SUMMER of FEAR by T. Jefferson Parker Read Free Book Online

those
terrible men in p-prison."
    She asked for seconds. I served them up in the kitchen and started back
outside. Around the house, Isabella wore baseball caps to hide the nakedness of
her head. I liked her head the way it was—its smoothness and humility, its
honesty— I liked it a whole lot better when it had Isabella's rich black hair.
Coming up on her from behind with the plate, I stopped for just a moment,
rocked for the millionth time by how it had changed. She looked like a little
man sitting there, a fan perhaps, her cap tilted at a jaunty angle as she
looked off into the west hills. I could see the line of her cheek, her fork
held midair and not moving. God I love you, I thought. God, help me love more.
God, do something good for her or I'll cut your heart with a chain saw and feed
it to Black Death. So Jah seh.
    I put down the plate, sat, drank. "Things are starting scare
me," I said. The wine was beginning to talk. "Nonfiction seems like a
terrible thing to try to capture. Who wants to. There's no order. Killers prey
on people at random. Good people like you get sick."
    "Nature is cruel," said Isabella. "I quit trying to
figure out why a year ago. But if you wrote ffiction, you could change that.
The killer could get a brain tumor. The hero's wife could be beautiful and
slender and have long black hair and help him solve the crime. She could cook
for him. At night, she could take him to bed and love him. She wouldn't be a
two-hundred pound bald whale."
    "You're not a whale—"
    "I look like one. I look in the mirror and I can't believe it's
me."
    "You'll lose the weight when you get off the steroids, not your
fault."
    "No wonder you drink so much. I would, too, if I had to look at
me."
    And there sat Isabella in her wheelchair, a once-beautiful woman racked
by medicine and cancer, tears running down her face and off her chin. The
neurologist had warned us about mood swings caused by drugs. Swing is
not the right word.
    I knelt down beside her and put my head in her lap. The Fourth of July
fireworks show started down on Main Beach and I could see the bright blossoms
unfolding in the sky, followed by the distant thud of the launcher. I kept
seeing Amber's head in the red explosions.
    For a moment, I thought about Amber and Isabella together, about how
different they were and how different— opposite, really—were the things that
had led me to love each of them. What had drawn me to Amber was her mystery,
her odd lack of substance, her absolute aloneness in the world. She rarely
spoke of her family, and not once in the years we were together did I ever meet
her parents or her sister, who lived, Amber said, in Florida. She told me once,
with that natural, unforced arrogance she wore so well, that her sister—Alice,
I think it was—was the only woman in the world prettier than she was. There was
some feud between them that had ended in estrangement, but Amber's details were
not forthcoming. She never called anyone in her family; never wrote; never
mentioned missing them even around the holidays. Her family name was actually
Fultz, which Amber changed to Wilson as soon as she was old enough. I wanted to
protect her. I wanted to give her connection. I always believed that I could
fill that huge emptiness surrounding Amber Mae. What I didn't understand until
much later was that she never wanted it filled.
    Years after that, when I met Isabella's family for the first time, I saw
the difference in bold relief. There was a closeness there, a strong sense of
interconnectedness, a blurred set of borders where she left off and her
parents—-Joe and Corrine---began. And where Amber was alone and vague and fore-molting one skin for another, Isabella was positioned firmly with her people,
forthright, and quietly content with them and with herself. As I fell in love
with Isabella, I plunged gratefully into that pool of connection, wondering
sometimes why I had be so taken with Amber's solitude and secrecy.
    And while I sat