Hidden Valley Road - Inside the Mind of an American Family - Robert Kolker Page 0,152

to New Paltz, New York, to a repairer-dealer. He dropped the screw into the rotor. The mechanic found the screw in the rotor.”

“I remember the rainstorm,” Michael said, “but I don’t remember the other stuff.”

“You don’t remember the rock hitting the van?” said Mark. They all laughed.

“Who the hell keeps falcons?” Lindsay said. “Every time I tell people, they’re like ‘What?’?”

“I tell people stories in the cab all the time,” Mark said.

John turned to Lindsay, suddenly serious, thinking about the funeral.

“What’s plan B if it rains?”

“Umbrellas,” Lindsay said. “If it rains, John, you can play at the restaurant.”

“The keyboard’s electronic,” John said. “It’s just not the same.”

Lindsay smiled and motioned over to the piano that Mimi had still kept at the house. “I’ll try to convince them to take the piano up from the basement and out to the field.”

There was more laughter.

* * *

—

DONALD WAS ALONE in the living room, away from the others, smiling politely at anyone who smiled at him. Today happened to be his seventy-second birthday, and Lindsay had asked Debbie to get him a cake as a surprise. But he kept to himself, mostly silent, until he was asked if he’d had a chance to say goodbye to his mother.

“Yes, when she first left,” Donald said. “She said, ‘Thanks.’ I said, ‘Thanks,’ back to her. I just thanked her for being there.”

Will he miss her?

“No,” Donald said. “She’s bred. She’s out of harm. I mean, she’s at sea right now, as a triplet.”

His mother is a triplet?

“I bred her as a triplet, at sea right now.”

As a human being, or as a fish?

Donald scowled, finding the question ridiculous. “As a human.”

But she’s at sea?

“Yeah,” Donald said. “They live with an octopus.”

A human lives with an octopus?

“Yes. Octopuses have the ability to make man. To make many humans, all animals. When the flood comes, then they keep them alive in the water sometimes.”

And Mimi is there, as a triplet?

“Yeah. She’s a little one right now. A little baby. She’s out there, maybe five months old today.”

Would you like that to happen to you when you die?

“Oh, I wouldn’t mind,” Donald said.

* * *

—

JUST BEFORE IT was time for Donald to return to Point of the Pines, they brought out the cake: chocolate with cut-up chunks of a Snickers bar on top. Donald had been so quiet all evening that he was almost not there, a shadow. But he seemed pleased by the attention now, smiling softly, his lips never parting.

Debbie lit the candles and brought the cake out to the patio where everyone was sitting—the same patio where they’d once kept Frederica and Atholl, and where Matt’s head slammed to the ground in a battle with Joe. As everyone sang “Happy Birthday,” Donald—the oldest person in the room now, the paterfamilias—stood over the candles and broke out into a wider smile. Then he crossed his arms across his chest and closed his eyes, as if he were making a wish.

Part Three

DONALD

JOHN

MICHAEL

RICHARD

MARK

MATTHEW

PETER

MARGARET

LINDSAY

CHAPTER 41

Lindsay had left Hidden Valley Road when she was thirteen, determined never to come home. She had moved from Boulder to Vail and then to Telluride, keeping her distance. But now, with Mimi gone, she was back there more often than she had been in years, seeing Donald, checking in on Matt, driving farther out to see Peter, and prepping the house for sale. As Lindsay drove the streets of Colorado Springs, memories revealed themselves to her—like the cottages west of the city, not far from where she had once hidden out with Kathy, when Jim got violent. “I drive by that all the