Some Kind of Miracle (10 page)

S
eth was in the bookstore sitting on the floor in a back aisle, reading a Tom Clancy novel. When Dahlia came around the corner and saw him there, she had a rush of longing to leap on him and cover him with kisses. Instead she slid down and sat next to him, and after a moment she rested her head on his shoulder. He didn’t look up but took her hand.

“That was fast,” he said. “What happened?”

“You won’t believe this,” she said, and told him the story. When he saw how rattled she was, he hugged her and didn’t sigh his “Oh, Dahlia, you jerk” sigh. She loved him for holding on to her hand as he paid for the book, and as they walked back toward the van, he kept his arm around her and pulled her close.

“So here’s what you do,” he said. “Tomorrow you call Melman’s office, say you misplaced the contract and you need to come by and pick up a new one. It
won’t be a big deal. It’s probably some boilerplate thing you can get at the stationery store. Then you go to Louie, who probably has some power of attorney anyway, and you make it clear that closing this deal will get enough money for him to pay whatever expenses of Sunny’s he has to pay. Believe me, he’ll welcome you and Marty Melman’s dough with open arms. So if you want to get your half, you’ll have to eat a little crow and be nice to Louie for a few minutes. You can handle it. It’s probably the way you should have gone to begin with.”

“Yeah, I guess,” she said. Seth opened the passenger door of the van for her, but before she got in, she looked up at the window of Sunny’s room. “I just had this last spark of hope today that—”

“That what? You were gonna get her to take this seriously? She doesn’t live in our world, Dahl. To people in her condition, a hit song doesn’t mean a thing. Neither does a hot career or all the toys and troubles that go with having those things you crave so feverishly.”

It annoyed Dahlia that he always made her ambition sound evil. She climbed into the passenger seat. “Actually, I was going to say I had a spark of hope that maybe there was some way to bring her back to being well. So many years have passed. Medical science has to have come up with something better than the stuff that guy is giving them from those little plastic cups. But how the hell would she ever be able to find out what it is? She’s too drugged on the bad stuff to have any motivation to go looking for the good stuff. And that leaves that jerk Louie, who gave up on her a long time ago because he was afraid whatever she had was
gonna rub off on his kids. So unless she has somebody to fight her battles for her, she’s trapped in her own skin.”

“You volunteering?” Seth asked, and she emitted a puff of air from her lips, scoffing.

“Yeah, right. Nurse Dahlia. As it is, you don’t think I’d do it for you—and
you’re
making love to me.”

Seth grinned.

“And, by the way, not often enough,” she teased.

Seth put his hand on her knee. “I’ll catch you tonight,” he said, and she was relieved that it was okay between them, at least for now. Of course it couldn’t last. Because the truth about her adorable boy lover was that he was floundering around in the world just like she was. She had traveled all those miles to see a long-lost relative who didn’t even want to see her, and she’d done it because she was afraid she had no spark left. She felt as dulled out as those people at the Sea View who were taking those little cups off the cart.

The loud blast of a car horn made her turn her head as Seth moved the van onto the 405 freeway. The driver was a pretty blonde in a black Mercedes convertible, cutting brazenly in front of the van. She had the top down, and Dahlia could see her yellow ponytail flying out of the back of a baseball cap. The Mercedes was shiny and new. The 430 convertible. Her favorite. Once Dahlia thought she’d be driving a car like that, but then she put those first big bucks she’d earned into that tiny house in Laurel Canyon, certain that after her first song was out in the world, she’d be on the map, sell song after hit song, and the dough would be rolling in. But that hadn’t happened.

Now the damned house was falling apart, and she didn’t even have enough cash to give it a decent paint job or to replace this van that creaked and complained at freeway speeds. It was a falling-apart rattletrap, and she knew she was going to have to get rid of it soon, but unless she made some kind of deal with Louie, there was no chance she’d be getting her hands on any serious money soon.

“Some people are meant to be rich, and some are meant to be worker bees,” she remembered her mother saying when her father came home from putting in long hours at the furniture store, on a day when Rose could tell without asking her husband that not one single customer had crossed the threshold to come in to browse around, let alone buy so much as a lamp. And Dahlia’s unhappy father stood on his tired feet all day, trying to look busy by dusting, by sweeping, by filing brochures, to justify the small salary that his rich Uncle Bernie, who owned the store, was paying him.

At least in the dental office where her mother worked, there were always the male patients who flirted with Rose, the woman patients who confided in her, and the handsome Dr. Raphael, who relied on her and who everyone thought looked like James Coburn, the movie actor. Every day her mother made small talk while she scheduled appointments and handed out mini–toothpaste tubes and toothbrushes with Dr. Raphael’s name on them, and most days she felt very important. But at the end of the week, one look at her take-home pay reminded her that she was simply a worker bee, too.

No, Dahlia thought as Seth changed lanes now and she spotted the Mercedes again in the distance, I can’t keep calling the bank and hearing the automatic teller report that I have no money. I have got to find a way to stop being a worker bee. Tomorrow she had to do eight massages in a row, and just the thought of it made her back ache. But she had to take advantage of the eight requests—because sometimes she’d only have eight appointments spread over two weeks.

“Hungry?” Seth asked. They were just fifteen minutes from home now, but she
was
feeling hungry, and some fast-food joint would do for dinner.

“Sure,” she said.

He pulled the van off the freeway and into the parking lot at Carl’s Junior next to a red pickup truck that had a pretty Alaskan husky sitting in the back.

“You want the drive-through, or should we live the high life and go in?” Seth asked her.

“I want to hobnob with the rich and famous. Let’s go in.”

While they stood in line, Dahlia watched an addled young mother surrounded by three screaming kids sitting in a booth by the far window. The young woman was stuffing a falling-apart burger into her mouth at the same time she hollered reprimands at her kids, one of whom was sitting on the table facing her with his feet in her lap. This is the quality of the places I get to dine, Dahlia thought, unless I put myself in hock like I did last night at that beautiful hotel, with elegant rooms and perfect lighting and soft sheets. I want that all the time. Not this. And Louie, that little weasel, is my ticket. What a joke! She looked
up at the menu, and suddenly every choice made her queasy.

“Fries and a Coke.” It was all she thought she could digest.

“Cheap date,” Seth said, ordering a messy saucy burger for himself and getting a flirtatious smile from the cashier.

Sliding into a booth, Dahlia watched Seth looking out the window, watching a group of small children jump out of a car and rush gleefully toward the elaborate play structure next to the restaurant. There was another bunch of children inside the primary-colored maze, squealing noisily as they jumped on the trampolines, laughing as they crawled on their stomachs through the plastic tunnels, shrieking as they vaulted from the monkey bars.

Seth watched them with a longing look, as if he wished he could be out there playing with them. He was nuts about children. Dahlia thought they were cute from a distance, but motherhood would never be for her. It was a subject that could get them into heated discussions about how they could possibly have a future together. Not that there was a chance Seth would ever get custody of his daughter away from his ex-wife and the pediatrician, but he devoted an awful lot of time and attention to that kid. He’d come back from being with her and tell Dahlia all about the games they played and the things Lolly liked to do.

“She likes to pretend she’s putting on a fashion show. She says, ‘Daddy, you sit here,’ and then she rushes into her mom’s room and gets old scarves and
earrings and her mother’s shoes, and she comes out and spins around and shows me her dress-up outfits.”

“Cute,” Dahlia would say. Maybe she couldn’t get too enthusiastic about Lolly because it was clear the kid didn’t like her at all. She was only four, and she already had a determined stance and eyebrows that moved together and a forehead that furrowed when she looked at anyone who appeared suspicious to her. It was the expression she wore every time she was stuck with Dahlia during those outings when Seth tried to get them together.

“The kid hates me,” Dahlia would say after they dropped Lolly off.

“She doesn’t hate you. She has a negative feeling about you because you’re a woman I care about who isn’t her mother,” Seth explained gently.

“Then why doesn’t she hate Dr. Shapiro, the dashing pediatrician who stole her mother out of your arms?”

Seth had no reply.

Dahlia nibbled on a Carl’s Junior fry and was sliding another one through the ketchup when she heard the screams. They were coming from the children’s play area, and now she saw one of the young mothers pounding on the window of the restaurant and a man who must be her husband catching sight of her and leaving the line where he’d been waiting for food to rush out the door and help with some emergency. A few other parents were gathered around the play structure now, tugging their little ones out of the tunnels and lifting them down from the bars.

“Call the police!” a skinny, red-haired woman yelled into the restaurant.

“Oh, my God!” Seth said, his face flushing as he stood to get a better look at something that made his eyes open wide. Dahlia followed his gaze into the play structure, and she stood, too.

The parents were tearing the children away from the sight of Sunny, pushing them into the restaurant as Dahlia and Seth rushed out the door. Inside the structure Dahlia could see the completely naked Sunny bouncing around on the trampoline and shrieking happily, her breasts flying up, her eyes wild with glee.

“How did she get here?” Dahlia said as they hurried toward her, but then they passed the van and saw that the doors were flung open and Sunny’s overalls and T-shirt were lying on top of their duffel bags. The laptop was open, with the solitaire game on the screen. By now all the children had been removed, and only a bouncing, laughing Sunny was left to play there.

“She fell in love with the solitaire game. I saw her watching me out the window when I put the computer back in the van. I forgot to lock the door, so she must have opened it and climbed in looking for it.”

“But she didn’t make a sound for hours.”

“The van’s so damn loud she could have been screaming her lungs out and we wouldn’t have heard her.”

Now they were at the play structure, and when Sunny saw them, she waved and laughed as if she’d been expecting them and was glad to see them. Seth
took off his jacket and climbed onto the trampoline with her, causing him and Sunny to bounce together as he moved toward her and did what he could to cover her nakedness with the jacket. Then he crouched next to her and spoke gently.

“I’m Dahlia’s friend,” he said. “You have to come with us now and do it fast. I heard someone say they were calling the police, so they might be on their way.”

Sunny’s eyes darted rapidly back and forth between the two of them. “Are the police coming because of the little cards?” she asked, her face filled with fear. “I didn’t steal them. I just wanted to play with the little cards and move them around.” Her brow creased, and her voice was thick, as if she were about to cry.

“I know you didn’t steal them,” Seth said, slowly leading her forward.

“I’m cold,” Sunny said. Dahlia could see that she was shivering.

It didn’t look as if Sunny had a purse or a bag with her, which meant she didn’t have her medication or a change of clothes. Somehow they had to get her back to San Diego now or in the morning. Tomorrow Dahlia had a busy workday, and she couldn’t miss it.

“Let’s go to the van,” Dahlia said, and she and Seth helped Sunny rock forward so she could step out of the play structure. Dahlia took off her own jacket, and with Seth covering Sunny’s front and Dahlia her back, they moved her toward the van. Dahlia hoped nobody in Carl’s Junior was writing down her license number. Seth pulled out onto the street, and Sunny pulled her clothes on in the backseat as he moved the van toward the freeway.

“Should we go home or back to the Sea View?” Seth asked.

“We’re almost home,” Dahlia said. “We’d better go there and think this through.”

Seth had just pulled the van onto the 405 when they heard the police sirens approaching Carl’s Junior.

I
ndecent exposure.” Those words flashed on and off in Dahlia’s mind like a neon sign all the way home. Blessedly, when they reached the Laurel Canyon exit, the police were nowhere to be seen, and she took her first deep breath in an hour. Now she remembered, as Seth steered the van up the winding little street toward the house, that she’d forgotten to leave any lights on, and for a moment she was relieved, thinking that with no lights on, Sunny wouldn’t see the chipped paint.

But when she glanced back at the bleary-eyed Sunny, she remembered this was not someone who was in a state of mind to notice paint, chipped or otherwise. All the way from Carl’s Junior, Sunny hadn’t said a word, just clicked away at the computer’s mouse, still mesmerized by the solitaire game. She was breathing heavily and every now and then, emit
ting a little harumph, probably at the hand the computer had dealt her. It took both Dahlia and Seth to help her out of the van and onto the driveway by the carport.

“This is my house,” Dahlia said. The stone path leading to the front porch was dark, and the two cousins moved ahead slowly, Dahlia guiding Sunny by the elbow. “When we get inside, I’ll make you something to eat. Are you hungry?”

“I want the little cards,” Sunny said.

“Seth’s bringing the cards.”

“I had a boyfriend once,” Sunny said. “Norm.”

“You had lots of boyfriends,” Dahlia said.

“But Norm was the one who looked like someone famous. Did you know Norm?”

“I did,” Dahlia said, fidgeting with the keys.

“Who did he look like?” Sunny asked.

“Arthur Miller,” Dahlia said. She was pleased to hear that Louie had been wrong about Sunny. She actually did remember certain things. She remembered every note and word of “Stay by My Side,” and Dahlia wasn’t surprised that one of the things that remained in her mind was her romance with Norman. Norman had been the love of Sunny’s life. It was good to know that certain people lived on in our hearts no matter what happened to our brains. Dahlia found the right key, inserted and turned it, and opened the door. Then, from the inside switch, she flipped on the porch light.

Sunny was dressed again, but she was disheveled and trembling. Maybe she never did take her medication that day, which could mean that she was danger
ous. Dahlia moved through the small living room filled with the shabby furniture that had once been in her parents’ house in the Valley. The couch that had sat for all those years in her parents’ living room needed to be reupholstered. It was fraying at the arms, and on one of them the welting had come loose from the fabric and was showing through.

Of course, nobody who came by noticed the living room furniture anyway, because the piano took up most of the room. It was the Steinway baby grand that Aunt Ruthie had left to Dahlia when she died, which was the same one Dahlia and Sunny had played as kids. A piano that would have gone to Sunny, if things had been otherwise. But Sunny’s future had looked so hopeless at the time Aunt Ruthie died that she never imagined her poor daughter would ever be well enough to play it again. And sentimental Aunt Ruthie, who wanted to keep the beautiful old instrument in the family, knew that Louie would sell it before her body was cold, so even though Louie was not happy about it, the piano went to Dahlia. Now she wondered if Sunny would recognize it.

In the dark she felt around for the switch and turned on the light in the little office that had been used as a second bedroom for the people who lived in the house before her. The office had a bathroom with an old Jacuzzi tub with jets that were so loud that, on those rare occasions when Dahlia used it, it sounded as if the whole house were an airplane about to take off. Dahlia remembered how she’d been so sure when she moved in that she’d be able to fix the place up and “make it her own,” an expression the pushy real estate
lady used repeatedly during the sales pitch. But here she was, still living with all of the same falling-apart furniture she had when she moved in.

“Gotta pee, fast,” Sunny said. Dahlia walked her to the bathroom, wondering if it was okay to leave her alone in there, but too tired to care. She was about to show her where the light switch was when Sunny closed the door in her face, and a quick glance at the space under the door told Dahlia that Sunny hadn’t even turned on the light to use the bathroom.

Seth was on the phone in the living room. “The Sea View,” she heard him say. “It’s a halfway house on Cormorant Drive.”

“What are you doing?” Dahlia asked.

“Trying to get the number and call that place. Maybe somebody from down there will come up and get her.” But then he frowned and shook his head. “They’re not listed,” he said, hanging up the phone. “Looks like we have a houseguest for tonight.”

Dahlia was exhausted to the bone, aching and wanting to get to sleep. Not wanting to do what she knew she’d have to do next, which was to go into the kitchen and make a meal for Sunny and then cancel all her clients for the next day so that first thing in the morning she could climb back into the van from hell and drive back to San Diego.

“Maybe if you’re nice to Sunny tonight, when Melman sends over another contract tomorrow, you can get her to sign it,” Seth said. He was trying to be cute, but Dahlia wasn’t in the mood.

“Not funny,” she said, going into the kitchen to make scrambled eggs. When Sunny emerged from the
bathroom, they put her in front of the TV and turned it on.
Third Rock from the Sun
was on. It was a sitcom about aliens, all of whom looked more human than Sunny did with her blindingly bright orange hair sticking up wildly.

“I have three meetings in a row tomorrow that I can’t miss,” Seth said after sliding some bread into the toaster. “So you’re going to have to take her back alone. You better get on the phone to your clients and tell them you have to cancel.”

From the kitchen phone, Dahlia left a message for Marty Melman and another one for Helene Shephard saying she had to cancel their appointments so she could take care of a relative in need. Then she called Leroy Berk’s house and left the same message for him. Seth sliced tomatoes and buttered some toast, but as they walked into the living room to bring Sunny the food on a tray, they stopped. She was sound asleep on the sofa, snoring loudly as the sitcom laughter rose from the television.

Dahlia studied her slack-jawed, worn-out face and soft, chunky body for a moment, remembering the days when the two of them shared the big bed in Aunt Ruthie’s house and she would lie awake at night studying Sunny’s radiant beauty. Now she felt as if she must be having a nightmare. How could this possibly be that same person?

“Leave it there, and let’s go to sleep,” she said. Seth set the tray carefully on the coffee table in front of Sunny, and Dahlia covered her gently with the afghan she always kept over the arm of the sofa, then looked at her again and sighed.

“My lousy luck,” she said. “She had to decide to find her way into my van, and now it’s cost me a whole day’s pay.”

Seth was looking at Sunny, too. “Dahl,” he said, “when you see that poor woman lying there and think about where she’s been and what she has to look forward to, isn’t it hard for you to start a sentence with the words ‘my lousy luck’?”

“You know what I mean,” she said, huffing into the bedroom, half wishing he would get his holier-than-thou self out of there, but afraid to be alone with Sunny who might do God only knew what in the middle of the night. In the tiny bathroom, Dahlia took off her clothes and turned on the shower, wondering if Seth would follow her and join her, the way he sometimes did.

She was soapy, and her hair was full of lathery shampoo, and her eyes were closed when the bathroom door opened and she felt the breeze as Seth pulled the shower curtain back. “I hope it’s you and not Norman Bates’s mother,” she said, feeling him step in behind her.

“Not unless the old broad likes to do this,” he said, sliding his hands onto her breasts and rubbing the creamy white soap all over her body. Okay, so this was one of the reasons she didn’t let their fights go too far. He was sweet to her even when she was cranky, logical even when she flared irrationally. And then there were all those times he was sexy and hot, and when he turned her to him and kissed her, his kiss tasted like chocolate-chip cookies no matter what time of day or night.

“You ever gonna make my daughter a flower girl and become Mrs. Seth Meyers?” he asked, using the hand shower to rinse Dahlia’s hair.

“When I can afford you,” she joked, knowing this was alligator country for her, far too dangerous a discussion for her to get into now. Marriage, in her mind, was going to be elegant and filled with travel, living in a real house with lots of help and having one room with just a piano in it, maybe overlooking the ocean. Not continuing to live in this shabby little place that was all the two of them combined could afford.

In bed she curled up close to him as he fell asleep, wishing she could love him more than she did. Wishing that she were capable of fawning and fussing over him the way a good man like him deserved to be loved and adored, revered for all of the qualities he did have and not resented for the ones he didn’t. Through the open bedroom door, she could hear Sunny’s snores filling the night, and she worried that she’d never fall asleep, but soon she did. And in her dream she was at a black-tie party with Marvin Hamlisch and Itzhak Perlman and Kermit the Frog. All of them were at conductors’ podiums, conducting her as she sat at the piano playing the song that she and Sunny wrote, “Stay by My Side.”

Her playing in the dream got louder and louder, and the conducting became more frantic, until she stirred and realized she wasn’t playing at all and that the music she heard was wafting in from the living room. She grabbed her robe from the bottom of the bed and walked to the door of the bedroom to see Sunny, sitting at the piano she had played throughout
her childhood, the piano that would have been left to her if things were otherwise. She was naked with the moon lighting her white back as she played the last bars of “Stay by My Side.”

Dahlia stood quietly as Sunny segued into a beautiful, lilting ballad, sexy and romantic, and she didn’t move as Sunny played another one that Dahlia had never heard before. These had to be the songs Santa Claus at the Sea View had described to Dahlia. Better than the Beatles, he’d said. He called Sunny the Goddess of Music. Dahlia slid quietly to the floor, where she sat for a long time, listening to the nocturnal concert without making her presence known.

Tune after tune came out of Sunny’s fingers, and all of them were fresh and lyrical, each one filled with emotion, whimsy, style, balance, and originality. They were Sunny’s own melodies, songs from her poor abused brain, and probably over all these years nobody had heard them except a bunch of mental patients who were watching
All My Children
at the same time.

Now Sunny was humming softly. When she got to the musical hook of the song, she sang it out: “What’s happened to me?” The song was so well composed and put together that it made tears come to Dahlia’s eyes. They were tears of admiration, along with an incalculable sorrow too overwhelming to name. A sorrow about all the years that had gone by between those long-ago days when she sat admiring Sunny as a child and now. Sunny had been playing for quite a while when the beeping of Seth’s alarm clock startled
her. When she turned toward the sound, she spotted a wet-eyed Dahlia sitting there.

“Good songs?” Sunny asked, deadpan.

“Great songs,” Dahlia said, hearing Seth shut off the alarm and make his way to the bathroom. “Will you show me the changes on that one where you sang ‘What’s happened to me?’ What were the chords you played just before the bridge?” Sunny turned back to the keyboard as Dahlia sat down next to her, ignoring Sunny’s nakedness, watching her play those chords and learning how to play the marvelous songs herself.

God, it was just as good as Dahlia remembered it. Maybe better.

“Do you have lyrics for it?”

“Just the title,” Sunny said. “‘What’s Happened to Me?’”

“It’s so good,” Dahlia said. A breeze swept in through the open living room window, and Sunny shivered, and Dahlia walked back to the sofa and got the afghan to wrap around her cousin’s shoulders. “I especially loved hearing you sing the one we wrote together. ‘Stay by My Side.’ Wouldn’t you like to let them use that in a movie? Do you ever go to the movies? You probably rent movies all the time at the Sea View. Wouldn’t it be fun to see one of them that had your song in it?” Sunny’s mouth screwed up, and she sighed and walked over to the sofa to gather up the pile of clothes she had strewn across it.

“It’s time for me to go back,” she said, completely ignoring Dahlia’s question. “I’ll get dressed.”

She may be crazy but she’s not stupid, Dahlia
thought as she watched Sunny go into the second bedroom and close the door. Seth hurried through and gave her a peck on the cheek.

“You gonna take her back this morning?” he asked.

“Yep.”

“At least she didn’t kill us in our sleep. Tell her I said good-bye,” he said, and he was out the door just as the phone rang. Dahlia grabbed it.

“Ms. Gordon?”

“Yes.”

“I have Marty Melman.” There was a silence and then a click.

“You canceled me for today?” she heard Marty say.

“I have a family emergency, Marty.”

“Well, shit, I got a fucking emergency, too. My fucking back is killing me. Tell your family to go fuck itself.”

“By the way, Marty,” she said, embarrassed to have to say it, “I’m glad you called, because somehow I must have misplaced the contract you sent me for the song, and I need another copy.” She wasn’t going to give this up. Somehow she’d find a way around Sunny’s reluctance. “Maybe you could send another one over. I’m real sorry.”

There was a beat of silence. “Uh…whoa! Didn’t Pepper call you?”

“What do you mean?” Dahlia asked. Something was wrong. She could tell by the sound of his voice.

“About your song? What was the name of it again?” Marty asked.