The Darkest Evening of the Year

in our lives, one way or another, a Holly Golightly attitude won’t work with her.”
    “Holly Golightly like in Breakfast at Tiffany’s ?”
    He said, “If there’s a Holly Golightly in Bleak House, I’m not aware of it.”
    “Listen up, nameless narrator, I don’t have a Holly Golightly attitude. It’s more like Katharine Hepburn in anything with Cary Grant.”
    “Nameless narrator?”
    “ Breakfast at Tiffany’s is told in the first person by a guy who’s in love with her, but we never know his name.”
    They let the dogs lead them in silence for a few steps, and then Brian said, “I am in love with you.”
    “You said so back at the apartment. I said it, too. We’ve said it before. We don’t have to keep saying it every ten minutes, do we?”
    “I don’t mind hearing it.”
    “Dogs know when you love them,” she said. “They don’t expect you to say it all the time. People should be more like dogs.”
    “No dog has ever asked you to marry him.”
    “Sweetie, you’ve been so patient. It’s just that…I have some issues. I’m working on them. I’m not just being rotten to you, though I’m sure sometimes it seems like that.”
    “It never seems like you’re being rotten. You’re the best. The way you’ve handled all this with Vanessa, Amy, you’re a wonder. It’s just…nameless narrator never got Holly Golightly.”
    “He got her in the movie.”
    “The movie was nice, but it wasn’t real. The book was real. In the book, she goes away to Brazil.”
    “I’m not going to Brazil. I don’t like to samba. Anyway, you’re not nameless narrator. You’re much cuter than he was.”
    The lampposts brightened as night pressed the last red wine out of the twilight.
    Along the pathway, from lamp to lamp, across the grass, from bench to bench and back again, the dogs enjoyed the park entirely as dogs will, sniffing the messages left by legions of dogs before them, alert to the scents of squirrels in trees, of birds in higher branches, and of far places from which stories are carried on the breeze.
    “Earlier, when I was doing all those drawings, I sensed—I knew —that Hope and Nickie are inextricably entwined, that I can’t have Hope without Nickie. There’s something so strange happening…yet Nickie acts like any other dog.”
    “Most of the time,” Amy said.
    She held Fred’s and Ethel’s leashes in her right hand. With her left hand, perhaps unconsciously, she touched the cameo locket at her throat.
    “You want to tell me about the bedroom-slipper thing?” he asked.
    “It doesn’t mean anything. It can’t. Anyway, it wouldn’t make sense to you without the backstory.”
    “So tell me the backstory.”
    “Sweetie, it’s not just a backstory, it’s a big honkin’ backstory. We don’t have time to get into it right now. In that last e-mail, Vanessa said ‘Stand by.’ We should see if she’s followed up while we’ve been out.”
    When they got back to his apartment, an e-mail from Vanessa was waiting.

 
    Chapter
38
    T he banks and beds of many rivers in southern California have been paved with concrete, not because the natives considered this more aesthetically pleasing than nature’s weeds and silt, but to prevent the course of the waterway from changing over time and to provide flood control. In addition, hundreds of millions of gallons of precious water that might otherwise have poured into the sea were efficiently diverted underground to stabilize the area’s water table during drought years.
    The rainy season usually began no earlier than December. Now, in September, the riverbed was dry.
    In the moonlight, the channel did not appear to be illuminated from above but instead from within its very structure, as though the concrete were radioactive and faintly glowing.
    In the Land Rover that had once belonged to Bobby Onions, the headlights extinguished, Billy Pilgrim cruised down the center of the sixty-foot-wide dry river.
    Twenty feet above him, chain-link fences prevented easy access to the river. Beyond the fences, on both sides, not visible from his low position, were shopping centers, industrial parks, and housing tracts, where hundreds of thousands of folks were living out versions of the American dream much different from the one that Billy pursued.
    Billy had worked in the illegal drug trade, the illegal arms trade, the illegal human-organ trade, and shoe sales.
    After high school, he had sold shoes for six months, intending to live in