The Girls from Corona del Mar: A novel

by Rufi Thorpe

  But with every day he grew older, his body grew heavier, and the pressure on his joints increased. Every day he lived upped the amount of pain he was in. These days, he moaned almost constantly. She gave him the Tylenol, the highest doses she was allowed to give him, but she suspected he had long ago become resistant to the drug. She made his life a continual cycle of things that he loved: SpongeBob, playing cars (Lor moved the cars for him, driving them up and down his body and making the noises), walks around the housing complex, chocolate pudding (one of the few foods he loved enough to even try to eat). She tried to avoid or limit all things he did not like: baths, doctors, her being out of sight. But he was not happy. Sometimes he could not even bring himself to laugh when she made the elephant puppet sneeze, which was his favorite, his very favorite thing. He just smiled at her tiredly, as though to say: “I know you’re trying.” Yet, if she killed Zach, she had no doubt that she would be tried and convicted and sentenced to life in prison.

  If, on the other hand, she killed herself, she would merely be passing the buck, and Zach would go to people who would continue to foster him in his agony, his body itself like a torture chamber for the soul within it, only those people would not even know enough to weep, would not love him, would not suffer with him. He would then be utterly alone. Lorrie Ann could not imagine anything more horrible.

  If she were a good person, Lorrie Ann believed, she would kill Zach in the kindest way she knew of, which, she decided, would be to grind up OxyContin and feed it to him through his feeding tube, mixed into the formula, and then suffer the consequences. Wouldn’t life in prison be easier than this? Wouldn’t she feel better at least knowing that Zach was in heaven? Or, if there was no heaven, as she more and more suspected, knowing that Zach was at least not in any active pain?

  But she was scared. She was scared to do it, scared something would go wrong. What if she only half killed Zach and they had to go to the hospital and they found out and took Zach away? Then all would have been in vain. She couldn’t let that happen. But what if Zach needed more help dying? Could she really bring herself to put a pillow over his face? Could she press down? Even if he were moaning, were screaming, were making those noises that sometimes sounded so achingly close to “Mommy” that it sent shivers down her spine?

  She worried also that her mother or Arman would walk in on her in the act. Could she possibly make them understand? She suspected that by crossing a line like that, she might cause reality to buck and sway. No one would be able to see her and forgive her. She would be beyond the pale, living in a world entirely on her own.

  At my kitchen table, Lor went on, talking calmly, a steady stream of words, as tears simply ran and ran down her face. I had never seen anyone cry like that before: just the tears, without the sobbing. She didn’t even reach up to brush them away, and so they flowed down her chin, her neck, and wetted the neckline of her sundress.

  I felt sure then that no matter what happened, no matter what she told me, I would be able to take her side, to understand, to agree. I even felt at peace with the way she had fallen into taking Arman’s painkillers. Of course, I thought, of course. I understood completely.

  Dana, Lor went on to explain, was from another time, and she wasn’t afraid of cops. She didn’t have any native distrust of authority. In fact, she assumed that such people took positions of authority out of an innate goodness and desire to serve the community. In Dana’s world, people became prison guards out of Christian charity toward the inmates. Do you see? And so, upon being assigned a social worker, Dana set about trying to befriend the woman. She held nothing back, but was frank and scrupulously honest. It was this behavior, actually, that convinced the social worker that Dana was, indeed, quite mentally ill. No one except for crazy people reached out and squeezed a social worker’s hand after having served them tea and mint Milano cookies. No one volunteered so much highly personal information. And, of course, no one went on so about the genocide of the American Indian.

  Lor herself had a social worker because of Zach, but Mr. Kawabata seldom visited. Dana’s social worker was not a bad woman, Lor made sure to point out to me. She was a lesbian.

  “How do you know?” I asked.

  “She looked like a lesbian,” Lor said. “I don’t know. Maybe she wasn’t. Maybe she just looked like one.”

  Kerry McDonough, which was the social worker’s name, was not tall for a woman, but stocky, with short salt-and-pepper hair and a potbelly. Her skin was pink, as though she scrubbed it with steel wool, and her nose was so shiny you could see your reflection in it. She wore little oval glasses with black metal frames. Of course, since Dana really was a wonderful woman, even if she was crazy, McDonough got to like her, and Dana, being Dana, liked McDonough. The two of them established a rapport. Dana even began to call McDonough Dunny, which McDonough secretly liked.

  “Oh, Dunny! Come in, come in!” Dana would cry, clasping McDonough’s beefy hands in her own and leading McDonough back into the kitchen, where she would offer her muffins made of Bisquick or a cup of chili or whatever she happened to have on hand. McDonough, to her credit, managed to listen attentively to quite a bit of Dana’s rambling about the Native Americans. What a shame, though, that McDonough assumed Dana was making it all up. In fact, almost everything that Dana said was true.

  “No, Dunny, that first study everyone quotes was done by the government. In the only study ever done by independent researchers, they give a high and a low number. The low number is ten million. The high number is one hundred fourteen million.”

  “That’s quite a variance,” McDonough said.

  “I know. Well, no one was keeping very good count, were they? They didn’t think it was important. Can you imagine? But you see, it’s a much larger number than the Jewish Holocaust.”

  “Wow,” McDonough said. Not only did McDonough not believe 114 million Indians had been killed, she had a hard time believing there had ever even been that many Indians total. In point of fact, McDonough did not have any clear idea of exactly how many Jews had been killed in the Holocaust, so Dana’s argument was moot.

  And so it came to pass that one day when McDonough was over, Dana asked her for a favor. Lorrie Ann was out looking for work. In fact, she was interviewing at a gastropub that was set to open in the newly revitalized downtown of Santa Ana. She had expected the interview to take only an hour, including drive time, but when she arrived, there had been a line around the block: all young women, dressed in black, clutching résumés to their chests and chewing gum. She got in the line and she waited in it for two hours before she was allowed to interview. The most painful thing about it was not the boredom of the wait, but how alienated she felt from the other girls, who were all about ten years younger than she was. Instinctively, they ignored her as they made giggling small talk with one another. Lor felt frantic. She worried she wouldn’t be hired because she was too old, that she would be put out to pasture like a horse. She was only twenty-nine! But in waitress years, that was like being one hundred.

  Back at home, Dana was asking McDonough if she could possibly help Dana change Zach’s diaper. Uneasily, McDonough agreed. Changing the diapers of ten-year-old boys with cerebral palsy was not normally something she considered within her purview. But for Dana, she would have done just about anything. I’m not saying she had a crush on Lorrie Ann’s mother; we don’t even know if Dunny was truly a lesbian. But a lot of McDonough’s cases were depressing, and visiting Dana was not depressing. In fact, Dana’s love of the American Indian and of ceramic gnomes and of blue eyeliner struck McDonough as downright charming.

  And so it came to be that McDonough entered Zach’s room for the first time and saw the heaps of undone laundry, the dirty bedsheets that were flecked with spilled feeding-tube formula, and the drawn mini-blinds, which made the otherwise ordinary room seem sordid and dim. She helped lift Zach from his chair and get his sweatpants off, but when she and Dana undid his diaper, and wiped away the shit, McDonough saw the sores. She saw
that they were festering. She saw that his whole bottom was bruised from sitting all day. She saw that he was emaciated and his rib cage was showing. She saw that the area around his feeding tube was pink and inflamed. She saw what looked like a lesion on his testicles. It was enough to make her nauseated, and she had to let Dana do most of the work while she sat on the edge of the bed with her head between her knees.

  She got up only when Dana announced that Zach was ready to go back into his chair. McDonough didn’t think he should go back into the chair, but she didn’t know how to say this. She needed to call Child Protective Services. She would call as soon as she got out to her car and have them come over right away. For now, she would help Dana and do as she was asked.

  But as she was lifting him, she dislocated one of his legs. It popped right out of the hip socket, and suddenly the room was filled with the pure siren of Zach’s agony, screams like McDonough had never heard in all her life.

  So McDonough called 911.

  So McDonough and Dana and Zach went to the ER.

  So Child Protective Services became involved, and Zach never came home again.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  The Intervention

  “It was probably only because McDonough liked my mom so much that they didn’t press charges,” Lor said. All of her earlier giddiness was drained away. Her eyes were glassy and distant.

  “For what?” I asked, outraged.

  “For negligence. Neglect.”

  “That’s insane. What were you supposed to do? So then what happened?”

  “Nothing happened,” Lor said. “He’s in foster care. A group home. Basically a nursing home.”

  I sat at the table with her then, just watching. She was leaning with her forearms on the tabletop, her shoulders hunched up around her ears as she squeezed at one of her cuticles. She had bitten it until it bled and now was trying to assess the damage. She blinked several times, as though her eyeballs were drying out. I got the sense that she was barely present.

  “Did you appeal?”

  Lor shook her head, still looking only at her bleeding cuticle.

  “Well, that’s the first thing we can do,” I said. “Listen, I was going to head back to the States anyway. I could come stay in California and help you get this all worked out.” Of course this trip to the States was being fabricated by me as I spoke the words. It did seem reasonable, in a way, to go back to the States for the abortion. It might be nice to have Lorrie Ann as an excuse. Just in case I decided not to tell Franklin. Just in case I needed, for some reason, to keep it to myself.

  “I don’t want to appeal,” Lorrie Ann said, very softly.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I can’t. I can’t do it anymore. I can’t go back to living that way.”

  “Of course. We’ll get you proper help. Maybe an in-home nurse or something.”

  “Mia,” Lorrie Ann said.

  “We can do this,” I insisted.

  “No.”

  She looked up at me with eyes so empty and blue, I almost dropped my teacup. I felt immediate shame. I was like a child playing with a doll, trying to prop Lorrie Ann up at the tea party that was her ruined life, just so that I could avoid the pain of having to admit that it was ruined—and that Lorrie Ann was nothing more than a limp doll, a corpse upon the wall.

  As it turned out, what happened was that Lorrie Ann had come home to the note from Dana telling Lor they were at the Hoag ER. The note did not say exactly why they had gone to the ER, but Lor knew that Dana had had her license suspended due to her brain injury and that, if they had gone to the ER, they had gone in an ambulance. (Bobby had taken over Dana’s old Accord.) Because of this, and the fact that Lor knew Dana couldn’t lift Zach, Lor honestly assumed much worse than a dislocated hip.

  When Lor finally found them at Hoag, Dunny and Dana were drinking cocoa out of paper cups that had clearly come from a machine. When they told her about Zach’s leg popping out of his hip socket, Lorrie Ann let out a trill of nervous and relieved laughter that made Dunny flinch. Lorrie Ann wanted to explain, but it was too complicated, and so she just made a waving motion of her hand. “I thought,” she said, “I thought much worse. Okay. I’m sorry. Okay.” She talked to the doctor, but she didn’t remember what the doctor said. All she knew was that they were keeping Zach overnight and she should come back in the morning, so Dunny drove her and Dana home.

  ——

  “Wait a second,” I said, “I don’t get it. How did you not know what they were going to do to Zach? How do you not know what the doctors said?”

  None of this meshed at all with my notion of Lorrie Ann. Lorrie Ann had practically given herself a medical degree by reading articles about CP on the Internet. Lorrie Ann was deeply invested in Zach. She loved him. It didn’t make any sense for her to just leave him at the hospital.

  “I was really high,” Lorrie Ann said.

  “You went to the job interview high?”

  “No, I went to the interview sober. I came home, found the note, got high, went to the ER.” She said this easily, without guilt or shame, as though she were just clarifying a simple series of events.

  “Why did you get high before going to the hospital?” I asked.

  Lorrie Ann looked into her empty glass. She had drunk all the seltzer. “I thought he might be dead.”

  “Why would you want to be high at a moment like that?”

  “So that I wouldn’t have to feel it.”

  “Wouldn’t you want to feel it?” I asked. “I mean, he’s your son. If you really thought he was dead, wouldn’t you race out the door and speed all the way there? I just can’t imagine you actually reading that note and not jumping in the car.”

  Lorrie Ann didn’t say anything. It was almost as though I hadn’t asked her the questions. She didn’t look at me either, but not as though she were avoiding my eyes—but like I wasn’t there at all. She just rolled the bottom of her glass around on the table, letting the afternoon pass, letting the sun fall through the open window onto her shoulders, lighting up her blond braid in spangles.

  “Lorrie Ann,” I said, trying to shame her into talking to me.

  “Lolola,” I said, like someone reprimanding a dog.

  “After you killed your little baby, you ate a hamburger,” Lorrie Ann said simply, dispassionately. “So don’t fucking talk to me that way, all right?”

  ——

  And it was true. I had killed a little baby. And now I was considering killing another one. I was some kind of modern Medea. Who was I to judge Lorrie Ann? Who are any of us to judge? It went beyond throwing stones from glass houses. It wasn’t just that no one was unimpeachable. It was that there was no such thing as judgment.

  I thought about Inanna tossing her lover, Dumuzi, to the galla and how I judged her, could find no way around judging her. She had loved him so much. The passages of her courtship with Dumuzi were some of my favorite in all of literature. They had rung through my mind when I was first falling in love with Franklin, had become part of our own love story. The fact that she went on to betray him felt like an almost personal affront.

  I remember first reading Franklin’s rough translation of it in the bathtub of my apartment back in Ann Arbor. And even completely alone, in the dead of night, I blushed red as a beet.

  The sexiness of it shocked me. I had never seen sexuality represented in such arboricultural terms. Inanna sings: “He has sprouted; he has burgeoned; he is lettuce planted by the water. He is the one my womb loves best.”

  As I read on, I became more and more scandalized. I couldn’t believe these things had been written down, in some ancient language, lost for thousands of years, and then Franklin had copied them into a Rhodes composition book in his scratchy, childlike penmanship for me to read in an old scarred bathtub in a rental in Michigan.

  Our system involved me looking at the cuneiform, which I could just barely read, as well as a copy of Franklin’s translation, most of which was done by hand and then photocop
ied for me. My reading level in cuneiform was about like a third grader’s: third graders can read Shakespeare in a technical sense, but in another sense they can’t read him at all. So I needed Franklin’s words in order to make sense of what I was reading, but I wasn’t only reading Franklin’s words: I was looking for the reflection I got between the two when I read them side by side. And then I tried to write down that thing—that magic thing that hovered between the two of them. “Make your milk sweet and thick, my bridegroom,” Inanna sings. “My shepherd, I will drink your fresh milk … Let the milk of the goat flow in my sheepfold.”

  I had never, not once in my entire life, figured my vagina as a sheepfold. I was both horrified and powerfully aroused by the idea.

  I often told Franklin he was my lettuce planted by the water.

  (Had I killed a little baby? Had I really done that? Was there really a little baby growing inside me now?)

  I wondered if Lorrie Ann had loved Jim the way I loved Franklin. Had he been her lettuce planted by the water? Had they watched in wonder together as her belly grew swollen and ripe, sure that they were owed the springtime of their lives, the bloody harvest of live-born young? Did he say something suddenly, offhand, as he was getting ready for work, or as he was rinsing a dish, that cut through the corridors of her loneliness? (I picture the inside of Lorrie Ann as one large colonnade, entirely of polished Carrara marble, every surface glittering like frosted glass or like the teeth of unicorns. In my mind there are no footsteps, no one wandering in this temple, for Lorrie Ann is the temple itself and not its priestess.) I remember them enjoying each other, surely, laughing. Jim could make anyone laugh. But had he known her? Had he really seen her, that frightening, wonderful, terrifying thing that was Lorrie Ann?

  “So you got high and went to the hospital,” I prompted. “And then Dunny drove you and your mom home again.”