I asked her if she knew about the Taylor boy. She said my father had threatened to kill him. The police said they’d have to prove damage. They hadn’t wanted to put me through that. They had settled on sending him away and watching me. I told her I hadn’t even remembered it until a few weeks ago. She laughed full out over Eric’s idea that Daddy had shoved him out of the plane over the ocean like a mafia guy. She said the wrath he was in, she wouldn’t be at all surprised if he had. It was good to hear her laugh over Daddy again. It was good to know about the wrath.
I asked her if she knew what Binky had kept from our father.
“She kept his office coat. The one embroidered with his name.”
“His white coat? Why?”
“I don’t know, Hannie, I never asked her. She didn’t know I knew.”
I knew why. Binky had her doctor’s coat, one way or another.
“She wanted to be a doctor, Mom.”
“I guess she did.”
“I’m glad you made soup that day.”
“Soup?”
“Yeah, you made soup that first day after they died. It was comforting to have that smell in the house.”
“It was all I could think to do.”
“I know. It was a good idea.”
I called Eric and told him she’d kept the coat. “Her dream coat,” I said. “I bet she would have worn it the first day.”
“Dr. Spring,” he said. “Does this shit ever end?”
“I don’t know. I don’t think so.”
“Me either. Take care.”
“You too,” I said. “And stop swearing. We’re starting to sound like a couple of Camp Pendleton Marines.”
“Fuck that.”
“Yeah, fuck that,” I hung up. That felt like the first decent good-bye all year.
I called Jon; it was stupid, but I told myself it was time to pack him up too. Whatever that meant. It rang and rang before a sleepy woman answered. I realized it was still early there. The phone got fumbled around a little and Jon got on. He sounded tense.
“Hi Jon, it’s Hannah. Sorry to disturb you. I wasn’t paying attention to the time. I’m just leaving for work here.”
“It’s okay. How are you?”
“I’m fine. I felt bad about just hanging up. I was upset. I know I didn’t sound very rational. It’s been a lot, but I don’t like that, the just hanging up. I wanted to say good-bye. I need to get to work.”
“I’ll call you later.”
“Don’t worry about it. I’m super busy now.”
“I’ll call you later.”
“It’s okay, it’s all fine. I just didn’t like that whole hanging up thing. I’ll be back in a year and we can catch up then. Tell Chana I’m still rooting for Cal Tech. Bye.”
Fuck that would have been better. I walked around on the stone floors. Some part of me hadn’t believed it. He really had moved on. Why had I called him? I was acting pathetic. I said the words about not knowing what was going on, but apparently even I didn’t believe me. Well I’d gotten what I deserved.
Maybe it was time to call my therapist and ask for a reminder about who I was. Or just confess to a massive relapse; that I’d tried to fit not one, but three, of the wrong men into my life over the holidays. Maybe I could live with her in lock-down clueless rehab until I left. My exploding heart set off shockwaves. I wondered just how long it would take for the time glue to dry and stick the broken pieces back together. It didn’t feel possible.
I hauled boxes up to my car. I had no will to drive to the studio and go through the motions, but I had told Margaret I’d be there. In our business, even with people as close as Margaret, you show up and act interested.
Margaret was on the phone when I arrived. She had a guy there setting up tables for me and moving things around. He helped me unload the car. Just being in motion in the familiar surroundings of a back lot helped. Margaret opened my boxes and pulled out treasures.
“This is great stuff,” her voice was muffled at the bottom of a carton. “I’d burn some incense to get us in the mood, but it would probably set off the sprinkler system.”
“I’ve been burning it at home, it’s a little shrill.” I must have sounded bird shrill myself; she looked at me over her glasses.
“How are you?” she asked. “Maybe you should have stayed home.”
“I can’t think of a time when I’ve been worse. Other than that, I’m fine.”
“You want to talk about it?”
“No. It feels like too much right now. I wouldn’t know where to start or how to stop. It feels like all I do is cry. I’m sick of me. It feels good to be here, to work.”
We unpacked the rest of the boxes and divided it up by topic. I had files of photographs, artwork, and artifacts, anything that might help us decode the zeitgeist of India circa 16th century.
We worked and made lists; we went to the commissary for lunch. We sat in the harsh winter sun with our pads and laid out an order for the work. We weren’t at a cold start; Margaret had already been working on the project for months. She wanted me to handle all the nighttime work. She was passing the really fatiguing work on to me as the younger member of the team. It was a vote of confidence. Our days went on like that for the next week. Work, lunch, sketching, planning, endless phone calls tracking down material in India while dealing with a 12-hour time difference. The production office was up and running over there. People were more than happy to stay up all night and take our calls.
Going out on location is different from personal travel; it’s like moving with an army. They’d provide all the support we needed so we could go into battle each day, then return to camp. We’d have runners and messengers and a general in our director. The only thing missing would be carrier pigeons. For all I knew about India, we’d have those too. Our camp would have Ed at the cook stove sipping gin.
I fell into a pattern. I swam laps in the morning, and then called Mother while it was still early. Some mornings she cried, but so far they were sober tears. I talked to Anna every few days. They were negotiating the household workload now that she was back in school. Their sex life had taken a turn to the wild, like New York in La Jolla. She’d never talked about their sex life before.
All of us had been roused from the going to work and making dinner trance of our lives. Death is like an earthquake, it reminds you to pay attention to life. Throw some extra shoes and a bottle of water in the trunk of the car, and get ready for it, for a while at least. Like everything else we try to prepare for, the day the earthquake comes the shoes have turned to stone and the water has leaked out and left a dried up stain.
I was up early on Saturday morning when Jon called. It was 5:00 a.m. in Hawaii. I couldn’t not answer.
“Hey, Jon. You leave before the kid woke up?”
“I didn’t want to miss you again. How are you?”
“Busy, we leave in a few weeks.”
“I want to see you before you go.”
“Don’t be ridiculous. I’m barely getting through the day.”
“I’m going to fly over.”
“Don’t come here. We don’t need that. I hate the whole talk it to death thing. That’s just code for you wanting me to apologize for something. I know all about that. I’m willing to make amends, but unless I’m completely crazy, I only inconvenienced you a few times. You seemed to have a good time; it was a fair trade. But seeing you, talking about it, it’s never going to happen. I’d rather go flog myself on Sunset Boulevard.”
“No apology. You know that wasn’t it.”
“What was it then?”
“It felt like a bomb had dropped, Hannah. I went from worrying that you were going to die because I took you to the waterfall, to hearing that story. I wanted to kill the guy. That’s all I was really thinking about. How to track him down and kill him for doing that to you. I got in that stupid place. I didn’t mean to be careless with you.”
“He didn’t do it alone and he sure didn’t do it to you.”
“I know, Jon. It took a while, but I got that part. I don’t appreciate you talking to me like I’m your daughter. I did my part. I cheated on him instead of just breaking up; I wanted it both ways. I let him talk about having children. We almost had a child.”
“You could have stopped that.”
“But that’s just it, I wouldn’t have, not without him agreeing. That would have felt dishonest. I realize now how incredibly stupid that would have been. I am so lucky. I don’t think I even liked him.”
“Then why won’t you see me?”
“Because I thought it was love with you. I’m so furious to be in this place and still so clueless that I can hardly stand it. You moved on and I need to do the same. I can’t be friends, not yet. I need time and space.”
“I haven’t moved on.“
“Jon, when a woman answers your phone in bed, you’ve moved on. I’ve never done that.”
“It didn’t mean what you think. It was nothing.”
“Why do men always refer to women as nothing? Do you tell her she’s nothing when you’re making love to her?”
“I’m not doing that. I have no idea why she answered the phone.”
“Not making love to her? She answered the phone. I don’t think she knows that, Jon. You sure had me fooled. Though to be fair, I just fooled myself. Even so, I wouldn’t have answered your phone. You so-called good guys are worse than the bar rats; you’re all voodoo spin. She probably thinks it means something.”
“She didn’t.”
“Really? Grandma back in town? You never told me about that. She had some serious wiles. Introducing me as Calypso, what insulting bullshit. You ate it up. And I sat there wide-eyed through your wading to dessert mumbo jumbo.”
“For christssake, Hannah, do you ever stop talking? It was none of your business. I’m never going to talk to you about that kind of thing. It’s history. It has nothing to do with us.”
“There is no us. Anyway, you’d tell me when you’re pissed.”
“If I was going to tell you when I’m pissed, I guarantee you, I’d be telling you right now.”
“It doesn’t matter. But tell me, Jon, how many men are going to refer to Chana Moon as nothing after she’s generous or naïve enough to share herself with them? Because she will, we all do. I don’t care how much you think you’ve got that covered. We’re just as interested as you are. That’s the truth that never gets spelled out. We just have so much more to lose. You still feel free, we just feel knocked up or used. I have to go.”
He didn’t say anything. I didn’t want to just hang up.
“I’m going to stop talking, Jon. Believe it or not, I’m sick of hearing my own voice. I’m sick of the whole thing. So do me a favor and just say good-bye. I don’t want to keep hanging up. It’s impolite.”
“I’m going to hang up but only because I’m too pissed to keep this up,” he said. “But I’m not going to say good-bye. You may be done talking, but I’m not.”
“Whatever,” I said. “Honestly, I don’t even know why you’re calling me. It’s going to be okay, you said so yourself. We’re both nice people. It was what it was. That’s all.”
We hung up without saying good-bye. I started feeling like I could breathe again. It almost felt like I was taking the first breath of my life. I was wrathful and weirdly calm, like the eye of a hurricane.
I don’t know why it was Jon, but he had gotten a maelstrom of pent up fury directed his way. I had no right to be so angry with him. We’d had a brief sex thing that I took to heart, right before I tried to bleed to death in his car. He’d helped me and it wasn’t even his problem. I wonder what had happened to the towel I sat on. Maybe I wasn’t quite as over the miscarriage as I thought. I thought about calling Steve, but that wasn’t it either. I was relieved to be spared paying for my dishonesty with him.
I was just mad at men. I’d lost count of the number of men at work I’d heard whine about being used for their meals and their money. There’s a cosmic difference between the outcomes of sticking your hand in a pocket versus in a pair of underpants, though maybe not in their minds. Only a shoulder licking? Who knows what that meant to the cocktail waitress? She could have been held down when she was nine, licked by a sick neighbor or abusive stepfather. She could have gone home from the bar that night feeling violated all over again and wept with helpless fury. Forty dollars just makes that worse.
Boing boing boing. My hurricane needed a name. Maybe it was Hurricane Clueless, or maybe Hurricane Finally Lost Her Fucking Mind, or maybe just Hurricane Had Enough.
TWELVE
I swam laps and had a shower and coffee before 9:00. The conversation with Jon was hamster wheeling through my mind. Until I’d said it, I hadn’t realized how naïve I’d been to buy his no wiles talk after seeing him with Candace. I could not wait to leave for India. The phone rang.
“Hi Mom, I was just going to call you.”
“Hi Sweetie, I thought maybe you could come down and spend the night so we can see each other before you go.”
“Tonight’s my only night. I’m going to be working straight through after this weekend. Does that work?”
“That’s great, I’ll fix dinner.”
I said I’d be down by early evening. I threw a few things in a bag and called Anna; we made a plan to meet in Del Mar in the morning for breakfast.
I ran to the market and bought a week’s worth of healthy food. I even bought a coconut; I have my own hammer. I stopped at Karin’s for a quick lunch. Oscar was just leaving to take the kids to a game. They both seemed okay, but Oscar wasn’t blue-black jazzy and Karin wasn’t all Chicago gum-cracking. They sounded overly polite with each other. They seemed older. Their lightness was gone.
“How are you two doing?” I asked.
“It’s smoothing out. I still don’t know if we’re going to end up flat lining. The kids are doing better in school; that’s our barometer at this point. I’ve taken a toe tag crime drama project in town. How about you?”
“Jon called this morning. He said the woman in his bed was nothing.”
“Yeah, they never are. How are you feeling? You all recovered?”
I caught her up on news.
The phone rang while I was unpacking groceries. I didn’t recognize the number. We had a lot of hunters and gatherers in the field since the project had gotten underway.
“Hi Hannah,” said Steve.
“Oh, I didn’t recognize the number.”
“I’m in New Mexico. I called Margaret this morning. I’m sorry about your sister and niece.”
“Thanks. You called Margaret?”
“Yeah. I wanted to know how you are and I didn’t think you’d take my call.”
“Well the number flew under my radar. I’m fine. Have you started yet?”
“Next week, everyone is arriving now. How’s your mother doing?”
“Okay so far. I’m just walking out the door. I’m going to see her a last time before we leave.”
“Would it be okay with you if I call her? Send flowers?”
“I guess. It’s not like you really knew her, but do what you want. Her name’s Jackie.”
“I know her name, Hannah. It was good to hear your voice.”
“Okay, I need to get on the road.”
“Have a great time in India,” he said. “Let’s have dinner when you get back.”
“Why would we do that?”
“I loved you, Hannah.”
“You had a strange way of showing it.”
”So did you.”
“We can talk when we both get back,” I said.
It was only 2:00 in the afternoon and the day was running away from me. I closed up and headed to San Diego. For the first time that I could remember, I was looking forward to seeing my mom. She c
an be one of the silliest people I know when she gets going. We’d always enjoyed each other’s sense of humor.
Traffic slowed then came to a full stop over an old mattress that had flown out of the back of someone’s truck. A dog cowered on it like it was riding a tattered magic carpet. People were stopped all over the road, trying to coax the snarling terrified dog to safety. My phone rang again, Steve.
“I can’t talk, I’m on the freeway.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“Tell you what?”
“About the baby. Your mother’s upset about losing a grandchild.”
“That’s infuriating. There was no grandchild. That’s just crazy. I had a miscarriage. I had no idea I was even pregnant. I should never have told her.”
“Hannah.”
“Hannah what? I can’t have this conversation on the freeway. You have no idea what it was like. I’ve never been through anything so painful in my life. I thought I would die.”
I hung up and turned off my phone. It felt fine to hang up on Steve. So she’d turned it into her very own lost grandchild drama. I guess some things might never change. I couldn’t believe she’d reverted to her self-absorbed suck so soon after Bettina and Amber died. I looked forward to screaming at her, while she was sober and would remember. That would be a first.
Someone finally got their belt around the dog’s muzzle and dragged it off the road. The truck driver picked up the mattress and threw it in the back. He drove off and left the dog behind. Bon voyage lucky dog.
I pulled into Mom’s driveway at dusk. A few lights were on. I used my key to unlock the door and called hello. No answer. I switched on some lights while I walked around calling for her. There was nothing going on in the kitchen except an empty wine glass. I got to the hall and saw one of her shoes, a few feet away was her second shoe. I followed her breadcrumbs and found her passed out cold on the floor of the den. What a familiar picture. I stood looking down at her. I didn’t feel like the helpless little girl who had done the same thing so many times before. I felt sad for her; but I was frustrated as hell that she’d managed to avoid hearing me scream about her lost grandchild bullshit.
Mary Ellen Courtney - Hannah Spring 01 - Wild Nights Page 20