by Edie Meidav
“I ran into Jane Polsby. In Ellay.”
“She told you about the boys?”
“This has nothing to do with the boys.” For a second some refuge might be found in Rose’s face but then it disappears. This is all ending terribly. Lana can find no bare minimum to get through this, great violence being done to whatever binding she had hoped for. What had made her think she could handle an old friend?
“I can’t take it Rosie. This time you really messed up. You don’t know a single thing about my life!” All that remains available is her oldtime talent for stomping off. Lana leaves Rose to sink, alone, onto a lounge chair.
It is Hogan who descends from the upper path, cracking a smile at Rose: “So.” When that gets no answer, he tries again. “Your buddy?”
Rose just shakes her head. Clumsy, stupid, wrong. Nothing ever comes with a clear label. Dizziness circles her vision: she always tries not to get teary so fast and must do what she can to swallow. Dabbing the edges of her eyes with her towel, she looks up at the manager. “I’m sorry, can I ask you a favor?”
“Anything.”
“Could you watch the boys—hers—wherever they are? Got to find her before,” she manages. Before what? Before it all blows up. She should have held back, not forced things. Just when the Lolas might have slipped back into the groove all over and naturally Lana would have come with her to testify. Instead Rose had gone and ruined everything.
“Your friend’s a hothead, huh?” says Hogan.
Rose’s hand rises and flops back onto the towel, only to get smeared with a flaccid spilled curl of sunscreen, a nautilus.
SIXTEENTH OF DECEMBER, 2008 8:19 A.M.
Lana would always know the voice, Rose and her deep-gut shout: “Lana.”
She could love that voice fiercely but speaks over her shoulder. “Or what’s it, necrophilia? I can’t believe you.”
“I mean he just thinks of me as some kind of supporter.”
Lana in her disappointment cannot finesse the mulberry-strewn ground, the tree roots, an excess of shakti pushing up out of concrete. She trips, splayed out, hands a V before her, a quick knife slicing up the leg.
Now she looks up at Rose’s face. “Sheesh,” says Lana.
The naked man with the key-string around his waist smiles politely down at Lana, at all female trouble in general, the trouble visited upon the world since the dawn of the akashic record and then elects to step over Lana’s shin, staying firm on his course toward the plein-air shower.
“You okay?” Rose kneels down, hand cupping toward the knee as if about to administer a sacrament.
“Don’t touch.” Last time Lana had done this she had wrenched the leg on some cliffs and it has stayed her weak one, another humiliating affront. It occurs to her that she has just fallen down a new kind of rabbithole.
“Think you twisted your ankle?”
“Please.” And whether Lana means please leave or please help, it doesn’t matter.
“I’ll get ice?” Rose, gearing up toward full savior bliss, tells Lana one of the first complete truths. “Wait for me, I’ll be back.”
SIXTEENTH OF DECEMBER, 2008 4:48 P.M.
Not a big deal. A little clinic for farmworkers about an hour away where all the signs are in Spanish. NO FUME, NO TIRE EL CHICLE, NO HABLE EN VOZ ALTA, CUIDA LOS NIÑOS CON LA LECHE. Hogan has taken her to the clinic in the cook’s stationwagon, the cook riding shotgun: the hooked cook, Lana thinks, a nice vet with a hook for an arm named Antwan who shows her pictures of his bitty girls up in Oakland, Jocasta and Yolanda. Their mother won’t let Antwan see them. Lana is almost cheerful talking with Antwan after the doctors wrap a cast on her foot, having giggled at everyone’s bad jokes about Viagra and their prescription of bed-rest and lack of weight on the foot, giggling all the way until they tell her about crutches and the rules—
It is her driving foot. She is laid up! And for at least three weeks. She doesn’t want to trust her hearing.
“Well, ma’am,” Hogan says in the waiting room, a little too merry, having sussed her situation. “Now you guys are here for good.”
“Me and Rose?”
“You and your boys. Why not. I’ll give you free room and board.”
Antwan the cook looks away: something in this parlay makes him need to amble down the hall to study the line-up of wanted posters.
“I thought Dirk was, you know, already taken care of. At Hope.”
“Who said he’s not. But this will be on your account, ma’am, not under your guy’s name. I’ll have to check but I bet I could arrange it so you and your boys could stay at Hope. I’m talking indefinitely.”
“Why would any place bother offering that?”
“Because your accident happened on our grounds, number one. You never signed our form. So we have liability issues. Though looks like you don’t exactly love lawyers.” He studies her. “Also you don’t want to depend that much on your man, right?”
“Okay.” She’s not about to let in any stranger that much.
“And then there’s that other thing, you know.”
“What’s that?”
“Your dad?”
Now she gets it. Either Rose has told him or the guy overheard but who fucking cares when her head clangs, tired of all of them, annoyed, and now there will be no going backward, the rabbit out of the hat, the magic of Vic spitting all over her. “Okay so what, you’re another worshipper?”
This Hogan similarly chooses to ignore. “How about let’s just call it avoidance of lawsuits, ma’am,” his smile hard to read, the guilt of conspiracy the only clear part she sees.
It could be funny. It could be that some force wishes for her never to stray far from Vic or the finger of the law. And just when she thinks she has found some rock to sneak behind, that finger always finds her and diddles her, just like the game of no escape her boys like to play, stuffing each other down under pillows and then tickling each other until one of them says peanut butter.
Back at the ranch, Hogan really does give her a better room. “For your convalescence.” He cannot help but add: “Away from your guy. A little bit of breathing room helps any relationship, right?”
Breathing room. Lebensraum on the lowest floor where Lana has no stairs but instead a balcony opening up to the broad mountains and beyond, her curtains marked by horseshoes, ropes, one-eyed dice. This will be her room in which she will try jostling the facts to get some kind of escape, a room from which to spy cars on the freeway, cars trammeled in jams and moving forward like little ants. My father was the wind in my sails is the odd phrase that rules her head before she drifts into what might be the most luscious sleep she has had since leaving her childhood bed.
DECEMBER 17–19, 2008
The doctors are beautifully compliant in doubling the dose when Lana asks. She is afloat on a rich cocktail that raises her higher, farther out in the universe than ever, shards pulverized into a fairydust spread over the galaxy as if somewhere she had accepted the fine print of disintegration. If she had only the pills and not her boys, the walls and the deep occasional talk with Elsa, a curvy she-male maid who comes twice a day, showing admirable mastery over duster and vacuum, so much of Lana could just etherize away.
On the first day, Dirk sits by her bed and palpates her hand. The shades are drawn so it must still be early morning. Dirk talks in one stream: he says she should see her mishap as if she were a seed with the earth lying atop her. If she sees the twisted ankle from a materialist standpoint, her situation is in fact terrible and her attitude will be as bad as if she chooses to pour ammonia or beer on that seed. Because can a seed grow with ammonia? If, however, she can see the accident as sparks from a divine plan for herself, she will know to bless the bad ankle—it’s a gift, Lana—and her attitude will act as water and light, making the seed grow and blossom into learning and meaning.
“Wait, so does that make me the seed?” she asks, not really following. “Or what, would you bless my ankle? I’m sorry, honey”—honey
what she used to call Kip, her past man and current man doing a small do-si-do—“could you please pass me one of those purple pills? Just a little water? You mind?”
Dirk does, leaving soon after. Whether she sees the accident from a spiritualist or materialist perspective, whether she has upset him, she can’t say, her mind foundering a bit on the question, the fairydust reclumping, earthbound and rimed. Of course she welcomes visits. While she likes the terms of the float, anyone coming through her door does remind her she exists.
Visits are patch-up jobs, she tells the maid Elsa, who turns off the vacuum and takes a break to turn off the smoke detector and go through two cigarettes in the room, telling her about all the operations, her first op presided over by a bad botcher, only interrupting herself to work the air-conditioning so it hums at an arctic chill. Lana feels exultant, listening: she has never met a more fascinating companion than Elsa.
And her boys also continue to function, reporting back to some customary dull spot in their psyche, one cabling forgiveness. Sedge has made a card that says mama mama, showing her jumping off a cliff into a rainbow. To make him feel she gets the meaning of this loving gesture, she places the card on her bedside table and kisses him for his lie in claiming both twins made the card, since this is Sedge’s breed of sensitive, never wanting either brother to suffer from lack of acclaim.
Maybe the next morning, not fully awake, she asks Sedge: “Hey, you just came through the wall?” From his scared face she understands she must have asked something that sounded crazy. “I meant to ask Lestrion,” she corrects herself. “I love you. Sorry. Mind if I go back to napping? Do you mind making the room just a bit colder?”
Because cold helps sustain divisions, keeps all from melting into unpalatable fusion, into the endless question on Rose’s face or the idea of Vic alone in his cell. Having entered her float through doors called Percocet and Vicodin, names alone that perk her up a bit, now Lana bounces through some cosmic tunnel: but she must focus on choosing the right door at its end. Behind door number one, some optimism awaits. Who was it who misplaced the list on which she is supposed to notate how many pills she has taken so far today?
The worst part being that, come the second day, Hogan or Dirk or someone mischievous seems to have misread the status of her current friendship with Rose. Lana gets the tiger, not the lady, someone having delegated Rose and her inquiring eyes to be in charge of Lana. Instead of her boys or even Dirk, it is Rose who comes bearing gifts, messages, taking over meals, babysitting, reprieve.
Old friends, only stalemated, Rose seems to think, from the way she accepts Lana’s rudeness, an ascetic uplifted by self-flogging rites. Lana is almost willing to take comfort in Rose. Their easiest topic is the leg. Does the leg itch? Does Lana need water? Any special books? Should Rose ask Hogan for a movie player? “Don’t worry,” Lana keeps saying, another of the greater lies. “Could you just fiddle a bit with the air-conditioning?” EVEN REPELLENT LOVE CAN OFFER CHARMING DISTRACTION FROM THE HORRORS OF EXISTENCE, her father had once told Lana, snarling after some gangly would-be swain had hovered around the house. Rose tells her about the thirty-third anniversary activities heating up around Hope but doesn’t make clear how she spends her day when not playing nursemaid.
Lana tries making a list of probabilities in her head:
Does Rose visit the prison and report to Vic?
Does she force-bond with the twins?
Is she having an affair with Hogan?
Lana pretends she doesn’t want to know.
“Who asked you to do this?” Lana asks finally.
“Wait, you’d rather have Dirk?”
Lana seriously considers. “Not at all.”
“I offered,” says Rose, simple and efficient, pulling thwarted bridesmaid stems of wildflowers out of a water-glass, the bouquet Lana’s boys picked for their mother yesterday.
“They go stale quickly,” says Lana, without curiosity, hands interlocked. What she really wants to ask is whether her friend had always been such a martyr. Hard to remember this face of Rose or maybe years curdle a person. Some worse part of her wishes to ask whether Rose ever enjoys herself anymore. Lana weights an elephantine patience onto her tongue. Something about the smooth heft of Rose’s loins and black of her hair scares Lana, testifying to some unguessable zone of power in this competent and helpful woman.
But where had Rose stowed her silly exuberant self? Before the accident, Lana had thought she could find her—but now that Rose is nowhere to be found. Only when Lana had slipped into an afternoon dream did she manage to find old-time Rose, so much hilarity in her she had to rise to her tiptoes because she could not contain that delicious laugh, Rose who would squeeze Lana’s ribs to get her in on the same joke, who never finished washing dishes, never finished anything, Rose unable to close a bathroom door because she never wanted the fun of connection to end, slipping an arm around Lana’s waist at night, losing keys and wallets and sweaters and screaming in happy terror when riding a bike too fast down a steep hill only to urge her up the same hill later.
Lana pines for Lola. Where is the Rose whose story of all life prior to Lana made it seem she had been a precocious sleeping princess awaiting true friendship, Rose who had lived a bad fairytale with a lucky ending, Rose a matchstick girl in a friendless alley who used to fear that voicing the wrong words would make someone across the world die?
Or where, at least, is the Rose who liked telling Lana that a Mahler had nothing to complain about or the Rose who had been such a jaunty survivor, singing sea shanties when the river went dry and they sloshed along holding up a canoe some guy had loaned them?
The only Rose whom Lana can locate awake is the Rose whose vulnerability lives one skewed glance away.
“No bedsores?” asks Rose. As if she is unable to stand the disorder of Lana’s room, her gestures are awkward and mechanical replacing the water. Lana’s ankle itches. Swollen with white blood cell helpers, as she had explained to the twins. But she won’t ask Rose to scratch her, since not too much help should come from this clone sent to tweak Lana’s ache for real Rose.
“Remember the doctor said turn every two hours, right?” says nurse-bot Rose, setting the alarm. “Keep the windows open. Maybe stretch a bit. What if you stopped taking some of those pills?”
Lana smiles back. What? If she stopped taking what?
“Painkillers,” Rose repeats. Lana cannot help the questions looping her head. An acrid brimstone scent to the moment of this martyr folding a towel, straightening, claiming rights.
Only when Rose leans down to pick up a towel, there in her lower back, two strong tree trunks joined, tanned and knowing, does Lana see more of her old friend, the one who liked climbing plum trees in front of her. In that back is something that makes Lana want to bite.
Rose stares. “Something the matter?”
“What if you stopped making suggestions?” snaps Lana, instantly regretting it. “You know, you look great today,” says Lana. “I love that flowered shirt on you.”
Rose stops, her smile slow. She sits on what has been claimed as Sedge’s metal chair, draping herself over the back of Tee’s. “Remember?”
“What?”
“That thing about flowered shirts?”
It takes Lana longer. “That time we convinced some guy to wear your crazy daffodil shirt around his friends?”
“And then his buddies teased him and he tried to get us to explain but instead we took his moped for a ride?”
Lana too wants the layers to peel away. “Then we came home and my mom and dad and—remember Gallagher?—they were fighting about politics in the living room.”
“We sat on the stairs and imitated their voices with puppet hands.”
“And walked to the park at midnight and went on the swings forever. Then you choked on oregano cigarettes.”
“See, you remember stuff, Lana.”
“Mainly bad moments. Don’t make that face.” Lana inspects her nails, says nothing before telli
ng a truth. “I remember thinking that night in the park you had saved me.”
“Only that night?” and in Rose beaming at her, Lana gets a vision freed of time, Rose again at fifteen. Then an undercurrent rises, one she would stem if she could. “Hey,” says Lana, reaching for more. Rose comes to sit on her bed and pat her shoulder, somewhat motorized but still comforting. It could be so easy to fall apart here with Rose. “I do mean it. You saved me.”
“Well,” says Rose, “for me, you were—” but some ungovernable meld gets stuck mid-throat, making her cough.
“We had everything. I mean,” and they start something of a laugh, cut short.
Rose leans back a bit. “You know. I am really sorry to ask. But tomorrow—this is so hard to say—I’m asking a favor.”
“Whatever you want.” And Lana means it.
Almost whispering. “Just come? Because one hour, one deposition—”
“O god. You’re kidding. My dad again?” Yet because one second ago Lana did feel an old friend was visiting her, she considers. “They told me I couldn’t leave this room.”
“Don’t worry,” says Rose. “We’ll arrange it. Worst-case scenario, we’ll carry you out on a stretcher.”
NINETEENTH OF DECEMBER, 2008 11:01 A.M.
Lestrion buzzes, his message unignorable. Trying to get through to Sedge but the boy can’t listen yet. “Please quit,” Sedge says. Everyone nearby in the dining room twists to eyeball the curly-headed boy with mediocre manners.
“What?” Tee punches his arm. “We got to be good. Anyway, let’s go watch the burn. I swear they’re doing it now.” He grabs their spaghetti dishes to go push them into a slot where a set of gloved hands seizes them.
“Thanks,” says Sedge to the gloved hands. Outside, Sedge can’t explain to his twin. What Lestrion’s facing is much larger than just being good. Hogan went out on his mission while the boys had gone to eat and once they return to their task of watching, the man stands hillside, watering down remnants of another controlled burn on a slope.