Slipstream

by Leslie Larson

One, two, three.

  Everything stopped when he heard the voice: his heart, his blood, his breathing in and out. He was thrown for a loop, as if his heels flew up over his head, as if he flipped, two somersaults in the air. Landing, not sure where. His mother. But not his mother as she’d been the last time he saw her, not as she’d be now if she were still alive. His mother when she was young, the way he remembered her as a child.

  “Where are you?” she said.

  His heart sank. The voice was similar, but it wasn’t his mother. There was the same huskiness at the back of her throat, a reedy resonance that he hadn’t heard in any other voice. But it wasn’t her. For a minute he couldn’t talk. It was like he’d lost her all over again. The same pain as that week after she’d died, when he’d followed the sun around on the floor of his room, sitting in the square of light, eating dry cereal out of the box and drinking warm, flat Coke from a liter bottle.

  “You sound like my mother,” he said bleakly.

  “I don’t sound anything like mom. She’s from Philadelphia.”

  “Not your mom. My mom.”

  Were they in an argument already? Logan watched the crowd of people surge toward him, the sea of strangers tired from their flights.

  “Are you there?” his daughter asked.

  “Huh?” Logan forced his eyes to focus.

  “I said, ‘Are you there?’”

  Good question, Logan thought. Good question.

  11

  Jewell had just closed the door on the Avon Lady when the phone rang.

  “Who?” she said into the phone. “Who?”

  Some asshole playing a trick. Sitting there on the line breathing, beating off for all she knew. A dick, not saying anything. A psycho, not talking.

  “It’s me. Your father.”

  “Oh yeah. My ass.”

  She knew it was, though. No one else had that ripple in his voice, as if he were talking through a grin. Her stomach froze. Now she thought the worst: he was on the run, or trying to get out of the country, or he wanted something. Why else would he call?

  He chuckled. “You sound like your mother.”

  “What’s wrong?” she asked. “Where are you?”

  “Nothing’s wrong. Just thought I’d say hey. I’m here at the airport.”

  It was like he’d pushed a button and a soundtrack came on. Now she heard the echo of big space, the noise of a crowd, a page over a loudspeaker, the beep of a courtesy cart.

  “Where? What airport?”

  “Here. Here in L.A. I’m at LAX.”

  “Where are you going?” she shouted frantically. God, her family. You don’t talk to them in a couple of years, then you have a conversation like this. It was always crazy. It never made sense.

  “Nowhere, babe. I’m staying right here. I’m at the airport on a job. Picking someone up. Just waiting around.”

  His phone broke up, and for an instant Jewell hoped that she’d lost him, that the line was severed and he’d never call back.

  “Are you there?” she asked.

  There was a loud pop and his voice snapped back on. “So, how’re you doing? I finally tracked you down.”

  “How’d you get my number?”

  “I had one you sent me while I was away. I called it and the guy there gave me this number.”

  Jewell hesitated. Away. That was what he called being in jail, like it was a business trip or a vacation. The guy. He must have called Hasani, the guy she’d been living with before she fell for Celeste. It figured he’d give out her number to anyone who called.

  “Was that your guy?” Logan said when she didn’t answer. His voice was youthful. Your dad’s hot, her friends had told her the last time she’d seen him, in high school. He wasn’t much older than some of the guys her more adventurous friends were dating. They’d made eyes at him, giggled.

  “No, not really,” Jewell said. Last time she’d seen her father, she’d been doing the straight thing. She didn’t much feel like catching him up on the details of her life with Celeste. “I used to live there, that’s all.”

  “Well, he seemed like a nice guy.”

  That was her dad, always upbeat. Jewell clenched the phone. All the imaginary conversations she’d had with him, all the things she’d practiced saying, and now she felt tongue-tied. “Where are you living?” she managed to ask after a tense pause.

  “I’ve got a place downtown. Just temporary. I’m trying to get my act together so I can get settled. Find a nice place and put down a few roots. How about you? What’re you up to?”

  “I’m in school. UCLA.” A drop of cold sweat rolled down her side.

  “I know, I heard that from Tommy. I talked to him today. That’s just great. That’s really something. And what are you studying?”

  Jesus, was she really having this conversation with her father? It was like a job interview, or a blind date. She stared at the stuff on the dining-room table: the project she was working on, the heaps of mail, the bag the Avon Lady had dropped off for Celeste. She hoped all the ruckus didn’t wake up Rachel.

  “Architecture.” As if to prove it, she gestured toward the mess on the table. She had cotton mouth. It irked her that she wanted to impress him. “Urban design,” she added in an offhand way.

  “Architecture! You’re kidding, right? Man, I can’t believe it. Well, I’ll be damned.”

  You could hear the hipster in his voice, the jailbird. Jewell wished she could see him. He’d come and gone so often, she didn’t know how much of him she’d made up and how much was really him. She tried to remember why he’d been sent up the last time. Using, selling, or some kind of parole violation, she’d forgotten which. He always explained it away as a legal technicality that had caught him unfairly, a mistake in the system that had singled him out.

  “Are you doing okay?” she asked cautiously.

  He used to let her squeeze his hand with all her might, used to dare her to hurt him. She’d squeeze, dig her nails in, try to bend his fingers back. He’d just laugh into her eyes and ask her if that was the best she could do.

  “Oh yeah. I’m great, fine,” he said, like there was no reason for her to suspect otherwise. In the background a gong chimed and an amplified voice made an announcement. The connection broke up again, and a rushing silence washed over her like a wave. He was gone, dragged out to sea in the churn of the retreating static, nothing but foam and bubbles left behind.

  “You there?” he said, his voice back, but tiny and far away.

  She pictured him on the horizon, a stick figure. “Yes. Listen, this is crazy.” Before she could stop herself, she added, “Do you want to get together?”

  “Absolutely!” Static popped like water in hot fat. “Oh, hey,” he said. “Yeah, yeah, right away.”

  It took her a moment to realize he was talking to someone else. She heard another man’s voice, what sounded like a palm over the receiver.

  “Listen, babe,” Logan said to her, “I gotta go.”

  “Okay, good-bye,” she said, and slammed down the phone even though she knew he’d already hung up. She kicked the dining-room chair. God, she’d been stupid again! Every time he called she was like a fawning dog, happy to forget the past and come running. How many times did she have to fall for it? He never had a fucking care in his life. Just showed up whenever he felt like it, then disappeared for months and years until he cropped up out of nowhere again.

  She went into the kitchen, opened the refrigerator, and stood staring inside. Mr. Goodtime Charlie. Mr. Cheerful. She wondered why her father had bothered having kids—not just her but the four who came after her, alien creatures who shared half her blood. She’d probably seen them a grand total of twenty times in her whole life, but she thought of them now as she took out the peanut butter and ate a few spoonfuls straight out of the jar. There was Stephen, the nearsighted whiner he’d had with his second wife, a small, mousy woman Jewell supposed he married in a half-assed attempt to keep himself on the straight and narrow. That hadn’t w
orked. His next wife was a speed freak barely out of high school. Their kids, Heather and Tony, must be teenagers by now. Jewell hadn’t seen them in ages; they’d gone to live with their grandparents when Logan and their mother had gotten busted at the same time. Then there was the last one, a girl named Jamie whom Jewell had seen only once, when the kid was about a year old. Logan had shown up with her and a young, silent woman who Jewell assumed was the girl’s mother at Jewell’s high school graduation. “Meet your little sis,” Logan had said, passing her to Jewell. She was a beautiful kid, very calm. Jewell had carried her to a corner of the auditorium and stared into her face. “You’re in for it, kid, did you know that?” she’d asked the smiling baby.

  She screwed the lid back on the peanut butter, put it away, and drank from the faucet in the kitchen sink. You could say one thing about her father, he sure got around. For all Jewell knew, she had twenty more half brothers and sisters she’d never heard of. She was the favorite, though, she had to be. The first, the one who looked most like Logan, the one he’d had when he was young, before all the trouble started. The one he’d called on the phone.

  She wandered back into the dining room and looked at her half-built project—a project, she reminded herself, that was due in two weeks. She looked at the clock on the bookshelf: 6:10. Celeste’s meeting with Rachel’s teacher was at 4:30, so Celeste should be home soon.

  “You’ve got to get a grip on this,” Celeste had told her that morning during their argument.

  “On what?” Jewell said, as if she didn’t know.

  Jewell eased the staple out of the bag the Avon Lady had left. Inez Cullen, it said on the bill, a strange name for someone who looked Asian. Jewell looked down at the jumble of boxes and bottles. Your daughter? the nosy Avon Lady had asked, craning her neck to get a look into the bedroom where Rachel lay napping among the piles of laundry on the bed. She’d sniffed around the place like it was Sodom and Gomorrah while Jewell made out the check. Magenta fingernails and every hair in place, with a big cross around her neck.

  Jewell pawed through the lipstick, body lotion, powder, and face cream. God knew why Celeste had to buy so much for everybody: her millions of friends who seemed to pop up wherever she went, her sneaky-eyed sisters, her mother whom she talked to almost every day. Cousins and aunts and friends of the family. Not to mention her ex-girlfriend Dana, who was practically joined at Celeste’s hip. The thought of Celeste and Dana together, riding side by side in Dana’s car, or possibly discussing the outcome of the meeting with Rachel’s teacher in a café afterward, made the roots of Jewell’s teeth ache.

  Stop, she told herself. Enough already.

  She was folding the bag back exactly the way it had been and bending the staple into place when Rachel appeared in the doorway.

  Jewell jumped.

  “What’s that?” Rachel asked.

  The kid had a narrow face, widely spaced eyes, translucent skin, and copper hair that stood in a crest down the middle of her head. Jewell liked her. “You’re awake,” she said, guilty to be caught in the act of rifling through the bag.

  Rachel nodded. Her eyes were the same reddish brown as her hair. She wore only her underpants and a T-shirt decorated with owls, her favorite animal.

  “That lady woke me up,” she said, leaning against Jewell. She pointed at the Avon bag. “What’s that?”

  “That’s your mom’s. Aren’t you cold?”

  Rachel shook her head.

  “Are you hungry?”

  Rachel fixed Jewell with one of her extraterrestrial stares. Jewell wondered if she’d figured out where Jewell fit into this whole two-mom picture. If so, maybe she’d let Jewell in on the answer. Celeste and Dana had adopted Rachel after she’d spent her first year and a half in foster care. Jewell put down the Avon bag and hoisted Rachel onto her hip. She had the sudden desire to kidnap her, to pack a suitcase, climb in her car, and hit the road. She imagined living in a trailer in the desert with Rachel, watching her grow up as the two of them crisscrossed the country. She pictured Celeste in the supermarket, reaching for a carton of milk in the dairy section and seeing Jewell and Rachel’s photos side by side on the carton. Missing, location unknown.

  “Let’s dance,” Rachel said.

  “Not now. I’m working. I’ll make you a scrambled egg and you can eat here, while I work on my project. After that you can draw, okay? I’ll let you use my paper and pens. You can help me.”

  Rachel nodded.

  She understood Rachel better than Dana and Celeste did, Jewell thought as she broke an egg in a coffee mug and beat it with a fork. She’d practically grown up in other people’s houses herself. Her mother the space cadet and her father the lowlife had married when they were barely eighteen, so it was no wonder they weren’t exactly model parents. You can’t blame a person for being depressed, but ever since Jewell could remember, her mother had spent a hefty portion of time in her darkened bedroom, watching movies on the TV balanced on a little stand at the foot of the bed, or working out complicated star charts with the aid of a thick paperback. The folds of the blankets were lined with food wrappers, pencils and paper for her astrological predictions, magazines, body lotion, and long-overdue video rentals. So Jewell was pretty much on her own. It wasn’t that bad; in fact, she was the envy of the other kids. She could stay outside as late as she wanted, long after the others had been called inside. She could wear what she wanted, eat what she pleased, stay at whatever friend’s house she felt like without asking permission. “Honey, don’t you ever have to go home?” her best friend’s mother had asked when Jewell was in second grade. Friends’ families took care of her: fed her; put her to bed with their own children; took her to swimming lessons and softball; drove her to movies, picnics, the beach. In junior high, one friend’s mother—an executive in the recording industry—had even bought her school clothes. Jewell’s mother had a typically offbeat sense of what was acceptable to wear. Half the time she just pulled the bedspread off the bed when she got up and wore it like a sarong around the house or—sometimes—even to the store. But that had its advantages, too. Jewell had gotten away with wearing nothing but a vintage slip she picked up at the thrift store to high school one day, a camouflage jumpsuit from army surplus the next.

  “You want catsup?” Jewell asked as she lifted the egg onto a plate.

  Rachel nodded rapidly.

  Yep, her mom had been clueless in a lot of ways, Jewell reflected as she dripped polka dots of catsup on the egg the way Rachel liked it. Her father, too, for that matter. In fact, now that she thought about it, the three of them pretty much had their own separate lives straight from the get-go. Logan certainly didn’t know what to make of her mother’s funks, which had given him a good excuse to go off and live it up on his own. Although sometimes things had clicked—like the time a friend of her parents managed to score a house down in Baja, right at the end of a dirt road near a bay where the stingrays were so thick you had to wear sneakers in the water and drag your feet when you waded out, to scatter them out of the way. You could see them below the surface, rising up like petals when you got near, fluttering away, drifting down in another spot about ten feet ahead. In the morning you felt the heat even before you opened your eyes and heard the roosters crowing, close up and farther away, like echoes of each other. For once her parents seemed to be happy right where they were, smiling at each other across the room while she and the other kids tumbled around on the tile floor and the other parents lounged on big couches, peeling the shrimp they bought by the bucket down at the little dock and washing it down with long-necked bottles of cold, pale beer. At night it was so dark. Jewell had walked between her parents down to a circle of concrete where a band played and people danced, smoke rising from a bonfire into the black sky and children chasing each other in the shadows. Her parents had danced and danced, laughing, until the sweat poured off them. All the men—both the locals and the friends who’d come down from L.A.—wanted to cut in on Logan and dance with Jewell’s mothe
r. “Man, would you look at her,” Logan laughed, standing behind Jewell on the edge of the concrete as her mother followed every move of the slim, serious Mexican man who turned and twirled her. Jewell felt Logan’s hands on her shoulders, smelled his warm, beery breath as he bent down and whispered next to her ear. “Just look at her, will you?”

  “Okay, here you go,” Jewell said, setting the egg down on the dining-room table. But the times when things worked out in her family were few and far between. She pushed Rachel’s chair closer to the table. “Be careful, it’s hot. Blow on it first.”

  Rachel ate a few tiny bites and pointed her fork across the table at the project Jewell had been working on for months now. “Whassat?” she said.

  Rachel was the only one who was really interested in Jewell’s project. Jewell was embarrassingly pleased and eager to explain. “It’s a community housing plan,” she said, waving her Exacto knife over the scraps of balsa wood and foam core. “See, here’s where the people live, and here’s where they cook dinner. Here’s where they eat, all together. And when they’re done, they can go outside here and watch movies. See, outside. If it’s warm they show the movies right here on the side of the building. Get it?”

  Rachel squinted her eyes. You could tell she was really thinking about it.

  Jewell pointed to another building. “And they can sleep outside, too, if they want. See these balconies right outside the bedrooms? In the summer when it’s hot, your bed just rolls outside on tracks. What do you think about that?”

  Rachel chewed solemnly. She wasn’t the kind of kid who got things on her face when she ate. Jewell wondered about her mother, the one who had given birth to her. She was fourteen when Rachel was born, Celeste had told her. Jewell had gotten pregnant herself her first year in college. Making the decision to get an abortion took about two seconds.

  “Where do the children play?” Rachel asked.

  Jewell laughed. Children. Probably a word that uptight Dana had taught her. “Right here,” she said. “See, there’s a place in the middle with the buildings all around. That way no cars can hit them and their moms can watch them. They’re safe. And if one kid wants to come out and play, she’ll know the other kids are there waiting for her.”