“He took a few pills, smoked a little pot,” I tell them, exhausted. “But those weren’t the problem.”
Salt
I live in Santa Barbara now at Gate School, the best girls’ school in California, two hours north of Palos Verdes. When my father returned, he sent me here, giving me a gold card, crying, kissing me again and again.
I have new clothes, a silver pen, a leather backpack. They sit in the closet, while I wear my brother’s old clothes. I pull his big wet suit on, standing on the sand, wrapping duct tape around the legs and arms for insulation.
The water is colder in Santa Barbara, murkier, blacker. I try to feel the old rush of motion, but I always end up near the shore.
* * *
Jim wasn’t a good arsonist. The house on Via Neve is still standing. Only the fuchsias and the eucalyptus trees burned, plus half of the old palm. The new gardener is replacing them.
A few more fires happened before they caught the real pyromaniac, a local forty-two-year-old structural engineer. A weekend volunteer in the fire-watch posse.
“Starting fires is beautiful, almost spiritual,” he said in his confession. “People run around like ants, while I just stand back and watch them.”
Marge Paxton gave an interview to the Times. “He seemed like such a nice man. He always brought good wine to our barbecues.”
His daughter wouldn’t give an interview, but they photographed her as she tried to leave her house. I barely recognized the frightened expression on her face.
I knew her as a towel girl.
* * *
The doctors call my brother’s escape plan a severe schizophrenic break, aggravated by drug-induced psychosis. They say schizophrenia is encoded into a person’s DNA, the same way eye color and hair color are. They have books to show my father and articles to prove their points. They have drugs to control violent outbursts. They have drugs for everything. Prozac, Zocolac, Xanax, Hanalax. All Jim’s medicines rhyme.
He doesn’t even try to stand up now. He is accustomed to falling. Each of his medications has its purpose, one to stop his thoughts, one to level his mood, one to counter the depressive feeling of having no mood. Another to counter the one that lifts him.
When I come to visit, I ask Jim how he’s doing.
He says “Fuck.” Then he says nothing for an hour.
As he sleeps, I watch his mouth move.
He won’t see my mother at all.
* * *
Almost every day my mother calls me at Gate School with news of diagnoses, tests, meds.
“He’s on lithium salts now and four others. If you wait,” she tells me, “I’ll get you the names.”
She asks me what electroshock therapy entails. I tell her. She says, “No, no, they will not put those things all over my boy.”
And yet they do. Cables and plungers and electric currents. Trial and error. That’s what they use. But nothing works.
“If he dies,” she says on my answering machine, “I’m going to go into the garage, put the door down…” I unplug the machine.
I visit my brother every week, but he doesn’t look like my brother anymore. He is dry like a sea urchin shell, scooped out.
His face begins to bloat, lose its chin and cheekbones. His hair begins to fall out, his walk is slow and heavy.
When they move him to the lockdown ward, I try to make him laugh. I imitate Bugs Bunny and then Skeezer’s weird whiny voice. Jim doesn’t even smile. He looks through me, tells me to be careful of becoming a harlot. I don’t understand how a surfer from Palos Verdes could come up with such words. Then I see the open book in his room. My brother is reading the Bible.
“If you look back,” he says, “you turn into salt.”
* * *
“Girlie. Fuck me. Baby. Blondie.”
They say this, the patients, as I walk down sea-green corridors with a burly male nurse.
“Don’t listen to them,” the nurse whispers, “just keep walking.”
“Why is everyone here so crude?” I ask him.
“This is a hospital for the truly insane,” he says. “It ain’t no Palos Verdes garden party.”
* * *
Outside the hospital, I wait for the bus. A pomegranate tree, heavy fruit hanging low, sways in the hot Santa Ana winds. Large red balls fall from the flailing branches.
My brother stands in the window looking at me, screaming into the sun as it sets, pounding on the glass.
“Don’t leave me here, Medina,” he yells, “I’ll burn.”
The orderlies inject something into him, take him away.
The last time I see him, my brother smiles at me with a full mouth of acrylic teeth. The teeth click when he talks, like the doctor’s shoes on the wide, white floors. Jim bashed out his real teeth on the side of the bed in a fit of rage. His rages are supposed to be controlled by medication, but sometimes he hides the pills in his cheek, only pretending to swallow. Then the rages come again, swift and merciless.
“I might leave this place soon,” Jim says, as we stand by the electric door. “I feel very peaceful now.”
Then he tells me to say good-bye to the Bayboys for him, he says he’ll miss the big, winter waves. He’s never going back to Palos Verdes, he says, but he doesn’t want to come to Santa Barbara either.
“It sounds like a good place, but I’m going somewhere better.”
He smiles at me when the orderly comes, the teeth clean and large, too big for his mouth.
“Good-bye.” He waves. “I’m going to the moon.”
He dies a few days later, overdosing on medications culled from other patients carefully, for months. He’s stored them in his pants, in a crease he had taped together for this purpose. He dies smiling, relieved after so much waiting.
Stars
“It doesn’t matter,” I tell my parents, shaking my head.
My mother and father are making plans in the moonlight for a burial at sea, a reception, a long, heartfelt eulogy.
I say to them, “Who cares what kind of sandwiches? Who cares what shape the urn is?”
My mother tears a napkin into shreds. Her face is white, her hair loose and unkempt, graying at the roots suddenly. “Medina, we have to give him a good funeral at least.” Then she says she can’t believe her son is truly dead.
“What about his life, isn’t that the point anyway?” I ask her.
* * *
The surfers of Palos Verdes surround the floating ashes in a perfect arc in the water, holding hands, repeating words the priest drones on the boat. They stay silent, heads bowed, religious for a moment, bobbing like toy ducks.
I don’t go to the funeral. I watch from the shore at Lunada Bay with binoculars, wearing a fancy green dress, counting all the surfers I know.
Later, the surfers come to the shabby house, where white paint is peeling off in long, weather-beaten strips. They tell me how sorry they are, how much they loved my brother. How the waves of Palos Verdes will never be the same without him.
I change into Jim’s big, soft clothes, looking out the window.
The waves are the same, exactly.
* * *
Distant relatives from New York City are gathered in front of the buffet table; I recognize some of them from pictures. “You’ve grown so much,” my aunt says, holding me away from her body, sniffling. “The last time I saw you, you were both just babies.”
“I don’t remember you,” I tell her.
My mother is sobbing to everyone gathered around the catered finger sandwiches. “Maybe I made mistakes with my boy, but I lived for him.”
I stare at her, shaking my head, laughing with no sound coming out. Acid bile rises up my throat.
“What do I do now?” my mother cries, collapsing into a ball on the floor.
“I’m leaving,” I say. “Jim wouldn’t even have liked this.”
All the relatives hum around her like bees, encircling her protectively, as they move away from me.
“Oh, Sandy…” my au
nt says. “She doesn’t mean it. We’re all upset today.”
My mother cries on the couch, slumped over, “Oh, God, how could he have done this?”
“Whichever way felt the best,” I tell myself, meaning it.
* * *
My father wants to give me every advantage now. He offers money, clothes, college.
“I don’t want those things,” I tell him gently.
A week later he sends me a self-help book called Grieving. The jacket cover is smooth and pale green like pond water. When I try to read the first chapter the words seem to float, half crazy like gibberish.
He visits me many times in my small, white, single dormitory room, where we step around the tortoises, step around the years.
“Your mother is almost a recluse now. There’s trash heaped in piles all over the house,” he says. “The neighbors want to call the health department.”
I tell my father I don’t want to think about that. I want to start over here, clean.
“Are you happy with this, Medina?” he asks, looking around at the small desk, the bare walls, the sandy wet suit on the bed, the wrinkled wet towels strung over the heater.
Later, he stands on the beach, waving, while I surf in the morning chill.
“Happy Birthday,” Adrian writes me from college near Sacramento, a few hours north of here. He’s working in an animal hospital as a certified veterinary assistant four days a week. I imagine him sitting alone in a small room, looking into small furry carcasses to see what went wrong.
“There are so many things that can go wrong,” he writes, “and a vet can’t fix them all. But animals can’t talk, so we have to guess. Sometimes I stay up all night, guessing. I try to help. Still, some of them die. In my hands.”
* * *
My mother calls a few weeks later from a motel in the Mojave Desert, far away from Palos Verdes. She explains she has nothing to lose now, she left the house with nothing, wearing only the yellow bathrobe. She had been sitting in the garage with the door down, but instead of waiting, she pressed down the pedal, drove straight through the wooden frame without stopping.
“For a minute,” she says on the phone, “I was sure I would die.”
My mother likes the emptiness of the desert. She’s going to wait for my father to sell the house on Via Neve and then take the money and buy a little place near Joshua Tree National Monument. She says Joshua trees smell like salt when you rub their leaves with your fingers, and the white sand dunes stretch out for miles like crystal waves.
“Maybe in time,” she says, “you can come visit.”
Never.
“Maybe,” I say.
She’s crying when she calls back later. “You should see all the stars here,” she says.
“It was Jim who liked stars,” I remind her.
They find her dead of a massive heart attack in a bed in the Desert Rose Motel, Cheetos blowing around in the whirlpool of air from the air conditioner. They find a letter she has been writing to me. It is ten pages long.
“I want you to know how sorry I am, Medina. I didn’t think everything would turn out like this,” it starts out. I stop reading. I take the letter and fold it into threes. I put it in a drawer, under my brother’s letters. Then I take it out again and fold it deep inside the warmth of a winter sweater.
I tell myself I’ll read it when it gets cold, sometime.
* * *
The money from the sale of the house is mine, my father says.
“I want you to have it for the future.”
He and Ava are long broken up now. His new girlfriend is a Chinese radiologist. The last one was a blond accountant.
“I’m only going to date women with jobs,” he assures me. “No more Ava Adares.”
I say nothing to him about Ava or Adrian Adare. I only tell him the details of my life that don’t matter.
He tells me all about my mother as she was, filling in gaps with stories.
“She was lovely when I met her. God, she was beautiful then.”
He talks about her as if she were a vase, a chandelier.
But when he talks about my brother we hold each other tight.
* * *
I surf the waves of Santa Barbara, wearing my brother’s lucky hat.
My father has become more superstitious, worrying a lot, calling twice a day, driving up to visit every weekend. He sends me thick medical studies on nutrition and pamphlets on fire safety and self-defense. He brings me a St. Christopher medal and some Indian malachite for good luck against sharks and earthquakes. To make him happy, I wear the hat and the medal, I knock three times on wood and promise him I’ll be safe. Then I escape and go surfing.
He comes down to the shore, watching me paddle and take off. When I wave to him, he swims out to meet me, wearing a shiny new pair of silver trunks. He hovers around while I wait for a wave.
“You don’t have a wet suit, Dad, you’ll get sick,” I tell him.
“Maybe I could learn to surf,” he says. “We could do it together like you and Jim did.”
Then he asks me if he can try my board and paddles furiously toward the next wave lineup, flailing his arms, fighting the current.
I touch his arm, treading water, and say, “Dad, if you’re going to surf, you have to go slow. Remember, you can’t win against the ocean.”
Later, we talk. He asks me how I’ve changed so much in a year, how I’ve gotten so calm. We’re lying on a big black towel under the night sky, looking at the endless spray of warm stars. My father is worried that I’m alone too much; he thinks I should come back, move in with him. I tell him I can’t, I like to surf here at night, alone. As we look up at the new, bright star near Andromeda, I smile, pointing.
“See, I pretend that one is Jim.”
Then I explain why I’m never lonely when I’m in the ocean—I talk to my brother while I surf. I tell my father Jim can see me every night in his wet suit, looking good on a wave.
Then I point out my mother, a new little star behind Jupiter, but close enough to watch what’s going on. I tell my father I talk to her sometimes, too.
“I fought for her, Daddy, all the tribes of Palos Verdes. None of it matters anymore.”
“So you’re really okay?” he asks, hopefully.
“Sure,” I say, not looking at him.
Later I swim far out from the shore. I wave to my father before diving under the black water. Then I scream as loud as I can.
* * *
Adrian has grown up. He tells me he has a beard now, he describes it as mammal-like. He tells me there is no one else, no other girls. He tells me his mother took my father’s cash parting gift and had extensive plastic surgery. He tells me she looks like a Palos Verdes type now. Her new husband is a gynecologist; he is short, a little shy. A little guy.
“They say they are happy,” he writes, “whatever that means.”
I write back: “If you want to come, I’ll be in Palos Verdes for two days. We can surf the bay one last time. Come on Saturday the seventh, to the house. We’re having an auction.”
* * *
There are fancy people gawking at our furniture, opening closets, looking at our clothes, bidding on our piano. There is wine and cheese on the table in the foyer. Palos Verdes people have turned out en masse, in a large show of support for us. I’ve asked my father not to come.
“Whatever,” I say when the estate-sale executor asks for my approval on a price.
I hear people whispering the Mason story. Suicide, mental hospital, crazy. They stand together like sheep, smiling at me shyly from across the floor.
I hear Marge Paxton say, “It’s like, an American tragedy.”
Skeezer offers to buy my brother’s surfboard for forty dollars.
“Never,” I tell the executor. “Not in this lifetime.”
* * *
The surf is good when Adrian and I go out. Four feet and clean. Still I struggle on my brother’s two-fin board.
The boys don’t throw rocks at
Adrian, or heckle him, or slash his tires. They make a clean, respectful swathe for us when we paddle out, letting us line up first.
“The difference is,” I tell Adrian, “I have money now.”
Some things are no different. We surf for two hours, until the light is gone and the first stars appear.
“See that star?” I say. “Jim gave it to me.”
He looks at the star, the brightest, bluish one, and nods.
* * *
The house is empty, dark, huge, after all the people leave. Adrian and I spend the night in the pool area, lying under the stars. He falls asleep on a deck chair. I stay awake, looking for constellations, lying on my brother’s board as it eddies in the chlorine current. Night birds fly past in gentle curved formations. I watch them, tracing their graceful flexions with my finger.
My whole life I’ve wanted to be graceful. Sometimes when I was alone in the pool, I used to do a freestyle water ballet, kicking my legs and swirling my hair around, feeling beautiful, pretending millions of people were watching.
Jim used to say that water makes everybody beautiful.
At sunrise I do a wave check, but instead of going down to the shore, I watch from on top of the trail as the Bayboys file into the water, joking and laughing, throwing seaweed at each other. They laugh and laugh, telling the same old jokes, comfortable with each other; a tribe.
Watching the surfers, loneliness comes over me like a wave.
“Hello surfer girl,” Adrian says quietly, awake now, handing me a towel.
He waits at the deck with fresh, warm breakfast croissants, wearing his nice reading glasses. We sit on the concrete ledge, and he shows me the book he’s been studying, Animals of North America. He tells me it’s a book I’d like, then turns to the chapter about desert tortoises and begins reading it out loud. All of a sudden I feel sick. I tell him I don’t want to hear anything about animals, especially how tortoises get to live for one hundred fifty years. He looks at me, puzzled, for a long time.
* * *
The couple who buy the house at Via Neve are young: he’s a corporate lawyer, she wears plaid Eddie Bauer slacks. They have a young, brown-haired son with huge blue eyes.
The Tribes of Palos Verdes Page 16