by Tish Cohen
Life hadn’t always looked like this. In 1996, she’d been another girl entirely. She was Delilah Blue Lovett, living with her charismatic, free-spirited mother in the gingerbread neighborhood of Cabbagetown in Toronto. Behind a vermillion front door that closed with a muffled thump that mimicked her mother’s faint French-Canadian accent. She had a curlicue-trimmed portico where a broom and a brass tub full of umbrellas stood ready to shelter her. She had Sunday-night dinners at her grandmother’s house in Mississauga. She had the asthmatic Russian son of the opera singer next door to spy on, and sleepovers with her best friend down the street.
Life hadn’t been perfect, but it had a certain ticktock. She could count on birthday parties with kids she’d known since kindergarten and cousins she’d despised since birth. The school was 793 footsteps there and back if you were careful not to step on any cracks—she was always vigilant about her mother that way.
Then her memory became a blur. Her parents stopped speaking and her life would never look the same. Her father buckled her into a lumpy seat on a 737 bound for Disneyland and said a long weekend on her own should give her mother the quiet time she needed. Who was Lila to argue? She was eight years old and on her way to meet Cinderella.
Turned out a weekend away from her only child wasn’t enough. Elisabeth Lovett, and her long, russet, corkscrew curls, her caramel skin, and her laugh that sounded like tinkling bells, needed more. So Victor bought a ramshackle cabin in the Hollywood Hills, enrolled his daughter in the local public school, and said he’d never liked the name Delilah. It had been Elisabeth’s overly whimsical choice and it was too much for California. He announced it was time for a nickname and Lila would do just fine.
It was at this moment the freshly christened Lila had an idea. While they were on the subject of inappropriate names, the thought of enduring another year with the nickname “Shove It” (or Lovett’s oh-so-imaginative and quick-witted cousin, “Hate-It”) made her feel sick to her stomach. Victor’s smile had nearly split his face. He patted her small hand, and said it was the perfect time to tackle their problematic surname and he happened to have one standing at the ready: Mack. He said it would honor his Mackinnon ancestors from the Isle of Skye, off the west coast of Scotland. She thought about it. Short, snappy, easy to spell. Seemed it would do just as well as any.
Then there were twelve birthdays without phone calls, twelve Christmases without cards, too many missed bedtimes to count; it was as if having a mother never happened. As if Elisabeth, and the liquid click of her lighter, the sweaters and T-shirts that slipped off her shoulder when she giggled, the flirtatious uptilt in her voice that turned her sentences into questions, had never existed at all.
After a while Lila stopped waiting. After a while it sunk in. Hope turned to numbness turned to disbelief—a coating that had grown so deep and crusty Lila could etch her name in it.
There was a game Lila used to play with herself: Had She Been Less of a Mother. Had Elisabeth been, say, a forensic accountant instead of an artist, would the absence of her clay-softened palm on Lila’s cheek have stung quite so much? If her voice hadn’t been rendered slightly rutted by cigarettes, would her bedtime lullabies have been quite so hypnotic? And what about her impossibly tiny ears? Had they been large and lumpy, would it have been less magical when she tucked that halo of hair behind them and leaned closer to hear what Lila had to say?
The answer was always the same. To have a mother like Elisabeth, and then lose her—not because she was struck by a car or swept out to sea by a dangerous current, but because she wasn’t sufficiently enamored by you to hang around—it left a hole in who you were. You became one of those people who radiated worthlessness. You became a living, breathing, walking—and in Lila’s case, drawing, painting, getting naked—tragedy.
But that didn’t mean Lichty, or anyone else, for that matter, was allowed to notice.
There was a flash of movement on a driveway up ahead. Lila slowed and feigned interest in her boots. Danica Seldin was climbing out of her Alfa Romeo convertible and gathering a few shopping bags from behind her seat, her glossy white ponytail falling forward. Typical Danica, all fit and beach ready in Lycra shorts, a tight white T-shirt, and flip-flops.
They’d started going to school together when Lila and Victor first moved in. Before her mother’s rejection had wormed its way into her flesh, rendering her so broken that her cracks scared off the other children, Lila had looked to Dani as a possible replacement for her best friend back in Toronto. Dani had worn hand-knotted string bracelets on one tanned ankle and a faded navy T-shirt that read CRAIG’S SURF SHACK in cracked letters across the chest. Her teeth were so white they could have been made of sugar, and the other kids crowded around her on the first day of school because her dad, Craig Seldin, had won a skateboarding competition Labor Day weekend and had been interviewed on TV.
Even to the newcomer with the fledgling name, it was clear Dani was the school’s reigning goddess and all the other kids followed her into class with the aim of sitting as close to her as possible. But the teacher had other ideas and assigned Lila the coveted seat next to Dani, then asked her to stand up and tell the other students where she was from.
You’re not from Canada, Victor had informed her the night prior—the first of many “lessons” he would teach her. “Americans,” he explained, “love other Americans. They never fully accept northerners as one of them. If you really want to fit in, you’ll tell the kids you’re from Seattle.”
So, tugging on her freshly cut bangs, she did. Turned out Victor’s advice worked. At recess, Dani sidled up to her and told her there was a famous skate park in Seattle. Said she was lucky to come from such a place and wondered if Lila had a skateboard. When Lila told her no, Dani offered to teach her to long board on the weekend. Lila didn’t know or care what a long board was—she had a friend.
Or so she thought. On Saturday morning, when she was preparing to go to her new buddy’s by scrubbing her navy T-shirt against a rock so it would look as distressed as Dani’s, Victor came out of the house, sat down beside her on the porch steps, and informed her it wasn’t safe to go off to the home of a strange family. Anything could happen. This wasn’t Toronto, he explained. This was America, and people had guns. In spite of his daughter’s insistence that Dani’s parents were neither armed nor dangerous, Victor said they couldn’t know for sure. He said it was best not to get too chummy because guns and molester-type habits wouldn’t be spread out on the dining-room table for her to examine. No, he said. She could see her new friends at school and that was enough.
Lila begged to be allowed at least to run to Dani’s house and explain lest the girl think she was being stood up. But Victor said there was no time. He was taking her to Universal Studios and wanted to get there before the lines got too long and the day grew too hot.
On Monday, she raced up to Dani at school to explain her father wouldn’t let her go, but the damage was already done. Dani, who had likely not experienced much in the way of rejection, refused to acknowledge Lila’s existence. And so, living in California became a never-ending string of paranoid declarations, arrested friendships, and conciliatory family outings.
Now, with arms full, Dani caught sight of Lila and bumped the car door shut with her hip. She glanced quickly, hopefully, toward the house, before conceding that escape was not an option and forcing a smile. “Hi, Lila.”
Lila wanted to slap her. “Hey. Haven’t seen you in, well, forever.” She felt herself square her shoulders in an effort to appear more substantial. Less flimsy.
“You look good,” said Dani.
Dani’s older brother, a surfer, had surfaced from the house, wearing nothing but faded plaid shorts, blond chest hair, and a leather necklace. Kyle pulled a couple of heavy paper bags from the trunk. They chinked as if filled with booze. Grinning, he reprimanded his sister. “Lila doesn’t look good. She looks great.” He winked, then trotted back up to the house.
The compliment unnerved Lila and s
he chose to ignore it. “So what are you up to these days, Dani? Running your dad’s surf shop?”
“Nah, that’s more Kyle’s thing. I’m up at Pepperdine studying sports psychology.”
“Wow.” Of course Dani was in college. What kind of twenty-year-old wasn’t in college? “You’ll be Dr. Seldin.”
“It’ll be Dr. McAllister. Remember Mark McAllister from high school?” Dani held up one hand and flashed a modest diamond ring. “We just got engaged.”
Lila examined it. “Pretty.”
“Mark’s at Pepperdine too.”
“Nice.”
“What about you? Where do you go?”
Nowhere.
I go nowhere.
Correction—today I went somewhere. Didn’t work out because I’m too broken for my own good. So tomorrow I’ll get back to my intensive program of going nowhere.
“I’ve been taking a bit of time off to figure things out. Working on my painting and stuff.”
Dani’s discomfort was visible. How embarrassing to have asked such a nonachiever where she goes to school. It was the equivalent of asking the fat lady at the grocery store when she was due. Dani flashed a patronizing smile. “Good for you.”
Kyle was back. “We’re having a party.” He pulled two cases of beer from the trunk and turned to face Lila. She felt his glance roam over her legs. “You should come hang out.”
Dani laughed. “Lila Mack doesn’t lower herself to attend lame-o parties, Kyle. She’s the tormented artiste, right Lila?”
Lila didn’t answer, stuck, as always, between being offended and flattered by this reputation her peers had bestowed upon her.
“Come on, Lila,” said Kyle. “I’ll make sure you have a good time.”
Kyle was attractive. Not many women would argue. To imagine spending time anywhere near such a male was to have a tingle shoot from Achilles tendon straight up the center of your spine. Even Lila wasn’t immune to the chemical reaction. Yet she backed away. “Thanks. But I have this thing to go to. With my dad.”
Dani marched—rubber shoes slapping against her heels—toward the ivy-tangled wooden gate that led up to the brick cottage. “Okay. Good luck with…what you’re doing.” With a sorrowful look back at Lila’s legs, Kyle fell in line behind his sister.
IF THE NEIGHBORING Hollywood Hills homes, many of them suspended on stilts as thin as uncooked spaghettini, had ever taken notice of the wooden house squatting at their knees, they didn’t let on. Maybe the primitive carpentry unsettled them, reminded them that they too, but for the grace of a few million dollars, might have wound up with window frames that weren’t square, carpenter ants that gnawed on their tibias, and indoor paneling that reeked of unwashed sheets. Or it could be that they kept their noses up to prove they actually do have a decent view of the Pacific. If the weather was clear and the air quality tolerable.
The Macks’ two-bedroom cabin had no such panorama. Whoever had built it, some eighty years prior, either required nothing more than a place to hang his rifle during hunting season, or had an aversion to glorious vistas, prompting him—or her—to position all the windows facing directly into the hilltop. The structure seemed convinced, like a young boy hiding behind his mother’s skirt, that by burying its face in dead grasses and exposed Eucalyptus roots, it was completely hidden from view.
Lila couldn’t have loved it more.
She tugged open the front door. “Dad?”
“Lila? That you?”
There he was in a kitchen chair in his blue suit, rapping his fist against the tabletop and staring out the window. In front of him was a box of donuts with greasy splotches on the lid. Lila flipped open the lid and pulled one out. “Soggy. Were they sitting in your car all day?”
He snapped the lid shut and sat back in his seat, obviously worked up about something. “You’re not going to believe it.”
“Believe what?”
Standing up, grim faced, Victor buttoned up his suit jacket, then smoothed his hair and motioned for her to follow him outside, his polished brogues lapping softly against the brick floor as he marched, toes pointed outward and knees slanted in.
“What? Where are we going?”
“You’ll see.” He started up the cement steps that led to the road.
“Why all the secrecy?”
“You’ll see.”
After trotting up the rest of the steps, he stomped across the gravel parking pad to where a white Prius sat tucked close to his beloved car. With eyes averted as if it were simply too painful to look, he waved toward the driver’sside door. “Did you ever?”
The parking pad was built too wide; an open invitation for neighbors and their visitors to squeeze their cars right next to her father’s 240Z. This car was his most beloved possession, and the tiniest ding or scratch inflicted by a careless driver drove him to madness. As long as she could remember, no matter what the weather, he’d parked in the very farthest corner of the lot at the mall, in the spot even the mall designers probably mocked. Not only that, but he always positioned the car on a diagonal, lest anyone intrepid enough to join them out in the badlands considered parking nearby.
It wasn’t a good time for Victor’s invisible car drama. She itched and crawled and ached to stand under a scalding hot shower and cleanse her skin of the afternoon’s humiliation. Instead, she peered closer to where he was pointing, to a spot just to the left of the door handle. “What am I looking for?”
“This. See this?”
“That speck?”
“White paint. From the Prius. I’ve calculated the trajectory of its passenger door. And if you look closely, you’ll see chipped paint on the edge of the Pruis’s door—exactly the same height where it struck mine. And it’s much bigger than a speck.”
“You need to stop obsessing and come back inside.”
He leaned over at the waist and ran a finger along the side of the car. “Jesus. The metal is damaged. Dented right in! It’ll have to be punched out, buffed, probably even painted.” He began scrubbing at the car door with the heel of his hand, his jacket sleeve brushing against the paint.
“Dad!” She reached out to stop him. “Your jacket.”
He examined his now grimy cuff. “It’s not too bad. The cleaner should be able to get it out, don’t you think?”
“Hopefully, but you should be careful with it. It’s your leading-man suit, remember?”
It was twelve years ago, a short while after they’d arrived in California. They were late for a movie in West-wood—Beethoven—to be followed by burgers and shakes at Hamburger Hamlet. Victor was not yet familiar with Los Angeles and had parked the Datsun—in its more pristine, prespecked days—too far away and, with only ten minutes to spare before the film began, he had taken hold of his daughter’s hand and begun to jog.
Even through the eyes of an eight-year-old, Victor looked overdressed, marching flat-footed the way he did along the city streets on a Saturday, dressed in his impeccably cut navy suit and white shirt, with jacket tails and chartreuse tie flapping behind him as he rushed. But Victor was Victor—ever the preener. No occasion was too casual to risk being underdressed. Besides, he’d lost weight from jogging through the hills and was thrilled he could fit into the indigo Hugo Boss he hadn’t worn in years. It played up his blue eyes, his brand-new California tan.
He’d slowed down at an intersection, unsure if they were headed in the right direction. As they waited for the light to change, a couple dressed in matching pastel T-shirts, carrying maps and cameras, stopped and whispered to each other with great excitement. They moved closer and the husband said to Victor, “I know you.”
Lila would never forget the way her father’s hand squeezed hers, tighter than ever before. Her knuckles pinched into one another painfully and she tried to pull away, but couldn’t. “We’re in a hurry,” Victor said curtly.
The wife, a heavily built woman with short, umbrella-shaped hair, said, “You were in that movie. Pretty Woman.”
They’d thoug
ht him a film star. From that moment forward, he and Lila had joked about the suit, calling it his leading-man suit.
It wasn’t until the couple had toddled off in a haze of disappointment that Lila had asked, “What about Beethoven?”
“I’m trying to find the theater.”
“Are we lost?” Lila had asked.
“We most certainly are.”
“How lost?”
He looked up at the hills, then across town in the direction of the Pacific, before staring up at the sky. He squinted as a snarl of dark clouds crept in front of the sun, not quite blocking out the light. The look on his face was one Lila would never forget: horror and relief. Guilt and sorrow. He bent over to pick her up and started marching in the opposite direction. “Wonderfully and terribly lost.”
NOW, STANDING ON the parking pad in his desecrated suit, Victor nodded. “I remember.”
“Come. Let’s head back inside and I’ll pour you a nice drink.”
He smiled, reached for her hand, and clasped his leathery fingers around it. Another father might pull his daughter near, wrap his arms around her, and mumble loving words into her hair. Not Victor. Physical closeness had never been listed in his emotional catalog. The man loved her, she had no doubt about it, but his emotions overwhelmed him. Embarrassed him. He patted her hand, then dropped it.
With her father waiting in the living room, Lila wandered into the kitchen, a long galley boasting plywood cupboards with red plastic knobs and matching red tiles on counters and walls. The rust stain in the big white sink paid homage to a tap that hadn’t stopped dripping since they moved in, and a few of the floor bricks were cracked so deeply it seemed as if weeds might burst through at any minute. She loved the cabin’s unrefined feel. From the moment they’d first set eyes on it, it was that kind of house. Inside out. Backward. Askew. A favorite T-shirt you pulled on in the dark.
She reached for a handful of ice cubes, dropped them into her father’s favorite glass, and drained what was left of the Balvenie Doublewood over the ice. With nothing but about a half inch of single malt scotch in the bottom of the glass, she looked around the room for another scotch to top it off with. There was really no choice. The only remaining scotch in the pantry was the watery-looking Dewar’s. It would have to do.