by Jill Barnett
Your child . . . children gave life its most essential meaning. Perhaps she had not thought of this before because of what she’d given up all those years ago. Avoided thinking about what defined mothers, because what kind of mother gave her child away? She started to cry, knowing it was too late and stupid, that she’d made her decision, but no one would know the real reason she was crying.
“Mom.” Annalisa touched her hand.
“I’ll see you in a while,” she said evenly, but had to close her eyes to all she saw on her daughter’s face, and when she opened them, she was staring at her mother over Annalisa’s shoulder. It took a minute to speak. “My God, Mother . . . how hard I’ve been on you.” She reached out for her hand.
“Laurel.” Her mother was at her side, sobbing in bursts of “I’m sorry” and “My fault” until Annalisa pulled her away from Laurel and tried to calm her.
Her last glimpse of them was the image of Jud with his arms around both women, then the bright fluorescent lights in the hall ceiling bled by on the way to the operating room, a red-and-white exit sign, a wall-mounted fire extinguisher, just flashes of things, like looking from a train window, a train traveling someplace she’d been before but never wanted to see again. Once inside, she had the absurd thought that the room looked like a professional kitchen: pendulum lights, an expanse of easy to disinfect and workable stainless steel surfaces, white walls, sinks, appliances, and rolling carts. The floors were truly ugly, though.
“We need to move you onto the table.” The nurses helped her and she lay there taking deep breaths, trying to be calm and brave and whatever else you were supposed to be. From somewhere outside the room came the diluted sound of the sixties. “I hear Janis Joplin,” she said.
Someone laughed. “Yeah, he’s back.”
She didn’t understand, but before she could ask what they meant, Cale was there dressed in green scrubs, staring down at her—the face she had believed she loved once a long time ago.
“How are you doing?”
“I’ve been better.”
He squeezed her arm, looking so at ease. Cale, who was never nervous. No wonder he was so good at his job. It probably never crossed his mind that he could fail.
“You will be better when we’re done,” he said. “We’re going to fix you all up so you won’t have to do this again.” He winked at her, exuding confidence, so she let go of everything else, because even if he hadn’t spoken with such authority, she still had to believe him.
The long hours of waiting tested even Jud’s patience and left him raw and restless. He didn’t leave Kathryn, Annalisa, and Matthew except to get coffee, and felt in a constant state of nausea, while Annalisa ate her way through the hours. Matthew brought her chips and Cokes, candy and pretzels. She chewed gum and drank thin hot chocolate from a machine. At noon she ate turkey, dry mashed potatoes, waxy gravy and institutional peas.
Kathryn barely moved, sitting in the small confines of the waiting room surrounded by Bannings, probably her worst nightmare. He was there and back in her daughter’s life, which was in Cale’s surgical hands, and Matthew had joined them around nine and hadn’t left Annalisa’s side. Kathryn didn’t cry again, but read magazine after magazine and said little, slowly fading into the silhouette of herself. At one point, Jud handed her a bottle of cold water. “You look like you did the first time I met you.”
Her blank look told him she didn’t understand, then, remembering, she nodded and took the water. “Thanks.”
“You okay?”
“I don’t know.” She seemed to have trouble finding her words.
He believed her much stronger than he was, until he realized she was reading Outdoor Fishing. Only a blind man could not see the importance of what had passed between her and Laurel just before the surgery. A complexity existed in female relationships he thought he might never understand.
“It took all the wrong things to finally bring her home from France,” she said finally. “Sit. Here. Please. I shouldn’t have blamed you and your brother. Why Laurel left had just as much to do with me. I’ll always regret that.” She took a drink. “And more.”
Across the room Annalisa and Matthew sat together, his arm around her, listening when she needed to talk, silent when she didn’t. Poor guy was gone over the girl. Jud had been there himself a long time ago.
“They have their whole lives ahead of them.” Kathryn shook her head. “However you measure a whole life. God, I hope they make all the right choices.”
He didn’t say what he was thinking: that the wrong choices only seem wrong when you looked back on them.
Then Beric King walked into the room exuding his television image, long auburn hair falling in a single braid over a cashmere jacket worn with custom slacks, an Italian belt and shoes, a basket of signature gourmet sandwiches held out before him as if he were ready to feed the five thousand. Hard to miss the way he carried himself like a man who knew his place in a room of strangers and who would seize his own perceived position among those who already knew him.
“Jud.” Beric sat down comfortably after catching enough of the nurses’ attentions. He watched Annalisa eat her sandwich and Jud’s, spoke to Kathryn awhile, and when the silence grew too heavy and long, he called his daughter’s name. “I want to talk to you about the width of the stainless steel counters.”
“What?” Annalisa looked ready to eat him.
“The counters.”
“I thought you and Mother worked that out.”
“We disagreed.”
“Dad,” she said evenly. “Mother is lying in there somewhere close to dying.”
“Very well. I can see you are too emotionally upset to handle your job right now I will wait.”
The break of silence said everything about Beric and his daughter. Perhaps Beric and his women.
“Come with me, Red.” Matt pulled her with him. “I’ll get you something to eat. We’ll be right back,” he called over a shoulder.
Beric picked up a magazine and said nothing else. While no small part of Jud resented him for marrying Laurel, he pitied the man more, for failing, and asked himself if all the bravado of Beric King was only clothing designed to hide the naked truth that Laurel didn’t love him anymore, and that he couldn’t control the most important women in his life.
The time ticked by at glacial speed and reading couldn’t distract Jud. Before coming that morning, he grabbed a book from the backseat of his car. Aside from the fact that it was small and fit in his pocket, the idea that a volume of Metaphysical poets would help distract him was a testament to his inert state of mind. He would find no comfort in the words of mourning from other men in other lifetimes. He couldn’t sit as part of a vigil and read about love and death, sonnets to dead women whom men had canonized with words of souls and hearts, sigh tempests and tear floods. He couldn’t make himself think of his love for Laurel in the form of words.
So the longer he sat there, the more familiar he became about stupid details of a room he wanted to never see again. The black-ringed clock on the wall must have been broken, or copied from a Lewis Carroll book. Only the second hand ever appeared to move. The walls needed paint, something other than diluted green, and the linoleum was the color of wet cement, topped with chairs made for someone with a twenty-six-inch inseam.
His brother sent no one with news, which was annoying, but then, this was Cale’s territory and Jud felt lost here, so he spent his time on an internal roller coaster, riding hills of anger and nervousness, while mentally making enough deals with God to change the path of his life forever.
Waiting for hours on end meant there was time to think, about things like the incident Sunday in Laurel’s kitchen, an example of what kept him and Cale from being as close in blood as they were in looks, and it brought to mind the patterns their lives took, moments so similar. The last time he’d been waiting like this had been in a hospice, with the family, while a silent and dark Hadesian cancer stole their sweet Robyn away. The unacceptable pai
n of losing her crushed Cale in those last hours he spent bent over her bed, and Jud wasn’t certain his brother had stood straight since that day.
Here Jud was in a vigil for the woman he loved without question, though Laurel had a chance Robyn never had. He looked up for another wasted glance just as Cale, in scrubs, walked through a set of doors. The triumphant smile on his face told Jud everything. He jumped up, whooping like a sports fan, fist in the air, and scared Kathryn, her face turning pale. For all her stoic silence in the long waiting room hours, she now looked ready to sink into the floor. “Kathryn. I’m sorry. It’s okay.” Leaning on him, she felt too frail to stand as she was, then she broke down, gripped his shirtfront in her fists, and sobbed, speaking incoherently.
“Mamie.” Annalisa took her grandmother by the hands and made her sit down.
“It’s all good. Everything went well,” Cale said, looking at each one of them. “She’s a tough one.” He was still grinning. “You can go in soon.” And at that moment, Jud thought his brother finally looked taller, and maybe stood a little straighter.
A huge elephant was sitting on her chest, choking her with its trunk. Laurel couldn’t swallow. Her eyelids wouldn’t open. Voices came from somewhere. Unfamiliar voices. The only sound she could seem to make was a low growl deep in her throat or the rasp of her own breathing. Under her fingernail she felt a flannel bed sheet, scratched it, then managed to open her eyes. The edges of her vision were cloudy, like beach fog. Her world turned from milky gray to color. The ceiling overhead was the mint green of a hospital room. Tubes came out of her mouth and she remembered it all from before. There was a sudden beeping sound next to her, which sped up, beeping faster. This was life.
She heard footsteps. “Hello, Laurel.” A nurse’s face came into her line of vision and the woman touched her hand.
Laurel could feel tears slip down the sides of her face and into her hair.
“It’s okay. You came through the surgery just fine. Dr. Banning will be here in a minute.”
Laurel held her hand tighter.
“I’ll stay right here. I won’t leave.”
Then Cale was there telling her what he’d found, what he’d fixed, and that she was going to be okay. “Jud might have killed me with his bare hands if I didn’t pull you through this. He doesn’t have a clue it was you who did the pulling. But then you probably don’t get that either, do you? He loves you, Laurel. All these years there’s been something missing in my brother. I didn’t know what it was until you came back into our lives.” He gave the nurse some orders, then turned back. “I’m going to let your family and my brother in now, two visitors at a time, then you need sleep. I’ll be back later.”
Her mother and daughter cried, holding her hand like the nurse told them to, so she could squeeze in response while they talked about all the things they would do together until they ran out of promises and said reluctant good-byes. They looked so much alike, perhaps were alike, one woman young and old. A quietude, arcane and rare, settled over her in that bare moment when the two of them walked away together.
The screens around her and attached to her sent signals and readings that were foreign and meant nothing to her. Eyes closed, she felt HAL-like, computerized instead of human. The coldness of the room didn’t help. But she was alive and fine, according to Cale, even if some machine was helping her breathe.
When she opened her eyes, she realized there was something completely laughable and surreal about seeing the man you love walk in with your ex-husband. Her first thought was vain, that she must look like hell, tubes running out of her arms and body. She probably had Fisher King hair. All around her were machines and monitors, beeps and buzzers and strange wheezing sounds, nurses moving efficiently around the open room.
Beric took her hand first and began spilling his guts about everything he had ever done wrong in their marriage. Hearing their history aloud made it sound like a lesson in stupidity, and Jud smiled at her a few times, then finally stepped in. “Beric, she can’t respond. Why don’t you wait and talk about this later?”
Beric looked at her, then bellowed a laugh. “I know what she would say. That I love a captive audience. See? She squeezed my hand.”
Laurel had come to a point in her life where she no longer regretted her marriage, or him, only perhaps the time gone. He left as he always did, ever the big personality, and Jud took his place. No, that wasn’t right. The truth was clear to her now Beric had been taking Jud’s place for years.
Closing her eyes was okay. With Jud she didn’t have to stay awake to reassure him. He knew. The pressure in her chest and her head was getting worse. She began to shiver and heard him ask a nurse to bring her a warm blanket. The woman adjusted an IV and told her she had injected some pain meds, said she should sleep.
“I’m here, Jailbait.” His voice was like bourbon—a silly thought she blamed on the drugs. But she was certain she felt him press his mouth to her palm, kiss it, before the medication sent her far away, to some strange dream world where she heard Jud Banning reciting love poetry.
35
His cars had changed over the years, still sleek, still black, but the building was the same as it had been when Victor first purchased it back in 1960. The City of Industry hadn’t changed much, was just what its name said it was. The Golden State Freeway, old, narrow-laned, and all concrete, still cut through its heart, surrounded by paint factories, canneries, packaging houses, and an oil refinery in the distance that pumped steam and fumes into the air. There was no gentrification here, just time almost at a standstill, and the bad side of what California industry used to be before environmental causes and agencies, so you didn’t want to breathe too deeply.
Victor got out of the car more slowly than he’d have preferred, his old body slow to react nowadays. Harlan closed the car door and leaned against a front fender as he had for too many years to add up. A scruffy orange tabby, thinner than he remembered, lay curled and sleeping near the front doors.
“How long has that cat been around?” Victor faced his old friend.
Harlan’s craggy ex-boxer’s face had wrinkled like a prune, and he was shorter. His head was barely over the top of the Town Car. “That old thing? Too long, like us.”
Time and life had just disappeared into thin air like those fumes from the factories. Victor was looking around him when the moving truck pulled up, and he told them to use the freight elevator. On the top floor, he unlocked the door and flipped on the light with traitorous fingers bent like commas. The windows were covered with metal blinds to block out the damaging sun, and the place was kept spotlessly clean by people who would never know or understand what was in this room.
Huge canvases with slashes of bold color hung from high near the ceiling to the floor, under expensive gallery and museum lighting. Harlan had asked him once if he was going to keep them locked up here, and why. Even now no sane answer came to mind. He had lived with Rachel’s shadow for more years than he could remember. He raised her sons, his penance for betraying and killing his own. He tried not to admit he could have easily lied to Rudy all those years back and changed the course of things. When he started buying the paintings, it was out of a need, never a plan.
He heard the elevator doors squeak open and two men came inside carrying a huge crated painting. “Where do you want it?” one of them asked.
“There against that wall.” The bolts to hang it from were in place. The movers removed the crating. A familiar envelope was taped to the wrapping with his name written on it. Victor tipped the men. “You can go. I’ll unwrap it.”
Inside the envelope were a folded note and his check for two million dollars, which wasn’t torn into pieces. He wondered if the painting was, and pulled off the wrapping. The canvas, stark white, a good eight feet by five feet, was undamaged, and a riot of bold color—orange and blue and red, black lines, and vibrant emotions painted by the woman he loved enough to betray his own son.
Rachel had been life and breath to him. He
loved her to the exclusion of everything. Nothing else mattered. There were no morals involved in what he felt for her, something even her death couldn’t change. Would he have done things differently? Probably not. He didn’t think regret existed in him since that day he cried uncontrollably over his dead and heartless mother. When he glanced at the title of the painting, he didn’t think much about it, until he opened Kathryn’s note.
They say obsession is about the things we cannot forget.
But that’s wrong. It’s about what we cannot forgive.
K Peyton
Victor tore up the note and the check. Inside another room in the back of the space, he turned on the light. Years of clay art and sculptures lined the walls and stood in corners, starting with the earliest Kay Peyton works, purchased anonymously in the early years, then the few K. Peytons he’d bought since, whatever number was needed to sell out her shows—a rare occurrence now since she sold on her name and talent.
He turned off the light and pulled up a chair in front of the last painting leaning against the wall, and he sat. After a while the air in the room grew thinner. It was hard to breathe, so he stopped trying.
Governors past and present, senators, and congressmen came to Victor’s funeral, some to eulogize. Eloquent and politic, they talked of raw land and Pacific hillsides covered in wildflowers, told stories of the coast after the war and a city of growing suburbs so sprawling you had to have cars, oil, and gas to exist, of industry and those who changed the landscape of the state. In paying tribute to the man, they christened him one of the last visionaries to give California its history, and spoke of him in godlike terms. Victor would have loved the implication but hated the pandering.
The service was more about money and power than anything religious, the way he would have preferred: some music, a crowded church, and the family dutifully sitting in the front row. Jud listened to men lionize a Victor Banning from magazine covers. But he and Cale knew the grandfather who made a home in which the three of them formed an odd family, devoid of estrogen, thriving on conflict and dysfunction yet fused together by some moral and genetic bond. No one was certain what made Victor Victor. Certainly not the men who spoke as if they had known him. Not Jud or Cale. Most of his story and any reason why he was who he was went to his grave with him.