Woke Up Lonely A Novel - By Fiona Maazel Page 0,130

work tomorrow and that will be that.” He waited for his mom to hallelujah the plan but heard, instead, a small cry followed by the circus of a body tumbling downhill.

“Ah, Christ,” he said, and he plunged headlong after her, grabbing for balance what he could.

“I’m here,” she said, and she jutted her arm from a bed of sage that, in its congestion, had hidden her whole. “I think I twisted my ankle. Go get your father? He’s waiting.”

“Clearly,” Ned said. The car horn had been blaring through the night for three minutes. If the feds had any sense, they’d hear in the urgency of this horn a sennet for their catch.

“Mom, can you get up?” He took her by the forearms and was shocked at their girth. They were bamboo; she was so frail. She tried to put pressure on her foot but buckled at the knee. “I can’t walk,” she said. “How stupid.”

Ned looked up the hill. The night was livid now, but he could still see in the angle of the hill’s incline no way to get back up together. Unclear, even, if they could get down. He told her to stay put while he went for Max.

“Neddy,” she said, and she grabbed for the hem of his pants. “I’m so sorry. This is all my fault.”

He waved her off and began uphill. The sky crackled, and you could hear the dry ravel and a sound like horse hoofs on cobblestone, which was actually rocks and pebbles and earth caroming down the mountainside.

The only light for miles was a halogen nested in the gable of Tracy’s barn. It guided their way as they picked through the brush.

“We can act like we’re someone else,” Larissa said. She was pendant between the men in her life, and, though the throbbing in her ankle was getting worse, the pendant thing was nice.

“You could help us here,” Max said. “You do have one foot that still works.”

“Or maybe we could just be hikers who lost track of time,” she said.

“Some hikers,” Max said. “The one thing we had to make that story work, and sonny boy throws them down the hill.”

“I got them back,” Larissa said. And it was true; the binoculars were slung around her neck.

Ned kept his eyes on the halogen. What might his sister not like in all this? How about a creepy brother come to her door with the horrible parents who rejected her.

They made it to the outlays of the house, where management started: a gate, a path.

“What now?” Max said, though he got no answer.

There were bighorn in the mountains; they lowed and baaed, and the sound traveled for miles.

They neared the barn. Ned was the first to stop. He cocked his ear. They were twenty feet from a window open a crack. He was about to press on when a child’s voice sniped at the air and decked his parents. They were on their bellies fast. He just stood there.

“Ned,” Max whispered, and he reached for his son’s calf.

“Neddy,” Larissa said, and she reached for the other.

He looked down at them. Max had served in Korea and been awarded a silver star. Larissa had served as a nurse at the Eighty-Fifth Evacuation Hospital in Qui Nhon. They knew how to take cover. A man’s face in the window, and Ned got on his stomach, too. Listened hard. The voice, after all, was his nephew’s. His nephew, Willard. He tried to memorize its timbre. The high notes. The jazz. He’d been told the boy was just over two. He heard running through the house and a man saying, “I’m gonna get you!” and the child shrieking and laughing and yelling, “No no, Dada,” and collapsing on the floor while his mother nibbled his arms and neck, threatening to eat her boy for dinner because he was soooooo tasty.

Ned rolled on his back. So did Max. Larissa, too. They were soaked and filthy and staring at the nimbus overhead. For everything he’d been through, it was hard to imagine it was clouds up there and not a larder of tears.

He went back to listening. This family inside was a miracle. The boy romping through the house, saying: “Willard’s bear. Willard’s shoes.” The parents keeping an eye on him but retreating to the kitchen to talk it over. The man who’d come to see them before? He was a representative from L.A. County’s flood control division saying that if it rained big again, tonight or soon, probably