“What if your dad just takes Prozac? He’s obviously depressed,” said Felix, continuing their conversation from that morning.
“I’m not sure that’s going to solve their issues,” Olivia said, already irritated, knowing where the conversation Felix insisted on having was going. She quickly turned toward Andrea. “Sweetie, don’t spit out your chicken. If you want me to cut it into smaller pieces, ask me.”
“How can you be depressed when you have so much money?” Felix said with sarcasm and a sprinkle of bitterness.
“He sold the land in the Santa Clara Valley way back in the eighties,” she explained, annoyed. “Who knows if he still has all that money? He might have spent it.”
“Hence the blissful life.”
“Well, it doesn’t seem so blissful now,” she said as she grabbed Diana’s plate. “Want some more nopalitos con huevo, honey?”
“Mommy? I’m tired,” said Diana, rubbing her eyes.
“Let’s go brush your teeth, sweetie,” she said, picking her up. “You too, missy,” she said to Andrea, dragging the girls away and leaving Felix alone at the table.
* * *
After everyone went to bed and the house was quiet, Olivia went to the kitchen, poured herself a cup of tila tea, and sat on a stool to think. Where was that feeling, the untamable beast that she called love, just to give it a name? Olivia had never been able to describe what she felt for Felix, not since the first day they met at a TED Talk about sustainable architecture. Three months into the relationship, love’s impact was already unfathomable. She was all Felix ever wanted and he told her so, every day. She felt desired, essential. She couldn’t decide which god to thank, so she thanked Cupid for shooting her through with an AK-47 instead of an arrow.
But then there was the other side of Felix, the “door-slamming” side. She also called it the “coffee-mug-thrown-out-the-window” side, the “walking-out” side, the “mirror-smashing-with-his-fist” side, the “grabbing-her-by-the-blouse-collar-and-rattling-her” side. It wouldn’t take long after Olivia delivered a beautifully remodeled house to its owners, or landed a new project, that Felix would react in an incomprehensibly nasty way in an unrelated situation, usually one that he used to make Olivia feel inadequate, dumb. “There you go again,” he’d say. “You forgot to buy eggs! Seems like there are never eggs in this house! You keep fucking it up!” And she endured it.
February
Tuesday, February 2nd
While Punxsutawney Phil back in Pennsylvania forecast an early spring, Oscar, the weather expert at the Alvarado household, was still gone and Keila didn’t seem concerned. So, Claudia, Olivia, and Patricia decided to invite themselves for dinner at Keila’s to confront her.
“You just don’t give a shit if Dad is dead or alive,” said Patricia, trying to control her fury.
“You can go on hating Dad, that’s okay, I understand, whatever he did to you, but not caring about his well-being?” said Olivia, staring at Keila with piercing eyes. “He’s our father!”
“Tell us the truth, now. Did he cheat on you? Did he hurt you? What atrocity has he done to you to deserve this kind of anger?” demanded Claudia.
“Just so you know, Mom, I already filed a missing-persons report before coming here. Expect a call from the cops. They’ll want to talk to the whole family,” Patricia warned.
Keila slowly poured herself another glass of wine and sat at the kitchen peninsula, taking in her daughters’ emotional blackmail.
“I know exactly where Dad is. You don’t need to come here and ruin my dinner with your Jewish guilt,” she said.
“Oh, yeah? Care to share this information with us, his daughters?” said Patricia, about to burst with the ire of an ill pachyderm. “You’ve been keeping us out of this, as if it didn’t affect us!”
“It doesn’t take a detective. I’ve been monitoring his activities on our credit card app. He drove to Florida, slept at roadside motels, got gas and ate all along the 10, then stayed at a hotel in Aventura. He’s on his way back; don’t worry. At his driving speed, he should be getting home around Sunday. So, cancel the silver alert.”
“I reported him as a regular missing person. He’s not senile, Mom,” said Patricia.
“He could well be. A senile zombie.”
“Why have you been keeping us in the dark? What kind of twisted person have you become, Mom? Did you enjoy inflicting this torture on us?” said Patricia, scraping her chair back from the table.
“At least you should have told us he was safe!” said Claudia, following Patricia toward the door.
“I just did.”
“This is so mean, Mom. Who are you?” said Olivia, picking up her purse and following her sisters. And, since she was the last one out, she got the privilege of slamming the door.
Wednesday, February 3rd
With Gabriel back in New York for a few days, Claudia’s house was entirely available to the three sisters to vent and scheme. As the sun set across the ocean, they sprawled on the king-size bed. Patricia rubbed Claudia’s back, and Claudia rubbed Olivia’s, like when they were little. Some leftovers they’d scavenged from the fridge were on a side table, still in their Tupperware containers. Velcro, Gabriel’s cat, joined the pride on the mound, finding a warm little corner next to Olivia.
The twins had tried playing with him, but the cat ignored them, so they sat near their mom and reluctantly played with a couple of toys. Their latest babysitter had quit abruptly (boyfriend trouble, what else?), so Olivia was forced to drag the twins around town enduring fit after fit: the one over not being allowed to play with the workers’ power tools at the jobsite in Santa Monica; the next one at the grocery store where both wanted to ride in the shopping cart; then the one in the car where Andrea insisted on unbuckling her seat belt as Olivia was speeding to get on a freeway on-ramp. And now, here they were, fighting over Velcro at Claudia’s house.
“At least now we know Dad is okay,” said Claudia.
“Why wouldn’t Mom tell us?” asked Olivia.
“I don’t want to hear a word about Mom,” said Patricia.
“Maybe she was afraid we would tell Dad that she was tracking his whereabouts and then he’d stop using his credit card,” said Claudia.
“You’ve watched too many TV series. I think Mom is just furious with him for leaving and not doing what he promised us, which is try to mend his marriage,” said Patricia. “And she just dumped it all on us!”
“Whatever it is, we need to sit down with Mom and sort this mess out. We can’t just stop talking to her,” said Olivia, ever the conciliatory one.
“I can’t. Not just yet,” said Patricia. “Can I sleep over again tonight?” she asked Claudia.
Not far from Claudia’s Malibu house, Keila sobbed in her own bed. How could she have been so selfish, so cruel? It was one thing to be angry with her husband. It was another to make her daughters pay for it. She squirted a few drops of CBD tincture under her tongue to calm down and called Patricia.
“Can I talk to you?”
“Not now, Mom.”
“Are you coming home later?”
“No. I’m at Claudia’s.”
“Listen, I was a jerk. Can I come over to talk to you girls? Please?”
“Olivia has to put the twins to bed. She’s leaving now. And Claudia has to go to a wine tasting.”
“How about tomorrow? Can you all come over tomorrow for dinner?”
A silence came back to Keila on the receiver. She waited.
“Hello?” she finally said. “Patricia?”
“All right, Mom. We’ll be there.”
Thursday, February 4th
Reconciliation had always been easy among the Alvarados. Most disagreements, disputes, and fights were short-lived, resolved without major drama. In the end, most were irrelevant. But Keila’s behavior had crossed that invisible line of deceit that everyone in the family knew about even though it was never explicitly stated.
On the way to meet with her�
�Claudia driving down PCH from her Malibu house in her Audi TT and Patricia following her in her Prius—they put their phones on speaker so they could talk from car to car.
“You do the talking. I’m afraid I might insult her and take this fight to the point of no return,” said Patricia.
“Just think about the amazing mother we’ve always had and rule this out as a crazy odd stage she’s going through. She’s not this sinister, never has been, really,” said Claudia, surprised at herself as she wasn’t known for being empathetic.
“He’s given her no reason to leave him.”
“How do you know?”
“I live with them. I’d notice if there was something weird going on.”
“C’mon, Pats. Men are so good at hiding their shenanigans. I’m not saying Dad is doing anything wrong, but in general, I mean.”
“She can’t deal with his downer mood. He needs help.”
“Well, then, have you tried to help him?”
“He won’t open up. You just missed the California Incline exit, by the way.”
“Shit. We’ll have to take the 10.”
Claudia glanced at her rearview mirror to make sure Patricia was driving right behind her and sped on to take the freeway.
“Can you connect Olivia?” she asked.
Patricia added Olivia to the call without taking her eyes off the road.
“Hey, are you on your way to Mom’s?” said Olivia on the speaker.
“Where are you?” asked Patricia.
“I’m almost there. I had to leave Felix in charge of the twins, but he’s showing a house in West Hollywood, so I need to hurry up. I’ll wait for you outside.”
When Claudia and Patricia arrived at Keila’s, they jumped into Olivia’s Honda Odyssey minivan—dubbed “Homer.”
“Damn, this car is bigger than my apartment when I went to NYU!” said Claudia.
“Focus, please, we need to decide how we’re going to handle this.”
Nearly an hour after the sisters parked outside Keila’s house, they walked in the door with heads full of words. Keila was in the kitchen juggling pots and pans.
Olivia had been picked as the designated spokesperson, so she cleared her throat and delivered the message: “You’ll get your turn to speak, Mom, so please don’t interrupt. If you have a problem with Dad, don’t drag us in. You two deal with it. We can offer support, but we’re certainly not going to be the recipients of your anger. This stops today.”
There. Short and to the point. Olivia would have never spoken with such aplomb to her mother (or anyone other than random flaky subcontractors working with her at her architecture studio) if she hadn’t worked on the message with her sisters and rehearsed it thoroughly.
“Well said, Olie!” Patricia chimed in, happy to realize that writing up the message to her mother as if it were a PowerPoint slide had proven to be successful. “You can speak now, Mom.”
Keila took a deep breath and slowly made eye contact with her three daughters while she figured out what to say to them. Her hands hovered over the pipián con camarones she had been making.
“You’re right. What’s going on between your dad and me is not your fault. I will never direct my frustrations against your dad toward you; I promise. Will you forgive me, girls?” asked Keila in a small voice.
“You’ll have to prove it to us, Mom,” said Patricia. “Now, could you look on your credit card app to see where Dad is right now?”
Keila launched the app on her phone and showed her daughters.
“He just checked into a Motel 6 in El Paso. I’m sure he’ll be heading this way next. It’s pretty much a straight shot on the 10 all the way to Rancho Verde. He’ll surely stay overnight in Phoenix and be home by Sunday.”
And just when Patricia was able to release the tightness in her chest, Keila snapped: “But I still want to wring your father’s neck!”
Sunday, February 7th
Oscar parked his SUV on the driveway and rolled his carry-on suitcase into the house. No one was there to greet him, or to scold him for that matter. He was well aware of the apprehension his careless disappearance might have caused. He deserved it. They’re probably watching the Super Bowl with friends, he thought. He walked around going from room to room, exhausted from the trip, and wondered what his life would be like if everything around him suddenly vanished. He ran the palm of his hand on the surface of the walls, caressing them, as if they were in danger of extinction.
Outside, the unusually warm day—eighty-four degrees was his guess, as opposed to the historical average of sixty-eight for that day of the year—bathed his skin. Not thinking that the strange February heat could be an effect of climate change, he stood at the edge of the dirt hole that was no longer the family pool, half filled with a slurry mix of portland cement and plaster sand. Henceforth, the kidney-shaped cement patch in the middle of the backyard would be known among the Alvarados as “the keloid scar.” An excavator was parked to the side and two soil compactors leaned against the fence. To anyone watching him from the other end of the yard, he would look like a creepy version of a David Hockney painting: a wretched figure, hunched over from self-pity and a mild scoliosis that had been diagnosed late in life, moving his head this way and that, following the path of an imaginary swimmer. Where was Keila? Where were the twins? Where were the girls? It was supposed to be Sunday family dinner, but the house was on life support. Or was it him?
Monday, February 8th
“What kind of idiotic tantrum was that?” Keila yelled at Oscar from the driver’s seat of her car. “The girls were worried sick!” she added, carefully wording her recrimination to leave herself out and at the same time administer to Oscar a dose of guilt.
Oscar, in the passenger seat, looked out the window, wanting to jump out into the Mulholland Drive abyss. There were still a few minutes of enduring Keila’s rage before they arrived at Olivia’s house to visit the twins. He acknowledged Keila’s reproach and felt a pang in his chest. His wife was right. What kind of man was he becoming, not to have given the slightest consideration to his daughters’ feelings?
“I just needed some space.” Oscar’s voice was barely audible.
“You really have to come up with a better explanation when we see the therapist this week. You’re not even good at disappearing! I knew exactly where you were.”
“I wasn’t trying to disappear. I had to get away to collect my thoughts. This thing, what you’re doing to our marriage, to our family, is cruel and uncalled-for.”
Keila stepped on the accelerator and took a curve a bit too fast. Someone in the oncoming traffic honked their horn.
Oscar kept his hand on the door handle, and when they finally parked, he got out of the car and rushed to the entrance, as if by going into his daughter’s house he would be protected from the savage creature his wife had become.
But something unexpected happened as soon as they went into Olivia’s house and found the twins in the den smearing Play-Doh on the shag carpet. An unspoken truce was suddenly called and both of them got on their knees to play with their granddaughters, relieved to see them quite recovered. They each knew that the year ahead would likely prove difficult. They might not succeed in mending their marriage. But sitting on the floor, helping each other try to remove the sticky red paste from the teal carpet, they each silently vowed to try.
Wednesday, February 10th
Olivia and her sisters had been raised both Jewish (for Keila) and Catholic (for Oscar). To avoid confusion, Oscar and Keila had defined the Old and New Testaments to their daughters as the Movie and the Sequel, creating for them a fluid, hybrid faith that ultimately boiled down to the celebration of all holidays indiscriminately, without giving their religion any further theological examination. Hanukkah was the time to light up the menorah, Christmas was when the tree was decorated and gifts were given and received, and that was that.
On this February morning, Olivia drove to Death Valley to celebrate Ash Wednesday by herself, as
she had done for the past five years. It wasn’t that she was devout, although the holiday’s message of mortality was clear to her more than ever before. She sped down Highway 14, hurrying past lines of semitrucks and slow-moving cars. She had an appointment with her other babies, Sarah and Elias, and wanted to get there early enough to spend the day with them. No one goes to Death Valley on a weekday, so she knew she’d have the whole desert to herself. She had expected to see the grays and browns of its perennial texture, the rocks and sand of the badlands and cracked silt on the playa’s surface, a sight she’d grown familiar with after years of visiting the park. But instead she found herself surrounded by a sea of yellow. Desert gold and gravel ghost flowers looked toward the sun among many other varieties that she could not identify, boasting petals in purple and pink and orange. She remembered her father telling her about a rare Death Valley superbloom he had witnessed as a child during a family vacation, and here it was again many years later. How ironic, she thought, that as the lush gardens of Los Angeles died out, starved by the drought, the driest place on earth was now blooming exuberantly. Could it be an effect of El Niño, the weather phenomenon her father talked about, or was it simply a gift of nature to ease her pain? She slowed down her car to take in the view. It seemed to her as if a blown-glass rainbow had shattered into millions of pieces and fallen to the ground. Farther down, the mild wind blew little sand clouds off the dunes’ crests, whitewashed by the sun. She had climbed up those dunes and had rolled down the soft, sandy inclines many times when she was younger, but these constantly moving mountains meant a lot more to her now; now her children had become part of them.
She parked on the curb along the road, right ahead of Zabriskie Point, a geological formation of rocks that had inspired a scandalous movie in the early seventies whose setting Olivia could not comprehend: Why pick such a rough spot to have wild sex and run around barefoot and naked? She grabbed her backpack and started her trek along a narrow trail that disappeared and reappeared as the desert reconfigured itself.
L.A. Weather Page 5