And Mimi hated the little rowhouse Becky and Andrew had bought the year before. “Your kitchen’s in the basement!” Mimi had shrieked in dismay when she’d flown in from Texas for a visit. Becky bit her lip at the spectacle of Mimi, who only ever made reservations, getting in a tizzy over the location of the kitchen. Instead, Becky pointed out the hand-glazed tile floor and the built-in bookcases were big enough for all of her cookbooks. Andrew, wearing an old pair of scrubs, painted each floor of their house a different color—rich wine-red for the kitchen, goldenrod-yellow for the ground-floor living room, robin’s-egg blue for the third floor, where he’d put up walls, turning what had been one big bedroom into one medium-sized bedroom, a short hallway, a closet, and a sunny little nook where their baby would sleep. He’d come to bed that night with paint in his hair, and she’d told him that it was just what she’d wanted.
And it was,
Becky thought, as Andrew said his final good-bye to Mimi and pulled her off the couch for a hug.
“You sure you don’t want a day off?” he asked.
She shook her head. “Can you feel that?” she asked, pressing his hand against her belly.
Andrew nodded. Becky closed her eyes and leaned against her husband’s shoulder as the baby swam inside of her.
“So,” my mother asked me during my ninth week under her same-as-it-ever-was roof, “are you here to stay?” She bared her teeth in the first-floor bathroom mirror, checking for lipstick. Another day, another white blouse/black slacks combo, here in the House Where Time Stood Still.
I sat on the couch with my head bent over the basket of laundry I was folding, feeling even more off-balance than normal. I’d woken up thinking not of the baby but of Sam. In Los Angeles, there’d been a homeless woman who hung around at the corner by the gate to our apartment building in Hancock Park. Morning after morning, wearing three dirty coats in the seventy-degree weather, she’d be there, jabbing her finger in the air and talking to herself. After we’d come home from Korean barbecue one night and she’d been gesticulating wildly at our car as we drove by, Sam had made it his project to win her over. It was for my own good, he told me. “I understand that there are crazy people everywhere,” he explained, “but if there’s going to be one around the baby, I’d rather she was a benevolent crazy person.” One morning, he headed out early, in a T-shirt and jeans and a baseball cap, all cleft chin and bright blue eyes, with an apple in his hand. Ten minutes later, he came back, sans apple, with a welt on his forehead.
“She threw it at me,” he reported, sounding both indignant and amused, and I teased him, saying she was the first woman in a long time who hadn’t been won over by his good looks and Texan charm. I’d thought that would be the end of his homeless outreach project, but every morning for two weeks he’d carry something out the door—a yogurt, a bagel, a packaged Zone meal (we’d had a huge fight about that, with me arguing that homeless, hungry people should not be given low-cal commodities and Sam saying that it wasn’t fair to treat our lady any differently than the other dieting denizens of L.A.). I don’t think she ever spoke to Sam, but I do know that she never threw anything at him again…and that once the baby came, when I pushed my stroller past her, she stepped back respectfully, looking at us with a hungry avidity, as if she were watching a parade.
My mother was staring at me, looking at my gray high school–era sweatpants and washed-out Pat Benatar T-shirt with her nose scrunched. “Do you have any plans?”
I folded a washcloth and set it in the basket. “I’m not sure.”
“What have you been doing all day long?” I examined her voice for criticism, for her typical thinly veiled anger, but didn’t find it. Her eyes were focused on the scarf she was tying around her neck, and she just sounded curious.
“Sleeping, mostly,” I said. It was partially true. I did sleep as often as I could, long, fuzzy hours on the Strawberry Shortcake comforter with the dusty blinds pulled down. I’d wake up from the naps with my heart thudding, a sour taste in my mouth, and my body covered in sweat, feeling less rested than I had when I’d laid down, and then I’d get into the rental car and head to the city, to the park, and to the woman I’d been…what?
Stalking
was the shameful word that surfaced in my mind. The week before I’d left a pacifier in the window box of the restaurant where she worked, but that wasn’t hurting anyone, was it?
So what else was I doing all day long? In between four-hour naps and trips to the park, I’d been trying to compose a letter to my husband. I wasn’t sure what it should say. All I knew for sure was that Hallmark didn’t make a card for it.
Dear Sam,
I’d begun.
I’m sorry.
That was as far as I’d gotten.
“Why don’t you tell me what’s going on?” my mother asked.
I shook my head. “Something happened,” I told her as the world started to spin. I gripped the laundry basket and shut my eyes.
“Well, Lisa, I managed to figure out that much,” she told me. I waited for her voice to rise into the taunting singsong she’d used to such devastating effect when I was a teenager. It didn’t. “You might feel better if you talked about it,” she said. I blinked at her to make sure it was still the same old Mom—sensible shoes and neat hair, the same long, sharp nose that I had, and lipstick that would undoubtedly wind up on her teeth at some point during the day.
“I can’t,” I said. “Not yet.”
“Fine, then,” she said. “Whenever you’re ready.”
“I don’t know why you’re asking,” I said, gathering the laundry. “It isn’t like you care.”
“Oh, Lisa, don’t start that adolescent nonsense. I’m your mother. Of course I care.”
I thought about what I could tell her and what it would do. I could imagine her face crumpling, the way she’d hold out her arms to me—
Oh, Lisa! Oh, honey!
Or maybe not. Maybe she’d just wipe her teeth with her finger and look at me as if I was kidding or inventing things (“Young lady, I want the truth, not one of your inventions!”). She’d looked at me a lot that way before I left. She’d looked at my father that way, before he’d left, too.
I got to my feet, holding the laundry to my chest.
“Lisa,” she said. “I do care.” If she’d touched me—if she’d put her hand on my arm, even if she’d just looked at me, just looked—I might have told her the whole thing. But she didn’t. She glanced at her watch and picked up her car keys from the table by the door. “Here,” she said. She reached into the closet, rummaging past my junior-high-era denim jacket and one of my father’s discarded raincoats, and handed me something—a down coat, calf-length and bulky, electric blue, with snaps running up the front. “It’s cold today.”
I looked at myself in the mirror once she was gone, seeing the circles under my eyes, the hollows in my cheeks, my greasy two-toned hair. I looked about ready to join the apple-chucking bag lady. I pulled on the coat, lay down on my tilting bed, and pulled out my cell phone.
You have twenty-seven new messages,
said the voice mail.
Lia, it’s me. Lia, where are you? Lia, could you please…
And then just
Please.
I hit “delete” twenty-seven times, and then lay there in the semidarkness, thinking about my husband. It still felt strange to think of Sam that way. We’d been dating for less than a year when we got married, and we’d only been married for ten months when I left.
Sam and I had met at a club where we’d both been working. Sam was tending bar. My job was to open the doors of cars as they pulled up to the curb, lean down low enough to let the passengers get a good view of my cleavage, and say, “Welcome to Dane!” with a smile that suggested the possibility, if not the likelihood, of hot anonymous sex in the ladies’ room.
“Not Dane’s!” the owner had screamed at the six model/actresses he’d hired, as five o’clock approached. “It’s not Dane’s; it’s just Dane! Welcome to Dane! Let me hear you say it!”
“Welcome to Dane,” we’d chanted.
“We’re like the world’s best-looking Hare Krishnas,” I said an hour later, leaning surreptitiously against the bar with one high heel slipped off so I could massage a blister in progress.
Sam had laughed when I’d said that…and, later, he’d handed me a vodka gimlet and hadn’t charged me. “Welcome to Sam,” he said. There was a hint of Texas in his voice, even after six years of struggling-actordom in Los Angeles. He was handsome, but so were most of the men in that town. Sam was better than handsome. He was kind.
“Are you sure?” I’d asked him when he’d slipped a coiled paper-straw wrapper band around my ring finger, the day after the three take-home pregnancy tests had come back positive, positive, and, you guessed it, positive. I’d twisted the bit of paper around and around, feeling happy and excited and scared.
“I’m sure,” he’d said. He’d reached into his pocket and pulled out a travel agent’s envelope with two tickets to Las Vegas. “I’m sure about you.”
Las Vegas was perfect. It eliminated the potential unpleasantness of a big wedding, with his family present and my family absent—absent and dead, as far as Sam was concerned, in that long-ago car-crash tragedy. “Go get a massage,” Sam told me after we’d checked in. “They do prenatal ones. I checked.” When I got back to the room, there was a green garment bag lying on the bed. “I know you don’t have a family to do this for you,” he’d said. I’d shaken the gown out onto the bed. It was a creamy color somewhere between ivory and gold, full-skirted, made of silk that was as soft as petals. “Let me be your family now,” he’d said.
There were birds in the hotel lobby, I remembered, parrots and macaws and lorakeets with brilliant yellow and emerald-green feathers. Their eyes seemed to follow me from their bamboo cages as I walked by with my husband, holding my frothy skirt, hearing my heels click on the marble floor. If I could rewrite the story in the manner of the Brothers Grimm, I would have the birds call out warnings:
Turn back, turn back, thou pretty bride!
Then I would erase what I’d written, going back and back and back to the night we’d met. If he hadn’t smiled at my joke; if he hadn’t given me the drink; if I hadn’t liked the look of his face and his hands when he passed his jacket across the bar, telling me that I looked cold in my hot pants.
I pulled my mother’s coat around me and got to my feet. The diaper bag was at the foot of the stairs where I’d left it. I slung it over my shoulder, worked my engagement ring off my finger, and slipped it into my pocket. I’d locked the door behind me before I remembered that the letter for Sam was still on top of my old bed. I decided to leave it there. Let her try to figure it out. Let her try to make sense of who Sam was and what I’d done to be sorry for.
Forty-five minutes later, I was back in the pawnshop I’d first visited eleven years ago, with a different diamond ring in my hand. The guy behind the counter spent what felt like an eternity peering through the loupe, from the diamonds to my face, back to the diamonds again.
“It’s from Tiffany’s,” I’d said to fill the silence.
“Seven thousand,” the guy had said—his first words. “And if it’s stolen, I don’t want to know.”
I wanted to argue, to bargain, to tell him that the ring was worth more than that, and found I didn’t have the energy. I just held out my hand for the money, and he’d handed it over, a thick wad of hundred-dollar bills that I folded and refolded and finally crammed into one of the bag’s many pockets, a zippered plastic one intended for dirty clothes or wipes.
Then I walked to a coffee shop on South Street, picked up a copy of one of the free weeklies, and began circling ads for apartments. I kept my head down and tried to ignore Sam’s voice in my head, the way he would have had me laughing by trying to pronounce
STDIO SBLT
and
RD BRCK GDN
and asking why the advertisers couldn’t just pay extra and spring for the vowels.
“
SUBLET, RITTENHOUSE SQUARE,
” I circled. “
ONE BEDROOM, HARDWOOD FLOORS, PARK VIEWS, AVAILABLE IMMEDIATELY.
” It sounded perfect, and the rent wouldn’t put an unsustainable dent into my cash wad. I dialed the number and was surprised to find myself talking to an actual person instead of an answering machine. I made an appointment and headed west, first up Pine Street, then up Walnut, where my feet slowed down of their own volition in front of an Internet café.
My fingers felt clumsy on the keyboard. My login was the one I’d given myself years ago—LALia. The password was our baby’s name. I had a hundred and ninety-three new messages, including one from Sam for every day I’d been gone.
PLEASE,
read the memo line of the most recent ones. Not
PLEASE READ THIS.
Just
PLEASE.
I held my breath and clicked one open.
Dear Lia. I’m honoring your wishes and not trying to find you, but I’d give anything just to know that you’re all right.
I think about you all the time. I wonder where you are. I wish I could be there with you. I wish there was some way to make you believe that none of this was your fault, it was just a terrible thing that happened. I wish I could tell you that in person. I wish I could help.
Can I?
He hadn’t signed his name.
I hit reply before I could lose my nerve.
I’m home,
I wrote to my husband.
I’m safe. I’ll write more when I can.
I paused, my fingers quivering over the keyboard.
I think about you, too,
I wrote. But I couldn’t. Not yet. I hit Delete, shoved a five-dollar bill in the tip cup at the counter and pushed through the heavy glass door.
Forty-five minutes later I was knocking on a door on the sixteenth floor of the Dorchester.
“It’s a six-month sublet,” said the super, a middle-aged man in khakis and a tie that he kept tugging. He opened the door on an empty one-bedroom unit with parquet floors, two big closets, a galley kitchen, and a view of the park. “Dishwasher, garbage disposal, coin-op laundry in the basement.”
I walked through the apartment, hearing Sam’s voice in my head. Dshwshr! Gbg dspsl! Pk Vu! The super was watching me closely. I pulled my mother’s coat tightly around me and looked down, noticing that my little pink slides, so perfect for traversing the three feet of sidewalk between valet parking and any given Los Angeles destination, were looking a little worse for the wear after weeks in Philly.
“And here’s your view,” he said, pulling open the blinds with a theatrical flick of his wrist.
I touched the glass with my fingertips and looked down into the park where I’d spent the last weeks sitting, watching, and waiting. Sixteen floors below me, a man and a little boy were crossing the park hand in hand. The man had on jeans and a blue shirt, and the boy, who was maybe six years old, was pushing a silver scooter.
“Oh, God,” I whispered, and placed both palms flat on the glass.
“Are you okay?” asked the super.
“Dizzy,” I managed.
He hurried up behind me, close enough to grab me if I fell, and then paused like he was frozen, unsure of whether or not to touch me. “You need to sit down?”
You needa siddown
was what I heard. Philly accents. I’d forgotten about them.
“I’m fine. Really. I was just a little dizzy. Too much coffee. Or maybe not enough.” I was trying to remember how people talked to each other. I’d gotten out of practice since I’d been back. “A goose walked over my grave,” I blurted, then bit my lip. That was one of my mother’s favorite sayings, and it had just popped out of my mouth like a dove flying out of a magician’s hat.