by Una LaMarche
“Quite a crew for first thing in the morning,” she says. “Are you on the list?”
“The list?” My heart drops.
“Yes, each patient has a list of visitors. You have to have been requested. We can’t be too careful, especially in this neighborhood. Hence the buzzer.” She gestures to a small monitor on her desk, a black-and-white video feed of the balcony we came in from.
“We’re here to see our father, so . . . I think we should be on it,” I say.
“And your father is?” She blinks up at me.
“Buck Devereaux.” I’m expecting her to flip through papers, so I’m taken aback when she stays frozen in place, her mouth falling open slightly, confusion in her eyes. “Or Allen,” I say quickly. “It could be under Allen, that’s his first name.”
“No, sweetheart,” she says, and the sudden change in tone of her voice and manner tells me immediately what’s really wrong, what I knew was wrong since I stepped off the bus. The blood rushes to my head so fast I can hardly hear the words as she says them out loud. “I know who your father is, honey. It’s just—I’m sorry to be the one to tell you this, but Buck Devereaux passed away last night.”
• • •
The first feeling is shock, plain and simple, like getting body-checked from a blind spot. Buck is already dead. We’re too late. This realization knocks the wind out of me. But once its meaning sinks in, there’s a wave of relief that dovetails with a swell of anger and then something else, a kind of bitter, throbbing sadness—is that grief? It all happens in the span of a few seconds, as the nurse looks up at me with naked pity. What kind of daughter doesn’t know her father is dead, she must be thinking. I want to explain, but I can’t form the words. So I just say, “Oh.” I look back at the others. Cass is stone-faced, but Leah’s face is threatening to crumple, the muscles around her mouth trembling as she tries to control them. Tim, who just looks worried, puts his arms around both of the girls. Denny takes my hand and looks up at me.
“Dad is dead?” he asks. “But I really wanted to meet him.”
Me too, kid, I think.
“We didn’t have any next of kin,” the nurse says apologetically, “or we would have called. The only person who’s been to see him is his girlfriend. She’s coming in to pick up his personal effects.”
Personal effects. That’s a good name for what we are. The effects of his miserable existence. I suddenly have a strong urge to see his body. I always look away when they show dead people on the crime shows Cass loves, but I’m afraid if I don’t see Buck I’ll always wonder if this wasn’t just one last way to avoid us.
“Is he—” I try to keep my voice steady. “Is he still here?”
“No, the funeral home came and got him,” she says apologetically. “I can give you the number.”
I nod, and she pulls a business card from a drawer. All Faith’s Funeral Home. Next to the address there’s a cheesy picture of an orchid lit by a celestial beam. I’m sliding it into my back pocket when the doorbell rings, a loud, almost cartoonish ding-dong! I can see a woman standing outside on the monitor screen, with messy black hair and big sunglasses.
“That’s Carly, his girlfriend,” the nurse says, pressing the buzzer, and we all turn to brace ourselves as the last guest to our sad little party arrives.
Carly is small and skinny, swimming in cutoff shorts and a tank top with a big pair of red lips silk-screened on the front. She’s wearing flip-flops, and her toenails have chipped green polish. From her body I’d guess she was in her twenties, but when she pushes up her sunglasses, her face is sun-damaged and kind of puckered, probably more like forty-five. She’s got watery blue eyes and eyebrows drawn in with pencil. If she’s not a junkie now, then she’s definitely had a past—you can tell just by looking at her.
“So you made it,” she says, giving us the once-over, looking totally unfazed by our color spectrum and various stages of dishevelment. Her voice has a pack-a-day smoker’s rasp. “You missed him, but he wasn’t awake much for the past week anyway. Probably just as well.” She walks past us to the front desk and leans her elbows on the counter. “You got a box for me, Gina?”
I didn’t even know Carly existed two minutes ago, so maybe it’s unfair to have any expectations, but I’m instantly thrown by how casual she is, as if she picks up the effects of newly deceased boyfriends in front of their bands of estranged children every other week or something.
“We made it,” I say. “Barely.” But Carly either doesn’t hear or chooses not to respond. Cass makes a WTF? face at me, while Leah shoots daggers into Carly’s back.
The nurse—Gina, I guess—bends down, reemerging with a shoebox a minute later, marked on one side with Devereaux in black Sharpie. It’s not even a large shoebox, either. It looks like the kind sandals might come in.
“Thanks,” Carly says and then turns back to us. “You guys want any of it?”
“What’s in it?” Denny asks.
“Probably just a bunch of crap, little man.” She puts her hand on Denny’s head, and I jerk him back, but she doesn’t seem to notice. “He promised me a ring, but he didn’t get to that. Bought himself a used car, though. Typical.” She sounds more pissed off than sad.
“What did he die of?” Leah asks. She’s more composed now, but her nostrils are still flaring.
“Well, he had hep C,” Carly says. “But so do I. The difference is, he kept drinking. I told him he had to quit, but he couldn’t. So his liver went. And once the liver goes . . .” She shakes her head and looks down at the shoebox. She takes off the lid, revealing a beat-up brown wallet, some car keys, a pair of aviator sunglasses, and a half-full pack of cigarettes. She puts the cigarettes and the car keys in her purse and then looks through the wallet for bills, finding none.
“Can I see that?” I ask. Carly shrugs and hands it to me, and I pull out Buck’s driver’s license from behind a scratched plastic window. The photo’s not too sharp, but he looks pretty much the same as I remember him. Longish hair, handsome face, maybe a little thinner in the cheeks. There’s an address listed for Venice Boulevard. “Does he have an apartment?” I ask.
“Please, that man had no credit,” Carly says. “That’s an old girlfriend’s place where he used to get mail. Since we hooked up, he’s been staying with me.” Drinking, bouncing from place to place, making promises he couldn’t keep—it seems like Buck didn’t change much. The thought is both depressing and oddly comforting.
“I’m Michelle,” I say, realizing I haven’t introduced myself. Not that she seems to have been wondering.
“Nice to meet you, honey,” she says, extending a bony hand. “You look like him. All three of you girls.” She smiles at Tim. “You, not so much, but you’re a cutie like Buck. Just don’t be a jerk like him, okay?”
“I won’t,” Tim says and puts a hand on the small of my back.
“Buck called,” I say, glancing at Leah. “He said he had something for us. Did he leave a will or anything?”
“There’s nothing but a lot of debt that I know of,” Carly sighs. “Luckily his mother’s taking care of that. She’s living large out in Utah someplace. Stopped giving him any money a while back, though.” She frowns into the box. “Unless you count paying for the funeral.”
“What about the car?” I ask.
“He left that to me,” she says a little sharply, closing the shoebox with a possessive thump. “It was one of the last things he said.” She laughs bitterly. “It figures he’d spend his last living minutes yakking about a stupid car.”
I turn back to Leah and Tim. “He didn’t say anything about what it was?” I ask. Leah bites her lip and shakes her head, and Tim frowns apologetically. “It was an heirloom,” I say to Carly. “Something from his family, maybe?” Hearing that “Grandma” Polly got rich gives me a sliver of hope. Maybe there was a piece of jewelry she gave him specifically for us. Maybe he didn�
�t tell Carly because he knew she’d try to cheat us.
“Oh,” she says, smacking her thigh. “Of course. I remember now. There’s another car somewhere, one he got from his dad. That one’s yours. Hope it’s worth something.”
A hysterical giggle rips out of my throat. Goldie. The “heirloom” he left for us was Goldie. I don’t know what’s worse, that she’s as dead as Buck is or that he had the nerve to leave us a piece of property that he already left behind eleven years ago and that we already owned by default.
“You okay?” Carly asks, and I nod mutely. I look back and see Cass and Leah whispering furiously. “Well,” she says, standing up, clutching her worthless box. “I have to get to work. The funeral’s Friday, if you’re sticking around. All of his Venice Beach buddies are coming. It’s gonna be a good time, just like Buck would have wanted.” Her eyes are watery and unfocused, and for a second I’m afraid she’ll burst into tears. But instead she just blinks a few times, gives us a limp wave, and bangs the door open with one bony hip. It slams shut behind her with a brittle clap.
“Wow,” Cass says.
“Who was that lady?” Denny asks.
“No one,” Leah says, clenching her jaw. Her eyes flash. “So that’s it?” she asks, looking back and forth between Cass and me. “That’s all we came for?” She sits down hard on a chair and bursts into tears.
“Hey.” I crouch down and rest my hands on her knees. It’s kind of a relief to be able to snap into comforting mode instead of dealing with my own feelings, which still are shifting kaleidoscopically from guilt to disappointment to anger and back again. “I know it’s not what we wanted, but if we had never come, we’d always wonder.” I look up at Cass; this is meant for her, too. “And now we know.”
“It just seems so unfair,” Leah cries.
“That’s because it is.” It’s all unfair: what Buck did to us, what happened to Mom, the fact that we traveled this far, sacrificing so much, only for Buck to peace out for good while we sat on a Greyhound bus just hours away, leaving us with nothing but a broken-down car full of bad memories. There’s nothing that’s ever going to make that fair. I try to think of something to say to soften the blow, but instead I find a lump forming in my throat. “Excuse me,” I whisper and make a break for the bathroom. I know I need to stop crying in them—it’s so pathetic and clichéd. But in order to break down I need a closed door, and that’s the only one I see.
It’s the size of a small closet, painted a buttery yellow, with one of those fans that turns on when you flip the light switch so it feels like you’re emptying your bladder under a low-flying helicopter. But I’m grateful for the white noise. It pulls double duty, drowning out both my tears and the voices outside.
I don’t know what to think about any of it. I think I’m still in shock that Buck’s gone, not just gone like I’m used to, but gone gone. I thought it would feel more freeing. Isn’t that what I told Cass back in the tent however many nights ago? That it would be a blessing? It doesn’t feel like a blessing; I don’t think any death can be a true blessing, even if the person was horrible. And now that he’s gone, I won’t ever know firsthand if he was so horrible.
So much of my hatred is rooted in what Buck wasn’t, not what he was. He was selfish and unreliable, a bad husband and a bad father and a bad boyfriend till his dying day, if I take Carly’s word for it. But I’ll never know any of his redeeming qualities, beyond being able to make a five-year-old girl laugh until her sides hurt, when he was in a good mood. I’m kidding myself if I try to pretend like I wasn’t hoping I’d get here to find him changed, and maybe we could have connected, and I could have walked away knowing something—anything—about my father besides the fact that he left us.
I tear off a long sheet of toilet paper and blow my nose. It’s weird, but I feel a lot sadder about not getting to see Buck than I do about not getting any money from him. The truth is, I stopped really caring about the supposed heirloom when Cass got sick. I guess that’s when I realized we had more important things to worry about than money. And maybe, deep down, I knew the whole time that it would end up being nothing, just the last in an endless string of disappointments.
I peel myself off the toilet and move to wash my hands, which is when I see it.
There, on the sink, wedged between the hot-water faucet and a container of antibacterial wipes, is a small cylindrical soap dispenser. And inside the clear plastic, amid a viscous, cloudy sea dotted with air bubbles, floats a miniature Christmas tree. The secret icon I’ve coveted all these years of some perfect, unattainable life is here, in what has got to be in the running for one of the saddest places on earth. The fact that it’s four months past New Year’s is almost beside the point.
I slowly depress the nozzle and let the soap pool in my open palm. Maybe no one’s life is what it looks like from the outside. Maybe Mom’s right, and if we all threw our problems in the air and saw everyone else’s, I’d grasp for mine (well, mine or Ivanka Trump’s). Whatever this sad bottle of soap means—if it is a sign from the universe and not just a sign that there was a recent local discount on out-of-season cleaning products—I need to stop wishing for an easier life, because no one’s going to hand it to me. I just have to suck it up and work with what I’ve got.
When I come back out, what I’ve got—all four of them—are waiting patiently, sitting in a row.
“Did you fall in?” Denny asks with a smirk.
“No,” I say. “But I think I just successfully removed my head from my ass.” I sit down across from Cass and rest my elbows on my knees. “I’m sorry this has been so hard,” I say. “And I’m sorry for making all of you come so far for nothing.”
“It wasn’t nothing,” Cass says. She takes Leah’s hand.
“Nope, not nothing,” Leah says, taking Denny’s.
“I got a cool pen,” Denny says, holding it up. We all bust out laughing, and Denny joins in.
As we file out the door, I double back to the desk to thank Gina. “Sorry about all the histrionics,” I say. “It’s been a long week.”
“Believe me, I’ve seen worse.” She cocks her head and studies my face. “You do look like him,” she says. “But if you don’t mind my asking, where are the other two?”
“Cass and Leah?” I ask, confused. “They’re right over there.”
“No, Madison and Karen,” she says. “He had the names all in a strip down his left side. Used to tell me, ‘These are all my girls.’”
“Oh, right,” I say, like I knew all along I was in his skin, that we all were, side by side, a tribe of survivors. I back away from the desk and give her a shrug. “They couldn’t make it.”
I push through the door to find Tim leaning against the railing, the searing California sun turning him into a human hologram. Denny’s voice echoes in the stairwell—he’s singing “Michelle” now, too. Soon we can form a band.
“Are you okay?” Tim asks. “That was intense, to say the least.”
“I think so,” I say. Although I have no way of knowing, really; right now my feelings are bobbing over my head like untethered balloons. It’s all so surreal.
“Is there anything I can do?”
“Just . . . keep being a good person,” I say, taking his hand and threading my fingers through his. “Open doors for old ladies. Lower your carbon footprint. Always tell the truth. That kind of thing.”
Tim nods solemnly. “Okay,” he says. “Then I should probably tell you, I’m falling in love with you.”
I close my eyes, not sure what to think. I’m still aching from the shock of losing Buck—or the idea of him, anyway—before I even had him, and now there’s a sudden swell of euphoria crashing up against the pain, hitting all the keys in my heart at the same time, like a cat running across a piano. I start to get anxious, bracing for the tidal wave, but then I open my eyes and look at Tim and realize that I don’t have to just wait for it to h
it me this time. I have another option I’ve never considered. I can dive in.
“Me too,” I say. Tim grins, and we both lean forward, two atoms succumbing slowly to an electromagnetic force.
“Are you gonna kiss again?” Denny’s yell is punctuated by barely concealed giggling, and Tim and I leap back, hanging our heads to conceal our self-conscious smiles.
“I don’t know,” he says, letting his fingertips brush mine as we make our way to the stairs. “I think we can find someplace more romantic, don’t you?”
“Definitely,” I say.
TWENTY-ONE
Wednesday Night
Los Angeles, CA Baltimore, MD ?
“Please direct your attention to the front of the cabin for a safety demonstration.”
There’s shuffling throughout the plane as a flight attendant with thick foundation and a bad case of bitchy resting face steps out into the aisle and begins miming buckling a seatbelt.
“Do they do this every time?” I whisper to Tim, who’s sitting to my left, in the middle seat between Denny and me.
“Yup, there’s even a video.” He points to the tiny screen on the back of the seat in front of me, where actors are inflating life vests and jumping onto emergency slides with the calm, blank faces of people who’ve recently been given heavy doses of sedatives.
“If this plane goes down, I will kill you,” I say, only half joking. I was all right until we got into the twisting, narrow jetway that led us from the terminal to the plane. Then I started feeling like Alice falling down the rabbit hole, my old, familiar panic winding around my ribcage and pulling tight. But Tim’s been explaining everything—every ding and snap and a terrifying whooshing sound like we’re about to be sucked through a wind tunnel to our untimely deaths (which apparently is just the flush of a chemical toilet). It also doesn’t hurt that Denny thinks the inside of an airplane is the coolest thing he’s ever seen and has been painstakingly illustrating a replica of our Boeing 737 ever since one of the flight crew brought him up to meet the pilot.