Some Kind of Miracle (16 page)

“Nobody,” both of her parents said in unison.

Within a week of Sunny’s returning from wherever it was she’d gone, she was found naked on a bus heading north in the San Fernando Valley. When the bus driver tried to help her, she pulled out a pair of sewing scissors she had taken from Aunt Ruthie’s sewing box and stabbed the driver in the penis. The police called Uncle Max, who went to bail her out, and since she’d left her own clothes behind on the bus, the police officers had given her a light blue shirt and some socks to wear home.

At home she seemed confused and embarrassed, and Dahlia heard Uncle Max tell her to get dressed so he could take her back to the hospital. Dahlia watched Sunny’s eyes get wide and fiery and saw her throw anything she could get her hands on in the kitchen at her father’s head, including a mayonnaise jar and a pot that still had beans in it from lunch. She missed him both times, and when he moved toward her, she dodged him and ran out the front door, but Uncle Max was too fast, and he grabbed the back of the blue shirt.

Sunny pulled hard to get away from him, but he was too strong for her. Her makeup was smeared, and she was screaming angrily, punching at him.

“Fucking bastard, no hospital! I’m saner than all of you! Fucking bastard!” she screamed and raged. Finally she tore away from him and was about to make a break for it when he tackled her, just as Norman
and his Aunt Rita pulled up to take her to dinner. Uncle Max ignored the approaching car and lifted Sunny to her feet and deposited her into his car. Norman and his aunt watched from their car, and Dahlia stood on the front porch watching, too. Dahlia was numb. The window to Norman’s car was open, and Dahlia could hear the appalled voice of Norman’s aunt.

“Honey, don’t look, don’t make eye contact, don’t feel guilty. I told you all the stories about how she was a deeply disturbed individual. Just make a U-turn and get out of here before she even sees you.” But Norman opened the car door, which made the aunt even more shrill and insistent. “Can’t you see that Max is obviously taking her back to the mental hospital? Do not get out of this car!” she ordered Norman.

Norman never looked at his aunt. He stepped out of the car and walked slowly over to Uncle Max’s car, where Uncle Max sat in the driver’s seat and Sunny sat hunched up in the passenger seat, almost unrecognizable as the beautiful girl Norman adored. Sunny’s window was open, and Dahlia watched Norman reach his large hand inside and rest it on her face. Dahlia held her breath, afraid Sunny might bite him or scream for him not to touch her. But Sunny, who had been wild-eyed and raging only a moment before, screaming and protesting against her father’s efforts to get her to the car, now looked up at Norman and into his eyes. Dahlia wanted to avert her own eyes then, because, even at her young age, she saw in the look that passed between them their sad realization of all of the things that were never going to be.

“Get better, Marilyn Monroe,” Norman said, and he leaned in and kissed her gently on the cheek.

“Will you wait until I do?” Dahlia thought she heard Sunny ask in a choked voice. When Norman was silent in reply, Uncle Max started the car. As a bleary-eyed, blotchy-faced Sunny looked longingly out the window, still beautiful even in that state, he pulled away. Dahlia watched as Norman, his face a mask of sadness, walked slowly back to his aunt’s car and got in.

“I told you,” she heard Norman’s Aunt Rita say. “I told you a million times—she’s not stable. Now you see why I swore on my life to your mother that I would put you in a witness-protection program to hide you from that insane girl, and never would I condone a wedding between the two of you. A wedding? Over my dead body!” And then they were gone.

A little over a year later, playing canasta with Rita Horn, Dahlia’s mother heard that Norman Burns had gotten married in Florida to the daughter of a cardiologist. After Rose told Dahlia the news at the dinner table, Dahlia went up to her room, lay facedown on her bed, and sobbed. After a while Rose came up to her daughter’s room and sat on the bed next to her.

“I know,” she said to Dahlia’s heaving back. “I always had the same fantasy, that he would wait.”

Helene Shephard lived so far out in the San Fernando Valley that one day Seth mentioned to Dahlia that the cost of the gasoline just to get out there was cutting into any profit she made massaging the sweet old woman. Dahlia joked that Helene was so thin that
what she saved on massage oil made up for the cost of the gas, but the truth was that she hated the drive, and she continued to see Helene only because she was a longtime client who had started getting massages when she lived in Brentwood and had stuck with Dahlia all these years.

Today, as Dahlia drove in bumper-to-bumper traffic over Beverly Glen and then down Van Nuys Boulevard onto the ramp to the freeway, without any side or rearview mirrors on her car, she wondered why she was bothering. But she knew the shabby reason and was embarrassed by it. Not
very
embarrassed, but it was something she’d never tell anyone or hated to admit even to herself—and that was her secret hope that Helene was going to leave her some money someday.

The old broad really seemed to like her. She asked Dahlia’s advice about everything, including what to do about problems she had with her adult children. And always, after the massage, she made it very clear that she needed Dahlia to stay and chat. Now and then Dahlia would decline and pack up the massage table that she brought with her, because Helene didn’t have one. But sometimes Helene lured her into staying, and they’d have a long chat, and from time to time Helene would make some joke like “After I’m gone, you’ll find something special waiting for you.”

Helene had a few married children and some nieces and nephews somewhere, but in all the stories she told Dahlia, it sounded as if she didn’t like them very much, so maybe there actually could be a little tidbit in her last will and testament for the nice masseuse who drove so far every week out of the goodness of
her heart. Today, by the time Dahlia turned the mirrorless van onto Helene’s cul-de-sac in Northridge, she was feeling grumpy. Maybe her blood sugar was low because she hadn’t eaten, and she was ten minutes late, and now she was annoyed to see there wasn’t even a place to park. There were four cars in Helene’s driveway, and every spot on the street was taken, and for some reason the front door to the house was wide open.

Helene must be giving a party, Dahlia thought, and it was probably a brunch. She had obviously forgotten Dahlia was coming, and she’d scheduled a party at her massage time. Well, Dahlia thought irritably, she’d better pay me anyway when she realizes she screwed up. I am not going to be able to make my mortgage payment this month with Margie Kane trying to kill herself and Marty throwing me out because of Sunny’s cigarettes. And now there wasn’t even Seth, who used to kick in half.

Goddamn it. I am going to march in there and tell Helene she can’t do this to me, she thought as she double-parked the van next to a shiny black Lexus. She’d walk in the door, and Helene would see her and be mortified about forgetting. Well, she’d better be mortified enough to give me a check for driving all the way out here, Dahlia thought. Through the open door, she could see a few dozen people standing around holding wineglasses.

Nobody looked over at her as she walked through the living room toward the kitchen, where she and Helene usually sat after the massage and had a cup of tea. There was a big group laughing and chatting in
the kitchen, and a dark-haired woman was carefully placing deviled eggs on a platter. There was another woman dressed in a black sweater and white pants. She was filling wineglasses on a tray.

“Uh, hi…” Dahlia said to the dark-haired woman. “Is Helene around?”

“Pardon?”

“Helene. We had a twelve o’clock appointment. She obviously forgot to tell me she was having a party. Is she around?”

“Oh, good heavens. Are you Dahlia?”

“Yeah.”

“Oh, Dahlia. I am so sad to be the bearer of bad tidings, but my mother died on Thursday. She had a heart attack, and I couldn’t find a phone number for you. We buried her this morning, and this is her wake! I’m so glad you came by. You were in her will. Thank you for being here. Want a deviled egg?”

I was in her will, Dahlia thought. Oh, yes! I was in her will. Thank you, God. Thank you, Helene! It was worth all those hours of listening to those endless stories you told me, Dahlia thought, reeling with happiness. God bless you, I’m in your will. I can pay the mortgage this month. “I love deviled eggs,” Dahlia said, devouring one and then another, thinking how much better deviled eggs tasted when you were solvent and eating them at your benefactor’s wake than when they were all you could afford.

God, she thought, I hope her children don’t hate me, a stranger, for being in the will. I mean, they were never around, and I was around once a week. And there
is
that old expression—“You snooze, you
lose,” kids. An interloper gets her share for being accessible and understanding. Wow! I’m beginning to see a real spot in heaven for myself here. First I rescue my crazy cousin, a major good deed for which there have to be some brownie points offered. Right? And now I find out that I meant so much to this woman who had several children but still put
me
in her last will and testament.

This was amazing. Dahlia wondered how soon she could ask how much Helene was leaving her without sounding too callous. The bad news was that she had to go home without her seventy-five-dollar check. After all, she couldn’t exactly say to these folks, Hey, I’m sorry your mother died, but I had her in my appointment book, and I got here at the scheduled time, so cough up the dough she would have paid me for the massage. The good news was that Dahlia was about to get a nice payday and never have to drive out here again, she thought, thrilled that she never followed the impulse she often had to call Helene and tell her to find a masseuse who lived in the Valley.

“Hey, everybody! Whose van is blocking my Lexus?” she heard a voice call out. It was a heavyset man in his fifties with gray hair and a bushy gray beard.

“That’s mine,” Dahlia said, a rush of excitement passing through her as she wondered if what Helene left her could cover the down payment on a new car or maybe even pay for the whole car. “I’ll let him out and move into his spot,” she told Helene’s daughter. She felt giddy. Full of hope for the first time in so long.

She would go home, figure out what to do about Sunny, then sit down and pay all her bills, knowing that for once they’d be covered. And if the money Helene left her was a lot, maybe she’d even admit the truth to Harry Brenner. Tell him the song was never hers to sell and that if he didn’t like any of the ones she was going to play him, the ones she’d written by herself, then tough.

“Great,” Helene’s daughter said. “I’ll go and get you the box.”

“Box?”

“Of sweaters. That’s what Mother left you. All her old sweaters. She said you really needed them, so my brother and I boxed them up. I can put the box right in your car now. Wasn’t that amazingly sweet of her? Some of these sweaters are so old-fashioned you’ll crack up when you see them. But I always believe it’s the thought that counts. Don’t you?”

“I do,” Dahlia said, trying to keep the smile plastered on her face, hoping she could wait until she was in her van before she fell apart. She was getting old sweaters—and she was
not
getting seventy-five bucks for the massage. How could she say anything to the daughter about the seventy-five bucks? Give me the dough for your dead mother’s massage? Helene had always thought Dahlia’s clothes were shabby. This was her nice way of trying to dress up poor pitiful me, Dahlia thought.

The daughter left the room, and Dahlia ate a few more deviled eggs. This house. The children would sell this house on a corner in Northridge, and it was
probably worth a million bucks. If Helene felt so sorry for her, why couldn’t she have left her a chunk of that instead of a bunch of old sweaters?

“Here they are,” Helene’s daughter said, returning with a cardboard book box, one flap of which she opened to show Dahlia that it was filled with a pile of brightly colored wool sweaters. The smell of mothballs wafted out of the box. At the curb, after Dahlia put the sweaters in the back of the van and thanked Helene’s daughter, she sat at the wheel looking at the stub that was all that was left of her rearview mirror and the rod where the passenger visor had once been. A new car. I thought it was going to be money. Enough money to buy me a new car. I broke up with my boyfriend and moved an insane woman into my life, and now I’ve lost another client. I can’t afford to keep my house. I don’t know what I’m going to do.

The bearded man with the Lexus was standing next to the open window looking in at her downcast face with big, sympathetic eyes. “I feel the same way,” he said. “She was my aunt, and I was nuts about her.” Dahlia nodded and started the van. The guy was obviously waiting for her to pull away so he could get out of his parking spot. “I took care of her during her depression, and she was always a pleasure, even when she was feeling blue,” he said.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, Dahlia thought. He probably got the money that could have gone to me. Well, she sure as hell didn’t feel like making small talk with him. Besides, she had to get out of there and hurry home to her kidnap victim and her stack of unpaid bills and her empty bed. The guy smiled broadly enough to
make his beard lift up to his ears. “Well, sorry to make you move your car, but I have to get back to my office to return some calls. When you do what I do, there’s always somebody out there needing to check in,” he said.

He was obviously trying to be friendly, hoping she’d jump into a conversation with him, but all Dahlia wanted to say was, Get out of my way or I’ll run you over, pal. Now she looked at him coldly.

“Hey, I can tell that you’re real upset about losing Helene,” he said. “Here’s my card. The death of a treasured friend can trigger lots of old feelings in each of us, and I’m here to help if you ever need to talk to someone who specializes in all kinds of emotional-distress syndromes.” This had to be a joke. This guy was like some ambulance-chasing lawyer who showed up at the scene of an accident to pass out his card to the victims.