Claire DeWitt and the Bohemian Highway

by Sara Gran

  I felt like something was ending.

  But it wasn’t over yet.

  57

  THE TRIAL WOULDN’T start for a long time. The case was getting a lot of press and each side was building their argument. Rob confessed to the police as easily as he had to me. The police took him to Santa Cruz and they got the Wandre at his friend’s house.

  Not one person called me to say, Good job, Claire. Nice work, Claire. You rock, Claire. Gee, Claire, how’d you solve that one?

  “If one is looking for a life of kindness,” Silette wrote to Jay Gleason, “look elsewhere.”

  They arrested Lydia in the house on Bohemian Highway. Someone tipped off the press and there were pictures on the front page of the San Francisco Chronicle and the Oakland Trib and the Santa Rosa Press-Democrat and even the LA Times. In the New York Times Lydia made the front page of the National section.

  That night I watched it on CNN. Someone filmed her being brought out of the house in handcuffs.

  If I’d ever seen a more beautiful woman I couldn’t remember it. She was the most glamorous thing in the world. She’d been heading out to dinner with Carolyn. She wore a black dress from the forties and a white silk flower in her black hair. On her finger she still wore her gold wedding ring.

  I figured that still would be the picture they’d use when they put her in those big picture books—Women Who Kill! and The Encyclopedia of Neglected Murderesses.

  I didn’t feel any better. Nothing was over. Nothing had begun.

  One hundred and fifteen days after Paul died, I lay on the floor listening to one of Paul’s records. I felt drained of everything good. I was out of cocaine. I’d used up all the Percocet days ago, and the purloined Valium had barely lasted a day.

  Everything hurt. Every nerve in my body had a grievance.

  Claude came over. He’d called a bunch of times and I hadn’t answered, so he broke into my apartment. He had keys and he could come over anytime he wanted, but it felt like a break-in. He looked at me with what he pretended was concern. I knew it was disgust.

  “Are you ever getting off the floor?” Claude asked, voice heavy with fake concern and pretend affection, as transparent as glass.

  I tried sitting up and I felt the room spin. I knew the rest of the world was just as exhausted and spent as I was. I lay back down.

  “Get me my purse,” I said.

  Claude got my purse. I looked through it and it was devoid of cash.

  “Go to the safe,” I said.

  “You don’t have a safe.”

  “Then get me the cookie jar,” I said. On my counter was a big cookie jar shaped like a cookie with a sticky note on it that said MONEY. I figured if someone broke in I didn’t want them messing everything up. I was almost sure I did have a safe but Claude didn’t know about it.

  Claude brought me the cookie jar. Inside was a few hundred bucks. I took out a handful of cash and handed it to Claude.

  “Go get me some coke,” I said.

  Claude looked at me like I was crazy.

  “No,” he said.

  I told him Adam’s address, told him where to go and what to ask for and to say it was for me.

  “You’re fucking kidding me,” he said.

  “I don’t kid,” I said. “You know that.”

  “Or what?” he said. Claude had never spoken to me like that before. I was proud of him.

  “Or you’re fired,” I said.

  I looked at Claude and he looked like he was underwater. The whole room did. It was unbearable. I closed my eyes. That was not especially more bearable.

  “You’re fired,” I said. “And then I shoot myself and it’s your fault. So go get me my drugs.”

  He would hate me eventually. Might as well start now.

  The record repeated itself. Paul howled. After Lydia was arrested no one bothered to change her locks and I’d gone to the house and taken what I wanted, which was this record and the Spot of Mystery cup from Paul’s dresser. On the way home I’d broken the cup.

  Claude was gone. While he was gone I lay on the floor with my eyes closed and thought about whether any of this was real. I was nearly certain I had let the real parts slip by and this was some kind of substitute.

  “Don’t ever make me do that again,” Claude said. Apparently he was back. He tossed the bundle at me, little envelopes of “A Very Special Blue Jay” and “When Elephants Roam.” I opened one of the envelopes and dumped it onto a hardcover book (A Brief History of Indonesian Criminology). From my purse I found a dollar bill, rolled it into a straw, and snorted up the cocaine. I felt my body come halfway back to life, my brain approach something like a waking state.

  I sat up. Claude stared at me.

  “You look like a ghost,” he said. “I’m calling someone. I can’t handle this. I don’t know what to do.”

  “You call whoever you want,” I said, or thought I said. “I’m pretty good like this.”

  I heard Claude on the phone and I tried to ignore him until I couldn’t. He took the phone into the bathroom for privacy, to talk about me without my prying ears spoiling it. When he was in the bathroom I left.

  Once I got downstairs I remembered I didn’t know where I’d left my car. The garage; yes; I had a garage I used on Stockton. I went to the garage and the man didn’t want to give me my car.

  “You sure you okay to drive, Miss DeWitt?” the man said. He was young and sweet, Juan or Jose or something like that. Fucking Mexican club kids, showing us all up with their hard work and kindness.

  “It’s Miss DeMitt,” I said, “and get me my fucking car.”

  He shook his head and gave up pretending not to hate me and got my car.

  I got in my car and I called Tabitha and we met at the Shanghai Low. Claude and his evil phone calls hadn’t reached her yet. Sam left his friend Chris in charge of the bar and we went in the back and did a few lines of Tabitha’s coke. She said I didn’t look good.

  “Thanks,” I said.

  “Did you sleep last night?” she asked.

  I hadn’t slept since they’d arrested Lydia, not for more than a few hours at a time. Before I could answer, Sam said, “Do you guys want to go to this after-hours I know out by the beach?”

  We did. It was a Russian bar/club where Sam knew the secret door knock and the name to drop and we were let in. Incredibly bad music played. The older Russians had bleached blond hair and gold chains; the younger ones had tattoos and wore Converse. Sam bought more coke from a Russian guy who was about fifty. He invited us into the back room and I wondered if every place on earth had a back room. Maybe there were back rooms in ancient Greece, back rooms in Papua New Guinea, all connected, one big dusty interconnected labyrinth where those of us who couldn’t face the light of day hid with our cocaine and our self-loathing.

  The back room of the Russian club was slightly cleaner and everything was in Russian. The Russian man cracked open a bottle of tequila and passed it around. He seemed to have endless amounts of cocaine; it was like a magic trick where he pulled rabbit after rabbit out of his pocket long after there shouldn’t have been any rabbits left. The sun came up and even though they had the shades pulled little cracks of sun broke in and it made me angry. What right did it have? Who did it think it was? I could tell Sam felt the same way and after a few more minutes or hours of this outrage he said, “Come on, I know a better place.”

  We got in my car, me and Tabitha and Sam and some guy and some girl, and Sam drove my car in circles for a while, getting lost, and Tabitha gave him directions, so speedy and determined that her words fell on top of each other, rocks tumbling down a hill, and the guy and the girl chewed on coffee stirrers and said nothing. “Do you want some?” the girl finally said. I said no. Thank God for tinted windows, for sunglasses, for my jacket, which I pulled over my face when the fog cleared and the sun got bright. My nerves felt raw, like their protective clothing had been ripped off and thrown away.

  Finally Sam found the better place. It was an apart
ment in the Castro. I didn’t understand if it was an actual place people paid to go or just some guy’s apartment. But we were there. Somehow I ended up at a glass table, always a glass table, with three stripper girls. They were young and wore glittery makeup and the highest heels imaginable. They wanted to talk to me but I’d passed talking hours ago. The girls left and were, one at a time, replaced by three fifty-ish guys from the neighborhood, formerly beautiful men going to seed. Like me they were well past conversation. We kept doing more and more and no one pretended it was fun anymore. No one pretended this was anything like fun.

  About that time I started to feel strange. Tabitha saw me and said, “You don’t look so good. I’m taking you out for some air.”

  When I stood up I fell down. I forgot my name and I didn’t know where I was. Had I ever known? Someone said “Claire.” I thought I knew her but no, maybe not.

  Someone took me to a bed in a room in a secret wing of the apartment and laid me down and everything went black. I felt my nerves shake and people were asking for Claire again, whoever that was.

  “She’s having a seizure,” I heard someone say. “Call an ambulance, she’s—”

  “Uh-uh, no ambulances. You get that crazy bitch out of here, now. I swear to God if you call an ambulance I’ll kill—”

  Someone helped me up. Tabitha took me outside. The sun had gone back down. It was almost night again. What I heard from her later was that my eyes had started to roll back in my head and I opened my mouth and clenched my throat as if to make a sound and didn’t. I started to fall and Tabitha sat me down and leaned me against a wall. She stayed with me until the seizure passed and then ran into a deli and got an orange juice and poured it down my throat. I swallowed it and came back to.

  “Wait here,” Tabitha said. “Just wait one second, baby, I’m gonna go get you help. Okay? Don’t move, okay?”

  I sat on Castro Street. No one noticed me. I remembered my name again. I drank some more orange juice and the sugar brought me back to earth.

  I stood up. I was standing okay. I looked around. I didn’t see Tabitha.

  I walked away and found my car.

  The brake and the gas were not particularly well-defined, but I got the car started and going. The city was cool and dark. I spun through the streets. The sugar high faded off and I was back to the high of drugs and not eating or sleeping for days, weeks, months. For 115 days.

  I was on the highway. Almost no one else was on the road. The sky was dark violet and unforgiving. To my left the bay glittered, looking deep and endless. I knew it was neither. I rolled down my window and the outside world roared to life. I rolled it back up. One hand on the wheel, I rummaged through my bag for my last envelope from Adam. I found it—“The Last Galapagos Chameleon”—and did another big bump on each side. Blood ran down my face.

  I felt a cold rush and then an ugly feeling in the back of my head and smelled smoke. I heard a long honk and a series of metallic crunches. Flashes of color and then everything went dark. I tried to open my eyes but I couldn’t find them. Nothing was moving or seemed to want to move.

  It was dark. It was as dark as it had ever been.

  “Shit, man. Shit shit shit. Call nine-one-one.”

  “I got warrants and no license. I ain’t callin’ nine-one-one.”

  “We can’t just leave her.”

  “Fuck, look at her, hold her tongue or somethin’.”

  “Oh shit. She hurt bad. We got to call—”

  “Help me pick her up. I know a place.”

  “She need a hospital.”

  I had another small seizure. My nerves shook as the electrical storm passed through my brain.

  I felt arms on me and I realized I was on the ground. I remembered I’d been in a car.

  “Put her in the back. Careful—”

  I felt arms, cool air on my back.

  “—I know a place.”

  A car. Long lights pulling on the walls and red monsters ahead. Hands on me again and the smell of redwoods.

  “They gonna take care of her?”

  “Yeah, they gonna let her stay. They ain’t kick no one out.” Someone laughed. “Not even me.”

  “She gonna be okay?”

  “We all gonna be okay someday,” the voice said. “But I don’t know about today.”

  58

  WHICH WAS HOW JENNY came to open the gates of the Dorje Temple in the morning and find me curled up in a semi-fetal ball under a redwood tree with my jacket pulled over my head, wet and shivering, blood on my face and in my hair, glass cuts from the accident up and down my left arm, somewhere in between unconsciousness and death.

  They took me in and brought me to bed in a cot next to the lama’s room. The lama called a doctor he knew who came over and said I was basically fine, just wasted and bruised and malnourished and dying. But easily curable.

  “Just keep her off drugs and feed her,” the doctor said. The lama told me later he said it like it was the easiest thing in the world. Like I hadn’t been trying to do that all my life.

  I slept in the cot for a few days. When I woke up everything ached from the accident. I felt exhausted. I didn’t really want to be saved again. The lama was sitting next to my bed with a pot of green tea with herbs mixed in.

  I drank some tea. He asked if I could eat a little something and I said no. I stared at the wall.

  “We don’t go through these trials just for the hell of it, you know,” the lama said. “We go through them for wisdom. For purification. So we don’t make the same mistakes next time.”

  I didn’t want a next time. I didn’t want to learn any more fucking lessons. I wanted to be with Tracy again. With Constance. With Paul. With people who loved me. I wanted to start over with them, to be someone else. Let someone else figure out who bludg-eoned the professor in the library with a candlestick. I didn’t give a shit. I wanted out.

  I curled up in a ball and pulled the blankets over my head.

  “Go fuck yourself,” I said.

  “You know, I’ve seen you try so hard to end it,” the lama said. “So many times. And I feel like it’s kind of bullshit.”

  “Thanks,” I said. “And you can take your fucking pearls of wisdom and shove them—”

  “No,” he said. “Honestly, Claire. I’ve never seen anything like it. You know there are people who would give anything to be you.”

  It was the stupidest thing I’d ever heard. If anyone wanted to be me they could have it.

  “I mean, you so clearly have something to do,” he said. “Most people, they try to kill themselves and, you know, it just happens. Most people, they kind of float through life with no direction and no signs and never even know why they’re here. I don’t think you really get that. You, you’re fucking indestructible. Look at you. You’re covered in scars, you’ve ruined yourself with drugs, and you’ve put yourself in more danger than anyone I’ve ever known. Or heard of. Did it ever even cross your mind”—he sounded pissed off at me now—“that things happen for a reason? That you’re here because people need you?”

  “Your fucking platitudes—”

  “Without Constance,” he went on, ignoring me, “we’d both be dead by now. No question. And somewhere there’s someone at least who wouldn’t have made it without you. I know it. I mean, you’re not giving me much evidence here of being a useful person, but I trust her. Apparently you’re being kept around for something. I mean, it could have been you. When she was killed, when your friend was killed, that guy—I mean it should have been you, a thousand times over, and it never is. I wish I were that fucking important. I wish the world gave that much of a shit about me. I really do.”

  I didn’t answer. He made a pissed-off noise at my awfulness and left, shutting the door sharply behind him.

  The next morning I started eating again. The day after that I got out of bed and walked around the grounds a little. The next afternoon I helped some of the kids with a gazebo they were building.

  After a few days
I ran into Jenny in the kitchen. She was making tea and she ignored me.

  “Hey,” I said. “Thanks. For letting me stay. I know—I mean, I’m sure you didn’t want . . .”

  She looked at me.

  “You fall down,” she said. “We all fall down. You going to get back up?”

  “I think so,” I said after a minute.

  “I think so too,” she said. “I think some people, we always get back up. Always.”

  That night the lama came into my room, where I was reading a Donald Goines novel for the second time. The monastery was a nice place but their library sucked. I made a note to buy them some books when I got back to City Lights.

  “So,” the lama said. “You haven’t heard from Andray, have you?”

  “No,” I said. Of course, I wouldn’t know if I had—I’d lost my phone the night of the crash, and also hadn’t checked my email since then.

  The lama looked worried. I’d never seen him look worried before. He sat down on my bed. I felt like we were kids at summer camp, sharing secrets. I’d never been to camp but it looked like this on TV.

  “Trey called me,” he said. “First a few weeks ago and then again last night. Andray took off with some girl he met in Kansas City. They were supposed to meet up in Las Vegas but Andray didn’t show. Hasn’t answered his phone, hasn’t called Terrell either.”

  I helped the kids finish the gazebo, and helped them start a new yurt. After ten days the lama drove me into town, where I rented a car and drove back to my place in the city. There was a stack of mail in the slot. I had a few hundred emails. A lot of client inquiries. A few looked promising. A woman whose son was being accused of a murder she knew he didn’t commit. A man who wanted to find some missing paintings, stolen from his family in 1942. Sounded kind of fun. But everything still felt heavy and dull, dirty and old.

  Nothing from Andray.