Some Kind of Miracle (9 page)

“Come by here, Lord. Come by here,” they sang in a blended four-part harmony that surprised Dahlia
with its quality. “Come by here, Lord. Come by here. Come by here, Lord. Come by here. Oh, Lord, come by here.”

Dahlia was transfixed by what she was seeing and hearing, astonished at the way the act of singing completely transformed each one of them, making their formerly expressionless eyes look as if they were lit from within. The sound of their song was angelic and their concentration unbroken as they watched Santa Claus and stood with lifted chins and straight backs and glowing faces.

“Someone’s cryin’, Lord. Come by here,” their voices rang out.

Sunny, who had been slack-jawed earlier as she passed out the song sheets to the others, now looked both angelic and powerful, and for the first time Dahlia saw in her expression a real suggestion of the cousin she had lost long ago.

“Someone’s cryin’, Lord. Come by here. Oh, Lord. Come by here.”

As they reached the end of the song, Santa Claus, who had been waving his arms enthusiastically, now lifted them in a grand gesture, bidding the singers to hold the last three notes. Come by here!!!

And then, as quickly as they had become the able and powerful choir, just after Santa called out “Thank you” to signify the end of their meeting, Dahlia was fascinated to watch the retrogression of each of them as their postures sank back, their focus seemed to shift inward again, and one by one they shuffled back toward the house.

“Thanks, Bill,” Dahlia heard a few of them say.

It was the short, stocky woman who noticed Dahlia first and poked Santa hard on the arm and nodded toward the door. He turned, and when he saw Dahlia, he said, “Company,” in a voice that sounded as if he were warning the others. When Sunny looked up to spot Dahlia standing in the doorway, she didn’t seem surprised. In fact, she didn’t react at all, just trudged past Dahlia, making no sign of recognition, and pushed the screen door open to go inside, letting it slam behind her.

“Did you like our choral group?” Santa asked Dahlia. The two of them were the only ones left in the Sea View’s spartan backyard.

“I loved your choral group.”

“We don’t get together very often, and Sunny, she’s my partner. She and I go over to the library and find music, and they let us run it off at a quarter a copy, so it’s not too bad. Then we have fun with it.”

“I could see that,” Dahlia said.

“There’s something about music that nothing else can quite equal,” Santa said as he and Dahlia moved into the house, where she could see some of the others filling the chairs that were parked in front of the TV. But Sunny wasn’t one of that group. The medicine man was nowhere in sight to stop her, so Dahlia decided to make her way upstairs.

The upstairs hallway smelled of Old Spice aftershave, and a door was open, revealing a messy bathroom with towels on the floor. Most of the doors were closed, but at the end of the hall there was one more open door, and Dahlia approached it. Through the door she could see Sunny sitting on the fuchsia che
nille bedspread playing solitaire. Dahlia watched her from a few feet away and saw Sunny’s brow furrow as she moved the cards from one row to another. “Sunny?” Dahlia said softly, and Sunny looked up blankly, as if she’d expected to see Dahlia there. As if she’d known all along someone was standing there watching her.

“I came to say good-bye,” Dahlia said. “And I was so glad I got to hear the choral group. You’re all wonderful.”

“Yeah,” Sunny said, returning her attention to the cards as she continued the game. Red six on black seven. Black four on red five.

“I remember you taught me how to play solitaire when I was seven,” Dahlia said, hearing her voice sound as tinny and hollow and insecure as it had with Marty Melman’s receptionist. It was that shaky sound, the one that said, You have something I need, so I’m nervous when I’m around you. How could she have that feeling with her own cousin, a mental patient?

“Now I play solitaire on the computer. With virtual cards. My boyfriend’s addicted to it,” Dahlia went on as she walked to the window in Sunny’s room to look down at the van, praying Seth was back and she would have a reason to say a quick good-bye, bolt out of there, and head home. But the street was empty, and Seth wasn’t anywhere in sight. “If you want to see the computer, I can run down and get it and bring it back.”

Sunny nodded. “I want to,” she said, sounding like a child.

“Don’t move,” Dahlia said, and she raced down the
stairs to the front door. The others all sat zoned out again, staring at the TV. At the van Dahlia climbed into the way-back where Seth had piled the computer on top of their duffel bags. Then she looked up at the Sea View, and when her eyes traveled to the second-story windows, she saw Sunny in one of them looking down at her. She grabbed the computer, held it up to show Sunny, and made her way back into the house and up again to Sunny’s room.

“Here it is,” Dahlia said, coming breathlessly into the room and setting the computer down on Sunny’s bed. “You see, the reason I have that van is because I’m a masseuse,” she continued, opening the computer and turning it on. Sunny was deadpan. “Do you know what a masseuse is?” Why in the world would Sunny know what that was? And how would Dahlia describe it to her? People take off all their clothes, and I rub their bodies? Well, maybe Sunny knew what a masseuse did. Mental patients watched a lot of TV. Somebody on one of those glamorous daytime soaps must get massages. Somebody in one of those tacky stories they stared at probably fell in love with the hot little masseuse and left his wife for her.

“So I need a roomy vehicle to carry a table and sometimes oils and sometimes sheets and blankets and heating pads.” Sunny had no interest in the story Dahlia was telling. All she cared about was the magic silver box Dahlia was clicking away at while she spoke.

“Okay,” Dahlia said, “here’s how you play solitaire on the computer. I’ll show you.” She sat on the bed
next to Sunny and pulled up the solitaire game on the screen. Then she slid the computer onto Sunny’s lap. Sunny looked at the screen and studied the little cards for a long time, then shook her head as if to say she couldn’t understand what Dahlia was trying to teach her.

“Now what?” she asked, clearly flummoxed by the whole idea that a machine could play cards.

“Here’s what you do.” Dahlia took Sunny’s finger and placed it on the mouse, the way Sunny used to take hers and place it on middle C. “Click on the six of hearts, but hold the button down, then move it this way and put it there!”

Sunny did what Dahlia told her, and when she saw the result, her mouth opened in happy surprise. “Whoa!” she said.

“Now do that with the black eight and the red nine,” Dahlia said.

It took Sunny a minute to find the right cards, and as she did, her right hand accidentally pushed the escape key, and when the screen morphed into the desktop with all the icons, her face crumbled. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” she said, on the verge of tears.

“Hey, it’s okay,” Dahlia said, pulling the computer onto her own lap, clicking the solitaire icon, and getting the game screen back, then putting an arm around Sunny, who looked relieved. Soon she was moving the cards quickly around the screen and laughing a little spurt of a laugh when the ones she needed came up. By the time she played the third game, she beat the computer and she was elated.

“I love this,” she said, looking deeply into her cousin’s eyes, and for Dahlia, in that instant, it was as if no time, no electroconvulsive shock treatments, no antipsychotic medications powerful enough to knock out an entire nation had ever come between them.

“I knew you would,” Dahlia said happily.

D
ahlia remembered the day she and Sunny had just finished playing and singing at another one of Aunt Ruthie’s parties when Esther Greenspan cornered Aunt Ruthie in the kitchen. “Those girls are adorable. Those songs they write are amazing. I could put them to work every weekend on the women’s-lunch circuit. They’d make a fortune.” Esther was Aunt Ruthie’s girlhood friend, and she’d shown up at one of the family parties and couldn’t get over the girls and their songs. Both Aunt Ruthie and Dahlia’s mother, Rose, shrugged. A fortune? They would need plenty of money for college, so why not let them?

Dahlia couldn’t believe they were getting fifty dollars each for appearing at this luncheon and as many more luncheons as they felt like doing, according to Esther, who hovered over them before the show. Her oversprayed bouffant hairdo was so unmoving that
Sunny couldn’t take her eyes off of it. The women at the luncheon streamed into the room at the Sportsman’s Lodge, all of them dressed in fancy suits and high heels with purses to match. They were the kind of women Dahlia’s mother wished out loud that she could be.

“The chicken-salad ladies,” Rose called them wistfully. Women who had money to buy seats at charity luncheons and then spend more money to buy brightly colored suits to wear to the luncheons. And on top of that, every one of them even had her hair and nails done, to be what Aunt Ruthie would call “all dolled up.”

The girls sat backstage peeking out to watch the assembled women who chattered and scurried from one table to another hugging one another, then sitting to eat and gossip over their chicken salad. Esther Greenspan came back and took the girls’ hands in hers, which were icy cold. She seemed edgy, as if she were the one who was about to go out there and sing for a few hundred people. “Break a leg, you two,” she said. Then she hurried onto the platform, and someone at one of the tables tapped a knife against a water glass to tell the women it was time to be quiet. Dahlia was tense. Sunny looked beautiful, her hair wavy all around her white skin, and she seemed to be enjoying watching the parade of clothes and jewelry.

“Am I on?” Esther said into the microphone, and then there was a loud squeal of feedback, and all the women held their ears. “
Now
am I on?” Then she put on little half reading glasses and read from her notes, “Welcome, paid-up members of the Beth El Sister-
hood. I won’t make a real speech until later. But right now you should welcome and enjoy these talented little girls, who are cousins. One writes the lyrics—Rose and Benny Gordon’s daughter, Dahlia—and the other the music—Ruthie and Max Gordon’s daughter, Sunny. So give them a big round of applause.”

The women seemed to appreciate the songs. Once they applauded in the middle of a number, and the girls were elated. Sunny leaned into the piano and added a few more musical flourishes that surprised even Dahlia. And the huge ovation at the end made it clear that the women were impressed with the little half-hour presentation the girls had practiced in Aunt Ruthie’s living room, on those days when Louie would sidle by and say things like, “With a little bit of effort, this could stink.”

“Let’s hear it for these talented young ladies,” Esther said, coming back to the platform. She looked very pleased with herself that the show had been so well received. Some of the women were even yelling “Bravo.” Esther gestured for Dahlia and Sunny to take a bow, and they held hands and blew kisses. That was when Dahlia glanced over at Sunny, sure she’d see happiness in her cousin’s face, but Sunny’s eyes were moving back and forth across the room nervously, and Dahlia felt a quickening in her stomach, knowing that the worst was about to happen. The wild look in Sunny’s eyes was unmistakable, and Dahlia inched closer to her to hear what she was saying.

“Birds’ nests,” Sunny muttered so only Dahlia could hear her.

“Sunny, it’s okay. Let’s just take our bows and get out of here.”

“No. No. It isn’t okay. I hate when ladies’ hairdos are so stiff and stuck in position that they look like birds’ nests. And they keep birds in there waiting to fly out and peck us.”

Oh, God. Dahlia was filled with a sense of impending doom. “Sunny, don’t,” she said, knowing how powerful the forces could be when Sunny started off on a tangent like this. She had to get her away from this place as fast as she could move her.

Esther was still at the podium. “Ladies,” she said as the women continued to applaud, “aren’t they great?” But Dahlia, still holding Sunny’s hand, felt the agitation flow through her cousin just as Sunny let go, hurried away from her, and bounded down the steps to where the twenty tables of ten were filled with jabbering women. Then, from a tray a waiter had left on a side table, Sunny lifted a pitcher of ice water in each hand, rushed to the table closest to the stage, raised the pitchers high, and spilled torrents of ice water on the bouffant, puffy, sprayed hairdos of the women. After that she moved back to the tray, grabbing another pair of pitchers and rushing to another group of women to do it again. The women were too stunned to stop her, and Dahlia stood in horror on the stage, watching.

After a moment Esther Greenspan realized what was happening and shrieked into the microphone, “Stop her! Someone stop her! She’s crazy!” But nobody stopped her. Women were screaming as if it were acid Sunny was pouring, and they were leaping to their feet to run out of the room, horrified to be seen with their flattened, sticky hairdos and runny makeup
and soaking-wet silk suits. Sunny was heading back to the tray, and she had just reached for another pitcher when Dahlia threw herself in front of the tray to stop her. She could see a phalanx of waiters marching angrily in their direction as she grabbed Sunny’s hand and tugged at her.

“Come on!” she screamed, and they bolted across the stage, knocking down a microphone and nearly tripping over the cord, racing out the back door of the hotel and down Coldwater Canyon before anyone could stop them. Running breathlessly to get away, until Dahlia looked back and saw that nobody was running after them, and finally they stopped and sat down on the curb to breathe. Dahlia felt like throwing up. Just thinking about all of those women melting down under the deluge of ice water made her feel sick.

Sunny was crying. “They had birds’ nests, and there were birds hiding in them, Dahl. I could hear them. The whole time we were singing, the birds were singing, too. Their chirpy little songs.”

“No, Sun. They weren’t. You need to change your medicine,” Dahlia said, putting an arm around her and feeling Sunny’s whole body racked with sobs. She remembered thinking at that moment how much she loved her poor, tormented cousin, wondering if anyone could stop this terrible devolution into madness that seemed to be sucking Sunny further and further from any semblance of normalcy.

The day after the luncheon, partly to appease the women who were threatening to sue and partly because Sunny became more and more uncontrollable at home that night, Dahlia remembered Aunt Ruthie and
Uncle Max putting Sunny away in a hospital outside the city, hoping the doctors could find some kind of medication that would put an end to those outbursts forever.

Today, as Dahlia sat on Sunny’s bed at the Sea View watching her play game after game of solitaire, she felt as if things were going well. Probably if there was ever a moment to take a shot at getting Sunny to sign the contract, this was it. She seemed peaceful, she seemed friendly, and right now, for all intents and purposes, Dahlia was simply the nice person who’d brought her this new toy she seemed to be enjoying so much. Dahlia felt afraid to broach the subject, but she knew Seth would probably show up soon, still angry with her about last night, wanting her to leave San Diego and come home, so she had to make a stab at this now.

“Sunny, listen. I tried to explain this to you yesterday, but let me try again. A very famous movie producer wants to buy our song, and we stand to make some money. We could make a lot of money from it. I have a real contract here. See this?” She pulled the four-page contract out of her purse and held it up, then riffled through it to page 4. “This line with the little
x
next to it is a place where if you signed your name, it would guarantee that we’d both get a lot of money. See where I wrote ‘Dahlia Gordon’? All you have to do is write ‘Sunny Gordon’ underneath.”

Sunny ran her finger over Dahlia’s signature, then nodded. “Okay,” she said.

She said okay. Dahlia sat frozen, afraid that if she
blinked, Sunny would change her mind. Sunny said okay, and now she was smiling.

“Only you have to leave the room while I do,” she added.

“Why?” Dahlia asked, barely breathing.

“Just because.”

Just because. Okay. Sunny obviously had some fear of being watched, some problem with shyness, some need for control. Dahlia didn’t care what the reason was. Why apply reason to this situation? She was about to get what she wanted. Sunny would sign the contract, so who cared why she wanted Dahlia to leave the room? Dahlia would do it gladly. Hell, she’d hang by her toes from the shower-curtain pole for that signature. In a few minutes she’d leave this depressing place with a signed contract in her hand.

“Yeah. Sure. I’ll leave the room. You mean you want me to wait in the hall for a minute or two?” she asked, and Sunny nodded. Done deal. Hello, Grammys, Dahlia thought.

“See you in two minutes,” Dahlia said, trying to keep the giddiness out of her voice as she walked into the hall. The strains of the theme music from some daytime soap wafted up the steps. Fantasies of the recording session danced through her brain. She’d wear a black turtleneck and black jeans. She and Jennifer Lopez would become instant friends.

“I love this song so much,” J.Lo would say. “You must have a few more in your trunk that I can record.”

“Oh, let me thumb through them and see what I can find,” Dahlia would reply. Once you made contact with people like that, they looked to you for material.
Stars liked working with people they trusted. God, it was taking a long time for Sunny just to sign her name, she thought. Maybe she ought to holler in to her and remind her that even though the contract was four pages long, all she had to deal with was that little
x
on the last page. Surely she wasn’t reading the damned thing. Dahlia had only skimmed it herself, and she was sane. Sunny could never wade through all that legal garbage.

Somewhere a toilet flushed, and from somewhere else Dahlia heard the moaning lady moan. This was taking way too long. Maybe Sunny didn’t realize that Dahlia was just out in the hallway. Maybe she thought she’d gone back downstairs.

“Sunny,” she said quietly, tapping lightly on the door.

“Yessss?” Sunny sang out.

“Are you ready?” Dahlia asked.

“I am,” Sunny said.

Dahlia sighed with relief and pushed the door open to see Sunny, stone-faced, sitting at the little chair next to her desk. Spread out across the bed were the four pages of the contract, but something had been written on them in what, for an instant, Dahlia was certain had to be blood. Sunny’s blood, like the time she dribbled it over the potato salad at the family picnic.

“What did you do!?” Dahlia shrieked. Then she looked back at Sunny, who was holding a small bottle of fiery red nail polish. The crimson letters she’d painted across the pages of the contract said: FUCK SIGNING, FUCK YOU, punctuated with little round faces with frowning eyes and downturned mouths.

“Why did you do that to my contract?” Dahlia
screamed. “Why?” This was a truly crazy person. The real question was why she had left the crazy person’s room thinking something sane was going to happen.

“I’m not ever writing my name on anything again,” Sunny told her. “My mother used to get me to sign those papers, too, because after I wasn’t a kid anymore, I had to agree to stay in some of those hellholes where she put me. If I signed, I couldn’t leave. Signing means you’re trapped. No signing. ‘Come on, honey,’ she’d tell me. ‘You know this is best for you.’ No signing.” Now she looked menacingly at Dahlia. “Get out of here. No signing.”

“This was about a song,” Dahlia said, trembling and knowing there was no way she could reason with this inflamed woman who was now red in the face and holding up the sheets of the contract, which had red polish dripping off them onto the floor. Dahlia snatched the laptop from the bed and turned to leave. “I’m sorry,” she said to Sunny. “I’m sorry I never came to see you before, and I’m sorry I asked you to sign this, and I’m sorry I was stupid enough to think this could work.”

Sunny was tearing at her own hair, repeating loudly, “No signing anything.” As Dahlia hurried down the hall and down the stairs and out of the building she could hear her repeating, “No signing anything. No signing anything.” In relief Dahlia stopped at the van, slid the door open, and put the laptop into the back, then glanced up to see Sunny standing in the window of her room, glaring down at her. Dahlia walked the few blocks up to the main street in town to look for Seth.