“Neither do I. But not this. I’m not going back to her and I don’t think you should, either.”
“That’s not your decision.”
I looked over at him. It was as if he’d aged ten years. I wondered if he was imagining having sex with Elise Ronan. I hated him. And I didn’t.
“Just take me home now,” I said.
* * *
That night my mom came into my room in her bathrobe and sat on my bed, took my hand. Her hands were always cold now and the flesh looked as if it would stay in little peaks away from the bone if you pinched it gently, like there wasn’t any moisture left in her.
“What happened today?” she asked.
“I can’t stand that woman. Who is she?”
“My oncologist recommended her,” my mom said. “Dad really likes her.”
“Dad really likes her? What about you?”
“She’s very practical. I just want someone who can handle things.” I could hear the fragility in her voice and I didn’t want to make it worse but I felt like I was about to scream.
Instead I pressed my head against her chest and she held me but she seemed very far away already.
“I have to have some more surgery,” she said, finally.
I pulled away. “What? What’s wrong?”
“There’s another tumor.” She was managing a smile but her eyes were shining with tears. Illumined. But the word didn’t matter. “I’m sorry, baby.”
“Why are you saying sorry?” I turned away from her. “You don’t have to be saying that.”
But I was lying. I wanted her to be sorry. If she was responsible for this then she could be responsible for making it go away. And she would do that for me, of course she would.
* * *
My mom’s surgery was scheduled for after the first of the year. All we did, all of us, was wait.
My parents had given up on trying to get me to see a therapist for the time being. They let me lie around and sleep, as long as I promised to eat three meals a day. I did as they asked, although the thought of having food in my system just seemed wrong, like making a plant eat a sandwich.
I felt a lot like a girl in a tower or one who slept in a briar-covered castle or a glass box. My skin was always clammy and my hair was tangled. I slept and slept on soft pillows, seeing almost no one. But if I was the spellbound princess I was also the witch who had put myself in that place of icy isolation. One thing I was not, though: the faithful prince with the sword and the kiss, the rescuer.
I thought about John a lot but in an abstract way, the way you would think about a character in a book, an actor in a film, a singer whose voice haunted you or a shadowy figure in a masochist’s wet dream. I watched candelabra-lit videos in my head of him dancing with me through the house in the hills, wearing a dark blue velvet suit and a carnival mask over his eyes, Chopin nocturnes coming out of his mouth and into the whorls of my ears. Even though it wasn’t real, the desire was worse than reality. Deep as marrow.
* * *
The tree has a hollow in it. That is where the children live. The dead children.
Sometimes you can hear them crying.
The tree grows up from the water. Its leaves fall into the creek. The water shines at its roots, a thin sheen over the mud. Light twinkles off of the wetness. You can see your face if you look closely enough. You can see their faces.
The children walk in a procession. They drink from the cups of flowers. They weep their songs.
There is one of them, a girl, who visits me.
She has small bright eyes, like little lights in her face, and tiny dimpled hands.
“They only wanted you to help them,” she tells me with her telepathic baby voice. “They did not want to hurt you. They did it for me.”
Sometimes I see her holding a large flower.
“What is that?” I ask her.
She shows me the drops of liquid glistering among the petals. “It’s Mommy’s tears,” she says, holding it out to me. “Drink.”
26. Whether they are ghosts or memories
Sometimes I think I dreamed it, at least some of it. Like this:
New Year’s Eve day there was a knock at the door.
I was lying in bed in my pajamas, watching the rain shaking the trees outside my window, making them look like frightened children. I didn’t move.
The knocks grew louder, more insistent. My dad was out and my mom was sleeping. I didn’t want her to wake up; she needed her rest.
I pulled on jeans and walked into the hallway.
Even with the rain outside, there was a strange winter afternoon stillness to the house. I shivered, barefoot on the wooden floor. I wondered if I listened closely enough, could I hear my mom breathing through her door? I was always listening for her breath.
I walked slowly to the top of the stairs and held the banister like I was eighty years old.
The knock came again. I went down the staircase and asked who was there.
“John Graves,” he said.
My heart was beating so hard it felt as if it could animate the rest of me—a stern puppeteer—but my limbs were frozen. I had to force myself to open the door.
It was the way I felt when I’d seen Jeni on the streets of Berkeley. He couldn’t be real. But there he was.
“Greetings.”
I took a step back and stared at him. He had grown a small beard and his hair hung shaggily to his shoulders. His glasses and his corduroy jacket were sparked with raindrops.
I tried to speak but couldn’t find any words in my throat.
“I tried calling you and you never answered.” His voice rose a notch and I put my hands over my face as he moved closer. “I’m sorry,” he said.
I backed away one step. But that was all. I didn’t shut the door.
“May I come in?”
I shook my head.
“Will you come driving with me then? I need to talk to you.” There was a heavy, lost sound to his voice.
I looked back into the house. Cold air was rushing into the warm living room. I imagined my mom calling me to her bedside, beckoning me to put my ear to her lips. My protective mommy who wanted to shelter me from everything. But there are some things from which you cannot shelter yourself.
“Wait.”
I closed the door and left him in the rain. I ran upstairs and checked; my mom was sleeping. I wrote her a note, put on a jacket, jeans and boots and came down again.
John was standing exactly as I had left him, with his hands in his pockets. I regretted for a moment having shut the door on him like that, not asking him in, but he didn’t seem to mind. We walked out to the car. He leaned over and put the seat belt on for me, reached and locked my door. I could smell him, which meant he was too close; it didn’t feel safe.
“I’m not a child,” I said.
“Sorry. I know.”
I turned to look at him. He was slumped in the seat. I wanted to pound his shoulders with my fists but they looked so defeated already.
He let his hand drop onto my arm. Even through the fabric of my coat I could feel his heat, as if without the cloth between us he would burn me.
“Why did you ask me to sleep with you?” I asked. “What was this thing about bringing your child back?”
“Tania said that was the only way it could work. If we really love you.”
“What the fuck are you even talking about?”
“Ariel, I’m sorry. I should have told her no. I was wrong. But I want you to trust me now. Please.”
I shook my hair around my face, scattering rain, and bit my lip. “How can I trust you? You kept these secrets from me all that time.”
He reached over and started to touch my arm, then drew his hand away when I flinched. “I wasn’t sure if I believed it. I left them for a while about two years ago because I didn’t believe it, I thought she’d lost her mind, but I came back because I thought, what if in some crazy way she was right? Or maybe, even if it didn’t work, it might help us all
go back to how things were before. I wanted to try. But it was fucked up. I’m sorry.”
“The way things were before? When you were with Tania? You kept it from me that you needed me for something. You pretended to love me.”
His voice was deep and crackled like wood in a fireplace. “I do love you. And I’m glad I came back to them because otherwise I might never have found you. You’re who I want, Ariel. I left the house again. I got my own place.”
“You left?”
He nodded.
“I don’t want to talk about it,” I told him, swiping at the betrayal of moisture leaking from my eyes. “I want to forget about all of it. I want to forget everything tonight.”
He paused, his palms open to me. “I do, too. How can I help us forget?”
I looked at him for a second before I spoke. There was a warm feeling spreading through my chest in spite of myself. “I’m hungry,” I whispered.
John took me to a Thai restaurant with pink booths where we ate soup and rice, noodles and dumplings. We hardly spoke, just stared at each other across the table the way you might watch an apparition. By the time we left the restaurant the rain had stopped. The air sparkled with moisture and Christmas lights. We drove around until we passed an outdoor ice-skating rink. John parked.
“What do you think?”
“I haven’t skated since I was twelve.” It was with Jeni.
“Like riding a bike,” he said. He got out of the car, came around and offered me his hand. I let him baby me. He rented the skates and knelt before me and tied them on. He held my hand as I went tentatively onto the ice. I let him. My legs felt like a fawn’s, tiny and weak, especially on the slick surface, wobbling on the narrow blades. I let John Graves lead me around and around the rink of ice while lights flashed, pop music played, soap bubbles filled the air and the world beyond our magic circle grew dark and still. For once I was awake. And the demons slept.
Later we drove through the canyon to the top of a hill overlooking the valley. John parked and we stared out at the false fairyland of light.
“Do you want to dance?” he asked me. “Dance this fucked year to its death?”
So he blasted the stereo and opened the car doors and we danced in the street until we were soaked with sweat. I took off my coat and then my pajama shirt and danced in my tank top, my nipples rubbing against the thin fabric. There was a nearly full moon ringed with mist but still white-bright. Jimi Hendrix came on and John sat in the driver’s seat and pulled me to him and as midnight came I lifted the glasses tenderly off the bridge of his nose and put them in my pocket and he kissed me the way I had never known anyone could be kissed. Blasts and riffs and explosions of kisses while I straddled his thigh and rubbed myself up against him again and again. Kissing to death the old year with its sorrow. Part of me felt guilty for the pleasure of the kiss after everything that had happened. Part of me thought, Without this I am bones in the dirt, Jeni. I can’t live the life we promised each other we would have.
“White Wedding” by Billy Idol made the speakers throb.
There was the sound of an explosion in the sky behind us and a flash of light illuminated John’s uptilted face.
“You thought of everything, didn’t you?” I said.
Fireworks shot green, pink and white chrysanthemums out of the sky.
We made love for hours in the back of John’s car, grasping for—in each other’s bodies—the two months we’d been apart, and at dawn he brought me home and parked in front of my house.
“You still don’t want to talk?” he asked.
I shook my head.
“Talk to me. Please.”
“I’m so fucked up.”
“Ariel…”
I looked at my house. The light was on in my mom’s window. “She has surgery in two weeks.”
He put his arms around me again and I had to force myself to pull away, shut the door and run into the house.
“May I call you?” I heard him say, but I couldn’t find the words to answer.
* * *
One night after John’s visit and before my mom’s surgery I went driving by myself. The streets seemed to lead me along until I was in parts of the Valley I hadn’t expected. The places I had been with Jeni. The library where we went every afternoon to check out as many books as we could carry. Sometimes we stayed there and read, in the cool, quiet room with the windows full of leaves and light. The musty smell of the books in their crackling plastic covers. The pencil shavings. The whispers. The park where we soared on the swing set, late into the evening on warm days, the sky turning pink and a little breeze starting to chill our bare shoulders. The mini mall where we got takeout Chinese in those white paper cartons with the red pagodas on them, frozen yogurt and a DVD and went home to get in bed and eat and watch. While we had dessert we took turns combing and braiding each other’s hair. The elementary school we went to, looking so small and dark now. We scratched our elbows and knees, pressed secret notes back and forth, wore matching outfits for weeks at a time. Once we swapped clothes and put our hair up in caps and came to my mother’s door thinking she might mistake us for each other. That was how much we wanted to change places; not because we didn’t like our own lives but because we wanted to know each other that well. Now the playground looked dangerous, the tetherball poles and volleyball nets casting shadows on the moonlit blacktop. The eucalyptus and jacaranda trees hung shabbily over the road beyond the chain-link fence. There was a quiet I hadn’t remembered feeling before. The middle school where we went. Parked in front of it, looking at the sign announcing the dates of winter break, the locked gate, the deserted grounds lit with a buzzing fluorescence, I shuddered.
Ghosts haunt every place we go whether we believe in them as apparitions or not, whether they are ghosts or memories. This city where I lived was filled with Jeni, but so was Berkeley. Everywhere I went she went with me and she didn’t. I could still hear her lispy laugh and see the dimples and the ways her eyes gleamed like a baby’s. When someone so young and lovely vanishes they leave a cutout in the atmosphere; they don’t fade. They leave a place for the sun rays to cut through and burn us, melt all the important ice to floods.
Berkeley terrified me but Los Angeles was a wild garden in its own way, where people also disappeared and blood stained the secret grottos. There was blood on the ground from the Native Americans who lived here first and had their land usurped and there was the blood of the Manson murders and the blood of the junkies dying in the streets, blood of people killed in car accidents on the highways. Have you ever seen those red stains on the cement? I felt as if the freeways were bent on leading me astray and that was how I drove them, defensive and fearful.
One kidnapped me and took me to the mall where Jeni and I used to go, a big indoor palace of mirrors and lights and music where the idea was to confuse and stimulate you into overspending. Boys and clothes and sugar, that was what we wanted. And because you could only pay for two of them you were willing to spend too much. The clothes might attract the boys and the sugar would soothe you if that didn’t work. I rode the escalator up and down up and down until some security guards began to eye me suspiciously. I walked through the food court and the fried smells and sugar smells coated the roof of my mouth and made me nauseous.
So I left the mall and drove to Jeni’s neighborhood and before I knew it I was sitting parked near her front door. Her parents still had the pale blue Christmas lights up and they looked like a sad attempt at cheer. I waited for a while and finally her dad’s sedan pulled into the driveway and her parents went inside without speaking to each other, as far as I could tell. They turned on every light in the house as soon as they got in. I wanted to go talk to them but I knew I’d seem like a ghost, that time of night and the way I felt. I wondered if they kept her room the way it had been when she disappeared, as if, even now, she might return to sleep there once again. I thought of Jeni’s room with the roses and books everywhere, the mix of flower fairies and rock stars. We ga
ve each other pedicures and listened to music and giggled late into the night. We were girls but becoming something else. If she was gone, then so was I. If my mom left I was more than gone. John Graves stood between me and complete annihilation but, at the same time, did I really exist with him, either? Did he exist?
What had I done, ever, in my life? I had been a daughter, a student, a friend and a lover but I felt I had failed at all of them. I had suffered loss and been afraid. I had loved books and words. If I vanished like Jeni had, what would it really matter? My mom would grieve and my dad, too. John Graves might grieve for at least a little while. But besides a love of words and beauty and a strange tenderness in my heart, what did I really give to the world? I was no heroine and I would never be. No heroine at all. I was what a girl is told to be by most of the world—be passive, be quiet, be slim, don’t draw too much attention to yourself. But in that way, too, I was a failure; I was a skeleton child who didn’t even comb my hair.
I drove to Kragen’s house and parked. All the lights were off and his car wasn’t there. My heart beat faster, as if it had already done something dangerous.
I got out of the car, leaving my keys in the ignition, and walked quietly across the lawn and around the side of the house. There was a gate but it was unlocked and I pushed it open and went in. A sensor light flicked on and I froze. Through the back window I could see the office. There was one bookshelf and I remembered how the lack of books in the living room had disturbed me. On this bookshelf, though, there were books I recognized, even from far away. Thin-spined and brightly colored. School yearbooks.
I tried the back door—locked. But I didn’t have to smash glass with my fist, either; there was a small window and it was slightly open.
I was sick of myself for doing nothing. For waiting and wondering and crying and forgetting.
I stood on a low wall and pushed the window. It stuck at first but then slid up. I hoisted myself onto the ledge and pushed my body through and slithered inside.
I wasn’t even scared anymore. The light in the yard was still on and it shone into the office. The yearbooks on the shelf were organized chronologically so it was easy to find the one with me and Jeni in it.
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