Once Upon a Day (38 page)

I had no interest in staying with Mrs. Fowler, and I was still a little afraid of hotels. But I was nervous about staying with Lucy too, especially because I knew her husband, Al, would be there. I did need sleep though. I’d hardly slept at all last night; I’d been so worried about what was happening to Stephen.

“Why don’t I give you a moment to think about it?” Lucy said, standing up.

She started in the direction of Al and Mrs. Fowler, but she walked very slowly because she seemed to have something wrong
with her right leg. It wasn’t a limp; it was more of a stiffness or weakness, and it wasn’t her foot, but the leg itself. Still, I knew it was a sign. Here was the charming coincidence, a nearly perfect example. I knew what I needed to do.

I stood up and walked over to them, but I spoke only to Lucy. “Thank you for your offer. I’ll stay with you tonight.”

L
UCY ALWAYS DREAMED
of what it would be like to have her daughter back, but it didn’t take her long to discover that the reality of being with Dorothea was nothing like her dreams. In Lucy’s best fantasy, Dorothea was always glad to be home, thrilled to see Lucy, understanding of all that had happened before—and that was essentially it. What Dorothea herself was like, the person she’d become, Lucy could never imagine, no matter how hard she tried. Whenever she looked at the age-enhanced pictures of Dorothea or Jimmy, it was like looking at a gross distortion of their small child selves and it was both depressing and a little frightening, as if two oddly featureless adults had swallowed up her babies.

The most startling thing about the real Dorothea was that she was so absolutely the same person Lucy had known. She’d grown up, but she was still unmistakably the daughter Lucy had loved for the first four years of her life. There was no distortion, just what Lucy thought of as a completion, and a truly fascinating one.

Of course she didn’t look the same, yet there were surprising similarities. Her skin was so white and baby perfect that both Al and Janice noticed it immediately: Janice whispered to Lucy that it looked like Dorothea had been brought up in a cave; Al said more kindly that it was one of many pretty things about her very pretty daughter. Dorothea also had the same hair she’d had before: dark brown, thick and very straight, though it had grown so long she had to move it whenever she sat down, and Lucy wondered why she wore it that way, when it had to be such a hassle to take care of. Her eyes were still large and the brightest blue, still clear and open in a way Al called “absorbing.” Al also said Dorothea had Lucy’s eyes, but Charles had blue eyes too, though naturally Lucy didn’t mention that.

Dorothea had been born tiny, and she was still thin, but she was also very tall. Lucy estimated that she was about five-ten, though it was hard to tell for sure because she didn’t slump like most tall women did. Her daughter had great posture, even when she was sitting, and it struck Lucy that this was part of the overall confidence she’d always had from the time she was very little. Al said she had a way of looking everyone directly in the eye, as though no one could intimidate her. “And did you see the way she just marched up on the stage? That’s an actress’s kid for you.”

The other side of the story, of course, was that she’d had a breakdown only a few minutes later. Lucy had felt so sad when she came outside and saw Dorothea doubled over, desperate for air. Her daughter’s breathing problems and rapid heartbeat were the one thing she hadn’t wanted to stay the same.

Late that night, when Lucy and Al were getting ready for bed, Al told her he agreed with Janice that it was wrong to let Dorothea keep believing her father was a good man. “I know you wanted her to feel better. But you have to set the record straight.”

Lucy told him that she would say more, when the time was right. Something was obviously going on with her daughter, and Lucy wanted to figure out what it was before she risked alienating
Dorothea. In the car on the way to their house, Dorothea had answered Al’s question about why she’d come to California with a terse, “Because my father told me to.” When Al asked how long she planned to stay, she said she’d rather discuss it later, but Lucy heard a sadness in her voice that made her wish she could fold Dorothea in her arms.

What had her daughter’s life been like these last nineteen years? Though Lucy was reluctant to ask her directly, knowing Dorothea didn’t trust her yet, she had a hunch from the way Dorothea spoke that it had been more than a little unusual. Al noticed it too. He said she sounded a little old-fashioned, but that wasn’t really a bad thing. “No kids today say ‘thank you’ and ‘you’re welcome’ all the time like she does.”

The next morning, Lucy had an idea. Janice had already told her that Dorothea had grown up without a TV and had never seen any of Charles’s movies. When Dorothea came into the breakfast room, Lucy suggested that she might want to watch
The View from Main Street.
“It’s very good. Your father won an award for the screenplay.”

“Do you mean now?” Dorothea said. Lucy noticed that her outfit looked a little wrinkled, which wasn’t surprising, given that she’d brought her clothes in a large green garbage bag rather than a suitcase. She couldn’t imagine Charles letting his daughter travel like that. She wanted to conclude Dorothea didn’t live with him anymore, but she had a feeling there was more to the story.

“Why not now?” Lucy said. “Al’s at work. We could watch it together and have toast or bagels.”

“All right.” Dorothea smiled a half smile. “I always enjoy movies. Thank you for suggesting this. Actually, I would love to see a movie Father made.”

At nine-thirty, they were settled in the den, each with a bagel and cream cheese and a glass of orange juice. Lucy was steeling herself a little because she hadn’t watched this herself since Charles disappeared. The only reason she even owned the DVD was because Walter made sure to always send her every released version of any of
Charles’s pictures. He also sent her some of the profits, but she only kept enough for the taxes on the house and for the trips she took trying to find the children. The rest she gave away to charity.

The movie was about an Irish Catholic family in the fifties, the Lanigans, who live in an idyllic little town in Nebraska. Mrs. Lanigan and the four young children are wonderful, but Paul Lanigan doesn’t appreciate what he has. He grew up without a father himself; he never wanted a family, but he ended up with one when his girlfriend got pregnant. He’s not cruel; he just doesn’t care. But then one day, as he’s walking his eight-year-old son to the store, Paul Lanigan is almost killed. He’s in the middle of complaining about something and he doesn’t see a car coming straight for him, but his son does and, at the last minute, he pushes his father out of the way.

The rest of the film charts Paul’s transformation as he comes to believe that the only thing that makes his life worth living is caring for his family. The plot itself wasn’t why Charles won an Oscar; it was the writing, especially the part of Paul, who the critics said was like the biblical Paul converted on the road to Damascus, except rather than believing in God, Paul Lanigan believes in the fifties dream of giving his children a chance at a better life. The complexity of the movie unfolds as Paul Lanigan has such difficulty defining what that better life would be, and he travels throughout the town, asking questions, trying to understand why his neighbors live as they do. In the end, he realizes that a good life requires being moral and being educated, and he decides to instill those values in his children. The last scene shows those children grown up, and it’s clear he’s succeeded.

Lucy might have found it hard to watch, with all the focus on the father, if she’d been really paying attention. But she wasn’t. She forced herself to look at the screen whenever Dorothea glanced at her, but otherwise she gave in to her desire to stare at her girl. Every few minutes, she was struck again by how amazing it was that the two of them were sitting in the den together on an ordinary Tuesday morning, just as if they hadn’t been separated for years.

When the movie was over, Lucy was hoping Dorothea might open up a little about the way Charles had raised her and Jimmy. Instead, the credits had barely begun when Dorothea said that she needed to call her father. “May I please use the phone?”

“Sure,” Lucy said, exhaling. She told Dorothea the nearest phone was back in the kitchen, but she didn’t follow her.

A minute or two later, Dorothea was back. “I left a message with Dr. Humphrey. I hope he’ll get it soon and relay it to Father. I’m so grateful to you for showing me this. It explains so much about Father’s love for the fifties. Even the clothes he had me wear were similar to the daughter’s outfits in the movie.”

“Really?” Lucy said. Dorothea was wearing a short black skirt, a light gray V-neck and black chunky heels.

“I myself am fond of modern clothes.”

“Me too.” Lucy smiled. This was the first thing Dorothea had said that indicated any distance from her father, and Lucy couldn’t help being encouraged.

The movie wasn’t long, and it was only a little after eleven. She asked Dorothea if she’d like to see any sights, maybe go out to lunch. “Los Angeles is a great city. There’s so much I’d like to show you.”

She was just starting to list some possibilities, when Dorothea said, “Thank you, but I really can’t stay. I do need to ask you some questions though, before I go back.”

Lucy’s heart sank. She’d clung to the bulky size of Dorothea’s garbage bag as indicating that her daughter would be here for at least a week or two. What if Dorothea was only here because Charles wanted some kind of agreement that she wouldn’t prosecute him if he came back to L.A.? This thought had occurred to her when she woke up in the middle of the night last night. One of the cable channels had recently done a retrospective of Charles’s work, and there was a lot of interest in what could have happened to him, especially now, when some young director kept mentioning Charles as his primary influence and “spiritual mentor.” This guy had even
called Lucy to ask her to be in a documentary about Keenan’s disappearance. She said no and when he started to argue with her, she’d hung up on him.

“All right,” Lucy said to her daughter. “But could I show you the upstairs of the house first?”

Dorothea had slept in the downstairs guest room last night. Lucy and Al lived exclusively downstairs, partly because the first floor was more than enough house for the two of them, partly because it was a hassle for her to walk up all those stairs if her leg was feeling stiff, but mainly because the upstairs was the only part of the house other than the playroom that she had refused to change. For the first year, she couldn’t bring herself to change anything, sure that her family would return any day. For several years after that, she was a full-blown addict, and the upstairs was the place she went to wallow in her grief and insanity. Then she met Al, when she rear-ended his car on the freeway. It was just a fender bender, but he insisted on driving her home because he could tell she’d been using, and then he came inside to talk to her about rehab. He’d done it himself, when he was in his early twenties, and he knew what it was about. She told him no, but he kept calling her day after day, and finally, she checked herself in.

Before long, she was off the pills and married again, but still, she couldn’t move or change the upstairs of the house. Al agreed to move in, even though he knew he was going to be living side-by-side with Lucy’s shrine to her lost family. He said as long as he didn’t have to go up there, he was fine with it. Lucy rarely went up there anymore either, but she needed to know she could. Sometimes she thought she clung to all these things because she didn’t have anything from her own childhood, not even a picture of her mother; other times, because she was afraid if she forgot any part of the past, she would eventually forget her kids completely. Or maybe she was punishing herself. Or maybe she’d just been waiting for this day, when she could take her daughter into the space of their family’s memories.

Seen through her daughter’s eyes, the upstairs was entirely innocent. Dorothea didn’t remember the bedroom that had been her parents’, the fireplace tool that Lucy had used to stab her hand, the balcony where she’d jumped the night she might have killed her last chance to have another baby. To her daughter, the only notable feature of the room was the incredible view of the ocean. “It’s just like my book about California,” Dorothea said. “Finally!”

Charles’s office, which had been pored over by so many detectives for clues, was barely worth a glance, though Dorothea did say it was nice. She said that about all the rooms, more out of politeness, Lucy could tell, than true interest. Probably because the place where she’d grown up was just as nice or nicer. Even her own bedroom didn’t seem to impress Dorothea, though she did say it was “very sweet.” And she took her shoes off. She said she couldn’t resist walking on such a luxurious carpet.

“Your father bought that for you,” Lucy said. “It was right after you started having your breathing problems, and he was afraid you’d lose consciousness and fall.”

As soon as the words were out of her mouth, Lucy wanted to kick herself for mentioning another positive thing about Charles.

“That sounds like Father.” Dorothea smiled, as she stepped around the room in her bare feet. “My room now has a thick carpet also, but nothing compared to this.”

“You still live with him then?”

“Up until recently,” she said, but her voice was quiet and her face looked so unhappy that Lucy couldn’t resist asking if something was wrong. “I’m sorry, but I’d rather not discuss it,” she said. She slipped her shoes back on, and Lucy took her to the next room, which had been Jimmy’s.

Dorothea walked over to the wall of cork that was covered with drawings and paintings her brother had made. “Oh, look at these adorable pictures!”

Lucy watched as Dorothea moved from one picture to the next,
staring intently, as though she was looking for something in particular. Finally she stopped and pointed at a picture of a dog.