My apartment building was in El Segundo, close to the airport, not too close to the runways, but sometimes, depending on the wind or other air traffic, the main flight path shifted and the planes went directly overhead. Those nights the sounds of planes turned into the sound of bombs and mortars and I really regretted signing a yearlong lease instead of renting month to month, but the places that would let me rent by the month weren’t good enough to bring Connery or Reggie to. The idea was that she would come over to the apartment and visit in a more neutral place than the house we’d made together. It hadn’t worked out that way; she’d been in the apartment just once to make sure she was comfortable with Connery staying overnight.
I pulled into the street in front of the building. I had to go around to get into the covered parking area. A parking area that was covered and not visible from the street was one of the reasons I’d taken the apartment. There was a man sitting on the steps in front of the gated front entrance as I drove around for parking. He was clean-cut, shortish brown hair, Caucasian or pale Hispanic, checked flannel shirt, jeans, running shoes that had seen better days. It was too hot for the flannel and the clothes didn’t fit right; if he hadn’t been clean, I’d have thought maybe homeless. I pulled into the parking area and was starting to park the car when I slammed on the brakes because my head finally realized I knew the face. I hadn’t seen it without a beard and long hair in ten years, but it was Jamie.
I managed not to hit the wall in the parking garage, but it took effort. I had to control my breathing like I’d seen a ghost. I so did not need this today after seeing Suriel, Harshiel, Turmiel, but especially Suriel, but I couldn’t leave Jamie sitting on the steps; part of me wanted to just pretend I didn’t recognize him with the new haircut, but I couldn’t be that shitty to him. I owed him more than that. I owed myself more than that.
I went up the stairs from the parking area to the main floor, though it was narrow enough I had to be careful that my shoulders didn’t scrape on the walls. It was also dimmer and cooler like a narrow bit of cave; I used to take my sunglasses off in the tunnel, but I knew better now. Full sunshine dazzled the eyes at the top of the stairs, bouncing off the blue water of the pool, so that without sunglasses you were blinded until your eyes adjusted.
The pool was at the center of an open courtyard with first-floor apartments on the pool level, and stairs leading up to the second-floor apartments. I started to make the turn up the stairs to my apartment but stopped with my foot on the first step. I looked across the pool toward the far entrance. I could glimpse the black iron gate that stayed locked to keep anyone out who didn’t have the code. There was a short corridor that led from the pool area to the gate, and it was just enough distance that standing outside the gate you couldn’t see into the main courtyard except for a glimpse of the pool. The privacy from casual passersby was one of the main selling points of the place, that and a pool for Connery. Our house didn’t have a pool, and I’d wanted something for him to do when he visited. I’d heard too many parents on the job who divorced and then couldn’t get the kids to visit them, or spent too much money on amusement parks, or other things like it was a contest. Who could be more interesting? Who would buy them more stuff? Reggie and I had agreed we wouldn’t let that happen; so far, we’d managed it. It helped that Connery was only three.
I started walking around the pool toward the gate. Maybe Jamie was back on his meds, or they’d found better ones for him? I prayed as I walked and hoped someone heard me that cared. Seeing so many old friends from the College had shaken me, and now Jamie, it seemed like an awfully big coincidence. I didn’t mean Surrie or Jamie planned it, I meant higher up. God doesn’t usually interfere directly, but some of his angels can. One dose of full-blown angel magic and I was suddenly paranoid, but that didn’t mean I was wrong.
My neighbor and apartment manager, Doris, opened the door of her apartment, which sat like a homey guard shack at the entrance to the corridor and its locked gate. She came out into the bright sunshine shielding her eyes with her hand above her cat’s-eye glasses, not the new ones that everyone seemed to be wearing this year regardless of age, but the original old-lady design, because Doris admitted to being over sixty, and I was betting over seventy was more honest, but Reggie had taught me not to question a woman’s age whether she’s turning thirty for the third time or staying in her sixties for the next twenty years.
“The man says he’s your friend, but I didn’t recognize him. He says he shaved his beard and cut his hair, and maybe he did, but you know I don’t buzz anyone in that I don’t know.”
“You did exactly right, Doris. It is my friend, but even I didn’t recognize him for a second.”
“Who knew there was such a handsome young man under all that hair,” she said, smiling up at me. Doris was short enough that looking up at me always looked like it hurt her neck. I usually tried to sit down if we had to talk for any length of time.
“I’ll just go see what he wants,” I said, and tried to move past her, but it wasn’t always easy to get out of conversation with Doris. She trailed after me in her slippers. She almost never put on real shoes unless she left the apartment building. She seemed to live in oversized shirts and long shorts or those pants that almost reach your ankles but don’t. Reggie didn’t wear them so I didn’t know what they were called, but they always puzzled me as if the person couldn’t decide if they wanted to wear shorts or pants.
I didn’t want to be rude, and I also didn’t want an audience for talking to Jamie through the gate, but I was going to start with the gate between us. I didn’t want to invite him into the building if he wasn’t safe to be around the other tenants. That wouldn’t be fair.
There was a bark from behind us and then her two pug puppies came racing out. They capered around her ankles and made it impossible for her to follow me until she’d calmed them down. Her elderly pug, Fred, had fooled me into thinking pugs were couch potatoes, but apparently that was just an elderly-pug thing, because the two tiny puppies were bundles of energy with tiny curly tails that wagged constantly. She leaned down, talking to them in that high-pitched pet voice. “What are you two doing out here? Did Fred knock the baby gate over for you again?”
Watching the two puppies bark, pant, and circle around her like furry little mushed-face potatoes on speed, I was pretty sure they’d escaped all on their own. Either way I was free to walk to the locked gate and talk to Jamie.
He got up off the steps and walked toward me, as if he’d heard me coming. He was older than the last time I’d seen his face bare and though I’d seen him regularly for years, it reminded me of the changes in Suriel’s face. It was them, just more grown-up. The look in his eyes was calm, happy, peaceful. It was his eyes before the angels broke him. I had to swallow past a lump in my throat. For the first time I felt like it was Jamie and not this other person that his mental illness had transformed him into. He had become his illness, so broken, eyes frantic, startling at things that I couldn’t see or feel, as if he were always surrounded by an evil, taller version of the pug puppies leaping and demanding attention.
I walked toward those familiar gentle eyes and was afraid to speak first, as if it were a dream and words would shatter it, but Doris had seen him, too. I wasn’t hallucinating, or seeing a vision, but still I stood there and didn’t know what to say first. So much I wanted to say while he looked like he could hear me and understand. I wanted to tell him so much before his illness took him away again. Jamie had helped teach me that death wasn’t the only way to lose someone.