One day right after the list came out, Micki’s mom had been driving her to piano and she asked her what would happen if Tiff weren’t chosen.
“You two have been best friends since you started at Arcadia. Do you want to give her up for The Fives?”
“We’ll still be tight.” As Micki had said this, she knew it probably would not happen that way. Fives hung with Fives—that’s the way it was. It was a miracle Tiff got on the candidates list. For one thing, she was about ten pounds overweight, and for another, she did not have great clothes. Plus she acted silly sometimes and Fives were always cool.
Her mother said, “I want you to be happy, honey. If The Fives are what you want, if you’ll be happy—”
Happiness was not the point of being a Five. The point was insurance. Fives dressed best, dated the coolest guys, drove the hottest cars, held most of the school offices and mostly got good grades and went to the colleges that counted. When Micki became a Five she would step into this hallowed and cushioned world and then she could finally relax. Being a Five was like a guarantee that even if she was adopted and her father was dead and she didn’t have a normal family anymore, there was nothing wrong with her; she was not a reject or a trash-can kid.
A dog on the other side of the fence began to bark. It snuffled and scratched about a foot from where Micki sat at the foot of the pepper tree. She stood up, brushed off the back of her skirt, kicked the fence, and walked on. At the next cross street she flicked her cigarette into the gutter and looked left. Two blocks away, Washington Street was a four-lane boulevard lined with shops and restaurants. Sometimes she walked home that way, stopping in some of the antique stores to poke around for treasures. She had found a tortoiseshell comb for her Aunt Mars last Christmas.
Micki’s mom would never have worn that comb in a million years but it suited Aunt Mars. Her mother, Aunt Mars, and Aunt Kathryn each had different fathers but when they were all together Micki could tell they were related. Especially Mars and Kathryn, who didn’t even look alike until you focused on their eyes—not the color, but the heavy eyelids like Gramma Stella. And they both walked like her, with their toes out like ballet dancers or penguins. Genetics. The word seemed almost magical to Micki. If she had a real sister, even a half sister, it would be someone she could look at and see bits and pieces of herself, only mixed up differently. But still familiar—like a gerbera daisy and a sunflower were different but the same, too.
People said she and Beth were alike because they were both blond and tall. Ha! The older they got, the more the differences showed. Beth was younger than Micki, but she could do everything better. Beth said The Fives were zero units. She said they could crawl to her on their hands and knees, like at the Feast of Guadalupe, and she’d laugh at them. She wasn’t just talking smack. Beth really would do that.
At the Miranda Street Park, Micki stopped for another cigarette over in the far corner where the old gravestones had been relocated and away from any patrolling cops. Micki didn’t wear a watch but she guessed it was not yet three. School was still in session and sometimes the cops got bored enough to hassle kids ditching class.
The Miranda Street Park had been built over a graveyard that was more than a hundred years old; instead of tossing the headstones, which probably would have freaked a lot of people, the city had them moved and arranged in lines close to the fence that overlooked the Washington Street canyon. When Micki was in grade school, she and Tiff had sneaked out of their bedrooms at night and dared each other to walk among the stones. They grew older, lost their fear, and invented biographies for the deceased lying beneath the acres of lawn. Micki’s favorite was Jenny Sanchez, aged seven. Etched in the square granite stone with her name was the figure of an angel bearing flowers. Micki ached with sadness when she saw that angel and asked herself why a girl only seven years old had died.
Micki was not a big church person—none of her family was, but as she sat smoking on Jenny’s headstone she said a prayer for the little girl anyway and wondered what it had been like for her family when she died. Did her mother have a bunch of other kids or was Jenny her only one, maybe the only girl? Perhaps Jenny was her miracle baby, the daughter she had stopped hoping for and when Jenny died—tuberculosis or maybe typhoid, they were common in the old days—her heart was broken and her husband spent all his time at work. She wondered if they ever talked about it or if they were like her family and tried to pretend they were doing great.
Death screwed everything up.
Micki’s father wasn’t buried anywhere because her mom said he would not like being in a cemetery. He got cremated; then her mom, without telling anyone, sneaked off to Garnet Peak in the Lagunas and dumped his ashes out into the desert. Micki thought about this and she hated her mother so much her jaw ached. If he had a stone like Jenny’s she could sit by it and talk to him. There were so many things Micki wanted to say and now she couldn’t.
Micki stepped away from Jenny’s headstone and flicked her cigarette butt at a puddle around a sprinkler head. She left the park and crossed Washington and turned up University. School’d be out pretty soon. Tiff and the gang might be at Bella Luna buying frozen coffee drinks.
Half a block away, Micki stopped and stared at the iridescent blue-green convertible in the Bella Luna parking lot, right next to the entrance; a few steps closer and she saw the side of a guy’s head wearing wraparound shades like a rock star incognito. Should she turn around, go home, or walk in like she had a right to? Bella Luna was always crowded so why should she be scared? It was a free country. Besides she couldn’t see the face of the guy driving so maybe it was someone else. There had to be more than one blue-green Jag convertible in the world. Iridescent?
To enter Bella Luna she had to pass right in front of the car and when she did she knew it was him without actually looking. She felt his shaded eyes like two warm hands pressing against her shoulder blades. She tried to act like she hadn’t noticed him. She pushed open the door to the coffee bar as if he were invisible.
Bella Luna smelled wonderfully of coffee, and Micki liked the way the tight little space was crowded with tiny chairs and tables and a few fat, old chairs and couches. There was always lots of conversation going on, but no one talked too loud; even the laughter sounded respectfully subdued in Bella Luna so the women with their laptops (they always took the cushy chairs) and the men reading the L.A. and New York Times were not disturbed. The barrista, a girl named Andy with a peroxide blond crew cut, five eyebrow rings, and a labret asked Micki what she wanted but Micki barely heard her. She felt a draft raise the gooseflesh on the back of her legs as the door opened. She knew it was him.
“What, again?” Andy had the too-cool-to-live coffee bar ’tude, but for once it didn’t tick Micki off.
“A double vanilla latte,” she said. “With whipped cream.”
“No problem.” Andy waited for Micki to find five dollars wadded up in a corner of her purse.
It was stupid to be so nervous about the Jaguar guy when she was perfectly safe in a place like Bella Luna where she came almost every day. Her order was announced and she moved over to find a lid that fit. For some reason none of them did; then there he was, standing right beside her. She could smell his lemony aftershave. She was surprised by how tall he was.
He handed her a plastic top.
“Thanks,” she mumbled, keeping her eyes down. Her knees felt like scoops of ice cream melting.
His voice was low, like the surf on a dark day. “You want to sit outside?”
That’s what she had meant to do, yes; but now she didn’t know if she should. Did he mean he wanted to sit with her? If he did, then she knew she should say no, but what if he were just making conversation? If she said no, she would sound rude. Or flakey. She looked around, any direction but his, and like being rescued by the Marines at the last minute, there was her godmother, her mom’s friend Wendy, coming through Bella Luna’s back door wearing a pair of paint-speckled overalls and a white sailor cap pulled dow
n over her red-orange hair.
“Hi, Toots.” Wendy hugged her and for an instant Micki wanted to cry, but she didn’t know why. “Shouldn’t you be in school?” Wendy looked from Micki to Jaguar man. She stuck out her hand. “Hi. I’m Wendy.”
With Wendy beside her, Micki took a chance and looked right at him as she had never had the nerve to do before, even when he asked directions. He wasn’t so old, maybe in his thirties, but a very tall and buff thirty. He wore his hair cut super short and his narrow wraparound, black-tinted sunglasses were pearlescent blue and hid his eyes completely. He wore Levi’s and a loose-fitting blue Polo sweater and expensive leather sandals. Micki stared at his toenails. They were perfectly trimmed as if he’d just had a pedicure and he had a gold ring on his big toe.
“Eddie,” he said and smiled as he shook Wendy’s hand, a sparkling white smile like a toothpaste ad. Micki wondered if maybe he was a model. “Looks like you’ve been painting.”
Wendy explained that she did residential brush painting only, very fine and careful custom work. “Today I’m finishing the gingerbread on a restored Victorian.”
“That must be very satisfying.”
“It is.”
Micki squirmed in the silence.
Wendy looked at Micki. “So why aren’t you in school?” She placed her palms on Micki’s shoulders and fixed her with an unnervingly steady gaze. Wendy’s blue-green eyes were almost neon sometimes and Micki had to look away, down at her sneakers. Wendy turned her toward the exit. “Go straight home, okay?”
Like she was a preschooler who needed to be told.
Chapter Ten
At about the same time, Beth Porter sat in the Mission Hills branch of the San Diego Public Library occupying space for four people on one of the long reading tables. Outside the picture window that fronted on Washington Street she watched the skinny eucalyptus seedlings planted at intervals along the sidewalk whip back and forth in the wind like pom-poms. The library was overheated and had a fusty, bookish smell Beth liked, even the occasional whiffs of disinfectant that wafted over from the bathrooms every time someone went in or out. It was comfortable and familiar and friendly.
On the table Beth had constructed a protective reef of history books, notebooks, papers, and half a dozen library books to keep away even the most intrepid of the many peculiar fish who occupied the reading room on weekdays. She watched one of the regulars at the next table pat the top of his long, matted hair, comb his fingers through it, pat it again as he read and muttered to himself. Hatching conspiracy theories, Beth thought. She didn’t want him anywhere near her.
The hubcap-sized black-and-white clock on the wall over the checkout desk said it was almost four-thirty. School had been out since three-thirty and still no sign of Kimmie, who had passed her a note during fourth period saying she and her boyfriend would pick her up at the library at four. Beth would not have waited around if she had somewhere to go besides home.
Kimmie’s taste in guys was the worst. This dude was stick-skinny, had piercings in creepy places—not that Beth had seen them and she never wanted to, either. His upper arms were covered with cheapo, all-black tattoos of devil heads and knives piercing a heart, blood dripping. So gross. Beth did not even like Kimmie most of the time, but she was the only person she wanted to hang with these days.
Which was weird.
Being with the girls she had known for years, especially Madison and Linda, who had been her friends since sixth grade, reminded Beth of the way things were before her father died. And more than anything else, Beth wanted to forget those times and get on with life. It hurt too much to remember. And scared her, too. When it came on, it rocked her with a feeling so powerful and huge and inescapable, she knew it would destroy her like a tidal wave if she didn’t protect herself.
She looked down at the notes she had taken for her winter history paper on World War One, all printed, all the letters close together and the words the same distance apart. Dysentery. Rats. Gangrene. The numbers of dead in that war numbed her brain, and she hated to read about the English officers who didn’t seem to care if a million guys died fighting the Germans. The gory details made a macabre sense, though, and helped explain why so many bad things had happened in the twentieth century; it got off to a really shitty start.
Her great-grandfather on her father’s side had died at the Somme. At home there was a picture of him standing in front of a tent, one of dozens of tents in the photo, and he looked like such a dork in his tin hat and stiff brown uniform buttoned up to his Adam’s apple, not like a real soldier at all. Yet he had killed men. And been killed. She wondered how he felt, leaving his wife and kids and a farm to fight across the ocean. It seemed almost insulting to the millions of dead that Beth would try to encompass so much suffering in twenty pages, Courier twelve, double spaced.
She didn’t want to think about dying and getting killed but for some reason she had chosen this topic and the paper was due in two days. In two days the formerly perfect Beth Porter was going to present a winter project that was just a list of words: dysentery, rats, gangrene, tin hats.
All the while she’d been thinking, her hand had been doodling. She stared at the design of boxes within boxes within boxes like a maze or a labyrinth. Cages inside cages.
Maybe she could write a poem. Teachers were always impressed when you took a big subject and compressed it into poetry. They all thought poetry was the world’s highest art form. Beth felt a lift in her chest as if she had been tensed for an attack and at the last minute the all clear sounded. She began to write quickly, listing every word that entered her head connected to war. Words that rhymed she put side by side and gradually a poem began to take shape. She forgot to be pissed off at Kimmie. She saw that with a little effort this might be a good project after all. Were there other pictures of her great-grandfather? Didn’t her mother have a cardboard box full of old pictures?
But she didn’t want to go home because it wasn’t really home anymore. What she had was a house and a sister and a mother.
The house on Triesta Way looked the same as it always had, maybe better since these days her mother hardly ever stopped working, writing things down, crossing them out, moving around like a human example of perpetual fucking motion. And she talked all the time, chattered like everything was just great. Beth hated that phony smile, that false laugh when she knew her mother was broken inside. Like she was. And Micki. They were all shell-shocked and maimed as if they had gone to fight the Hun. She wanted to scream at her mother to stop pretending they were the same as they used to be. But fear shut her mouth, which meant that in the end Beth was just as phony as her mother. But at least she knew it. And she was afraid to stop. The world of artificial smiles and busy-busy would melt away like an iceberg towed to the Anza Borrego and abandoned. The phony world would vanish and what remained would be worse than phoniness. The truth. A world absolutely, starkly without Jack Porter. And Beth would have to learn to live with it. She was afraid if she did that she would in time forget him and then it would be as if he had never lived at all. As if, like Micki, she had never had a real father in the first place.
He had died on a Tuesday, on his way home to pick Beth up for dinner at the Big Bad Cat. That’s where they always went on their special night out. Her father said the place served comfort food. Beth did not know what he meant by that, why he needed comforting, but she liked the huge hamburgers and piles of fries, golden and crisp on the outside, pulpy and steaming inside. He always pretended to read the whole menu like all the choices tempted him, but he ordered the same thing every time: meatloaf and a pile of mashed potatoes with extra gravy. He used to say, “Your mom’s a great woman, but she has her limitations, and meatloaf and gravy is one of them.”
These days she hardly cooked anything.
When the drunk driver slammed into his truck, Beth had been in her bedroom. She was drying after her shower and her clothes for the evening were laid out on the bed: a pair of striped hip-hugger pedal push
ers and a new tee shirt with big eyes embroidered all over it. No one remembered afterwards that he had been coming home to get her. No one remembered Tuesday was their special night.
Beth folded her arms on the table and laid her head down. She got him in her mind and then she couldn’t get him out. Except when she was with Kimmie, who was what her Gramma Stella called “a piece of work.” The things she said and did were totally distracting. Kimmie said that in modern families the father wasn’t really necessary because women could take care of themselves. She always made big-deal statements like that but she never asked why or how something was true. Her own father was a Realtor and lived up in Orange County with his second wife in a monster-sized house with an indoor swimming pool. According to Kimmie he had been having an affair with a Philippine dentist, but as soon as he got divorced he dumped her and hooked up with a practically anorexic aerobic instructor. Kimmie said their baby looked like Mussolini.
Life was crazy. If she were Kimmie, with a living, breathing father, Beth would go up to Irvine and pound on his door. She would demand that he pay attention to her. She would not let him ignore or neglect her. How could Kimmie stand it, knowing he was up there and did not want her?
The big secret was that Kimmie’s mother had moved to Los Angeles during Christmas break, leaving Kimmie and her sister, Jules, alone until the end of the school year. Mostly Kimmie had the condo in the Gaslamp District to herself because Jules was in college and kept all her stuff at her boyfriend’s.
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