as I always expect them to be.
        Naming the variety, she said, "This is the John F. Kennedy rose. Isn't it exquisite?"
        With one hand, she gently lifted a mature bloom so heavy that its head was bowed on its bent stem.
        As Mojave-white as sun-bleached bone, with a faint undertone of green, these large petals weren't delicate but remarkably thick and smooth.
        "They look as if they're molded from wax," I said.
        "Exactly. They're perfection, aren't they, dear? I love all my roses, but these more than any other."
        Not merely because this rose was her favorite, I liked it less than the others. Its perfection struck me as artificial. The sensuous folds of its labial petals promised mystery and satisfaction in its hidden center, but this seemed to be a false promise, for its wintry whiteness and waxy rigidity - and lack of fragrance - suggested neither purity nor passion, but death.
        "This one's for you," she said, withdrawing a small pair of rose snips from a pocket of her sundress.
        "No, don't cut it. Let it grow. It'll be wasted on me."
        "Nonsense. You must give it to that girl of yours. If properly presented, a single rose can express a suitor's feelings more clearly than a bouquet."
        She snipped off eight inches of stem with the bloom.
        I held the flower not far below its receptacle, pinching the stem with thumb and forefinger, between the highest pair of thorns.
        Glancing at my wristwatch, I saw that the lulling sun and the perfumed flowers only made time seem to pass lazily, when in fact it raced away. Robertson's kill buddy might even now be driving to his rendezvous with infamy.
        Moving along the rosarium with a queenly grace and a smile of royal beneficence, admiring the nodding heads of her colorful subjects, my mother said, "I'm so glad you came to visit, dear. What is the occasion?"
        At her side yet half a step behind her, I said, "I don't know exactly. I've got this problem-"
        "We allow no problems here," she said in a tone of gentle remonstration. "From the front walk to the back fence, this house and its grounds are a worry-free zone."
        Aware of the risks, I had nonetheless led us into dangerous territory. The decomposed granite under my feet might as well have been sucking quicksand.
        I didn't know how else to proceed. I didn't have time to play our game by her rules.
        "There's something I need to remember or something I should do," I told her, "but I'm blocked on it. Intuition brought me here because… I think somehow you can help me figure out what I've overlooked."
        To her, my words could have been barely more comprehensible than gibberish. Like my father, she knows nothing of my supernatural gift.
        As a young child, I had realized that if I complicated her life with the truth of my condition, the strain of this knowledge would be the death of her. Or the death of me.
        Always, she has sought a life utterly without stress, without contention. She acknowledges no duty to another, no responsibility for anyone but herself.
        She would never call this selfishness. To her it's self-defense, for she finds the world enormously more demanding than she is able to tolerate.
        If she fully embraced life with all its conflicts, she would suffer a breakdown. Consequently, she manages the world with all the cold calculation of a ruthless autocrat, and preserves her precarious sanity by spinning around herself a cocoon of indifference.
        "Maybe if we could just talk for a while," I said. "Maybe then I could figure out why I came here, why I