by Jeff Ewing
“Like where?” he said.
“I don’t know. L.A. maybe.”
“Los Angeles?”
“Yes, Los Angeles. L.A.”
“What, like Disneyland?”
“No. I don’t know, maybe. Carla might like that. But other things too—museums, the ocean, movie studios.”
“I don’t know. We don’t know anybody.”
She wasn’t sure how much he knew about Clifford. Not that she was hiding anything, really.
“This is our chance, while Carla’s still little. Before she starts school.”
“That’s a long way off still.”
“Not that far.”
He leaned back and smiled across at her. “There’s no hurry.”
The smile infuriated her, the same smile she’d seen all her life—a smile of tolerance, thinking her beauty was an advantage with no downside.
She drank a bottle of wine by herself after Matias and Carla had gone to bed, something she never did. It was a pitiful rebellion. The determination and confidence she felt as she stood naked in front of the bathroom mirror didn’t last—it was just a body, nothing more, something she wasn’t even responsible for.
She had to call in sick the next day, another thing she never did. She didn’t know if Clifford came in or not; she never asked anyone, and nobody mentioned him to her.
She called the number on the card twice from the pay phone by the bathrooms, and hung up both times. What would she say? What was she willing to do? That seemed to be the question.
It’s possible to go through life without answering those kinds of questions, and Elena tried. She thought she could starve them out, that by refusing to answer them she could banish them, but they filtered in through the windows and doors with the dust, swirled up around her as she moved through the house or wheeled Carla in her stroller to the playground. They became part of the flavor of everything, along with all the other contaminants.
She left a note for Matias finally, said she was going to see the ocean—which was partly true. She took Carla to her mother’s. She wouldn’t be gone long, she said, three days at the most.
“It’s an affair, isn’t it?” her mother said, twice. She was excited by the idea, even gave Elena tips for making it memorable.
“Leave him wanting more,” she said, pouring a mini bottle of screw-top champagne into their orange juice. She lifted Carla’s little hand to wave goodbye through the screen door when Elena left for the train station, her face flushed and her eye squinted in a suggestive wink. Elena had never seen her so proud; it was an unhappy discovery.
There was hardly any shade on the platform. She huddled under the narrow awning with an older woman who smiled but didn’t say anything, a paper bag at her feet bulging with neatly folded clothes. How much would Elena have if she packed up and left, she wondered. Not much more than that, if it was down to essentials.
She found a seat by a window and watched the sun drop behind the hills. It disappeared quickly, and then the valley became very dark. Here and there the lights of a plant or a county prison flicked past. The towns got bigger as she headed south, then smaller again past San Jose. Even the smallest looked welcoming in the dark, ribbons of light strung out along invisible streets and up rivers and creeks that would be almost dry now.
The name of the train, printed at the top of the ticket, was the “Coast Starlight.” She liked the sound of it, as if the stars along the coast were somehow different from the ones she saw at home, brighter and more fixed, looking directly down on her. She liked that they named the train. She didn’t know they did that. It made the whole trip seem more exalted somehow, a forged path through fields of clamoring starlight.
At one point she fell asleep, and when she woke up two girls about her age were sitting across the aisle. They were dressed in smooth silk tops unbuttoned partway down. One of them dangled her high heel from her toes, bobbing it up and down to a song in her head. The girls ignored their surroundings thoroughly, only glancing once or twice derisively out the window.
“Jesus Christ,” one of them said. “Where the hell are we?”
The man in the seat in front of them turned and helpfully told them the name of the town they were passing through. They smiled, then rolled their eyes when he wasn’t looking.
“Like it matters,” one whispered.
Elena fell asleep again, and when she woke up the next time the train was pulling into a large station with arched doorways and a tile roof. Lights blazed out the windows and she could see streets leading off brightly into the distance. She stood up and leaned close to the window.
“Where are you going?” one of the girls asked. The girls were glamorous and made Elena feel shabby in her print dress and flats.
“Los Angeles,” she said.
“Ooh. Good for you.”
“You’d better hurry then,” the other said. She was tall and thin with a nose that seemed a little too small for her face. “They won’t turn the train around.”
“What? Is this it?”
“That’s Sunset Boulevard right over there. Those lights.”
“Oh god, thanks!” She hefted her overnight bag and tucked the little box of snacks under her arm. As the train pulled away, the two girls waved through the window. She waved back. Her heart was thumping and she could feel the heat from the pavement rising up to her. Inside the station, she found a pay phone and fished Clifford’s card out of her bag. He’d be surprised, no question. What would he say? She realized she hadn’t planned any farther than this moment, past the phone call.
She dropped her money in, and a voice told her to deposit more. She looked at the paper tag above the receiver, saw it was a different area code from the one she was dialing. As she dug for more change down through the stubby eye pencils and half-empty powder tubs, the tarnished necklace and the pair of cracked turquoise earrings, an unpleasant revelation dawned on her. She should have known, of course: most girls she met behaved as if life were a race and Elena had been given a head start. She stepped out of the booth, walked back through the station doors and looked up at the sign—SANTA BARBARA—dangling from the eaves.
She had a little money left after paying for a return ticket, so she bought herself an ice cream cone. It was a silly, extravagant thing. She didn’t even like ice cream much. But this was the closest she would ever get to being somebody else, so she did what she might have done. While she licked the drips from her hand, she laughed quietly at the idea of showing up at Clifford’s door unannounced, standing on his doorstep with her little flower-weave bag in her hand. His reluctant courtesy as he invited her in. And instead of anger, she felt an unwanted kinship with the two girls on the train, who were probably still laughing, leaning their glittering heads against each other in the passing lights. Maybe they were masquerading too, seeing what it felt like to wield a little power.
She thought she could smell the ocean, a briny smell like sweat. She didn’t know, she’d never been close enough before; maybe it was just the station, all the bodies passing through. The night was clear and there were stars littered out to the horizon. They were a little brighter, maybe, but other than that no different from the ones she knew at home. It wasn’t disappointing, exactly—it seemed, in fact, about what she was due. She’d lied to get here, to herself most of all. If there were sins, as she’d always been told, that had to be one.
“I was hoping you’d aged badly,” Clifford said some years later, the last time he came through. Elena poured his coffee while he dragged his finger through the sheen of oil on the table.
“Was there ever a movie? Or did you get those cards printed somewhere around here.”
“There was a movie.” He tapped his temple. “It was a beautiful thing, breathtaking. In meetings—when I described it—all these jaded Hollywood guys sat up in their chairs, hanging on every word. I had a picture of you I’d taken you didn’t know about. I had it printed twenty by thirty and sat it on an easel while I talked. They saw you like I did
, saw the camera hang on every move you made, never wanting to leave you.”
“So what happened?”
Clifford shrugged, a slow slump that rippled through the baggy shoulders of his blazer.
“They couldn’t get a star to sign on. For the guy.”
“Oh.”
“They were afraid of you, Elena. That’s what it was. They were afraid all the light and the power and the love would turn toward you.”
She doubted that, but she didn’t mind him saying it.
“I started down there once, you know,” she said.
“You did? When?”
“A while ago. When I was younger.”
“What happened?”
“I turned around.”
He smiled, leaning down to meet his cup halfway. “Probably just as well.”
“You think so?”
“I don’t know. But that’s what you say, right?”
She nodded, but it wasn’t. Not to herself, anyway. In the privacy and security of her own head, she finished the trip. She sat out on his patio with him and let the sun—softened by the ocean—drape itself over her. They drank some kind of cocktail his housekeeper made, but she didn’t get drunk. She never lost her head, just took it all in. She avoided looking in the housekeeper’s face to prevent herself from seeing her or her mother there, and sipped from the glass that never seemed to empty as the stars began appearing one by one, out of the haze hanging between her and the ocean, cool fires burning outside the drag of time. Ice clinked in their glasses as they discussed the shooting schedule for the next day.
She always stopped there, before the story became ridiculous, before the probable reality intruded—Clifford’s apartment a drab warren on some nondescript street, the sky sooty and gray, sirens and drunken quarrels drowning out the distant waves. The ending wasn’t important anyway, it wasn’t even an ending necessarily. What passed for an ending could easily be just a gap between two halves. An intermission. There wasn’t any sure ending until you were dead, and then it hardly mattered how you got there. That’s how she put it to herself, anyway, on the days she let her mind off its leash.
At the end of her shift, she sat at the counter next to Shelly, who was flipping through a National Enquirer, tsking and shaking her head.
“These people got everything you could want, and nine times out of ten they piss it away,” she said.
“You think it’s different here?”
“Jesus yes. Are you kidding? Nobody’s got anything to piss away.”
Elena watched the famous faces flip by—smiling, angry, surprised—stars with their dogs, with their children, newly minted couples looking like they never expected to meet an obstacle where they lived. Maybe one of these days there’d be a picture of Clifford, dapper and successful, with his latest discovery, a girl something like her.
She shooed him out of her mind and thought instead about Matias waiting for her when she got off the train, Carla curled into his shoulder. How he managed a thin smile and walked with her back to the truck without ever asking one question. She’d taken it as an act of kindness at the time, and was grateful to him. But in the years since she’d considered whether it might not have been just a lack of curiosity, that maybe he was like everyone else after all—wanting above anything to know just what he knew, and nothing more.
The last of the light was long gone from the sky when she closed out. There might have been stars, but she couldn’t see anything past the reflections in the windows. In the carousel by the register there was a slice of pie that had been there as long as she could remember, cherry she thought. She tapped the glass case and a cloud of gray dust rose up, swirled around, and settled like powdered light on the crust.
LAKE MARY JANE
HER LEG HURT WORSE NOW, a day after the alligator rose out of the murk and clamped onto it, and everything was so much more complicated. When the gator had bit down, it was just a thing that was happening to her. Not a pleasant thing, sure, but simple. Now people she’d never met were picking it apart, like the expert on the emergency room TV saying “A ten-year-old girl? There’s no way. If the alligator wanted to take her, there’s nothing she could have done about it.”
“I should have saved her,” her dad said, yanking the plug on the TV.
“She saved herself,” Emily said. “That’s even better.”
Anna thought about that, and wasn’t so sure. She’d pulled as hard as she could on the jaws, yes, but when the alligator had released her he did it without much fuss, almost gently. And when she collapsed on shore she could see his knobby head a little ways out watching her out of one eye. The lid had blinked twice, like a private code, before he sank under again.
“People are skeptical,” the reporter was saying, one side of his mouth smiling. “You understand.”
Before he showed up, they’d all been sitting close together on the couch with the air conditioner humming and the TV on quiet. A nature show about red pandas.
“No, I don’t understand,” her dad said. “Are you calling her a liar? A child who just had her leg torn up by a fucking alligator?”
“Come on, what really happened?”
Her dad’s temper surprised her sometimes—when he got mad at her for spilling a glass or knocking something over—but he always apologized. In the hug afterward, she could feel love up and down his arms, every hair holding onto her.
“It doesn’t matter, dad.”
She was limping a little, and the medicine was making her sleepy. Her dad reached behind him and pushed her back, out of the doorway. When she fell, the reporter pointed at her on the floor:
“Get that,” he said to a man with a camera.
It surprised her a little, the sound of her dad’s punch, how it was soft and hard at the same time. Not too different from the sound her leg made when the alligator bit down.
She ran her hand along the back of her knee where the tooth marks angled up and around like a crooked smile. Someone said her dad might go to jail for hitting the reporter.
Emily threw the remote across the room. The cover broke off, and the batteries spilled out onto the floor.
“It happened like you said, right?” she asked, down on her hands and knees scooping the batteries up.
“Yes ma’am.”
“You didn’t just cut your leg on an old car fender or something?”
How weird was it that she missed the alligator. Like a friend almost, someone who moved away one summer day without telling her.
“No, I don’t think so.”
Emily blew the hair out of her face and grunted back up onto the couch.
“Goddamn Florida is all I can say.”
Out on Lake Mary Jane, a man with a long pole and a pistol dragged an alligator out of the water. He said it was the same one, but how would he know?
They sat together on the couch, her and Emily, with an empty space between them. Anna could smell the butterfly bush outside the kitchen window that Emily always left open and her dad yelled at her about. This was her favorite time of year, the flowers reminded her—everything alive and stirring before summer came on full and it got too hot to do anything at all.
They’d think she was crazy if she told them how much she still loved swimming, the lake so cool and quiet. She wanted to go back, maybe ask the gator why it had let go. It wasn’t her doing, she knew that. Like everyone said, she was too little. All she knew was it had left its mark on her, which is what love does.
CROSSING TO LOPEZ
THERE WASN’T AS MUCH SATISFACTION as I’d hoped in watching Jason fall. Seeing him suspended for a second after I’d tripped the latch—not falling yet, but knowing he was going to—I did enjoy that. But at the same time, I knew it wasn’t progress. No matter what had happened over the years I should have moved beyond it. No matter that every rise of his was accompanied by a fall of mine, we were adults. I should have grown up, let the grievances fade between us. How else do you get past banging your head against a wall?
“Do you miss it?” my daughter asked just this morning, running her finger across my eye patch. When she was little, she would reach under the patch and touch the empty spot, gently. It never bothered her.
“Maybe sometimes.”
A typical equivocation on my part that she fortunately has not inherited.
“I like it this way,” she said.
It happened when we were in high school, me and Jason, crossing the Kendricks’ pasture to try to catch their llamas copulating and take pot shots at them with a BB gun. Stuck out on an island in Juan de Fuca Strait, with nothing but water everywhere, that’s what we had. He claimed it was an accident, that he was aiming at the tractor behind me. But we’d just split two Colt 45 talls and I was arguing with him about my girlfriend Tricia who would soon be his girlfriend, so yeah, I’m skeptical.
I didn’t appreciate her sufficiently, he was saying, and he may have been right. (At school I’d come across them sometimes, leaning close, their eyes—two apiece—lingering on each other unapologetically.) As we crossed from the road through the greening fields with the malt liquor circulating freely among my suspicions, he extolled her virtues and my shortcomings, and I hated them both a little. I said she couldn’t go a day without being told she was a precious gift, and if I still had the receipt I’d return her. And yes I did call her an emotional orca, but even I don’t know what that means, so as justifiable cause it’s pretty thin.
It didn’t hurt, exactly. There was an ache and a weird feeling of subtraction, something yanked out of me, but that was it. A red-tail circling above the ridge screeched once, then faded out, dissolved into a gray amorphousness. Not black, like you might think, just a dull spreading opacity, which it remains to this day.
“I’ve always been fascinated by the decision-making process,” Jason said, standing in front of the classroom where his daughter and mine sat next to each other, watching rapt as he turned his mice loose in their glass box to ram into transparent doors and claw their way over Stickum-painted barricades. There was no cheese waiting for them at the end, which I had thought was customary and only fair. There was no prize at all, and no discernible way out. He set them going like balls rolling downhill, noting their choices, clicking his stopwatch to record their reaction times, knowing their journey would be without end or reward.