Turning on the Tide

by Jenna Rae

  She spent another forty-five minutes dribbling along the highway with thousands of commuters before she started recognizing anything. She laughed when she saw the sign for Rancho Cordova.

  “I need to stop for the night,” she told her skeptical-looking eyes in the rearview mirror. “And I know how to find it and how to find the freeway in the morning. Plus it’s very affordable. And I know where the ice machine is.”

  Mrs. Sutton huffed in Lola’s ear, but it was Orrin whose voice slithered inside her head.

  “It’s just what you deserve,” he hissed.

  His voice was cold and hard and Lola shivered. She nearly stayed on the freeway, but Mrs. Sutton’s disapproving voice pushed her to take the exit.

  “Really, my dear, this is hardly an appropriate choice. I forbid it.”

  “You should know by now, ma’am,” Lola drawled, in unconscious imitation of Del, “I don’t much like being told what to do.”

  There was a new desk clerk staring glassy-eyed at the same old battered television and struggling one-handed with the same old worn-out cash register behind the same old scarred lobby counter. He directed Lola to a ground-floor room, and Lola resisted the urge to request her old room, the one she’d lived in, once upon a time, the one where she’d found out that Orrin was dead, that Tami Holden was dead. The one where she’d thought Orrin was playing a trick on her and was going to show up at any moment and take her by the hair and drag her into the car and make her go back to his house and never let her outside again. It was too easy to imagine that she wasn’t Lola Bannon but Lolly Beckett and that the past several months had been a dream.

  Lola closed her eyes, hoping to block out the thought, but that only made it worse. The smell of the new room, so like the other, assaulted her and made it hard to remember where she was.

  “It wasn’t a dream. I’m not her anymore. I won’t ever be her again. It’s over.” She shook her head and felt how light it was.

  “No hair.” She reached up and felt her head. “Short hair. Lola Bannon has short hair.” She opened her eyes and saw her purse, the pretty new purse she bought with Lin when Del was hurt. “None of it was a dream. It was real and I’m real.” She touched her purse and felt how soft it was, and she was all right again.

  “Back in the here and now,” she whispered.

  She remembered how her face had felt big back then, swollen and sore. It had been hard to breathe and she’d had a hard time seeing. She’d looked in the mirror and not recognized herself.

  She walked now as if in a trance to the smudged, speckled mirror in this other room in the same motel, wondering why she’d chosen to stay in this place of all the hotels and motels—dozens lined Highway 50—she could have selected.

  “Maybe I needed to see how much I’ve changed.”

  Her reflection gazed coolly back at her. She didn’t recognize herself in that reflection for a long time. She had clearly defined features and a bold, androgynous haircut. She didn’t look afraid or cowed or invisible.

  “I’m in there,” Lola whispered, and the sound of her own voice made her reflection somehow shift so that it was old Lola and new Lola all in one. She had the short, chic hair, but it was uncombed and lank from sweat. She had the balanced features, but the skin was sallow, the eyes ringed in dark circles, the mouth drawn close and tight. If she puffed up her cheeks a little she would look like her old self again. She held her breath and stared unblinking until her eyes were watery, and there she was, new Lola.

  “Sometimes it was easier to be the old me,” she confessed to her image. “No one expected me to know anything or be anything or do anything. I just had to try not to make Orrin mad. Not that it ever worked, but at least I didn’t have to think so much.”

  She turned to the misshapen bed in the center of the dark, mildew-tinged room. This mattress, like the other, sagged in the center. The edge of it, she remembered, had been the only firm part. It had bruised the backs of her thighs when she’d sat on the side on the bed, unable to sleep. She recalled inching towel-wrapped ice toward her face the day Orrin threw her out. Remembered finding out that Tami—what was her last name? Lola’s gaze darted around the room.

  “Have I really forgotten? Didn’t I just know it? I did, didn’t I? Holden.” That was it, Tami Holden.

  “Were those her sunglasses?”

  “What do you care?” It was Orrin’s voice, the old one, the scary one that meant he was building to an outburst. The one that was a warning to her and a kind of verbal foreplay for him. She’d started, at some point, to think of all of his assaults as sexual in nature. It was all about power, wasn’t it? Exerting power over another person and erasing her. Punching her over and over, throwing her against the wall or the table or whatever, screaming and spitting in her face while slamming her into the ground or the kitchen counter or the wall—Orrin been aroused by the violence. How had he learned to associate violence with sexual arousal? Lola hadn’t really wondered about that in a long time, but early in the marriage she’d spent endless hours trying to decode the man she’d married, figure out how he’d become a monster. Her thinking had gotten her nowhere, and eventually she’d stopped trying to figure out how he got that way and started focusing on how to survive him. Paying close attention to Orrin was Survival 101, a thing she’d learned from the foster homes, and the first law of the world she lived in was to monitor the dangerous person closely. Look for cues in facial expression, body language, tone of voice, everything. Had she ever stopped doing that? Orrin’s face froze at some point, probably because of the Botox injections he thought she didn’t know about, but his warning voice was a thing he couldn’t hide. It had held a kind of power over her after a while, had acted as a sort of paralytic on her thinking, and it had, she’d come to believe, held a note of glee in it.

  “You liked getting mad,” she whispered. “You wanted to get mad.”

  Had he ever had sex with her without getting mad first? Without scaring and bullying and hitting her? She tried to remember.

  “It’s all such a blur,” she said, sitting on the edge of the bed. It cut into her thighs, just like the old bed in the other room.

  “It’s right there, upstairs and over that way.” She pointed.

  Why am I here? She tried to remember but couldn’t. All she could remember was that Tami Holden was dead, dead, dead.

  “And it’s all my fault.” Lola shook her head. “Enough of this! I can’t save Del if I just sit here like a lump.”

  “You couldn’t save yourself. What makes you think you can save Del?” The voice was low and indistinct.

  “I don’t even know if she needs saving.”

  “She probably doesn’t. You just don’t like it that she picked Janet over you even though you knew she was too good for you.”

  Lola nodded. “I did know she was too good for me. It was just a matter of time before she figured it out.”

  “Janet is young, hot, sexy—and smarter than you.”

  Lola nodded again.

  “Still,” the voice—Lola realized with vague unease that she wasn’t sure whose voice it was—continued, “she seems like a bitch.”

  “I don’t know her very well.”

  “She lied.”

  “Yes.”

  “She hurt the cop.”

  “Yes.” Lola gathered herself. “Who am I talking to? Who are you?”

  There was a laugh. “Haven’t you figured it out, dummy?”

  Lola shook her head. “I thought at first you were Mrs. Sutton. Maybe Olivia. But now I’m not sure. This is crazy.”

  “No crazier than driving past a dozen nice hotels to stay in this dump.”

  Lola flushed. “I knew the way here. And there was traffic. So I stopped at a place I’m familiar with, that’s all.”

  The voice offered no comment.

  “Well,” Lola conceded. “I guess there were a few nicer places I passed on the way. It just never occurred to me to stay at one of them. I don’t know why.”

&n
bsp; She looked around the room. It was dirty, even by third-rate motel standards. There was a wad of used tissue under the nightstand and a piece of candy wrapper near the door. The carpet had been vacuumed, albeit carelessly, and the bedding changed, and there was a faintly chemical smell that suggested someone had cleaned the sink and toilet. But Lola had seen how many rooms the housekeepers in this place were expected to clean in a very short time, and there was no way they were actually getting anything clean. They were just making the rooms look clean enough to placate the customers.

  Lola looked out the window at a trio of scantily clad young girls loitering by the lobby. Prostitutes? Maybe. There had been a steady parade of men in and out of certain rooms last year. From late morning to early afternoon, usually, then from about four to midnight. Lola had barely noticed them, at first, except for noting with disgust the way they spoke to the girls. They treated the young prostitutes with disdain and a kind of self-righteous disgust even as they haggled for a better price for exploiting the teens. It had made Lola sick, back when she’d lived here, and she’d gotten in the habit of either keeping the curtains closed or turning her back to the view.

  “Sartre says we have to decide whether to live or to kill ourselves and that once we decide we have to act.”

  “Hmm.” The voice sounded almost disinterested.

  “But I don’t think it’s that simple. I think we have to decide every day, several times a day, not to kill ourselves.”

  “Yeah, yeah.” Bored, now.

  “With everything we have to survive, everything we carry around all the time, it’s hard.” Lola’s voice broke. “It’s very hard, sometimes.”

  “Waaaaah! Life is hard! It’s so hard to be alive. Poor Lola, poor baby Lola, has to deal with fucking being alive! Poor, poor you!”

  Lola hugged herself. “You’re so mean! Why are you being so mean?”

  “Oh, come on! Haven’t you figured it out? Are you really that stupid?”

  At that, Lola closed her eyes. She took a deep, shuddering breath before easing them open. “Tami? Is that who you are?”

  There was a long silence.

  “I’m sorry,” Lola whispered. “I’m so sorry. It’s all my fault you died. You were so young, and I’m so sorry.”

  “You’re sorry?”

  Lola held her breath.

  “Is that supposed to make me feel better? Is that supposed to make up for killing me? Huh?”

  “No, I can’t make that up, I know that. All I can do is say ‘I’m sorry.’”

  “You murdered me, you coward. And you have the balls to sit there and whine about how hard it is to be alive?”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Oh, well, fine, then, Killer.”

  Lola shook her head. “Please don’t call me that, Tami.”

  “Why not, Killer, does it hit a little too close to home? Huh?”

  “Please.”

  “You killed me. You murdered me. I hate you. I will never forgive you because you KILLED me!”

  “I didn’t kill you.”

  “What? What did you say?”

  “I didn’t kill you.” Lola stood and shook her head again. “I was a coward and I didn’t stop Orrin from hurting me, but I didn’t even know about you. I had no way of knowing he wanted to run off with you. I didn’t know anything about you or about the money, if he really was embezzling it. I wasn’t responsible for what he did. I didn’t kill you. I’m sorry you’re dead, and I wish I could make it never to have happened but I can’t. I did not kill you.”

  She looked around and waited for the voice to come back, for Tami Holden to argue that it was all Lola’s fault. But she didn’t. Lola wiped her streaming eyes and blew her nose and looked around one more time.

  “I made a lot of mistakes.” She picked up her purse, brushing it off as though to clean the memory of this dirty place from its supple surface. “But I didn’t kill Tami Holden, and I don’t have to spend the rest of my life drowning in guilt over her death. I didn’t even know I was doing that, but I was and it’s time to stop. Enough.”

  She was in her car ten minutes later and stopping at the same Starbucks where she got her first coffee that strange, terrible day after Orrin threw her out. It was gratifying to be just another customer, not the pathetic ragamuffin with the battered face she’d once been. She sat at a table, pulling out the laptop and completing her last-minute preparations. What were the people around her doing? Going over their tactical plans? She doubted it. Writing poetry, finishing marketing reports, writing their first or tenth or fiftieth novels or short stories or memoirs. No one looking at Lola would peg her activities now. What would they see, looking at her? Not Orrin’s wife, that was for sure. Not a woman on the way to rescuing her beloved. She was wearing all black, it was true, and she was focused and serious. But she could have been planning a birthday party or composing an email to a financial advisor for all anyone knew.

  Lola knew she was a different person from the punching bag who’d staggered in here back then and different from the passive recluse she’d allowed herself to become after that. If she survived the night, would she be different again? Or was she kidding herself? Would she always be, underneath, the pathetic excuse for a human being she’d allowed herself to become? As she headed out to the car with her untouched coffee and laptop bag, she felt the cool night air on her scalp. No more shroud of hair to hide behind. No more shroud of hair to hide the world from Lola. She’d been wallowing all that time and hadn’t realized it. She’d let her guilt and shame and fear and self-pity build a wall around her, and she was finally ready to kick down that wall. She’d never forget Tami Holden, but she was done hiding behind Tami’s death.

  “I was carrying her around,” Lola told the darkened night as she headed toward Highway 50. “It was making me sick inside, carrying her around like that. It infected me and my relationship with Del and everything. It stained me from the inside out.”

  “Now I’m ready,” she announced to the blurry lane line, as she left the last lights of Folsom and headed up to the foothills. “Now I can save Del.”

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  “Wake up.”

  Del resisted the urge to open her eyes. It was time to start thinking clearly and get out of here. She needed to know Janet’s endgame and her mental state.

  “I know you’re awake, Addie.”

  Del’s eyes shot open. Her shock over Janet’s hard tone was even greater than her shock over Janet’s use of Del’s old nickname. Was she being deliberately cruel?

  “I understand, you know.”

  Del eyed Janet, whose appearance would have seemed flawless from ten feet away. Up close, her mask was cracking. Her makeup was streaked with tears, her hair frayed, her fingernails bitten down to almost nothing and blood-tinged. The circles under her eyes were deep and dark, and she’d developed the lax skin of a much-older woman. Dehydration? Possibly. Del knew she herself was dehydrated.

  “You feel powerless. So you’re trying to scope things out. What do I want, how do you get over on me, it’s natural to focus on that stuff.”

  Del tried to look innocent.

  “It’s not gonna work, Del. I don’t begrudge you the attempt, but it’s not going to work.”

  “What do you want?” Del’s voice came out a raspy croak.

  Janet pulled on a loose strand of hair. “There’s a feeling you get when you surrender to the inevitable, my darling.”

  “What do you want?” Del tried to let her voice harden a bit, but it was again only a croak. Her throat hurt. She really was very thirsty, but there was some stubborn part of her that refused to beg for water. As she watched Janet play with her hair and gaze at her with eerie calm, though, her thirst began to overtake her stubbornness.

  “We call it surrender, we think that’s a show of weakness, but it’s really oddly proactive. It’s taking control by surrendering control.”

  Del regarded Janet blankly.

  “I know it’s confusing. But
it’s what has to happen or this’ll never work.” Janet made it sound so reasonable, as if she were talking about a recipe or car repair.

  “What’ll never work?”

  Janet leaned over to kiss Del’s forehead. “I have to save you, my darling. That way we can have a healthy relationship.”

  “What?” Del started to sputter but regained her composure. “What do you mean, you have to ‘save’ me?”

  A thrill of fear ran through her at her own words. What the hell did Janet have in mind? Del flashed to a scene familiar to every movie-watching child of the late century—bad guy has good guy tied to a table or a railroad track or a board over a pool. There’s some imminent threat—table saw or oncoming train or man-eating shark—heading ever closer to the trapped hero. The bad guy calmly explains his rationale for his mad schemes while the good guy seems doomed and helpless. Somehow, though, the hero finds a way out of the trap and saves the day.

  I’m not gonna be able to save the day.

  Del tried to swallow but couldn’t. Her throat was thick and clogged with sobs. I’m so thirsty, she tried to say, not caring anymore about what a hero would do or how craven she sounded, but no sound came out. Not even a croak.

  I can’t even ask for water. How can I save the day?

  “I can only save you if you let me.”

  Del turned her face to the wall. Her throat was on fire, and she should be trying to work Janet if only to get water, but she couldn’t seem to control her emotions. It had been hours, maybe a full day, since Janet had given her a final kiss on the forehead and then left without a word. Now she was back, her face painted with sympathy and kindness and fatigue.

  “Darling, please look at me. Sweetie?” Janet’s voice was soft, warm, sweet. Janet was, Del figured, most dangerous when she was trying to be sweet.

  If I make things too hard for her she might just leave me here again, this time for good.