Happy Family (31 page)

They end crumpled, damp, on the floor beside the bed, a sheet one of them must have dragged down snared around her leg like seaweed. His arm is draped over her shoulder. She can see the veins rising beneath the shadows of lines and ink on his arm. He tickles her shoulder with his fingertips; she shivers. It's raining. Hard. She listens to it
tip-tip-tip, tip-tip-tip
–ing against the roof. He yawns and stretches his arms over his head. What was it about the over-the-head stretch, the casual display of biceps and forearm that was so masculine it made her feel like Olive Oyl? “You got me good here,” he says, touching his neck.

“Oh, sorry,” she murmurs.

“Why? I'm not. I don't know about you, but I'm thirsty as fuck.” He goes to the kitchen in search of an oasis. She hoists herself into the bed. She thinks:
I'll just close my eyes for a minute. Just for a few seconds.

She wakes with the where-the-hell-am-I panic of a one-night stand. Sour breath, dry mouth. Sonny's on his back, one leg swung nearly off the side of the bed. She checks him out in the gray morning light: no drool, no snoring. His face looks younger at rest. She can't believe she passed out like that; sex was one thing, but actual sleeping with someone? She sees a bottle of water left on the floor for her; she grabs it and guzzles quietly so as not to wake him. She settles back into bed and realizes what's missing. For the first time since Michael's death, she didn't awaken to a sense of dread.

Sonny sighs and rolls over, his hand finding her breast, rousing her and himself into the half-life of not-quite-awake desire. They go easy; he enters her spoon-position, his fingers cheerleading her into the collapse of orgasm. She drifts, dissolving into vapor. When she wakes again the room is dark and she's alone in bed. She levers up a blind he must have closed. The ocean is whitecapped, the sky is gloomy, spitting rain.

She checks herself out in the bathroom. It definitely looks like she was fucked all night. The only thing she sees to put on is a sweatshirt hanging on the back of the door. It's missing a zipper. She dons it and pads to the kitchen, searches the space for her missing clothes. He's gotten a fire burning in the fireplace and proffers a mug. “Be warned: it's instant. I'd have done a Starbucks run but it's pretty gnarly out there. What—are you crushing on the djellaba? You are, aren't you?” He's wearing a white-and-blue-striped cotton tunic. It's not unsexy.

“Looks like a caftan to me.”

“I got it in Morocco. Stole it from a hotel room. Admit it. It's turning you on.” He's funny and knows how to build a fire, but where is her underwear?

“Have you seen my clothes?”

“I've got another one of these if you want,” he says, referring to his caftan. “Super-comfortable. Although that's a good look,” he says, taking in her near-nakedness. She runs a hand over her hair and feels sand.

“You're not good at accepting compliments.” Michael always used to say that to her, but she tries to put that thought out of her mind.

“Not my strong suit,” she says, sipping her coffee. Instant makes her nostalgic, something about astronauts and Tang and simpler times.

“Don't tell me you're shy? You weren't last night—”

“I'm autistic before I've had coffee.”

“Got it. Look, can we cut past the awkward part now we're sober? You have anywhere you've got to be anytime soon? Because I'd like to hang out with you some more.”

“Are you always this direct?”

“I'm not always anything.” He's moved next to her and traces her neck with his finger. “You're cold. Get ye by the fire, lassie. That and a shot of
uisge beatha
will warm you right up.”

They toast and drink standing by the fire. He moves behind her, his arms around her waist, and she wonders how he can still smell so good after a night of sex. She's seduced by the fire, relaxing into his steadiness. She can feel her lids getting heavy when it hits her: she's forgotten about the cat.

“If he was going to die, he would have done it already. It's true. If there were toxins left in his system, he's either purged it or is four-paws-up. In any case, there's no point rushing back.”

“Says the volunteer vet?”

“You thought I was the vet? More like vet tech. If you're going to be facetious, at least get your semantics right.”

“I should see for myself. Clothes, please?”

“Ah, what the hell, I'll drive you. We'll stop and get some food on the way. I'm jonesing for something ethnic. You like Indonesian? I know a place that makes killer crab
lada hitam
.”

“Where do you get Indonesian food around here?”

“Well, it's not exactly around here. In case you haven't noticed, Malibu is a whole lot of bland and blander. I'm starving, aren't you? You have to be hungry—it's two o'clock. Your clothes…” He opens the door to the living-room closet, where they're hung on a peg. “Didn't want them to dry all wrinkled.” Did she look like someone who cared if her jeans were wrinkled?

“I thought you were an animal lover.”

“I love a lot of things. Spicy food isn't totally top of the list, but close. It's all about balance; I learned that the hard way. Come on, let's do this. It looks like the rain is slowing down for a minute. We'll take it to go. The faster we get there, the faster we get back to check on the kitty.”

“Not exactly around here” is twenty minutes away in a strip mall off Pico in Santa Monica. Sonny's truck is filled with boxes so she has to maneuver to get in and out. He holds up an umbrella and they dash through a tiny market back to an even tinier restaurant. Who would even know this place existed? As a child she'd associated the scent of cumin with dirty underwear, but now the spicy smell makes her ravenous. The woman behind the counter recognizes Sonny and leaps up to help. She brings out a hot tray of banana-leaf wraps for them to try while they wait. They're like little Asian TV dinners. Melt-in-your-mouth, pop-of-spicy deliciousness.

“I told you it was worth it,” he says.

Because you're worth it.
Was that a shampoo commercial, some bullshit statement that was all Go, woman, go, but at the same time saying, As long as you cover those grays? You're worth it. Something Taya might say once Cheri tells her she hooked up with a random guy she met at her vet's. A guy who belts back the booze despite being self-proclaimed sober. She may be hungover but she doesn't miss a beat.

Skipperdee, it turns out, is exactly where she left him, curled up on a white pillow on the white couch, shedding gray fur. He meows when they call his name but doesn't get up. They peel off their wet jackets and Sonny sets about building a fire in the living room while she putters in the kitchen, putting food out for the cat. Funny how jobs divide up in coupledom. How much was in Michael's column that's now in hers? One of his last sentences was “Remember to call the chimney sweep!” She has not yet followed through.

“Where are you?” Sonny says, handing her a beer.

“I'm here.” As soon as the food is opened they plate it and carry everything they need to the table by the fire in the living room. Cheri eats ravenously—this was definitely worth the trip in what's now pouring rain.

“Okay, I can't eat another bite,” she says, pushing her plate away, feeling relaxed.

“There it is again.”

“What?”

“Your smile. It's crooked, but it's there.”

“I smile. It's not like I don't smile.”

“You've got a lot of looks, but it's hard to know what you're thinking. I bet you've used that to your advantage.” She purses her lips into a bit more of a smile. Sonny eyes what's left on her plate. “You going for that or can I?”

“All yours,” she says. He stabs a shrimp with his chopstick. Cheri looks out the window; the sky is dark and foreboding; the rain is starting to come down harder. “It's getting apocalyptic out there. People in LA always seem to be putting sandbags out or fighting fires or dealing with earthquakes. Why do people pay all this money to live where the land is most unstable?”

“Unpredictable is more interesting,” he says with his own crooked smile.

“I thought we were talking about weather.”

“Are we? Then bring on the zombie apocalypse. If it's going to end, might as well go out raging against the dying of the light. Unfortunately, all my end-of-the-world provisions are in storage,” he says.

“Don't tell me you're one of those guys with a homemade bomb shelter…”

“Let's say I have good survival skills, thanks to my second stepdad sending me away to wilderness training for fucked-up kids. You think cooking over a fire pit is roughing it, this was hard core. We had to eat rattlesnake and bugs, whatever we could find. Or starve. You know how hard it is to skin a rattlesnake with your bare hands when you're ten?” She wonders if that's even possible. “After the quake in '94 I got a bit extreme, I'll admit it, with the freeze-dried food and emergency generators.”

“So you're saying you have sandbags.”

“Correct. But if there was a tsunami or major disaster I'd be way unprepared. Bad news about being homeless means you can't carry generators and stockpiles of munitions around with you.”

“You don't need stockpiles.”

“Depends on how many zombies we're going to be fighting. That's why you have this?” He puts his hand on the top of her gun tattoo.

“That's kind of personal,” she says.

“I think we veered into the realm of personal when my tongue was on your pussy,” he says. “But I don't mean to pry.”

“I got it in a former life.”

“Former life, former boyfriend. You got fucked up and got matching tattoos. I know the drill.”

“We were cops.” She cracks open the Macallan she's glad she remembered to bring.

“Unexpected.”

“That's what a lot of people said at the time,” she says, pouring them each a whiskey.

“So back up. You said you taught religion. Was that before or after being a cop? Was this in Chicago or New York?”

“The eighties, New York. In the housing projects. On the Lower East Side.”

“You are definitely an interesting woman. I don't trust anything linear. Why did you become a cop?”

She considers what to say. “Probably because I knew it would piss off my parents. I wanted to get as far away from them and their world as possible.”

“And did you?”

“Mission accomplished,” she says, taking a drink.

“I worked with guys straight out of Compton; I can imagine it must have been pretty hard core in the projects in the eighties. And as a woman? Was pissing off your parents worth it?”

“Okay, maybe that wasn't the only reason,” Cheri says. “I did have some ideas about making a difference.”

“So tell me about the guy out there with the same tat. You were in love with him?” She'd been married for ten years and yet when she thinks of being in love, she goes back to Eddie Norris.

Whether it was the rain or the hangover or being properly fucked for the first time in ages, Cheri found herself telling him things that, in all the years of marriage to Michael, she had never revealed. She started with her first months on the job. Told him about the harassment; opening her locker to find bloody Tampax or, once, some rotting fish. Cops calling her Kike Dyke and Bagel Bitch. How she had the highest scores in her police academy class but wasn't put in rotation; couldn't get in a car or foot patrol because females were girls first, cops second. Until Eddie Norris. “He came from a SEU narcotics division up on One Hundred and Twelfth Street; he made twenty collars a month. A hundred hours of overtime—he barely slept he worked so much. He was a solution looking for a problem; everyone wanted to be his friend. Most guys in that position were walking egos. But not him. He got along with everyone. And he wasn't afraid he'd look like less of a man because he was letting a rookie female actually do the job. A lot of cops wanted to be in Alphabet City then; dope deals took place on nearly every corner, out of cinder-block holes in the walls of abandoned buildings. The projects were an urban blight, drug dens built into broken-down tenements. It was a hotbed, you always felt like something was about to explode, and usually it did. I know, you think adrenaline rush, power trip…”

“I think you said you lived there. The good-cop part,” Sonny says. Cheri thinks of Yure's grandson in the wheelchair. She and Eddie had found the gangbanger who did that and put him away.

 “There was that. I wouldn't have gotten on that beat if it wasn't for Eddie. He was comfortable in his skin at a time when I wanted to jump out of mine. He didn't give a shit what people thought. People were always busting his balls about his car—this piss-yellow Mazda—but he didn't care. He loved it.”

“And he loved you. Not that I'm equating you with a piss-yellow Mazda.”

“Yeah, we had something…a real connection.”

“So what was it? I'm not going to go for the easy, cop-on-cop sex. You said fuck you to your parents and joined the police force and here was a guy who I'm assuming was the total opposite of anyone you'd grown up with…”

“No. Well, no and yes.” She might have been running away, but she was also running toward something. “I guess you could say Eddie Norris caught me. He stopped me, allowed me to let down and just be myself. He accepted me.” She looks around in search of what is just now sinking in as being the heart of what went so right and then so terribly wrong in their relationship. “I felt safe,” she admits. Sonny gives her a knowing nod.

“So why did it end?”

“The truth?”

“No,” he says, “I want a lie. Your choice, given there's no way I'm going to know the difference.”

Should she tell about that night? What sent her running back to Eighty-first Street to barricade herself in her room in a tailspin of shock and heartbreak? She had never spoken about it to anyone. Eddie Norris banging on her apartment door. Insistent. The last time he'd done that, he'd taken her and fucked her from behind over the bathtub. The clear plastic shower curtain pressing against her face, like Saran Wrap, like silk. That was a fantasy. They'd done some role-playing but part of their cop-on-cop sex was they'd seen enough darkness to never let it go too far. She'd thought maybe he was going for a repeat.