It was just as we’d left it.
Perfect. Nearly pristine. Lucky.
I didn’t yet know the end of world had already started.
When we entered the house through the garage, it was dark and hot and damp. The windows, even under the clamped-tight shutters, were covered in mud. Inside it was silent. As I walked into the great room, I kicked an empty wine bottle that went careening in arcs across the dark, hardwood floor. The big candles on the coffee table were burned all the way down, and wax was drizzled all over the room like snail trails. My heart started beating hard. All the covers from my bed had been brought down to the great room, a messy bed made across the massive coffee table.
He wasn’t here alone.
On the floor, next to the makeshift bed, a black pistol.
He doesn’t own a gun.
I picked it up, slid it into the waist of my skirt, grabbed two wine bottles in my knuckles.
This is why he left.
The kids were toddling up the stairs to their rooms, even the baby scrambling up in a crawl step by step with Avery holding her hands up behind him in case he fell.
“What the fuck are you doing here?”
I turned, and in the doorway was my husband, Dr. Liam Rivers, staring at me.
“I snuck back in.”
“You did, did you? I didn’t tell you to come back.”
“Daddy!” the kids went running to him, grabbing his legs.
“We sneaked back in with a whole bunch of men!” Avery announced.
“A bunch of men, huh?” he asked, looking at me. “I bet.”
“Go check out the backyard for me, babies, will ya?” I asked, and they unlatched the back door and went out. I could see them through the mud-filmed windows walking across the trunks of overturned trees.
I stood looking at Liam and he at me. For a minute I thought he was going to embrace me.
“Clean this fucking mess up,” he whispered, left the room, went out to the drive, got in his car, and pulled away.
HECK ON WHEELS
There was a time that Liam would have respected that I could score two generators, months of food and supplies, then finagle my way back into a mandatory evacuation area all on my own within a span of twenty-four hours. It was that badassness in me he’d found so sexy in the first place.
We were cut from the same cloth: two broken people born to families with expectations so low in life anything above “not a dropout” or “not in jail” was a wild success. Families who played it by ear and kept what happened in the dark a secret come daylight. Families that didn’t even show up to our graduations. Histories of drink and violence and despair. What we had, we got from scraping the very back corners of our own dark hearts.
We started, both of us, from scratch.
I spent my first two years after high school at the local community college in South Sacramento. My family had relocated from Mississippi. Mama told Papa if he didn’t get her out of Jackson she’d leave him. So there we were, picked up from one Delta town to another: night and day. And all the other “smart kids” at John F. Kennedy High had long since shipped off to four-year institutions, but my parents had made no plans whatsoever for my college education. Never spoke of it: never considered it. Cosumnes River College was my start, and while high school had mostly bored me silly (outside of show choir and jazz choir and dancing with the Hawaiiana Revue), college inspired me in a way that was soul-deep, exhilarating.
* * *
I wrote essays on Emerson that bled off the page. I choreographed a modern dance solo to a recording of Audre Lorde reading a poem. I loved how I could take a history class that fed into my art class that fed into my lit class that fed into my music class. Education was everything to me suddenly.
Days in class, nights downtown at cafés or the clubs, dance classes. I got everywhere on my little sky-blue scooter.
I was riding down Riverside Boulevard, which runs below the levee next to the Sacramento River all the way from South Sac to midtown. My girlfriend Ava was riding behind me. There is a turn in the road where Riverside crosses under Interstate 5, and for a moment you can’t see the traffic coming from the other direction, and so when we banked, it was only at the very last second that we saw her: the lady with the stiff white beehive behind the wheel of the impossibly large, shiny yellow Cadillac DeVille, a cigarette perched artfully in her right hand off the steering wheel. Passing into the shade under the overpass, I sped up to miss her, and the front wheel of the scooter hit the curb, tipping up. Everything went slow motion as I watched Ava fly up and over me, into the ivy that lined the levee.
“Oh, fuck,” I said, and I saw her face turn toward mine as she passed me in the air, her short platinum hair around her like a punk halo.
Then I flew through the air, too, following her, a graceful hurl halted in a dreadful jolt by the solid, six-inch steel bus stop pole.
The pole bent: I broke.
Ava rose from the bank of ivy with barely a scratch.
On the sidewalk, the EMTs split my jeans up the center, and my shirt, but there wasn’t a scratch on me. They loaded me in the ambulance. Even so, I was going down fast. Like the rest of my life, the damage was all inside.
When I wrapped around that pole, my rib cage had shattered, and my shattered ribs had punctured both lungs, and those jagged ribs had lacerated my liver into several separate pieces, and the impact was so severe that my common bile duct was not just impacted—it was gone. Poof. No longer existed. It took the trauma surgeons a good bit of time and several experimental surgeries in the first few days to figure out how to sew me back together and give me back a life.
That summer was spent in the hospital, with surgery after surgery. My gallbladder was sewn, experimentally, to my duodenum. I disappeared to seventy-eight pounds, at five foot eight inches tall, a skeletal version of my former self. They fed me through a tube for months, trying to get my insides back in order. The white, silky lipids would snake down from the tube and into me, filling me with a flash of heat: I got used to it. When finally they wanted me to eat real food, it was a revolting task. Mama would bring me french fries, begging me to eat.
“I already ate three!” I’d screech, frustrated.
“It’s okay, Alice, just do what you can,” Mama would assure me, the love in her voice the only thing I could count on for sure.
Mama nearly lived at the hospital, spending easily nineteen hours a day there. At first I had lots of visitors, but as the months wore on, usually it was just family. Papa would come nearly every day, but he couldn’t stay in my room longer than a few minutes without breaking down.
“I’m so sorry, babe. I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” he’d repeat over and over, until Mama would quietly shoo him out of the room and he’d go back to being mayor of the waiting room, bolstering all the other families on in, as it was called, the motorcycle trauma wing. Papa was like that, the king of everything, the most popular, the hand-shaking, back-slapping everyman head of every board and club and industry in which he traveled. King of everything, that is, except his own family, where he was sort of the exiled dictator who came back occasionally—impotent yet raging—as we moved around him with equal parts pity and dismay.
Lying in my hospital bed with the feeding tube under my clavicle and the drainage tube coiling out my side and the oxygen hooked in to my nose and the IV pumping in the top of my right foot because the veins in both hands had been shot months before, I was helpless. A little pitiful. Gone was the alpha girl always at the head of the class, the jazz singer off to the South of France at fifteen, the skater chick keeping up with the hard-core boys at the Mile High Skate Halfpipe up in Tahoe, the Littlest Princess dancing (at five years old) with the Los Angeles Ballet. I was fragile—near death, in fact, on several occasions.
The first day I’d come in, they’d taken me straight to an OR. I remember sliding away on the table, not sure if it was consciousness or anesthesia, but I remember a nurse taking off my nail polish, and I had
the thought, Too late, too late.
It’s too late to worry about my nail polish. I’m gone.
Then everything in the room slid around backward like through a fish-eye lens, and I saw myself crucified there on the OR table, and I saw the nurse taking off my nail polish, and I saw Dr. James Holcroft slice me straight down the middle from breast to pelvis, and out of that wound I saw my whole life rise up, all of it, the blood and the guts of it, the shit and the flower petals from my parents’ wedding raining down on me the first time I fucked a girl and me dropping into a half-pipe and a wave breaking over me in the ocean like the way my father’s hand went over my mouth so easily the first time he entered me, and I heard myself sing an aria in the fourth grade—that’s the first time I discovered I had a voice—and black birds sprang out of my mouth and into a sky filled with stars the shape of every moment of shame I’d ever swallowed and then they fell to the ground, beautiful, shooting jade, exploding into laughter.
Everything was silent.
I didn’t see God.
“Alice? Alice?”
I opened my eyes.
Dr. Holcroft smiled down at me.
“It’s too late for my nail polish,” I said.
He smiled.
“You made it,” he said.
I looked down, my belly swollen up the size of a basketball.
“How long have I been asleep?”
He laughed. “Not long enough for that kind of trouble—about twelve hours.”
I had four more surgeries in the next week.
I was in four months that first stay.
Once, when fluid had built up in my lungs, they rolled me down to the bowels of the hospital and sent me into the sterile white tube of the MRI.
“Okay now, Alice, hold your breath until we say you can let it out,” came a disembodied voice from the tech, as I slid into the white tube, cold and silent.
“Breathe now,” said the voice.
The table moved me slightly out of the tube.
“One more time, Alice, take a deep breath and hold it in.”
Again, into the tube, out.
Then a long pause, nothing.
I was feverish in a way I’d never felt before. It seemed that everything inside me was boiling over, and I felt the heat surround me, too, almost sitting off my body a half an inch or so, scalding and suffocating. Why am I so hot?
“Alice,” said a familiar voice, Dr. Holcroft, “try not to move at all; we’re going to do a little surgery right there on the MRI table.”
My drainage tube had somehow backed up, and a lung was so full up it was in danger of bursting: too dangerous to move me now.
They came in, put up a tent in front of my face so I couldn’t watch them cutting into me, piercing the abscess, inserting yet another drain in between two rib bones straight into my liver.
I’d just come back from this surgery on the MRI table when Papa came in, standing at the end of my bed, holding on to my foot, crying. Papa wore very thick glasses in a square shape, and the tears pooled up in the bottoms of the frames before spilling down on his red, rough cheeks. “I’m so sorry, babe. I’m sorry, I’m really sorry,” he’d say. And I’d look away and let my eyelids fall slowly closed, feigning sleep. I needed sleep, anyway, and besides, I couldn’t stand to see him cry, and I wasn’t anywhere near close to telling him, “It’s okay,” when we both knew that his apology wasn’t for my sickness but for something sicker still.
Aside from the patients from Folsom State Prison, whose doors remained closed with full-time guards standing at the ready, there were a lot of guys with head injuries on the motorcycle wing. One would yell, “Waitress!” every ten minutes, when he needed his nurse. Another routinely escaped his room, ripped off his gown, and came running into my room, yelling, “Fuck me, waitress! I love you!” Fake sleep was a defense I knew well and used often.
I started to ease myself out of bed every morning before the sun came up. I convinced Mama to bring me regular clothes, and when the doctors and their gaggle of med students would arrive about five, I’d be sitting in the visitor’s chair in my room, the hospital bed made, asking to go home. This ritual continued for about three weeks before they finally relented.
After nearly four months, I was finally released from the hospital. I had a drain in my side where a gaping hole oozed bile and liquids from my inner swelling; I could barely stand straight from my stomach muscles being cut down the middle in so many surgeries; and I was still less than eighty pounds. But I was out, and alive, and ready to get back to school. I remember the ride back to my parents’ house (my apartment had been packed up and moved out of months before) noticing that the leaves were changing on the trees. The highway runs adjacent to the treetops in Sacramento, which is known as the City of Trees, and I remember thinking that the burnt orange treetops were the exact same color as the carpet in my parents’ den.
School started three weeks later, and even though I’d missed the application deadlines, I met with an admissions counselor, my perfect transcripts from community college and my thick stack of medical records bound up with a thick rubber band. She let me in.
I started as a junior at Sac State in the fall semester. I was like every other student, marching around campus in my Levi’s and Docs. Everything seemed as if it might return to normal. But doors were too heavy for me to pull open: chairs hurt the bones of my scrawny behind. My hair was falling out in patches, a classic body-trauma response. When I raised my hand to speak in class, the wrinkly sound the drainage bag at my waist made me cringe each time. More seriously, I kept falling ill again—passing out in public or uncontrollably vomiting or spiking a wild fever—and being readmitted a day here or two days there. Finally, the doctors convinced me to stay home and do nothing but rest and work on increasing my strength.
I dropped out of college, dejected.
Now my days were spent in my childhood bedroom, watching daytime TV, reading fashion magazines, letting Mama change my dressings and my drainage bag, pretending to eat the cream-laden food she brought in on trays.
One evening, I convinced Mama I was strong enough to bathe on my own. She had a lawn chair in the bathtub for me to sit in, and usually she’d undress me, help me get in the chair, then wash my hair and the rest of me, get me out, towel me off, dress me, and put me back to bed. But this time I wanted to do it myself. I went in the bathroom and shut the door. I took off my clothes that Mama had bought from me from the girls’ department, peeling them off and stepping out of them where they fell. Just as I went to step into the tub, I looked over at myself in the mirror. A ragged girl, her hair missing in clumps and white and fuzzy like cotton where it remained, eyes sunken in and dark, lifeless. My body—truly skeletal, covered with ragged, raised red scars up and down the stomach, the dreaded drain protruding from the side of my waist, every rib and clavicle standing out like sharp twigs—was a shock. I fainted.
Mama got me back to bed, and I stayed there. And stayed. Nothing could rouse me. I hit a funk so hard I couldn’t drag myself out. So what did Mama do? Signed me up for modeling school.
The Mannequin Manor on Howe Avenue was a suite of offices outfitted with mirrored makeup rooms, several practice runways, an on-camera studio, and other classrooms. My first week there, they declared me a “spring.” I didn’t know if I should laugh or cry, but I could see—after the careful application of makeup by my slinky, gorgeous, elegant teacher, Zara—that the girl I thought I’d lost was still in there somewhere.
After the eight-week course was finished, the head of the modeling school showed us a video about a modeling convention in New York. And because it was my normal mode to follow everything through to the extreme, I convinced Mama and Papa to pay. A few weeks later I went to New York.
It was a silly thing, the convention. Models aren’t taught in schools, and stars are found in midwestern malls and Southern Friday-night football rallies, not the Hyatt Centric Times Square.
There were three parts to the competi
tion: runway, commercial, and print. I’d gone and taken my photos beforehand with a photographer in San Francisco and some shots of me, wholesome in a cropped Guess jeans jacket, won first place. I also won first place for my rendition, on camera, of a L’Oréal “Because I’m worth it” commercial.
On the last day of the convention, a room was set up with scouts from various agencies for the girls to take their books around. I woke up the morning of the scouting session thinking, I don’t want to be a model, I want to be a poet, but I dragged myself around anyway. I was signed by two agencies—McDonald Richards in New York, a big commercial talent agency who thought I had a future in shampoo commercials and foot modeling, and Maxi International, a Paris agency I’d never heard of.
The owner of Maxi International, Sabine, sat at the table alone, looking like a cross between a Chanel model and a middle-aged math teacher, her dirty blond hair pulled back in a strict long braid down her back, with a pink grosgrain ribbon to match her suit. She flipped through my book, saying, “Oui,” and “Oui,” and “Oui,” with each glossy page that passed.
“We’ll be in touch, oui?” she said.
And that was the end of the convention. I flew home, ready to get back to school.
Two days later the phone on the wet bar in my parents’ house in Sacramento rang; it was Sabine, offering to send me a ticket to Paris. She suggested I go to the office in San Francisco, get a “hurry visa,” and arrive in ten days.
I said yes.
I wasn’t nearly well enough to be moving to Paris to model, but with school off the table for a while, I had nothing else to do and—heck on wheels—I was skinny.
THE MAXI PAD
All I knew was that someone would pick me up.
When I arrived at the airport on a sharply cold, slate-gray day, I had the faint feeling that I’d taken a wrong turn. I’d spent the last six months in the hospital or in a twin bed in my childhood bedroom, and suddenly here I was, standing on a curb at Charles de Gaulle, with an enormous suitcase filled with stacks of Levi’s, a dozen white T-shirts, one tiny black spandex dress, three pairs of Western boots, a pair of biker boots, a pair of red fishnet stockings, and a black leather biker jacket. There was no one there to greet me, no hired driver with ANDERSON scrawled across a white sign the way I’d expected. I dug through my bag for the agency address, and, finding it, held up my hand for a taxi, the long purple fringe of my suede coat fanning out behind me in the wind. Just then, a burly young man roared up on a motorbike and said, “Alice?”
Some Bright Morning, I'll Fly Away Page 3