by Tish Cohen
“It was the name he wanted to give you if you’d been a boy. Did he tell you that?”
“No.”
“I never thought of it. Not once in twelve years.”
Lila couldn’t resist. “If you’d called I’d have told you.”
Elisabeth turned away, dabbed at her eyes with the tissue. After a moment, she turned back, more composed. “So, Miss Lila Mack, where’s the front door?”
Lila pointed to the other side of the cabin. “Are you—do you want to come in?” She glanced down at the plaid curtain flapping through the open kitchen window. “Dad’s home early, I think. His car’s here.”
“No.” Elisabeth pressed another kiss to her cheek. “And I don’t want you to tell him I’m here. Not yet, okay?”
Lila shrugged.
“We’ll meet in the morning like we talked about. After that, you can tell your dad.”
“Okay.”
“And, sweetheart, there’s no pressure. You can call me whatever you want. Mum, like you used to. Or Elisabeth. It’s been so long and I realize you’re feeling quite shocked right now.”
Lila half laughed. “Just a bit.”
“Then why don’t you call me Elisabeth for now? Then, later, who knows?”
“All right. Elisabeth.”
“Your head will be much clearer after a good night’s sleep.” Her mother pulled her close again. “I’ve spent every moment of every day loving you. You just remember that.”
Her mother had loved her?
Near impossible to fathom. One didn’t cut off all ties with a person they’d spent every goddamn day loving.
How could the woman stand here and lie to her face?
Elisabeth climbed back into her car, her face almost level with her daughter’s knees now. She reached for Lila’s hand and gave it a squeeze. “You won’t disappear will you?”
“Why would I do that?”
Elisabeth smiled sadly and whispered, “I’ll see you in the morning.”
And just like that her mother was gone. They would reconvene the next day over coffee and toast in a sidewalk café, blinking out the rosy morning light with grapefruit and strawberry jelly. Eighteen percent cream between them to help if things got weird. Lila would keep her thoughts focused this time. Try to keep her mind off the bits of trash skittering by on the street—and whether beige was such a great choice for the nearly new cowboy boots she’d bought the other day as it looked too much like fresh canvas and might just fall victim to inadvertent doodling—and firmly attuned to the situation.
There’s a thing that happens to a child who grows up thinking her mother doesn’t want her. That child can’t help but hold this knowledge like a cavity way at the back of her mouth. It’s ugly and tastes bad and convinces her she is unlovable to the core. For who could fall for someone whose own mother can’t stick around? But instead of turning against her mother, the child reveres her.
After all, this mother is nothing if not discerning.
There might be one day in high school, early on in twelfth grade, perhaps, when the English teacher is away and the substitute turns on one of those TVs on the tall rickety stands so the class can watch the Angels game. The girl with the rotting tooth might sit up a little taller when she recognizes the bird logo on the opponents’ chests. It’s the Toronto Blue Jays and they’re playing at home. In Toronto. The child can’t help but scan the faces in the crowd, nor can she help holding her breath when the camera settles, for just a moment, on the reddish-haired woman holding a hot dog with mustard in one hand—even though the mother despised mustard and, the child is fairly certain, never watched baseball.
Look, the child might say to the class. That’s my mother. The kids roll their eyes until the girl insists it’s where she comes from. That Toronto is her home team and that her mother is a fan. That part is a lie, but she’s already in so deep it seems necessary. The girl then refuses to take her eyes off the game, marveling the whole time about the minuscule odds of such a sighting. The class marvels as well, which makes the girl feel important. There is also a feeling of justification. Of course her mother doesn’t have time to contact her. She is busy. She is on television! There must be dozens of home games over the course of a year, repeating themselves year in, year out.
In bed that night, alone in the dark, the girl knows she was wrong. But reliving the sighting is so delicious that she decides to languish in it until she falls asleep. And for a few more years after that.
Nine
It started with words going missing. Victor would be sitting across from a client and would suddenly lose the word “shipment.” But not in the same way as other slips of the tongue, where you could search your mind, wait a moment or two, and welcome the word back into your mouth with a blush and a smile. This was different. Shipment. As if the word, maybe even its meaning, had never existed for him at all.
He’d driven straight home and parked the car, oddly more shaken by his ill-timed mental lapse than by the breakdown of his career. No, that wasn’t quite right. More that his temporary inability to reason confirmed what Siniwick had, apparently, suspected for some time: that Victor was crumbling apart.
The sky was drooping with a heavy cloud cover that offered the air below a reprieve from the relentless sun. Probably wouldn’t last. Before long, the cloud would dissipate and the heat would once again rush through as if an oven door had been opened. Victor marched toward a clump of bougainvillea rioting up the stem of a basketball hoop that backed onto a ditch. Idiotic place for a hoop, Victor thought. Every missed shot meant the ball would tumble down a gulley to the cul-de-sac about five hundred feet below. Though, he supposed, any child learning the game under such exhausting conditions would develop an accurate shot mighty quick.
Victor would get up early tomorrow to prepare cover letters and résumés to send to every major medical laboratory, medical supplies outfit, and retirement center in the greater Los Angeles area, none of whom he expected to hear back from. It was his age. Might as well have been emblazoned across the top of his bio—Aging fast! Not a day younger than fifty-three!—complete with a high-resolution photo of his creased face. Who could miss the obvious? He graduated college in 1978.
He could just hear the responses. We’re not looking to add to our sales team right now. It’s a tight economy. We’ll keep your résumé on file and give you a call should our needs change.
He thought about setting out to see Gen again. But the crosstown drive spooked him. If he, a man who had long considered himself a highly skilled driver, was capable of losing his senses in the middle of a simple turn at a simple intersection, anything could happen. So what was he to do? Call her up and ask her out, inform her she’d have to pick him up because driving over to her place gave him the willies? Out of the question. He’d have to come up with a better way.
He continued on with nothing much to look at but scorched brown bushes and a yellow sign warning of even more twists in the road. After a while, he veered down a freshly paved street to his right. If nothing else, the tarmac was softer beneath his dusty brogues.
A few minutes later, he reached an oversize stop sign at a three-way intersection. A silver Nissan 350Z, the pricy modern evolution of his own 240Z, pulled up alongside him and the passenger-side window rolled itself down. The young man behind the wheel, looking purposeful and corporate in a gray suit and close-cropped hair, leaned toward him. “You wouldn’t happen to know the quickest way to Mulholland Drive, would you?”
“Nice car.”
The man glanced at his clock. “Thanks.”
“What kind of mileage do you get with these new ones?”
“I’m running a bit late. If you could point me toward Mulholland…?”
Everyone was in a hurry. Victor was going to miss being in a hurry. If he’d known it was a temporary state, that it would skitter away from him before he was done with it, he’d have had a bit more respect. Not wasted time bitching and groaning about traffic and meetings that ran late
and clients who made outrageous demands on his time. It was the hurry that made you important. It was proof that you were needed somewhere. By someone. Proof that you weren’t starting to disintegrate.
Then again, at this moment, here was someone needing his help as he stood, dusty and sad, in the gravel. Pride shot through Victor’s veins like epinephrine. He tugged up his pants and squinted at the street sign, which only revealed the name of one of the roads, Rykert Canyon. He wasn’t about to let this moment pass too quickly. Glancing down at the young man, Victor said, “What sort of work do you do?”
“Financial planner.”
Victor smiled. “Ah. I’m in sales. Or was. Though it wasn’t money I sold, more like Vacutainers and surgical masks to hospitals and doctors.”
The guy looked interested in something other than his clock for the first time. “So you’re in a period of adjustment?”
Victor reached up to smooth his hair. “I’m open, yes. You could say that. If the right opportunity presents itself.” He wouldn’t mind selling financial products. Sure as hell would be easier on the back than lugging around cartons of disassembled human skeletons. Perhaps things might turn out all right after all. Maybe with his experience he was more employable than he gave himself credit for.
The guy pulled out a card and handed it to Victor. WEST COAST INVESTMENTS, INC., MATTHEW NG, INVESTMENT PLANNER. “Maybe after my appointment, we can chat.”
“Certainly. I could make some time this afternoon.” Victor thumbed the card, imagining his own name on the front. Investment planner. Had a certain impressive ring to it. “I’ll give you a call in about an hour and a half. That sound okay?”
“Sure. And in the meantime, check out the Web site, WCI.org.”
“Good idea. Never hurts to be prepared.”
“Read up on our Senior Advantage line of products. I’m advising all my aging clients to stay out of high-risk investments and I’ll tell you the same.”
Victor stared at him, blinking as reality settled over his mind like a film of canyon silt. Matthew Ng had no interest in hiring him. He wanted to sell him investments for the aged. Saw Victor as a man wrapping up his life, with no greater goal than making sure he has sufficient cash to pay for orthopedic socks, maybe even an electric scooter. So stupid to think he was looking to hire a balding wanderer with sand on his shoes and sweat on his brow.
Outrage at Siniwick, at this cool financial planner, at the goddamned hazy rules for left turns at traffic lights, and most of all at life for being so easily charmed by his ex, churned in Victor’s belly and rose up his chest like bubbling, belching, burning lava. To top it off, he couldn’t remember the name of this person staring up at him.
“So,” said the boy with no name, “how about those directions to Mulholland?”
Victor leaned his forearms on the passenger-side door. “You won’t get anywhere fast on Mulholland.”
“Why’s that?”
“Fucktard of a road bends and twists itself around so tight, it eats breakfast out of its own asshole.”
As the car roared away, a cloud of dust scrabbled up Victor’s Italian wool pants, and he heard the word “prick.”
Matthew Ng! Victor stood up straight and smiled. Matthew Ng was his name.
SEPTEMBER 8, 1996
Two hours after the car stalled, Victor pulled onto his ex-wife’s narrow, leafy street in Cabbagetown and slowed to navigate past the parked cars lining the right side of the road. Things hadn’t gone well on the phone in the bar. Elisabeth had all but told him he was the cause of Delilah’s bad grades and theatrics. She’d insulted his parenting skills, his ridiculous attempt at a crosstown shortcut, even his choice of vehicle, declaring forty-one-year-olds didn’t drive around in vintage sports cars.
The tow truck driver hadn’t helped matters. He showed up an hour late without jumper cables, which was all Victor wound up needing. The guy flagged down a silver Lexus, its bald driver rushing home for Sunday-night dinner after a day on the golf course—poor soul attempting an ill-timed shortcut—and begged him for a jump-start, something Victor could have done himself hours before. That is, if he weren’t so worried about blowing up his child by connecting the wrong wires.
He pulled the car into the shared driveway of Elisabeth’s elegant house—a slender Victorian with bricks painted a gleaming white, rafters stained black to match the roof, and a front door done in high-gloss blue. From the street, the house appeared tidy and spare; it wasn’t until you stepped up onto the porch and were greeted by the metal aardvark statue painted in the colors of the desert and the enormous firefly made of coat hangers and the purple child’s handprints stamped all over the floorboards that you realized you were looking at the home of someone who appreciated whimsy. The light over the front door seemed to wink as he ducked his head to pass beneath the feathery red Japanese maples lining the verandah, Delilah sleepy in his arms.
Footsteps pounded against the floor inside the house, the front door flew open. Elisabeth stood taller in outrage, in the usual bare feet, undershirt with no bra, paint-splattered black leggings, hair streaming out from behind child-size ears. Sexy and animal, even in anger. Under the porch light, Victor could see deep vertical lines forming along her upper lip. If he’d been brave enough, or stupid enough, to point them out, Elisabeth would probably attribute these to him as well. She stabbed her cigarette into an ashtray on the radiator just behind the door and reached for her daughter, hauled her inside as though her ex had been dragging the child toward the mouth of a grizzly.
“Two and a half hours late, Victor,” she snapped, pressing Delilah’s head into her abdomen, back into the womb. “Two and a half hours. Do you know what I’ve been going through?”
“Sorry. There was an accident on the highway, so I took what turned out to be a terrible shortcut, and wouldn’t you know the car died over by the meat packing plant, where there is absolutely no cell reception and don’t get me started about the smell. The ground reeks of blood from the slaughter—”
He stopped. It wasn’t until now Victor noticed a few pseudoartsy types lounging on the sofas, all wearing grimy, wrinkled T-shirts to mark them as angst-ridden souls so tormented by their own brilliance they were unable to contemplate anything so banal as throwing a load into the wash; as poverty-stricken beings who navigated such dank and narrow passageways leading down from their garrets, it was impossible to stay clean. But most of all, as beings who were far too superior to give a damn, and if society didn’t like it, society could just suck it.
But Victor had been around Elisabeth’s friends long enough to know to look closer, past the smears of paint on the grimy cotton to the tiny embroidered polo player over the left breast. Or the expensive detail of ticking-stripe broadcloth affixed to the shirttail. These dedicated artists Elisabeth surrounded herself with didn’t live in garrets. They were mostly wealthy trust-fund babies from Forest Hill or Rosedale who called themselves artists, but spent most of their days lying around somebody’s living room smoking pot.
Typical Elisabeth. Invited anyone she pleased home to mingle with their daughter. Elisabeth’s standards were loose—she might have only known a man twenty-four hours but if she met him in an art gallery, if his khakis were covered in paint, if his shoes were Cole Haan, he was to be trusted.
And if history had proven nothing else, it had proven Elisabeth’s judgment to be dangerously lax.
“You’re entertaining again on a night you have Delilah?
But Elisabeth had already turned away. She watched, openmouthed, as her daughter staggered across the living room and, with impressive drunken drama, draped herself across an overstuffed armchair. The stoned-looking guests shot exhausted greetings to Delilah, who was strung out sideways in the chair and groaning.
“What’s wrong with her?” Elisabeth said. “Is she sick?”
“Is that a bong on the table?” Victor craned his neck to get a better look and the tubular apparatus vanished from view. “How long have you known these cha
racters?”
“I’ll thank you not to denigrate my friends.”
Delilah announced, “I’m drunk. Deak says I have backwash.”
“My eight-year-old daughter’s been drinking?” Elisabeth squeaked.
“It’s not what it sounds like,” said Victor. “We had to run into a bar to use the phone. It was a perfectly decent place, more of a restaurant really, one of those western-themed—”
“You took my child into a bar, let her get drunk, and you’re describing the cowboy theme?” asked Elisabeth, curling back her upper lip in disbelief. “Are you kidding me?”
Victor stepped onto the threshold and clapped at Delilah, pointed up the stairs. “You go off and get ready for bed, Mouse. Daddy loves you.”
“Don’t tell her what to do under my roof,” Elisabeth said, lighting another cigarette with shaking hands. “And don’t call my daughter Mouse.”
Delilah squeezed her eyes shut and pointed herself toward the stairs, feeling the air in front of her as if she were suffering from not only the deathly grip of backwash, but sudden-onset, alcohol-fueled blindness. “Night, Mister.”
“Look,” Victor said to Elisabeth, “this could have happened to anyone. I stopped someplace to use the phone and you know our girl. She likes to shock…”
Elisabeth backed him out of the house. “First of all, this is the second time she’s gotten into drink with you. She got into vodka at your house last year. And second,” she hissed, “she’s not our girl. She’s mine.”
“We’ll see about that.”
“What a joke—you going for joint custody right now. You think I won’t bring this up at the hearing? You think this is going to help your case?”
“That’s ridiculous! She didn’t even know it was an alcoholic drink. She just downed the dregs of someone else’s Coke and there happened to be rum in it. Don’t start up about this. She could just as easily have done it with you.”