Beth shrugged, feigning boredom now. “I’m going to Kimmie’s.”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“I don’t have to give you a reason.”
“But it might be nice. It might be the honest thing to do.”
“Honesty has nothing to do with it.” Lana’s body felt heavy and flaccid as if she had stayed a year in bed. “You’re a growing girl, you have to eat something.” It took a huge effort to stand and walk. “Come down to the kitchen.”
“I made a quesadilla when I got home.”
“That’s not enough. Make some of that vegetable soup.”
“I hate soup.”
“Since when?”
“Ma-a.”
“You’re an athlete. You’ve got to eat to stay strong.”
“Hah!”
In the kitchen Lana took a plastic container of homemade vegetable soup from the freezer. “You play soccer and basketball—”
“Yeah, well, not this year.” Beth took the soup from her and put it into the microwave, setting the controls with impatient jabs of her index finger.
“You love basketball. You told me last year—”
“People change.” Beth leaned against the counter and stared at the floor.
“What about your friends? Madison and Linda?”
“What about them?”
“Your best friends are on the team.”
“Kimmie’s not.”
The microwave rang like an alarm and Beth removed the steaming soup. Lana caught a faint aroma of carrots and onions and beef broth but not enough to make her hungry. That was the problem with microwaved food—it lacked the sensory pleasures of a simmering pot. In truth, she didn’t blame Beth for not wanting to eat it. Still, a growing girl needed nourishment. Like a plant. She handed her a spoon and dropped an ice cube into the soup to cool it down. She watched Beth take a mouthful and thought of the thousand-and-one meals she had fixed for her family and that effort seemed like a thread, a continuity she could hang onto.
“I don’t want you to quit sports, Beth.” She buttered a piece of sourdough bread and laid it on a plate with a wedge of cheddar beside it. “You’ve been an athlete since you started playing soccer. Remember? You were four and the star of the team because you were the only kid who figured out the point of the game.”
Beth looked pained. “Why do you always haul out that story, Ma?”
Because I knew you then and understood you.
“You’re five-feet-ten. I thought you wanted to get a basketball scholarship.”
Beth tipped the plastic container of soup forward so Lana could see that it was empty. “Can I go now?”
“No. Yes. Be home by ten. It’s a school night.”
“Whatever.”
“How’re the reflectors on your bike?”
“I put new ones on last week.” Beth grinned her wide, impish smile full of fun; it surprised Lana like a gift she had given up hoping for. “See? You don’t have to worry about me.”
“Oh, baby,” Lana laughed. “I’ll worry about you until I’m in my grave and probably afterwards, too.” She reached for Beth, wanting only to touch her cheek as she had a thousand times before, but Beth would have none of it. Ducking away, she leapt for the back door, calling, “Hasta,” over her shoulder.
When she was alone again, Lana went out onto the front porch and leaned against a pillar. Here and there at the western horizon, rain fell to the sea in fraying, silken floats; but overhead the sky was watery blue behind puffs of stormy gray clouds blowing east like a stampede of flying sheep.
She wished she could follow the clouds to a new life. She remembered thinking much the same thing on the night of the fireworks that didn’t happen. Talk about a portent! No wonder she was having such a lousy 2000. She did not want to go away forever, just long enough to figure things out. She already knew she had to do more than mend and patch her family. Something at the core needed fixing. She and Beth and Micki had to learn how to be a family without a father. She knew that. But how? What would the new family look like, feel like?
All her life she had done what was required of her and this time would be no different. She patted the porch pillar with the flat of her hand as if to reassure the house on Triesta Way she would do whatever she had to. Once she figured out what that was.
Later in the afternoon Lana scrambled eggs for Micki, who hated school food and refused to carry a lunch from home. When she had money she ate off-campus with her friends; when she was broke she came home ravenous, her blood sugar somewhere below sea level. Now that she was on the outs with Tiff, Lana did not know what she did at lunchtime.
“How was it today? Did you talk to Tiff?”
Micki looked at her like she’d lost her mind.
“So what did you do?” Lana did not look up when she asked because with Micki she was more likely to get a straight answer if there was no eye contact. She slid the eggs from the frying pan to a blue plate.
“You said I had to go to school so I did it. I went.”
“And?”
“It sucked the big one.”
Micki opened her backpack and began flinging books onto the table. History of Europe since 1900, a tome to challenge a body builder; American literature since who knew when, another massive volume. Even at an expensive school like Arcadia, the lockers were too small to hold the number and weight of books the girls carried around with them, so they carted their education on their backs and grew up strong as weight lifters or bent as dowagers.
“What’s your homework?” Lana buttered four slices of toast. “Want some ham?”
“I don’t care.”
Lana took a heel of ham out of the refrigerator, sliced two pieces, and warmed them in the microwave. She laid them on the plate beside the toast. For a moment she watched her daughter eat.
A car pulled into the driveway beside the house and a moment later a door slammed. What now, Lana thought with irritation and dread, and then saw Carmino at the back door with Buster. Gala came running and barking from somewhere in the front of the house and slid to a stop at the porch.
“Come on in,” she said to Carmino. “Both of you.”
Buster and Gala approached each other cautiously, circled, and sniffed. Gala cast a condemnatory look at Lana, dropped her red-feathered tail, and slunk out of the kitchen.
Carmino explained what the vet had said. It came down to old hips, old back, old age.
“He looked at his teeth, says he’s got more’n ten years. That’s a long life. For a Dobie.”
Buster did not look happy, sitting on bony dog haunches, head low. Lana saw how gaunt he had become and remembered that when Jack brought him back from Doberman rescue, she had recoiled from the sight of his mangled bullet head. An ugly dog, she had said. A junkyard dog. But now, to her eyes, there was something poignantly sweet in his ugliness. She crouched at his level and called him to her. He let her rough his ears, more like a pit bull’s than a Dobie’s.
“He’ll be fine here,” she said, looking up at Carmino.
“Cool,” Micki said with more enthusiasm than she’d shown in several days. “He can sleep in my room.”
“Let’s let him sleep where he wants. A bedroom might not seem right to him.” Lana straightened up. “I’m going to have to go get some more food, a dish and all.”
“I can do it,” Carmino said.
“No, you go on back to work and check on Moises. He’s good but he’s not you.”
In the car driving down the hill to Petco, Lana did an inventory of her motives. There was plenty of dog food in the house and spare pet dishes in the garage. She just wanted to get out of the house and avoid further conversation with Micki.
Outside Petco, she called Michael on her cell phone and told him about Eddie French. Before she could ask him to do it, Michael offered to run a check on him.
Then she called Wendy, who answered from a perch halfway up a housepainter’s ladder.
“I’m just finish
ing the trim on the west side. Pink and gray and really pretty.”
“You want to call me later?”
“Nope, this is perfect. I’m due a break.”
It took fifteen minutes for Lana to tell Wendy the whole story of Eddie French.
“I’m glad you called Michael. You gotta know what you’re dealing with here.” Wendy’s voice sounded brisk and confident.
“And you have to do the telling,” Wendy said. “I don’t trust Beth’s motives.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, think about it, Lana. She’s just lost her own father and now her adopted sister’s got a new one and not only is he her father, he’s also rich and hip.”
“You mean you think she wants to hurt Micki?”
Wendy laughed. “Beth’s not a saint—she’s a good kid but not a saint.”
“I never said she was. But she’s not unkind, that I know for sure.”
“Uh-huh,” Wendy said.
Lana made a few purchases at Petco—food and a bowl and leash—then drove up the hill to Bella Luna for a cappuccino to go. As she waited for her order she looked around her at the coffee bar clientele, the young professionals bent over their laptops, the friends in conversation, the untidy girls and boys dressed in their signature black and charcoal gray. For every girl with combed hair and a touch of makeup, there was another slouch-shouldered and kohl-eyed. Lana thought of Beth giving up basketball because of her new friend Kimmie and realized she had never met the girl and that in an emergency she would have no way of reaching Beth. Beth and this girl were spending hours together every day and Lana had no idea who she was or where she lived. She put her purse down on the counter and dug out her list. She wrote talk to Beth about Kimmie at the bottom, crossed it out, and crammed the same words at the top between call Ma re HC and check on Kay.
Driving home, Lana thought about Wendy’s words: She’s a good kid but not a saint. Was she not seeing Beth as clearly as others did? Should she, on top of everything else, begin to worry about her, too?
Chapter Seventeen
Kimmie Taylor’s bedroom was long and narrow with one set of windows and a sliding door leading to a perilously small balcony overlooking Sixth Street two blocks south of Broadway. The only furniture in the room was the queen-sized bed Beth had never seen made, a dusty exercise bike, and a chest of drawers. A huge poster of Johnny Depp hung over the bed.
Though still early, it was dark out; Beth heard the happy-hour racket issuing from bars and restaurants in the Gaslamp District. Kimmie sat on the floor in thong panties and a midriff tee shirt giving her toenails a third coat of blood-red polish. Her bony knees and elbows looked too large for her small body. Her skin had a blue-white transparency that, with her dyed black hair and gray eyes encircled with black liner, gave her a ghoulish look she admired in every window and mirror. From where Beth lay on the bed, she could smell her. An odor like stewed chicken.
“They’ll be here any minute.” Kimmie’s boyfriend and someone called Damian. She blew on her toes. “This guy really wants to meet you—”
“Which I totally don’t get.”
“He saw you with me and he says you’re hot.”
Which meant what? That she was cool? At school Ms. Hoffman talked about using precise language. When she said precise she sounded like a snake and at lunch all the girls imitated her. But Beth liked it when words meant something.
“If you go, Strider’ll be pissed off. He promised Damian you’d be here.”
“I hate his name. Did you ever see that movie?”
“Remember the Rottweilers?” Kimmie asked. “They were so-o rad.”
“Who’d name a kid after the child of Satan?”
“It’s not his real name,” Kimmie stood up and walked to her closet. Like the rest of the room, it was almost empty. Through Kimmie’s eyes, Beth saw the clothes in her own closet, the rainbow colors, the boxes of shoes, and the hook on which her comfortable, old dressing gown hung. Kimmie would laugh at all this. She didn’t own a dressing gown and her closet was a bat cave of black and gray. “He named himself. Like Strider. His real name is Robert.”
“He chose that name? Of his own free will?”
Beth wished she were home reading a book, wearing her dressing gown. A gift from her father, it was tight across the shoulders and too short by several inches, but she would wear it until the seams burst because nothing else felt quite as snug. She grabbed a hank of hair and pulled hard, like Micki did, so she wouldn’t think about her father. Instead she thought of Eddie French.
Maybe he and Micki would go off and live in his house in L.A. Her mother would fight it, of course; but he was rich and maybe Johnny Cochrane was his attorney. Micki would leave and Beth and her mom would be alone in the big, haunted house on Triesta Way.
Beth had not mentioned Eddie French to Kimmie. She wanted to talk about him but her thoughts felt intensely powerful and too dangerous for casual conversation. It was like being a government agent carrying a secret formula with the capacity to destroy the world.
Beth lay back on the bed and groaned.
“Stop worrying.”
She sat up again. “I’m not worried.”
“He’ll be your first, right? You want it to be, like, perfect.”
“My first what?”
Kimmie’s look was meant to wither.
“Oh. That.” Did Kimmie actually think she would have sex with a stranger in this apartment where the germ level was probably close to toxic? Hadn’t she heard of HIV and all the other bugs buzzing around between people’s legs? Kimmie was not stupid so why did she act like she was? Beth had figured out the answer to that one. She could see that life would be much simpler if she were able to turn off her brain the way Kimmie could.
“I’ve gotta be home by ten. I promised my mom.”
“Jeez. She’s like that Hitler guy.”
Beth swallowed back a defense of her mother.
Kimmie stripped out of her thong and tossed it into the corner behind her open bedroom door where she put all her dirty clothes.
Beth looked away, embarrassed. In her house no one walked around naked. She looked back, pretending to look at her magazine. Kimmie had a thick triangle of dark brown wool between her legs. Nothing like Beth’s sparse growth. She wondered if there was something wrong with Kimmie. Or with her. She had never seen an adult woman naked from the front, not even her mother, who was even too modest to walk around in her underwear. She had no idea what was normal and what excessive. Maybe blondes didn’t have as much hair as brunettes. Just a few months ago she would have asked her mother to explain all this, but they did not have that kind of relationship anymore.
It was not all her mother’s fault they had stopped talking. If Beth asked her a private question, a female question, she would be thrilled and probably give Beth more answer than she wanted. If she had been with Madison and Linda, they would have gone off on the idea of a book about pubes. Kimmie wouldn’t get that it was funny. She did not have much sense of humor, and if it wasn’t about her, conversation did not interest her. Kimmie was in love with herself like the guy in the myth who kept looking at his own reflection in the water. The spotlight and the microphone were always aimed at Kimmie, and for hours on end that was fine with Beth. It helped her forget her father and how much she did not want to be home now that he was gone. She used to love her house. She and Madison and Linda had spent about a thousand Saturday night sleepovers in her bedroom where everything was just so, the way she liked it. And shooting baskets in the driveway. That’s where she perfected her hook. Now she could not wait to get away from home, and she hated her bedroom with its old-fashioned bed and the shelves crowded with mementos she was supposed to keep to remind her of family trips to Yosemite and San Francisco and the time her father took her to the circus and they sat in the front row and an elephant almost stepped on her toe. If she threw them all away, would she forget?
Kimmie pulled on tights without underwear and slipped her fe
et into sandals.
“I think I’d die if I had a mother like yours. She is such a nag.” Lana was not a nag, but why explain when Kimmie would not listen?
If she went home she knew exactly where she would find the book that had a picture of the guy looking at his reflection. And on the inside front cover she would read To Beth from Santa written in her father’s big, looping scrawl. In the grownups’ living room there was an easy chair with wide arms and a square footstool the size of a table, both covered in a soft, knobby, oatmeal-colored fabric. This had been her father’s chair—her mom preferred the matching couch where she could stretch out full length. To sit in it with him, talking and reading, falling asleep—Beth thought she would give up years of her life to do that just one more time. Over a period of weeks they had read the myth book cover to cover, and her father had told her about Freud and Jung and how no one said or did anything without a reason, even if they didn’t know it. That was one of the things she had loved about him. He never thought she was too young to learn.
Beth saw that it was going to be one of those nights when nothing, not even Strider and someone named after the son of Satan, could distract her. How did her mother manage to act like nothing was wrong? Maybe she didn’t care anymore. This answer seemed unlikely, for she knew her parents had loved each other. There had been times when Beth felt like a fifth wheel around them.
“Thank God my mom knows not to ask too many questions,” Kimmie said.
Why don’t you shut up, Beth thought. Your mom’s not so great. She left you alone in this dump.
Beth had never met Mrs. Taylor nor had she seen a picture of her, though Kimmie had said repeatedly that she was totally hot-looking, which, when Beth applied Kimmie’s standards of style, probably meant she dressed like a hooker. Tight skirts, spikey heels, and too much hair gel. Beth tried to imagine a mother who would leave her fourteen-year-old daughter alone in a condominium while she moved herself and all but a few sticks of furniture a hundred miles north to Los Angeles.
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