Lola, California

by Edie Meidav

  “No,” she lies.

  “She’s a good girl,” he says. “Like her mother.”

  “How?” Choking more on his words than the smoke.

  “Burdened by good looks and good manners.”

  “Your daughter?” Incredible. What memory can he hold? One of the things he had always stormed about was Lana’s lack of manners, all her uncouth American ways. She becomes sure that whatever happens, he won’t remember this meeting.

  “When does the ceremony start?” He waits. “I am ready to get out of this place already.”

  “I think in about an hour. What were you saying about your daughter?”

  “She could play the violin. Beautifully.” A smile runs across his face. “You have no idea how celestial her playing was. She had a real gift. Straight to the heart. The tongue of angels. But she made a mistake. Should have kept up with it.” He becomes an old man again, eyes confused. “What’s happening now? What’s that racket?”

  “A siren.”

  “Oh. I thought it was something like thunder. Dry and sterile with no rain.”

  “There’s a fire but it’s contained. Or maybe,” she dares, “some protestors are coming to free Vic Mahler?”

  “Why would anyone want to free Vic Mahler? I told them Vic was ready. They are the ones forcing me to wait now.” Something like a sob escaping. “So.” A different smile returns as if they are strangers standing in line. “What sort of thing do you do to keep body and soul together? What’s your calling?”

  “I have two children but I don’t really have a calling.”

  “Do you drive a big car?”

  “No, an old undercover cop car. Not a minivan.”

  He thinks about this. A minivan. “Then you should populate your minivan more.”

  “People still care about Vic Mahler,” she says, her own squeak escaping.

  “Vic Mahler means the same to them as a minivan or police car does to me. An idea. Don’t get upset.” He is tender, his hand upon hers. Someone keeps making her cry, letting her head fall onto that bony chest, her hand on his rickety shoulder, his voice reverberant. “You are a sensitive, emotional person. I can tell you are a person of great worth and capable besides. Do you have a husband?”

  She tries but cannot stop. Her hand wet on the device, the innocuous cup, the miniaturized plastic egg-poacher Hogan had pressed on her last night. “I can help you get out of here,” she tries, lifting up.

  Now he beams. “You could?”

  “You really want out?”

  “I’m sorry,” he says. “This is probably not the right time. You should go now. I need to take a nap but let’s set up something soon. Next week maybe? You know there are some French bandits waiting to tie me up. You see them right there in the corner of the room?”

  “There are no bandits,” she says. “You’re having a hallucination.”

  “But I see them and can hear their whispers. They’re crouched right there.”

  “Like you always said. The mind is powerful. It’s playing a trick on you.”

  He studies her dimly for a second, appraising her understanding of reality, before nodding. “Well, I find it hard to believe you. But I do accept the possibility of your proposition.” He has stayed so open, almost a child in his ability to take on another’s way of seeing: he accepts what she says despite the report of his senses. And yet their moment seems to be passing since he focuses now less on her than on his fingers, performing some slow ghost dance that entertains him, entwining, unbinding, waving.

  As if she were Mary utterly alone with this man. As if Mary lived in her for the first time. How lonely to have been her mother, married to this man with this particular daughter. To be Mary and have kept him ticking along in civil urbanities while denying her other wishes: to tear him apart and find his root, rip off the mask of coffee parties and clubs, to find in herself the lost scapegrace, bearer of an original sin she had so successfully tried forgetting.

  Lana sees the bulge on the chest, as promised no bigger than a trinket pushing forward through the shirt. You won’t even have to touch skin to skin, the man had said, sniffing her response, eyes a ferret’s.

  Only if she could get Vic out of his cave would she do it. “You know I’ve never been very good at speeches. I’m not a flowery kind of person. It’s hard for me to tell you how important you’ve been to me.”

  And he looks up from his fretwork with his fingers, his tiny ghost dancers, seeing her as if for the first time, an openness in his eyes she can’t remember having ever seen. “Don’t worry. You are my first-born.” He listens to the weight of the words. “You are my only child. A melody can play all the time and it never needs a single word.” Inside her is a wall with tears going down; she could move just one bit toward that fountain and drown. “You know, sometimes I cannot help but really miss your mom.”

  “Papa.”

  “I can’t help it. It’s a little thing. Scarcely of consequence to anyone else. But I loved the way that when we made love she—”

  “Vic.”

  “She liked giving this little hoot. I can’t imitate it. I’m not talking about something volitional. More a sneeze, I can’t explain, I’m just sharing this with you. Really that hoot was a pinprick, a nothing, a drop in the ocean of everything else. But that little cry. In many ways that cry was what cursed me. Or all of us. Because inside all her self-improvement and tightness, did you know your mother still showed some abandon—”

  She takes his hands. Not to shush him, not fully: she is right now of the same matter as he is, missing the one she could have had, the mother she almost had, every word he utters carrying her forth on the same wave so they swim together.

  And yet he is wrong; she must correct him, she craves a chaste truth down to the marrow. “I don’t think it was the cry that cursed you guys.”

  He is wrongly pleased. “You don’t?”

  “Maybe it was,” and she chokes, “having me? Your daughter? You know,” and she has never said this to herself or another, “you really have no idea,” and for one moment seeing she has buffeted others and carried them along in herself, “how bad I am,” collapsing, not meaning to have said this but unburdened, for this second simple as a child with this boy king in prison. How bad and how good to not be defended against her badness, to not have to justify to anyone.

  “Mopsy,” he says, knowing her as he used to, his fingers bloated but intentional, knives stroking her hair, her head fallen. And his stroke lets her own hand find its purpose, no more tinkering, letting the saucer cup climb, the egg-poacher reaching unpoaching, all of it letting her find the mercy in herself to place the ungiving thing firmly on his chest, to hold it three seconds over the left ventricle just as the man had said, the miniaturized plastic will be undetectable in your boot, no one will think it anything but heart failure. This is your gift to a person, given his recent wishes spun by the new factors complicating his case, not just a statute but the history of prosecutorial misconduct, Vic’s whole case about to become a mess, caught in the courts for years. So she has only three seconds to give someone fully what he needs and what only she can give.

  This will be done. Vic letting out a surprised little oh! before falling over on her as if to rest in a deep sleep while mortar continues to fly around, a man finally safe and free.

  She doesn’t realize if time has passed, one second or ten minutes. The guard has come, name forgotten, giving back some crutches, telling her not to worry but she must exit down the left corridor now, no time to lose as he will stand by, a weak smile already on him as if he halfway understands how responsible she just made him for Vic.

  Far off beyond the sirens she hears hooves. She could use a friend, at least an ally right now, but anyone she would call a friend has been thwacked away. “What’s happening?” she manages.

  “We’ll know.” The guard almost smiles. “Don’t worry. Please, now you must head out that corridor. Follow the exit signs. Don’t stay, get yourself out. Anyone see
s you, say you got lost.”

  “You’re so calm,” she marvels.

  “I’ll stay. Dispatch will get my call and send someone down with a gurney. For now I am standing by in case he needs exit.”

  Exit. He had asked for it and that was a needful act. Later, on the road, she will believe her whole life had brought her to that second and that maybe if she had not been such a bad person, she could not have fulfilled her father’s will. At the critical moment she would have lacked stamina no matter how many times, back at their apex, he had made her promise to keep his dignity intact. The salmon, having spawned, fulfilled its biological function. Was that not the self she should respect most? Honor your parent by honoring the clear-thinking one and not the other selves. And I came not for revenge, she will remind herself, I came to help and when I was with him, did he not give some confirmation?

  She will begin to tell herself that she could know what he wanted better than he might have ever known himself. A good death. As she knows from her own kids, only children know best who a parent is. Only children can give the punishing gift of themselves.

  She had her knowledge of him to deliver and it belonged to nobody else living. Even if the state of California had gotten a thousand depositions from a thousand tributaries, what would it have ever known about her family? And if the sin lived in her having taken another’s life rather than granting it, shouldn’t she have been the one to accept the sin rather than some random jailer?

  TWENTY-SECOND OF DECEMBER, 2008 7:37 P.M.

  In the blue safety light of the communal kitchen, the boys find their mother fixing tea, padding about in bare feet and wide slacks. This is the mother they know. As if she has managed to escape a spell that had forced her in this last period to use crutches and be touchy, to not pad about much. Now their real mother swishes by under artificial moonlight, a recognizable mother, the yummy one who used to sing random folk songs and take them to the ocean with their dog Cad running near where rocks pushed up from the foam like a bunch of stranded bowling balls. This same mother always carried them slung on her front and back and now long-spined in the kitchen, their mother like an angular barn mostly withstanding time, her neck straighter than anyone’s, this mother theirs in her silver hoop earrings and hair full over that long neck.

  For a second Sedge gets adult vision, able to see their mother as she exists apart from them.

  Dirk had been calling their mother an Amazon but Sedge thinks that means Asian because once she’d mentioned her mother had been part-Japanese. Anyway Sedge finds the idea of Amazon upsetting: he knows Amazons slice off half their chest and that man-eating monkeys come from the Amazon while pasta comes from Asia and pasta he can handle but not the other chest stuff.

  So struck by the sight of her, at first Sedge, thinking Amazons and Asians, says nothing. She looks up from her tea and smiles, the most exuberant, beautiful sight in the world. Sedge’s tongue lies heavy, which is something of a relief; paralysis means Lestrion has not forsaken him. Sometimes Lestrion can forsake him for weeks and these times are bad—Sedge ends up gravityfree, spun out into a galaxy, lacking a compass. Other times he knows Lestrion is manning the controls even if the space robot has his mischievous side. If Sedge doesn’t cup his hands and whisper to him every once in a while, Lestrion can grow unruly, his behavior embarrassing.

  So now Sedge stands, hands hanging, staring at his mother, tongue stuck.

  Tee stops too, struck not by Lestrion but by his twin’s paralysis. Much as he would never admit it, Tee uses Sedge as his own compass.

  What Sedge’s tongue can’t bridge, what he can’t translate, is the awesome good luck of finding their mother making tea, their mother with her access mostly oblique now seeming available and ready for customers. Once, trying to take her in, when she’d been working her market job late hours, Sedge had inhaled an onyx from her dresser and had to be taken to the emergency room and then his mother had come so soothingly too, belonging to him with her quick laugh and sharp wrists, her banana scent: how quickly she could understand before you ever opened your mouth.

  We all need to leave he wants to tell her now.

  He imagines them pulling off the road to a rest stop. He would casually say to his mother you know, we never really liked Dirk.

  She would smile the way she was smiling now only to admit you know, me neither and she would belong to her boys but especially to Sedge, creamy and compliant. She would heed their requests, taking them to a water playland where they’d never leave or at least never have to return to the zone of Yalina, their old home against which they’d already been brainwashed.

  On the ride down to Hope, hadn’t their mother muttered been there, done that? One day they would live in a big house where their grandparents would come visit. They’d have a sprinkler on the front lawn, tons of extra fancy rooms and many new and interestingly submissive friends. Sedge stands there in the kitchen’s blue light wondering how to transmit the vision and get his mother to understand that now is the time to leave.

  Instead what he says is: “Ma, we did something bad.”

  She kisses the top of Sedge’s head then Tee’s, truly in a good mood.

  “Would you like some of this delicious tea someone made?”

  “Chamomile?” asks Sedge, diverted, screwing up his face.

  “No, something else. You’ll like it, I think. Cinnamon,” she says, “cayenne,” licking her finger, “honey?” Not finding mugs, she gives them each a big bowl. “It’s how the French drink,” she tells them for the millionth time. On high stools at a butcher-block island in the half-dark kitchen, they sit a threesome again.

  To hide his pleasure, Sedge lifts the giant drink to his face, hearing their mother tell them how her father used to love drinking from big bowls: this is the first time she mentions her own father without any pressure from their questions about cereal boxes and other facts. Of course Sedge had been curious, had wanted to know who their other grandpa was, but she had never surrendered much of a satisfying answer. A parent can put a spell on you, she says.

  Which all matters less than that, in the bowl’s reflection, wrinkles form around Sedge’s eyes and mouth and ears, magnified by a trick of light. He is a monster and cannot retreat from this central fact. The intruder Dirk sits gagged and bound with an orange cord and Sedge is the most evil person ever invented this century or ever.

  “I’m sorry, mommy,” he blubbers. Tee looks over at his twin, disgusted.

  Lana’s eyes upon the two don’t waver. “Sorry for what?” Her voice warm and tender, unjudging, her good mood floating above everything. “I just had the best exorcism of my life.” Exercise, schism, they don’t really understand what she just said, so Sedge tries to bring some clarity into the picture, mumbling toward the middle of the room. “Mama, maybe someone messed things up.”

  “Try more of this yummy drink?” Their mother has a serious dream in her voice. And here is where Lestrion must have understood Sedge’s wishes enough to finally help his mother make a good choice. “Maybe we should just pack our bags and go.”

  “Go?” squeaks Tee. “What about goodbyes? Zabelle? Hogan?”

  “How about we’ll write them cards.” She tousles his head; Sedge must work to keep himself from spluttering; she barely notices. “Let’s go make our own fun. Seriously. Let’s drive—” She founders, seeming not to have thought beyond the idea’s brink, just as they’d had no real plan for what would happen to their gagged Dirk.

  “To Mexico?” says Sedge.

  “That’s a great idea. How about Isla Mujeres? Or La Paz? We could get a house by the beach. You guys could learn Spanish. We’d play on the beach. I’d homeschool you. You’d get good at listening. We’d catch our own salmon for dinner. Sardines.”

  “I don’t like sardines. What about Colorado?”

  “Maybe let’s just drive for a bit and figure out where we’re going?”

  “Road trip!” Tee’s fist punches the air.

  “But keep it our secr
et, right?” and in the way she raises a finger to her lips, in her wide-open eyes, in how she says “just the three of us?” they love their mother all over.

  SOON

  they place him in a departure lounge where he is pleased to be neither in the past nor the future. They call out numbers of departing flights but his will not be called for a while. A sense of well-being floods his toes. When Mary had first suspected she might have Lana inside her, she had been lying on her back and had girlishly awakened him to say a warmth had entered her from the toes and traveled up to her belly. A spirit just entered me, she said, to which he had said back: that’s your Catholic schoolgirl voodoo speaking!

  Having spent much of his life pooh-poohing others, now he gets this last joke: he is experiencing a reverse pregnancy, an undoubling, a womb turned inside out. His spirit is slowly traveling up from his belly so as to lodge, temporarily, in his head. Troubling that he still has some theories about Jesus to share with whomever will listen, though only a chair mars this departure lounge.

  The way of silence is not only death but incest. Paracelsus says, “He who enters the kingdom of God must first enter his mother and die.” The silence which is death is also our mother. The matrix in which the word is sown is silence. Silence is the mother tongue.

  What will be left will be this giant head, its bones and sockets hearing but not seeing, thoughts coming, going, shrinking him into a mere homunculus. Then the involuntary act of breath will cease along with the thoughts and the thinker will leave, going where? The girls walk toward him in identical yellow tank tops, happy he has not boarded his flight yet. You like the shirts? No one’s lips move. How many more moments of pleasure do they want him to string together? Does it matter if they want him to have five more moments or ten? Why are they all so voracious?

  TWENTY-SIXTH OF DECEMBER, 2008 4:32 P.M.

  The woman in charge of Decedent Affairs winks like a mother. “Right this way,” she says. “You must have been close. You came despite Christmas.”