Pasadena

by Sherri L. Smith

  To us, anyway. At least until the pool guy came.

  Joey makes his excuses and exits, shutting the French doors behind him. Mrs. Kim and I regard each other blankly until the latch clicks shut, like a starting pistol. She immediately assumes the stoic expression of a woman suffering another loss in a long, painful life. You would almost believe she had weathered a war, lost people a lifetime ago. Maybe she had. She sighs and climbs to her feet.

  I step toward her, close enough to see that the perfect skin is turning to crepe. Her lipstick bleeds just outside the edge of her sad smile, into the lines of age.

  She pulls off her gloves and drops them to the slate patio. I reach out and take both her hands in my own. It’s as close to a hug as Mrs. Kim and I have ever managed.

  “I’m glad you’re back,” she says, her voice suddenly thick with emotion.

  “I don’t know what to say,” I admit. “I . . .” Words skitter away and I squeeze Mrs. Kim’s hands instead.

  She seems to recall herself and pulls away, exclaiming like a schoolgirl from another century, “Oh, goodness! My hands are so dirty. Let me wash them. Come inside. Violetta made iced tea this morning. I’m sure Parker hasn’t finished it all.”

  I follow her back in through the dim cave of the house, thick white carpets and double-high ceilings fighting for the right to swallow every sound.

  Joey is nowhere in sight. Through the windowpane set into the front door, I can see his escape route. He’s waiting on the curb, leaning against his car. Crying.

  “So, obviously, Maggie didn’t have a will, but I’m sure she’d be happy for you to have anything that you want of hers,” Mrs. Kim says, scrubbing her hands furiously at the kitchen sink.

  I stand across from her at the large granite-topped island and lean in to smell a vase of red roses. Mrs. Kim only grows pinks and whites. Pulling back from the vase, I see the card from the florist, tucked into a small envelope. Sympathy flowers, then. Red. An odd choice. Unless they were from someone who knew Maggie well. Pink and white might suit Mrs. Kim, but her daughter’s tastes ran darker. Flowers were just the start.

  “You know where the glasses are,” Mrs. Kim continues, pointing the way with her chin. I go to the cupboard and take down two tumblers, filling them from a half-empty pitcher of iced green tea off the door of the double-wide commercial-grade fridge.

  “We’re thinking Thursday for the funeral. Enough time for my brother and parents to fly out from Korea,” Mrs. Kim says. “I’ll let you know . . . send an e-mail or something, when the plans are finalized. If you wouldn’t mind telling her friends. I don’t know them all, but they are welcome to come.” She dries her hands on a waffle-weave towel and takes a long drink of the tea I pass to her.

  “I needed that. It’s so hot today,” she says conversationally, taking off her hat. She fans her face with the brim before dropping it to the counter, her eyes fixed on some point over my shoulder. “Oh, Jude.” She says my name softly, like a curse word, like a prayer.

  “I always knew Maggie would go to Hell,” she says. “It’s hard for a mother to know that about her own child.” Her eyes drift to mine. “You understand?”

  A spike of anger goes through me. But I nod, to keep her talking, to keep from saying anything I can’t take back.

  Mrs. Kim looks down at the water rings our glasses have left on the countertop. She picks up her hat, drops it, does it again. “It wasn’t too late for redemption. But she’s made sure of it now. You see, I knew about the nights she’d sneak out, or have her friends over. The boys, the smoking, the running around. A mother knows. But suici . . .” She can’t say it and swallows the word. “My baby died, and I didn’t even feel her go.”

  Finally, this eggshell of a woman cracks, sudden tears aging her face a thousand years. She grips the counter with both hands as if it’s a dial that can reverse death. But the counter remains unmoved. A moment later, her crying jag done, she wipes her face with a napkin I pull from the rooster-shaped holder on the counter and dashes the tears from her eyes.

  “I’m tired,” she tells me. “I think I’ll lie down. Go on out to the pool house. Take whatever you’d like. Violetta can see you out.”

  I nod and watch Mrs. Kim glide away into the foyer and up the curving stairs. She looks nothing like her daughter now. She looks defeated.

  Even beaten and battered, Maggie never did. Then again, the only beatings Maggie took were by choice.

  Once Mrs. Kim is gone, I text Joey to meet me out back. I’m ready now. I want him to tell me the rest of what he saw, how he found her. I don’t stop to think that it might bother him to return to the scene of her death.

  It’s funny. I always thought I’d be the one to find Maggie’s body. I was the one on speed dial for every crisis. But she didn’t call me that night. Who did she call instead? If not me and not Joey, then maybe no one. But something just doesn’t feel right.

  “I’m going to do it,” she said. “It’s the only way.”

  “What?” I was in my room, under the covers, cell phone pressed to my ear. I could barely understand her through her sobs.

  “I’m better off dead,” Maggie said. “I already know a way. And then I’ll be fine. Okay? I just wanted you to know. I love you.”

  “Maggie, don’t be stupid,” I said, already out of bed, stealing my mother’s car keys, trying not to scream. If I screamed, I’d wake the house, wasting time. “I’m coming.”

  “Don’t.” Maggie had stopped crying. She sounded resigned.

  I moved faster, starting the car, still in my pajamas.

  “Maggie, wait.”

  “If only you knew,” she said, and hung up.

  I dropped the phone and ran a stop sign to reach her in time. Raced through the side yard, clanging the gate loud enough to set the neighbor’s Pekingese yapping. I slipped, skidding alongside the swimming pool, and landed at the front step of the pool house, a one-room stucco cottage at the back of the yard that had been her room since she was fifteen.

  I slammed into the front door, throwing it open.

  “Well, you took your time,” Maggie said.

  No blood on the floor, no bottle of pills, no pile of tissues or tear streaks or broken glass. Just Maggie on the sofa—a graying hand-me-down from the eighties—her cordless phone in one hand. “She’s here, gotta go.”

  She hung up with whoever and grinned at me. “Want a G and T? I smuggled a bottle from the big house yesterday.” She rose and rummaged through the mini fridge in the tiny kitchenette, emerging with a large bottle of Bombay Sapphire. Resting it on the coffee table with a heavy thunk, she dropped back onto the sofa, arranged her pink cat-print pajamas, and took a drag from one of those damned filterless cigarettes.

  “Well?” she said, looking at me—shaking, queasy with fear and anger, collapsed against the front door.

  “Well, what?” I managed to say. “I thought you’d be dead.”

  “I am dying. Of boredom. I call it a surprise slumber party. You like? Starts with a bang.” She stubbed out her cigarette and stretched like a cat. “Oh, don’t pout. Take off your coat and have a drink. We’ll watch a movie. That Touch of Mink just ended.” She pointed to the TV with her glass. Doris Day’s credit was rolling by. “But another one’s about to begin.”

  The pool house is empty now. The little building seems to sag, the stucco faded, the windows dark. No stench of burning cigarettes, no glasses of gin and tonic. The bed is unmade and there’s a half-eaten bowl of popcorn on the counter. The thrift store décor is no longer ironic, just tattered and worn without the glamour girl for a foil.

  I pace the room. She didn’t leave a note. Then again, most suicides don’t. I sit on the sofa, staring at the unmade bed on the opposite wall, the TV stand that swivels to face either one, depending on where she lay. The TV is facing me. I wonder if the dent in the mattress matches her hips.

 
Maggie, what did you do?

  Joey knocks outside.

  “Come in.”

  “You all right?” he asks. I should be the one asking him.

  “Yeah,” I say. “Just thinking.”

  “About what?”

  “Pajama parties.” I brush my hair from my face. “Her mom said I could take anything I wanted.”

  “Yeah,” Joey says. “She told me that too.”

  I look up at him. “What did you take?”

  Joey blushes and I’m afraid he’s going to say underwear or something equally perverted. Instead he points to the low bookshelf at the foot of the bed, the one holding up the TV on its swivel stand.

  “I lent her my copy of Cyrano de Bergerac in ninth grade. I just took it back.”

  I nod, relieved. Maggie has a lot of things that are mine. Things that come with being the same dress size and in the same classes—borrowed clothes, forgotten books. But I don’t want them back. She should go into the afterlife with some possessions.

  All I really want are answers.

  I move over to the bed and lie down on it. Joey watches me self-consciously. The dent in the mattress is too big for my hips. I sit up suddenly. Maggie wasn’t alone here last night. I jump up from the bed, wondering if the cops bothered to check it for blood, hair, or other things. I go into the top drawer of her tiny dresser, pulling out her underwear and lingerie.

  “Oh, Christ,” Joey says, his mind going to where mine had been a few minutes before.

  “Shut up. I’m looking for her pink slip.” She’d bought it as a joke in the old-lady section of Macy’s where they still sold the girdles and undergarments our grandmothers wore. A pale pink slip with tea-colored lace around the edges. She said it made her feel glamorous, like an old-time Hollywood movie star. It was her favorite outfit for seducing new boys. It made her confident, and the thin fabric outlined her “assets.”

  “It’s not here.” I check the hamper. Empty. “You said you found her in the pool?”

  Joey clears his throat, sounding oddly strangled when he speaks. “Yes.”

  “In a swimsuit?” I ask.

  “Um, no. In a nightgown or something. I thought she was naked at first. It clung to her.”

  I hang my head. “Pink. With tan lace.”

  Joey nods. “And a tiny pink rose. Right here.” He presses his finger to the middle of his chest. “I kept staring at it when I did CPR, thinking if the rose rises, she’s breathing, she’s alive.”

  “Huh,” I say. It comes out as a sob.

  “What? Does that mean something?” he asks.

  I nod, trying to force back my tears. “Yeah. It means she was sleeping with someone new.” I rub my eyes. “What kind of drugs?”

  Joey blinks. “What?”

  “What. Kind. Of. Drugs. The coroner?”

  Joey shakes his head. “I don’t know. The EMTs mentioned it. Mr. Kim says they’ll know in a few days.”

  I sit up and look at him. “What if somebody drugged her?”

  His eyes flick across the unmade bed. “Like date rape?”

  “Maybe. She didn’t do pills.”

  Joey shrugs. “Well, even if someone had drugged her for sex, why toss her in the pool?”

  I fish around in my bag for sunglasses and put them back on. “Chlorine? Maybe it washes away the evidence. They should at least look into it.”

  Joey is silent for a moment. “Yeah,” he finally says. “I guess we’ll know when the results come in.” But I can see he’s thinking now, no longer trying to avoid what I already know.

  Maggie didn’t kill herself. She was murdered.

  3

  We drive south, crossing streets with names like Alessandro, Bellefontaine, and Orange Grove. A hundred fifty years ago this place was a rancher’s paradise. But the natives and Spaniards made way for orange groves and new Americans, like high school seniors making way for the next graduating class. To this day, the streets are named after the wealthiest families and the crops that made them rich. Never after the people who planted them.

  The houses shift from double-lot mansions and Victorians, stately Italianate facades, and Craftsman houses with their dark woods and deep green plaster, to apartments and bungalows the size of Maggie’s pool house.

  If the Kims live in the big house, Joey and I live in the servants’ quarters.

  “Your mom home?” Joey asks when he drops me off in front of my place, a cracked stucco two-bedroom rental at the back of a three-house lot. Mrs. Feldenkrais is taking out her recycling. She looks a sight in her yellow housedress, hair like spun cotton candy. Neither of us wave.

  “Probably. We talked before my flight. She wanted to pick me up but I told her I needed to see you first.”

  “Well.” Joey climbs out of the car and pulls my duffel out of the back. “If you want to get dinner later, call me. A few of us were going to . . . you know. Like a wake.”

  “A wake,” I repeat, letting it sink in. I already know who will be there, Maggie’s inner circle. Could one of them know the new bedfellow? “I’m in.”

  “Great.” He hesitates, like he wants to say something else. His eyes flick to the house and back to me. He drums the heel of his hand on the car door. “Great. I’ll pick you up at seven.”

  He leaves me standing on the curb, heels digging into the dead grass, pondering what just went unsaid. Heat rises from the pavement in waves. Seven hours ago, I was in a woodland paradise. I could be swimming in Danielle’s Olympic-sized pool. I pick up my bag and walk to the house.

  The front door is open, which means the AC is on the blink again. The TV drones away in the living room. Someone sits on the old brown sofa. A man’s hand raises a can of beer.

  Roy. My mother’s favorite mistake.

  I go around to the backyard before he can see me, stumbling across the broken brick pathway to the rear door. I drop my bags on one side of the cement steps and sit down. A lemon tree wilts in the center of the yard, casting a thin shadow on a broken lawn chair.

  I could call Joey again. He’d come get me. But then we’d have to talk about more than just Maggie. I’d rather face what’s inside the house.

  I peer into the dim crawl space behind the steps, shove my duffel bag inside, and stand up, shouldering my backpack. I’ll go to the movies or the library. My mother will be home eventually. Or it’ll be time to go to Maggie’s wake.

  My eyes drift closed for a second, long enough for me to realize I’m too tired to keep going. I give up the dodge game and unlock the back door. I enter through the kitchen, my recovered suitcase trailing crumbs of yellow dust from beneath the house. The TV still plays in the living room. I hear him cough.

  My stomach buckles. Roy and I don’t mix. Not if I can help it.

  I turn into the hallway and slip into my room, locking the door before I collapse, face-first, onto my bed.

  “I slept with him, you know.” Sophomore year. Maggie and I were dipping our toes into her then-boyfriend Keith’s pool.

  We’d seen each other around freshman year. I was the new kid in town, she was the one who fit in, even with the seniors. But it wasn’t until that spring that she took notice and invited me into her world. A world with pools like Keith’s, overlandscaped monstrosities with fake boulders and a fire pit in the Jacuzzi. Maggie said it looked like a watering hole from The Lion King.

  In the house, Keith and Joey were playing video games with Keith’s older brother, Scott, online. Scott was stationed somewhere overseas where they still had Nintendo and Internet access twenty-four hours a day.

  “Who?” I asked. I felt like a child next to Maggie in her black one-piece, her butterfly kimono flared out behind her like wings. My toenails were unpainted. I wore no makeup. I was fifteen and looked like I was twelve. Maggie was my age, going on twenty-five.

  “Scott. Corporal Punishment over t
here.” She pointed with her chin, meaning the house where the boys were online, or maybe the country where Scott was stationed.

  “You slept with your boyfriend’s older brother,” I said, deadpan.

  Maggie laughed. “Don’t be disgusting. Keith wasn’t my boyfriend then. We were just hanging out and there was Scott with those puppy-dog eyes, all ‘I’m going to war and may never come back.’ It was, I don’t know, exciting. The whole life-and-death thing. What if I was his last chance to get laid by an American chick? So I did it.”

  I took it all in without comment, resting my chin on my knees. When she didn’t say any more, I asked, “How was it?”

  Maggie sighed and stretched out on her towel. “Oh, you know how boys are. There’s the sensitive ones that get all weepy and ‘I love you’ if you let them touch you, and the douche bags that go all cold and stoic once they get their rocks off. I was kind of hoping for a douche bag. I mean, soldiers are macho, right? But nope, he was the other kind.”

  I looked at her, expecting a joke. “You’d rather have a jerk than a guy that loves you?”

  Maggie sat up on an elbow and turned her heart-shaped sunglasses my way. “Honey, if a boy only says he loves you after you’ve screwed him, it ain’t you he loves, it’s your Bermuda Triangle. Much more honest to have a wham-bam-thank-you-ma’am than a post-party love fest. Even better if they’re a little rough, so there’s no confusion.”

  “Rough,” I repeated, swallowing my disgust.

  “Yeah, why not?” Maggie smiled a little. “I’ve gotten a shiner or two in my day. It’s primal. You know, exciting.”

  “Like screwing your boyfriend’s brother because he might die in the war?”

  Maggie pouted. “Don’t get all high and mighty on me. Have you seen my parents? I can’t believe they ever did it enough to have me and Parker. It’s like they’re stone. I’d rather smack and get smacked every once in a while. At least I’d be feeling something.”