Authors: Clare Willis
When the plane landed at San Francisco International Airport Richard was one of the first people to disembark. He left his seatmate curled under a blanket, her face turned toward the window, while a flight attendant made his way over to wake her up. Sometimes watching the aftermath of a kill was interesting: loved ones wailing and screaming, officious policemen stamping around, pretending at competence. But he knew this one would be neat. The flight attendant would quietly call an ambulance and the paramedics would bundle Vera up and carry her away. It would be hours, or even days from now, before anyone noticed that Vera had been exsanguinated. If they figured it out at all.
Looking out the taxi window at the foggy, steel-gray depths of a seasonably cold June day, Richard was content. He imagined the paramedics covering her with a sheet, but not before they noticed the little Mona Lisa smile on Vera’s chalk-white face, and wondered what she had been thinking about right before she died.
By eight o’clock the toasts had been made, the cake had been eaten, and the bouquet tossed, so Sunni felt she could make her escape. She left the rest of the guests whirling like Turkish dervishes to nineties cover tunes and repaired to the elegance of the Redwood Room at the Clift Hotel. Sunni’s booth faced the monumental wooden bar, rumored to have been carved during the gold rush days from the trunk of a single Sequoia tree. Unmerciful techno pop music hacked at her eardrums, but thanks to California’s no smoking ordinance, the air at least was clear. Sunni always appreciated it when a law touted community benefit over individual freedom. Unless
her
freedom was in jeopardy, but she’d quit smoking when she was sixteen. Her bridesmaid’s dress was in a shopping bag on the floor, and she’d changed into a comfortable going-out outfit: jeans, black silk blouse, and a short, close-fitting red leather jacket.
On her size five feet were a pair of Prada pumps with four-inch heels. She always wore heels to compensate for her short stature, and she stretched her modest budget to buy the good ones—Prada, Louboutin, Blahnik. The cardboard monstrosities Lydia called shoes were in the garbage can outside the reception hall. The dress would join its sisters at Thrift Town on Valencia Street, where perhaps it might find a second life as a prom dress or a Halloween costume.
Her best friend Isabel entered the bar, craning her head as she looked for Sunni. Quite a few of the patrons stared as she wove around the tables, and not only because her neon green animal print dress could have doubled as a hazard sign. Isabel’s arm crutches seemed to make people think they had license to watch her like a show on cable TV.
Isabel’s crocodile-skin Birkin backpack landed in the center of the table, perilously close to a lit candle. Sunni moved it to a safer spot.
“How was the wedding?” Isabel asked, leaning her crutches against a chair.
“Beautiful, touching, and heartfelt,” Sunni said.
“What’s wrong?” Isabel gave her the same suspicious look as the woman in the bathroom.
“Nothing’s wrong.”
Isabel waved a hand in dismissal. “I’ve known you forever, Sunni. I can tell when something’s bothering you, and it wasn’t just that you hate weddings. Spill it.”
Forever was an exaggeration, but it didn’t feel like much of one. Sunni had been fourteen when she met Isabel, on her first day at the Ashwood Psychiatric Institute in San Rafael, across the Golden Gate Bridge from San Francisco. When a nurse in surgical scrubs showed Sunni to her room, Isabel was already there, sitting on one of the iron hospital beds, reading
Tiger Beat
magazine. Sunni had tossed her fraying duffel bag onto the other bed and sat down.
“What’s your name?” Isabel asked. She gave Sunni a big smile. Her pink lip gloss was askew, her blond hair was messy, and there was a pair of weird crutches leaning against the wall. Sunni wondered what Isabel’s diagnosis was, whether they put people with the same illnesses together or spread them around.
“Sunni.”
“Cute name. Mine’s Isabel.”
“Nicetomeechya,” Sunni mumbled. She tore a cuticle off and savored the tarnished penny taste of blood.
“I’m fourteen, how old are you?”
“Same.”
“What are you in for, Sunni?”
“What are
you
in for, nosy? ”
“Depression.”
“Oh.” Sunni narrowed her eyes and peered at the blond girl. She might be crippled, but her hair and skin were very glossy, and her clothes looked expensive. The girl was rich, and Sunni was ready to hate her. “Then why are you smiling like an idiot?”
Isabel shrugged. “I don’t know. Just being polite, I guess.”
But Isabel didn’t withdraw or turn away, as most people did when Sunni antagonized them, she just kept looking at her with an open, inviting expression. For some reason, perhaps because she had just been admitted to a psych hospital and didn’t have much to protect anymore, she decided to tell Isabel the truth.
“They say I’m depressed, but that’s not really it. I’m not like other people,” she said. “I have these weird abilities. But they keep getting me into trouble.”
Isabel nodded as if she was familiar with this problem, as if Sunni had said she was bulimic or had a drug problem.
“What do your parents say? ”
“I don’t have any parents.”
To Sunni’s surprise, Isabel reached across the suitcases and grabbed Sunni’s hand. “That must be so hard for you,” she whispered.
At that point the girl who had prided herself since the age of eight on having a heart of stone, had started to cry.
Sunni looked up at the bar. “Let’s get a drink first. I need it.”
A waiter approached, his eyes fixed on Sunni. He was a handsome young white guy with short black hair, gold hoop earrings, and a tattoo on his neck that looked like a hand strangling him. From a distance he had looked thirty. Close up he appeared closer to twenty.
“That’s a righteous tat,” he said. “Did you have it done in the city?” Sunni saw a flash of gold in his tongue when he smiled.
Sunni reached a finger to the rose tattoo just under her left collarbone. Many times she’d picked up the phone to call a dermatologist and have the tattoo removed, but had never been able to go through with it. So it remained, an ambivalent memento of turbulent times, and of people, and things now lost. She pulled her blouse to cover it. “I don’t really remember where I got it,” she lied.
He chuckled. “Hell, I don’t remember getting half of mine.”
“Can we just get a drink, buddy?” Sunni said abruptly.
The waiter lifted his hands in a gesture of surrender. “Sorry. Didn’t realize you were shy about it.”
“I’m shy, believe me.”
Isabel snorted with laughter.
“What can I get you, ma’am?” he asked Isabel.
“A glass of Hess chardonnay. ”
He turned silently to Sunni.
“I’ll have a margarita, lots of salt,” Sunni said.
“Certainly. I’ll just need to see some ID.” He smiled apologetically.
“Oh, really? From whom?” Isabel said.
“From you both,” he replied, but he was still looking at Sunni. “I’m sorry, ladies, it’s my job. My boss is right over there behind the bar. Otherwise it would be totally cool, you know. ”
“Will it be totally cool when you figure out that I’m thirty-two?” Sunni said as she pulled out her wallet. She gave the waiter exactly five seconds to look at her ID before she snatched it back. Isabel took longer to get hers out, but she let him stare at it for as long as he wanted.
“I’ll get your drinks.” He smiled and walked away.
Isabel turned to Sunni, a quizzical eyebrow raised.
“What? “ Sunni asked.
She inclined her head toward the waiter, who was watching their table while the bartender worked the blender. “You still get these young guys hitting on you. How do you do that?”
Sunni rolled her eyes. “He was hardly hitting on me.”
“Until he saw your license he was. ”
Sunni squinted at her friend. “You want teenage boys hitting on you, Izzy? ”
“I’d like anybody hitting on me, Sunni.” Her eyelids flickered. “Seems like men think that if you have a disability you don’t have a vagina.”
Sunni looked at the table, chastened. She tried to recall the last time Isabel had been out with a man. She remembered their prom night all too well, but surely Isabel had been out with someone since then? Maybe not. Sunni rarely thought about Isabel’s multiple sclerosis, but it was probably the first thing a potential date would consider.
“It’s just because I look so young,” Sunni grumbled.
“You should be happy. When you’re fifty you’ll look like you’re thirty.”
“Humph,” Sunni snorted. “And when I’m a hundred I’ll look like I’m eighty. What good will that do me?”
The waiter silently set their drinks on the table. Isabel rolled the first sip of wine around her mouth like the connoisseur she was. “Okay,
now
tell me what’s wrong,” she said.
“I saw him at the wedding. This drunk guy tried to attack me in the bathroom and suddenly there he was.” Sunni took a big swig of her margarita. “My guardian angel.”
Isabel’s eyes widened. “Someone tried to attack you? Are you okay? ”
“Fine.”
“Did he save you again?”
“Actually, no, I took care of the guy myself. Kneed him in the balls and then punched him in the neck.” She smiled at the memory.
“You didn’t,” Isabel gasped.
“I did. It was so weird. I got this burst of adrenaline, and then everything was moving really slowly, well, I was moving normally but everything else slowed down. It was so easy to take the guy down. It felt like I was made to do it. ”
“And your guardian angel? What was he doing?”
“Nothing. Just watching. ”
“He didn’t step in?”
Sunni shook her head. “No, but when it was over he tried to leave, so I grabbed him.”
“You actually had your hands on him? He’s a real, flesh and blood person?” Isabel asked.
Sunni’s jaw dropped. “Izzy! Did you think I made him up?”
Isabel looked guilty. “Not that you made him up, exactly, but that maybe you were exaggerating a little.”
Sunni thought about it. Had she been that extravagant in talking about the man? She thought she’d been entirely straightforward. She saw him a few times a year, and he seemed to be watching her. He’d saved her from a mugger once. He was extraordinarily handsome, and extremely tall. What had she exaggerated?
“Anyway,” Sunni said, a little huffily. “He said his name was Jacob Eddington.”
“He told you his name? So you have something to go on!”
Anger boiled in Sunni’s gut, filling her body with a tension that had no outlet. “No, I don’t. I’ve already looked him up, Googled him, what have you. Jacob Eddington doesn’t exist, at least not in California.”
Isabel watched a rowdy group of men in suits toast each other loudly. “Did you follow up on some of the ones in other states?”
Sunni pursed her lips. “Yes, Izzy, I called Iowa, Nevada, and Rhode Island. As you can imagine, no one said they’d spent the last ten years following me around San Francisco.”
Isabel sipped her wine, her eyes wide with amazement. “How did it end?”
“He tried to hypnotize me.”
Isabel choked, sending a spray of wine flying onto the table. “He did not!”
Sunni nodded. “That’s what I think it was. But it didn’t work.”
“Well, at least you know he means you no harm. Maybe you just have to take a religious-type attitude toward this. Just accept that he’s here for you, watching over you.” Isabel checked her watch. “I have to go, Sunni. I’m meeting Daddy for dinner at the Ritz. We’re wining and dining some clients from Japan.”
In the ten years since her mother died Isabel had slowly become Dennis LaForge’s surrogate wife, eventually performing all the spousal duties except conjugal ones. She lived with him, picked up his dry-cleaning, entertained the clients of his real estate development company, and attended his charity galas. It was a peculiar relationship, and probably one of the reasons Isabel was still single.
The LaForges had changed Sunni’s life. After her discharge from the Ashwood Institute, they moved her into their Russian Hill mansion and became her foster parents. They helped her to go to college, and when she decided she wanted to open an art gallery Dennis bankrolled it and became her first and best customer. She would always be grateful to them. It was weird to see your almost-sister essentially marry your almost-father, but they were both adults and it was their choice, so Sunni stayed out of it.
“Why don’t you come to the gallery tomorrow, and bring Dennis?” Sunni asked as Isabel slid her arms into her crutches. “A piece came in that I think he’d be interested in. We can have dim sum afterward at the Golden Dragon. ”
“What’s the piece?”
“A Qing dynasty porcelain vase with a garniture of Louis XV bronze mounts.”
“English, please,” Isabel said.
“A vase made in China in about 1750, brought to France and decorated with bronze handles in the shape of lions’ heads.”
Isabel frowned. “Doesn’t he already have a bunch of vases?”
“Yeah, he has a bunch of Impressionist paintings too, but does he stop buying them?”
Isabel laughed. “At least I like the Impressionists.”
“When you inherit you can sell everything you don’t like.”
“He’ll probably give it all to a museum for the tax write-off before he dies. Are you coming, Sunni?”
Sunni shook her head. “I’m going to have another drink.”
“Suit yourself. I’ll see you tomorrow.” Isabel maneuvered slowly through an obstacle course of tables and chairs. Sunni wondered, not for the first time, if public establishments had any idea how difficult they made it for people with mobility issues. Would it be so hard to put tables in a straight line?
She beckoned for the waiter with all the piercings and ordered another margarita. Normally she wasn’t much of a drinker, but her encounter with Jacob Eddington had left her agitated. When the waiter returned with her drink he leaned toward her ear.
“The gentleman over there would like to buy you a drink.” He indicated the table of rowdy men. Sunni would have assumed they were stockbrokers, except with the stock market in the toilet it had been a while since she’d seen any of those types celebrating.