Terminal Island Read Online Free PDF Page B

his scalp. His fingers came back bloody.
    “Mom…?” he said. But she was already inside the lobby.
    When he looked back up, the thing was gone.

    * * *

    Henry is yanked back to the present by a bleating car alarm. The golf carts weren’t enough, apparently; now there are also full-size cars and trucks vying for space in the alleyways.
    “You should have seen it before,” he says, shaking his head as he looks down from their third-floor balcony at an idling supermarket delivery van, the smell of its diesel wafting up in the evening breeze. “It was so quiet and idyllic, just those little electric wheels putzing around. I can’t believe they started letting cars in.”
    “I can,” says Ruby, spreading peanut-butter on a cracker for Moxie. “It’s the way of the world, honey.”
    “Yeah, but what is this place selling if not ambiance? You’d think they’d be more protective of the bottom line, if nothing else.”
    “Does it look like they’re hurting for business? This is still Southern California—nobody expects to escape traffic. It’s part of the lifestyle.”
    “I guess,” he says wistfully. “Too bad, though. It was nice.”
    “I bet.” She jostles him. “Cheer up, gramps—this is fun!”
    “No, you’re right. I’m glad we came. Thank you.”
    “You’re welcome. And thank you —I appreciate you giving me a little more time to shoot establishing material before we look up your mother. If we’re going to do this right I have to build everything toward that ultimate confrontation.”
    “You make it sound like a death match.”
    “Well, it’s the crux of the whole story. But without a decent buildup there’s no payoff—it’s all about creating dynamic tension.”
    “I’m all caught up on tension, thanks. That’s why I’m taking a breather first, so I don’t explode all over her. I figure I haven’t seen her in years; what’s a couple more days? I’m not really doing it for the sake of good TV.”
    “No, I know. Honey, I hope you don’t think I’m being callous or anything. Just tell me and I’ll put the camera away right now, seriously. Your well-being is much more important to me than getting a MacArthur Genius Grant.”
    “Very funny. No, that’s okay. I told you it doesn’t bother me as long as you’re just documenting reality, not creating it.”
    “Absolutely. Look, we both need a chance to decompress; we’ve barely had two seconds to ourselves since the baby was born. This is first and foremost a vacation. All I’m really doing is making a home movie so that Moxie will have a record of meeting her grandma. It might be the only time she ever does, right?”
    “That’s what we’re here to find out.”
    Being in Avalon has dredged up a lot of things that Henry blocked out about his childhood. He has spent many years stewing about the past, about his mother’s failures and his own. Blaming her. Escaping the hurt by escaping her, physically moving halfway across the country to get away. Joining the Marines. But being back here is opening a strange trove of memory, like finding a box of forgotten pictures in the attic. Pictures that tell a slightly different story than you thought. Not because the story is different, but because you are.
    That realization of how much he has changed comes as a little bit of a shock. Henry wasn’t aware of it happening—it has been so incremental that it caught him off-guard. Yet why should it be surprising? He is middle-aged, a husband and father, a war veteran, hardly the same person at all as the little boy who lived through all this—that was someone else entirely. It’s hard for him to believe that these things he has agonized over for so many years—and by which he has largely defined himself—are suddenly not so significant, mostly the product of his own overheated imagination. Catalina is not the island he remembers; neither magical nor terrifying. It’s just a place like any other.
    Wandering the town after Moxie’s