Jaguar Read online

  Jaguar

  ML Hamilton

  authormlhamilton.net

  Jaguar

  © 2017 ML Hamilton, Sacramento, CA

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means without written permission from the author, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review to be printed by a newspaper, magazine or journal.

  First print

  All Characters appearing in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  For those who strive to do right and for those who sometimes stumble, you are not alone.

  Grief is in two parts. The first is loss. The second is the remaking of life.

  ~ Anne Roiphe

  Table of Contents

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 7

  CHAPTER 8

  CHAPTER 9

  CHAPTER 10

  CHAPTER 11

  CHAPTER 12

  CHAPTER 13

  CHAPTER 14

  CHAPTER 15

  CHAPTER 16

  CHAPTER 17

  CHAPTER 18

  EPILOGUE

  CHAPTER 1

  “She’s not in the house!” shouted Henry. “I’ve looked everywhere and she’s not here.”

  Jaguar dashed into the living room, his eyes immediately landing on the overstuffed recliner where his mother usually spent most of the day, watching game shows on the large screen television he’d bought her. The recliner was empty.

  “What do you mean she’s not in the house?” he demanded of his father.

  Henry held out his hands helplessly. “She was here. I went to get her lunch and now she’s gone. I’ve looked everywhere.”

  Jaguar’s eyes snapped to the front door. It was closed, but the deadbolt had been turned. He ran toward it, yanking it open and peering down the walkway leading to the street. Bounding down the two stairs, he raced down the walkway, looking both ways for any sign of his mother. His heart was hammering in his ears and he had a strange feeling of weakness flowing through him.

  “Do you see her?” called his father from the doorway.

  “No! You wait here. Keep the cell phone close and I’ll call you if I see anything.”

  “I was just in the kitchen for a few minutes. She couldn’t have gotten that far.”

  Jaguar closed his eyes, saying a prayer to a god he wasn’t sure he believed in anymore, and tried to calm himself enough to think through this. Where would she go? What did she like to do?

  She and his father had moved here after Jaguar had “made it big”. He’d helped them buy the little rancher in a gated community and he’d believed that that would keep them safe. He hadn’t visited much the first few years they lived here. He’d been too busy touring with the band, going from state to state, a new city every night. He hadn’t realized what was happening to his mother until the first time his father called to say she was missing.

  Where had she gone then? Think, he commanded himself. Think!

  Panic wasn’t any good. Panic was the enemy. He rubbed his right temple with his fingers, then he pressed the bridge of his nose and closed his eyes. Where would she go? What would she want to see? Do?

  The park. With the ducks. He’d taken her there yesterday. She and his father walked there on good days, bringing stale bread to throw into the water. He turned right and began looping toward the small park in the middle of the gated neighborhood.

  He paused at the edge of it, searching beneath the redwood trees for her, saying another prayer that she hadn’t gotten confused and fallen into the pond. A moment later, he spotted her, sitting on the bench at the edge of the pond, looking small and frail.

  He bent over, bracing his hands on his thighs, trying to catch his breath. Maybe he should think about giving up smoking. At twenty-nine, he was too young to be this winded from a short jog. Gradually his heart slowed and he straightened, the flush of relief washing over him.

  As he made his way around the lake to her, he thought of the woman she’d been. She’d had dreams of playing the violin in the symphony, but she’d wound up teaching music at the community college. He wondered if she even remembered those dreams now.

  She wore a housedress and slippers, but he remembered when she was younger, she would never leave the house without her make-up perfectly applied, not a hair out of place. She’d been a fashionista before it was popular to be one. He could still hear the arguments she and his father had had over her spending on clothes.

  He smiled, remembering how she’d never chastised him for his experimentations. His father hadn’t understood the piercings or the tattoos or the different colored hair, but she’d told him to be his best self. His best self. He’d never forget those words.

  She looked up when he stopped before her. He’d gotten his blue eyes from her, a blue so pale it almost looked unnatural. Her hair had gone to white and floated around her head in a wispy cloud. Her once lovely face was lined, but it was the confusion that gave him a gut-check. She didn’t recognize him. Her son. Her only child.

  “Mom?” he said, hoping that would spark something.

  Her eyes moved down his body, over the sleeves of tattoos on his arms, over the many piercings in his ears. He was thinking of taking some of them out. It seemed a little silly for a man in his thirties to have more metal in his ears than cartilage.

  She tilted her head. “It’s a lovely day, isn’t it?” Her eyes drifted away, taking in the redwood trees, the quiet, the soft sound of the ducks’ feet moving the water in the pond.

  He sat down beside her, suddenly weary. It was a weariness so deep, he wasn’t sure how to conquer it. For so long, he’d worried only about himself, about the next concert, the next platinum record, the next high. Now it all seemed so senseless, so empty, so pointless. Maybe he was growing up.

  “It’s a lovely day,” he repeated.

  “I like to feed the ducks, but I don’t have any bread.”

  He nodded. “I should have brought some.”

  She looked at him. He could feel her scrutiny. “What’s your name again?”

  “Jerome,” he said, hoping to jar an earlier memory before he’d become Jaguar. Before he’d become a cliché. Unfortunately, he had a hard time remembering who Jerome was. Maybe Alzheimer’s was in his future too, but Jerome seemed like a person from another lifetime. He’d picked Jaguar so many years ago, trying to be edgy. Jerome Jarvis just didn’t seem like a rockstar’s name, or that’s what Desmond, the band manager, had told him.

  He’d worn Jaguar so long, he didn’t think he could be Jerome again. It was curious. There was the name your parents gave you at your birth and then there was the name you adopted as you became a full-fledged individual. For some, it was just a variation on their birth name, but for others, it meant a whole new identity. He’d become Jaguar.

  “I always wanted to raise a duck,” his mother said. “They used to have ducklings at the feed store when I was a girl, but my parents said we didn’t have money for one.”

  He glanced over at her. This was a new story he hadn’t heard before. “Really? Why did you want a duck?”

  She furrowed her brow for a moment, then she smiled. “When they’re little, they imprint on you, then they’ll follow you around. I thought that would be so wonderful, to have something so loyal to me.”

  “Why not a dog?” he asked, smiling at her.

  “Oh, we could never have a dog. Clarence was allergic.”

  Clarence, her brother, was younger by three years, but dead by fifty. He’d never lived long enough to get Alzheimer’s. Drunk driving had taken him and his wif
e one Christmas when the snow had fallen particularly heavy in Sequoia. He’d been leaving his sister’s house. Ida had never gotten over it, never stopped blaming herself for their deaths.

  When she remembered.

  Some things were better left forgotten, he decided.

  His phone rang. He fished it out of his pocket and glanced at the display. His father. Shit. He should have called him. Now he was going to hear it. He thumbed it on and held it to his ear.

  “Did you find her?” came Henry’s panicked response.

  “Yeah, she’s in the park.” He kept his voice level, so he didn’t spook his mother. “She’s just watching the ducks. We’ll be back in a little bit.”

  There wasn’t an immediate answer. Jaguar felt a tick in his right eye. He knew his father was gearing up for an explosion. “You found her and you didn’t call me,” Henry said in a low growl.

  “I just found her,” said Jaguar, trying to head it off, but he already knew it was too late.

  “I’ve been sitting here going out of my head imagining all sorts of things and you couldn’t take thirty seconds to call me and tell me she’s alive! This is how you’ve always been! You never think of anyone else! You are the most selfish…”

  Jaguar disconnected the call and shoved the phone in his pocket. By the time he walked his mother to the house, Henry would be in control again. He didn’t like to upset his wife by screaming in front of her.

  Ida was staring at him with a worried expression on her face. “That sounded unpleasant.”

  Jaguar laughed. “It usually is.”

  Her frown deepened. “What’s your name again?”

  “Jerome,” he repeated.

  “It’s a lovely day, isn’t it, Jerome?”

  Jaguar looked at the pond, watching the ducks, turning the phone over in his hand. God, he hated this. He hated the fact that she didn’t remember having a son. All she seemed to remember was a younger time, a time before she was married and had a child, but maybe there was a sort of freedom to that. A sort of relief.

  “It is a lovely day.”

  Her eyes focused on his arms, on the tattoos that covered them. She laid a frail hand on his forearm, tracing the line of a music note.

  “I used to play the violin.”

  He looked over at her. “I know.”

  “I was pretty good. I thought I might play for the symphony.”

  “Why didn’t you?”

  Her eyes drifted away, back out over the pond. “Things get in the way.”

  Like getting married? Having a child?

  He nodded. “They do.”

  “I was afraid.”

  He looked at her. He’d never heard her say that before. “You were afraid to play for the symphony?”

  “What if I wasn’t good enough,” she whispered, then looked up at him. Her fingers continued to trace the music note. “Do you play music?”

  “I do.”

  “Do you ever worry you aren’t good enough?”

  “All the time.”

  She smiled at him and he smiled back. “All you can do is be your best self. That’s all you can do.”

  Jaguar leaned over and kissed her on the cheek. “That’s what you’ve always told me,” he said.

  Sitting on the bench next to her, her thin fingers pressed against his forearm, he watched the ducks swimming and he had to admit it was a lovely day.

  * * *

  “We need to think about the best plan for her,” Jaguar said to his father as they sat in the kitchen.

  Ida had picked at the lunch his father prepared, then she’d wanted to take a nap. She was resting in her room, the door partially open so they could hear if she called to them. He needed to get to the hardware store, pick up another lock, one she couldn’t work so there wouldn’t be a repeat of today.

  Henry washed dishes, his back to his son. Jaguar looked around the kitchen. He’d made sure they had the latest appliances, the finest dishwasher, stove, refrigerator, and yet his father preferred to wash dishes by hand. He wasn’t going to argue with him about that. He’d learned to pick his battles with this man because so often the battles found him.

  Living in suburbia. He shuddered. He was used to hotel rooms, limos, bodyguards. He wasn’t used to doing these menial chores or watching others do them. He’d thought coming back here, immersing himself in his past might help him get out of his funk, help him create the edgy music he’d once wrote, but his days were occupied with minutia. Part of him resented it as he had when he was a teenager, and part of him felt reluctant to leave.

  “I’m gonna have to get back to LA, Dad,” he said.

  Henry slammed the cabinet door shut, whirling on him. For a man in his sixties, he was trim and fit. He had a head of grey hair, but it was thick, which gave Jaguar hope for his own hair. There was nothing frail about Henry. He’d only retired early to take care of his wife, but Jaguar suspected he’d still be driving a forklift for the warehouse store if she hadn’t needed him. Early onset Alzheimer’s had affected all their lives.

  “And you want to just shove her into an old folks’ home so you can wash your hands of the problem.” Henry’s face twisted with disgust as he looked at his son. “Go back to LA. We don’t need your help. We don’t need anything from you.”

  Jaguar rose. He and Henry were almost the exact same height, just shy of six feet. “I’m trying to help.”

  “This isn’t helping! I had it under control all this time and you come in thinking we should just do what you say.”

  “She got out of the house. She’s gotten out of the house three times over the last week with both of us here. What are you going to do when I’m back in LA?”

  “Same thing we’ve always done. Live our lives. Why don’t you get it? We don’t want you here anymore than you want to be here. You left when you were eighteen. Well, don’t come back here thinking we need you to fix anything. Just go live your life, do your drugs, sleep with your women. Stop pretending you give a damn about any of this!”

  Jaguar reared back. True, his father wasn’t saying anything that he didn’t already know he felt, but this attack felt particularly personal. He opened his mouth to fight back, then something struck him for the first time.

  Henry was afraid. He knew what Jaguar knew. They couldn’t go on like this. They were going to have to make a decision about his mother. Jaguar reached for the keys in his pocket.

  “I’m going to the hardware store. I’m gonna get another lock for the door.”

  Henry didn’t answer. He dropped his eyes to the floor, then returned to his dishwashing.

  Jaguar walked into the hallway and looked in on his mother. He could only see the white cloud of her hair and hear her soft breathing. He fought with himself for a moment. He wanted to get a joint out of his room where he’d hidden it in the dresser, but he’d been trying to quit.

  He couldn’t seem to write music anymore and he’d worried first that his cushy lifestyle was affecting it, but now he feared it might be the pot and alcohol. They had a tendency to dull his ambition. He just wasn’t as hungry as he once was for the fame. And it was easier to blame the illicit substances than it was to face the fact that maybe fame was wearing on him. Maybe, God help him, he was growing up.

  He’d tried working a menial job like he’d done when he was in high school, but people had flocked to see him, turning the job into another affirmation of his fame. It didn’t help that his two bodyguards had run interference for him the entire time, or that they drove him to and from the job in a limousine.

  A few weeks ago, he’d sent them back to LA with his manager. He’d also banished the limo, but he still couldn’t write. At first he’d told himself he was suffering from the trauma of the events that happened a few weeks ago, but he knew he was lying to himself. The songs just weren’t coming.

  He pulled the door half-closed and forced himself to turn away from the temptation of smoking himself into oblivion. Striding to the front door, he went out and climbed into
the Honda Civic his parents kept. Starting the car always gave him a little moment of panic. Once he’d moved to LA, he’d stopped driving. He’d bought the limo and had one of his bodyguards drive it for him. At first that had seemed the surest way to prove he’d made it. Then it had become a habit. He hadn’t driven himself in so long, the act of getting behind the wheel kicked his anxiety into high gear.

  Not that Sequoia had the traffic of LA. He drove out of the gated community and pulled onto the highway, his thoughts returning to his mother. He hated the thought of putting her in a home. Maybe he could talk his father into relocating to LA. His condo was big enough for the three of them and he could hire a full-time nurse.

  His band, Anaconda, might not be selling albums like it had, but he was a savvy businessman. He’d invested wisely. He’d never trusted anyone else to do it for him. He lived extravagantly, but for all the toys and gadgets he’d bought, he’d invested an equal share in his own solvency. If Anaconda never had another hit, he would be fine. Financially fine, he thought. He wasn’t sure about the rest.

  Without Anaconda, he didn’t really know what to do with himself. He’d never liked school. He didn’t really have any hobbies. He didn’t ski or surf or enjoy sports of any kind. He couldn’t see himself running a business. Sure, playing barista for a few days had been fun, but he couldn’t see doing that for the rest of his life.

  He wouldn’t allow himself to think about anything else. His past had recently returned to bite him in the ass, but he just didn’t know how to deal with everything that had happened yet. His mother was taking all of his concentration right now.

  The rest he’d deal with once the test results came back. The rest he’d deal with when he had no other choice. Right now it was just too much.

  He pulled into the parking lot a short walk from the hardware store and climbed out. Pressing the button on his keychain to lock the car, he glanced toward the Caffeinator, the coffee shop he’d recently worked in, but he didn’t head in that direction. If he set foot in the Caffeinator, a crowd would follow him and he didn’t need that right now.