Blood Father

by Peter Craig

  Lydia surged upward, spilling everything off the table and grabbing Danielle by the hair. Everyone leapt into the aisles and crawled into neighboring booths as dishes smashed and silverware clattered to the floor. Lydia dragged Danielle toward the hostess stand. The other girls shouted, Chloe started crying, and the manager hollered that he was calling the police. Lydia picked up a fork and pressed the tines against Danielle’s cheek, and whispered, “Keep talking, bitch, and I’m going to pluck your fucking eyeballs out.” Danielle screamed, and within seconds the staff was gathered around, pulling Lydia by the waist and arms as she held on to Danielle’s hair.

  “Get her off me!” shouted Danielle.

  In a thick accent, the manager said, “The police are coming.”

  Lydia released her grip, fought out of the crowd, and pushed past a cook trying to contain her. The manager broke into his native tongue as she grabbed her satchel and ran for the door on clattering shower shoes. Past the parking lot and down a residential street, she trotted alone, just as the skies were turning gray and the birds were awakening in every ragged tree. After putting the shoes into her bag, she ran barefoot, hearing sirens along Fairfax. Would the police surround the deli? This excited her. It made her feel powerful and relevant, though she wasn’t sure at what point a tantrum became a crime.

  For a while she fluctuated between sprinting and walking, until she was just off Wilshire Boulevard. She found a phone booth beneath a decapitated palm trunk, whose shaggy leaves had probably been lopped off to prevent some epidemic of blight. It stood now like the remaining column of an ancient ruin. On its trunk was a graffiti tag, which she recognized as the same one from the bodyguard’s neck. As if this coincidence unified all other events in her life, she decided that everything in this random spot related to her future. The growing light hurt her eyes; the tar pits were rich and rank nearby. She flipped through a half-gutted phone book as if scanning for a prophecy, and read, “Tile-Ceramics-Contractors & Dealers.” She couldn’t stop laughing. She glanced at her hand and saw Jonah’s number, smudging, almost vanished from sweat. There was a quarter at the bottom of her messy satchel. She picked up the phone, started to dial, and stopped.

  No, she thought. It was too soon. She might seem desperate.

  For a week, Lydia tried to decipher what Jonah had told her that night. What did she want? He had been close to the truth: The idea of vanishing was the most exciting thing she knew, and she believed that this was the accumulation of so many moments of narrow escape in her memory. She never felt more electric and alive than when her mother had awakened her at 3 A.M. that long-lost morning to escape a violent and coked-up stepfather, who had finally fallen asleep. Lydia’s mother had married three men and lived with three other serious boyfriends, but often all Lydia could remember were the wild fluctuations between rage and tenderness, the shouting in the house, the broken lamps, the scrambles, the nights the police came, windows filling up with red flashing lights, radios murmuring, the bathroom door kicked off its hinges. Lydia remembered far less of her childhood than most kids—with images assembling around eight years old, and a kind of preverbal and anxious darkness spanning out before, with its own syntax of suffocating and fleeing. She knew that she hallucinated as a child: She saw toy trains crossing her beige carpet with vigorous puffs of steam. She would often see a shadow in her room with luminous, mesmerizing teeth, the way the Cheshire cat appeared piece by piece in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, until there appeared a glowing pink fedora, suspended in the dark over the neon smile. Her bedspread would become the top of a mountain, and the Navajo design on her wallpaper would awaken in an animation of dancing stick figures, writhing together. She heard the train’s whistle, even smelled its smokestack; she felt the room spin like a carousel and she left her body—but she didn’t remember much of her real life behind those disembodied visions. There were entire houses lost in the shadows of memory, entire months and years left out, coming into the light only during the breathless moments she fled with her mother, and the loving nights they spent together in motel beds.

  It was as if she grew up on the run. She remembered the flophouse by the freeway, late at night, the sobbing phone call her mother made to family outside of San Diego; and she remembered the policeman who came to file a report, giving Lydia Tic Tacs and talking to her about his own daughter, a figure skater. Her mother curled up against Lydia that night, crying, while Lydia told her, again and again, that they were far away where no one could ever find them. No one could reach them by phone, no one could see through those windows. She imagined shrinking away from her mother’s arms, hiding forever, living happily in this alien terrain of carpet fibers and bathroom tile.

  Was this the fear and restlessness that Jonah had seen in her? He was such an odd man, sulking, lowering his head when he joked—but watching so closely. Had he seen something in her from those distant blackouts of memory? She thought of the way that a mosquito leaves an enzyme in every bite, so that other mosquitoes, days later, can still smell the wound.

  Lydia had first tried to run away at twelve, after an attempt to tell her mother about an ongoing problem with her second stepfather. Her mother had replied that the accusations were impossible: The man could never have touched her. Ursula claimed that she had been too vigilant for any such possibility, because of similar experiences in her own life. She accused Lydia of loving drama, wanting attention—and that night Lydia stewed with hatred for her mother, her stepfather, and herself. She cut her legs with a pair of sewing scissors, then crawled out of her window and walked miles down Ventura Boulevard, sleeping that night in the plastic tunnel of a children’s playground. She was gone close to two days before the police found her, hungry and ragged and living in the park. She gave the cops her address, rode with them, then walked back into her living room, where her mother was hovering over a cigarette on the couch. “Do you have any idea what you just did to me?” asked Ursula. “You don’t, do you?”

  “Sorry for the inconvenience, Mother.”

  When Lydia finally ran away for good, at fourteen, she kept running, fleeing the parents, rules, and tensions of each new stopover. She became addicted to the rhythm of escape and arrival, the new friends that took her in with whispered complicity and the sudden fights that led to her departure, the crying phone calls and reunions. She couldn’t sleep without reminding herself that everything in the room was meaningless, that it could be burned down or flooded or smashed in an earthquake—as if impermanence itself was her lullaby.

  Whatever he had read in her behavior that night, after seven days of deliberating on the subject, Lydia decided finally to return to Jonah’s house in the hills. It was a listless weekday when she returned from a Laundromat with his clothes, clean and folded in a shopping bag. She began making herself up for a date.

  For the past few days, she had been staying with Chloe’s older sister, Shannon Silverman, in an ugly slab apartment building of Russian immigrants and aspiring guitarists off Hollywood and La Brea. The black sheep of the family, Shannon was a snarky, condescending cocktail waitress, with a commercial agent and a worsening drug problem. She had appeared in two ads for hand cream and one for nasal spray. Lydia could picture her having a promising future as the pitchwoman for cold medicine, because she was always groggy and spent most of the daylight hours with an ice pack on her face.

  Lydia was desperate to get out of her apartment.

  Shannon was among the foulest people she had ever known. She blew her nose into paper towels and left them around the couch; she picked her toenails off and threw the crescents into the dead plants. Worst of all, she had to know more than Lydia on every conceivable topic, as if, in the five extra years she had been alive, she had done nothing but read encyclopedias. When she deduced that Lydia had a “crush” on some older man in the hills, she pummeled her with advice about everything from phone etiquette to fellatio. Because she was comfortable in strip clubs and sports bars, because she drank Pabst and could name all the Cl
ippers, because she liked drag racing and junk food, she was convinced that she “thought exactly like a guy,” as if adopting the male psyche meant little more than reading the sports page in a sleazy neighborhood.

  On the phone with Jonah, trying to keep away from Shannon’s eavesdropping, Lydia described herself as “the girl who fell in the pool.” He said that he knew who she was, then stated her full name. His life was a mess; he was in the middle of an ongoing disaster; but she could certainly come by with his clothes.

  A half hour later, Lydia pulled up to the automatic gate in a taxi, holding her plastic bag. She couldn’t remember ever feeling so nervous, but she told herself that this was only an errand. In her efforts to look more adult, she now appeared as if she had dressed for a job interview. She wore a silk blouse and a skirt stolen from Shannon, which she must have saved for callbacks, with muted lipstick and her hair tied up into a loose splash. The cab driver told her she smelled nice. In stiletto sandals, she walked the long winding driveway to the porch. The city was now obscured under a milky haze.

  When she entered the front room, she noticed that there was now a long dining room table with only two chairs. Jonah sat at one end, stooped over and listening to his cordless phone with the cell phone beside him. All he said, over and over, was “okay,” until finally he broke the pattern with “not on the phone.” He wore suit pants and a white V-necked T-shirt. His hair was messy and his eyes were bloodshot. The table was littered with tissues.

  She stood in the middle of the dim room, holding the bag, until he gestured for her to sit down at the other end of the table.

  Finally he hung up and stared at her for a while, nodding.

  It was surprising how many details Lydia had forgotten about his face: His nose was longer and sharper, his wrists were tiny, his neck slender. She had remembered him as larger and more imposing, and was surprised by what a narrow little man he was.

  “I have your clothes,” said Lydia.

  “You’re an honorable person,” he said and blew his nose.

  Lydia sat up straighter and said, “You didn’t seem very happy on the phone—”

  “I never get anything but bad news on the phone.”

  His cell phone rang again. Lydia laughed and said, “Even more.” She waited patiently at the end of the table while he merged from one phone call to another in a schizophrenic flux between aggressive and apologetic tones. Every now and then he would glance at Lydia and put up his finger; but when she stood, he covered the mouthpiece and said, “Give me a few minutes, Lydia. I want to talk to you.”

  It was the most abrupt invitation she’d ever heard, sounding as if she’d done something wrong. She grew tense hovering in that near-empty front room, with dust now swimming in the afternoon light as it came through cypress trees along the hill. She whispered that she would wait outside, and she spent the next hour pacing between the railing and pool, glancing out over the thickening haze that was covering the West Side.

  After a while, she wondered why she was staying here and waiting. He’d presented himself like a guru to her a week ago, and now he couldn’t be bothered to hang up the phone. Plus, there was something nervous and pushy about him today, something that seemed surprisingly overwhelmed for a man of power. She hated waiting for people in general, and she especially disliked rudeness; by the time he was off the phone and coming outside, she was prepared to tell him off.

  She met him head-on in the middle of the porch, wagging her head side to side and raising her finger, proclaiming, “You know what? I’m not some maid that comes over here with your motherfucking laundry. . . .”

  But he only seemed amused by this tirade. He put his hands up in the air and said, “Shhh, shhh—I know. It’s okay. It’s okay.” He smiled with tight lips and added, “You’re so mad you’re turning ghetto on me here. Come on now. Calm down.” He was so unfazed by the outburst that she was confused and disarmed. She took a step backward, and he continued ahead with a stooped, goading posture, as if offering his hands to a growling dog. “Lydia. I shouldn’t have made you wait—but this is my life. I wanted to talk to you. We had an interesting moment the other night, and it’s been on my mind. But if I drop everything I’m doing—I’ve got a catastrophe on my hands. You don’t want to be responsible for that, do you?” He grinned as if everything were a secret joke.

  “No,” she said, still breathing heavily.

  “Come on now. Sit down.”

  He led her to a lounge chair, and he perched across from her. While she stared at the marine layer forming over the ocean in the distance, he asked her questions, rapid-fire, with the friendly but detached tone of a job interview.

  He said that he had been asking around about her. He’d learned quite a bit. Why had she run away from home? He wanted to know how she lived. Did she work? Where did she stay night to night? Wasn’t she exhausted? Where did she want to be in a year, in five, ten? He had the sedate tone of a therapist, and Lydia performed for him, lighting a cigarette and explaining that she could never go home, never in her life again, because everything in her mother’s house was a disgusting lie. Yes, she’d been abused, hurt—but she didn’t think that was her ultimate downfall. She thought it was the lying, pretending day after day that everything was fine, in pretty houses with pretty things. She said, “I just couldn’t be part of that bullshit, you know—for the rest of my life.” She told him about her father in prison, joking that she was actually white trash, an undercover redneck sponging her entire life off sugar daddies and spoiled teens.

  “What’s he in for?”

  “My dad? Manslaughter. He’s out now. He’s somewhere in the desert—I looked up his number once. But I didn’t have the guts to call him.”

  “Why not?”

  “I don’t know,” she said, twisting her neck and massaging the top of her own shoulder. “Nervous.”

  “Scared he’s not who you want him to be?”

  “Mmmm. I guess.”

  “You had an image of him in your mind. He’s the secret: some crazy rebel, can’t be tamed—and you’re scared he might just be a dumb ex-con. Right?”

  She looked at him with her eyes thin. Insulted, she wondered what kind of insight or affection she’d earn for enduring such comments.

  Staring away for the first time, Jonah said, “I want to help you out, Lydia. If you’ll accept.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “You’re a discreet person, right? You’ve kept secrets your whole life.”

  She nodded.

  “Well, I’m going to make you a business offer. Because the second I saw you, I knew the kind of person you were. And I knew that you were in trouble. If you don’t want the responsibility, you turn it down flat. I won’t bother you again. It’ll be like we never met. You’re a smart person, and I don’t need to explain this to you.”

  She frowned and met his eyes.

  “Did you drive here?” he asked.

  “I took a taxi.”

  He smirked at this information. She demanded to know what was so funny, and he said, “You never get anything but a one-way ticket, do you?”

  He wanted to show her something, and a few minutes later she was riding shotgun in his BMW as he swerved rapidly out of the mountains. The air conditioner was so cold that her skin goose pimpled and the hair rose up on her neck. He continued talking on the phone, just a headset now, until he lost reception in the canyon. He rode down Franklin, in and out of slower traffic, under the freeway and past the weeded lots and billboards near Highland. When he spoke to her, briefly and between calls, he reiterated that he understood what she felt, day to day: He knew that she was tired; he would never offer her this if he didn’t feel some rare spark of recognition. “On a practical level, Lydia. But in other ways also. People need to take the good things in life when they get them.”

  Along Sunset, down Fairfax, he interviewed her again, this time asking about drugs. He was concerned about whether or not she could control herself.

 
“I just party, you know. Socially. I’m not like some junky ho.”

  “And boyfriends? What about them?”

  She smiled bashfully again. “No, I don’t have a boyfriend.”

  “Tito?”

  “Oh my God. I hope you’re joking.”

  Just as the sun was setting, he turned onto a residential street and pulled up across from the house. It was small, cute, and hideously suburban, with a splash of red bougainvillea blocking the barred front windows. The timed sprinklers came on across a plot of crab grass, flanked with boxwood hedges. Lydia took a deep breath. With its brightness, its chipper whitewashed façade, Spanish tile roof, and flagstone walk leading to the mesh of a security door, it looked to her like a decorative birdcage.

  Jonah turned off the car and rotated to face her from his seat. He said, “I’m going to explain the situation, and if you don’t like it, we shake hands and you walk away. Basically, half my life is normal. I have a real estate development company. It was my father’s, God bless him, and I’ve expanded it every year since he died. Now, some of it—and just some—involves being secretive. I have a very specific job for a set of people. I find houses and I buy them—all through my company. I scout out a good neighborhood. I make sure that people around it don’t ask too many questions. A good, typical Los Angeles block full of houses that turn over quickly and people who never meet their neighbors. Ideally, I can sell the house a year later and make a profit.

  “Now, I’ll pay you to live in the house. What am I paying you for? I’m paying you to keep it clean, keep it quiet, to keep it looking normal. I’m paying you to sit on an egg until it hatches—understand? You pretend to go to work, you pretend to come home. You could pass for your early twenties, so you’re somebody’s personal assistant; you just got out of UCLA, and your daddy is rich and supplementing you.”

  “What’s in the house then?”

  “Listen—you don’t know what’s in the house—it’s not your problem. Even I don’t always know. They’re stash houses. They’re like storage, or, let’s say, transfer points. This is the kind of stuff that takes a lot of organization to move, and it can’t just go from point A to point B all the time. But your job is only to live here and look like everybody else. And we’ve had a lot of problems doing it the old way, with people who knew too much. It’s my ass on the line; the deeds are in my company’s name—so I’m the one who’s developed this new way of doing things. You’ll never see the stuff. It’ll be buried, hidden, someplace where only an exterminator could find it. Our people will be in charge of everything going in and going out, and they’ll do it with workers and electricians and whatever else they need. You just stay put and enjoy.”