The Husband

gagged down a flavorless meal.
    "Besides," Anson said, "directional mikes don't work between one moving vehicle and another."
    "Then let's not talk about it till we're moving."
    "Mickey, there's a very thin line between sensible caution and paranoia."
    "I passed that line hours ago," Mitch said, "and for me there's no going back."

Chapter 23

     
    The moo goo gai pan left an unsavory aftertaste that Mitch tried unsuccessfully to wash away with Diet Pepsi as he drove.
    He headed south on Coast Highway. Buildings and trees screened the sea from sight except for glimpses of an abyssal blackness.
    Sipping from a tall paper cup of lemon tea, Anson said, "His name is Campbell. He's ex-FBI."
    Alarmed, Mitch said, "This is exactly who we can't turn to."
    "Emphasis on the ex, Mickey. £#-FBI. He was shot, and shot bad, when he was twenty-eight. Other guys would have lived on disability, but he built his own little business empire."
    "What if they've got a tracking device on the Expedition, and they figure out we're powwowing with an ex-FBI agent?"
    "They won't know that he was. If they know anything at all about him, they might know I did a large piece of business with him a few years ago. That'll just look like I'm putting together the ransom."
    The tires droned on the blacktop, but Mitch felt as though the highway under them were no more substantial than the skin of surface tension on a pond, across which a mosquito might skate confidently until a feeding fish rose and took it.
    "I know what soil bougainvillea needs, what sunlight loropetalum requires," he said. "But this stuff is another universe to me."
    "Me too, Mickey. Which is why we need help. No one has more real-world knowledge, more street smarts than Julian Campbell."
    Mitch had begun to feel that every yes-no decision was a switch on a bomb detonator, that one wrong choice would atomize his wife.
    If this continued, he would soon worry himself into paralysis. Inaction would not save Holly. Indecision would be the death of her.
    "All right," he relented. "Where does this Campbell live?"
    "Get to the interstate. We're going south to Rancho Santa Fe."
    East-northeast of San Diego, Rancho Santa Fe was a community of four-star resorts, golf courses, and multimillion-dollar estates.
    "Jam it," Anson said, "and we'll be there in ninety minutes."
    When together, they were comfortable with silences, perhaps because each of them, as a kid, had separately and alone spent much time in the learning room. That chamber was better soundproofed than a radio-station studio. No noise penetrated from the outside world.
    During the drive, Mitch's silence and his brother's were different from each other. His was the silence of futile thrashing in a vacuum, of a mute astronaut tumbling in zero gravity.
    Anson's was the silence of feverish but ordered thought. His mind raced along chains of deductive and inductive reasoning faster than any computer, without the hum of electronic calculation.
    They had been on I-5 for twenty minutes when Anson said, "Do you sometimes feel we were held for ransom our entire childhood?"
    "If not for you," Mitch said, "I'd hate them."
    "I do hate them sometimes," Anson said. "Intensely but briefly They're too pathetic to hate for more than a moment. It would be like wasting your life hating Santa Claus because he doesn't exist."
    "Remember when I got caught with the copy of Charlotte's Web?"
    "You were almost nine. You spent twenty days in the learning room." Anson quoted Daniel: " 'Fantasy is a doorway to superstition.' "
    "Talking animals, a humble pig, a clever spider—"
    "A corrupting influence,'" Anson quoted. " 'The first step in a life of unreason and irrational beliefs.' "
    Their father saw no mystery in nature, just a green machine.
    Mitch said, "It would have been better if they hit us."
    "Much better. Bruises, broken bones—that's the kind of thing that gets the attention of Child Protective Services."
    After another silence, Mitch said, "Connie in Chicago, Megan in Atlanta, Portia in Birmingham. Why are you and I still here?"
    "Maybe we like the climate," Anson said. "Maybe we don't think distance heals. Maybe we feel we have unfinished business."
    The last explanation resonated with Mitch. He had often thought about what he would say to his parents if the opportunity arose to question the disparity between their intentions and methods, or the cruelty of trying to strip from children their sense of wonder.
    When he left the interstate and