The Edge Of The Sky

by Drusilla Campbell

  Lana lifted her hands and let them drop. “Okay, sign us up.”

  “You start on Monday.” Mrs. Gant directed her comments to Micki, not Lana. She handed her a small stack of forms. “You can bring these back with you then.” She stood and shook hands with Micki across the desk. “Welcome to Balboa High.”

  Thirty minutes later, Lana dropped Micki at home with orders to vacuum the entire house, clean the bathrooms, and go over every square inch of the backyard picking up dog poop. As if she were not being punished for smoking at school and had been asked instead to choose a new wardrobe, Micki frolicked from the car with a wave of her hand and leapt up the front porch steps with as much bounce as a new tennis ball. At the top she turned and waved again, grinning.

  “Well, Jack,” Lana said aloud as she drove back to work, “I hope I’ve done the right thing.”

  She stopped at a light on Lewis and waited for a pair of skateboarders in baggy pants to cross in front of the 4Runner. Sunlight struck the chrome bumper of a car across the intersection. The light flashed into Lana’s iris, up her optical nerve, and into her brain—and she smiled suddenly. For no particular reason. A gust of warm air puffed through the car window. It lifted the hair that lay across her cheek, sending a shiver through her body. There was definitely something peculiar about summer weather in January, but she would not waste her energy worrying about it when there was nothing she could do. Enjoy it, she thought. A leaf of summer in the book of winter.

  When she got home that evening just after six, there was a note on the oak table saying Micki had gone to Tiff’s to tell her about Balboa. Beth had taken a bowl of cereal up to the playhouse, Tinera and the girls were with their father, and Kathryn was in the grownups’ living room, clutching a pillow to her ribs, bawling.

  Lana opened a couple of beers and went into the living room. She dropped onto the couch beside her sister and handed her one.

  “Okay, what’s he done this time?”

  “I don’t know. Nothing.” Kathryn blotted her face with the bottom of her tee shirt and took a long swallow and hiccupped.

  “What happened?”

  The question brought on more tears, more hiccups.

  “Hold your breath,” Lana said. “You can’t breathe no matter what I do.”

  Kathryn nodded and Lana began to tickle her. Kathryn held her breath as long as she could and then air exploded from her, taking her hiccups with it.

  “Thanks,” she said, and had another swig. “They were so glad to go with him. I felt so abandoned. Colette just danced when she saw him and waggled her arms in the air, wanting to be picked up like she’s a baby and of course he did it. Swung her around . . .”

  “I warned you,” Lana said. “He seduces those girls—that’s what he does.”

  “He loves them. You make it sound obscene.”

  “Whatever. When’s he bringing them back?”

  Kathryn looked down at her prim denim skirt and then at her feet in their neat little spectator heels. Her cheeks were blotched and so tear-stained that Lana wondered how long she had been sitting, crying by herself.

  “I want to do the right thing.”

  Frowns and sulks had put a permanent downward twist at the corners of Kathryn’s mouth. Between her wide blue eyes the worry lines dug as deeply as Grace Mamoulian’s. As Lana blamed Dom for aging her sister prematurely, she reminded herself he had not taken a knife and etched those lines. Kathryn’s passivity, her need to be adored, her martyrdom, had done it.

  Lana sat forward, irritated suddenly. “Did you hear me?”

  “What?”

  “When’s he bringing them back?”

  Kathryn drank. “Tomorrow, I think.”

  “You think?”

  “Please don’t scold me, Lannie.” She pulled her hand down her face. “I just couldn’t keep them apart anymore. He loves them so.”

  “Even if they’re not boys?”

  “You have to understand. He and his brothers think having sons means they’re strong, masculine.”

  “I thought that was demented the first time you told me and now that I’ve heard it fifty times, it’s still demented.”

  “He’s made more money than all of them combined but they still treat him like he’s Baby Dominic.” Kathryn looked at Lana from the corner of her eye. “He cries.”

  “You told me the other night he cries for effect—you said he turns on the waterworks.”

  Kathryn looked confused.

  “Is that true, or isn’t it?”

  “You don’t understand him—you never have.”

  “I understand him and I understand you.” Lana drained her beer. “Tell him to grow up. We all have to, sooner or later.”

  Kathryn said reproachfully, “You mean me, I know you do.”

  “You. Him. All of us. It’s the only way life works.”

  “He says he’ll go to therapy if Jessie can find a man. She gave me a couple of names.”

  “When pigs fly.”

  “Well, what am I supposed to do? You tell me.”

  “I already did and you don’t remember because you didn’t want to hear it in the first place.”

  “What?”

  “I’m not going to help you slide through life anymore. I’ve been protecting you since you were small and maybe it was the right thing to do back then, but I should have stopped a long time ago. I’m as bad as Ma, with all her doting and fawning over you. She hasn’t done you any good and neither have I.”

  A stubborn warning muscle moved an inch below Kathryn’s right ear.

  “I’m talking about the real world. You’re going to have to start learning how to live in it. I’m not going to help you anymore. You’ve got to learn how to take a risk.”

  “Oh, for goodness sake, I know about risk. What about Jacaranda?”

  “Jacaranda’s a horse. I’m talking about inside risks, not broken bones.”

  Kathryn looked fierce, as fierce as she could, given her marshmallow chin and cherubic eyes.

  “Want another beer?”

  Kathryn sat up straight. “No, I think I’ve had enough.” She squared her shoulders and brushed her palms together like a baker dusting the flour from his hands. “I guess I’ll just go home, back to business as usual. I did take a risk and look what it got me.”

  “Oh, shut up.” Kathryn stood and Lana grabbed the waistband of her skirt and tugged her back down to the couch. “That martyr shit doesn’t work with me.”

  “I thought you wanted me to make my own decisions. So I’m making one. I’m going home. The girls love their father and so do I and if he wants a son, I’ll give him one. Anyway, it’s the only thing I know how to do, get pregnant; and I do that every time the man looks at me.” She paused, smiled sweetly at Lana, and added, “Unlike you, I’m really good at getting pregnant.”

  Kathryn meant to hurt Lana; instead, she just made her mad. “If I tell you to shut up and listen to me, is that enough? Or do I have to beat you up?”

  Kathryn looked at her blandly, daring her to say anything worth listening to.

  “You’ve put Dom on notice, Kay. For the first time he really believes you’re not going to take any more of his stuff. This is your chance. You’re afraid, I know, but don’t let that make you do something foolish like give in and go home.”

  “I thought you were going to let me take care of myself.”

  Yes, but it was going to take some time to learn how.

  Kathryn’s mouth curled in a sneer. “You and Mars, you’re both convinced that you’re the smart ones and poor Kathryn, she’s just plain dumb, beautiful but feeble in the brain, or she never would have fallen in love with—”

  Lana grabbed her sister’s wrist with two hands and twisted them in opposite directions. Kathryn shrieked.

  “That’s an Indian burn,” she cried, rubbing her wrist. “Ma says you can’t do that.” She looked at Lana for a stunned second and then laughed. In another second she was crying.

  Worn out, Lana sat ba
ck and let her sister go until she wound down and stopped. She said, “You have to take care of yourself. And the girls. Whatever that looks like to you, I don’t know, but you can do it. You only think you can’t.”

  Kathryn scrubbed the back of her hand across her wet and reddened eyes.

  Shall I be honest, Lana thought, or kind? Or was honesty the ultimate kindness, the truest way to show her sister that she loved her? She paused over the question. “I’ve never thought you were dumb,” she said, finally. “But you do more dumb things than most. And bigger. Plus, you don’t think we all expect much from you and so you . . . live up to our expectations.”

  More tears. Lana watched, feeling distanced and cool-minded.

  “You sound like a self-help book.”

  “I know you love Dom. I don’t understand it, but I know it. Loving isn’t enough, though. Unless you want more scenes like Monday night.”

  “I never would have hurt him—he knows that.”

  “If he knew that, he would have walked out of the closet and taken the gun away from you. But he didn’t.”

  “So make your point.”

  “You have to be honest with him. If you are and if he really loves you, your marriage will be better.”

  “I suppose yours was so perfect.”

  “This isn’t about me.”

  “You have the answers, you always have—”

  “That’s it.” Lana stood up. “Do what you bloody well want.”

  That night Dom brought the girls back and Kathryn did not return with him to Tres Palomas, though Lana, standing in the kitchen, heard him beg her to. They had argued for a long time but rather than listen, Lana went upstairs and closed her door. Later Kathryn came into the bedroom where Lana was sorting laundry. She resisted the impulse to open her arms to her little sister and praise her determination.

  “When’s Eddie French coming?”

  “Saturday.”

  “I’ll be out of your hair by then.”

  “Stay as long as you need to. You and the girls are always welcome here.” Kathryn turned away and Lana added, “By the way, I’ve decided to make Saturday a party. Like we used to do. Mars and you guys and Mom. It’s time she meets him.”

  “Can Dom come?”

  “Of course.”

  Kathryn nodded and walked back down the hall. Lana called after her, “And there will not be fireworks. In case you wondered.”

  “I guess that guarantees there will be, huh?”

  Later, Lana lugged the laundry down to the porch and ran a load of wash. She stepped outside, put a rotary sprinkler in the center of the garden, and set the timer for thirty minutes. She let go a long breath and then inhaled, drawing down to her toes the fragrance of damp earth and star jasmine and wet stones.

  Soon the girls will be gone. I’ll be alone in this big house with my dogs and my plants. I’ll run some days and read books. I’ll be late for appointments and keep lists and even when I’m living alone, I’ll still need a cleaning lady once a week to sort through my clutter. Alone, she thought with an acceptance that was neither stoical nor fatalistic, to which no adjective could be applied. In that moment, perversely, she felt Jack’s warm touch, and without stopping to wonder, she reached up and patted her left shoulder.

  Chapter Thirty-four

  Micki prepared for Balboa High School by redyeing her magenta streak and applying henna tattoos up the outside of her right leg from ankle bone to knee. After school, Beth shot baskets in the driveway and at night she talked on the phone with her door closed. Kimmie seemed to have vanished.

  Something about this bothered Lana but she brushed it aside, busy with other things.

  On Saturday night Stella arrived early. She had done herself up for the occasion of meeting Eddie French, gotten a new tint for her pinkish blond hair, and coordinated her makeup: pastel pink lipstick, pastel blue eye shadow. Spike heels that must have killed her bunions showed beneath the hem of her long, rose-patterned silk caftan. She smelled of Shalimar.

  Lana felt a pang of love for her stubbornly vain mother. “You look marvelous, Ma.”

  Stella peered into the corners of the kitchen as if she expected to see someone crouched there.

  “He and Kathryn took the girls to the zoo. They’ll be back in a little bit.”

  “You’re gonna like this guy, Ma,” Mars said from the sink where she was washing lettuce.

  “You.” She gave Mars a poke in the ribs. “You like anything in pants so long as he’s young.”

  Lana and Mars looked at each other and laughed.

  Stella sat on Lana’s desk chair. “I don’t know how you manage to do anything with this mess. You should get a rollaway desk so at least you could cover it up. The kitchen would look better and all your business wouldn’t be right out here where anyone can look at it.”

  “So don’t look, Ma,” Lana said.

  “I suppose you brought one of your boy toys, Marlene. Where is he? Playing Nintendo?”

  “Just family tonight,” Lana said cheerily.

  “That’s what you’re calling him now, Lana? Family? What about Jack? I wonder how he’d feel about that?”

  Mars put a hand on Lana’s arm and looked down at the paring knife in her hand. “One quick jab to the heart—that’s all it’d take.”

  A while later, Stella came upstairs where Lana was toweling herself after a shower. Stella sat on the bed and watched her dress as she had when Lana was a girl. And like a girl, Lana felt shy under her mother’s scrutiny, aware of her naked body’s imperfections. Stella judged and compared everything, even her daughter’s middle-aged body.

  Lana pulled on a pair of dark wool trousers, nicely tailored, and tugged a brass-studded belt through the loops.

  “I like that Realtor friend of yours,” Stella said. “We’ve been out a couple of times. And, of course, it’s just as I suspected—there’s not much out there even if I do get top dollar for the town house. Which this friend of yours says I will, since it’s in excellent shape, well decorated and all.”

  If you like pink and blue with here and there some gold plate to catch the light, Lana mused.

  “The places I like, right there at Bird Rock, I can’t touch those. But she says next week we’ll go over to the Shores. There’s something there she thinks will suit me.” Stella patted Gala and kissed her nose. “Of course, I don’t want to go too small. I’m not interested in a cottage. I raised you and Marlene in a cottage and that was quite enough for me.”

  “And what did the loan officer say?” Lana asked as she applied a little makeup at the bathroom mirror.

  “You need more blush, Lana. An older woman needs to put color in her face.”

  “Thanks, Ma.” She brushed a little extra coral-colored powder along her cheekbones. Her mother was right. She did look better.

  “The loan officer was most encouraging. And such a nice young man. I thought to myself, he’d suit Marlene, but he was married. Showed me the picture of his two little boys. So cute. Anyway he told me to come back when I find a place I like.”

  “Have you thought about what I said?”

  “You mean about taking Dominic’s money?” Stella nodded. “I don’t think you’re right, that he would use it . . . to make sure I was on his side.”

  “Ma—”

  “Just wait a minute, please. I’m not quite as dithery as you think I am, Lana. I keep my eyes open and I know he’s not an easy man and your sister isn’t as happy as I’d like her to be.”

  Lana was surprised. She stood in front of her mother, holding her sweater, listening.

  “I just don’t want to do anything that might make it more difficult for her.”

  “Ma, I’m proud of you.”

  “Well, I hope so.” Stella walked to the dresser and examined her face in the mirror. “I think sometimes about all the packing up and signing the papers and I get a little tired. But yes, if I find the right place, I’ll move. It will have to be perfect, though.”

  Lana pulled
on the chocolate-colored turtleneck sweater that Jack had always said suited her. You look like a Sees candy. I want to eat you up.

  “Are you listening to me?”

  “Of course I am, Ma.”

  “And? I thought you’d at least have an opinion.”

  “I do and you’ve heard it—I won’t go over it.” Lana smiled. “I’m mending my ways. Saving my good advice for myself and my girls.”

  Stella raised her eyebrows. “What about you?”

  “What about me?”

  “You seem cheerful for a change.”

  Stella was right—Lana was cheerful and for the first time in many months she wasn’t pretending.

  “You’ve accepted this boy?”

  “He’s a man.”

  “Barely.”

  “And what I accept is that he’s part of Micki’s life and I can’t do anything about it. I’m not sure I would change things even if I could.”

  “My, aren’t we mature all of a sudden.”

  Forget we, Lana thought, and started down the stairs. Stella’s next question stopped her.

  “What about our Beth? How’s she taking all this?”

  “It’s not easy, Ma.”

  “Why isn’t she here? I thought this was a family party.”

  “I told you on the phone. She’s at a dance.”

  “A dance!” Stella’s face lit up. “How wonderful. What did she wear?”

  Lana told her. Stella got upset and went on for several minutes about how the youth of America had been going downhill ever since the Sixties. And they went downstairs.

  A dance. When Beth and Micki were little, Lana had daydreamed ahead to their first dates and dances, but she had gotten it all wrong, imagining long dresses and corsages and handsome, tuxedoed boys at the door. Even her own teens had not included those, not for the kids who knew what was happening. Lana and her friends had boycotted their prom and gone to a midnight showing of The Rocky Horror Picture Show. Beth had gone off to Kimmie’s clutching her overnight bag, wearing a black sweater, a tiny black skirt over black leggings, and black boots. She had skinned her hair back into a bun the size of a baby’s fist.

  So much black. What kind of church did Kimmie attend anyway?