Some Kind of Miracle (6 page)

In the silence of her van, she took a deep breath and, still parked in the small Gordon Hardware parking lot, looked at the address and wanted to kiss the scrap of paper. The name of the halfway house was the Sea View. It was in San Diego. Not too bad. For a while, she remembered, Sunny had been in some place up near Oakland. Oakland was far. San Diego was a couple of hours’ drive from L.A. No big deal.

She’d pack a few things and head down there tomorrow with Seth. They’d stay overnight somewhere. Make it a romantic outing. She’d enjoy spending some of the money she’d have by next week. Just the beginning, she thought. She was back in show business. Marty Melman would never dream of dropping his pants to pee in front of a songwriter.

Seth watched her pile her clothes into an old suitcase that smelled musty because she’d just dug it out of the same storage area where she’d found the tape recorder and the tape.

“Think they’ll let me into the hotel with this shabby suitcase?” she asked.

“As long as you pay the bill, they don’t care about the suitcase,” he said.

Dahlia held up a black T-shirt with the signs of the Zodiac on it, but it was tired-looking, and she threw it back in the drawer.

“There must be some kind of legal issue here,” Seth said. “Maybe she’s incapable of signing anything, and her brother has to sign for her.”

“Get ahold of yourself,” Dahlia said. “I mention a big deal to Louie, and the next thing you know he’ll get greedy ideas and try to call Marty Melman. He could blow the whole thing right out of the water. I’d forge her signature before I’d do business with Louie.”

She stopped folding an olive green T-shirt she liked to wear with her camouflage jeans and looked at Seth. “Believe me, I thought about putting two signatures on the thing, telling Marty that Sunny signed it, and
that’s it. The problem is, that little monster Louie not only remembers the song, he remembers it better than I do. He sang every word of it to me using a hose nozzle as a microphone. He’s not going to hear that song in the movie and say, ‘Isn’t that nice?’ He’s going to say, ‘Where’s my sister’s piece of the action?’ And the only way his sister is going to get her share is if she signs the contract. So I’m going to San Diego to get her to do it.”

Dahlia placed the T-shirt on top of the camouflage pants and stood gazing absently into the suitcase. “I can’t believe I’m standing here wondering what I’m going to wear. If Louie’s description of Sunny was accurate, she’s probably not going to notice my outfit.”

“Dahl,” Seth said, sitting on the bed, “this has fiasco written all over it. Let’s talk it through for a minute. Okay?””

Oh, no. Here we go, she thought. Her face flushed, and she tried not to flare. He’s going to try to talk me out of this. Either by making me feel guilty for doing something bad to my “poor crazy cousin” or by starting in again about how it’s only money and he doesn’t care about money. This is what happens when you’re with a man who has no ambition. He was satisfied doing what he was doing and earning his meager salary doing it. She was someone who worked all day and night standing over people’s bodies, kneading their flesh with aching hands and arms, only half listening to their stories, wanting to say to them, “Could you just go to sleep? I don’t care about your dog’s asthma or your sister’s diabetes,” and this little talk Seth wanted to have was going to be designed to make her
think that the way her life was now should be good enough for her forever. What was that quote he always ran by her? “Stop living the life you planned and live the life you were given.”

“Tell you what,” she said, closing the suitcase. “I’ll just go down there and feel it out. I’ll leave you at the hotel pool and go over there by myself. Worst case? The whole thing inspires a song or two.”

“But maybe she’s in such bad shape that it’s a real bad idea?” he tried.

“Or maybe it’s the best idea anyone ever had,” she said.

“My Jeep’s got a real bad leak, and I can’t drive it that far. Think the junk heap can make it?” Seth asked, putting an arm around her. It was his way of telling her he wouldn’t fight her. He’d go with her even if it was a fool’s errand. Dahlia nuzzled her face into his hair.

“Guess it’ll have to,” she answered. He smelled so good, and she loved him in her bed, but she wasn’t going to give up this sliver of a possibility that she could have the life she’d planned, not this floundering-around life she’d been given.

In the morning it was still dark, four-something on the blue digital numbers on the clock, when she woke up with Seth wrapped around her and the possibility that something good was about to happen filling her. I might have a song in a movie, was her first thought. I might be able to dig myself out and write songs again. Slowly she extracted herself from Seth’s arms, padded into the living room, and sat at the piano.

After a few minutes of noodling, she had an idea for a verse, but it wasn’t very catchy. She played out some chords, but none of what she was coming up with was terribly inspired. Dahlia stood and looked inside the piano bench because she remembered she’d put a few lead sheets in there from the times she’d made passes at songs over the last year. At least one of them must have potential. But as she leafed through them, she was more and more disappointed when she realized that her memory of them was a lot better than the actual songs. One had an unwieldy bridge that sounded as if it were from a different song than the refrain, and another one had an uninspired melody that was as dull as dirt.

As the sun came up, she reworked a ballad idea she’d started a few months earlier, called “Don’t Make Me Laugh,” but halfway through it she decided that the tune was only fair and not worth the work. Besides, the thunk on her front porch signaled the
L.A. Times
delivery and that was a good excuse to stop working. She left the piano bench and went to the door.

It was still dark outside. The black sky was filled with morning stars, and she wanted to wish on one, remembering how she and Sunny always used to wish on stars together. She remembered that her own wish always had something to do with becoming famous and Sunny’s wish was always about being “wildly in love” with someone who felt the same way about her. Dahlia told her that was dumb, that she should wish for being both famous and loved, pointing out that there were plenty of stars and plenty of
nights to wish on them, so why always wish for a man? But that was all Sunny wanted.

Shivering from the cold morning air, Dahlia came inside and sat on the living room floor with the paper spread out in front of her. Page by page she riffled past all the bad news and stopped to look longingly at the ads from Saks Fifth Avenue in Beverly Hills for clothes she couldn’t afford, then on to the Calendar Section to see the show-business news, even though it never failed to depress her.

On page two her eye caught an item that said Jane Myron and Roger Mark were writing the score for a Disney animated feature. Now, how did they get that? She remembered meeting the young songwriting team at a party, where Jane Myron said to her, “I love your songs. ‘My Kids Are My Life’ is one of my favorite lyrics ever.” Dahlia put the newspaper into the trash can. She couldn’t waste any more time. She had to go back to the piano and sit there until she thought of something to write. “Don’t Make Me Laugh” had sort of a nice verse, but it wasn’t drop-dead good, just pleasant, and nobody was paying big bucks for pleasant. Maybe she’d crawl back into bed next to Seth and think about what she would say to Sunny when she got to San Diego.

D
ahlia remembered the way Sunny used to love to get dressed to go on a date. Sometimes it seemed that her cousin’s primping and preparation, her love affair with her own skin as she slowly worked the moisturizing cream into her face and throat and down each arm, was such a production it was almost as if she were doing it in a show on TV where she was demonstrating the products.

The care she took in the application of each step of her makeup was exquisite, and Dahlia loved to watch and imitate the faces she made while drawing and painting and dabbing and brushing and tweezing. First she smiled that big forced smile to create the apple cheeks on which she feathered the pink color with a big bushy brush; then she stretched her eyelids for the liner that she put on with a very sharp pencil; then she made that stretched-down face to allow for the
mascara on the lower lids that she put on with a brush on a wand; and then she pulled her lips very taut for the lipstick she put on with a stiff retractable brush. And she would talk while she was doing it, truly as if she were on television giving a makeup lesson.

“You need to keep the eye pencil very sharp,” she would say, “and then come up like this from under the lashes, and that way the line stays very thin and very close to the top of the lashes. Then I like to put a little bit of loose powder on both the upper and the lower lashes, too, because it gives the mascara something to grab on to and makes it hold better.”

Dahlia sat on the floor marveling as she watched, and soon the finished product of all that perfectly done makeup was as glamorous as any movie star.
More
glamorous and more wonderful than any movie star, because this one hugged her little cousin and teased her and wanted to play duets with her and write songs with her to bide her time while they waited for Sunny’s various dates to arrive.

Dahlia would hear a car door slam and run to the window to watch the nervous dates get out of their cars and approach the house.

“Another victim is about to fall into the clutches of my baby sis,” Louie would yell from the kitchen, and Dahlia would be embarrassed for Sunny because her brother was such a jerk that he was calling her dates victims, right in front of them. Sometimes the date would be carrying flowers. One of them, who wore a tweed jacket in the summer, lifted his arm over his head on the way to the door and sniffed his armpits,
not knowing Dahlia and Sunny were watching through the window.

“He’s poor,” Sunny explained, “so he only has that one heavy wool jacket.”

And all of the dates looked at Sunny with that same hungry look in their eyes. Boys that Dahlia found stupefyingly handsome would seem to go weak at the sight of Sunny, and Dahlia wondered if any boy would ever look at her that way. But after a while some of the boys would be scared off when the incidents began happening too frequently. Like the time Sunny deliberately drove one of their cars into a telephone pole. A week later she shaved the head of another when he fell asleep at a romantic picnic they’d been having at the beach. Not long after that, she stood on the lawn of another one’s family home naked, hollering for his parents to come out and meet the girl their son was “boffing.” It was a word Sunny often used that sounded to Dahlia like a game you played in gym.

It didn’t take long for Sunny’s reputation as a nutcase to get around, and there would be extended periods where no boys called or came to take her out. A lot of the time her behavior at home was lethargic and insolent, and soon her parents started having her put away in a hospital or “a home” for a little while here and a little while there, hoping at the end of each limited stay that this time she’d improve and be well. But she never was.

Dahlia remembered how in the early years, in between the hospitalizations, Sunny would come home
and, in spite of whatever she’d gone through in her treatment, still look gorgeous. And within a few days, a new boyfriend would surface, because her beauty was such a magnet that everywhere she went, young men fell all over themselves to talk to her. For a while “the boyfriend of the month,” as Louie called them, was Bob Hirsch, the son of the pharmacist on the corner, even though he had to know better than anyone about all the drugs Sunny was taking for her mental-health problems, because she refilled her prescriptions at his dad’s drugstore.

And then she was back at the makeup table, first applying the creams, then the colors, then the scents, able to make herself as beautiful as ever. All right, Dahlia admitted to herself, so the last few times she had started to look a little worse from the wear and tear of whatever they did to her in those hospitals. And what they did must have been bad because Dahlia’s parents would shoo Dahlia out of the room when they talked about it. But in her little cousin’s mind Sunny always had the radiance of an angel.

Unfortunately, the Sea View didn’t have a view of the sea or anything else besides another run-down building across the way. It was a two-story wooden house on a side street in a downscale residential neighborhood. The railing on the big front porch that ran the length of the house was sagging. The house next door had a side yard that was adjacent to the Sea View, and on the patchy grass were a dilapidated set of swings and a slide. Dahlia wondered how the parents of
young children must feel having a board-and-care for schizophrenics overlooking their children’s play yard.

“Wish me luck,” Dahlia said as she and Seth stared up at the people sitting on the porch. All of them were lined up on rocking chairs gazing quietly out over the railing as if there actually were a sea view to look at, except for one white-haired black woman, who was perched on the railing looking at the wall and talking. All of them were smoking cigarettes.

“I’m scared,” Dahlia said softly.

“You don’t have to do this,” Seth said in a voice that made her know he was wishing she’d turn to him and say, “You’re right. Let’s get out of here.”

“Yeah, I do. I have to do this,” she snapped. “This is a big chance for me, and I’m not gonna blow it.”

“You realize that I don’t care if you write hit songs or massage people or wait tables,” Seth said.

“Seth, my honey,” she said, trying not to turn this into an argument, but her face was hot and she was trying to keep the irritation out of her voice. “You
should
care. Because if I get Sunny to do what I’m asking, my present life of walking in the servants’ entrance of rich people’s houses is over. I didn’t drive all the way down here to turn around and go back to that. Last week my ancient client Helene asked me if I wanted some of her old sweaters because she felt sorry for how shabby I always look. I nearly cried. She actually used the word ‘shabby.’”

“I’ll buy you all the sweaters you want,” Seth said, and she saw the adoration in his eyes, but even the tentative way he said it reminded her of her late fa
ther. The kind of man who was too nice to be aggressive in business and never destined to be a world-beater. After her father died, people came up to her at the funeral and told her stories about the times he’d graciously let them skip a few payments on furniture they’d bought because they couldn’t come up with the money. “He got in trouble with his uncle,” they said, “but he understood that some people struggled more than others.”

Seth worked hard in a publicist’s office, but he couldn’t have chosen a career that was more wrong for somebody with his too-nice personality. Publicists had to be killers, pushy and aggressive never-take-no-for-an-answer types who beat down people’s doors in service of their clients. Seth could never do that very well. That’s why he was still working at a so-so firm in a low-level position and living on a meager budget. And yet he didn’t seem to care. That was the part that bugged Dahlia so much, that he was content with so little.

“I’m going up,” she said.

Sunny. Is it possible that she could look so bad that even
I
couldn’t recognize her? Dahlia wondered, opening the door of the van and climbing out. As she walked up the steps, the foul air blowing at her was thick with the stink of cigarette smoke. Not one of the four men or the woman even looked at her as she walked past them into the house. The kitchen was to her right, but it was barricaded with half a dozen piled-up kitchen chairs on which someone had taped a handwritten sign that said
OFF-LIMITS
. Maybe kitchens were too dangerous for the Sea View
denizens to handle. The fire, the use of knives and other tools—it was all probably more than they were able to negotiate safely. There was a dreary living room to the left, with two threadbare sofas and a chair against the wall and a large TV in a corner, which a dozen metal folding chairs were facing.

At the farthest window, there was an old upright piano. Nobody was in either of these rooms, and though the stairwell was right in front of Dahlia, she thought that going up might be a mistake, so she went back out to the porch. The white-haired woman was talking to herself earnestly with her brow furrowed. “And you know what I told him? I said, ‘Baby, I’m not gonna do that,’” Dahlia heard her say.

One of the men looked like Santa Claus—he was round and large, with a white beard—but he certainly wasn’t jovial. His beard rested on his chest as he stared straight ahead. Dahlia cleared her throat loudly, thinking one of them might look up at her, but not one of them even blinked.

“Uh, hi. I’m looking for Sunny Gordon.” No response. “I’m her cousin. I was wondering if she was around? Anybody know?”

Finally Santa Claus looked up and turned slowly toward her. He was dead-eyed and sleepy-looking.

“Field trip. Couple of ’em went to the mall to get cigarettes and that kinda thing,” he said, then went back to his reverie.

“I’ll wait,” Dahlia said. “Thanks.” And she walked back down the steps.

Seth was reading a newspaper in the van when she got in again.

“Did they say she lives here?” he asked.

“Not exactly. But one of the men seemed to know who I meant.”

“Maybe we ought to go to the zoo for a couple of hours and come back later and try again—”

“Look.”

There was a faded brown Oldsmobile rattling up the street. Even before it turned into the driveway, Dahlia was sure it had to be the car returning from the mall. The car with Sunny in it. The car stopped, and she was surprised to hear her heart pounding too fast in her ears. She put her hand nervously on Seth’s arm as the doors to the car opened and they watched each of the passengers climb out.

There were two women. One was a short, stocky woman who was jabbering to the one who was still in the car and waving an angry finger as she did. The other one had flaming wild and frizzy orange hair, wore too much makeup, had long blue fingernails, and was dressed in a bright red parachute jogging suit that clashed with her hair color. A burly black man with a big belly and a very bushy Afro was the driver, and he locked the car doors, then took the steps two at a time and went inside.

Behind him the short woman rushed up the steps and into the house while the orange-haired one walked more slowly. She stopped to talk as she got to the top of the steps, and now Dahlia saw she was chatting with Santa Claus, who stood and pointed down to Dahlia’s van. The shocking orange hair shimmered halolike around her beaten and tired face, and she squinted hard as she peered at the van where Dahlia
leaned out the window to look back at her. The color of the woman’s hair was a blindingly bright Day-Glo fluorescent that practically pulsed. Dahlia got out of the van, and when she did, the woman walked down a few of the steps to look more closely at her. Dahlia felt panicky, but she moved forward to return the woman’s gaze.

“That her?” Dahlia heard Seth ask. His voice sounded very far away.

A clammy feeling crept into the back of Dahlia’s neck as she began to make out the woman’s facial features clearly—the flat nose, the prominent ears, the almond eyes, the turned-down mouth of her father’s family. There was no mistake. Under the haggard face and baggy eyes and blazing hair was the result of twenty-five years of God only knew how many electroconvulsive shock therapies and probably every kind of mind-altering drug. Sunny. Nicknamed that instead of called her proper name, Sandra, because she was born to brighten all of their lives. That’s what Uncle Max always said.

“That’s her,” Dahlia replied as a slide show of the times they’d spent together rushed through her mind. Sunny, Sunny, my God, it’s you, Dahlia thought, wanting to run to her and shake her and shriek. You have to remember me. You were the one who taught me to play the piano and write songs and love music. You were the one who adored my lyrics and sang them until you broke people’s hearts. You were the one who told me the facts of life. You told me about boys and how dumb they all are, you taught me how to dance and put on lipstick and practice kissing my pillow so
I’d be ready for kissing boys. But by the time I was ready to put it all to use, you were gone. And “gone” was definitely the word to describe the vacant look in this woman’s eyes as she walked down a few more steps, staring fearfully at Dahlia.

This is a mistake, Dahlia thought. In spite of what Louie had told her, the Sunny in her dreams was the one she’d been certain she was going to find here today. The Marilyn Monroe Sunny of the poofy bosom poking out of a sundress and the raucous, contagious giggle that would always get Dahlia giggling, too, and the pretty hands that used to take Dahlia’s tiny fingers and place them on the proper piano keys to teach her how to play each tune. I will get back in the van and leave right now, Dahlia thought, fearing there was a real chance she was going to get physically ill. This woman doesn’t know it’s me anyway, she rationalized, so her feelings won’t be hurt if I leave.

But she didn’t. In fact, something made her move toward the odd woman in the red jogging suit, and the closer she walked, the more she was able to sort out the Sunny she knew somewhere in among those weary and distorted features.