San Diego Noir

by Maryelizabeth Hart

  She reached into the pocket of her shorts. She had a couple of dollars there. “Here,” she said, extending her hand.

  He reached out and took it. His nails, she noticed, were chewed and rimmed with black.

  “God bless you,” he said. “We’re bathed in the light of the Heavenly Host.”

  “Kari?”

  “Oh. Hi, David.”

  She’d fallen asleep on the couch. The television blared on regardless. She’d done her weights like she was supposed to, had a banana, and then settled down to watch television, but it hadn’t been very interesting, she guessed. What was even on now? It looked like a show about pandas.

  David stood in the center of the living room, dressed in a suit and tie. The energy rolled off him, she thought; he was almost as tense as the bum she’d given money to.

  She sat up. Waited a moment for the dizziness to pass. “Did you have a good trip?”

  He nodded. His eyes flicked around the living room. “Jesus, Kari. This place is a disaster.”

  “It is?”

  She hadn’t noticed. She tried to see the room the way he saw it. Her sneakers, jacket, and tote bag on the floor, dumbbells scattered around, an empty glass and a crumpled can on the coffee table.

  “I’ll pick up,” she said. She’d meant to do it. She’d just forgotten.

  David shook his head and grabbed the glass and plate, took them into the kitchen. She stood up and followed him. He started putting dishes in the dishwasher, picking them off the chipped tiled counter.

  “I can have the cleaning lady come more,” she said.

  His back was to her. “It’s not that. It’s this house. All of it.”

  David didn’t like the house. He never had.

  Kari’s dad had left her this house. She remembered staying overnight when she was a kid, sleeping on the couch, her brother curled up on the floor in a sleeping bag, the two of them going to the beach with their dad.

  Before, she and David had lived in a rented condo in Escondido, and it was funny, because when she was a kid she’d loved coming here, but as an adult, Before, she’d felt more like David felt now: that it was run-down, not clean, not nice.

  Finally David turned to her. “I’m sick of being panhandled every block. Did you see that kid who’s parked himself in front of the house? Two days running now! That’s the kind of neighborhood we’re living in, with fucking bums puking on the sidewalks. We can afford something better than this.”

  “You mean, I can afford it,” she said.

  Something dark crossed his face. He slammed the glass down on the counter and stalked out.

  She hadn’t meant to make him mad. She was just stating a fact.

  When she went out into the living room, he was sitting on the couch, flipping through channels with the remote.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “I wasn’t trying to, to …” She thought about what she wanted to say. Sometimes it took her awhile to turn the feelings in her head into words. “Insult you.”

  “I know.” He put down the control and leaned back against the couch, his body still rigid as a plank. “Things are turning around,” he said. “The market’s coming back up. Probably better to wait and sell this place then.”

  “But I don’t want to sell it.” She sat down on the couch next to him. “I like it here.”

  “Great. With the hippies and drunks and stoners.”

  “Why don’t you like it?”

  “Jesus. Because it’s a dump. Because nothing ever changes. Other parts of town, they build nice houses. Have new businesses. Improve things. Not here.”

  She thought about it. She liked that Ocean Beach didn’t change. “Why do you like me?” she asked.

  “What?”

  “I mean … you liked me before, but I’m different now. You liked someone else. Who isn’t here anymore. So why do you like me?”

  “I don’t like you,” he said. His voice was dark, like his face had been. “I love you.”

  “Why?”

  “How can you even ask that?” He let out a sigh. “It’s not your fault. I know it’s not your fault.”

  “That doesn’t matter,” she said. “If it’s my fault or not. I don’t … I don’t expect you to …” She stopped there, puzzled. What was it that she didn’t expect?

  “I promised to always take care of you. Remember?”

  “You don’t have to,” she said. “I know I make mistakes, but … I’m doing all right. I can take care of myself.”

  “I want to,” he replied, his jaw tight, then sighed again. “Take care of yourself? You probably don’t even remember what day it is tomorrow.”

  She thought about it. “It’s Wednesday.”

  He closed his eyes. “It’s our anniversary.”

  Oh.

  It was not on her list for the day, but it was on the San Diego Zoological Society calendar in the kitchen, noted there beneath the photo of the cheetah cubs in David’s blocky print: Our Third Anniversary.

  David had changed into sweats and a T-shirt. He sat on the couch, watching some financial news show. She couldn’t really follow those now, or maybe it was just that she wasn’t really interested in them anymore. The market this. The market that. Who cared?

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m sorry I forgot.”

  “That’s okay.” He tried to smile. That is, he did smile, but she didn’t think he meant it.

  She wasn’t good at remembering where she put things, or what she was supposed to do, or a lot of facts and figures. But she was good, she realized, at judging emotions, whether people’s words and expressions matched their feelings.

  “How do you want to celebrate?” he asked. “Or do you even want to?”

  She thought about it. Our Third Anniversary. Underneath the photo of the cheetah cubs.

  “Let’s go to the zoo.”

  On Wednesday mornings she had her appointment with Helen, her therapist. It was nice, because Helen’s office was just off Newport Avenue, and she could walk to it. She hadn’t driven since the accident. She didn’t have seizures or anything like that; she probably could drive. She just didn’t think she wanted to.

  “I don’t know why he likes me,” she told Helen.

  The therapist leaned back in her chair. She was fluffy. Cloudy, in Kari’s way of picturing her, but with sharp beams of light that refracted through the clouds: a mass of graying brown hair, hornrimmed glasses, chunky jewelry and layers of gauzy clothing, and a penetrating gaze, a way of pinning down feelings with sharp words, like the feelings were dead butterflies.

  “You’re a very likable person, Kari.”

  “Maybe. But I’m not the same person. I’m not …” She struggled to find the words. “We used to want the same things. I was quick, like he was. I was … ambitious. We were going to, to make a lot of money. Live well. Have nice things.” She shrugged. “I don’t care about that stuff now. But he still does. And he says that he loves me, but I don’t know why.”

  “Because you’re lovable.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “You’re kind. You’re caring. You’re pretty …”

  “So is it about how I look?”

  Helen sighed. “It’s about a lot of things. Have you asked him?”

  “I tried. But he won’t tell me.”

  Helen tapped her pen on edge of the desk, like she was summoning up her words. “Kari, you keep talking about how he feels about you. How do you feel about him? Do you want to be with him?”

  She considered this. “I don’t know.”

  “You really need to think about that, Kari. And you need to think about what you want to do, long-term. You’ve made a remarkable recovery. It’s time for you to start thinking about the future.”

  She tried to smile. “It feels so far away.”

  “I know. But it comes before you know it. Look.” Helen hesitated; she wasn’t sure of something, Kari thought. Maybe not about what she wanted to say, but the words she needed to use, so that Kari w
ould hear them. Finally Helen continued: “Your life is very different than it was, and you can’t do some of the things you used to do. You’re not going to be a lawyer.”

  “That’s okay. I don’t want to be one.”

  “Good. So why don’t you think about what you do want to do? And we’ll start focusing on that.” Helen opened up her day planner. “Next week?”

  When she walked home, the bum was there, leaning against the telephone pole.

  “Spare a dollar? So I can get something to eat?”

  I gave you a dollar yesterday, she started to say, but then she thought, That was yesterday, and today he needs to eat again. She had a dollar and some change in her pocket. She gave it to him.

  “Jesus loves you,” he said. “But the Shining Ones, the deceivers, they take a pleasing form.”

  There were a lot of gaps in her memory. The stuff she’d learned in school, especially law school. Some of it was there, but she couldn’t connect it all together. And other kinds of things: incidents. People she knew. Places she’d visited. She’d remember, sometimes, if someone reminded her, that, oh yes, she’d been there. She’d seen that.

  Other people and places were gone, no matter how well they were described to her.

  The zoo was something she did remember. She’d been coming here since she was a little kid, for all her life, really.

  Walking through the front entrance, seeing the flamingos across from it, smelling that strange chlorinated bird-shit smell, she thought of coming here with her parents, back when her parents were together, and her little brother.

  Before everyone died.

  “Let’s get some tacos,” she said to David.

  Her father had died first. A heart attack. Had left the house to her and her brother. They’d talked about selling it, but Jake wanted to live there while he went to college. It was something the two had argued about, because she’d wanted the money to pay off her law school loan, but they’d decided to table the discussion for at least a year. There was insurance money from her dad, at least, to compensate her for the lost income, the money that Jake couldn’t afford to pay.

  She’d graduated. Passed the bar. Her stepfather and mother wanted to celebrate. They’d all ridden together in her stepfather’s car: Kari, Frank, Mom, and Jake.

  There was life insurance money from Frank and her mom. Money from the sale of the very nice house they’d owned in Del Mar. Money from their IRA. She’d had her own insurance, though it hadn’t begun to cover the total cost of her hospitalization and rehab.

  The real money came from the lawsuit over the accident, which had just been settled.

  “You’re going to need advice and guidance,” Helen had told her. “But you’re competent to make some basic decisions about your future.”

  David wanted to be her advisor. He was her husband, it only made sense. But the things he wanted to do with the money—investments, expansions, new houses—didn’t interest her.

  She hadn’t said no yet. But she hadn’t said yes, either.

  “How much longer do you want to stay?”

  He was already bored. They’d been there nearly two hours, including the time it took to eat, and they’d only gone to the Children’s Zoo and the Insect House and the Reptile House, then through the Monkey Trail and down to see the pandas.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “We haven’t been to the tigers or the elephants yet.”

  She thought that he sighed. “Okay. Let’s go see the elephants.”

  The elephant exhibit was new. When you entered it, there were signs welcoming you to see the animals that were here in Southern California thousands of years ago. There were statues of mastodons and saber-toothed tigers, equipment for kids to climb on, all sitting in beds of ground-up tires; metal monoliths two, three times her height, with cutouts of gas pumps and faucets and bulldozers, slogans like Reuse and Recycle and Sustainability. There was a tar pit with animal skeletons—fakes, she figured.

  And then there were the real animals. Rattlesnakes. Condors with wingspans as big as Chinese kites. Lions, with signs warning you that their spray range was seven to ten feet.

  The elephant enclosure wound around the mesa like a broad, lazy river of packed brown dirt and sand. They followed it, watched an elephant use its trunk to retrieve items stashed up in the branches of a metal tree. “Look at that,” she said, pointing. “Look at the end of his trunk! It’s like …” She stopped, puzzled. “I don’t know. Like a finger, but with no bones. Like what an octopus has.”

  “A tentacle.”

  She laughed. “Yes! Like that.”

  They reached the Elephant Care Center. From the front, it looked ordinary, a small building that could have been a vet’s, or a dental office, or anything. Then around in back, it opened up, like someone had unfolded a pop-up book, into a huge sort of barn, as big as a jet hangar. Banners of elephants’ legs hung above massive steel bars—cages. It looked like a science fiction movie, she thought. Like there should be monsters inside. But it was empty. Dark.

  “Is that where the elephants sleep?” she asked. “Or just where they go when they’re sick?”

  “I don’t know,” David muttered. He wiped his forehead with the back of his hand. The sun had finally come out, late in the afternoon.

  The greatest danger to elephants is the encroachment on their habitat by man, she read on one of the plaques. It took her a few times but she understood it. She got it right.

  “We need to leave soon,” David said, “so we can go home and get changed for dinner.”

  “Dinner?”

  “We have a reservation at Tapenade. I told you that.”

  She nodded. She didn’t think that he had, but it wasn’t worth arguing about. Sometimes she thought that he pretended to tell her things and didn’t, but she wasn’t sure why.

  Maybe so she would think that she needed him more than she did.

  They took one last walk through the rainforest, into cool mist and vegetal darkness. There was one place she particularly liked: a giant walk-through aviary, taller than jungle trees. Birds flew overhead, emitting alien cries and chatter. She and Jake used to play here when they were little, race up and down the greening cement paths until their parents lost patience. She remembered that, suddenly, smelling the mossy water, hearing the birds call.

  “Let’s walk a little longer,” she said. There was still so much she hadn’t seen.

  Below the aviary was a series of paths and grottoes. There were sun bears. Tapirs. Monkeys with names she’d never seen before. Golden-bellied Mangabey, with the Do Not Feed warning next to it. A sleeping snow leopard. A North American lynx. She read the placards on each, mumbled the names of the animals to herself.

  Status—Endangered. Status—Threatened. Loss of habitat. Extinction.

  “Are you crying?” David asked. “What’s wrong?”

  “Just … it’s sad.”

  Do Not Feed.

  “Let’s go home,” David said. “You’re tired. You get stressed out when you’re tired.”

  “I’m not. I’m not … tired. Or stressed.” She pulled her arm away from him and continued down the path.

  Here were some smaller enclosures, containing little monkeys and birds.

  Did you know … the sign said on one.

  “Did you know,” she repeated aloud. “Like people, not all animals are … are physically perfect. It is the, the policy of the San Diego Zoo to allow … to allow these … individuals to, to live normal lives …”

  “Let’s go home, Kari,” David said. “We’re going to be late.”

  “I know what I want to do now, with the money,” she said over dinner.

  David had just taken a sip of his wine. He held onto the glass, frozen in place. “Oh?”

  “I want to, to do something … for animals.”

  David put the glass down. “What?”

  “I’ve been thinking a lot about it,” she said slowly. “Like when I’m out feeding the cats. And then today, at the
zoo.”

  “Kari, what are you saying?” His voice rose. “You want to give your money to cats?”

  “No,” she answered, her voice sharp. “I still understand a few things. I’ll have … a foundation … or a nonprofit. I’ll pay myself a salary from it. I’m not stupid.”

  “Look, honey …” He took a gulp of wine and lowered his voice. “You’re doing a lot better. You’ve really come a long way … but you’re not ready to take something like that on.”

  “I know,” she said, and she felt calmer again. “I’ll hire someone to help me decide what kinds of projects. I was thinking, maybe, helping animals that get hurt. Or buying land where they live so they’ll be safe.”

  “Kari …”

  “It’s my money,” she said. “I get to decide.”

  Maybe that hadn’t been very nice.

  It had been a few days, and David was still mad at her, she could tell, no matter how many times he said he wasn’t. “We just need to think about this a little more,” he kept saying. “Talk it over.”

  That wasn’t all he wanted to do.

  He’d called a lawyer. He thought that she wouldn’t find out. But that was one thing she remembered about David, that she was beginning to remember better: he thought he was smarter than he was.

  It had been easy to find out. He liked to take long showers, so when he went into the bathroom, she checked his cell phone. There were two numbers that weren’t identified, and she wrote them both down. After David left for work, she called them.

  The first was a restaurant. The second, a law firm specializing in divorce, family law, and mental health issues.

  Competency.

  She Googled the name of the firm, and that’s how she learned what they did.

  She wasn’t what she used to be, but she wasn’t stupid.

  That was yesterday.

  She hadn’t said anything to David about what she discovered, not yet. She was still trying to work out what it all meant.

  Today was Saturday, a day that she went to Dog Beach and then to feed the cats on the jetty. She walked down a little street that fronted the beach, lined with a row of houses, all lowbuilt with sharp angles—left over from the ’60s, maybe. In the middle of these was a house under construction. Three stories high, strange swooping curves. It looked so wrong next to the little Jetsons houses. Like a mistake. A big sign was posted on the chain-link fence surrounding it, with the headline, What’s Happening Here.