by Andrew Roe
“We should call Tim and Amanda,” says Patricia.
He nods. Yes. They would have to tell their children. Another dread. They would be telling countless friends and family and neighbors over the coming days. The grim task of communication awaited them.
“Definitely,” he says. “But later, OK?”
“OK,” she says. “Later then.”
So they sit and wait and after a while, because he doesn’t know what else to do, he turns on the TV. They watch one show and then another, all afternoon, until it gets dark, the screen glowing before them, a forgiving radiance that neither wants to end.
“It’s getting late,” she says, her voice sounding tired and drugged and ancient, already half gone.
“Are you hungry yet?”
“No.”
The local news coming up next: something about Clinton, terrorists, the Lakers, a little girl up in L.A. who was paralyzed in an accident and now was supposedly performing miracles, people lining up outside her house.
And he wants to reach over and touch Patricia’s face, her arm, to see if that would be different, too, her skin, her lips, also transformed, but he can’t bring himself to do it, not yet, he wants to touch and verify but he also doesn’t want to frighten or alarm, it’s another important moment, one that he knows he will relive many, many times and he doesn’t want to do anything wrong or make her jump or disturb her, but then he realizes she’s fallen asleep, his wife, Patricia Marie Kennard Westerfeld, girl and then woman of his dreams, all these years, all this history and significance, as well as the future ahead, which is now no longer a future, and he just sits there and gives up and does not give up and believes and does not believe and listens to her breathe and it’s a beautiful sound and a resilient sound and it’s hard to imagine that such a thing would ever cease from happening, that it would be gone from this earth and from him, and fairly soon, according to the doctor who was too young, who did not look anything like Pernell Roberts. Donald doesn’t want to move. It’s very late. They could try A, B, or C. He listens to the house settle, an old, familiar, soothing creaking now rendered new and alarming.
5
| Karen |
AND SHE’S OUT—OUT of the house, out into the world, away from 147 Shaker Street and its many layers of drama and involvement and responsibility, the trips out now more and more infrequent as the number of visitors has increased in the wake of her interview with Kellee Clifton (three weeks ago), so much to be done, so much to be done, and plus, too, as more people arrive and so desperately want/need what her daughter has, she finds herself becoming increasingly protective of Anabelle, hesitant to be away from her, fearful that the visitors will suck her dry, leave her empty, depleted, changed yet again. But Bryce and Dom insisted she go. They told her that it’d been too long, weeks, whatever, and that she needed to come up for air, breathe. “Go, go, you’re gone,” said Bryce, who’s now at the house just as often as her niece. “Come back before five o’clock and I won’t let you back in the house. Don’t write. Don’t call. See ya.” Had it really been that long? She didn’t want to leave Anabelle, didn’t want other people to have to deal with the new hustle and bustle. Sleep was now further minimized to only three or four hours a night. Always on the phone or talking to a visitor or tracking down a nurse last minute or figuring out what the time difference in Australia or Laos was, because people from there had left messages and she really, truly tried to get back to everyone. Always something. Including, of course, the caring for her daughter, the constant work and worry. There’s no time for herself, so it’s hard to know how long it’s been since she’s left the house, hard to sort out one thing from the other. The result? She’s driving up and down El Portal Boulevard like a teenager on Saturday night and doesn’t know where to go or what to do.
El Portal Boulevard cuts through the city of the same name, dividing the southeastern Los Angeles suburb in half: above the boulevard and below the boulevard. The former has the hills and the money, while the latter is flat and has the Food Outlet. Karen has lived below the boulevard in El Portal her entire life: it’s where she grew up; it’s where she went to high school; it’s where she met and fell in love with John; and it’s where she became a parent. Most of her friends have left (college, jobs, relationships, life), and so had her mother (Fort Collins, Colorado) and her father (Yuma, Arizona, living with his second wife and their many cats), but Karen has always felt an allegiance to the place where she’s from, even if there isn’t much there, even if it’s the kind of city that gets left off those maps the local TV weathermen show every night.
Since she doesn’t have a destination in mind yet, and since she’s tired of aimlessly driving and hearing the same Prince song on multiple radio stations (“1999,” of course), she decides she might as well be useful and get some shopping done. So she hangs a U-turn and heads to Costco, two towns over and near the recently renovated Prado Mall. The sky is both metal gray and bright yellow at the same time. She passes a bank with a sign that alternates the time and temp: 9:42, already 94 degrees. Another scorcher. The electric bill is going to be a bitch this month, the air-conditioning running around the clock.
It’s a weekday, a Tuesday, but the Costco parking lot is packed. Karen manages to find an orphaned shopping cart and, once inside, navigates the aisles and the shoppers and the darting kids. Costco always overwhelmed her, all that space and the endless items for purchase. It’s usually best to have a list, but she does not have a list, this is a dangerous unplanned visit, and so she wanders from section to section. She buys cookies and snacks and an assortment of juices (apple, grape, kiwi, mango) for the visitors. Plus paper cups and plates and napkins and more. The cart quickly fills. She realizes she’s hungry and so she says yes to every sample item offered to her, the people wearing their doctorly white jackets and latex gloves and smiling, smiling, smiling. Suddenly it seems very important to have a vast quantity of oatmeal.
Near the canned-goods aisle, a woman stops her.
“Hey, it’s you,” the woman says.
Karen thinks it might be someone from high school. She scans the woman’s face—round, tired, ordinary—for recognition but comes up empty. They’re roughly the same age. Could have played softball together. Gone to summer camp. Talked about boys and braces and Robert Plant’s jeans.
“You’re the mom,” the woman clarifies, and then Karen understands.
“Yes, it’s me, I guess.”
“I’ve seen you and your daughter on TV. The Miracle Girl. Wow. And you’re the mom of the Miracle Girl. And you’re here, at Costco, you’re here, too. Wow. Could I get your autograph?”
Karen scribbles her name on the back of a receipt, moves on. The experience dazes her, makes her head spin like she’s just been on a pukey carnival ride. Weird. How do celebrities do it? Do you get used to it? Do you ever like it? People knowing you and yet not knowing you. She puts on her sunglasses and escapes to one of the lengthy checkout lines, every cart in front of her filled and brimming with bulk merchandise, as well as last-minute candy for Halloween—she hadn’t thought of buying candy herself, but it’s too late now; there’s no way she’s getting out of line. The cashier has one of those patchy hippie beards that John had unsuccessfully tried to grow, both she and Anabelle complaining of the scratchiness of his insufficient whiskers. And in fact John had applied (also unsuccessfully) for a job here once. There was a time when he applied just about everywhere.
When it’s her turn she makes the usual small talk (the long line, the weather) with the cashier. If he recognizes her, he doesn’t show it. And then everything begins to shake. There’s that initial quiet as the fact of the earthquake sinks in, then there’s a building panic as people think they better make a run for it and bolt outside, because outside is safer, inside a huge, cavernous warehouse store is not safe and could be quite fatal and fucked up, and last words/thoughts are hastily composed, loved ones considered, obituaries visualized, but then before it progresses any farther than tha
t it’s over, the shaking ceases, and there’s a collective relief and everyone can breathe again, earthquakes like little mortality checks for Southern Californians. This all lasts a mere six seconds.
“That’s the third one in what—a month?” says the cashier.
“I don’t know,” says Karen. “Something like that. There’s been a lot.”
“And that was the biggest one yet, I think. Five-point-seven at least. Maybe five-eight. What do you think it means, all these earthquakes we’re having?”
Karen doesn’t know what to say. She looks up at the ceiling, seeking out a crack or hole or something to indicate potential structural damage, and wonders what would happen if it all came down, before she then realizes she needs to get back home as soon as possible, because there’d been an earthquake there, too.
ON THE DRIVE home, she passes the mall, which takes her back, which always takes her back. On the radio they’re saying it was centered somewhere out in the desert, no reports of damage or injuries yet, more updates coming soon.
THE PHONE WAS always ringing. That whole six months or so with John before the accident, the noise didn’t let up, erupting through the house no matter the day, the hour, its harsh, cheap, electronic cackle accusing her somehow.
She wasn’t working then. Wasn’t even really a consideration, it had gotten so bad, her bluesy spirits and feeling of sinking deeper into a nameless despair, often unable to sustain a single, simple thought. And plus the phone was never for her. The voices all sounding guilty of something, a crime yet to be committed. Ninety-nine-point-nine percent male, their names hard to spell, their manners and general phone etiquette wanting. Speaking in hushed secret-agent tones, as if a person was sleeping next to them, as if there was someone nearby whose attention the caller did not want to arouse, much like the way John spoke when he was on the phone. After a while she didn’t want to know who was calling, and so she refused to take messages, then to pick up at all, which John filibustered about because the answering machine was either broken or intermittently reliable at best, and how did it look, he said, to have people calling with no machine, no one answering, just the ringing and ringing, like he’d given them a bum number, and no one answering meant they wouldn’t be able to pay the mortgage this month, and they needed the money. Another thing about the phone was that it only rang when John wasn’t there. When he was there, the phone did not ring. Well, at least not as much, but not as much by a significant margin. When he was there, he was the one who made the calls. He dialed, he had conversations, he left messages, then he left the house. It was only when she was alone, that is with Anabelle, the two of them, that the phone rang.
At some point he bought a pager. Then besides the phone ringing there was the pager going off and beeping. He clipped it on his belt like a doctor. Or no. He didn’t wear a belt. So he must have fastened it to his jeans. His beloved Levi’s, which he’d buy three at a time (and they had to be Levi’s, not Lee’s or some wannabe pretender brand; and they had to be 501s, the cardboard shrink-to-fit kind), then wash them over and over until the stiffness and dark blueness faded away, the denim lightening and softening. Only then were they worthy of entering his limited wardrobe rotation. Jeans and T-shirts almost exclusively. The jeans piled in their closet, the T-shirts taking up two drawers plus overflow, some dating back to high school and qualifying as archeological artifacts, some from relatively recent concerts by bands on their third or fourth final farewell tour. The first time she saw him he must have been wearing jeans and a T-shirt. It’s just the odds. Which prompted the question: how does a woman fall in love with a man wearing jeans and T-shirt? How is such a thing possible?
Life was a real cabaret. And there were episodes, as they came to be called, like she was on a TV show. They varied in intensity and severity. The mall episode had been one of the worst, one of the worst public ones (the private ones sometimes just as bad, if not more horrible in their own way), the memory of which has stuck permanently in her brain, snapping in place Lego-like, along with the phone ringing and the other irrational fixations from those days, a reminder of how close she had been, how little it takes to fall and perhaps never find your way back.
All morning she had been deliberating about making the trip to the mall. Now that she was spending all this time at home she was realizing how easy it is to get obsessed, obsessive—completely, totally. That was the danger. Every little thing had the potential to mutate into a costumed epic period drama. So one simple decision that had germinated while forcing down her reheated-from-yesterday morning coffee—hey, maybe I should swing by the mall real quick sometime today and pick up whatever it is I’ve been meaning to pick up—had dragged through Judge Judy and a Home Improvement rerun, a draining play session with Anabelle, the sofa contemplation of sit-ups and more coffee, the search for a masculine tool of some kind in the black hole of the garage (turns out it wasn’t there, loaned to a friend of John’s and gone for good), and into the initial preparations for lunch as she flipped on the old portable black-and-white in the kitchen that, if nothing else, made you appreciate color all the more. And still nothing had been decided. See, there was so much to consider. Until your life slowed down to practically nothing, to a stagnant hum, there was no way you could know how one trip, one decision, could be so complicated and take up so much mental and physical energy. But it did.
Not helping matters much was the fact that she’d spent the previous night in the bathtub, in her robe, and now her back hurt. She’d been in the tub smoking and crying and after a while she didn’t see the point of leaving. So she slept there. It wasn’t the first time. Anabelle more than once waking to discover her mother curled inside the porcelain like a punished pet. But her wavering about whether or not to go to the mall involved more than sleep deprivation. Increasingly she had developed a full-blown, probably diagnosable anxiety about leaving the house, and it was getting difficult to conceal, John starting to make comments, grumbling about being the one who had to run out for milk or eggs or whatever they were lacking—there was always something, their privations numerous and diverse. Actually, she had been thinking about the trip to the mall for the past week. It had become a major preoccupation, a multiday serialized internal soap opera with ups and downs, tensions and climaxes, resolutions and further plot complications. Deciding, postponing. Rationalizing. Re-rationalizing. Re-re-rationalizing. Thinking tomorrow. Thinking why not combine a trip to the mall with a trip to the market. Two birds, etc. But then concluding that no, that would be too much. Better one trip one day. Spread it out, equalize. So do the mall today, or tomorrow, and then do the market the following day or on the weekend. Although if you go on the weekend it will be more crowded, meaning that waiting until Monday was probably best, but since Monday was a transitional day, a bridge from the weekend to the week proper, Tuesday was more likely. So you see.
The phone was ringing again. John wasn’t home, of course. He was there less and less, even though he wasn’t working. Not technically. Not according to the government. He was freelancing, he liked to joke. This after he got laid off from his job installing doors and windows, and after his unemployment ran out, John often explaining, “It’s temporary, Karen, just temporary until something else comes along. How else are we going to pay our bills?” His friend Tommy Arroyo had moved to Humboldt and had a cheap, steady supply. The packages arrived in the mail, the baggies nestled in coffee grounds because Tommy had seen it done like that in a movie. John called a few friends and some former coworkers, wanting to keep it mellow and controlled, just a little extra income to get them through a rough patch, but the friends had friends, and so did the former coworkers, and plus there was a sudden shortage of marijuana in the greater Southern California area due to some recent seizures and arrests and bad weather in Mexico that had significantly curtailed the year’s crop. So the phone rang and rang, and since she wasn’t working, basically incapacitated at this point, who was she to say anything? J
ohn always coming and going. Driving with his sunglasses and color-coded Ziploc baggies and Anabelle’s car seat in the back, making deliveries to apartments and bars and, once, the parking lot at Dodger Stadium. She didn’t pick up the phone because picking up the phone not only would entail hearing the voices she didn’t want to hear but would also entail a conversation of some sort, no matter how rudimentary. So she let it ring. She yelled at Anabelle, “Don’t pick up. Don’t you dare pick up that goddamn phone.” Sometimes Anabelle did that. Answered the phone and said nothing. Waiting for something, someone to come on the line and clarify the situation, provide information, hint at what she was supposed to do next.
And then Karen was there. The mall. It had happened. She was in the world once more. Obeying traffic laws, using her turn signal. She was there with her daughter and they had driven the so-and-so miles and found a parking space. She had come for something, only she couldn’t remember what. She had told Anabelle what the thing was but now she couldn’t remember, and neither could Anabelle, or maybe she knew and wasn’t telling, which was entirely possible. They were hopeless, mother and daughter. The mall was crowded even though it wasn’t the holidays or the weekend or the summer. She didn’t know where matters stood calendar-wise, but maybe it was the first of the month, which would explain all the shoppers. There were young mothers everywhere—young mothers who looked like they didn’t want to be young mothers, or mothers at any age for that matter, their children circling them, like baby birds clamoring to be fed. There was music, or Muzak, part of the universal mall background drone that you don’t really think about until you force yourself to listen. Which was what she did. The sounds, the people, the mall maps and signs, all pushing her toward the early stages of overload, engulfing her slowly like a lapping wave covering the sand, spreading its wetness and damp. It was a Beatles song. The one about looking at all the lonely people. “Eleanor Rigby.” Was that song from before or after the Beatles started taking drugs? She didn’t know. John would know. John knew all kinds of useless trivia like that, yet had trouble remembering their anniversary.