by Peter Craig
She retreated up the carpeted stairs as Tito called her a “tease.” She ducked into a kitchen off the empty front room, a huge expanse of cabinets and counters under bright track lighting, a disaster of bottles filled with cigarettes, plates of congealed nachos, and pots of hardened noodles. Her heart beat like a stopwatch; she was trembling with restless energy. When she was a little girl she used to come downstairs into a bright, empty kitchen on nights after her mother fought loudly with her second stepfather—she would do the dishes, reorganize the refrigerator, anything to keep moving, a forced mania that kept her eyes away from the gloom at the edges of her home. She began doing the same thing in the stranger’s house: She ran the sink, scrubbed the pots, cleaned the wineglasses, and sponged the counters. Rapidly, she grew familiar with the cabinets and drawers and the dishwashing machine.
While her hands were buried in the froth of the sink, a slightly older man—probably in his late twenties—wandered into the room on his cordless phone. He spoke quietly and hung along the walls, seeming unaware of his surroundings. She was certain that it was Tito’s older brother, but he carried himself so humbly that she was startled. He was wearing a copper-colored dress shirt and dark slacks hemmed above his bare feet; and when he rolled his eyes, his exasperation seemed wry and sophisticated.
“Oh, Jesus—are you serious?” he said into the phone. “What do you want me to do? Because it’s still in escrow: We can’t. These people are fucking crazy. I think he’s a narcissist—I think he can’t even see his behavior. He thinks he’s entitled to the money. No, I’m not going to twist myself up to this demented logic anymore, okay. That’s a ridiculous excuse. I can’t keep dealing with people like this. No, no, no—whatever. Call me later—call me if you hear any news.”
He hung up and sighed, leaning against his marble counter. Lydia was washing a Teflon pan. For a long time the room was silent except for the clanking of pots and silverware. Finally he said, “I would give anything if Tito had more friends like you.”
“I want your house,” said Lydia. “It kicks ass.”
“Yeah, if I could get the posse out of here. Nothing scares me more than white kids wearing Fubu.”
“Why don’t you just throw them out?”
He nodded at the floor, smiling. His mannerisms seemed to contradict each other: He delivered his joke with a spark of aggression, then glanced away bashfully at the floor. “I don’t know—maybe I need a little chaos to break the routine.”
“Where’s the switch for the garbage disposal?”
“That panel under the sink.”
She flicked the switch, waiting out a brief growl until a whirlpool formed in the standing water.
“So what happened to all of your furniture?” asked Lydia as she wiped her forehead with her wrist.
He began unloading plates from the dishwasher to give her more space. “That’s sort of a liquidity problem.”
“Like—a flood or something?”
“Right,” he said, laughing suddenly. “A big flood of bullshit swept right through there. Washed all my furniture down the hill.”
“Don’t make fun of me—I don’t know all your, like, Scarface Realtor words.”
He was an inch or two shorter than she was, and he seemed very small and spry from the way he leaned down and covered up his smile. He wagged a dish in the air, and said, “I like that. Scarface Realty.” Then he turned sideways to pass between her and the counter, refilling a glass cabinet.
To Lydia, there seemed to be a surprising intimacy in this shared chore.
“By the way,” he said. “You should be more careful. Going into a strange house and cleaning up like this. Gives people the wrong idea. Before you know it, you’ll be waxing the floors.”
“Oh, I am so totally going to wax your floors—baby.” She tilted her head back in an imitation of rapture.
He gave the first note of a laugh. “You have a thing for floors?”
“For your floors. Go look at ’em. Those are hot floors.”
He shook his head and clicked his tongue. “What about bathrooms? You want to do some work there, too?”
“Depends on how dirty I feel,” she said, lowering her face and speaking in an exaggerated parody of a seductress.
“Oh Jesus! I’m in trouble now.” He was searching her eyes, and Lydia became momentarily insecure.
He was silent for a long time, studying her, and then he pushed the joke too far, continuing despite the lost rhythm, asking, “Can you lay tile?”
Now Lydia wasn’t in the mood for this banter; he’d looked at her too closely; he’d lost the breeziness she needed.
He pressed on, “Because I’m thinking of doing some renovations in there.”
Rapidly, Lydia felt a swell of irritation, and she focused on the last dishes, scrubbing as he watched her now with an eerie and detached curiosity, like a talent scout or an anthropologist.
“You’re not friends with Tito, are you?” he asked.
His voice was lowered, and he spoke with a suspicion so deep that it frightened her. Her throat tightened. It was astonishing how quickly she had gone from attraction to queasiness, knocked off balance by some mean scrutiny in his eyes; and she was noticing a mechanical nature to her movements now, lathering the last dishes simply in order to have something else to focus on, feeling trapped in a ragged, horrible inertia. Now she hated herself for having been so tacky. She wished she could rewind the moment. Finally she said, “I don’t even know Tito.”
He said, “Don’t take this the wrong way—but I feel like we’re the two most out-of-place people in the house.”
“What way am I supposed to take that?”
Her heart was beating in her ears and throat, and she couldn’t stand the silence as he studied her.
Neither moved, until his phone rang again. He waited three rings, then glanced at the caller ID. “I have to take this. It’s nice meeting you.”
A half hour later, Lydia sneaked another two lines with Danielle and Rugby. Afterward, she joined the party that had spilled out onto the patio. Alone, Lydia stood by the baluster and smelled the night air, a perfume of eucalyptus and gathering moisture. A cooling, luxurious breeze tugged through her hair, and she closed her eyes and rolled her head around in it. She recognized the dusty smell of oleanders from a house in her childhood, back when her mother was married to the orthodontist—and she had loved that house, with its two staircases, olive trees, and the quiet sound of mourning doves on hot afternoons. She would run in the sprinklers, lie in the grass. She was feeling buoyed again, free and easy in the perfect air. In fact, she loved this entire miserable city, every ugly corner of it—the whole smudge of lights below; she loved it more for being so difficult. The traffic, the gunshots—imagine what the riots must have looked like from this perch, a vigil of candle flames spreading outward from Koreatown; or the earthquake, with a sudden blackout and a distant swelling of car alarms as if from an orchestra pit. She knew there was real beauty and happiness inside the most difficult places, and she could feel better times ahead, like a warming change in the wind. This bolstered feeling couldn’t just be from the drugs, because it was too overpowering, too real.
She lay down on the diving board, staring up at the flushed sky, while below she heard splashing, puffing, and horseplay in the water. “Get your friend in here, Danielle.”
Everyone called for her to join them. All across the dark water, she saw indistinct figures, floating, and she couldn’t identify the disembodied voices: “Marco.”—“Ah, the poor bitch can’t swim.”—“Polo.”—“She can swim, yo. Check out those tits. Fucking flotation devices.”—“Ah-ha-ha-ha, whoooo!”—“In the event of a water landing . . .”—“Lydia, you loser. Come in. It’s awesome.”
Just then, someone grabbed Lydia from behind, hands in her armpits, and threw her into the pool. Whoever it was, he wasn’t particularly strong, and, as she relaxed and dropped into the deep end, she wondered why she had surrendered so easily. As if it were a pl
anned stunt, she let herself drift downward underwater. Her eyes adjusted to the blackness until she could see the silhouettes of trees through the wavering surface and bicycling legs spaced out above her. She smiled, broke into a loud laugh of bubbles, and followed their trail to the top.
When she came up, Danielle was in the middle of a tirade: “Because those are my clothes, Tito, you piece of shit—and that’s, like, a thousand-dollar skirt. You’re fucking paying for that.”
Tito said that she and her bitch friends had probably done twice that much in crystal, while she retorted that she’d gotten a B-minus in calculus and could call him on his “retarded-ass drug-dealer arithmetic.”
Calmly, Lydia climbed out of the pool. The soaked blouse clung to her and the skirt was heavy. She was shaking, and, when she laughed, it sounded nervous and involuntary. She ignored the ongoing argument, punctuated with splashes and squeals, as she passed through the doorway, across the floor, arms crossed over her chest.
“Hello,” she called. She tracked a wet trail to the kitchen, where she wadded up paper towels beneath her feet and shuffled back over the puddles. Down a long hallway there was another series of doors, and the empty house now seemed larger and more mysterious, stretching out like an evening shadow.
Suddenly Jonah came in from the hallway, tying his robe. Lydia started laughing in staggers, and said, “I’m sorry, I’m getting your floor all wet. Your brother threw me into the pool.”
“All right. Come on then.”
He led her into his bedroom, where the television flickered without sound, casting light across rumpled sheets. A few strides farther, she was standing beside him in a large bathroom covered with mirrors. She saw her reflection from a dozen angles, nipples sharp, hair in mermaid tangles. Jonah went through drawers and laid out clothes on a tile counter: sweatpants, Bruins sweatshirt, and shower shoes. With his mussed hair and his fancy robe, she thought he was the most adorable person she’d ever seen, and she wanted to bite him on the ear. She wondered why he’d scared her before; he seemed so drowsy and harmless now. She was even turned on by the sleepy, salty odor of him, like a Sunday morning in the sheets.
“Okay,” he said. “Change into this stuff here. I’ll leave you alone.”
She took off her clothes, eyeing the door, imagining him bursting back into the room; she both wanted this to happen and didn’t, and her goosebumps seemed like part of a great, aroused indecisiveness, like some internal friction. She regarded herself in the mirror, her pale skin, the rolling terrain around her waist and hips; she had never before looked so sexy. She prayed this confidence wasn’t just from the drugs. Jonah was displaying genuine valor by staying on the other side of that door. As she unfolded the clothes, she still pictured him rushing in on her, picking her up, sitting her on that counter or throwing her against the glass—it would be like that, she thought—on the cusp of violence, half passionate, half dangerous.
He didn’t come through the door.
Holding her soaked clothes in a plastic bag, dressed as if for a workout or an illness, she returned to his bedside, where he faced the oncoming lights of the television. Speaking with a flutter in her voice, she told him that she would have the clothes laundered, pressed, and returned to him within twenty-four hours.
“Keep them,” he said. “They’re sweatpants.”
She stood her ground, trying to decide if he was angry with her, or repelled by her earlier behavior. Finally she replied, “I would feel a lot better. I don’t like to take things. If you want, I could mail them to you.”
“What was your name again?”
“Lydia Jane Carson.”
“Well, Lydia Jane Carson. Let me ask you a rude question. What the fuck are you doing here?”
She waited in the dark, hovering by the bedpost. “What do you mean?”
“I mean, I’m looking at you, and I’m seeing a smart young woman, who’s got a lot going for her. But you’re out wandering around in the middle of the night with a bunch of losers. So what is it? What the fuck are you looking for here, kid?”
Lydia had no idea why he seemed so angry with her, but she paused, watching, her eyes narrow and her nostrils flared, digging in for what felt like a strengthening assault.
“I need to get at least an hour of sleep. Okay? I’m not on summer vacation with the rest of you screaming fuckups. Somebody has to work and pay for this wonderland. And guess who that is?”
“I know.”
“If it’s important to your sense of honor that you return my sweatpants—”
“It is,” she said.
He sighed and said, “I’ll give you my cell number.” He found a pen, but no paper. As he rolled around to search the drawers, Lydia noticed a small gray nine-millimeter pistol beside a box of tissues. She put out her palm for him, cupping it as if for a handout. He grabbed her wrist. His fingers were so much finer than hers. Squeezing tightly and pulling her toward him, he asked, “How old are you anyway?”
“Eighteen.”
“Sure you are.” Between the head and heart lines of her palm, he etched his number, pushing hard enough to hurt. “Why don’t you stop hanging around with these people? I love Tito, but he’s a bad seed. He’s never going to be anything but a freeloader.”
He finished writing his number, then closed her hand for her.
She took a deep breath that raised her shoulders. “When would be the best time for me to call you? Regarding the clothes?”
He was frowning, looking right through her with hard, green eyes. “Call me whenever you want, but let me give you a warning, because I like you. Call me because you want to talk. Don’t call me for something else. Do you understand? I’m not some new connection. You come around here thinking you’re going to use me for that—and I’m going to be really disappointed.”
His point hit her with a gust of sudden alarm. She didn’t know why she couldn’t move from his line of sight, but she stood firm, breathing heavily, feeling a deep shamefulness that she had presented herself this way to him—a drug whore, a cheap skank trying to climb the hillside into his rich house. “I apologize if you got that impression.”
He said, “Give me back your hand.”
He took her hand in both of his, staring upward from the bed. His face softened, and he said to her, “I’ve been looking at you all night. And kid, you are a disaster. You are in so much fucking pain—you want to vanish into the dark out there. I swear to God, I know you. And you’re better than this. You’re smart and you’re tough: I can see it. But you’ve never met a man in your life that you trusted, that you didn’t fight with. You ran away from home, I heard. You’re living with kids that barely know you. I know what you want, kid. I know what you really, honestly want, deep down—because you’re just like me. I’m not talking about anything physical, nothing like that—drugs, sex, no way, nothing that easy. I’m talking about something that scares the shit out of most people—most people. So you call that number someday—and come back here—any time you want to know.”
An hour later, with her hair still damp, Lydia sat with her girlfriends and three boys who had joined the snowballing group, all marooned together around two booths at Canter’s Deli. Dawn was coming through a stained-glass skylight. The conversation drifted among objects of titillation and ridicule, until Danielle was accusing Lydia of fucking Tito’s older brother. The voices in the group blended together around her: “Don’t act all innocent, Lydia.”—“Look at her, she’s blushing.”—“She’s in love with that guy.”—“You should be careful, though—he’s like Mafia or something.”
Lydia finally joined the medley to reply, “He’s not in the Mafia, Chloe. I heard him talking on the phone about escrow.”
No one knew what escrow was, but one of the boys claimed that it had to do with huge amounts of illegal money. Danielle suggested that Lydia had overheard this phone call while she was “pulling a Lewinsky” under his desk, and Chloe hit her on the shoulder. Danielle told everyone about Chloe’s eating disord
er, and, while they argued over which was worse, bulimia or anorexia, a boy in a knitted cap shouted, “Jus’ don’t lose that ass!”
Once again, they fixated on Lydia. They argued about who had “custody” of her for the next few days, and Danielle said that she didn’t understand why they had to take care of Lydia if she was going to “be all high-and-mighty about fucking that Mafia guy.” Who did she think she was, anyway? Danielle was sick of this living-on-the-lam routine. She proposed an intervention: Either Lydia should return home, back to her antipanic meds and her perverted stepfather, or she should go live under a bridge with the rest of the homeless teens. Lydia promised to pay her back for the skirt.
With her eyes streaked red from chlorine, a cigarette angled upward in her fingers, Danielle smirked and replied, “I’m just questioning this whole thing. Why do we have to have a white-trash pet? I mean, there are plenty of fucking runaways. We could probably go to the bus station right now and have our pick of the litter.”
Chloe said, “Danielle, you’re evil.”
One of the boys was laughing so hard that coffee came out of his nose.
Danielle continued, “I mean, face it, Lydia is trailer trash Barbie. Let’s go down the checklist. She ran away at, what? Fourteen? She has sex for drugs. She mooches everything. And, last but not least, her biker father is in jail.”
Lydia locked on Danielle’s eyes. She replied, “I’m warning you. I’m not in the fucking mood right now. Say one thing about my dad. One thing, I dare you.”
“I could say tons of shit about your father,” she said, puffing. “Tons and tons. Like the fact that he probably raped your mother. You’re the product of a crime.”
“She was with him for almost a year.”
“Yeah, that’s called brainwashing, bitch. And you know what else I know about your father? I know that right now, as we speak, he’s on his knees, taking it in the ass.”