“Marvin, are you my goddamn mother now? Did I fucking ask you for coffee or juice? Please, okay, just get me the damn drink?”
The little room is bright, morning sun off eggshell walls, a blue vase of Peruvian lilies on the table beside the bed. Daria turns away from Niki and Ophelia and stares out the second-story window of her big, apricot and cream–colored Victorian house at the busy morning traffic down on Steiner Street and the neatly mown green swatch of Alamo Square laid out beyond. This too-big house she bought for her and Niki right after Skin Like Glass went platinum and Rolling Stone was calling her the next Patti Smith. The next Angry Voice of Misunderstood Women Everywhere, and then the world spins three hundred sixty degrees, and she imagines someone else out there somewhere, staring across the square at this bedroom window, at her, so scared and angry and completely insignificant. Forget the rock-star shtick and she’s nobody at all, a frightened, hungover refugee from another world, the girl who fell to earth or San Francisco, and yesterday her lover tried to kill herself with a handful of pills.
“I’m sorry, Marvin,” she says, blinking at the sunlight, blinking because she’s trying not to cry. “I think my brain’s still back in Little Rock,” but Marvin’s gone to get her drink, or maybe he’s finally had enough of this shit and walked out on them, halfway back to anywhere sane by now.
“Fuck me,” she whispers and sits down on the edge of the bed. There’s still a pack of cigarettes in the inside pocket of her leather jacket, the pack she bought from a newsstand at the airport, and she takes one out and lights it, blowing the smoke away from Niki.
“If the band doesn’t string me up for this one, baby, the promoters will, or Jarod or the fucking label. I already told Alex he might as well get in line with the rest,” she says and touches Niki’s forehead with the calloused fingertips of her right hand, brushes tangled black hair from Niki’s face, and she makes a tiny, uneasy sound in her sleep. Her almond skin feels cool as stone, as smooth and incomprehensible as marble. And at this moment, in this clean Pacific light, she might almost be the same girl that Daria Parker saw for the first time nearly ten years ago, ten years plus a lifetime or two; the same rumpled, carelessly beautiful Vietnamese girl on the run from herself and New Orleans and a head full of ghosts, stranded and alone in downtown Birmingham.
Daria glances back up at Ophelia hanging on the wall, and Jesus, she never liked that painting to begin with. Despair like something sacred, something virtuous.
“You’re scaring the holy shit out of me, Niki. Do you know that? I can’t keep doing this,” and then Marvin’s back with her drink, Bombay and tonic and fresh lime in a tall, plastic tumbler, ice cubes that are round, and she thanks him for it. Daria raises the glass to her lips, and it’s half empty when she sets it down on the table next to the blue vase, the cold gin warm and familiar in her belly, burning its way quickly towards her dizzy head, and she tries not to notice that Marvin’s staring at her.
“You still haven’t told me what happened,” she says to him, and Marvin shakes his head, sits down on the hardwood floor beneath the window, makes a steeple with his fingers and thumbs and rests his chin on it.
“What makes you think I know? I woke up yesterday morning and she was gone.”
“And she didn’t say anything or do anything Friday night?” Daria asks, then takes another long drag from her cigarette and reaches for the rest of her drink.
“I ordered take-out. We watched a movie, and then she listened to some old CDs until she took her meds and got sleepy and went upstairs to bed.”
Daria exhales, and the smoke hangs thick and gray in the space between them. “And that’s all?” she asks. “You’re not leaving anything out?” and Marvin glares at her and frowns.
“It was Thai take-out,” he says.
“Fuck you, Marvin,” and Daria closes her eyes and rubs hard at her left temple.
“You’re doing it again.”
“Doing what? What is it that I’m doing again?”
He watches her silently for a moment, the stern and gentle press of his gaze against her tender, jet-lagged skin and the feather-iron weight of his silence. She knows he’s choosing his words more carefully now, and Daria lets herself wish she’d stayed in Little Rock. She can feel guilty about it later, when the headache’s gone and Marvin’s gone.
“You know what I mean,” he says. “Thinking maybe if you just try hard enough you can be Sherlock Holmes and Sigmund Freud and Florence Nightingale all rolled into one.”
“Is that what you think I’m doing?” she whispers and opens her eyes, is dimly disappointed that nothing’s changed, still the same bright San Francisco morning filling up the bedroom and wounded, sleeping Niki still right there in front of her. The room smells like cigarette smoke and clean linen, no trace whatsoever of the lilies on the table and she wonders if they even have a scent.
“Yeah. Something like that.”
“I’m losing her, Marvin. She’s slipping away from me a little bit at a time, and sooner or later she’s gonna get it right. Maybe next time, or maybe the time after that—”
“Unless she doesn’t really want to die,” Marvin says and produces a pale green ceramic ashtray, seemingly out of thin air, and hands it to Daria. “It’s not that hard to die. And we both know Niki’s not a stupid lady.”
Daria taps her cigarette once against the rim of the ashtray and doesn’t look at Marvin. Doesn’t look at anything but the tiny heap of powder-gray ash marring the clean ashtray, the glazed finish, and she knows that Marvin washed it by hand. He washes and dries everything by hand because he says that dishwashers are too rough on dishes.
“You might as well know I never bought into that whole ‘cry for help’ thing,” she says. “If somebody needs my help, if Niki needs my help, she knows how to ask for it without putting me through this shit.”
Marvin nods his head once, noncommittal nod, and then he goes to the bedroom window, stands there with his back to her and Niki, staring down at the traffic on Alamo Square. Daria crushes the butt of her cigarette out in the ashtray and sets it on the table.
“You think I don’t know how much Niki needs me here?” she asks, but he doesn’t answer, and Daria sighs loudly and reaches for her pack of cigarettes, her old Zippo lighter.
“You’re smoking too much again,” he says very quietly.
“Yeah? Well, it’s a goddamn miracle I’m not doing a hell of a lot worse than that,” and Daria has to flick her thumb across the striker wheel four times before the Zippo gives up an unsteady inch of blue-orange flame.
“She was playing your music,” Marvin says. “Friday night, before she went up to bed. She plays your music all the time these days. I finally had to ask her to use the headphones because she’d put one song on repeat and it was driving me crazy.”
The Zippo’s flame sputters and dies before Daria can light the cigarette hanging limply from her lips. She curses and flips the cover shut again, turns to face Marvin and the Sunday morning sunshine streaming in around him.
“Look, I don’t need you laying some kind of fucking guilt trip on me, okay? Jesus,” and she takes the cigarette from her mouth and puts it back in the pack.
“You said you wanted to know everything.”
“Then why didn’t you tell me before now? If you thought it was important that she was listening to my music Friday night, why didn’t you tell me that to begin with?”
“Take her with you, Dar,” Marvin says, and he glances at Niki; she’s rolled over onto her left side now, and her face is buried deep in the white cotton folds of sheets and pillowcases. “That’s what she needs. Just to be near you for a little while. Just a few days—”
“No,” and something in the way she says it, spitting that one word out at him, so emphatic, so final, something cold and ugly in her voice—but nothing she can take back, no matter how it makes her feel. “You weren’t with us when she freaked out on me in Boston. I can’t work and watch after her at the same time.”
“Then take me with you, too,” he says. “I’ll watch her when you can’t.”
“I said no, Marvin, so don’t ask again. Does she even look like she’s in any shape to be on the road?” and Daria pauses, knows he isn’t going to answer her, but leaves space for an answer anyway. “Now, if you don’t think you can do your job, I can look for someone else.”
“I’m trying to do my job,” he says, the angry smudge at the edges of his voice. “I’m trying to keep her alive.”
“Well, you sure could’ve fooled me.”
And then neither of them says anything else, only one or two heated words away from something that can’t be taken back, apologized for, excused. Daria sits in the chair by the bed, running strong fingers through her spiky blond hair, staring at Niki’s bare shoulders as though there might be answers printed on her skin like tattoos or scars. The answers she needs to hold the world together around her, around them both, some secret talisman or incantation against all her fears and failures.
She was playing your music. She plays your music all the time these days.
“Will you leave us alone for a while?” Daria says. “I need to get my head together, that’s all. I have to figure out what the hell I’m going to do next.”
“Yeah, Dar, sure,” he replies, the reluctance plain to hear, but at least he doesn’t sound pissed off anymore. “If you need me, I’ll be in the kitchen.”
“And take this damned thing with you,” and she reaches into her jacket, removes her cell phone from a pocket and hands it to Marvin. “If anyone calls, especially that prick—”
“You’re busy.”
“Whatever. You can tell them I’m off screwing a herd of sheep for all I care.”
Marvin turns the phone over in his hand a couple of times, as if preparing to pass judgment on its molded plastic faceplate, plastic the indecent color of ripe cranberries. “It does have an off switch, you know?” he says and points to a tiny black button on one side.
“Then turn it off and take it with you.”
Marvin nods his head and walks past her to the bedroom door, has already started pulling it shut behind him when he stops and looks back at Daria.
“Hey. Who was Spider?” he asks her, and she stares at him like someone struck dumb, struck stupid, someone too far gone to ever be surprised by anything ever again but this one thing.
“What?”
“Spider. Last night, at the hospital, when Niki started coming back around, she asked for someone named Spider a couple of times. I’d almost forgotten—”
“I don’t know,” Daria lies, answering the question much too quickly, and she can see from his expression, the mix of confusion and concern, that Marvin knows perfectly well that she’s lying.
“I’m sorry,” he says. “I thought it might be important,” and he closes the door, leaving Daria Parker alone with Niki and Ophelia and the sun-bright walls.
“She wrote this song when we lived in Boulder,” Niki said, and Marvin frowned at her, at Niki Ky sitting in the center of about a hundred jewel cases, the scatter of CDs like tiny space-age Frisbees. Niki in a gray-green cardigan at least two sizes too large and a black T-shirt underneath, faded black cotton and a big white letter Z with a question mark behind it—Z? inside a white silk-screened square—and then the song started again.
“When we still lived with Mort and Theo on Arapahoe,” she said.
“Yeah,” Marvin replied and he turned a page in the book he was trying to read. “You told me.”
“She used to play it on Pearl Street, for spare change, you know, and I’d sit on top of the big bronze beaver and listen. Sometimes Mort would tap along on his snare drum, if he didn’t have to work that day.”
“You told me that, too, dear,” and Marvin stared at her over the top of his paperback Somerset Maugham novel. “But haven’t you played it enough for one night?”
“You had to have a license, but there were lots of street performers on Pearl. No cars allowed. We knew a girl who juggled wineglasses, and a guy named Silence who played the hammer dulcimer.”
Marvin made a face like a cat trapped in a small child’s lap, sighed and glanced back down at his book.
“I’m sorry,” Niki said, not entirely certain what she was apologizing for and feeling more annoyed at Marvin than sorry for playing “Dark in Day” twelve times in a row.
“No,” he said, but no change at all in his expression, the strained patience, his good-nurse face that she hated so much. “It’s not your fault. I think I’m getting a headache.”
Niki picked up one of the CDs, turned it over and stared at her reflection in the iridescent plastic. Her face too round, too fat because the Elavil made her gain weight and hold water. Dark circles beneath her eyes and the disc’s center hole where her nose ought to be. She held the CD at an angle so it caught the lamplight, sliced it up into spectrum wedges, violet to blue to green, yellow to red, and she hummed quietly with the song. Daria’s bass thumping out the rhythm like an erratic heartbeat, breathless fingertip dance across steel strings to draw music from nothing, and Niki murmured the last part of the chorus just loud enough that Marvin would hear.
“‘Dark in day, I’d always say, that’s not the way to know,’” her voice and Daria’s, pretending they were together because Daria was still on tour, out singing for other people in Nashville or Louisville or Memphis, some distant Southern city that Niki had never seen and never wanted to see. And her reflection in the CD wavered then, as if the plastic were water now and someone had just dipped their hand into it, concentric ripples racing themselves towards the edge of the disc, and Niki dropped it.
“Is something wrong?” Marvin asked, and no, Niki said, didn’t say the word aloud but shook her head, not taking her eyes off the CD lying on the floor. It had stopped rippling and she stared back up at herself from the mercury-smooth underbelly of the disc.
“You’re sure, Niki?” and she looked up at Marvin, hoping he wouldn’t see that she was frightened, because then he’d try to get her to tell him why, to explain another one of the things that no one ever believed she really saw or heard. The things they gave her pills for, so that she wouldn’t really see or hear them, either.
“I dropped it,” she said. “Sorry,” and then she smiled for him, and Marvin smiled back and stopped looking so concerned.
“It’s almost midnight,” he said. “Don’t forget your medicine. And will you please use the headphones if you’re going to keep playing that same song over and over?”
Niki glanced nervously back at the CD, but it was still just a CD again. Nothing that shimmered or rippled like ice water, and she reached for the headphones lying in their place on the shelf beside the stereo as “Dark in Day” ended and began again.
Lady lost in all your pain and thunder, all your shattered wonder…
She reached down and used one finger to gently flip the disc over so she wouldn’t have to see the mirrored side anymore. The safer, printed-on side instead, Tom Waits’ Bone Machine, and hardly any of the silver showing through.
Walking where the spinning world grows brittle, and I can’t find you there…
She plugged the black headphones into the stereo, and Daria’s voice shrank to a whisper, a small, faraway sound until Niki pulled the phones down over her head so that the music swelled suddenly around her again, wrapped her tight in electric piano and drums and the constant, comforting thump, thump, thump of the bass guitar.
You never look over your shoulder anymore, Daria sang, her gravel-and-whiskey voice suspended somewhere indefinable between Niki’s ears, somewhere inside her head. I’m afraid what you would see. And Niki began singing again, never mind if it annoyed Marvin, because everything she did annoyed Marvin, and singing made her feel a little closer to Daria.
“‘Dark in day, I’d always say, dark in day, that’s n
ot so far to fall.’”
The three prescription bottles were lined up neatly for her on one of the big speakers, the pills sealed inside like flies and ants and moths in polished chunks of amber. All her crazy medicine, her psychoactive trinity: Elavil and Xanax and the powder-blue Klonopin tablets. It made her feel better to have the bottles nearby, especially when Daria wasn’t. Niki reached for the Xanax, first station of that pharmaceutical cross, calming palindrome, and the glass of water that Marvin had brought her almost half an hour before.
Lady lost where night can’t reach you anymore, tripping softly ’round the edges you endure…
She popped the top off the plastic bottle and tipped it carefully so that only two or three of the pills would spill out into her open palm. Always careful, because she hated it when she poured out a whole handful by accident, that sudden rush like candy from a vending machine, and always a few that slipped, inevitably, between her fingers, bounced or rolled away across the floor, and she’d have to scramble about to find them. She tapped the mouth of the bottle once against her hand, but nothing happened. Niki checked to be sure the bottle wasn’t empty, saw there were at least two weeks’ worth of tablets left inside and tried again. And that time a single white pill came rolling out and lay glistening like a droplet of milk on her skin. It certainly wasn’t Xanax, whatever it was, wasn’t anything she was supposed to be taking and nothing she remembered ever having taken before, that tiny, glistening sphere like a ripe mistletoe berry, and Those are poisonous, aren’t they? she thought, holding the strange pill closer to her face.
Dark in day, Daria sang inside her head, I’d always say, dark in day, that’s not so far to fall.
And then a very faint, rubbery pop, and the white pill extended eight long and jointed legs, raised itself up, and she could see that there were eyes, too, shiny eyes so pale they were almost transparent, a half-circle dewdrop crown of eyes staring up at her. Niki squeezed her hand shut around the thing, the impossible spider pill, and glanced quickly towards Marvin. He was still sitting on the sofa, his nose buried in The Moon and Sixpence. So he hadn’t seen, had not seen anything at all and he wouldn’t, even if she walked across the room and showed it to him.
Murder of Angels Page 3