by Peter Craig
“And if the cops come?”
“They won’t. Nobody in this neighborhood ever looks out their windows. There’s only one way for you to screw this up, and you won’t do it.”
“What way is that?”
“Well, we had some people in a house, out in the Valley. This is what I’ve been dealing with on the phone. They were skimming for themselves. Happens all the time. Just some tiny amount they thought they could get away with. But now the people I work for, they’re upset. The accounting is very precise here. This isn’t some kid with a big piggy bank. If we put in fifty grand—it better be there the next day. If we put in a million, two million, when it goes down to get washed, we’re going to notice if there’s a nickel missing. That’s how people get hurt. Do I have you here?”
Lydia stared at the house.
“You treat it like a job and I’ll take care of you. I’ve survived in this business for a long time, and I have a good feel for when things are low risk. This is an easy one, Lydia. Easy as it gets. If you really never know anything, then nobody can touch you. You want the grand tour?”
She took a deep breath and asked, “Why me?”
“Because you need someplace to live. And because you understand.”
“You don’t even know me.”
“Yes, I do.”
She glanced between the house and Jonah, then said, “I came over today, and I was hoping maybe you’d ask me out to a movie or something. A cup of coffee. Something disgustingly normal.”
There was never any cup of coffee, never any movie—but the house, and her indecision about it, became a courtship of its own.
Lydia would call Jonah from Shannon’s, late at night, curled up on the couch or sitting in an armchair by the window, bare feet pressed up against the glass. She would say, “It’s me,” and he would wait for a long time in silence.
He’d ask if she’d made her choice, and she would begin a long, airy ramble of thinking out loud: What if the police found something? What if she couldn’t handle the stress? At first he would come and go on the phone, traveling back and forth through different layers of call-waiting, but as the night wore on, he would stay with her in a breathy silence, hardly speaking, now and then responding to her pauses: “You know it’s just going to be up to you, Lydia. I can’t decide for you. I’m not going to force you into anything that makes you uncomfortable. But I think you can do it. I think you deserve a break for once in your life.”
These conversations, beginning as great, meandering bouts of hypothetical arrests and disasters, slowly gathered their own kind of gravity. Lydia would tell Jonah about her life, idle things about her friends, until the talks would turn dark, and she would analyze herself for him. “Am I telling you too much?” she’d ask. She told him about the time she tried to kill herself with pills, and said that it was because she felt dirty and broken; she remembered being overwhelmed with disgust more than sadness. She thought her way into corners; she second-guessed herself until she couldn’t move. She felt ruined before she began.
“You’re this beautiful, perceptive girl,” said Jonah, “and the only thing standing in your way, Lydia, is this criticism of yourself. You’re beating yourself senseless. You want some kind of punishment. Well, you can be kind to yourself. You deserve it as much as anybody, and I’m qualified to tell you that. I’ve been around in my life, Lydia, and I’ve never met anyone with as much on the ball. I mean that. You’re so smart—and like all smart people, you’ve got a big burden you carry, in both arms, in front of your eyes, and you can’t see around it. You’ve got to just put it down. Trust yourself.”
When Jonah did contribute a story from his own life, it was small, matter-of-fact, and horrifying. On their third night of whispered deliberation, he said that his parents had been murdered in their kitchen when he was sixteen years old. Lydia broke into tears, apologized for going on so long about herself, and said, “God, my problems are meaningless next to that.”
“Stop it,” he said. “It’s not like that. People have whatever past they have—and you don’t compare them. It’s not like it’s currency or something. One person’s problems aren’t worth more than another’s. You are whatever you are—right at this second. Everything you did or thought in the past is over.”
She had never heard anything quite so terrifying and so seductive at the same time—for she perceived in his attitude an escape route from every weight upon her; she saw in it the fantastic promise of fleeing, again and again, of renewing herself with each day and each new crisis.
During another phone call, Lydia, still hedging about the house, drifted into a talk about love, and what she believed it was, and how she had never felt it until recently. She said that it felt like she had been in a dark and crowded room, and, out of all the whispers and shadows, someone had found her, touched her on the shoulder, seen who she was beneath her borrowed clothes and posturing. She said that she had a flutter in her chest when she heard his voice. She confessed that she now waited for the day to end so that she could have their phone call at night. She didn’t want to scare him away. But she believed that they were built out of the same pain and anxiety, and that they could heal each other, little by little. People in her life tried to talk her out of her emotions, but Jonah just listened. He made her feel calm, and she was never calm, never, not under any circumstances: She had a huge, clattering pinball machine of a life. She partied and wrote and danced and shopped and did everything with a manic ferocity to stave off any feelings of loneliness or desperation. But he made it so that she could lie down flat on her belly on the bed, barricaded with pillows, the phone under her hair—silent. She could listen to only the wind in the earpiece; she could savor his voice like an old song; and she was aroused, more than ever in her life, by a stillness in him, a patience that seemed to her the depths of strength and power.
She gave him this speech and began to cry that she had been so lost in her life, and when she recovered with gasping breath, tears on her lips, he waited for a long time to finally say, “Do you want to come over here?”
“I don’t know if I should.”
“You shouldn’t. Unless you want to.”
“I’m just scared.”
“That’s okay. You should be scared.”
“I’m scared of, just, how much there is. You know? It’s so much, Jonah.”
“Don’t come if you don’t want to.”
“I do want to. I want to more than anything. But I don’t know what’s going to happen.”
“Nobody ever knows what’s going to happen.”
“I just don’t want to make a mistake. I feel like I have this weird hope—I’m serious—and I’ve never had it before.”
“You shouldn’t come. You should stay there, Lydia. We should talk again later.”
“I want to come over.”
“You should think some more. Make the right decision.”
“I’m going to come over. I’m going to take a cab up there.”
“Only if you want to.”
“And Jonah. I really—I just really feel deeply about this. About everything.”
“I know you do, Lydia. Just buzz in at the gate when you get here.”
She paid the cabdriver during the last snaking turns along the road, then stepped out at a little past midnight into a weak drizzle. She ran up the slick driveway and saw Jonah standing in all of his clothes on the patio, the city lights around him. After a dozen strides she was in his arms, entangled in the first kisses, ranging from closed-mouth nibbles, like sips of hot water, into long, ravenous sweeps. He held her hips first, then the sides of her face, and she became acutely aware of her height, wilting downward to meet him. She put her hands onto the small of his back, and he grabbed her hair and tugged it in his fist.
She didn’t recognize the smell of his breath, sour and nervous, or the smoky odor of his skin; she began to lose her sense of this man whom she’d known only on the phone. She began to wonder if he was in fact the same person
whose voice she’d memorized over the past nights. Nothing seemed real; she watched herself from a few feet away. Here she was: Lydia Jane, seventeen and on her own, sober, standing in the faint marine mist over a sprawling city, kissing a stranger. She was as lonely as ever, watching like a ghost from the side of the porch as she took his hand, nodded—then followed him into his house and his life.
eight
The day Lydia moved into the cottage, she was disappointed that Jonah didn’t show up to help. Instead he sent several of his goons—Iván, the Salvadoran kid who had frisked her when she’d first come to the house; Tito, still smirking over their encounter in the bathroom; and a lurching, silent Mexican kid covered with Aztec graffiti. The three men seemed to have expected a moving van full of belongings, and they were amused by Lydia’s ragged duffel and worn-out sleeping bag. For the rest of the afternoon, they sat on the wide expanse of beige carpet and snorted lines of speed off a CD case.
“Will Jonah kill me for this?”
“He’ll kill you for something,” said Iván.
He and Tito laughed, but the stout, frowning man only nodded, as if the comment were some new information to absorb.
“I haven’t met you,” Lydia finally said to him.
Iván smiled and said, “Yeah, this is Chupacabra, man. We call him that. Call him Choop.”
“That’s some kind of monster, right?”
“Yeah. This Yucatán Bigfoot motherfucker,” said Iván. “Like half Godzilla, half King Kong. Roams around villages and eats goats and rapes the bitches.”
“I knew he looked familiar,” said Lydia. Iván and Tito laughed, while Choop kept his dark, unyielding eyes on her.
“He’s a hit man,” said Tito.
“He’s a crazy fucking vato. You ain’t never seen a dude this cold.”
They were smiling, ribbing her, and Lydia said, “Really? Who has he killed?”
“Everybody,” said Tito. “He killed everybody. Biggie, Tupac.”
“JFK.”
“Fucking Gandhi.”
“That shit was cold,” said Iván. “Killing Gandhi like that.”
“He’s just crazy. You don’t even want to know, baby. Give her the last line, man. Ladies’ night.”
Tito handed the CD to Lydia. She pulled back a drape of hair, snorted it up through a rolled-up bill, and rubbed her nostril. Her eyes watering, she glanced up at their three eager faces, and said, “You know I’m not fucking you guys for this.”
There was a long silence, until Iván clapped his hands down onto his legs and said, “Damn. Now you tell us.” Even Choop cracked a smile.
The three men drove off shortly after dusk, facetiously congratulating her on her new home, and leaving Lydia to wander among the empty rooms. She had expected to enjoy her newfound independence. She intended to learn something from the solitude and from each new chore, whether putting up a shower curtain or boiling water in her tin camping pot for the stove’s first cup of tea. Despite having no detergent, she used the washer and drier with a feeling of sudden maturity, more in command of her life with each folded shirt; she envisioned herself repairing fau-
cets, tending a garden, whipping up pasta salads, and carrying on sparkling conversations at dinner parties. She would grow more patient and philosophical. These empty rooms would be the stage for an overnight success story: a transient girl blooming into a sophisticated woman.
Instead, the first two nights felt like a dare in a haunted mansion. She thought that every spot on earth, whether a thousand miles away or just a few blocks, must have had its own particular sound: Here it was a fugue of tireless dogs, sirens and shrieking fan belts on a nearby boulevard, rattling wind chimes, rumbling car stereos, and the arrhythmic clanking of tires over a loose manhole cover. Mourning doves cooed at midnight, maybe confused by the ambient light. In her sleeping bag on a mildewed carpet, she lay awake and watched headlights pass through the rooms, projecting window shapes in floating paths across the walls. She spent hours giving herself a deranged pep talk as she wandered the dark rooms with a blanket draped over her: “Don’t worry, don’t worry. Just a Thursday night, any night. Okay, Carson—let’s get it together. Relax.” But every time she was on the verge of sleep, she would wonder again about the secret buried somewhere in the house.
The next morning, Lydia called Chloe and asked her to stay over for a night or two. She needed distractions: TV, music, or late-night gossip. Instead Chloe came in her mother’s car and with her father’s credit card, and drove Lydia around Melrose to pick up modernist furniture and art prints. They bought Lydia a cell phone and a thousand prepaid minutes. She told Chloe that she was house-sitting for an international lawyer, and she embellished him further into a dashing adventurer who worked on human rights cases, liberating imprisoned Malaysian textile workers and enslaved Ukrainian prostitutes. Lydia was possibly in love with him.
“God,” said Chloe. “Where did you meet this guy?”
“Some chat room.”
On her fourth night in the house, Danielle arrived with three guys from Sa-Mo and a Persian ecstasy dealer from Beverly High. After Danielle and Lydia cried through mutual apologies, they joined the boys taking hits from a beer bong in her empty bedroom. Danielle had brought over the clarinet Lydia had left in her closet, and Lydia stood in the middle of the smoky room, stoned and laughing over the mouthpiece, playing staggered bouts of classical music. Chloe boasted that she was awesome on that thing; Danielle called it the aftermath of a hopelessly nerdy childhood; and one of the boys said that she was “getting him hard.”
Lydia was halfway through a rendition of Bolero, broken up by sweeps of her own giggling, when the smoke alarm went off. Because she still had no chairs, Lydia had to ride piggyback on a man’s shoulders to bust it off the ceiling, and then everyone stomped on it for good measure. At this, Lydia announced that if the police or fire department ever came to this house, they would all be killed, because the landlord was in the Mafia.
“I thought he was some kind of magic hippie lawyer,” said Chloe, her eyes shrunken and glazed.
“Yeah,” said Lydia. “And he represents like drug lords and shit. So everybody be incredibly fucking mellow or this clarinet goes up your bung-hole.” She broke into a fit of uncontrollable laughter, bending at the waist, while the others called her a burnout.
Over the next several days, her friends took up the project of decorating the little cottage as if it were a full-sized dollhouse. Two girls brought kitchen utensils; Chloe seemed obsessed with hanging spider plants wherever she could. Danielle brought beanbag chairs, and her boyfriend (no longer in his Rugby shirt) carted over a picnic table in his father’s SUV, along with a PlayStation 2, which he rigged to an old TV and played at deafening volume.
The population of the house grew each night. One morning, at the end of the first week, Lydia rose from a mattress full of half-naked and sprawled kids, fighting her way out from a tangle of arms and legs, to tiptoe across a floor littered with twisted bodies and drooling faces. Like crossing a river on slick rocks, she navigated the open spaces between hands and knees and backpacks, until she reached the bathroom, to find a sallow, fat kid going through her medicine cabinet. He wore a sweatshirt hood over his shaved head, and he looked to her like a large, doughy child. His breathing was strained, his skin was damp and clammy, and he had flushed red streaks on his cheeks; Lydia thought that he must have been searching for asthma medication. He had thrown all of her perfume and makeup into the sink. She asked, “Who are you all of a sudden?”
“I got fucking, like, acid reflux or some shit.”
“You know, it’s ridiculous the way you people use this house,” said Lydia. “Don’t throw all my shit out in the sink, okay. Please.”
The kid drooped his shoulders and sighed, then began listlessly restocking the shelves.
About fifteen minutes later, Lydia saw a van pull into the driveway.
An electrician approached along the short flagstone walkway, wearing a uniform
jumpsuit and carrying a toolbox. He seemed like a possible front, maybe carrying a delivery. Lydia panicked. The man was short and sturdy, with a broad and handsome Latino face and a smile with closed lips, and, when she greeted him, he was already nodding as if in the midst of a conversation. “You’re the tenant?”
“Hi, hi. Listen. I have some people over. Just a gathering, you know. Very informal.”
“The landlord wants me to check an outlet.”
“Okay. Don’t worry about the mess, okay. Most of it’s my family. I have a humongous family.”
He entered the musty front room and began nonchalantly treading around sleeping arms and bodies, disappearing into the back of the house. Lydia combed around the room, staring at the unfamiliar faces, searching for Chloe, until she realized that she had gone home. She called her, crouching down into an empty corner, and said, “I’m so fucking screwed. I need you to help me. These people have to stop coming over here, I swear to God. There’s a guy in my bathroom now that I’ve never even seen before.”
When she hung up, she began rousting the kids, one by one, by saying that the owner was coming back. The electrician never reappeared, and by the time she had forced most of the crowd outside, still climbing into their shirts and jeans, she noticed the truck was gone. Lydia worried aloud that she’d have to mow this lawn and trim these hedges or she was in deep shit—and someone in the crowd commented that she probably wasn’t ready for home ownership. There were so many stragglers that it took until after one o’clock to get everyone out of the house, and the floor looked like the aftermath of a concert.