The room was full of flowers of every conceivable color, hue, and proportion. It smelled like a jungle, and Jake wondered what his old man would say about the composition.

The pneumatic door closer hissed softly and Jake turned to see a nurse in hospital blues come in. She was small, compact, and there was something familiar about her. “Has anyone asked you about the mail?”

Jake’s eyes swept back to his father, then to her brown stare, then down to her name tag. Rachael, it read. He would have much preferred a last name to go with the woman. “Mail?” was all he said.

She nodded. “The mail department called up and asked the station what they should do.”

Jake looked at her, wondering what the hell she was talking about. “About what?” he asked.

“About your father’s mail. It’s piling up.”

Jake sighed, tightened up his chest to process oxygen a little more efficiently, then shrugged. “Just put it in his nightstand. I’ll take care of it.”

The nurse stared at him for a few seconds, then her head began to shake side to side. She raised an eyebrow. “There’s an awful lot, Mr. Coleridge.”

“Cole. My name is Cole.”

She paused for a second, as if her hard drive had crashed. “Um, there’s nine sacks of mail for your father downstairs. I suspect that a lot more is coming. There will be more flowers, too.”

Jake’s brain was still hung up on trying to figure out what was so familiar about her. “Nine sacks?” he asked, jerking a thumb at his father. “For him?”

“Apparently so, yes.”

Jake let out a sigh that he followed with a loose shrug. It was hard to forget that his father was famous but he had somehow managed it. But the world of the triple W would no doubt be abuzz with news of his father’s accident. “Any suggestions?”

“Peter Beard stayed overnight once. His people took care of everything. We’re not equipped to handle this much mail.”

Jake smiled. “I don’t have any people.” Or a desire to be here, he wanted to add. “I’ll get someone to come collect it.” His father’s snoring hitched with an interrupted breath, then stopped. “Do you have a pediatrics ward?” he asked.

Nurse Rachael nodded. “Of course, second floor. Why?”

“Take all of my father’s flowers to pediatrics. Hand them out to the children. Throw the cards out.”

The nurse nodded slowly as she tried to find something wrong in his directives. When she couldn’t find a loophole, she smiled. “That’s a wonderful idea.” Suddenly, Jake realized what was so familiar about her.

Jake turned back to his father. “Has he been awake at all?”

Nurse Rachael nodded. “He was up last night, at the beginning of my shift.” As if to accentuate the point, she suppressed a yawn with the back of her hand. “He was in pretty good spirits.”

“Him?” he asked, not meaning to sound so surprised. Jake could not remember his father ever being in good spirits. The light etched his face with deep shadow, hollowed out his cheeks. He looked dead. Then the snoring started back up and the illusion was broken. “Did he say anything?”

“We talked a little. He asked for a drink and I got him a glass of water. When he took a sip he asked, ‘What the hell is this piss?’ Apparently he was hoping for scotch.” She smiled. “He seems to like me. He gets agitated around the other nurses. But a little of his fear seems to leave when I’m here. He keeps telling me that I look like Mia.”

Jake’s vital signs fluttered and he felt a little more of the old fear come back. So his father had noticed it, too. “You do.” He took in a breath and thought back to the days when you could smoke in a hospital room. Glory Days, Springsteen had called them. “Mia was my mother. My father hasn’t spoken her name in thirty-three years.”

Nurse Rachael—look-alike—nodded knowingly. “Divorce?”

Jake thought back to the last time he had seen his mother. It had been after a gallery opening in the city when he was twelve. She drove home by herself, leaving Jacob to his sycophants, his critics, and his booze. She sat down on the corner of the bed and he woke in a fog. Her hair was tussled from the open convertible and she was wearing a black cocktail dress and a pearl necklace. She smelled faintly of perfume and salt air.

She had leaned over and kissed him. Told him she loved him. That she was going back out for cigarettes. And a bag of Mallomars. They’d go down to the beach and watch the sun come up from the sleeping bag. She rubbed his back, then went out for smokes and cookies.

She never came back.

“No,” he shook his head, and the loose image of that night fell apart. “My mother was murdered.”

9

June 1978

Sumter Point

Jake was deep in the heat stage of REM sleep when she put her hand on his back, and his skin felt like a smooth sun-baked stone. She rubbed gently, feeling bones under the skin. Eventually he woke, rolled over.

She just watched him, waiting to see if he would make the rare transition from sleeping child to awake child; most of the time he would just smile at her, close his eyes, and drift off into wherever it was that he went when he slept.

“What time is it?” Jake stretched and his pajama shirt climbed up, exposing ribs and tummy.

She looked at her watch. “Four thirteen.”

“Dad come back with you?”

His mother’s face, a beautiful mixture of gentle shadows, smiled. “The show went well and he wanted to stay and talk. I wanted to come back to see you.”

“You should have stayed,” Jake said through a gaping yawn. “Did you have a nice hotel room? The kind with free soap?”

She smiled, rubbed his leg. “Yeah, the kind with free soap.” She leaned over and kissed him on the forehead, something he was not yet embarrassed about—at least not in private. She had driven the coastal highway with the top down and she smelled of perfume and salt, that humid ocean smell that gets into everything by the water. “What did you do tonight, Jakey? Anything fun?”

“It was all right. Billy came over. We watched the Creature Feature. Battle of the Gargantuas was on but we didn’t have any Mallomars. Billy decided that he wanted to sleep at home.”

She ran her hand along his leg and kissed him again. “I have to run back to the Kwik Mart to get some cigarettes. I’m pretty sure they have Mallomars, too. You want me to get you some?”

It was the kind of thing his mother always did for him and he had to constantly resist the urge to abuse her kindness. Even at the age of twelve he could see that his dad did that enough for the both of them. “I’m okay, Mom.”

“I’ll be back in fifteen minutes. If you want, we can go down to the beach and watch the sun come up. I’ll put some coffee in Dad’s old army Thermos and we’ll cuddle up under a blanket and pretend that we’re the last two people on the planet and apes have taken over.”

“Cool.”

She smiled, stood up. “See? I’m not so bad for an old lady.” She was thirty-seven.

She leaned down and kissed him again and he couldn’t smell cigarettes on her and he knew that she was going to go to the store whether he asked her to or not. “Get a big bag,” he said.

“You got it.”

They found her car a mile from the Kwik Mart, pulled into the driveway of an empty summer rental.

There was no blood—no signs of a struggle—just her Pagoda sitting on the gravel with over half a tank of gas in it. A fresh pack of Marlboros sat on the middle console, a single cigarette missing from the pack. The bag of Mallomars and her purse were on the passenger’s seat. Two cookies were gone but the $25,000 in cash from the gallery show was still in her purse. Nothing missing but those two cookies and a single cigarette.