Lemon Reef

by Robin Silverman

  “Things are settling down in Baxter and Flint,” Bea said. “It’s helped a lot that Carlos Robles is the minor’s attorney. He supports your decision, and he’s managed to calm Margaret Todd down a bit. Apparently the baby is doing fine, and the mother is seeing her every day. So it was a good call. It took a lot of guts.” I was relieved. I had been expecting to return to a battle and was glad not to. “How’s it going there? Are you okay?”

  “Fine,” I said, consciously omitting any mention of the box and my intention to go and get it. I thought about asking Bea if she’d sent the fax, but I knew she wouldn’t be able to tell me if she had. I doubted it was Bea who’d sent it anyway, since the last thing she would have wanted to do was get me more worked up.

  Bea didn’t believe I was fine, but it was not her nature to pry. She just asked if there was anything she could do. I said there wasn’t, that I would see her in a few days. Then we warmly ended the call.

  *

  I poured myself a glass of water and went to sit on the lounge chair on the patio. The sun on my skin made me sleepy, and I lay back and closed my eyes. I thought about the Jeep and whether Talon knew we were looking into Del’s death. I didn’t want to believe Ida had told him, but how else would he know? Ida’s love-hate relationship with Del made it hard to know how to be with her. She’d given me important information, but I wasn’t sure I could trust it. Still, the conversation I’d had with her the day before had stayed with me, left me wondering how to measure how much damage I’d done. Especially when so much else contributed to the harm at the same time. The law has formulas for apportioning blame; the human psyche doesn’t.

  Before I told Gail about Del and me, before things really spun out of control, I knew we were in trouble, and I wanted to get help. It’s no excuse, but it seemed to me at the time like the worse things got, the more adamant Del became about not asking for help and the more worried I became about both of us. In the end, by the time I talked to Gail about what was happening, it was as if Del and I had been in a bad accident. On impact, I was hurled from the car, and although it would be a very long time—years—before I hit the ground, my landing would be far softer than the crash itself had been for Del.

  *

  There was one time I came close to asking a teacher to help us. It was early November, just after the Stevie Nicks concert. I was sitting alone in Elaine Fernandez’s classroom, upset about having just learned our tenth-grade class was doing How the Grinch Stole Christmas for the Christmas play. Del breezed in. I hadn’t seen her yet that day, and she surprised me with how beautiful she looked. Her hair was tied back in a ponytail. She was wearing a sleeveless button-down linen blouse, a short beige denim skirt, and sandals. Her cheeks were rouged and her lips lightly glossed, making her seem older than her fifteen years.

  “What’s wrong?” She stopped a few feet away. “Gail told me you’re upset.” I told Del about Grinch. She stared at me blankly. “Yeah, so? Big deal.” I glared at her for not understanding. Del widened her eyes and raised her brows. “Jenna.” She spoke slowly as if trying to get through to me once and for all. “You can’t expect the school to do Metamorphosis for the Christmas play.” She was trying not to laugh.

  “It’s a gay adolescent coming-out story,” I said.

  “It’s a man turning into a bug.”

  “That’s the same thing, Del. Ever heard of metaphor?”

  She shook her head at the futility of arguing with me about this and just moved closer to me. “Nobody understands what you mean by that.” Del lifted herself up onto the table to sit beside me and crossed her legs. “I don’t understand what you mean by that, and you’ve explained it to me five times.”

  I didn’t respond. I was looking down at the terrazzo floor, searching it, my eyes filling, tears starting to dribble out. I was thinking about Gregor’s good intentions and how they didn’t matter, how since he had become a bug, nobody could see how hard he was trying or recognize the same good-naturedness he still possessed, which they had loved in him when he was human. Overnight, his grotesqueness became the only filter through which he was apprehended, through which his motives were discerned.

  Del looked at me, said with alarm, “Jenna, why are you crying?” I shrugged my shoulders and wiped at my eyes. She closed the classroom door, rested her hands on my thighs, and leaned in so our foreheads were almost touching. Then she waited.

  I spoke and cried at the same time. “They hate me.”

  Softly, “Who hates you?”

  “My parents,” I said. “They hate me.” I raised my eyes to hers, whispered, “Because I’m a girl.” It was something I had felt for some time but had never said aloud.

  Del’s eyes were somber and still, her lips slightly drawn in. She was trying to figure me out. She sat next to me again, put her hand on my back.

  “I’m that bug, Del.”

  She moved her gaze away and then back, and then as if it was the only thing she could think to do to comfort me, she wrapped her arms around me. “I love you.”

  The door opened and Fernandez, our tenth-grade English teacher, entered. She paused at first when she saw us, her expression unchanged. Then she closed the door behind her. I trusted Elaine Fernandez. She had introduced me to Kafka and was the first Freud enthusiast I’d ever met—talked openly to her tenth-grade class about bisexuality as the norm and Plato’s mythic hermaphrodite as the precondition to heterosexuality. Black hair framed the black eyes now settling on us. Del slowly let go of me and then shrugged in Fernandez’s direction, as if to say she didn’t know how to help me. Fernandez lifted herself onto a nearby table and faced us.

  Del sat beside me with her hand on mine. “She’s upset about the play,” Del said. “But I don’t understand—”

  Fernandez nodded and interrupted, “I thought your paper on Metamorphosis was excellent, Jenna.”

  “I’m Gregor,” I said and started to cry all over again.

  Fernandez watched me, her expression kind and open. She studied me momentarily and then said, “Because you might be gay?” I froze. Yes, I had said as much in my paper, but hearing her say it out loud was unsettling. Del jerked her hand away from mine. There was a lengthy silence, the three of us just looking off in different directions. Fernandez then looked squarely at Del and me and said with apparent concern, “Are you girls okay?” Her mouth drew into a straight line across her face. Her eyes were solid and stern. She expected an answer.

  Del crossed her arms. “We’re fine.”

  It wasn’t true. Pascale was drinking more, the beatings were getting more frequent and extreme, the sex between Del and me was becoming bolder and more desperate, and I was becoming aware that it—the sex—meant something different to me than it did to Del. For all of it, I was terribly worried about us, and I wanted very much to talk to someone about it.

  I touched Del’s arm, said gently, “Del.”

  She answered with a threatening glare. I said nothing more.

  *

  The patio door slid open and Nicole stuck her head out. “Talon’s at my mother’s house with Khila. It’s now or never for that box.” I threw my legs off the lounge to stand. “Ida says she’s gonna call us as soon as Talon leaves,” Nicole said. We both froze for a moment, wondering the same thing. “She’s not gonna call us.” Nicole moved from foot to foot. “I know she’s not gonna call us.”

  “It doesn’t matter. Let’s just go.”

  Talon and Del had bought a small house in Pembroke Pines, an area north of where we grew up. To get there, Nicole and I exited I-95 at Pembroke Road and headed west. After we turned off the freeway, I kept my eye on the mirror, looking out for the black Jeep. I didn’t see it. With no sign of being followed, I lost interest in the Jeep and began to look around. Not long ago, the street we were on had been a narrow two-lane road, which crept along through open fields, one-level apartments, and run-down wooden shacks for stores with gravel lots for parking. Miles of dirt, dry shrub, and straw grass accompanied one en route
to the few pockets of modern development spread far apart. That was how I remembered Pembroke: dirt roads, white people, pickup trucks, and backwoods poverty. Now we drove on a newly paved four-lane roadway, edged with concrete strips of white storefronts that boasted big windows and tacky signs. Traffic lights with four-way signals dangled over corners where stop signs had once sufficed. Horns honked, voices carried, engines revved and spat, buses unapologetically sprayed soot into the faces of unsuspecting pedestrians.

  I watched Nicole’s face, her slight nose, full lips, distinct cheekbones and chin. Her hair fell casually to her shoulders, folded like a habit behind her small, stud-framed ear. She looked straight ahead, concentrating on the street, studying it, anticipating its next move.

  Back to thinking about the fax, I asked, “Do you know what Talon’s birth name is?”

  “Larry.” Nicole laughed. “It’s funny when you think about how different the names are. He just wants to scare people. Gets off on it.”

  “Do you know if he has a criminal record?”

  “Don’t know. Can’t you find out? You must have access to criminal records.”

  “Not without breaking the law,” I said. She had a funny expression on her face, and I knew that it was because my concern for the law sounded ludicrous given what we were on our way to do at that very moment. It seemed different to me. Breaking into Talon’s house felt like a personal risk, whereas accessing confidential records felt like an abuse of power. There was more silence, and then I asked, “Do you still like Elvis?”

  Nicole seemed surprised and pleased. “I love Elvis. I can’t believe you remember that.”

  “I do remember that about you. The first time I ate over at your house you watched Love Me Tender on television, and Del and Ida made fun of your Elvis crush.” She smiled. I began to say something else, stopped, thought about it, decided to go ahead. “Remember the Christmas Eve that I hung out with you guys? The year your dad left.” She nodded distantly. “I remember he got you that neon poster of Elvis in a metal frame, and you hung it over your bed.”

  “That was the saddest night,” Nicole said, with the obvious intention of bringing the conversation to a close.

  *

  Nearly a week had passed since the Christmas Eve when I had left Del crying in her bed and had come home to find my parents at the dining room table with my stories and letters and photos. The fight with my parents had ended with me being grounded for the remaining week of Christmas vacation.

  During that week, I had hardly left my room, could do little more than sleep and cry. Then on the Saturday before school was starting, I awoke with a strange symptom. My top lip was swollen, as if I had been stung by a bee or bitten by a spider. It was neither of those things, as it turned out to be a stress symptom that recurred somewhat frequently over the next few years. I had my period and had bled through my sweats, but I was not particularly motivated to clean up or change my sheets. That morning, when I did finally get up to pee, I realized the grotesque image I breezed past in the mirror—menstrual bloating, fat lip, frizzy and clumped hair, eyes and face swollen from crying—was me.

  I opened the medicine cabinet in the bathroom to look for aspirin. Beside the aspirin was a bottle of Valium, which I opened instead. I stood by the sink and stared at the small pills, dumped some into my hand. I had never thought about killing myself before. What led me to consider it then was a future without Del in it. It was an unbearable thought. I missed her. Every breath was a reminder of life without her; every inch of my skin ached for her. I sobbed uncontrollably, felt pain I could never have imagined coming in waves from wake to sleep, following me into dreams, worse than ever upon awakening. I would emerge from a dream about her, eager to tell her about it, and face my empty room and the dead phone beside my bed. I would lie there doubled over, trembling and waiting for the stabbing in my chest to pass. My heart was singed and there was no relief in sight. I put the pills back in the bottle and left it on the shelf, marking the bottle in my mind like a dog-ear on a page to which one intends to return.

  My volume of Kafka’s stories lay open on the bed beside me. I turned to Metamorphosis and began to read yet again of Gregor Samsa’s transformation into a giant bug. Some people believe the bug was a cockroach, some a dung beetle, others say Kafka never intended it as any particular kind of insect. Great debates have taken place: Roaches are flatter with longer legs; dung beetles go through a quick metamorphosis like the one in the story. In fact, it only took Gregor one night to undergo a transformation from a human into an insect. What changes in the human condition might a week bring?

  The disconnected phone lay silent beside my bed, the sun came and went, marked only by a pinstripe of light landing on the wall by which it announced its arrival and departure each day. Was this the lesson my mother intended for me to learn, that my desire in and of itself was a betrayal? Was that what she’d learned a long time ago—that sexuality, rather than a tender inclination toward expression, is something to be refused? What frailties and fears reside in the strata, rhythms, and recesses of our minds has everything to do with the ways our hearts were broken as children. One learns to know and not know, inquire and then precipitously withdraw, look on and then away, listen for and then categorically reject—to pray rather than to think.

  Katie tapped on my bedroom window the Sunday night before school was starting. I climbed out to meet her.

  “I’ve been calling and calling,” she said.

  “I’m on punishment.”

  She crunched her brows and dipped her chin. “You? Why?”

  I shrugged. “What’s up?”

  “Please don’t tell anyone, okay?” I nodded. She started sobbing. “I need an abortion, can you go with me to the clinic? I have an appointment tomorrow. We need to leave at lunch break.”

  I reflexively agreed. This was one of those things you just do for a friend.

  “Please don’t tell anyone,” she pleaded again. “Not even Jason knows.”

  “I won’t. I promise. If Jason doesn’t know,” I said, “then how is he gonna help you pay for it?”

  She didn’t answer.

  *

  Nicole and I continued driving north onto a narrow cul-de-sac of small stucco tract houses. We stopped in front of the one I presumed was Del’s, its fresh white paint speckled with particles of silver reflecting the sunlight, momentarily reminding me of the white light emanating from the heat of a sparkler on the Fourth of July.

  “Maybe they left a window unlocked,” I said, the thought of breaking in suddenly more real and unsettling. It was a meaningless distinction, legally. Unauthorized entry is unauthorized entry. I began to reconsider, realizing I was about to risk my career, my marriage, and possibly my freedom. I heard Bea McVee’s cautionary Do I need to worry about you? I thought about Madison, my house, my life in San Francisco. Weighing against these: the wrongs I couldn’t right for Del and myself when I was a kid; the image of her hooked to a chain thirty feet under the water; Khila’s pleading eyes; and the thought of Talon having murdered Del and now trotting off to Texas with Del’s daughter and some bizarre woman who referred to herself as Khila’s new mommy. I couldn’t let that happen without a fight. I told myself we’d be in and out, as I climbed into the backseat to let myself out.

  Nicole said, “I know where there’s a key.”

  Stepping out of my side of the car, I felt reluctant to put my foot down on the notably white sidewalk for fear of soiling it. It took me a moment to realize the glistening cement in front of Del’s house had been bleached. The lawn was thick and green and manicured, the bushes clipped and shaped.

  “She was such a neat freak,” I said, remembering her clean room and ironed clothes.

  Across the street, a face peered out from behind a curtain in the window. A man’s face, Caucasian, with a thick jaw and dark hair. Those were the only details I could make out from where I was standing. He was clearly watching us. My heartbeat quickened at the possibility that he was Talon
’s friend and he would call him. But even from a distance, and with so little of him visible, something about the way he was hiding and watching made me reconsider.

  “We have to go quickly,” Nicole said.

  Nicole agreed with me about Del having been a neat freak as she led the way around to the back of the house. She ran her fingers across the frame over the back door, announced the key proudly, as if she’d just made it appear from behind some unsuspecting child’s ear. “I told her a thousand times that’s the first place a thief’s gonna look.” Putting the key in the door, she said, “And I should know, two felonies for B and E.”

  The shallow walls were upon us quickly, with looming low ceilings and little light. We entered through a room with a couch and a television. The room was filled with empty boxes, which we assumed were there because Talon was packing. We passed the small U-shaped kitchen and entered the living room/dining room. The wood shone, the metal sparkled, the carpet stood at attention. Chairs were tucked beneath the dining-room table, pillows were intentionally placed. I thought of the state of my own laundry, the toss my own house incurred on a normal day—puppy toys, stacks of books, clothes left on the bathroom floor, dishes in the sink, discarded pages from Madison’s drafts hurled in the direction of the wastebasket. On a bookshelf among many framed photos was an eight-by-ten photo of Talon and Khila.

  “There is not a single picture of Del.”

  Nicole whispered, “It’s like a museum in here.”

  I was thinking sort of the same thing—how Del’s house had the feeling of something that used to be alive, something exhibited as a stand-in for itself.

  “And they have a kid?” I noticed the near-perfect image of a filled candy bowl reflected in the coffee table on which it sat, and the CDs and tapes alphabetized by performer and stacked in perfect succession.

  “I know,” Nicole said. “What does Khila do in here, stand still?” Nicole started toward the kitchen and then froze. She reached back for my arm. “Jenna, what is that?” She was pointing at a camera bracket affixed to the ceiling above the dining-room table.