Then my mother enters the living room after seeing them out and stands before me with her righteous hands on her righteous hips.
“You’re as bad as your father,” she begins as I hightail it out of there and head for the border like every bad guy does. But my south of the border happens to be my sister’s bedroom.
“Sho,” she cries as I enter her room. She is wearing a sweet and goofy smile for me and I sit with her while she stares at I know not what.
“Don’t you walk away from me while I’m talking to you!” yells mother after me. “We have more to say about this, you and I, Horatio! You can lie to the police but you cannot lie to me. I was there. I saw that harlot in your bedroom and I can just imagine what was going on before I got home. Under your sister’s very nose and in MY HOUSE!!” She drones on and on but I tune her out now that I am in Josie’s room, secure in the fact that at least it was not under my sweet girl’s nose that these heinous acts were committed. I am back in the safety of her world and reading to her from an old “Tales from the Crypt” comic book. This room has become the only place I really feel safe. It’s time to come back to some sense of normalcy. Start getting my life back on whatever track it was on before this whole “Thou shalt not commit adultery nor prong the Reverend’s freaky wife” thing began. Set about doing stuff for just Josie and me. But it doesn’t happen.
Three days later, my mother walks into the kitchen, where I am heating up a frozen pizza in the lethal microwave, and announces that she is finished with us men. All our lying and cheating. All the secrets and the sex. All our irreligious behavior and denial of the Holy Scriptures. (???) She has had it and will brook no more wanton conduct. She is divorcing my father, and as soon as my school year is up I must move out and get a darn job. She is done with all of us. I ask her why she is lumping all the bad behavior of us male Cottons into this one act of divorce. Well, two, counting the moving-out-and-getting-the-darn-job thing. But she won’t talk about it anymore. Her mind is made up. My father has heard from her and has agreed to the divorce. Now all that’s left is for me to do the school/job dealy. She has HAD it!!! She storms from the kitchen and out of the house. The front door slams shut as a kind of exclamation point on her monologue and I hear the car engine cough and turn over. She takes off with a small but angry squeal of burning rubber. I traipse out after her as the frozen pizza turns into radioactive goo in the nuke. But she is gone.
Their divorce is not a surprise to me, but the reality of it hurts like hell. I feel responsible. Like the whole Reverend’s-wife fiasco was the straw that broke the large, long-necked, arid-climate-dwelling ungulate’s back. I never see my father again. He moves his stuff out while I’m at school and doesn’t bother to contact me. “Boy” is off his radar. So is his more-loved daughter, I guess, now that she can no longer reciprocate what I think I always saw as his preening love for her. We’re on our own, kids!
I go through weeks of depression that thankfully Josie is spared. Our parents’ divorce at this late stage of the game would be exceptionally hard on her, were she aware. My girl is not. I thank heaven for small fucking favors.
Not much changes in the physical appearance of the house. The furniture—all selected by my mother—stays. The only thing that’s missing is the photo of them on the mantel by our Lord and the one in their bedroom. They are permanently retired from public view. His clothes are gone, too. The only shot that exists of my father and me remains on my desk. It was taken on our one and only trip to Disneyland when I was six years old. I’m smiling into the camera, as happy as a squirrel with an acorn hat while my dad stares distractedly off to the left of the frame as though he has no interest in being in a photo with his son. A few weeks later that photo magically disappears as well. Zap!
I don’t quite understand why I am so down about this dissolution of our parents’ laughingstock set of matrimonial vows. I knew their marriage wasn’t good, clearly headed for if not already on the rocks, but the finality of it is almost as devastating as discovering that I wasn’t the only monkey who was getting his banana peeled by sweet Virginia, the Reverend’s horn-dog.
At school I begin to flirt with the mixed bag of pleasure that is marijuana. It makes me feel a lot less depressed and a little less lame, even though I know I’m deliberately lowering my I.Q. and flatlining my drive to succeed. The silly nonsense word-jumbles Josie has begun to babble now and then sound even funnier when I’m high. “Door up, down.” “Sho read curtain cabbage.” “Bathroom face.” “Daddy touch no-no.” Phrases that make absolutely . . . Wait!! Back up! . . . What was that last one??? Probably just her brain misfiring. Okay, we have enough shit to deal with, and at this point everything else is just more shit.
Unbeknownst to my mother, who has upped her intake of her drug of choice (red wine) I drop out of school so I can take better care of Josie. My grades were sucking anyway and I’m pretty sure the whole Nobel Prize–winning scientist career is off the table for good. I have mastered the G chord now on my guitar, so possible rock-star fame is still quite alive, although it could be coughing up blood. Not sure. Fingers really hurt too.
We all hunker down for the long winter that seems to be upon us Cottons. And life just keeps getting increasingly surreal.
One morning I notice that the left side of Josie’s face is looking a little slacker than the right side. Over the course of a week or so I’m alarmed to notice that instead of self-correcting, it begins to droop even farther. One morning, concerned that she may have had a stroke or something, I bundle her up, guide her into the car, and take her to see her doctor, hoping we’ll be back before mother realizes I am driving the car without her permission and without a license.
Her doctor is a nice enough guy, but whatever his specialty is, it doesn’t include asymmetrically drooping faces. So he refers us to a neurologist, who then refers us to a radiologist, who then orders a series of MRIs of Josie’s head. By the time we get home it’s dark and our mother is well aware that I’ve taken the car without asking her or bothering to apply for a valid driver’s license. She’s convinced that I just took her sick daughter for a self-centered joyride.
I try to explain, but she has already hit the wine rack and will hear none of it. I’m just doing what I want, when I want, with no regard for anyone but myself, “You selfish little bastard!!”
I take Josie to the bathroom and then tuck her into her bed. I head to the kitchen to try again with Mom. She is still on her rant until I override her with a childishly shouted, “Josie’s face is lopsided. The doctor thought it could be bad!!!”
She falls silent. Her pinched, furious expression softens to a more dumbfounded look.
“What?” It’s as if the words I just yelled are taking their time to land.
“One side of her face is kind of sagging, so I took her to the doctor to check it out,” I say. But she’s off again.
“Without asking me if you could? You just take my car?! And with no driver’s license? Is there any illegal thing you will not do, Horatio?”
I stuff it down, doing my utmost not to go south with her. I try again. Equably.
“Mom. Just shut up and listen, okay? The MRI guy told me he saw something in her head.”
She stops one more time.
“In your sister’s head?”
We are finally on the same page.
“Yes.”
“Like what? What did he see?”
“Some kind of lump.”
“On an MRI he saw this?”
“Yes. He said he was only a technician and wasn’t supposed to say anything but I told him she was my sister and I really needed to know, now. He’s been doing this for fifteen years and seen a lot of MRIs and he said that we should get the results from the neurologist as soon as we can.”
It takes a few seconds for this to register but register it finally does. She slaps a hand to her mouth as if to shut herself up and stop any further discourse, then turns and bolts for Josie’s bedroom to be with her daughter, all a
nger and blaming gone. That is the part of her that is still our mom. It’s unexpected, but I start to tear up, seeing her run to her baby’s side like that. With the amount of stress and the blitzkrieg of crap we have all gone through, I lose it. I drop to a kitchen chair and burst into tears like I am six years old again.
A few days later we three journey in to see the neurologist on a cold and rainy November afternoon, as united as we’ll ever be at this stage of the game. Mom drives, of course, and I’m in the back with my bundled-up sister, who drools and doesn’t seem to see the bare trees as they fly past her window in a blur. What’s left of our family arrives at the doctor’s and we sit silently in the waiting room while the girl behind the front desk sexts her boyfriend on her cell. We are both, my mother and I, fearing some pretty bad news. But when we’re escorted into his office and the doctor finally enters, it’s not bad at all!! It’s fucking terrible. Beyond terrible.
“It’s called a glioblastoma multiforme. It is, unfortunately, the most aggressive form of brain cancer, and it occurs predominantly in young people,” is what we hear from him.
He points to a series of cranial MRI’s on the desktop of a computer sitting to the side of his hard oak desk. We’d all missed these when we came in, such is our collective state of mind. The soft-tissue outline is so obviously my sister’s face that I audibly gasp. There is a diffused white mass at the base of her skull.
“What we are seeing here is a stage-four tumor on her brain stem. Our options are pretty limited at this point, I’m afraid.”
“What are the options?” I manage. I assume my mother’s in shock.
He looks to her to see if this is her question also. She nods silently, sadly. He seems to be a regular guy who is just doing his best to deliver this awful news, but we’ve already been set up to expect some “options.” Like there will be a couple of reasonable choices.
He takes a breath. “Honestly? I would suggest that you take Josephine home and make her as comfortable as possible,” is the first “option” he offers.
“That’s it?!!” I respond, maybe with a little too much energy for the small room. He shifts in his seat ever so slightly and I sense that I’ve made him more uneasy.
“Well, we could try chemotherapy and that might add a few weeks, perhaps even a few months to her life, but it would certainly make her quite sick and with a relatively insignificant result,” he says. “Truthfully, I don’t think it’s worth it.”
We sit there in silence, trying to grasp the death sentence he has just delivered.
“How long does she have?” My voice sounds far away to me, and I think I’m just parroting a line I heard in some movie, but it’s the only thing I can think to say. And it feels like a movie we are all in. Where the worst that could possibly happen, does.
“At best, I’d say three to six months.” He has a gentle and understanding expression on his face and his eyes are kind, but the words hit us like a hammer blow.
So we will go from four Cottons to two Cottons in a matter of half a year.
“Sho mom love smile,” our girl blurts out into the quiet room. And I begin to think she understands more than I suspected.
I wrap my arm around her. She rests her sweet head on my shoulder. I try really hard not to cry.
Bobby
In the small, ancestral law offices of McGivney, McGivney, and McGivney in the city of Inverness, where the shelves are overstuffed with the myriad of paperwork and legal volumes that are the necessary evils of the profession, the shrill ring of a phone pierces the quiet. Weak afternoon sunlight filters in through four-hundred-year-old windows that looked upon this same room when Shakespeare was a contemporary playwright. They distort the light, creating diffused shadows and imbuing the furnishings with muted edges. Clive McGivney rises and answers the phone, his voice colored with a warm Scottish burr. He listens and grunts a short, satisfied reply, then sets the phone back in its cradle. Turning to his father, who is sitting across the room, he shouts for the benefit of the old man’s rapidly declining auditory faculties. “Dad, they think they’ve found Devin Young’s kid in the United States. Apparently it’s a lass named Alice.”
Bobby
“Then get the gun out of my face,” says Lexington Vargas, reasonably enough.
“Dude, there’s no need to threaten us. Really,” I add, shooting furtive looks in the rearview mirror at gonzo Gorgeous George, who still has the large weapon pointed at the large man’s large head.
“I am here to help,” Merikh repeats as if it were a mantra.
I slow the muscular Kia, the Rolls-Royce of the Korean auto industry, down to a stop at an intersection as the light changes from green to yellow to red. The rain has subsided a little but it’s still a downpour.
“If you really mean us no harm, then put the gun down. Please. I’m not going to the cops, I promise.” Again I am trying the role of negotiator on for size. I must be getting better at it because Merikh slowly lowers the angst-inducing firearm until the business end is no longer aimed at its former and sizable target. He looks skittishly at Lexington Vargas, as though trying to judge if this is the right move or not. Then he puts the gun back inside the brown leather jacket from which it first appeared.
It’s the right move for us but possibly the wrong one for him, because L.V. is suddenly all over him like a cheap suit, wrestling Merikh for the now-concealed weapon, accompanied by grunts and much seat-kicking. Alice, bless her heart, starts whacking the handsome intruder with a small, balled-up fist, inflicting limited damage I’m sure.
The door nearest Merikh abruptly flies open and he is unceremoniously shoved out of the car and onto the roadway by way of Lexington Vargas’s substantial foot. The fact that he got it all the way up to Merikh’s chest in the first place, restricted by the confines of this tiny car, impresses the hell out of me. He reaches over and yanks the door shut, wrenching the whole interior side panel off in the process. Okay, it’s a puny car, but it still saved our lives—and it seems to be doing it again as L.V. yells, “Go man, GO! Let’s get the fuck away from this guy, excuse my language, Miss.”
He is a gentleman to the end.
I gun the Kia’s hamster and we roar through the red light at a hair-raising twenty-one MPH. Mercifully, because of the late hour, there is no intersecting eighteen-wheeler there barreling through to smash us to smithereens. Merikh is already up on his feet and running after the car just like the damn T-1000 robot in Terminator 2. He’s shouting something, but it’s inaudible to us over the hamster’s heavy breathing.
Inch by anxious, nail-biting inch, the Kia pulls away, and once again this impressive Asian automobile delivers us from possible annihilation.
I watch in the side mirror to see if Merikh whips out the gun to take a pot-shot at our retreating, slightly rumpled butt, but he does not. I turn my eyes back to the road as our brawny Kia gobbles up the highway.
“That’s so weird,” says Lexington Vargas, looking back at the fast-disappearing figure on the street.
“Yeah, totally,” I agree. “What a nutjob.”
“No, I mean . . . I couldn’t find the gun. It was nowhere on him.”
“Is it on the backseat . . . or the floor?” asks Alice.
“No,” says our giant friend and bodyguard.
“Where did he put it?” I’m having a hard time with this now, too.
“He didn’t ‘put’ it anywhere. I think it disappeared.”
I give Alice that “WTF” look you see on kid-actors’ faces in bad teen TV sitcoms and then suggest to our small group that, since it would now be a logistical nightmare to get Lexington Vargas to La Crescenta due to the exploding plane, and if Alice is good with it (please God, please oh please!) maybe we should all crash at my place so we can discuss what, if anything, we should do now about our curious coming-together, it being the weekend and all.
L.V. is only too happy to finally find a bed now that his own has been rendered fairly inaccessible, but Alice hesitates, understandably.
“It’s cool if you want to go back to your own place,” I offer unconvincingly as I ease on the brakes in anticipation of changing course yet again.
“I don’t think I want to be alone right now,” says Alice. “And since we’ve all been through this weird night together, it’s probably a good idea to circle the wagons at your place.” (Insert “smiley face” re: Alice.)
I turn the proud Kia toward the part of town that harbors my divorcee’s home-away-from-home and put the pedal to the rodent. The Kia fairly hums in agreement.
Alice is dialing a number on her cell phone (nuns have cell phones?!) and I hear a thin, faint, scratchy voice say, “What is the nature of your emergency?” I realize she’s dialed 911.
“We picked up a guy in our car and he pulled a gun on us,” Alice says breathlessly.
Scratchy voice in the earpiece.
Alice answers, “No, we pushed him out and drove off.”
Scratchy voice again.
“I don’t know. I wasn’t really paying attention to the street names.” Alice turns to me. “Where were we when we kicked him out?” she asks.
“Yeah, I was kind of focused more on the gun, too, and the fact that he might possibly blow my brains out the side of my head,” I answer.
“Somewhere on Barham. Before the studios. I was a little busy, too,” answers the ever-cool Lexington Vargas.
Alice relates what little information we have. Then she adds, “Wait a minute! What am I thinking? He’s one of the people from the airplane that crashed on the freeway tonight. He came down an evacuation slide and got into our car. That should help you locate him. It didn’t look like there were very many people who got out before the plane exploded,” she continues.
“Funny what small details escape you when someone points a gun in your face,” I say with no slight irony. Self-preservation comes first, right? But Alice isn’t listening to me.
“What?” she says into the phone. There is an odd note to her voice.
Magnificent Vibration Page 12