“Do you care about your own family?” Mike began without preamble. “Are we even in the picture? Our daughter has saved every summer to help pay for some of her Stanford tuition. How do you think she feels about this? Huh? What kind of mother chooses her sister and parents over her own daughter? Tell me that!”
“I never wanted to do this—to you, to us—don’t you see? I just wanted to meet my obligations since I knew my father hadn’t met his. I thought I had no other choice, but I was so wrong. I should have listened to you. I don’t know why I didn’t. I really don’t.”
“I told you over and over again. Unbelievable! Debts are debts. And now, because of you, we have them. Giant ones. A second mortgage. Tuition coming up next fall. Aren’t we allowed to have dreams, too? They blew their chance to have theirs come true. Now you’ve turned your back on us, just like your mother always turned her back on you. There isn’t always love in a family. You know that. Open your eyes, goddamn it. You chose us last.” Pause. “I have nothing more to say to you.”
“Mike—” Jules began. But he had already hung up.
“You’ll see,” Mike had been telling her for months now. “You’ll see. There’s no happy ending to any of this. You’re just enabling them and screwing us over.”
That was exactly what she had done. She had thought she had to choose her mother first. How could she have known that this would happen if she did?
COLLECTIVE KARMA
“Have hired a private investigator. Hope I can do better finding Zoë.”
Mike’s text was small comfort. Jules had driven in the pouring rain around East Palo Alto from midnight until four a.m. before finally giving up and coming home. No luck finding Zoë. She was losing her mind. I’ve lost her.
Jules hadn’t heard from Zoë, except for texts asking her to send money to different East Palo Alto addresses. Thank God for those; at the very least they let her know that Zoë was alive and nearby. And she was still getting text messages from Mike, in spite of everything.
How could she have fooled herself into thinking she was doing the right thing? Jules hadn’t been there for her daughter or her husband. Now Zoë had left, and Mike as well. There was no one to call family.
She needed oxygen—lots of it—for what she had to do now. Zoë was nowhere to be found in East Palo Alto, so she had driven back to Carmel. She needed desperately to take a long walk to meditate, clear her head. Give herself a chance to think straight before she took further action. Breathing in the sweet marine air, Jules recalled how some of her foreign patients had become so used to the polluted air in their own countries that the coastal air in Northern California sickened them. It made them nauseous, they said. It was too fresh. She hoped in every cell of her being that life would be fresh again for her family. Safe. Loving. But the air was rotten.
Her parents were on their way out. Eviction was a possibility. Perhaps they would move in with Joanne, even though their cognitive faculties might soon decline further, which would make things difficult on Joanne. If they refused that option, and if Andrew wouldn’t help, maybe they would go into some kind of government-subsidized public housing. And her sister—Joanne would have to figure out for herself how to get her health costs covered. Jules had her own family to think about. Her real family, and her karma, the consequences of her actions. Why had it taken her so long to see how wrong she had been?
Jules slowly slipped into her jeans and pulled on her old gray T-shirt. The material was silky, like Zoë’s cheeks when she was a baby. She walked briskly up the canyon road behind her house, then sat down near a stunning waterfall, wildflowers in neon purples and oranges laid out on the hills like slabs of gigantic mosaic tiles. Jules looked past the hills to houses with spectacular ocean views—postcard perfect. She had always loved this spot. But nothing was as it had once been.
Sitting near the curb was a small, squat, cement-gray figure—misshapen and deformed, obviously abandoned. Like Gollum of The Lord of the Rings. A cracked five-inch gargoyle. Jules thought about taking him home—using him as a garden gnome. She picked it up—it was heavy, as if filled with someone’s ashes—and read the sticker on the bottom: Stone Boy. Made in China. As she carried him down the hill towards her driveway, going so fast she almost tripped, she hid him in the crook of her arm. He seemed forbidden, somehow.
She entered the house with her abandoned nebbish. She wanted to share it with Mike and Zoë. Jules loved getting their reactions to things. Zoë was very observant. Saw what others didn’t. And she had imbued objects with spiritual values ever since she could say her first words. Like almost every small child Jules met, the world, for her daughter, was a magical place where everything was alive, warm, compassionate, and caring. The difference: Zoë had never lost the feeling that the sky listened to her wishes … until now, that is.
Placing the nebbish near the tree outside her daughter’s bedroom window, Jules imagined the backstory behind it. Someone else’s castoff. In some Asian cultures there was a belief that merely possessing something that once belonged to another was highly risky. The previous owner’s past karma lived in the discarded object. Usually a bad omen, but not always. The concept was bachi—punishment or retribution for past deeds.
Jules was superstitious. He won’t bring bad karma to my family, she reassured herself. Mike and Zoë will be safe. We will be together again. Someday soon. No external threats. Nothing alien threatening us. Collective karma.
She looked out at the sunset—startlingly red, a surreal cinnabar sphere dropping molten lava into the ocean’s horizon, melting, a red-lacquered soup bowl with a lid on it. Dissolving into a funnel-shaped vortex that drained into the sea.
Mike and Zoë were at risk, and Jules was the cause of it. But she had a plan.
Every tiny creak in the walls, every rustle under the windows of the living room, every sound seemed magnified in the house, both inside and out. Funny how even her five senses had changed since Mike and Zoë had left. Everything about this room seemed too big now. She sat down on the oversized, four-cushioned red Italian leather couch and picked at spoonfuls of a defrosted Trader Joe’s chana masala. She and Mike had a routine: half the time they watched a movie or something they had TiVoed while eating on TV trays, and the other half they spent at the dining room table, with candlelight and fresh flowers arranged, ikebana-style, in a centerpiece. Routines were wonderful. Pleasurable and reassuring.
There were lessons to be learned from her family’s buildup of unspoken truths, promises broken, obligations obliterated. Bachi. Karma.
Letting go. Disposing of parts of the family. How could she do that?
Family and dysfunction went together—like peanut butter and jelly. Family sagas. Everything would be okay. But how? She needed to find Zoë and Mike. Now.
REHAB
Five o’clock: still pitch black outside. Jules listened, nerves splitting apart, blackness in her peripheral vision. Jules was stalking her own daughter—living in this cheap motel in East Palo Alto, studying Google Maps, and leaving countless messages, both voice mails and texts. Zoë was living God knew where.
She had gotten a brief “Happy Thanksgiving” from Zoë, with a strange man’s voice echoing hers. But she’d missed the call; she received it only as a voice mail on her cell phone. Who was that, anyway? His voice wasn’t a young voice. Had her daughter met someone? A ne’er-dowell, perhaps, as Mike liked to call slackers?
Mike had moved into a tiny apartment in Palo Alto. What kind of mother had Jules become? Why weren’t the police doing anything? Where the hell was her daughter?
Stanford’s campus was unusually quiet over Thanksgiving break. Very few cars in the parking lots. The place looked deserted. Not the typical stream of bodies with backpacks heading towards the student union. Or bikes zipping in and out of the Inner Quad, almost running down any students and other pedestrians trying to cross over to another building. Even dormitory row seemed unusually still. As far as Jules knew, Zoë was still somewhere near campus. Mi
ke said the private eye suspected Zoë was living in East Palo Alto, though.
Maybe a cup of chamomile tea would calm her nerves. Jules felt wired, as if amped up on amphetamines. But she needed, above all, to think clearly. Driving into the visitor parking lot behind Tresidder student union—usually an impossible place to find a spot—Jules pulled into a parking place no more than twenty feet from the back patio of the café. She walked inside, eyes adjusting to the dark.
A young student, piercings in her left nostril and upper lip, smiled unenthusiastically, as if she were in pain, at Jules when she ordered her tea. Jules watched as the young woman steeped the tea bag for her, rubbing at her nose and then touching part of the rim of the mug. She made a note to avoid touching that side of the cup with her lips.
Tea in hand, Jules sat down outside, under a large sun umbrella, at a small round café table cluttered with old copies of Stanford Daily and crumpled-up napkins. Two students, dressed in beautiful saris, sat at the next table. No one else was outside on the sunny, cheerful patio. Jules soaked in the sunshine and picked up the Daily.
A grainy photograph on the front page, captioned with “Another beautiful day on the world’s most beautiful campus,” caught her eye. Was that Zoë in the photo? Who was the old man with her? Grungy, at least middle-aged, with his arm around her? Her jeans were torn at both knees—was that the style nowadays? Zoë’s body was draped on his, as if she had collapsed, but her face was turned up, tilted to the sun. What photographer would want to take a photo of that? The two were identified: “Zoë Foster and Carl Nagy.” There were several other photos: students playing Frisbee, reading on the grass, and sunning. But Jules wasn’t interested in the other photos.
Her phone beeped. She looked down. Another text from Zoë asking for money—but this time with an address in East Palo Alto. An actual address, not a post office box. She wants me to find her! Jules thought, heart lifting. She jammed the newspaper page with the photo into her purse. I’m out of here. Now. Today is not tomorrow. I will not leave here without my daughter!
She looked up the address on Google Maps. She wished she could give her daughter a heads-up that she was coming, but she feared Zoë wouldn’t be there when she arrived if she did. Oh, she hoped she would be there.
She slowly drove by the busiest Starbucks on University Avenue in the direction of the apartment complex matching her daughter’s address. She was looking for a place to park when she spotted Zoë and that Nagy guy from the picture walking into the building. What an unbelievable coincidence! Maybe she had earned some good karma after all to give to Mike and Zoë.
She leaned on her horn. “Zoë! Zoë, it’s me! Your mother!” she called out the window.
Zoë didn’t turn. Hadn’t she heard her yell out her name?
Dragging her index finger down the list of metal mailboxes and across each line, Jules found her last name. Small, inked-in letters: Foster. Above it was another name: Nagy. She tried to stay calm; she buzzed apartment 470 and waited. She was relieved to find the apartment was in a well-kept building, at least. Impatiens and azaleas had been planted in front and were carefully maintained. Nurtured the way she had wanted to nurture Zoë.
A male voice came through the intercom. “Who is it?” His voice sounded sleepy. Or worse.
“I’m Julia Foster. Does Zoë Foster live here?” She waited. Whispering came through the screen of the intercom. A female whispering and others, both male and female.
The buzzer was earsplittingly loud, but brief. She couldn’t open the door in time. She rang again. This time the buzz to open the door was sustained, dragged out, as if the person pushing the button was annoyed.
No elevator, but the hallway up the stairs was brushed clean. It even sparkled—there was some kind of mica or other metallic element in the white paint. Down near the fire escape, the last door on the right was open. She could smell something cooking—it smelled bad, like skunk or rotting waste. Reminded her of the smell of rotten carrion, those small animal carcasses their cat Neko dragged into her bedroom closet in Carmel from Mal Paso canyon.
The curtains were half drawn, so Jules couldn’t see in right away. She had to adjust.
Then she saw: a circle of men and women, half sitting, half lying down on the floor. No furniture. No light. Some only in underwear. Lots of smoke and pungent body odor like raw, overripe onions. Jules looked at each face. The first one her eyes landed on was a beautiful very young woman, dark hair pulled tight into a ponytail, leaning on a guy much older, her eyes half closed, mouth gaping open. The guy’s hand was between her legs, under the seam of the crotch in her jeans. Nagy. Maybe forty-five years old, he looked alert like a frog on a lily pad, ready to catch whatever flew by.
It was Zoë. Almost unrecognizable. So skinny and frail, shirt stained a grayish brown.
Jules recognized the shirt, a birthday present. Very expensive, but Zoë had wanted it so much that she had bought it for her. Zoë’s hair was cut very short in the front. Bald patches revealed her pale scalp—Maybe from malnutrition or drugs? Jules speculated. And then there was the guy—flabby, sporting a Rasputin-type goatee. He could have been Schlepp’s clone, except for the flab. Jules felt she had flown backwards through time, to that day when she had to endure his touch while carrying Zoë in her baby carrier.
No one seemed to notice her. Zoë looked half asleep. The guys—except for Nagy—just stared, eyes glazed over, pupils probably dilated, although she couldn’t see them in the dim light. Who had pushed the buzzer if they were all so comatose? Nagy? Was he the dealer? Jules couldn’t breathe in all that smoke. She was claustrophobic.
Walking over to Zoë, carefully avoiding stepping on anyone else sprawled out on the floor, Jules almost lost her balance. She had to grab on to what seemed like someone’s head—sparsely hairy—in order to keep from going down. But she steadied herself and focused on her daughter. It was all about Zoë.
Just before she got to her dazed daughter, she tripped and fell against her shoulder. Her tears dropped, but she didn’t know where. Hugging Zoë, shoving Nagy aside, she whispered in her ear, “Come on, sweetie, we have to get out of this place. Now. I’ll help, but you have to wake up. You can do it, sunshine. Just lean on me.” She shook her. No response. She tried again, harder this time. “Now, darling. Now. Before it’s too late!”
Zoë, eyes half open, just stared. Her gaze was flat. Like that vole Neko had left in Jules’s closet that one time. Her daughter’s pupils seemed too huge as Jules examined her closely. Her own eyes had adjusted enough to the dark to get a good look.
“Hey, lady, she’s not going anywhere,” Nagy said, shoving her hard. Jules fell backwards and landed in some man’s lap on the floor. Without hesitating, she struggled to right herself, kneeled close to her daughter, and put her arm around her. “It’s now or never, sweetheart. You can’t be in this place. You hear me? I’ll call the police if you don’t come with me.”
“Mom?” Zoë mumbled.
“Goddamn it, lady, if you don’t leave now, I’m going to make you.”
“Please, Zoë. Please. You’re breaking my heart.”
Nagy got up, yanking Jules’s arm, and dragged her to the door. Then he shoved her out into the hallway and slammed the door.
“I’m calling to report illegal drug use—perhaps marijuana, heroin, God only knows—in an apartment in East Palo Alto. I think my daughter, Zoë Foster, eighteen—almost nineteen—years old, is under the control of perpetrators of a drug ring, Officer. You must help. Go there. Raid the apartment and get my daughter out.” Jules was sitting in her car outside Zoë’s apartment building. Her cell phone battery was almost dead.
Jules was connected to Sergeant Savage, East Palo Alto Police Department. She had wanted to talk to the other police officer, Sergeant Hyde, who at least had some knowledge of her situation. Or so she assumed.
“We’ll look into it,” Savage said, and he gave her a case number before hanging up. Yet another case number. How many case numbers wou
ld it take before her daughter was safe?
Her phone vibrated next to her. She answered on the second ring. “Zoë?”
“Nope, sorry,” a male voice responded.
Jules couldn’t place the voice. “Hi,” she said warily.
“Don’t you recognize your own brother’s voice?” Andrew sounded hurt. Jules hadn’t seen him for almost ten years.
“Geez, Andrew. It’s midnight.”
And then he told her. He didn’t know exactly when it had happened. That evening around eight o’clock perhaps. The ambulance had arrived almost immediately. It was gusty, windy out, but the storm had calmed down by that point. Their father had suddenly stopped talking and then slumped over, motionless, his face in his food—his favorite, sushi takeout, a rare treat. He was the last one still eating. His right arm had raised momentarily, his chopsticks no longer in his hand, then fallen.
“Paramedics carried him out on a stretcher, hooked him up to ventilators and other monitoring devices, and started to work on him with defibrillating paddles as they whisked him away. Mother said she went with him and Joanne. In one of those high-tech American Medical Response ambulances with all the latest equipment. But I don’t know if Dad can pull through.”
Jules slouched in her car. She was so tired.
“Dad called me on the telephone before dinner, yammering on and on, and seemed fine. Sometimes I walk away from the phone to rest from all the preaching, and when I pick up the receiver again he’s still delivering a sermon. Mostly gloom and doom about his stock portfolio. That he hopes things will get better. I feel so bad now,” Andrew confessed. “Maybe he won’t ever be able to talk to us again.” Jules could hear him trying to clear guilt from his throat.
Jules thought about how she did the same thing almost every time her parents had called—but she had never told anyone that, not even Mike. It seemed so depersonalizing and disrespectful. But some simmering resentments and lurking grievances, she thought, are best left unspoken. And sometimes that means walking away from the phone.
Things Unsaid: A Novel Page 17