by Jessica Raya
Copyright © 2017 by Jessica Raya
All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, or stored in a retrieval system, without the prior written consent of the publisher—or, in case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, a licence from the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency—is an infringement of the copyright law.
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Raya, Jessica, 1971–, author
Please proceed to the nearest exit / Jessica Raya.
ISBN 9780771073205 (bound)
I. Title.
PS8635.A9396P73 2014 C813′.6 C2013-903199-5
Ebook ISBN 9780771073212
Cover design: Jennifer Lum
Cover image: © CSA Images/B&W Engrave Ink Collection/Getty Images
The lyrics on this page are from “We’ve Only Just Begun,” words and music by Roger Nichols and Paul Williams. Copyright © 1970 IRVING MUSIC, INC. Copyright Renewed. All Rights Reserved Used by Permission. Reprinted by Permission of Hal Leonard LLC.
McClelland & Stewart,
a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited,
a Penguin Random House Company
www.penguinrandomhouse.ca
v4.1
a
For Julia
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraph
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Acknowledgements
Only fools, liars and charlatans predict earthquakes.
—Charles Richter
1
This will probably come as a surprise to many, but not once in all the time that I knew her did Carol Closter ask me if I believed in God. She simply assumed I did, the way I once assumed that everyone listened to the Carpenters. Which isn’t to say that I didn’t believe in God, only that I didn’t believe in Carol’s God. Back then, my God was a sort of Santa Claus, a kindly robed hippie who went around granting good grades and sweet-sixteen convertibles. But, like I said, in the two years that I knew her, Carol Closter never asked and I never offered. If I reached spiritual enlightenment by listening to “We’ve Only Just Begun” over and over until my mom pleaded with me to please, please, please stop before she threw herself off the roof, well, that was nobody’s business but mine. We’ve only just begun to live / white lace and promises. I’m sure the Bible has some catchy lines, but God’s no Karen and Richard. My dad’s favourite line: We’re all just one bad decision away from disaster. You won’t find it in a Carpenters song. That one was pure Jim Fisher.
“We’re all just one bad decision away from disaster.” This was the epilogue to every story about another poor sap who’d gotten himself maimed or blinded or worse. Jim Fisher sold insurance, and being a man who didn’t know how to talk to children, including his one and only daughter, he spoke to me as he would a client, spouting the facts of life, death, and dismemberment the way other men did baseball scores. Being a girl who didn’t know how to talk to men, especially her one and only father, I listened, my tender mind whirring to catalogue these catastrophes under Bad Things That Happen to Other People. I grew up knowing that more toddlers drowned in backyard pools like ours than in the canal that split our town in two. I knew my chances of choking on a hot dog or slipping in the tub. For years, I thought “stop, drop, and roll” was a game all families played. My mom thought this kind of talk would frighten me. I thought his knowledge of the world’s secret workings would keep us safe. So I kept my dolls mummified in bubble wrap and cut my hot dogs into bite-sized pieces and waited for my Barbie Dreamhouse life to take shape.
By the time I met Carol Closter I’d stopped worrying about the kinds of things you can insure yourself against. I was fourteen years old at the start of 1971, and as far as I could tell each new day was another chance to completely screw up my life in ways my dad couldn’t even imagine. What was a little earthquake or electrocution compared to the daily hazards of high school? Anyway, by then the man was living in a pool house. He was hardly in a position to be offering advice.
I used to blame Neil Armstrong. The night he walked on the moon, my family had camped in front of the television like the rest of the country. It was July 1969, and some of us still believed the stars had all the answers. Mom had bitten her Patti nails and wept quietly. She wasn’t one of those mothers who cried all the time. When Nixon was sworn into office, girls at school said their mothers had blubbered like babies. Mine had turned off the TV and gone to bed with a headache. My mom was from Canada and Canadians couldn’t vote. If my history textbooks were right, Canadians didn’t do much of anything. She probably cried on the night of the moon landing because she realized nobody from her country would ever step foot off this planet. My dad, on the other hand, was one hundred per cent American. He sat quietly gripping the arms of his favourite chair as if he was sitting up there in the Lunar Module between Buzz and Neil. When Old Glory was planted in Swiss cheese, Dad stood and saluted the set. “Well, how about that?” he said. “How about that.” Then he picked up a throw pillow and took his own earth-bound steps through the sliding doors. He spent the rest of the night outside on a lounge chair, gazing up at Neil’s moon. The next night he was there again, wrapped up in an old sleeping bag. By September, he’d claimed the thin mattress of the pool house cot. One small step for man, one giant leap for Jim Fisher.
In the weeks that followed, under cover of dark, Dad ferried his things quietly across the yard. He took his two favourite books: the latest edition of Morbidity & Mortality, which arrived at his office every December wrapped in plastic like someone’s warped idea of a Christmas present, and Natural Disasters for Insurance Sellers, a depressing doorstopper with the physical charm of a phone book. They were followed by a box of Cuban cigars and the misshapen clay ashtray I’d made in fifth grade. Next went his plaid dressing gown and clock radio. Inch by inch, Dad was planting his own flag. One morning I saw him shaving over the pool, the unreliable reflection his mirror, ropes of white foam falling into the water.
My mom said nothing of Dad’s migration. She preferred to express herself through the art of interior decorating. The less time he spent in our house, the less she liked it. Suddenly every chair and sconce offended. The brass chandelier clashed with the tweed sofa, the floral sofa with the plaid stair runner, and so on. Sprucing, she called it. “Just sprucing things up!” The neighbourhood women were in awe. “You could decorate professionally,” they told her. “You could be in one of those magazines.” But nothing satisfied her for long. Eventually she’d come home with a stack of paint chips. Our house was like Heraclitus’s river: you never stepped in the same room twice.
Of the bills, my dad only said, “Well, hell, Americans buy things.” This was nowhere more true than in Golden, California, a town built on the optimism of young families who fled the city for three-bedroom, two-car homes promising luxury for him and leisure for her. Dad had ordered our own white rancher over the phone, at a time when buying things you’d never laid eyes on seemed like a swell idea. Now the house was my mom’s domain, in body if
not in name, and he had the pool house, his own Lunar Module at the back of the yard. When I told my best friend Melanie D’Angelo about it, she said, “I guess your parents are as nuts as mine.” What else was there to say? The Fishers were like the D’Angelos were like everyone we knew. Looking too closely at your family was asking a question you didn’t really want the answer to.
My parents had met in Santa Barbara, where she was on exchange for a semester and he was selling life insurance door to door. My mom was the first woman in her family to go to college, but she wouldn’t be the first to finish. “That’s how things were. Half my friends were engaged, or engaged to be engaged, whatever that meant.” That was all she ever said about their courtship, not that I wanted to know. Like most parents I knew growing up, mine were not what you’d call happy. They didn’t fight like other parents, but probably only because they were rarely in the same room. There were the obligatory functions, dinners with clients, community fundraisers, but even seated side by side under long white tablecloths, my parents maintained their distance. At home, they danced around each other, bodies circling but never meeting, graceful as the sparrows that lived in our lemon trees. If hands accidentally met reaching for the coffee pot, apologies ping-ponged between them—sorry, sorry, as if everything was a mistake. It had been like this for as long as I could remember. Dad’s move to the pool house simply formalized their arrangement.
A few times a year, when the country club ordered complicated centrepieces and hired a band and life could be viewed through the bubbles in a champagne glass, there would be an extra appointment at the hair salon, a new dress for her, a freshly pressed suit for him. She would tell him he was handsome. He would put his hand around her waist and call her babe. For a few days after, they would be attentive to each other, flirtatious even. But within a week the curtain would be drawn and the delicate ballet would begin again. Sorry, sorry. These extravagant evenings were the tenterhooks on which their marriage hung.
That Valentine’s Day—V Day, as I’ve come to think of it—seemed no different from the others. I barely glanced up from the television as my parents said goodbye, drifting out in a haze of cigarette smoke and vodka-loosened smiles. “Don’t wait up,” Mom giggled. I didn’t.
When I woke the next morning and made my way, yawning, to the bathroom, I heard my mom’s bedroom door open. Dad crept out, dinner jacket slung over one shoulder, a red rose hanging limply from the lapel. He was carrying his black tasselled loafers like a birthday cake.
“Oh,” he said quietly. “Morning, sport.”
Around the time he moved into the pool house, Dad had started calling me sport, kiddo, champ. I guess he thought it made us sound like buddies. I thought it sounded like he couldn’t remember my name.
“Morning, Cap’n,” I said. “Nice shoes.”
He cleared his throat but didn’t say anything. Jim Fisher was from a generation of American men who didn’t say more than was necessary, men who invented Liquid Paper, network television, and the hydrogen bomb. He’d been to Korea, but he never talked about it, which is probably the only thing you can say about something like that. “Your father loves you very much,” Mom was always telling me, as if she’d married a deaf-mute. On the rare occasions when he hugged me, he came at me from the side, one-armed and by surprise. It had all the warmth of a noogie. Dad said having to shake hands all day was worse than mining coal—come five o’clock, he didn’t have anything left to give. You wouldn’t know it by looking at him, at that capable square head on those wide, straight shoulders, the steady brown eyes, the practical sideburns. Jim Fisher looked like he’d been born in a blazer. His salesman smile, when he turned it on, was a hundred watts of California sunshine.
He gave me one of those smiles now. “Okay,” he said and hurried away in his socks.
I took my time showering, giving Dad plenty of time to make a run for it. While I got dressed, I heard my mom shuffling down the hall, her groans like little curses. I grabbed my book bag and followed her to the kitchen.
Mom stood at the sink in her slip, waiting for her glass of Alka-Seltzer to stop fizzing. She’d fallen asleep in her makeup. A hair fall clung to the back of her head. If my dad was like the California sun, Elaine Fisher was like the sun-tanning lamp she kept in the garage. Having the misfortune to be born Canadian, she worked harder at being American than any American I knew. She read biographies of dead presidents, straightened up before the cleaning lady came, and could spend more time with a McCall’s magazine than I ever did with a textbook. But beneath the Miss Clairol blond was just a girl from Alberta who refused to wear girdles and couldn’t see the appeal of a gelatine mould. She drove her Buick Electra with her head tucked into her neck, squinting at the road as if unsure where she was and how the heck she’d got there.
“Is that what you’re wearing?” she said, finally noticing me.
“Is that what you’re wearing?” I said.
“Why? Where do I have to be?”
The toaster started smoking. She lifted the lever, pinched two pieces of hot toast between her fingers, and flung them at a plate. “There’s something wrong with that thing,” she said, as if we didn’t eat black toast most mornings. The only person I knew less skilled in a kitchen was me. Dad said we were the only two people on earth who could burn air.
As I scraped and buttered, Mom reached into the drawer where she kept her cigarettes and her calculator. She always had to convert recipes from four servings to three. For years she blamed her cooking on poor math skills. The cigarettes were in a small black enamel box along with her silver lighter. She coaxed a Salem from the pack, lit up, and inhaled extravagantly, as if to say, now this is breathing. I bit off a corner of charred bread. Now this is eating, I thought.
There was a pile of loose coupons in the open drawer. Mom reached in with her free hand and dug around until she found what she was looking for: the brochure our house had been ordered from. I used to look at that brochure all the time when I was little. Except for the baby brother, that was my family and our house. I don’t remember my first home, the Santa Barbara bachelor pad where we lived for a year before those student protesters killed a caretaker and Governor Reagan called in the National Guard. To me, my life began right there on page 12. I liked to imagine myself delivered in a giant box along with the terracotta tiles and self-cleaning oven. Later, I imagined Dad taking one look inside that box and saying, “What? I didn’t order this.” It’s not that I thought my dad didn’t love me. I just didn’t think it would have occurred to him that he had a choice in the matter.
“Did you see your father this morning?” Mom said, staring down at the brochure. “Did he say anything to you?”
“About what?”
Mom nodded slowly, as if she understood something. If she did, I wished she’d explain it to me.
I chewed the last bit of toast and swallowed. It stuck in my throat halfway down. There was a cup of black coffee on the table. Dad’s coffee. I swallowed again, preferring to scrape the toast down dry. Mom got a glass from the cupboard and filled it with milk. I drank it in one go. When I put the empty glass on the table, the cup of coffee was gone.
Mom handed me my bagged lunch. “We ran out of sandwich meat,” she said. “I got creative.”
“I’ll alert the school nurse.”
She half smiled, smoke streaming from the corner of her mouth. Then she put the brochure and the enamel box back in the drawer, and shut it a little harder than necessary. I wondered if she thought the same thing I used to—that without that baby brother, we would never be the kind of family you could use to sell things.
By the time I got to school, I’d missed homeroom and, according to Melanie, the most important moment of my entire life. She pulled me into the bathroom. Jamie Finley had asked someone to ask someone what my story was, she said, “for a friend.” Her eyebrows went up, or what was left of them. She’d started plucking recently.
“I have a story?”
“A friend, Robin
. A friend?” Melanie rolled her eyes. She did this all the time now that we were mature high school students. “Troy Gainer, Robin. Troy Gainer likes you!”
Troy Gainer was a junior and a jock, one of the guys on the swim team who had Nautilus machines in their garages and all the personality of a dead man’s float. Half the girls at Ronald Reagan High School would have thrown themselves on a landmine just to get a ride in his red Mustang. I knew this for a fact. They confessed it in bathrooms and whispered it in the halls. They wrote it in notes passed between desks, their cursive slanting dreamily, their lowercase i’s dotted with hearts. I would die to have him like me. Wouldn’t you die? I’d heard Melanie say it more than once. She thought Troy Gainer was a stone-cold fox. More importantly, he was popular. He was practically a god.
“Why don’t you look happy?” she said. “Do you know what this will do for our social life?”
“But Troy Gainer’s never even talked to me.”
“Of course not. Good-looking boys don’t have to make the first move. But remember how he smiled at you in the stairwell that time?”
“That was a month ago, and he was laughing, not smiling. I think I had toilet paper stuck to my shoe.”
Melanie gave me a teacher’s look, one I was all too familiar with. You can do better than this, it said. You’d better.
I ratcheted up the corners of my mouth. “Troy Gainer!”
Melanie turned to the mirror and slicked her smile with strawberry lip gloss. “Troy and Robin,” she sang, “sitting in a tree.”
A half-hour later I sat in social studies, doodling RF + TG over and over on a sheet of foolscap, hoping that if I wrote it enough times my hand could convince my brain that it was true. My stomach was getting in the way. We were learning about ancient Asian cultures and our teacher, Miss Blumberg, was wearing a red cheongsam with a chopstick speared through her bun. Much as I tried to concentrate on Troy Gainer and the long and beautiful life we’d have together, I kept thinking about egg rolls.