Lana slipped her card into the ATM slot and keyed in her code number, a combination of her daughters’ birth dates. While she waited for her money, she distracted herself from thoughts of Micki by pressing the balls of her feet hard against the ground. This worked to focus her attention down and away from Micki, and generally, the trick worked; but sometimes she pushed so hard her toes curled and her foot cramped. That really got her mind off her troubles.
As she listened to the busy clicks and hums of the ATM making money, she remembered a line from an old musical. “Plant a radish, get a radish, not a brussels sprout, That’s why I love vegetables, you know what you’re about.”
Vegetables, flowers, weed and pest control, columns of numbers, order forms, and tax documents. These she could handle.
She had been a cocktail waitress with a mediocre degree in accounting when Jack introduced her to the nursery business; back then she did not know a stamen from a staple. But she took to plant work immediately which surprised her until she realized she loved the logic of plants and garden, the calm predictability that was not too different from the fact that two and two would always add up to four. She put a cosmos seed in the ground, watered and fed it, and up popped a flower. Not a rose, not a cyclamen, but a daisy-faced cosmos.
Jack had wanted children; Lana would have been happy to do without, but she never regretted giving him what he wanted. When the girls were small and uncomplicated, caring for them had been a joy. By opening her heart to Micki and Beth, Lana had discovered new regions of herself, continents of love she had not known existed. And their home was nothing like the one she grew up in. The Porters—Jack, Lana, Micki, and Beth—were a happy family in their house on Triesta Way.
The house had been the first Jack and Lana looked at, and they fell in love with it instantly as the Realtor must have known they would. The wide-open, echoey, and light-filled rooms—so much space after living with two babies in the cottage on the nursery grounds! Lana was light-headed from the possibilities.
Lana knew they could not afford this house, the only derelict building in an excellent neighborhood. A flat-roofed, two story, southern California stucco, unpainted for decades, with windows the size of double beds, it sat like a plaster block in the middle of a vast, neglected garden. A sagging front veranda ran the width of the house; across the back was a long, dangerously bouncy, and termite-ridden balcony with a broken railing; the roof of the garage had fallen in.
Lana and Jack had not needed the Realtor’s spiel to convince them this was the house they were meant to live in until they were old and feeble. The girls had been barely crawling and toddling then. All these years later, Lana felt a thrill of gratitude mixed with disbelief when she turned into the driveway beside her home. Her dreams had come true in this house. They were a happy family.
“It’s Dad’s and my night out,” Beth said, dropping her book bag on the round oak table in the middle of the kitchen. She knelt to smooch Gala, the Irish setter.
“Where you going?” Lana asked.
“Big Bad Cat.”
Micki sneered. “You guys are so boring. Dad and me are going to ride the roller coaster next week.”
“Your father hates roller coasters.” Actually it was Lana who refused to set foot in one.
“He promised,” Micki said.
And Jack always kept his promises.
Lana looked at the coats and homework and book bags and raincoats and umbrellas that marked the trail her daughters had taken through the back door, into the kitchen, and up the stairs. She called to them, “Don’t leave all your stuff down here. The housekeeper came this morning—let’s try to make it last, okay?”
“You leave stuff around,” Micki said, vaulting the banister.
“I’m the grownup.” Lana dug in the cupboard for a dog biscuit and tossed it to Gala.
Damn. She had forgotten to stop at the market, and it had been right there on her list to pick up chicken for dinner. She dropped her purse on the floor and took a pizza from the freezer and set it on the counter. In the crisper there was an unopened bag of lettuce. She checked the pull date and tossed it in the direction of the compost pail.
Micki looked at the pizza box. “Pepperoni’s greasy. I’ll get pimples.”
“No, you won’t. Italians have beautiful skin.”
“Am I Italian?”
Lana turned at the catch in Micki’s voice and realized she had been holding back tears ever since the fight in the school hall.
“Oh, my honey, not with those eyes and that hair.” Lana made her voice light as she wrapped her arms around Micki. “You know why the girls say those things to you. It’s like when someone teases a dog, poking it and poking it so finally it bites. Can’t you just shine it on? Let it roll off your back?”
Micki pulled away, a look of indignation on her face. “Why should I? I’m not the one who’s doing anything wrong.” She grabbed a fistful of hair and tugged so hard, Lana winced. “It’s not fair what they say. How would you like it?” She made a growling sound and tugged again and again.
“Honey, you’ll hurt—”
“I hate them! Why can’t I go to Balboa High? What’s wrong with public—”
“There’s nothing wrong with Balboa. Micki, we’ve had this conversation a dozen times. You can’t run away every time something you don’t like happens or makes you unhappy. These things, these . . . challenges, they’re part of growing—” Why should Micki be convinced by the tired words when Lana wasn’t? But she did not know how else to respond to her daughter’s pain. Certainly not with the truth that when Micki hurt, Lana hurt right along with her. She might as well be a little girl herself for all the help she was.
The doorbell rang.
Thank god. Saved by Jehovah’s Witnesses.
Without pausing to look through the peephole, she opened the door. At first she did not know what they were—just a pair of young people—a man and woman in identical, full-length gray raincoats. Behind them Lana saw a clearing sky and across the street old Mr. Anderson in his dressing gown, sweeping away the leaves that blocked the gutter.
“Yes?”
“Mrs. Porter? Mrs. Jack Porter?”
“I’m Lana Porter.”
She waited for them to say something. Instead they looked at each other and they were too young and new at their jobs to hide their discomfort. A fist clenched in Lana’s insides.
“No,” she said, speaking only to herself. She shook her head and started to close the door and then didn’t. Gala whimpered and shoved her head under Lana’s hand.
“You’re not Lana Porter?”
“Who is it, Ma?” Beth yelled from the top of the stairs.
Lana heard herself say, “My husband?”
The young woman looked at her partner and her expression drooped with regret. “I’m so sorry. . . .”
2000
Chapter Two
Jack died and a part of Lana died with him. Just because it was a cliché didn’t mean it wasn’t true. Lana was a refugee afoot in a cratered world. Death and sudden invasion had bombed her homeland out of existence.
She did not forget her daughters but she lost interest in them.
Between the day of the accident in October and Thanksgiving, Lana survived by sleeping her way from one ruined hour to the next, comatose with shock, half blind without the light of Jack’s smile, that beam of light that strangers basked in and the chilly required. And now the widow wept for it and awoke with gummy eyes. All slept out—it had to happen eventually—she lay in bed with her eyes closed, inhabiting a borderless, fogged-in world. She kept the blinds drawn and let the laundry pyramid; dishes of uneaten food piled up on the floor beside her bed.
When she could, her sister Kathryn came by to vacuum and dust; Mars lived in for the first week, paid the bills, fed Gala, and made sure there was toilet paper. The house stank of pepperoni and sausage. The women in Lana’s run-and-read group brought food—salads and vegetable casseroles to balance out the pizza. Joa
n Lang sent her cleaning lady every Tuesday. Lana’s best friend, Wendy, checked with Carmino daily to make sure Urban Greenery functioned normally; she supervised Beth and Micki’s homework, took them to the movies and to spend the night at her house. Lana presumed Wendy also comforted the girls. She hoped someone did; it was beyond her.
She thought about getting up—knew she should, but didn’t. Micki and Beth fixed their own breakfasts, and must have moved through the house like ghosts. She was able to forget about them for hours at a time. Even Gala stopped barking and larking around the house in her silly setter way, got the message that something had gone very wrong, and from then on slept on Lana’s bed, occupying the foot on Jack’s side. On Thanksgiving Day, Lana stayed home and the girls went to Wendy and Michael’s. The next day, Wendy came upstairs to see Lana, who had wrapped herself in a comforter and moved from her bed to the chaise on the back balcony from where she could see the garden. What a mess it was, all overgrown and weedy after six weeks of neglect. She didn’t want to think about what it would take to put it—and the business—back in order.
“What did you do today?” Wendy leaned against the balcony railing and her bright persimmon-colored hair caught the light of the midday sun.
“You look like a pumpkin,” Lana said.
Wendy was breathless and spiky with energy. And mad at me, Lana thought. She had that wound-up look she always got just before she said something she thought was important.
Here comes the lecture.
“Did you eat that casserole Susan left you?”
“I forgot about it,” Lana said, and then, “I know, I know, this can’t go on.”
“You’re right about that.”
“I just need more time.” There would never be sufficient time; her heart would never heal. But this was the kind of thing grieving widows said. So she said it.
“Have you looked at your girls lately?”
Of course she hadn’t. She could not bear to. For weeks she hadn’t looked at anything; that was the point of lying in bed with her eyes closed—or didn’t Wendy get how things were now? Did she have to spell it all out, every vowel and consonant?
Jack had not come home directly that October day. With a pile of packages on the truck seat beside him, he told Carmino he was going to the main post office. He had turned the truck into the intersection at Morena and Tecolote as he had countless times; and at the same moment, a man who happened to be mad at his wife and his boss and the bartender who had just kicked him out of the Harbor Bar skidded his panel truck across two slick lanes of traffic and slammed into the Urban Greenery logo on the driver’s side of Jack’s truck. Before the police got to the scene, Jack was dead.
“Micki and Beth are just as miserable as you,” Wendy said. “Except for them, with you up here sleeping all day, it’s like both their parents died.”
I know, I know, Lana thought. But I can’t help it.
“I want you to get out of bed and start being a mother again. Your girls need you, Lana. Get up because of them.”
“This sounds like a bad movie. The one where someone tells the poor widow to live for the sake of her children. And she does and everybody lives happily ever after.”
“This isn’t a movie, Lana. It’s your life. And theirs.” Wendy’s mouth looked stitched together, a seam. “I know you feel like you’re dying, but the girls need you to live. So get up and pretend. For them.”
“It’s too hard.”
“Then let them up here, let them cry with you, for God’s sake. Grieve together, that’s what families do. It’d be good for all of you.”
It would not be good. Lana pulled the comforter up over her head. If she let the girls into her sea of grief they would all drown.
Wendy tugged the comforter down. “I’m taking them home with me. I’m moving them into the spare bedroom because they are in danger.” She said the last four words as if they were written in six-foot orange neon matching her hair. “You can’t do this to them. They’re not eating right. They look like street kids. They’re children, Lana. They need their mother.”
In the almost twenty years they had been friends, Lana had never seen Wendy so angry. She pushed away from the balcony, coming to stand only a foot from Lana, her hands spread flat against her thighs. “Goddamn it, Lana, stop being so fucking selfish.” Her face was bright red as if they’d been running a marathon together. “You have a family. Do the right thing.”
“There is no family. Three people live in this house. And a dog. But that’s not a family. It’s a refugee camp.”
Wendy snarled and left, taking the girls home with her for the rest of the weekend. Lana swallowed a sleeping pill and awoke in the middle of the night disoriented, headachy, and restless. She pulled on her old blue cashmere dressing gown, thin and soft as baby hair, and went downstairs barefoot. The silent house blazed with light so she moved through all the rooms, turning off switches until she stood in the dark with Gala pressed hard against her legs. She stood in the dark with nothing to do and then went back to bed.
The Monday after Thanksgiving, Beth stood at Lana’s bedroom door in her school uniform, a tartan skirt and navy blue blazer, and peered into the gloom. Lana saw the frightened wariness in her expression as she said, in her smallest and least-likely-to-offend voice, that there wasn’t any cereal and the bread had grown whiskers.
“Go to my purse,” Lana said. “Take some money and stop at Jack in the Box.” She turned her face into her pillow that smelled of bad breath and dirty hair.
The next time Lana awoke she felt sticky. Downstairs a warm winter Santa Ana blew between the slats of blinds that rattled like bones. In her bedroom the sheers billowed like ball gowns. She got up, took a shower, and washed her hair. She stripped the bed and ran a load of wash—not because she wanted to but because her underwear drawer was empty. She put on a jog bra and a long skirt and nothing else. The waist of the skirt dipped below her navel and between it and the band of the bra she saw her ribs for the first time in more than a decade. She went downstairs and forced down a spoonful of peanut butter and a glass of water. The milk was sour. Again or still, she didn’t know which.
The rest of the day she concentrated on putting one foot in front of the other: dried and folded the wash, ran the dishwasher and emptied it, opened all the windows and let the Santa Ana rush through the miserable house. In the middle of the afternoon she dressed in Levi’s and a tee shirt and drove to Von’s and spent more than three hundred dollars on groceries, buying whatever took her fancy, from stuffed grape leaves to Asiago cheese bread. Back at home she put everything away and made a gigantic chopped salad with grilled chicken, baked a frozen pie, and took Gala for a walk down to the end of the block.
She did not dare go upstairs. If she saw her bed she would lie down and never get up again. She lay on the couch in the grownups’ living room and cried.
On either side of the entry, there were spacious living rooms, one designated for adults and the other for children. The grownups’ living room had been Jack’s favorite place, with its round-shouldered, overstuffed couch and chairs upholstered in craftsman fabrics, the built-in bookshelves on either side of the wood-burning fireplace. While the kids watched television in their own living room across the entry, Lana and Jack had retreated to their adult haven to read and talk and listen to music. Talk.
That’s what Lana missed—the sound of his calm, clear voice and the gift he had for telling funny stories, for making trivialities sound special, the way he wondered out loud and the way he listened—as if what she said was more important than anything he had heard all day. The way he saw the light and dark of her and loved it all.
She would never see him again. Not touch him, not hear his voice. He was dead.
“Dead.”
The word banged against the windows and sucked the air out of the house. Dead. Forever dead. Lana wanted to die herself.
The girls dragged through the back door a little after four, and their faces lighted with rel
ief and hope when she turned to greet them as she stood at the sink cutting back the stems of roses, filling a ceramic vase with big, overblown blossoms. She held out her arms to them and they came to her like they were starving.
“We’ll be fine,” she said and hoped she sounded convincing. “We’ll get on with life—that’s what Daddy’d want.” Inside she was broken beyond mending, but the girls did not need to hear that any more than she needed to dwell on it. Wendy said pretend, so pretend she would—that life was like a spreadsheet: a little Wite-Out, a bit of rearranging, and all the numbers would tally just fine.
The relief of Lana’s family and friends was embarrassingly obvious. Everyone praised her and promised that with time it would get easier. And to Lana’s great surprise, as she staggered through Christmas and groped her way out of 1998 and into 1999, she discovered they were right. The days resumed their old length and shape. She returned to Urban Greenery. Never mind what she knew—that if she stopped pretending she would be sucked down the drain at the end of the world.
No one ever said that this was a dishonest way to live.
Get out of bed and brush your teeth. Smile at yourself in the mirror. Wash your hair and your clothes and your face and your hands. Act as if food and hygiene matter. Laugh at the girls’ jokes, help Micki memorize theorems and vocabulary words, speak Spanish to Beth. She brought men in and got the garden cleaned up, planted a sunflower smile on her face, and everyone praised her. Even her mother, Stella, said she was glad Lana had “come through the worst of it.”
Act as if you have a life, Lana thought. And people will believe you do.
And one day in November, a little more than a year after Jack’s accident, she began to believe it, too. Under flawlessly clear skies, temperatures dipped below freezing three nights in a row; diamond stars punctured the black bowl of night, and Urban Greenery went into its disaster drill. Snuff pots were set out among the perennials; the seedlings had to be covered by sunset, the tenderest specimens sheltered inside. For hours every day, Lana fielded panicky gardening questions about spineless frangipani, wilting plumeria, drooping jacaranda and what to do with the blackened bracts of prized bougainvilleas.
The Edge Of The Sky Page 2