Lola, California

by Edie Meidav

  Plus, when you actually have to take something, Lana kept telling herself, doesn’t it become more real than if your body just hands it to you? And hadn’t she anyway known the march of conception, five times, when none of those moments had been right? The ripe full crankiness of early pregnancy had always made her stride toward the nearest clinic. Hadn’t she been in school, too young to be a good mother?

  And what anyway were all the celebrity moms doing, going to Russia, China, Malawi, Vietnam to adopt babies? Airlifting children into lives they considered better. How was having the law mediate this sort of transaction any different?

  Plus she had not asked for her insane asylum to administer an abortion or worse a hysterectomy as she suspected had happened. Didn’t the universe owe her a small bonus?

  Lana among the mamas never lingered long on the pains of labor. She just nodded sympathetically when they spoke of it. She mentioned her ghostly own and then moved on into discussing child-rearing techniques. Ultimately didn’t it all come down to nurture, not nature? Look at her own family: did Lana resemble her mom and dad one bit? And consider the genetic hex: if she had gone ahead and birthed her own child, would the child have turned out as twisted as Vic Mahler? Didn’t that Nazi guy Goering’s daughter sterilize herself?

  So much better to bypass nature then, to impress upon herself the importance of nurture. You could bear down on aspects of child rearing as much as you bore down to give birth.

  Earnestly Lana read everything, letting it inform life, grinding up organic baby food with the zeal of the baker of communion wafers. She helped foster independence, letting the babies hold spoons, mush dribbling down their chins, always trying to give her best and then some, at the end of the day more satisfied than a prelate after the rigors of ritual.

  Sometimes in the tired-soldier look she and Kip shot each other, at night after they’d stoked the woodstove for lighting the next morning, the twins in bed, she knew a peace she hadn’t felt since she’d been a girl back in her Lola days, that giddy froth. Did Kip ever shoot back a flare of suspicion? If he did she didn’t notice—these were his kids and to them he was a good father: a morning’s rough warmth, a nighttime patience.

  And once they started living in the guesthouse on his parents’ land, she had to work fewer hours at the market. In that guesthouse, with Kip still around, she couldn’t have asked for a better time, the boys toddling, falling, laughing, making little burps, holding items up for inspection, causing chaos. Sedge always turned to her to see whether she noticed while Tee drove straight ahead into any new commotion.

  Did she deserve to be this happy?

  One of the things she’d liked least in the asylum—or whatever people called the hellhole in which she had weathered nine months, enough to birth a baby, she’d marveled—was watching her fellow inmates’ behavior at the salad bar. It reminded her uncomfortably of her lost college years. By the gravity of the patients’ sashays near the salad bar, you could tell which girl had a strong father making her a puppet. Each girl’s choice came weighted with severe predictions regarding success or fall-on-your-face failure. Choose the wrong legume and you faced a dearth of love, existential abyss, death by fat. While Lana hadn’t been given the choice of an abortion, her fellow inmates had been choosing vinaigrette.

  In this way Kip could be patient. Whenever Lana would get into her salad bar/hysterectomy riff, most often in her tiredness after a stint at the supermarket, he tried soothing her ideas but never once ridiculed her. And she learned why: in an especially tender moment, long before she brought the twins, he did admit that he wondered if he might not have been subjected to something equivalent. One bad night after a ’shroom trip, Kip had been taken up into a spaceship, losing his dignity to aliens and returned to earth with the sense that nothing would ever again be the same. At first she’d found the comparison a condescending insult. Then she took it at face value: he believed in his alien probe while she knew she’d received an unwilling abortion or worse. What mattered most was sympathy, his hands fond over her hip, not just locating her but fixing her in space, better than any global positioning system used by his harvesters.

  Before she had left him to go up north, Lana had to keep some part of herself safe, having to protect herself from Kip and his parents, from his father’s tales of wholesome prairie life, from his mother eyeing how Lana handled the heirloom blue-laurel china. If Lana ever made the mistake of speaking ill of his parents, Kip exploded. Then she withdrew even deeper, becoming an automaton avoiding his gaze as she passed him in the corridor, feeling as if with a magic wand he had managed to turn her into Mary at her most cold and abstracted. Kip would protest, voice loud late into the night. You didn’t tell me I was getting involved with an ice queen, did you?

  Later she told him that the worst of their arguments had led to the angry sex he couldn’t quite remember. And all had led to the conception of the twins the night before she cut out. It’s like the twins came out of whatever hope we used to have, she said. And the reason she’d left in the middle of the night? To make sure she could cool out her head. This last part was true. And he liked the idea of her picking berries not far from the Salmon River while her belly grew fat with his spawn.

  At least you still have a womb, he’d say, patting her belly while she winced, your doctors never took your female parts out.

  Okay, so she had disappeared on Kip but her reconciliation package included that after those eight-odd months she had returned not empty-handed but with twins springy-haired and big-eyed, an echo of Kip’s legacy.

  Which is all a long way of saying she had not hedged. She had done the most she could to fetch those boys far from the rim of doom.

  TWENTY-FIRST OF DECEMBER, 2008 9:32 A.M.

  Rose has her hands on her head, eyes bleary, ears agnostic. “Please. You don’t think you told me enough?” Peel away the layers and be worshipped, this is what Lana seems to want. A curbless street toward forgiveness. An incomprehensible incident forgiven.

  “Well, it will all be in tomorrow’s papers anyway, Rose.”

  “Really?”

  “No.” Lana not combative but reeling her in. “You don’t get you’re the only one I could tell?”

  “No.” The ordeal now stretches before Rose: there will be no time for interrogation or unscrambling. This confession has left her unravished, obtuse, at a loss.

  “So was I wrong?” Lana only now starts to exhibit nervousness, rocking back and forth in her chair, sensing her audience might not wish to grasp the credo just set forth, her Rose not rising to the fly.

  “I must be unlucky. What, you want me to tell you everything’s okay? You might as well have just gagged me or dropped me in a ditch.” The secret horrible confession already bursts Rose’s head, making her move inside all spoken words with the speed of love, hearing a black ringing with no idea how to proceed, just banking on a certain willingness in herself toward conversation with this woman sitting up in bed, her pupils huge.

  “Well, maybe I just told you that stuff as kind of an adjustment thing? Maybe I didn’t read the cues right. Our situation here’s temporary. You know how a person gets tired of being the weakest link?”

  Something makes Rose dead from the neck up. “Lana. You don’t get it? You just made me your witness. Practically an accomplice. Almost as guilty as you are.” She rises abruptly to go sit on a chair. The stillness lucid between them, the only moving thing in the room is Rose’s hand, her fingers attacking the chair’s wicker arm, piece by piece, shredding it into the carpet, the pieces falling on the carpet in some illegible writ about her clod’s fate.

  And yet there is a great astringent charisma to Lana right now, a mystery of her violating self, her lips red as a doll’s now breaking the lull. “But Rose, who needs to know?” A smile unfit for human consumption, arousing. “Just say I didn’t talk to you, right?”

  At least one of them in the room is slowly being driven insane. “You aren’t that scary a person.”

&nbs
p; “What are you saying?”

  “You have no idea how this works.” Rose looks around the room, feeling as if it has shrunk into a cannibal’s lair, greased and ready.

  “Wait. My eyes hurt. Like someone put acid in them.” Lana rubs furiously for a second but when she gets no response, she leans forward. “I’m saying you always asked me to open up more to you?”

  “Well,” Rose must prowl some limit inside, not sure where the terrain drops off until she comes to a rough edge, “that was a long time ago.” Years later when she remembers this moment she won’t recall how the anger started. But for so long she had kept Lana as her rich flowerbank, Rose the bee always there for the Mahlers, as if in their silence the family had kept her feasting on their bright goldenness so she stayed buzzing but barren, filled so many years as part of their importance, self-sealing, airless, her fate never to be satisfied by the nurses and soldiers of the world but rather only by the Mahlers. Something in this drone’s anger gives her strength to dare imagine the thin gray shadow of the mother of the twins, the cardriver ostensibly giving birth to sons, bearing them between her legs and transporting them somewhere only to return to her barren car and even emptier home. When the cardriver had seen her babies stolen, had she panicked? Had she immediately resigned herself to having the life she meant to have siphoned off by an unknown Lana?

  All these years Rose had held aloft her unquestioning admiration for Lana and the Mahlers and had therefore buzzed toward and away from so much. How admirable her friend had seemed in her heedless female criminal joy—but here Rose had come somewhere she could not follow, to someone who took her lack of caring to the nth degree. Fulfill yourself, yes, that was what Vic had preached, but what happens if your fulfillment makes you stumble over other souls in your way?

  Most other people would have given up on the family long ago. Lana must know, doesn’t she, how Rose has kept her central, as if no other hue could rival the carnival colors of Lana and the Mahlers, these past saviors of Rose robbing all present savor from life, giving her now a deathbed weariness.

  Hadn’t Rose asked for something else? Not for this Hogan, this Lana, these boys. This whole time at Hope had wrought exactly the opposite of her wishes. The cocksure possibility of Lola seems to have distracted Rose and spun her away from actually helping Vic. When who had helped create Lola? Who had been the first to breathe the prospect of a love golem into Rose’s life? Vic. Again she could have been more helpful to Vic and once again she had failed. She would blame Lana but can’t, her shock at the real badness too great.

  “Hey Rose. Come on.” In the way a deer could just sidle up to another, Lana could make one right move but it is already too late. Rose is heading toward the door, opening it for herself. “Come on Rosie. Don’t let this be the thing.” Lana stops, a victor who understands timing, one with a final baffler. “I mean—your whole thing about my family. Aren’t you the one who loved,” waving, “all that Mahler stuff?”

  “Jesus.” The look that Rose turns on her old friend could freeze ichor. “Stealing? It’s so permanent.”

  Lana wants to blot out this last part, jumping as quickly as she can to hop over and lean into this particular Rose, a woman looking through her with a face fascinated but unsolvable, a million miles away. Lana does what she can to pump life back into her, giving her the same massive hug Vic had once given Mary, years ago at Hope, the kind that breathes into another’s qualms while gushing at warp-speed into Rose’s shoulder. “I mean that drug we drank? Seriously. Maybe this was all just to get some kind of rise out of you?”

  All could be relinquished: what great freedom could be found in letting go. Rose has no practice in it, the room falling outward but the place too small for whatever lets her shiver out of the embrace. “God, I am sorry.” And she is, even with her hand on the knob tugging the door open against a desert gust.

  “Don’t get unreal on me. Come on. Hey now.” From the way her lips and eyes move independent of each other, Lana could be starting her first conversation with her friend, trying all over to lure her back in.

  TWENTY-FIRST OF DECEMBER, 2008 9:41 A.M.

  In the dark chill of Lana’s room, Rose cannot help but consider her reflection. Odd that instinct had made her sprint up here rather than just out and away into that better-adjusted realm in which she had never tracked Lana Mahler to Hope and all her memories of being Lola at least would not have gotten shot through with fissures. Vic had once told Rose that a friend who betrays you makes your epistemology shake your ontology or was it the other way around? While what Rose feels is as if this recent period marks having fallen through some previously unknown looking-glass back into the lair of the Mahlers, their ontology screwing with her epistemology, finding it hard to trust anything, least of all the report of her senses, and perhaps it is this that had made her run straight back into the lair of Lana, having left her friend bewildered in Rose’s room, likely to hitch-poke up here any moment. In the room, the fig perfume steals Rose’s breath. All Rose needs is one bit of independent confirmation, some proof one way or another.

  Because clearly Lana’s confession was not just some drug-tale: its moments had been recalled and told a little too clearly. Lana had unbosomed herself, thrown it all out, clearly wanting to be seen in true colors. But how could she have had such little conscience? Never mind the dark hints she had offered of an asylum stay: could an adult woman have stolen two boys?

  Flagrant with guilt, Rose concedes everything. She had tried weaving a rope with sand and where was she supposed to go now? Join far-off protestors on the distant hills? Or march, solo and failed, to the prison and just beg for entry as if at the face of heaven? Dear Vic, I seem to be made of clay and wish to make myself all over again.

  And how much easier to just melt away and go home. To pretend she had never heard of the Mahlers. Surrender them in all their basic unprocurability. Let her instead be true to the lesser planet of stasis, sleep with a silk pillow over her head to muffle the faraway hint of a man in a bloodbath. Having lifted only a half finger in his direction, she could just drive away, five days before slaughter. The giddy unwisdom of this all offered a beautiful requiem.

  Of course she would like to blame Lana for her distraction, though the evidence grabs her around the throat: Rose in the labyrinth of Lola had become an impostor of Rose, playing perjurer to any altruistic urges, following up poorly on Vic. And if she were really honest, slakeless thirst rather than self-sacrifice had led her to Hope. Adulthood had coveted the lightness she once knew with her friend and this hope too now seemed impossibly juvenile, the pall of time thrown over it.

  In only one sense she recalls herself as Rose. She is struck by the urge to find a computer, to get on the web, to madly contact every single lover she had ever known. This whole trip now seems a fatal mistake as if she thought she could tour some country’s canals and leisure zones only to find herself awaking in a gulag, the frame larger than its original conception. You love playing with fire, she tells herself, wanting to hold on to the giddy power she had felt for just a second in her room, the freedom of relinquishing Lana. And what should she do now, go ask Hogan for help, answer questions, be forced to say a formal goodbye?

  How come Lana always gets to flee, leaving no trace?

  Rose’s finger runs with no incarnational logic over the dresser’s maroon textured scarf while her pulse blasts. There must be a pattern here but she cannot hold the scarf in the same sphere as the story. What had Lana meant with such a blatant project of exposure? She had meant it as an unfolding. Could the Lana who had chosen this scarf also have done what she claimed? Rose stands, one minute of life putrefied, putrefying, staring at the totem of herself in the mirror. Dare double dare. Lana had been so free-speaking, offering revelation up as a contagion. It was ostentatious how little she cared about Rose, offering no token, dropping Rose in the middle of the Mahler enigma. Their loss doesn’t have to be mine. A great relief starts to creep in at the edges, a breathing space inside Ros
e, one she has never known.

  It is not hard for Rose to open the dresser drawer, the top, eyes turned upward like a midwife or a coroner dislodging the guts of a terminal patient until her fingers close on that empty, ratted bead purse, both keepsake and jackpot enough that her grip fastens.

  You lost me, she tells Lana, hanging the purse around her neck and inside her blouse so it brushes her breasts softly before she goes out the door and shuts it with no bashful joy, these last honors both cussed and freeing.

  TWENTY-FIRST OF DECEMBER, 2008 10:14 A.M.

  Rose in a skirt, heaving her duffel bag into the backseat of an over-heated car. For this second, however, Rose is grateful: she seems to have lost her need to read signs everywhere. Nothing right now speaks to her in code or command. Everything is just what it is, varnish stripped. Only to jump at the figure coming in her sideview: Lana stumbling.

  “You need your crutches!” says Rose, pity rushing her. Without meaning to she startles out of the car, the ratty purse still inside her shirt.

  “That’s your car, Rosie?”

  “Well. Thought I would go—”

  “Somewhere for the day?” Lana forces a smile. “Not to tattle though, right? Not like you’re heading straight to your lady lawyer or someone.”

  “No.” Rose vast and beyond could still be startled that this mirage might not think beyond herself. “God.”

  “What.”

  “Just how you still want a partner in—” and Rose waits, with ungrudging respect for their past. “Your partner in crime.”

  “Thanks. I knew I could tell you. Hey you forgot this?” Lana presents her with something in brown paper. “Found it under a heap of towels in your room.” Brown-wrapped, marked lola, the scrapbook from the long-ago time when they’d come to Hope. “You take this wherever you go?”

  Rose can’t speak; her throat scalded, no new words forming.