Fire Sweeping: The California Ballot Killings Book II Read online

  Red velvet cake.

  Fruit cake.

  Fruit cake was Mom’s and Dad’s favorite.

  It was also a favorite in the Southern African Federation, where my parents were born. There, it was known as “wedding cake” since it was doused with booze, covered with marzipan, and consumed at weddings. Who can argue with that?

  “Mom,” Nate asked, “could we also have a jumping castle for your birthday? My friend, Brad, had a jumping castle at his birthday, and it was so cool that it even had air conditioning inside. Brad also had an indoor trampoline, but you said I should be careful on the trampoline. I don’t need to be careful about anything because I can take care of myself.”

  “Mom,” Jon responded. “Why does Nate always get what he wants? If you get a jumping castle with air conditioning for Nate for your birthday, then I want a pony, Mom. At school, they took us on the pony ride. Remember?”

  “But, Mom,” Nate said, “Jon is dumb. He’s so dumb-uh, Mom. Remember he got all his math homework wrong—”

  “I’m not dumb, dummy!”

  “You’re the dummy, Jon. You can’t even do basic homework. Mom and Dad have to help you. You’re, like, really dumb, Jon. You’re so dumb that—”

  “Hey, hey!” Mauru said. “You’re brothers. Be kind to each other.”

  Knowing that certain products would be banned, I resolved to enjoy them while they were still available. Of course, I couldn’t tell anyone what I knew was coming—it was all confidential until it was made public—but I could reflect my insider’s knowledge in my choices.

  What better way to enjoy such “lavish things” than to throw a belated birthday party for myself as a sign of my silent protest against the coming change?

  (I’ll even admit that I feared that 2039 might be the last time I celebrated my birthday with my family because they still didn’t know about Mike, and they didn’t know about the ultimatum that hung over me like a serpent slithering across the ceiling of my bedroom.)

  Mom and Mauru asked why I’d had a change of heart about celebrating my birthday.

  “I guess thirty-nine’s not that bad, after all,” I said. “I don’t ask for much, Mom. A birthday will make me happy, I guess.”

  “I’ll pay for it,” Dad offered. “Mom and I will pay for your birthday. You’ve made us happy, Janet. Four wonderful grandkids. A son-in-law, well, really, a son we never had—Mauru. We’ll pay for it.”

  “We’re paying for nothing, Dad,” Mom declared, as she referred to Dad by his title. “Janet’s a grown woman with a job. She can pay for herself.”

  “Mom,” Dad insisted, “I love you, and I’m paying for my daughter’s birthday. We’re paying for it. She’s the only child we have. I’m fifty-eight, and I want Janet—I just everyone—to be happy.”

  “We’re not paying for it, Dad,” Mom insisted. “I’m fifty-eight, too, and I don’t see why we should pay for Janet’s birthday. I think a nice little gift, maybe a pedicure or something, would do the trick.”

  “Hint. Hint.” I said as I wondered if Mom was suggesting that my feet were so bad I needed a pedicure. Mom had a habit of acting like Dad’s money was hers. Dad had won the lottery twice. The first time, he’d won two million dollars. The second time, he’d won close to seventy-one million dollars. You’d never know it if you only listened to Mom.

  “Well, Mom,” I said, “you can do both. You can get me a pedicure and throw me a party. With all the drastic changes everywhere, there might never be another birthday to celebrate, and I want to celebrate my birthday with my family.”

  Mom stared at me. “Answer me this,” she said as she brushed my twins’ hair. “Is there something wrong, Janet? You’ve been acting, well, like something’s wrong, for weeks now. Are you sick? Because I’d want to know. In these times, I’m not having my daughter suffer from some illness in silence.”

  Mauru looked at Mom and me.

  Mauru was, I’m quite sure, wondering where the illness-talk was coming from. Such talk also made Mauru uncomfortable because Jon had been asking about the disease killing teenage boys, the hatred, and Jon wanted to know whether he’d get it. (The hatred lies in the dust, is carried by the wind, and it causes beet-red eyes, violent coughing fits, and chest pains. No cure is available.)

  “No, Mom, I’m not sick.” I shook my head emphatically. “Why do I have to be sick to celebrate my birthday?”

  “OK, Janet,” Mom said as she took a seat. “I give up. I’m sorry for asking why you’ve been acting strangely over the past few weeks. If you don’t want to tell me what’s going on with you, fine.” Mom sighed as if she were exasperated. “We shouldn’t waste money on unnecessary things. As they were saying on Revere the Penny the other day, ‘The penny is the foundation of financial security. We should revere every last one of them in these times.’”

  “Your mom’s right, though,” Mauru said when we got home. “You’ve just been acting weird, Jan. It’s like you can’t forgive yourself for whatever reason. Whether it’s because of that tequila evening you had at work, and you came home late, or because of something else, I don’t know.”

  Mauru suggested that I talk to someone. He was worried about me. “You’re just not yourself,” he said. “You’re not. As the child of a psychologist, I know that mental health professionals can help people. You could use the help, Janet.”

  Where was the sense in paying a shrink at least two to three hundred dollars per hour to sit on a couch in her office and chat? People told me their secrets, and I listened, nodded, smiled, and sighed appropriately.

  I couldn’t help but imagine the following scene: The shrink would have her legs crossed as she sat tall in her chair, nodding every so often, looking at Mauru then at me. She’d nod again as we took turns talking, me resisting telling her a thing, Mauru staring at me in frustration, and the shrink looking at me all the while, while saying, as she nodded yet again, “Janet, would it help to look at Mauru and tell him why you don’t want to be here? Could you share what’s preventing you from wanting help? What should he know?”

  I’d begin a word, a phrase, a sentence. Maybe I’d even say the first two letters of Mike’s name, which would sound like the word “my.” The shrink would lean forward a little in anticipation, and she’d nod again, encouraging me in the silence, smiling a little, before sitting back and taking a deep breath as the word, the phrase, the sentence I wanted to say next evaporated in the space between us.

  “This is a really tough process,” the shrink would admit in that distinctive shrink’s voice that one finds among kindergarten teachers, clerics, and aid workers. “Telling someone who believes that they know you that there’s something about you they don’t know is quite hard, Janet. It goes to trust, loyalty, even safety. And you’re from a family of immigrants. We’re seeing how immigrants and internally displaced people from other states are being treated in these times. That must be weighing on you, too.”

  No.

  Thank you.

  I would not go to a shrink.

  “I’m good, thanks,” I said to Mauru.

  Mauru shook his head. Nate was yelling at Nathaniel and Nathalie for touching his stuff, and Mauru told him to stop.

  I went to get the twins, who screamed as I removed them from Nate’s books and toys, and I had to calm them down and sing some Almond Leather to them (my favorite group) before I focused on the details of my birthday party.

  Mike.

  Was he OK?

  Would he adore my wild kids?

  He’d met Jon and Nate when he’d come to our condo in Rancho San Antonio in November 2034, but he hadn’t yet met the twins, who were born in July 2037.

  Would my kids forgive me when they eventually learned about Mike and me?

  You know those websites that provide you with “Today’s Morsel of Wisdom”?

  It was on one of those that I read the following one morning, while Larry Wagon, my boss, discussed a case with two attorneys:

  Out beyond right and wron
g

  There thrives a world. I’ll meet you there.

  I was struck by the verse, “Out beyond right and wrong.” Did such a place exist? Could it?

  I imagined the morning my kids would learn that I’d cheated on their dad with a man called Mike Iet. By then, all of my kids would, I hoped, have survived both their father and me. The world would have healed itself, and the leaders in that new world would be public servants in the truest sense of the term.

  My kids would have their own families.

  As they sat in a prairie (a rarity in these times), they’d share a large family picnic filled with all the products that were once banned and unavailable during their childhood and adolescence, and a note would arrive in—what?—well, the beak of a, um, hummingbird.

  Yeah, a hummingbird.

  Hummingbirds were common in San Diego when my family moved here in 2026. You’d see them on your porch, and they’d be sipping from one of Mom’s favorite flowers—the bird of paradise.

  The note delivered by the hummingbird would inform my kids of my betrayal decades before.

  Jon (the most sensitive of my kids) would most likely be hurt, and Nate (the most rational of my kids) would tell him that it was all in the past, Jon. Nathaniel and Nathalie (whose lives would be devoted to fun) would both wonder, for a moment, if they’d ever known me, and if there were other men, other encounters with strangers, in that past.

  Jon would run after the hummingbird, trying to extract answers from it, as his spouse tried to stop him, telling him to let the past go, Jon. Maybe a grandchild (or two, or three, or four, or five) would sing my favorite Almond Leather song, for no reason at all. Maybe a grandchild would be named after me and another after Mauru; one could only hope.

  I just wanted my kids to be OK.

  After Jon and Nate bickered again, Mauru sent them to two separate rooms. They chatted with each other as they stood at the doors of the rooms in which Mauru’d confined them. (Our condo had three rooms. Mauru and I had the master bedroom, Jon and Nate shared a room, and our guest bedroom was now occupied by our twins.)

  “Hey, Dad,” Nate called. “I’ve apologized to Jon, and he’s apologized to me. The argument is over now.”

  “It’s true, Dad,” Jon said. “I don’t think Nate’s glib anymore. Nate’s not glib, Dad. Can you forgive us now? It’s kinda boring being on a timeout if you think about it.”

  “Yeah, Dad,” Nate said. “Why don’t you punish us with something like, ‘You guys have to watch TV for the next ten hours or even the next day. Or, you guys have to play video games for two weeks, as punishment?’”

  “That’s great,” Mauru said. “But you’re still on timeout in your rooms for another two hours. I want all my kids to be respectful to each other, and that includes you two.”

  Mauru knew that Jon and Nate would tire of sitting at the door. Jon would start yawning, Nate would ask Jon to get him one of his books, and they’d sit, reading to each other, while Nate explained words whose meaning came quickly to him but which took Jon a little more time to get.

  As he approached six, Nate was way ahead of all the other kids his age at day care, but the Rancho San Antonio school district wouldn’t allow Nate to start school until he turned six.

  Wishing for a little moment to myself, I told Mauru I was going to visit the Martinez family, our neighbors, to ask if Miguel Martinez, a chef by training, would bake all three cakes for my birthday party, which I’d decided would be held in about two weeks.

  Did Mauru want me to take the twins with me?

  He said he didn’t. He just wanted to spend as much time as he could with all the kids before they grew up and ended up “who knows where with who knows whom.”

  “We’re a unit,” I said.

  Mauru smiled and kissed me on the cheek.

  Miguel Martinez was sharpening a knife on a stone when I knocked on his door.

  “Janet,” he said as he opened the door. “How are the little ones and Mauru? I was telling Dolores that we still hadn’t had you all over. Please come on in.”

  Dolores hugged me, and Miguel hugged me, too.

  “We were just saying that one of the nice things about this terrible drought is that we don’t get nearly as much of that junk mail they call ‘direct marketing’ in our mailbox anymore,” Dolores observed. “You know, before you’d get an entire newspaper filled with pictures of steaks and everything else on sale.”

  “Please, Janet,” Miguel said, “take a seat. Can we offer you something to drink? Dolores made some delicious horchata de arroz this morning.”

  I took a seat on a modern sofa made of a cognac-colored leather. It was comfortable, and the color was sumptuous—a cross between caramel and chocolate.

  “I’d love some horchata. Thank you. You have a lovely home,” I remarked.

  The walls had whimsical reproductions of paintings dealing with food. Who doesn’t love everything to do with food?

  The first painting was of a young man in profile. His cheeks were made of peaches, pears, garlic, eggplants, and a gourd. His forehead was made of apples and wheat. His eyes were made of cherries. His nose was made of cucumber. His lips were made of peas, and his chin was made of apples.

  Leaves, berries, and twigs of various kinds were elegantly arranged to fill out his head and create what looked like a cap. The back of his head looked like it was made of a mini pumpkin, which, on top, had ripened or split into a reddish bloom.

  I wanted to inhale and bite him.

  Near the painting of him was a still life, which I’m not sure I liked. For me, a painting must either be a landscape, or it must be a portrait of some sort; a still life is neither.

  On the right half of the still life were three truckles of cheese cut in half, balanced one atop the other on a large silver plate.

  In the center was a large leg of fatty ham. Breads of various kinds lay in the foreground. In the background, there was what looked like wine. (“Claret” comes to mind. Maybe it was claret. What is claret? Can you buy it in the supermarket? Where is it from? Does anyone like it anymore? What does it taste like? Can you cook and bake with it?)

  “The first one is Arcimboldo,” Dolores informed me as she served me some horchata and sat on the couch beside me. “The second one is Van Schooten. The final one over there, la mejor pintura de todas, of a crimson hibiscus on a tan background, is by José María Velasco Obregón. He is a great painter, a genius, and he’s from Mexico. We have another wonderful painting in our guest room, maravillosa, by José Agustin Arrietta, another genius from Mexico, Janet. It has heirloom tomatoes, avocados, bananas, apples, carrots, lettuce, garlic, red wine, water, and a whole chicken in it!”

  I smiled and thanked them for the horchata, which made me feel naughty. The drink had both vanilla and cinnamon in it, which the CWP would ban.

  “This is just won-derful,” I said. “Thank you so much. I needed this today. It feels so good to have something with both vanilla and cinnamon.”

  “¿Por qué? Why, Janet?” Miguel asked. “Vanilla and canela are not going anywhere, as far as we know. Is there something you know that we don’t? After all, you work at the law firm that hosted the fundraiser that was in the Golden State Herald.”

  “Don’t bother her, Miguel,” Dolores said. “Let her enjoy my horchata, por favor.”

  I felt honored that they would talk to me in Spanish. My Spanish is so fantastically bad that I appreciated the opportunity to act as if it were more sophisticated than it actually was. I thought that I might respond in Spanish to Miguel’s question about vanilla, cinnamon, and the CWP’s plans for so-called “lavish things.” But then I thought of what a bad impression I’d make if I mangled my Spanish, and I dropped the idea.

  Miguel was seated in a platinum-colored rocking chair that looked so comfortable. It had such plump cushioning that you could mistake it for something edible.

  “2003,” Miguel said. “Estes Park, Colorado. 2003. We bought all these great paintings in 2003.” />
  “It used to be beautiful there,” Dolores said. “Just green, so green. The air was fresh and clean; the Rockies are nearby. We thought we’d spend the rest of our lives there. We spent fifteen years in Estes Park, Janet. Our daughters Sofía and Isabella were both born in Estes Park. Sofía in 2004 and Isabella the following year. Drought has changed a lot of things there. Colorado had its longest drought from 2000 to 2009; 395 weeks. Now drought is back, and it’s here to stay. And now you have all these internal migrants everywhere, even some from Colorado, like us.”

  “They’re calling us ‘Raddies,’” Miguel said.

  “Raddies?” I asked.

  “Some call us ‘Collies,’” Dolores said as she shook her head, “but many call us ‘Raddies.’ There’s such a dislike for people from out-of-state right now because of the jobs and the water and everything else, you’d never think we were all Americans.”

  “Anyway,” Miguel said. “Colorado gave us our grandchildren, Stella and Angelita. Well, we had a good life, Janet, before we moved here.” Miguel smiled.

  I nodded. “I’m so sorry to have come unannounced like this,” I said as I finished my horchata. “I don’t know what I was thinking to bother you both.”

  “No, no,” Miguel said. “We like the company. We’re retired.”

  Miguel and Dolores both smiled uneasily. They seemed a little dejected, and it felt odd to ask neighbors I’d only talked to a few times, who were in retirement, to bake me three cakes, which had to be ready in two weeks. Presumptuous and probably a little rude, too.

  I thanked them for their time, apologized, asked if I might take the empty glass to the kitchen and wash it. I expressed again what a lovely home they had, and I thanked them for welcoming me at such short notice.

  “It seems you wanted something,” Dolores said, intuiting the reason for my visit. “How can we help, Janet?”

  “Consider us your friends.” Miguel smiled as he took another sip of his horchata.

  I sat down and sighed.

  “I’m embarrassed for asking this, but would, um . . . How should I say this? Um, so, would you, um, know of a great pastry chef, who could—No, scratch that. Would you both like to attend my birthday party in two weeks? We’re holding it at my parents’ place in La Jolla. My mom’s just agreed to host it, and my parents’ home is a lovely place to throw a party.”