Your Heart Belongs to Me

shits.”
    “She’ll blow your brains out, Dad. What can he do to you that would be more final?”
    Licking his lips and the fringe of mustache that overhung them, Jimmy rose unsteadily from the sofa. He was a skinny wreck. The seat of his jeans sagged, he had no butt left, and sticking out of his T-shirt, his elbows looked almost as big as his forearms.
    “She’s making this worse for me,” Jimmy said to Ryan. “Bitch won’t let me have a joint. Make her let me have one.”
    “I don’t set the rules here, Dad.”
    “It’s your house, isn’t it?”
    “Dad, go with Bamping.”
    “Go with what?”
    “Bamping. That’s his name. Go with him now.”
    “What kind of name is Bamping?”
    “Don’t do this anymore, Dad.”
    “When they bought your company, did they buy your balls?”
    “Yes, they did, Dad. They bought them. Now go with him.”
    “This sucks. This whole situation sucks.”
    “It’s no tangerine dream, that’s for sure,” Ryan said.
    “What’s that supposed to mean?”
    “Nothing.”
    “It means something, all right. Wise-ass.”
    At last Jimmy allowed Bamping to escort him back the hall to the bedroom. A door closed.
    “Very carefully,” Violet said, “take off your jacket.”
    “I’m not carrying a weapon.”
    “Very carefully,” she repeated.
    He took off the jacket and draped it over the sofa, where she could examine it if she wished. At her command, he took off his shirt and placed that beside his jacket, and then he turned in a circle with his arms extended like the wings of a bird.
    Satisfied that he wasn’t armed, she pointed to a La-Z-Boy recliner and said, “Sit there.”
    Obeying, Ryan said, “Funny.”
    “You are amused?”
    “I wouldn’t go that far. But it’s funny how the warriors of the Greatest Generation and washouts of the next both like their La-Z-Boys.”
    He did not recline but sat straight up, leaning forward.
    “Where have you been?” she asked.
    “Denver.”
    She kept at a distance from him, not willing to get as near as she had been to Jimmy. “Were you running away?”
    “I thought about it,” he admitted.
    “I didn’t expect you to come here.”
    “If I didn’t, you would have killed him.”
    “Yes.”
    “I guess you still might.”
    “I might,” she said. “I will certainly kill you.”
    “Maybe I didn’t come alone.”
    “You came in a limousine, which is parked a block away. There is only the driver. He is in the car, listening to very bad music and reading an obscene magazine.”
    Although Ryan’s fear was not diminished, a peculiar calm came over him, as well. He wanted not a single day more that was alike to the days of the past sixteen months. He had been saved from certain death, but he had lost Samantha, he had lost a sense of purpose, and he had lost the capacity for pure joy. His lifelong conviction that the future was worth the travails of the day, while not broken, had been shaken. He had arrived at a lever-point moment. Here he must pivot to a better future or give up the game.
    “If you’re going to kill me,” he said, “may I have the courtesy of knowing fully why?”
     

 
    FIFTY-TWO

    T he bamboo shades, dropped to sills, were dimly backlit by the overcast day but admitted no light to the living room or to the dining room that lay beyond a wide archway. Illumination came from two table lamps turned low, from the luminous shapes everchanging in a lava lamp, from three candles glimmering in colored glasses on the fireplace mantel, and from two glass vessels on the coffee table, in which floating wicks burned scented oils.
    More than light, shadows shaped the room, smoothing every sharp corner into a radius, layering velvet folds of faux draperies over flat surfaces, and conspiring with the pulsating candlelight to suggest that the ceiling had an undulant form.
    The woman roamed ceaselessly through orderless patterns of pale light and masking shadow, through shimmering nimbuses and quivering penumbras. Her languid movements might have seemed lethargic to some, but not to Ryan, who saw in her the measured restlessness and the lethal power of a tiger.
    “Who is this?” she asked, pointing with the pistol to a poster.
    “Country Joe and the Fish,” Ryan said.
    “I don’t see fish.”
    “It’s the name of the band. They changed the world.”
    “How did they change the world?”
    “I don’t know. That’s what my father told me.”
    Lamplight uplit her face and, with illusory powder and mascara,