XVIII.
IT WAS harder to leave Paul’s house than it had been to leave yours. I’d grown accustomed to the junipers and pines of Topanga, the shadowed, sheltered feeling of the canyon. There was a sense of withdrawal away from the city’s studded sheets of light, a comforting echo of Michigan. I liked the way time seemed to pass more slowly. And, of course, I’d grown attached to Paul. I thought of him coming home to an empty house, registering my absence. I thought, achingly, of him sitting with a cup of tea at the card table and sleeping alone beneath his kites. And yet the scene seemed distant to me, inaccessible, like a movie still.
It was possible that I’d return someday, I told myself, although I knew that it wasn’t. It wasn’t possible to live simultaneous lives, at least in this world. I closed the low door of the cabin behind me and lifted my suitcases into Paul’s Cavalier. Perhaps I’d regret my decision someday. Perhaps it would become a thorn I’d never dislodge. Some errors were irreparable, I knew. They could only be lived with, incorporated into the body like a foreign object.
Who can tell what breath entered into me, after that, and told me what movements to make? I have as much grasp of it as you do, Elise.
Perhaps I knew what I was doing. It’s hard to be honest about something I don’t fully understand. For so long I’d attended to the winds of suggestion, relied on the subtle cues of the universe and my own subliminal moods. It’s difficult, impossible really, for any of us to know all the ways we’re tethered to unknown forces, or to gauge the true reasons for our actions. We’re open-pored beings, after all. We’re lotus roots suspended in the Spring and haired with tentacles, instinctual creatures wearing halos of consciousness.
What happened is that I left all the phones—Shelby’s, yours, and mine—at a gas station in Topanga, where I bought a map of Southern California. I sat in the Cavalier, breathing its ghost smell of cigarette smoke, and unfolded the map over the steering wheel. I took the meteorite in my hand and closed my eyes for a moment. Like that, I achieved Unity Gain. Sparks leaped between planes of consciousness. I don’t know if you ever experienced this. My sense is that you never did. I believe you were doing it wrong the whole time. And so maybe you’d say it was just my imagination, or a retroactive application of pattern and meaning, but I swear to you it happened just this way. I opened the map, and right there was a dot with the word “Hesperia.” Not the town in Michigan, but a place in Southern California, about two hours’ drive from Topanga. A sister city. Its flip side. How did my eyes find it so quickly if it hadn’t been placed there for me?
The Econo Lodge had a room for forty-five dollars a night. I still had what remained of the petty cash you’d given me, almost three thousand dollars. I rented a post office box, and sent away for the birth certificate. It was scandalously easy to do. Only my sister would be lazy or ignorant enough to keep Social Security cards in her wallet. Both hers and Briella’s were there, crisp and new.
My hair had grown out since the long-ago day we’d gone to Abbot Kinney, so I went to Supercuts in a strip mall and came out with a short, angled style like Shelby’s that curtained the sides of my face. I ran my hand up through the layers as I settled into my room, which was nice for the money. There was faux mahogany furniture, and a gray sateen dust ruffle on the bed. The black carpet was patterned with ovals running on the bias with dots in the middle, like repeating eyes. There was the flat black portal of the television. Crucially, there was a mini fridge. Like a rodent preparing for hibernation, I went to the supermarket and gathered cans of chili and green beans, cartons of mini muffins, and tabloid magazines. Handing the magazines to the checkout clerk, I glimpsed the register screen, the color-coded buttons darkened with grime. I’d never press buttons like that again, never wear a navy polo shirt, never go back to that life. The boy dropped the magazines into a plastic bag, and I grabbed the bag away from him.
I looked through all the magazines. You weren’t there. Other actresses peacocked for the camera. The pages—all of them—were jammed with newly minted faces. Each issue was fresh and amnesiac, toasting whatever starlet was next, the latest bijou to bob atop the cultural tide. It was tragic, I suppose, to think that each new arrival was duped into thinking she was unique, that she possessed some unusual flair, or even her own personality. You’d find this tragic, I was sure. Its truth would already be descending upon you.
I rolled up the magazines and put them in the wastebasket. I sat at the little motel desk and, on a scrap of drawing paper, wrote a letter to Paul, who deserved an explanation. I considered for a few moments, then wrote that I needed to go back to Michigan to see my new niece. I’d most likely stay there for a while, to help take care of my father. I’d be in touch when I had a sense of when I might return.
I folded the letter and left it on the desk. I turned off the lights and closed the blackout curtains against the sun and asphalt. With the bed linens nested around me on the carpet, I sank into the Spring. In my dream, I opened the door of the room where the orbs hung and found that the room had been paved black. In the middle of the floor was a cement trough, an industrial bathtub filled with water—warm when I dipped a finger in, salty when I licked it. In the dream, I climbed into the trough and lay submerged in water the temperature of blood. You were somewhere in the house, but you didn’t know I was there. The room itself was stygian, and I was afraid the door would lock, that you’d never find me. I was afraid I’d be trapped in this tank, that I’d drink the salt water and die.
I sprang upright in bed and clutched at air. By slow degrees, I recognized my surroundings, the glossy dresser, the textured blanket over my legs. I wanted to fling away the blanket and break through the window to the parking lot, but my brain came awake in time to calm itself. This room was a cell of my own choosing, I remembered, and I was not captive but freer than ever.
I mobilized myself only to use the bathroom, eat, and take the fenugreek capsules I’d bought at CVS. Lying back in my blankets, I touched my breasts with my fingertips and circled my nipples until they stiffened. At first, I was aroused by this and couldn’t resist sliding my hands down my own body and imagining myself with a man. I began by thinking about Paul, but he transformed into Rafael. Eventually, though, the nipple massages became more procedural. I did them eight times a day for twenty minutes as I fell into sleep or trance, and again when I awoke. The visions flickered like film stills. I saw the interior of Shelby’s trailer, the caged dog snarling. I saw a zebra running with her colt, and the burning savanna behind them.
After six days, when I felt a surge beginning, I drew myself up from the blankets and sat on the toilet. On the evening of the summer solstice, I packed my things, threw away the remaining food, and checked out of the Econo Lodge. I’d showered and washed my hair before leaving the room, but the receptionist’s gaze still lingered as I handed back the key card. When I asked, she told me that Party City and Babies “R” Us were located in the same strip mall in Victorville, so I loaded my suitcases into the Cavalier and drove there.
I wore my sunglasses as I drove, and pulled down the visor. My eyes were still dry from the arid motel room, the air conditioner, and the dust motes. My hands massaged the steering wheel. The freedom of a car was familiar, welcome—this simple American thing, a steel shell and gas tank, a pedal to press with one foot. It was an extension of me, a conductor of my horsepower.
Tinny music played as I walked through the store aisles. I did my shopping quickly. At Party City, I didn’t know what I was looking for until I saw it. A hairy cloak, furred mask and gloves, ram horns. I brought it all to the checkout counter. Behind the counter, Mylar balloons were pinned to the wall, and I thought distantly of Paul’s kites. In front of the counter were bins of glow rings, and in a flash of inspiration I scooped them up and paid for those, too.
I coasted all the way to Calabasas. Turning off the 101, I stopped at the post office to mail my letter, then followed the map into the mountains. Las Virgenes Road past Mulholland Drive, past the Hind
u temple, past the entrance to the Rhizome. About a mile farther down, I turned off the main road and followed an unnamed lane that doubled back up, winding through the mountains. It was easy to drive off the lane into the trees, to hide the car among the oaks and chaparral. From here, it was only a few hundred yards on foot to the edge of the Rhizome’s property. I could see the twin protuberances of the Goat Buttes, the same view I’d seen through the windows of the nursery.
As I sat on the ground to wait for nightfall, my senses were sharpened. A slight breeze stirred the air, and I caught the burnt-wood smell of creosote, the faint marijuana lift of sagebrush. The rattling call of a towhee, the squawk of a jay. I put a fenugreek capsule on my tongue. I reached beneath my shirt and touched my breasts as I watched the light retreat over the hills, its copper glow like flame in the trees, until at last the fire was extinguished and the trees blackened. For a moment, in the gloaming’s indigo confusion, I imagined a zebra and her colt galloping past. I blinked, and the vision evaporated.
This being the longest day of the year, it wouldn’t be fully dark until ten o’clock. As the last blue light in the sky clung to the horizon, I put on my fur cloak and mask so that I was completely covered, and I adjusted the cord that held the horns to the sides of my head. I wanted to run but made myself go slowly. With calm focus, I tramped a path to the Rhizome. I heard the sound of my own breath and the crunching of dry grass underfoot. Every few yards, I drew a glow-in-the-dark ring from the Party City bag inside my purse and dropped it to the ground. I traced a wide circle around the side of the property in order to approach from the front. Finally, I came out into the parking lot, where costumed figures were emerging from Porsches and BMWs. I walked with purpose alongside them to the entrance path lined with tiki torches. I was fully costumed, my disguise impenetrable, my confidence total. I was safe within my own waking dream. With my furred hand, I showed my membership card to the brunette leopard at the door and went in behind a couple dressed as a magician and a rabbit.
I didn’t recognize any costumes from the previous year. Naturally, these weren’t people who recycled ensembles for an annual event. These were all new spirits, freshly quarried from recent night visions. There was a Green Man, with eyes peering through a mask of leaves. There was a macaw wearing its own gilded cage. There was a woman in a nude bodysuit with a trompe l’oeil painted upon her chest, a cavity containing a glistening heart.
There was an open bar in the lobby again. I requested a glass of water, just to have something to hold, to fit in with the ritual. Outdoors was the ring of fire, the garden courtyard in its periphery of torchlight. I went deeper into the garden. As I came toward the outer band of torchlight, where it met the leafy shadows, I saw a dancer in a midnight-blue leotard. Her red hair was tied back, and she wore a sequined eye mask with a headdress of feathers. Horn bulbs protruded from her temples. Of course it was you. I spun away and edged behind a fountain where I could watch you without being seen. Even from this distance, I could see that the tabloid reports were true, that you were a shadow of yourself. You were drinking, and in deep conversation with a tall Jesus in a crown of thorns. There was no evidence of your recent pregnancy. Your arms were bony, your abdomen was flat as a girl’s, and your breasts were still the size of dumplings. A thought drove through me like a spike, that you’d somehow failed to give birth, that the baby in the photos was a prop, that the child in the nursery crib was a different Amara, who belonged to someone else. You might have lost your nerve and sought a late-term abortion. Looking at you there in the licking torchlight, I could have convinced myself of it.
You laughed at something Jesus said, and my vision clouded. It was the same laugh that had rung in my ears since I was a child, awake and asleep. The bright sound of a plucked harpsichord, golden and reverberating. It was part of what had made you dear to me and what had made you famous, what made you envied and hated. But further than that—and this is the truth that dug its way into me at that moment—it was the sound of your utter vacancy and hopelessness. Only something empty could ring that way.
There was no point in waiting. I left you and went back through the garden toward the building. I remembered the ugly sound of Shelby’s laugh that night in the beer tent. I remembered the leather vest of the man who’d held her, the unfixed wheels of her eyes. I remembered the pills—I knew they’d be oxycodone before I took them from her stolen purse and flushed them down the toilet—and I remembered the tender wrinkled lids of Briella’s eyes as she’d slept. The plastic handle had jutted from her car seat. It would have been so easy to grip and lift it, to take her away. Why hadn’t I done it? I’d balked at the act, at a punishment too severe for any sister, any mother. And so I’d left the baby in the rotting cave of that trailer—and saw now that I’d punished her, instead. I’d thought of the child every day since. I’d imagined the mice that would eventually come, and the maggots. I’d imagined the bedbugs and lice, my sister unconscious on the couch as the baby screamed.
Inside the building, I took the stairs steadily, feeling the reserves of strength in my thigh muscles, unexercised for these sedentary weeks. At the top of the stairs I stood for a moment, a beast of potential, before moving down the hallway. I reached the nursery window and saw the daycare workers: Tasha, Marlene, and all the others, disguised in eye masks with rabbit ears. And there was Amara, in her crib, just beside the door. I withdrew to the end of the corridor, to the fire alarm on the wall near the emergency stairs. It was a simple red handle, part of the environment, long ignored. With my fur-gloved hand, I gripped the handle and felt the thrill of a consummated fate. I pulled the handle down. As the first light pulsed on and the first alarm blast sounded, I was already striding back to the nursery. My lungs felt larger, each breath pulling in a surfeit of oxygen. One of the daycare women slammed the door open and ran past with two babies bundled in her arms. A deep power coiled inside me as I caught the door and entered the room. A mother in search of her child. The alarm bleated. The women were fast, scooping two babies at a time. “Just take one,” someone yelled to me. “We have to get them all out.”
Amara was swaddled in a white blanket like a cocoon. Her fox-kit eyes met mine as I lifted her to my chest and ran out of the room.
In the hallway, the alarm was louder, a blaring admonition. A commotion rose from below, shouts carrying over the music that was still playing. I heard the pounding steps of people on the main staircase as I fled through the hallway to the emergency exit. You would be on your way up, I knew. Any woman would rush upstairs for her child when she understood what was happening. Even you. I was faster, though, and I’d had a head start. I knew that the emergency stairs led down to the back door of the building, to the gardens and spa, and this is where I went.
The courtyard that had been pulsing with life just minutes before was barren now; only torches stood guard. The stampede would have herded out the front door to the parking lot. The baby was a tight package in her swaddling blanket, and I cradled her like a football as I rushed through the courtyard and into the hedge maze. The alarm was still audible, and I heard the distant sound of sirens as I navigated the path, shielded by boxwood ramparts. Once out of the hedge maze, we were safely hidden from view. With raw power, my legs carried me to the edge of the property, to the first glowing ring on the ground. I bent to retrieve the phosphorescent objects as I went, secreting them away in my purse. The sounds of the Rhizome were muffled by the time I reached the car, which was dimly visible in the grayscale dark, a fairytale carriage.
XIX.
YOU KNOW more than I do, of course, about what happened at the Rhizome later that night, but I think I can imagine it. By the time you got to the nursery, most of the cribs would already have been empty. Assuming that a daycare worker had taken Amara outside, you would turn and go back down the stairs, among the last to evacuate, pushing through the bottleneck at the door. The fire trucks would just be arriving, spinning their lights over the parking lot, turning the costumed crowd into demons.
You would find the daycare workers huddled on the ground, holding all the babies, and you’d lift your sequined mask and go to them. You’d look at each baby until their faces blurred and you began to doubt your own memory. The firefighters would bustle past the ridiculous party guests and their luxury cars and push into the frilly, defenseless building. Some of the guests would get into their cars and leave; others would savor the excitement, the primordial atmosphere of fire and disguise. There would be animated talk and gesturing, everyone linked together in this dream-memory, so thoroughly Perrenian. The firefighters would emerge at last and irascibly announce the false alarm. It would be safe to reenter the building, to continue the party, but you’d be suddenly sober as you followed the daycare workers upstairs to the nursery again, asking, “Where is my child?”
Then, panic and recrimination. Which one of them had brought her out? Had someone put her down somewhere in the parking lot or the weeds and forgotten her? A frantic search around the nursery, the building, the premises. At some point—when?—the police would be called. The wider search would begin. Eventually, suddenly, you’d remember something specific I’d once told you, and Tasha would be summoned for questioning.
“My friend told me that she seemed unusually attached to the babies,” you’d tell the police through tears and mucus.
“And which friend is this?”
“Abby, my friend Abby.”
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