* * *
She followed the same route she’d just jogged along, relieved to be sitting in the car this time. Driving! What a miracle. Rolling beneath the jacarandas, Liz imagined passing her previous, pathetically clambering self. Feeling a little ashamed actually, as she hit the gas to move on, move past, feeling judged if that was possible, by this figment of her own imagination.
She didn’t see it, only felt it as she turned the corner: a bump from underneath the car, once, then twice, three times. Liz jumped in her seat with each jolt, then looked into the rearview mirror expecting to see some piece of dislodged machinery in her wake, then thinking, knowing almost, that it was the dog. Bandit! She quickly sent out some kind of prayer or wish, hoping it wasn’t the dog, and then she saw him, right on cue, standing safely up on the sidewalk, his stubby black-and-white face watching her car pass. Liz loosened her hands from the steering wheel, relieved, looking back up to the rearview mirror, wondering what the hell she had hit, then seeing the reflection at the back of the car, the spin of golden hair, the small body rolling free.
* * *
She dialed Jane’s number from the police station. They hadn’t spoken in weeks, but Liz didn’t know who else to call.
Listening to the ring, she kept telling herself that this was her one phone call. But of course it wasn’t, she wasn’t being charged with anything. This was an accident. The girl was chasing her dog and ran out into the street. Liz may have taken her eyes off the road for a second, less than a second, but that wasn’t a crime. You couldn’t be punished for inattention.
The girl. Liz could still feel the car bumping once, twice, three times.
She left a message on Jane’s voice mail, then sat trembling in a rigid metal chair on the other side of the officer’s desk. The man was maybe fifteen years younger than Liz. His neck was crosshatched with tiny cuts and nicks, as if this morning had been his first attempt at shaving. He asked questions and took her answers, his eyes down on his paperwork, as if unwilling to look at her face.
* * *
She crossed through the sliding doors into the slick-surfaced corridor, everything straight and flat and scrubbed to a shine, the overhead lights reflecting as bright white suns flashing on the walls, the floor, the polished wood counter of the nurses’ station.
The nurse said that she could only give information to the immediate family. She asked Liz if she was immediate family, and Liz said yes. The nurse looked at her for a moment, as if waiting for a different answer, then finally told Liz which corridor to follow. The other family members were back there, the nurse said. The little girl was still in surgery.
The girl’s name was Rose. Liz knew this because the girl’s father had called it out as he ran toward them in the street.
She walked down the hall, not knowing what to expect, her head full of terrified noise. Turning a corner, she stopped at the edge of a small waiting area. It was softly lit, with carpet and couches and lamps on end tables, like a living room that had been pulled from a house in the neighborhood and dropped into the middle of the hospital.
She saw the father first, that big blond beard. He was wearing the same clothes as when he had come running out to the accident, shorts and a zip-front sweatshirt with the empty hood lolling back between his shoulder blades. Everything was one size too tight, as if he had recently put on weight. He was speaking to an older man, a grayer, slighter version of himself. The father saw Liz and started toward her, his body charged with anger. She thought he was going to take a swing at her. It seemed like the obvious next action. He stopped a step away, still on the carpet.
“What the hell are you doing here?”
He said this clearly, loudly. This was not a private conversation. Liz looked past him into the waiting area. There was the older man and a matching older woman and then a younger woman sitting on the edge of an armchair, her back straight, her hands in her lap. She was the father’s age, Liz’s age, with lustrous dark hair and large, black-framed glasses. She was dressed smartly, professionally, in a navy-blue blouse and tailored cream pants. She seemed more out of place here than anyone. The father almost belonged, a raw creature stalking the halls, his emotional locks broken, but the mother seemed bewildered, as if at one point in the recent past she had looked up from her desk, expecting to see her workplace, but found herself here instead.
“I’m so sorry,” Liz said. “I just didn’t—”
“You can’t be here,” the father said. He was a good head taller, looking down on her, his hands hanging at his sides, fingers stretched out as if he was keeping them from balling into fists. “You need to leave.”
Liz stepped back from the carpet. She looked past the father again. The mother and grandparents were watching her. She wanted more than anything to cross into that place, to join their worry and fear.
She couldn’t be there. Of course not. But she was a part of it, still. No one would be there if it wasn’t for her.
* * *
She found a small chapel by the elevators. A square room, no windows, with the same softly glowing lamps as in the waiting area down the hall. There were a couple of wooden kneelers, two chairs, and a coffee table. On the table, a Bible, a Torah, a Qur’an, a paperback copy of Dianetics.
She paced the room, not sure what else to do, what physical pose to assume. Standing, sitting, kneeling. She wasn’t religious, hadn’t been to church since she was a teenager. She pressed her fingertips to the divots on her cheek. The room felt like a cell. The police hadn’t confined her, but she would confine herself. She would stay there until something changed, until there was an outcome she would have to face.
She looked through the books on the coffee table. She thought about a book she’d written a few years ago, her favorite so far, a novelization of a movie that, for an enormously complicated and seemingly surreal set of legal and financial reasons, had been shelved at the last minute. Her book, though, for an equally complicated and surreal set of oversights and errors, was still published and shipped to stores. There was only a week or so before all of the copies were recalled, but during that time Liz went to the bookstore at the mall almost every day and stood in the aisle across from its shelf, its cover and spine. It had felt so complete to her, standing there. She knew that she would grieve its loss when it disappeared, but for those few days it existed, and she was happy to be with it, to see its face when she came around the corner. Still there. Not for long; but in that moment, still there.
She checked the time on her phone. When would Jane arrive? When would Jane come in and take control, talk to the doctors, to Rose’s parents? Jane had that way of imposing order onto chaos, making sense of the senseless. Liz could imagine it clearly, Jane walking through the chapel door, taking the reins of an unendurable moment.
A sharp point pressed through the pocket of her jeans, into the skin of her thigh. Liz had forgotten about the barrette. After the ambulance had taken Rose and her father, Liz had walked back to her car to get her purse and phone. She was going to leave her car. The police had offered her a ride to the station if she didn’t feel capable of driving. She hadn’t felt capable. She had found the barrette on the street by the curb. A little metal clasp with a plastic top in the shape of Minnie Mouse’s smiling face. Liz had picked it up and looked back to the young police officer with the bad shave. He was waiting for her by his cruiser, but facing the other direction, watching a squawking flock of wild parrots circling above the tree line. Liz had put the barrette in her pocket.
She stood now in the small chapel, moving her fingertips over the smooth curves of Minnie’s ears. She could still see Rose lying in the street, her eyes closed as if she were sleeping. It was the only time Liz had ever seen her. Would she ever see her awake? She could picture Rose now, in an operating room down the hall. Lights and machines, tubes and scalpels, men with masks. Rose’s face, her eyes closed. The bruises had already started to form when Liz first knelt beside her on the street. Rose’s skin darkening, rising in sic
kening bumps. Liz had never seen her without those bruises, without her body twisted that way.
She should have given the barrette to the police officer. She should have given it to Rose’s father. But it felt like it belonged to her now, or that the holding of it belonged to her, its escrow, the waiting.
Down on her knees, Liz pressed her forehead to the tile floor. She felt flushed, feverish, and the tile was cool against her skin. She tried to picture Rose’s face smooth and bright, unblemished; her body straight and strong. Tried to imagine her eyes, the color there, what it might be. Blue, sky blue, to go with her sunlit hair. She tried to imagine Rose’s eyes opening.
Please. Whispering to the floor, to the operating room down the hall.
Please, wake up.
* * *
There was a knock at the chapel door. Liz stood. She didn’t know how much time had passed. It was Jane, finally. Jane had come. She wiped her eyes, smoothed her hair, hating herself for her stupid vanity in this of all moments. But Jane had come. Jane was here.
The door opened and an older woman stepped inside. Liz recognized her from the waiting room. Rose’s grandmother. But her earlier composure had frayed; a stunned fragility had taken its place. She held her shoulders high and tight, flinch-ready, as if anticipating a blow.
Liz was terrified that she would speak, of what she would say, what news she carried.
What she carried was the smell of cigarettes and a paper plate lined with rolled cold cuts, carrot sticks, florets of broccoli and cauliflower. She looked at Liz and seemed about to say something but then stopped herself.
From out in the hallway, Liz could hear metal carts trundling, the soft bleeping of machines, a distant laugh. A woman’s voice over the PA in the hall paged a doctor with a long, consonant-heavy last name.
Liz didn’t know what to say, so she didn’t say anything. She simply stood there, holding the barrette at her chest. Rose’s grandmother looked down at the plate and then back up again, starting over.
She said, “I thought you might be hungry.”
* * *
Liz slept fitfully, up every hour or so and walking the house, Rose’s barrette in her hand.
She checked her phone again. Another missed call from Jane, another voice mail. She didn’t listen to the message, but she could still hear Jane’s voice, her low honeyed rumble. She looked at Jane’s name on the screen and tried to imagine Jane in the house, in this room, her arms around Liz’s waist, the new shape of Liz’s body, holding her tight. She tried to imagine going through whatever was to come together, carrying this as they had carried so much over the years.
She squeezed Rose’s barrette. The pinpoint bit into her skin.
She couldn’t do it. Her imagination wasn’t strong enough to force Jane into this moment. She belonged to Liz’s life before the accident, and now there was this life, whatever it was, whatever it would be. She touched her fingertip to the phone’s screen and swiped, erasing Jane’s name once, twice, three times.
At the dining room table, she sat and finished the manuscript. She used all of her notes, her sketches, her jogging-route imaginings, every daydream possibility, moving out very far from the center she had been given. She emailed it to her editor, knowing that in a few days she would get a call that it had been rejected, either by the publisher or the studio, or both. It wasn’t the book they wanted. It was a book about Dean’s Wife, which was something nobody had asked for. But for now, until that call came, it was finished, it felt right.
She checked the clock on the laptop. If she was going to go, it was time. Rose’s grandmother had told Liz that the next surgery was scheduled for noon.
The house had grown warmer. The midmorning sun sat hot and white, halfway up the backyard sky. In the kitchen, she packed what she had in the fridge into a canvas grocery bag: little plastic cups of yogurt, a few bottles of water. She left the broccoli and carrots, limp in their drawer. Closing the refrigerator door, she stared at the Fatty magnet for a moment, before pulling it free and setting it up on top of the fridge, just out of reach in the dust and crumbs beside the microwave.
She called a cab. Her car was still in the tow lot. She had no idea if there was any damage. She refused to think about the possibilities, the location of dents, marks on the paint.
How strange to ride a cab through her own neighborhood, like a tourist, someone passing through. Everything looked strange, unrevealed. She winced at every pothole and speed bump. At each stop sign and red light she leaned in to speak to the cabbie, to tell him to turn back, take her home, but before she could make a sound the light would turn, and they’d start forward again.
In the grocery store she filled a cart with boxes of crackers, packages of chocolate-chip cookies, long cardboard cylinders of potato chips in various flavors. Comfort food. It wouldn’t be enough. There was no telling how long they’d need to be comforted.
In the toiletries aisle she gathered toothbrushes, toothpaste, face wash. From a rack by the beer she found a pair of men’s work pants and a hooded sweatshirt in what seemed like the proper size. When it was her turn at the checkout, the woman at the register asked Liz if she’d found everything she needed, and Liz wanted to say no, to tell the woman that she was going to put it all back, that she didn’t want any of it, but instead she pulled her credit card from her wallet and swiped it through the console. Outside, she carried her bags to the waiting cab.
The hospital lot was full, the loading zone lined with ambulances, so the cabbie stopped half a dozen rows back and popped the trunk. Liz paid him and he helped arrange the grocery bags into her arms.
The cab pulled away. Liz started walking through the rows of cars. She reminded herself to breathe, but she couldn’t breathe. A flock of birds passed overhead in a loose arrow, then flew out into the distance, above the hilltops; parrots maybe, arcing together in the breeze. She wanted to turn back. She could feel the sun on her neck, on her hands. Keep walking, she told herself, whispering the words aloud. The sound of the whisper seemed like something she could follow, one moment to the next. It was an order, a wish, a prayer. Liz could see Rose’s grandmother at the other end of the lot, smoking a cigarette under the hospital entrance overhang. She wanted to stop. She wanted to fall to her knees, drop the heavy bags, unburden herself, allow the contents to spill and roll away, all this stuff she’d bought, too much or not enough. Keep walking, she whispered. She could smell the smoke now, she was that close. She wanted to run off in the other direction, into the street, into traffic, in front of another car, another distracted driver, one of her own. She wanted to scream until the scream filled her head, the parking lot, negating the place, carrying her somewhere, anywhere else. She wanted to turn back.
Instead she whispered again, sending her voice ahead to pull her along.
Golden State
He didn’t know anyone. No one knew him. Claire and his mother had moved to Glendora a month into the school year because that’s when the lease had run out on their apartment in Utica. Diane didn’t have a new job lined up, but she’d inherited a little money when Claire’s grandfather died, and she figured they could live off that while she looked. She didn’t want to rush into anything; she didn’t want to settle this time. She’d told Claire that she was sorry about having to start another new school, that they couldn’t have moved later in the year or over the summer, but she didn’t want to wait any longer. This was their chance.
Claire didn’t know why he’d argued so hard against the move, why he’d yelled and sulked and sniped. It wasn’t like there was much to miss in Utica. His dad had left when he was two and Claire had no memory of him and no one had seen the man since. He and Diane had lived in seven different apartments; he’d gone to seven different schools. He was a twelve-year-old boy named Claire with long hair and crooked teeth. A change should do him good, should do them both good. At least, that’s what Diane repeated over and over on the drive west, like if she said it enough times out loud it would somehow become true.
Neither of them had been to California before. The only thing Claire knew about the place came from TV, watching the Yankees play the Angels in Anaheim. Back in Utica, the games started late because of the time difference, nine or ten o’clock, but Diane had always let him stay up, even when he was a little kid, spread out in his sleeping bag on the living room floor, watching his team out in the Wild West. Bobby Bonds tracking a fly ball deep into the right field corner and Claire taking his eyes off the play, distracted by the alien background, the strips of freeway crossing the hazy sunset, the long rows of shag-topped palm trees that looked like something out of Dr. Seuss. They may as well have been playing on another planet. The Yanks never did so well out there. Who could blame them?
Diane had used the promise of potential Angels games to help sweeten the deal of the move. Claire had never seen the Yanks play in person, but Glendora was only an hour or so from Anaheim, and when summer came, Diane said, she’d find a way to get them to a game. He imagined a spot in the right field bleachers, watching Bonds running down a fly, both he and Bobby turning their heads at the last moment to look out over that foreign terrain beyond the wall. Catch, cheer, maybe their eyes meeting in silent recognition. Men of New York. Bobby, though, would get to go back home after the game.
Their new street in Glendora ran long and wide along the base of the lower San Gabriels. The sight of the broad mountains filled Claire’s bedroom window. Diane said that plenty of people would kill for that view, but it was obvious, based on the ages and conditions, that the homes on the other side of the street were the real prizes. They boasted long, smooth, newly paved approaches, driveways like lavish greetings. Big and new and beautiful, those houses stood with the mountains at their backs, as if facing out together, powerful and confident. The neighbors directly across the street had the most impressive spread of all, a broad sweep of gleaming blacktop that stretched back to a white Spanish-style home with an orange tile roof and a two-car garage.
A Perfect Universe Page 4