This Is Not Over

by Holly Brown

  I was startled. I’ve never seen that, and no one has mentioned it before. “Does she ever talk to me when I’m not here?”

  “Not that I’m aware of, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t happen. You could ask the nurses.”

  As if I need to expose myself to further humiliation.

  “My point is, she’s unpredictable. The photo albums could be agitating to her, or soothing, but it can turn on a dime. They could trigger a delusion or a hallucination. Then we’d have to medicate her further. We want to keep her calm without having to resort to neuroleptics because those can have all sorts of unpleasant side effects for someone with LBD.”

  LBD. Little black dress. Or a warpath deterioration that robs you of all that you were and all that you loved.

  “The best thing you can do is keep coming. And take her on walks, as much as she’s willing.”

  “She’s not very willing.”

  “Then just keep coming. You’re doing all you can.”

  She meant this to be comforting. But being told that you’re powerless is never actually a comfort. I never could embrace Step One. Neither could Thad.

  When it comes to him, I truly am powerless. I have to submit to his tyranny, and meanwhile, he sends me texts about the paintings he’s working on, as if all is normal. I respond, through gritted teeth, fearing that if I don’t, he’ll retaliate through Larry, or he’ll use more drugs. He’ll harm me or he’ll harm himself. He’s holding me hostage.

  Something’s changed inside of me since the blackmail. I can tell myself that this isn’t the real Thad, it’s his addiction. I can say it’s not about me, it’s about the drugs. But I can no longer manage to believe. Not every addict would blackmail his own mother. I never heard a story like this at Nar-Anon.

  This isn’t only about drugs. It’s about who Thad is, and who I am, and what he feels about me, all of which is devastating and angering in equal measure. I’m used to dealing with devastation where Thad is concerned, but the anger . . . I don’t know what to do with that. It’s an electric current running through me all the time now.

  Just keep moving, it’s all I can do. Keep busy, like the officer said.

  “Thanks, Frank,” I say, reaching out to shake his hand. “I appreciate your time.”

  He starts to walk away, and then seems to think better of it. “A word to the wise,” he says. “You need to Google yourself.”

  “What?”

  “You seem like a nice lady to me, someone I’d like to do business with, but what I read on the way over here . . .” He shakes his head, like it’s not to be spoken out loud. “Google yourself, you’ll see what I’m talking about.”

  Wait a minute. He wouldn’t want to work with me? Frank of Bengal Construction with its D- grade from the Better Business Bureau and innumerable one-star Yelp reviews was scared off by my Google results. Whatever he found was so bad that he decided to swindle someone else.

  “What did it say, on the Web?” I ask.

  “It’s about your rental.”

  Of course. Dawn. Just because she hasn’t contacted me, that doesn’t mean I’m safe. I should have known she’d see through my baseless police threat, that someone like her would simply find other means to torture me.

  Oh my God. The lights I didn’t remember leaving on outside, the mouse in my pool. No, not a mouse. A rat. Brownish-gray, the same color as the stain she left on my sheets. Dawn was in my house, or someone else was, at her behest. A woman as beautiful as her could easily have henchmen.

  No, it can’t be. No one would do that. It was just bad luck, for the mouse and for me. It was a random act of God.

  Since Frank’s being honest and happens to be standing in front of me, I go ahead and ask him. “Do you know if Beverly Hills has a rat problem?”

  Frank thinks I’m nuts, that’s plain to see. He’s probably reconsidering his original estimate of zero. A woman this insane would have replaced her whole house, subbasement to roof.

  “I’m no expert,” he disclaims, and then he goes on to tell me how it’s common knowledge that rats have been living it up in Beverly Hills since the drought of the late nineties sent them scrambling. He distinguishes between black rats, which live in attics and trees and move like ballerinas, and Norwegian rats, which are grayish-brown, big and lumpy and slow. He tells me that I don’t need to be worried about them carrying disease, that’s for crowded urban spaces like tenements; no, in Beverly Hills it’s about chomping through power lines, and if that hasn’t happened, if my electricity is still humming, then I’ve got no problems. He loves that phrase, it seems.

  So a Norwegian rat decided to take a dip in my pool, that’s all. Beverly Hills is apparently teeming with them, though I’ve never seen one before. It’s merely poor timing that I’m having my first sighting now. It wasn’t Dawn or one of her henchmen. It wasn’t someone sending me a message. It was a fluke, that’s all.

  I thank Frank again. Maybe I’ll even give him his first good Yelp review.

  He smiles as he tips his head to one side, a gesture of false modesty. See, classic shyster. But even shysters can come through for you sometimes.

  I don’t have time to Google myself because the next estimator is pulling up in his truck right now, DUNLEAVY CONSTRUCTION emblazoned on the side.

  Even if she had nothing to do with that rat, Dawn’s soiled so much more than just my sheets. She’s tainted the Santa Monica house. This place felt inviolate to me, which sounds odd given that I was opening it up to strangers. But I’d never had a real issue before Dawn, and in fact, all the e-mails from satisfied customers, the positive reviews, and the praise had validated my sense that the last home my parents ever shared was a truly wonderful place.

  I miss checking my e-mail for inquiries about the house. I liked reading the palpable desire of strangers, and after their stays, their effusive words. Now, I just keep hearing Dawn’s nastiness in my head, and her petty complaints. I can’t help but think of the partially obstructed view from the kitchen. I look at the bed and I can still see that stain, which is presently morphing into the dead Norwegian rat.

  Wait a minute . . .

  In my original e-mail, I called it a cat-shaped stain. She’s correcting me, telling me it’s the shape of a large rat. Even if rats are now indigenous to Beverly Hills, there’s no way it was a coincidence.

  As I wait for Dunleavy to emerge from the crawl space, I leave a voicemail for Officer Llewellyn. I explain the cat/rat shape. He’ll have to take me seriously now. I wish I’d thought to save the corpse. It just hadn’t occurred to me that vermin would be evidence.

  Should I Google myself now? I’ve never thought to do it before. I have limited social media presence. That’s for young people, people like Thad, not for women my age. It just seems desperate to me when sixty-year-olds are posting selfies. Just that word, “selfie,” makes me cringe. You take pictures of people you love, and you with them; you don’t just photograph yourself. We used to call behavior like that narcissism.

  Dunleavy emerges, and he says that it’s not just a matter of repair work; we’re looking at total foundation replacement. He tells me to brace myself, and then gives me the estimate I’d been hoping for: $35K. Now all I need is to convince Larry that we can’t sell the house this way, any home inspector would tell the potential buyer and it would queer the deal, so we’ll need to repair it. Besides, we can’t sell it anyway because I’m too sentimentally attached. No, because we can recoup the $35K and far more if we just hang on to the house longer. Another five years, and during that time, I would detach. I would work toward letting go. I would become more rational, more like Larry.

  Thirty-five thousand will buy me at least a year of helping Thad. During that time, I can try to convince him to give rehab another go. He can be magically transformed into a better person. He’ll do regular drug tests, and if they come back clean, he can rebuild his relationship with Larry. We could pay for art school, and Thad could parlay that into a job. He could give up this long-
standing myth of exceptionalism and hunker down and work. It’ll buy me a year, and that’s as far out as I can afford to fantasize.

  A year is a long time. Anything could happen. This isn’t over yet.

  33

  Dawn

  Hi. What should we do for dinner tonight?

  I can cook.

  Are you sure? We could go out.

  I’ll cook. You don’t need to spend your money.

  Okay, see you soon.

  See you.

  Hey, Thad. Where were we?

  You were about to tell me something about your mom.

  Oh, yeah. She keeps bugging me.

  I know that drill.

  Since my dad died, she keeps hinting that she should move in with me.

  I bet your husband loves that idea.

  He likes it a lot better than I do.

  That’s fucked up.

  It is fucked up. I should want to help her.

  No. I mean it’s fucked up that he cares about your mom more than he cares about what you want.

  He’s just being a good person.

  To her, maybe, but what about you?

  I don’t want to talk about Rob.

  Awesome, I don’t either. I want to talk about you.

  I’m not a very good person.

  Bullshit.

  My mom needs help, and I don’t want to give it.

  What goes around comes around, Dawn. It’s just karma.

  You believe in karma?

  When it comes to parents and kids I do. You take good care of your kids, they’ll take good care of you. You mess your kids up, they’ll mess you up right back.

  My mom’s already a mess.

  Exactly. Karma.

  There’s something whacked in your logic, but honestly, I can’t figure out what it is.

  We all started out good and pure, right? If we’re not anymore, it’s because of what was done to us, probably by our parents.

  But at what point are we responsible for our own lives, and our own choices, and we can’t blame anyone else?

  How old are you?

  30.

  You’ve got 5 years to go. I’ve got 8.

  Sometimes I just get so mad. I feel like I can’t really have kids because of her. Like I wouldn’t know what to do with them.

  You can do whatever you want.

  Sure, we all can.

  No. You, Dawn Thiebold, can do whatever you want. In a world full of shitty false people, you are amazing. There should be more of you. Make more.

  I’ve actually got tears in my eyes. Who would have thought Thad could have that effect?

  I feel bad now, that I misjudged him. I assumed he was a loser. I mean, I know he doesn’t have a job, and I don’t get his art. But then, I don’t get art, period. I’ve gone to museums and it all just leaves me cold. I don’t know how people can stand in front of a painting for more than thirty seconds, even if it is beautiful. Because I can recognize beauty, and appreciate it, but then you move on, you know?

  Thad’s got this warped worldview, but there’s truth in it. Plus, he makes me laugh. We’ve never even talked on the phone, yet there’s an intimacy to the way we relate. I answer all his texts now.

  I can’t fully explain his allure, and I don’t have to, since no one knows we’re even in contact. All I know is that I’m not some Eliza Doolittle type to Thad. He’s not trying to elevate me. He gets me, and likes what he gets.

  It could just be that I’m hungry for male attention. There was a time when I could count on always having a guy on the string, even two or three of them, but that seems like forever ago.

  Rob’s always given me plenty of attention, but lately, it’s felt more like scrutiny. Ever since that dinner with his parents, I catch him studying me, like he’s trying to figure out how I can be so cold about my dead father and my live mother. It makes me want to hide. There are things he can’t know, things that I can never tell. Our conversations have become depressingly superficial, and the distance between us is growing. I’m afraid of what could happen if we continue this way. I just never saw it coming.

  I met Rob more than four years ago, when I was an assistant manager at Target. I was due to go back to college the following semester, with a plan to work all day, go to school at night, and study whenever I could fit it in. I was entirely independent, relying on no one, with no one to rely on me. Then one day, I glanced down the frozen food aisle, and there he was, reading the nutritional information on an entrée for one. A good sign, as far as his singlehood was concerned, though not the sexiest male behavior. It was—I’d soon learn—classically Rob.

  The Target customer base doubled as my dating pool. I liked to approach attractive men and offer assistance. Sometimes I did it when they looked genuinely confused, but that wasn’t the case with Rob.

  I was learning to distinguish between men who were attractive and men I was attracted to. In my late teens and early twenties, good sex was worth the drama. The two were proportional: The greater the drama, the better the sex. I liked a roller coaster, and I could spot one at a hundred paces. Love? Who needed that? I just needed the upper hand. Hard-to-get was my playbook.

  But then something changed. I started noticing babies. And families. I started wanting something I’d never wanted before: a real home, one that was stable and loving. The men I was attracted to could provide multiple orgasms, but they couldn’t provide that.

  At the same time, I’d been reading a rash of articles by regretful women in their thirties and forties. Some had gone on to have babies without mates; some were just plain alone. All of them had the same advice: settle in your twenties, when the odds are good, before the goods are odd. In your twenties, they opined, you’re not too set in your ways, and neither are the men. You can meld. You can grow, together. Settle when you’re marketable, with ripe, juicy ovaries. Settle before the men are irreparably damaged. Settle without desperation. Settle now.

  While there was plenty of backlash—women who offered alternative stories of finding their great love at, say, forty-three, or ones who just found the very notion of settling to be antifeminist—I was persuaded. I decided that it was time to set the table for the family I was going to have.

  Enter Rob, stage left, the undeniably good-looking, neatly dressed reader of ingredient lists. I asked if he needed help, and he dug around to find some inane question, and we were off and running. I’d found someone patient, kind, and reliable, from a good family. He gave back rubs and foot massages. He was a better-than-average cunnilinguist. What more could I ask for?

  I felt so fortunate to have Rob, given my family history and my relationship history. That he could know all about both and still choose me—that was thrilling in itself. Sure, I left out a few details, but I was sure they would never be salient again. He proposed within the year, and not only marriage; he also proposed that I move in with him and give up my job so I could focus on school.

  To any outsider, there was no settling involved. A lot of the time, I didn’t even think I was doing it. But there was a niggling thought beneath it all that I didn’t find Rob fascinating, in mind or body. He didn’t entirely capture my imagination. He was just so knowable.

  I was relieved when he did anything unpredictable. I wanted to fuck him senseless the first time his temper flared. It was a road rage incident. We’d been sideswiped, a near-collision, and he tailed the guy home, all the way to San Leandro. Rob was taller, and the other guy was more muscular, a roughneck type, but Rob was furious. He slammed the guy against the car door. “That’s my wife in there!” he shouted. “You don’t ever fucking do something like that with my wife in the car!” The guy started nodding, agreeing, he wouldn’t ever fucking do it again, and Rob was shaking with adrenaline when he climbed back into the driver’s seat. I was shaking, too, with desire. I’d been with men who’d gotten into fights before, sometimes nominally to defend my honor, but they were looking for any excuse to burn off some testosterone. It didn’t mean anything. But Rob w
as different. He was actually looking out for me, and he was capable of badassery.

  It registered that he could turn that rage on me someday. But that just added to the excitement.

  I do sometimes think that I could have settled richer. If I’d relaxed my requirements about the person being attractive and in my age ballpark, I know I could have married up, fiscally. Someone would have been happy to have me as his trophy wife.

  But that’s a level of compromise that I wasn’t capable of at age twenty-five. Would I be capable at thirty-five, or forty? Hopefully, I won’t find out. Rob and I will be long past the rough patch we’re in now, my parents will once again become irrelevant, and I’ll get over this weird ambivalence I’m having about kids. We’ll be a family, with two children at least, living in a beautiful house that Rob will buy with his great new job after extricating himself from the family business and that I will supplement with my income as a successful . . . something or other. We won’t need getaways in rental homes. I won’t pretend to have anyone else’s life. We won’t want anything but what we have.

  34

  Miranda

  Bewarethisrental.com:

  I originally posted this review on Getaway.com. The landlord, Miranda Feldt, has since taken down her listing, so I’m reposting it here. People can draw their own conclusions.

  Beware of your “host”

  THREE STARS

  I wouldn’t have left a review at all, if I didn’t feel it was my civic duty to warn others. Sure, there were small issues with the house itself . . .

  Déjà vu washes over me. This is how it all began, the step-by-step destruction of my life. If not for Dawn, Thad wouldn’t be blackmailing me now. I wouldn’t wake up in cold sweats for fear that my husband is going to find me out. I wouldn’t be the liar I am now.