Live Wire

His car lights caught a For Sale sign on the Nussbaums’ front lawn. Myron had gone to high school with their son Steve, though everyone called him either “Nuss” or “Baum,” a friendly kid Myron really liked but for some reason never hung out with. The Nussbaums had been one of the original families, buying in when this farmland was originally turned into housing forty years ago. The Nussbaums loved it here. They loved to garden and putter and work on the gazebo in the backyard. They brought the Bolitars the extra tomatoes from their garden, and if you’ve never tried a Jersey tomato in August, you just don’t get it. Now even the Nussbaums were moving out.

Myron parked in the driveway. He saw movement in the window. Dad had probably been watching, the ever-present silent sentinel. When Myron was a teen, he had no curfew because, his father explained, he’d shown enough responsibility not to need one. Al Bolitar was a terrible sleeper, and Myron could not remember a time, no matter what hour he returned home, when his father was not up waiting for him. His father needed everything in place before he could close his eyes. Myron wondered whether it was still that way for him, and how his sleep had changed when his younger son ran off with Kitty and never returned.

He parked the car. Suzze was dead. He had never been big on denial, but he was still having trouble wrapping his brain around that one. She was about to start the next big chapter of her life—motherhood. He often imagined the day his own parents first came by this dwelling, his father struggling at the plant in Newark, his mom pregnant. He pictured El-Al, young, holding hands the way they always do, walking up the concrete path, gazing at this splitlevel and deciding, yes, this would be the place that would shelter their new family and hold their hopes and dreams. He wondered now, as they looked back, whether those dreams came true or whether there were regrets.

Soon Myron would be married too. Terese couldn’t have children. He knew that. He had spent his whole life wanting the American Dream family—the house, the picket fence, the two-car garage, the two-point-four kids, the barbecue in the back, the basketball hoop on the garage—in short, the life of the people here like the Nussbaums and the Browns and the Lyons and the Fonteras and the El-Al Bolitars. Apparently it was not meant to be.

Mom, blunt as she was, had made a good point about selling the house. You can’t hold on too tightly. He wanted Terese home, with him, where she belonged, because in the end, only your lover can make the world disappear, and yes, he knew how corny that sounded.

Myron trudged up the concrete walk, lost in this thought, and maybe that was why he didn’t sense the danger before it struck. Or maybe his attacker was good, patient, crouching in the dark, waiting until Myron was close enough or distracted enough to pounce.

First came the flash of light. Twenty years ago, Dad had installed motion-detector lights in the front of the house. This had been a big marvel to his parents, on par with the discovery of electricity or cable television. For weeks, El-Al had tested this new technology, trying to walk or even crawl deliberately, seeing whether they could fool the motion detector. Mom and Dad would approach from various angles, at various speeds, laughing heartily whenever the light would snap on, catching them every time. The simple pleasures.

Whoever had jumped out of the bush had been picked up by the motion detector. Myron saw a flash of light, heard a noise, a rush of wind, the sound of exertion, maybe words. He turned toward it, and saw the fist heading straight for his face.

There was no time to duck, no time to get up a forearm block. The blow was going to land. Myron turned from it. It was simple science. Move with the punch, not against it. Turning lessened the impact, but the powerful blow, delivered clearly by a strong man, still packed a wallop. For a moment Myron saw stars. He shook his head, tried to clear it.

An angry snarl of a voice: “Leave us alone.”

Another punch came at Myron’s head. The only way to get away from it, Myron saw, was to fall on his back. He did, the knuckles grazing the top of his skull. It still hurt. Myron was about to start rolling away, rolling to safety so he could regroup, when he heard another noise. Someone had opened the front door. And then a panicked voice: “Myron!”

Damn. It was Dad.

Myron was about to call out for his father to stay where he was, that he’d be fine, that he should go inside and call the police, that whatever he did, he should not come out.

Not a chance.

Before Myron could open his mouth, Dad was already in mid-sprint.

“You son of a bitch!” his father shouted.

Myron found his voice. “Dad, no!”

Useless. His son was in trouble, and as he always had, his father hurled himself toward it. Still flat on his back, Myron looked up at the silhouette of his attacker. He was a tall man, his hands balled into fists, but he made the mistake of turning at the sound of Al Bolitar’s approach. His body language altered in a surprising way. The hands suddenly went loose. Myron moved fast. Using his feet, he wrapped up his attacker’s right ankle. He was about to turn hard, trapping the ankle, snapping it or tearing the tendons ten ways to Sunday when he saw his father leap—actually leap at the age of seventy-four—toward the attacker. The attacker was big. Dad had no chance, and he probably knew it. But that didn’t matter to him.

Myron’s father reached out his arms like a linebacker blitzing the quarterback. Myron tightened the ankle trap, but the big man didn’t even lift a hand to protect himself, just letting Al Bolitar knock him off balance.

“Get away from my son!” Dad yelled, wrapping his arms around the assailant, both crumpling to the ground.

Myron moved fast now. He rolled up to his knees, getting his hand ready for a palm strike to the nose or throat. Dad was involved now—no time to waste. He had to put this guy out of commission in a hurry. He grabbed the man’s hair, pulled him out of the shadows, and straddled his chest. Myron cocked his fist. He was just about to snap a right into the nose when the light hit the attacker’s face. What Myron saw made him pause for a split second. The attacker’s head was turned toward the left, looking with concern at Myron’s father. His face, his features . . . they were so damned familiar.

Then Myron heard the man—no, he was a kid, really—beneath him say one word: “Grandpa?”

The voice was young; the snarl gone.

Dad sat up. “Mickey?”

Myron looked down as his nephew turned back toward him. Their eyes met, a color so much like his own, and Myron would swear later that he felt a physical jolt. Mickey Bolitar, Myron’s nephew, pushed the hand off his hair and rolled hard to the side.