I Met Someone

by Bruce Wagner

  Dusty hit the road again, which seemed to be the theme of the hour—intimate, introspective journeys, far different in flavor from those of the carefree, location-jumping itinerant life of her profession. She thought about the fish they released into the river . . . and let the freeway carry her like those ineluctable waters. Softly, she began to cry—

  And then suddenly, like a dream, she’d arrived:

  Home.

  The house on Mimosa Lane . . . listed on the National Register of Hysteric Nightmares—vortex of her wounding, and sacred burial ground too. (Thanks, Snoop!) Sitting in the car, she got infested by a gooey, revenant stillness.

  Salutations of the dead—

  As she stared out the window, the image-repertoire encroached: her girlhood self on a ten-speed . . . a smiling, lawn-watering daddy—her Arnold, so handsome, in the silly orange bermudas that she loved . . . Miranda, on the Fourth of July . . . the cat that got killed by a pit bull . . . nursing her little one (her little one! Aurora) in the bedroom upstairs. The house had been redone—spray-stuccoed and generally face-lifted—so she felt less of a charge. Shifting focus to Ida’s ramshackle one-story, she watched herself grow numb. Dusty knew what was happening: the organism was protecting itself. Systems were shutting down. Yet as the blankness receded, she felt a certain exultation, because suddenly she saw herself surviving. (She loved declaiming “I’m a survivor!” during sessions with Ginevra. Hadn’t she earned that right?) She could absolutely visualize herself—one day soon, maybe sooner than she imagined—moving on. Free as fuck. She sensed that coming-to-wisdom place, a complete understanding that she was merely an instrument played by the Universe, a servant of God’s will, a magnificently insignificant player—an actor!—in the great mystery. One needn’t be a guru to have such a revelation; on a good day, albeit a very good one, anybody could see that life was but a dream.

  The front-seat epiphany left her open to embracing the Narrative, only this time that of her own—not mother’s, daughter’s, wife’s, not anyone’s but hers. She would hold in her hands (and heart) the gloriously random, still meaningful, still unique Saga of Dusty Wilding. That’s what this ghostly place was telling her: it was time to live her story, without encumbrance. She needed only be awake enough, aware enough, to watch it unfold this moment (impossible to have any other), as she sat in this car on this street, the street upon she once lived, and once died too—where Janine (her birth name) and Aurora Whitmore, or at least her idea of them, died, together.

  How could any of that be a problem? To jump from one cosmic narrative to another? How a problem, to be fully conscious? To acquiesce to what was, what is? To have the veil lifted and finally see? How a problem, to know nothing could be altered, nor would one wish it to be?

  Ida Pinkert would say, “Yes, it’s true. Your baby was murdered,” and I’ll be okay with that.

  I’ll be okay.

  Because I’m a survivor.

  That’s what I do.

  —

  After a few minutes on the porch, she thought she heard a small voice. Bending to listen, it seemed to be saying, “Come in! Come in!” She turned the knob and pushed through.

  There stood Ida, giddily encaged in a walker.

  She took hold of Dusty’s wrists. “You look wonderful. Oh, I had no idea you’d get my note and I am so pleased. There were so many times I was going to call you over the years, Janine, you must forgive!” Her face scowled with worry. “Oh, I called you Janine. Do you mind? You don’t mind if I call you Janine?”

  She led them to the kitchen, where they sat at a table strewn with bills and reminder notes. It was obvious Miss Pinkert spent her waking hours there. A relic of a television was on, sound muted.

  “I went to see all of your movies until it became just too hard to get around. A girl comes once a week; she drove me to the library. I asked Griselda—that’s her name, she’s from Salvador—I asked if she knew how to send something on the computer but apparently she did not! She doesn’t speak English very well, though I think she speaks it better than she says. She certainly seems to understand it well, very well. I think she’s lazy . . . I thought she would know how to do the computer. I thought that if you have one of those Apple phones—which she does, even her little girl has one, how they can afford it I don’t know—I thought if you have one of those Apple phones and you’re young, well, relatively, then you would know how to send a message on the computer. But you see she didn’t. So a young man helped me. Oh, he was wonderful.

  “The last time I visited your mother was, good Lord, I want to say five years ago. Could it be so long ago? At that lovely, lovely place. That was a lovely place you found, but so far away! The gals at church used to take me, they were wonderful, I paid their gas, well, offered to, but they wouldn’t take my money. Not at first! And I don’t know why I visited your mother because once I got there, well, sometimes she just wouldn’t say a word. She could be in a mood, you know—oh, she was famous for her moods! But I suppose I thought it was the right thing, she was all alone, I don’t think many people talked to her, it was always difficult to be her friend, for Reina to be a friend. If you can’t be a friend, then you won’t have too many. That’s the general rule. I don’t even think the staff talked to her! Not that much, anyway. She didn’t have an easy time of it there. I don’t think she had an easy time of it anywhere. So I suppose I was trying to ‘lighten her load.’ We’d known each other so long! Good Lord, too long. And that is what—I believe that is what a friend is for. You can’t always have reciprocation.

  “Well, it got harder to get the ladies to take me but eventually they did because I insisted on giving them money and they just had to take it. I paid their gas, plus twenty dollars, which eventually became forty dollars, gas plus forty dollars, but that was my limit. I am on a fixed income! Then, well, I suppose it just became too much because people have their own lives, they have children and husbands and all kinds of things. And they could only drive me on weekends—they worked—and I suppose they wanted the weekends to themselves. Who could blame them? No one wants to cart an old lady up to Santa Barbara for twenty dollars. Or forty dollars. Because that was what I eventually gave them. Maybe they wouldn’t do it for a hundred dollars! And I wanted to reach you, Janine—oh, for years!—but I just didn’t know how. Reina wouldn’t talk about you. When I asked if she’d seen you, she would not say a word. And I daren’t ask for your telephone because she would have been suspicious. She was a little paranoid, you know. So one day I got very bold and did a terribly sneaky thing. I told one of the nurses—they knew I was ‘the neighbor,’ and a harmless old lady, which I was and still am!—they could plainly see I knew the lay of the land—that you and your mom weren’t ‘close.’ So one day I took one of the nicer ones aside and told a little white lie. I’m calling it that but maybe it was a big white lie! I said that you and I spoke every day but I’d had a terrible flood—there were those awful, heavy rains at the time—and the telephone people were at my home trying to fix everything and all of my papers with all of my phone numbers were just soaked and I was worried you would might be trying to reach me and that you wouldn’t be able to . . . would they please give me Janine’s—Dusty’s—number again? ‘Again’ I said! Pretending that I already had it, or had it once, which of course I didn’t. Oh, that was terrible of me. I didn’t even think to ask for your computer name. Lord, I felt like a criminal! Just shaking like a leaf. Well, I don’t know if they believed me! But they were so kind to give me your number, and even a way to reach you on your computer, which I could not decipher. I called a few times but there was never an answer. And it just kept ringing so I couldn’t leave a message . . . I thought they must have given a wrong one, just to get rid of me!”

  “Ida,” she said, calmly touching the old woman’s hand. “Did she kill her?”

  “Did she—”

  “Ida . . . I know that she killed her. Isn’t that what yo
u wanted to tell me? Isn’t that what was so ‘urgent’?”

  “Oh—no! No! No! Good Lord, no . . .” she said, aghast.

  “You can tell me now—you won’t get in trouble.” She felt grounded and alive. “Because it’s over. Reina is dead and it’s all over. It doesn’t matter anymore, Ida, so don’t be afraid.”

  “But she didn’t! No no no, no one killed that little girl! Oh, mercy! Oh, you poor, poor thing! Mercy, mercy, mercy! And it’s my fault for not calling you—I should have called a long, long time ago! Oh, Lord have mercy on our souls!”

  Dusty caressed the spinster’s bruisy arm, and flashed on paramedics invading the house; Ida’s end of days.

  “Your mother told you that your little girl was adopted—she told me that—but it just wasn’t true! She gave her away! She paid a girl to take her away! I saw the woman and her man-friend steal it. Steal the baby! I watched from my window! Arnold—your father—the dear man—this was years later, just before he died—he used to write me the most beautiful letters—your father told me—oh and it broke his heart!—that Reina paid the gal to take her. He begged her not to do that, Arnold said, ‘Please take the little thing to a hospital! We dasn’t do this, please!’—because he knew it wasn’t right—but she—Reina—wouldn’t—well, you know what she was like! And you knew the young gal, you knew her, she sat for you, and oh Dusty, I just never thought the gal was fit. I thought she was unbalanced and somewhat of a—well, she was a whore. She had different men at the house when she looked after you, many men, you were so little, and Reina turned a blind eye, but I watched from my window. I just don’t think that gal was fit, and I don’t see how she could ever have been fit to be a mother to that—to your little girl . . . I always thought she was a very disturbed young lady and could not understand—I could not understand how Reina let her in that house the way she did, to look after you! And none of it was legal, you see, I would have had no trouble with an adoption, no trouble at all, it would have been the best thing, but this was not legal and that is what has bothered me all these years! And that is why I wrote to you, to tell you, and clear my conscience. Oh Lord have mercy! It was not legal. You see it just wasn’t right, and should have been handled quite differently.

  “One must always obey the law.”

  —

  Ida’s news dismantled her on a number of levels.

  After the shock engendered by Livia’s inference of homicide had subsided, Dusty experienced what she could only describe to her therapist as a feeling of intense relief. The grisly “solution” of her daughter’s murder tied everything up in a silver bow, letting Dusty off the hook. It no longer mattered that she never went looking for her baby—in fact, she was far better off for having done nothing. An added bonus was the shower of fresh blame she could unleash upon her mother’s corpse, a pastime that always rejuvenated. With the polished stone of rage born of the terrible suffering both had caused, she killed two birds: demon mother and martyred child. It was a win-win.

  But now she was robbed of such closure. That familiar, lifelong fetish of self-hatred, only recently banished, rose in her throat like vomit. She excoriated herself for “wishing” her baby dead—her Aurora! Her beloved, whom she’d recently disinterred, rhapsodizing over her corpse with Ronny! Aurora: holy grail of her rapturous quest for motherhood, mother love, completion! She had looked spinster Pinkert right in the eye, so certain that Baby Rory was dead, daring her not to tell her otherwise . . . The hubris! Her revulsion was unbearable. Reina once said it and Reina was right: she, Janine Whitmore, was unfit to be a mother—or anything else.

  In an instant, the burgeoning, self-proclaimed hero of her own story was covered in horror and shame, less than human.

  Again.

  She regressed and became undone.

  Dusty told her wife that she needed to sleep alone for a while. She stopped sharing information with Allegra about the search. The actress was amicably distant. Allegra thought she knew why.

  —

  During this time of withdrawal, Allegra began seeing Larissa. She was playing with fire but felt justified. She strongly suspected Dusty and the stand-in were having an affair—that would explain so much.

  She was on an information-gathering mission, or so she told herself.

  Today, instead of the invisible Miracle Mile IHOP where they’d had a few rendezvouses, they met at Larissa’s house in Mar Vista. Even though they hadn’t fooled around since that time at Soho, Allegra knew it was dangerous. The irony of a covert dalliance with Dusty’s “double” wasn’t lost, amplifying the frisson of guilty arousal; if nothing about it felt right, it felt sexy, and she didn’t want to overthink. (She wasn’t thinking at all.) Apart from the fact-finding aspect, the clandestine get-togethers with her wife’s probable lover were an antidote to Allegra’s jealousy, furor, and confusion. Besides, there could only be consequences—real consequences—if her suspicions were unfounded. Which they weren’t. Because why else would Dusty have lied about seeing Larissa in the weeks following the notorious ménage?

  If she couldn’t confront her wife, her wife’s stand-in would do.

  “Are you having an affair?”

  They were on the couch in the living room of the modest Spanish bungalow, whose furnishings and general vibe had seen better days.

  “With Dusty? No!” protested Larissa, in dinner theater–style outrage. “Allegra, please.”

  “Well, I think that you are,” said the guest, determined to hold ground.

  “We have tea. After yoga. We talk.”

  “What about?”

  “Just . . . stuff. Oh come on, Allegra! I think she’s just lonely.”

  That hit her like a fist in the stomach because they used to talk all the time, about everything. Bunny + Leggy—Best Friends Forever . . .

  “Stuff like what?”

  “I don’t know, just . . . things. We just talk about—I talk about—my son. Or my ex, who almost just died.”

  “What does she talk about?”

  “Her life . . . her mom. Stuff.”

  “And you don’t sleep together?” she said pitifully.

  “Absolutely not.” Larissa subtly gamed it to sound like a lie, even though it wasn’t. “And if we did, I wouldn’t be seeing you.”

  Allegra sighed—out of words.

  “She has seemed a little distracted, though,” said Larissa, gently testing the handle on a new trapdoor. No need to yank it open just yet . . .

  “When did you see her?”

  “Uhm, I want to say . . . last week?” The iffy, laid-back delivery hit its mark. “She’s probably just, you know, massively processing. The mom thing’s a pretty big deal.” It was important to stay vague yet believable about her nonexistent encounters with the actress.

  “Did she tell you?”

  Larissa smiled, all squinty-eyed naïve. “About—?”

  Allegra decided that even if Dusty hadn’t told her, no harm could come. Anyway, it was her body.

  “The miscarriage.”

  In a flash, Larissa got it. “Yes.”

  “What did she say?”

  “Just . . . that she’s—sad,” said Larissa, wading into perilous waters of improv.

  “God!” said Allegra, pissy. “She never talks about it with me. She just packs me off to fucking grief groups.” A deep sigh, then: “Everything’s just so fucked.” The young wife was beyond tears. When Larissa touched her arm then began to massage, Allegra felt a sleazy jolt.

  “Wanna feel better?”

  “No—”

  “Oh come on, Leggy. Come on . . .”

  There was fussiness and cajoling before Allegra allowed herself to be ushered to the bedroom. Larissa kissed her neck, her cheek, her lips.

  “I can’t, I can’t,” said Allegra. “Too much guilt.” She was lost.

  “She wouldn’t feel guilty
.”

  “Then you have—you fucked her, you were lying!”

  “No! I told you, we haven’t. But I didn’t say we wouldn’t—it’s possible. Anything’s possible. I think she’s definitely attracted . . .”

  “Ugh ugh ugh—”

  “You know, sometimes you need to step outside the relationship,” said Larissa, in (sex surrogate) wisdom mode, “for it to heal. Then you come back to it. Maybe that’s what she’s doing—I mean, not with me but maybe with someone else. Those are your instincts, right? Or maybe you’re not thinking that . . .”

  “You are fucking her! You are both so totally fucking!”

  “Allegra, stop,” she commanded. “Whatever she’s doing, if she even is doing anything, it’s not with me. I promise.” Her aggressiveness shut the poor girl down. Then Larissa grew pensively co-conspiratorial, nearly rubbing her chin. “I kind of had that same feeling too . . . that maybe she’s—maybe exploring. I guess you got me thinking—power of suggestion! I’m so totally suggestible. But you know,” she opined, “a lot of time that’s not the end—of a marriage—or a relationship—it’s the beginning. For both parties. A chance to start over. Can be. I know from whence I speak. Been there, done that, with Derek. Firsthand experience. I didn’t do it with a woman, but I did it with a man. And it kinda worked.”

  She kissed her neck again.

  “Ooooh,” squirmed Allegra, playing the gamine, as her composure slipped away. “I just don’t like to lie . . .”

  “Sometimes you have to. As long as you’re not lying to yourself.” Her quarry needed more tenderizing. Radically inspired, Larissa shot the moon. “Why don’t you just tell her? That we’re seeing each other? Not ‘seeing,’ but that we’ve gotten together. Tell her you called—or we ran into each other at Soho or wherever—and that you just really needed someone to talk to. Which is true! Because she wasn’t available. And you don’t need to go into any details—because it’s kind of none of her business. You’re a human being, Allegra. She isn’t your whole world. Or shouldn’t be. Maybe she needs help seeing that. And you know what? You just might be surprised. Maybe she’ll think it’s a good thing that we’re hanging out, maybe she even wants that. Wants you to have a friend, a ‘mutual’ friend. Or more . . .” She stroked her cheek as she kissed her on the mouth. “Maybe all of us together again would be her healing.”