The Good Sister

by Drusilla Campbell

  A V8 yellow Camaro from the sixties and beside it a bullet-shaped, cherry-red Studebaker, probably ten or fifteen years older.

  “The red one’s my favorite ’cuz it looks like a rocket ship. Daddy says it’s almost as old as Gramma Ellen and it still has the paint it got from the factory.”

  Next to the Studebaker was a silver-blue cloth-top roadster from the twenties: long and low, its fenders like breaking waves. Parked beside it, looking humble, a woody station wagon, and against the far wall a black sedan.

  “It used to belong to a really bad criminal,” Merell said, lowering her voice. “There’s bullet holes in the side of it, and Daddy says that makes it more valuable. Vintage cars are an investment.” She looked up at Roxanne through her shaggy bangs. “Do you know what ‘investment’ is?”

  “You tell me.”

  “It’s kind of like a savings account that gets bigger even though you don’t put any more money in it. Daddy says you should have a lot of different investments in case something happens to one of them.”

  Roxanne thought about the Johnny Duran who took the time to teach his nine-year-old daughter about investment strategy. She thought about the Johnny who led his children on a follow-the-leader conga line. And she thought of that afternoon’s Johnny, the contemptuous man she’d slapped because her sister wouldn’t or couldn’t or didn’t know she had the option.

  “Which is your favorite car, Merell?”

  Merell looked at her strangely. Roxanne realized her mistake.

  “Silly me. You told me that, didn’t you. It’s the Studebaker.” She mussed Merell’s hair. “You have to forgive me, Sugar Pie. It’s been a long day.”

  Merell nodded sagely. “You’re worried because Mommy and Daddy had a fight, but it’s okay. They always make up when Mommy says she’s sorry. Sometimes Daddy says she’s crazy and before the police came, Gramma Ellen said she ought to be in a hospital. If she goes to the hospital who will take care of us? Mommy fired Franny and Daddy has to work and Gramma doesn’t like us very much.”

  “She likes you fine. But she’s not very good at showing it.”

  Merell tugged on her bangs, staring down at her feet. “I saw on TV about these kids who had to go to a foster home. What if that happens to us?”

  “It won’t happen, Merell. I promise it won’t.”

  Roxanne held her niece close, feeling under her hands the girl’s vulnerable framework. As often happened when she worked with children, Roxanne experienced a painful empathy, a sense of what it meant to be a child in the modern world. Though childhood had been brutal and dangerous at the dawn of human life, at least back then most threats were simple and easily understood: starvation, injury, disease. A child like Merell was threatened by these but more powerfully by a vast menu of horrific possibilities: drugs, gangs, murder, rape, pandemics, nuclear annihilation, and climate change, details of which were readily and luridly available on the Internet and television. Children had always been powerless, but never more than now when, despite Merell’s intelligence, she possessed nothing with which to defend herself.

  “You’ll never be sent to a foster home, Merell, I promise you that. You’re surrounded by people who love you. Nothing bad will happen to you or your sisters.”

  Chapter 11

  Ellen had arranged to meet Dennis Dwight at the bar in the Mariposa Hotel in downtown La Jolla. She wanted to get there early and have a drink to settle her schoolgirl nerves.

  Before she knew BJ, Ellen had been more of a drinker than she was now. BJ had been abstemious by nature. A man who liked a martini or two before dinner and wine and beer in moderate amounts, he made it clear that drunken women disgusted him. Eager to please, Ellen had fitted herself into his way of living as she had once fit into Dale’s. It was hard now to recall that earlier incarnation of herself, the woman who had drunk enough to black out and done something so terrible she could never forgive herself.

  But tonight she needed a drink to settle her nerves. She imagined that BJ would tell her there was nothing wrong with her nerves, but it was easy for a good-looking, successful man like him to say that. A sixty-year-old woman on a first date: she needed her head examined. Or a Valium. Short of those options, a martini would do the job. Dating had been much simpler when she was a kid and knew the rules. Or thought she did. But in the world of cyberdating—senior cyberdating—she didn’t know if there was a timetable of appropriate behavior and expectations, a list of things one must not say or assume. She had actually made a special trip to the bookstore in search of such a guide; and when she couldn’t find one she was too embarrassed to ask a salesperson for assistance.

  “How’ll I recognize you?” Dennis asked on the phone the night before, a languid drawl in his beautiful, deep voice. “You gonna wear a red rose?”

  “I’ll hold it between my teeth.” Late at night, on the telephone, she felt brave and flirtatious and hummed a few sexy bars from Carmen.

  She compared the sick nervousness she felt now—like four black coffees on an empty stomach—with the scary excitement of stepping off the Greyhound in LA with no job, nowhere to live, and not a single friend. Back then she thought she knew about the world because she’d groped around with boys in the senior class, thought she knew men because her best friend’s father had made a pass at her. She trusted that life would give her what she wanted if she made herself available, and some of the time it had. Eventually she’d even found BJ, but on the way to him there had been so many mistakes in judgment. The memory of every one of them was in the car with her, driving into La Jolla to meet Dennis Dwight.

  Ellen was lucky to find a parking place on Herschel, not far from the Mariposa Hotel. She pulled down the visor mirror and looked at herself. Was her hair too blond? Was the cut good? If it were shorter would her jaw look firmer? She picked up the red rose she’d cut from a bush at the house. It was a day or two beyond its glory, but would have to do. In the Mariposa’s lobby, logic told her that the desk clerk and concierge didn’t care if she was there to meet a man she’d only spoken to on the telephone. But she felt conspicuous anyway and slightly ridiculous holding a red rose, teetering in shoes designed by Torquemada.

  A blue-tiled arch led into the narrow bar, where there was subdued lighting and heavy carpet, small tables and deep-cushioned, suede-upholstered easy chairs. No mirrors or booths, no vulgar display of bottles. At the Mariposa the alcohol was discreetly concealed below the granite bar. A trio of enlarged photos of butterflies hung on the bar-back wall.

  Ellen ordered a vodka martini, and when the hostess brought it, she told herself to drink slowly. She deliberately did not look down at the glass for several minutes. She wished she had never quit smoking, thought about BJ, imagined what Dennis Dwight would look like, checked to see if she had lipstick on her teeth. Just one swallow and then she could sit back and relax. Business in the bar grew brisk and several men and women in suits and stylish sportswear entered from the lobby. She felt ridiculously overdressed in four hundred dollars’ worth of tucked silk from Neiman Marcus.

  “I’m meeting someone,” she explained to the hostess and immediately wished she hadn’t.

  The girl asked, “Can I get you an appetizer while you wait?”

  “No, thank you. We’ll be dining later.”

  It seemed as if she’d just taken the first sip and her glass was empty. She couldn’t remember if it was her second or third. Her rose lay on the table, its petals limp. For a few moments that felt like forever, she fiddled with the stem of her glass, thin as a drinking straw, and then ordered another. She couldn’t just sit there with nothing in front of her.

  More people came into the bar and now the tables and barstools were full. Across from Ellen the place where Dennis Dwight was meant to sit confronted her like a toothless grin. She didn’t wear a watch but she sensed that she’d been sitting in the bar at least forty-five minutes. Meetings at Starbucks were better. In a coffee shop she could read a newspaper as she waited. If she finished her coffee
and left, no one had to know that she’d been stood up.

  A tall man in a gray suit—expensive though a little snug and a few years out of style—stood at the entrance to the Mariposa Bar. He saw her; she was sure he saw her. He was the right age and his comb-over was presentable. He was definitely closer to seventy than fifty but she forgave him his lie and hoped he wouldn’t find hers out quite so readily.

  She didn’t know if she should look at him again or pretend to be fascinated by something. The butterflies on the bar-back—brilliant turquoise and black with flecks of gold in their hugely magnified wings—were like the ones she and BJ had seen in the rain forest in Costa Rica. He called them flowers with wings.

  She looked up, holding the rose, trying to smile, but the man was gone.

  * * *

  The night sky over San Diego was starless, the light of a million suns blotted out by the gray urban glow. To the east a cantaloupe-colored moon rose from behind a scrim of lemon-scented eucalyptus trees. Stretched out on a chaise on the terrace, thinking about that evening’s conversation with Ty, Roxanne found her mind resting easier than it had in many weeks. She dozed until jolted awake by the slam of a car door. Glancing at her watch, she saw that it was too early for Johnny and Simone. A moment later her mother hobbled around the side of the house, one shoe on, one off, muttering under her breath.

  A gust of warm, citrus-scented wind lifted the hair at the back of Roxanne’s neck.

  “Mom, are you okay?”

  “This dress cost four hundred dollars and I spilled red wine on it. I don’t even know why I was drinking wine. And these shoes!” She threw them over the edge of the terrace into the yellow lantana and walked on. She stopped and held up the skirt of her dress, which was discolored by a dark stain. “Maybe it was Scotch.” She looked at Roxanne. “Does Scotch wash out?”

  Seeing her mother intoxicated brought to Roxanne a flood of emotions so old they were barely more than shadows cast by the memory of shadows.

  “Did you drive yourself home?” Her mother nodded. “Mom, you shouldn’t have.”

  “Stop managing me.”

  “Where’d you go?”

  “Why are you here anyway? Where’s Franny?”

  “Simone fired her.”

  “And you’re babysitting?” Ellen looked suddenly stricken. “No, no, no.” A moment ago she had been rigid with fury over a broken heel and stained dress; now she was close to tears, broken, a house of cards collapsing. “You should be at home with your husband. You don’t know how quickly, how suddenly…”

  “Mommy, what happened?”

  “When?”

  “Tonight, of course.”

  “Oh. I don’t remember.” She sat on the edge of a chaise. “I’m telling you, Roxanne, you can’t waste this time. You’re young and you love each other, I know you do, but you take him for granted and one day you’ll be sorry. You’ll think of all the meetings and open houses and signing conferences you just had to attend and then he’ll die ahead of you because they always do, and you’ll regret it all….”

  In Roxanne’s eyes, Ellen had always moved through the world unhampered by self-doubt and regret; but tonight it was achingly clear that her confidence was a thin shell mapped with cracks. Roxanne didn’t want to know this. She didn’t want to feel sorry for the mother who had abandoned her.

  “You should go up to bed.”

  “Don’t dismiss me! Just hear what I’m saying. I never gave you much advice, did I? So when I do, you should listen. You’re so judgmental, like your grandmother.”

  Don’t you dare criticize Gran. Roxanne wanted to walk away and leave her mother alone, feeling sorry for herself. She saved me. You abandoned me. The hurt was as fresh as if it had only recently happened….

  It was dark when they arrived at Gran’s. Roxanne remembered getting out of the Buick and standing at the foot of the verandah steps. As she looked up, the woman on the porch with her large, muscular arms folded across her chest had seemed by the light of a single yellow bulb to be an enormous creature, a colossus. “What are you doing here, Ellen Rae? You should have called ahead. You can’t barge—”

  “Take her, Mom.” Ellen thrust Roxanne forward so she stumbled against the first step and sat down, whimpering as she rubbed her shin. “I can’t deal with her.”

  “You should have thought of that before you had her.”

  “Don’t lecture me, don’t say I told you so. Just for once, say nothing. I’m begging you, Mother. You have to do this.”

  The memory of that day filled Roxanne’s mind, expanding to include the huge, empty house, the thousand rows of fruit trees standing witness, a harvest moon…. She remembered the bright light of it, Ellen’s fearful and exhausted expression, the tremble of a nerve at the corner of Gran’s pursed lips. That night, this night: there was something about the oversize moon, the warm night air…

  Ellen talked on, half to herself. “You want to be smart for your kids and do all the right things, but if you did the right thing you never would have had them. In the first place.” She looked at Roxanne, light glittering in her narrowed eyes, and poked a manicured finger in her direction. “You’re not a kid anymore, Roxanne, so pay attention. I know what I’m talking about…. There isn’t time…. You gotta let your sister… I know I shouldn’t have made you take care of her… all the time. BJ said it wasn’t fair….”

  To Roxanne’s knowledge her mother had never admitted to any flaw or apologized to anyone for anything. Now this remorse: was it real or alcohol talking? She could be in a blackout right now and remember nothing in the morning. Was there any point in listening?

  Elizabeth had a theory that before birth, souls choose their families, specifically their mothers and fathers, for what they can learn from them. So what karmic lesson was Roxanne learning from Ellen? Don’t drink, don’t abandon your kid. Lead an orderly life because if you don’t, everything will fall apart around and over you.

  “Come on, Mom. It’s getting cool out here. Let’s get you up to bed. You’ll feel better in the morning.”

  Ellen looked at her, blinking. “Why are you here? You’re always here. Someday… Did I say this? They always die, Roxanne. They die and they’re gone and you’re alone.” She pulled up her skirt and sobbed into the stained silk.

  “That’s enough now, you’ll ruin your dress.”

  ”Don’t take that tone with me.” Ellen shoved past Roxanne. “I’m not a child, I was never a child.”

  That makes two of us.

  As Roxanne watched her stagger up the stairs to her apartment over the garage, she remembered that there had been a time before Gran and Simone when her mother was drunk every night. She had put her mother to bed, cleaned up her messes.

  From the top of the stairs Ellen called out loud enough to wake the neighborhood. “There’s something wrong with this damn key.”

  A sheet of pale gold moonlight fell across the carpet in Ellen’s bedroom. Roxanne pulled back the bedspread and helped her mother lie down. There was something about this night and the moon’s calm expression observing through the window beside the bed. Roxanne shook her head to clear it, and the mist shimmered and swirled and parted and came together again.

  A night for remembering.

  Ellen and Dale liked parties, poker parties, mostly. Roxanne remembered the arguments and laughter and the LP records stacked on the spindle of the stereo, the clink of red, white, and blue poker chips as her father spilled them back and forth between his hands. In the morning the house smelled sticky-sweet and smoky as she washed the glasses and emptied the ashtrays. By contrast Gran had been a teetotaler except for one glass of red wine at dinner on Sunday night and another when she worked on her jigsaw puzzle. Roxanne thought of the parties in Logan Hills and she recalled Gran and the ranch; and when she did, the old, never-completely-asked, never-honestly-answered question rose from the calm surface of her thoughts.

  “Tell me, Mom.” If she’d had enough to drink, she might actually tell the trut
h. “Why did you take me up to Gran’s and leave me there?”

  “You ought to thank me for that. I did the right thing.”

  You broke my heart, you marked me forever, how could that have been the right thing?

  “I can’t get it out of my mind, Mom. I’ve tried, all my life I’ve tried, but I can’t.” She touched her mother’s wrist, put her lips on the pulse she felt there. “You didn’t visit me once. Not once.”

  “You don’t understand.”

  “Help me understand, Mom. Just tell me why.”

  From the peak of the roof came the song of a mockingbird, a serenade.

  “I never wanted you children. Not your sister, not you. It wasn’t personal. I just wasn’t cut out for it: motherhood. When I got pregnant with you, I wanted an abortion, but we didn’t have the money. Back then it was either pay some old woman with a crochet hook or a decent doctor over the border, and one of those cost five hundred dollars. I thought I’d do it myself, but I just couldn’t.”

  Roxanne had read of the women who tried to end their pregnancies with bent wires and plumbers’ snakes, even long-handled soda spoons. Over the centuries, millions of women and girls and their unborns had bled to death in bathtubs and basements and out-of-doors behind garden sheds. She and her mother might easily have been two of them.

  “I was a little off my rocker. I thought if I ignored you, you’d go away. I threw up all the time and I told them at the dealership that I had flu, and they believed me, but your dad knew better and what a rampage he went on. I thought I couldn’t live without him. I thought I’d die if he left me.”

  “You loved him.”

  “I was a fool.”

  In the night garden, by the glow of an orange moon, crickets sang songs of love and black moths sacrificed themselves to the light.

  “He was the sexiest man I’d ever met. Not a high school boy or a car salesman trying to make his quota in a cheap suit. Your father was the kind of man who came into a room and everything stopped. The women all wanted him and the men envied him and looked up to him and did what he wanted. When I was with him I felt hypnotized.” Ellen looked at her. “You have no idea.” Her eyes were glassy with drink and tears.