“Oh,” Sarabeth said.
He gave her a quizzical look, his straight, dark eyebrows coming together, his head tipping slightly to the side. “Can I help you?”
“No,” she said. “It’s just—I thought there were painters here.”
“There are.”
She looked down and saw his toes poking out of the cast. They were sexy toes, actually, with clean, squared-off nails. Was he cute?
Shut the fuck up,
she told herself.
“I’m upstairs,” she said, “and—” She looked past him into the apartment. “Wait, are you listing this place?”
“Next week. Why, you interested?”
She explained her situation, why she was there, what she needed—she was pretty babbly, but he hung on till the end.
He said, “Well, that’s both quite a jam you’re in and also highly resolvable.”
“It is?”
“Which one do you question?” He smiled and said he’d be right back, and he left her on the doorstep and disappeared into the bedroom of what appeared to be a mirror-image version of Helen’s place. She heard him speaking Spanish, heard another voice, heard laughter.
“They’re going to quit for lunch soon,” he said, coming back. “They’ll come help you then if that’s OK.”
She stared at him, embarrassment beginning its long, vinelike climb up her insides. She was aware that even if she knew what to say, she might not be able to say it.
“I’d offer my services as well,” he said, “but under the circumstances—” He gestured at his leg.
Still she stared.
“Is that OK, then? Half an hour or so?”
“Yeah, no, it’s just—” She took a deep breath. “I’m completely mortified.”
He gave her an incredulous look. “Why?”
She shielded her eyes for a moment, her face on fire. “Sorry,” she said, “this is absurd. It’s just—I feel like a little kid. I needed someone to take care of my problem, and it happened.”
“To me you had a problem and pursued a solution and found one.” He had a sweet look on his face, a look that was both gentle and amused, and she felt herself begin to relax. “Like an adult,” he added.
“Oh, so you’re nice.”
He grinned and pulled a card case from his back pocket. “Peter Watkins. Coldwell Banker.”
“Sarabeth Leoffler. Um, home sale design.”
“Really? I thought you were one of us.” He gave her a long, appraising look. “OK, then,” he said, “half an hour or so,” and she thanked him and waved and turned away.
I thought you were one of us.
He’d meant one of us realtors, of course, and his saying so meant he recognized her, but all she could think, her earlier despair returning, was that the real mistake he’d made was in thinking she belonged to the community of the competent.
She was in bad shape. To make matters worse, when she got home she had a message from Mark. “Hi, Sarabeth. I’ll bet you know who this is. Nothing important, just saying hello.” She pressed 3 for erase and hung up so quickly, the handset fell from the charger. She hurried to her room, got into bed, and pulled the blankets over her head. Early on with Billy, tortured with indecision but unable to stop herself from seeing him, she’d fled Berkeley one Friday afternoon when his wife and kids were going away for the weekend and he’d said he could spend the entire time with her. Forty-eight hours! She hightailed it to the Mackays’, and Liz gave her a glass of wine and dinner and the guest room, where, once everyone else was asleep, the two of them sat together on the bed, legs crossed, and talked and talked. “I’m worried about
you,
” Liz said. Meaning not Travis, not Zeke, not Her, though when Sarabeth brought them up Liz said she couldn’t imagine it not affecting them as well. “But I don’t know them,” she added.
It had been October, maybe November. Rain falling: thumming the roof, rattling the leaves on the trees.
“You think he’ll hurt me?”
“I can imagine a lot of things that might make you suffer.”
“But I’m suffering now.”
“I know. I wish you weren’t.”
Liz didn’t tell her what to do. Not until much later, when some kind of impatience had taken over, or moral disgust, or something. “Why am I still doing this?” Sarabeth had asked her, and Liz had said, “Why
are
you?” In other words
stop
—and so for a while Sarabeth didn’t tell her any of what was going on.
What would Liz think of Mark’s visit? She’d be horrified. Or was that wishful thinking, the same thing as wishing Liz knew? As wishing she’d called back.
It had been a week to the day since Sarabeth had sent her the voice message.
“Jim?” she said into the phone a little later. “Can I come over?” And then she blurted out the entire story of Lauren and Liz.
Jim and Donald lived way up in the Oakland hills, in a house they’d built on the site of a house they’d lost to the ’91 fire. When she arrived half an hour later, she found they’d made a space for her in the short, steep driveway, and they both came to the front door to welcome her.
“I told Donald,” Jim said. “I hope that’s OK.”
“Of course,” she said, and Donald enfolded her in his long, skinny arms. She stayed close for an extra moment, breathing in the wool smell of his sweater.
In the living room Jim poured her a glass of red wine, and then he and Donald settled on the couch while she took a seat on the floor, on the thick rug that lay in front of the fireplace.
“So what’s next?” Jim said. “What are you going to do?”
She was surprised by this. “Nothing. There’s nothing I can do. I can’t call again.”
“What do you mean? That’s ridiculous, of course you can call again.”
She looked away. Behind the couch, a sliding glass door led to a wonderful multilevel deck: the number one item on the wish list Jim and Donald had given their architect. They told stories about how invigorating it had been to start over, to get
exactly the house they wanted,
but she couldn’t imagine how they’d borne so much loss. Among many other absences, they now had no pictures of either of them from birth to the day of the fire.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m not sleeping well. I’m so tired it’s affecting my social skills. Why do you feel you can’t call again?”
It had to do with respect, with not being the kind of person who hammered and hammered. She didn’t know how to explain this, though. She said, “I’ve been really tired, too. Do you suppose we have chronic fatigue syndrome?”
“Everyone’s tired,” Donald said. “Haven’t you heard? It’s the new depressed.”
“Where does that leave depressed?” Jim quipped, and Sarabeth smiled and rolled her eyes, but she couldn’t muster the energy to take it any further.
On the coffee table there was a platter of bread and cheese, and he slid it toward her. “Eat. Want any of this? Or I can cook you something.”
“Oh, I’m fine, thanks.”
He sliced off a piece of Brie and put it on a cracker. “Here.”
She let him hand her the cracker, and after a moment she took a bite. In her mouth there was texture, the cracker crunching, the buttery smoothness of the Brie, but she didn’t taste much of anything.
“You could write her a letter,” he said, and she shrugged.
“I suppose so. Actually, I think I just have to wait.”
Donald cleared his throat. “I’ve been thinking that your mother must feel very close right now. Her death, I mean.”
Sarabeth felt a caving sensation in her chest. It did and it didn’t. She did and she didn’t. The fire crackled, and in the quiet afterward she heard the faraway barking of a dog. She brought her glass to her lips and let the rich, dark wine bleed across her tongue and into her throat.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “Did I overstep?”
“No, of course not,” she said. “It’s fine.”
And it mostly was. There had been times when she hadn’t talked about it—in college, in her early twenties—but she’d gained some distance somewhere along the line. She had even, in her mid-thirties, had a friend whose father had killed himself, and the two of them had done little
other
than talk about it—to the point where they had a kind of routine going, the suicide sisters, that they performed for and with each other. It had made them fast friends for a time, and then embarrassed and awkward former acquaintances ever after. “My mother didn’t leave a note.” “My father left a note and didn’t mention me.” An integral part of the routine was competition.
“Let’s go into the kitchen,” Jim said. “I’ll make some pasta.”
“I’m—”
“Come on,” Donald said. “He won’t do it just for me, and I’m starving.”
Jim stood and offered her his hand, and she let him pull her to her feet. He’d been so nice about the condo earlier, praising her when the job she’d done was merely adequate.
She followed him into the kitchen. While he and Donald moved from refrigerator to sink to stove, she sat at the table and glanced at some of his work papers—flyers for the condo, comps on a house in Kensington, a stack of photocopies of a newspaper article about the housing market. “Top-Priced Bay Area Communities” read the heading of a sidebar, and she looked, as she always did, for Palo Alto: the median price for a house was $1.2 million.
She had, from time to time, thought of asking Jim to figure out what her family’s house on Cowper might fetch in the current market, but she didn’t really want to know.
Gazillions
would be the answer. And it wouldn’t matter, because it had been necessary for her father to sell it when he did. Necessary in every way.
Life on Cowper Street, life in that house, with its elegant, unlivable rooms. What she remembered was a fear of displeasing her mother, of her mother becoming angry at her—or angry at herself, which was just as bad. There was loud anger in the kitchen, where plates could be broken, and silent anger upstairs, where Lorelei simmered and sulked. Sarabeth remembered hysterical anger in the garage, when she hid once behind a wheelbarrow and wasn’t found for a long time.
Toward the end, Lorelei changed. She became quieter, and she cried a lot. She was almost always in bed when Sarabeth left for school in the morning, and the last thing Sarabeth did before heading out was stop in and say goodbye. Very occasionally there was something lovely about Lorelei in bed—the stack of pillows, the crystal carafe of water—and at such times Sarabeth could feel drawn by the room, by the idea that Lorelei might absorb peace from the room, even by Lorelei herself. On the last day, though, it was just a mess: curtains drawn, abandoned clothing all over the floor.
Sarabeth hadn’t discovered the body, but only, she sometimes thought, through sheer determination not to. When she returned home from school in those days she occupied herself with avoiding the parts of the house where she might come in contact with her mother. On that day, the kitchen bore traces of her mother’s having been up for a while: there was an unsuccessful soft-boiled egg lying near the sink, most of the yolk congealed on the counter. Sarabeth cleaned it and then took her homework to her father’s small office off the living room.
She worked. The house was very quiet, as it could well remain until he got home. Liz was still at school—she was on the yearbook staff, and they were working furiously to get the final pages finished and off to the printer. From her father’s desk, Sarabeth had a narrow tree-impeded view across the street to the Castleberrys’ front door, and she was simultaneously watching for Liz and listening for Lorelei. She would realize many years later that she had made a deal with herself, the deal being that when she saw Liz she would go and check on Lorelei. Life was usually best when Liz was home—best best when Sarabeth was over there with her—but on that day, as she looked up again and again to see if Liz was pulling up across the street on her bike, she was relieved each time to see nothing but the Castleberrys’ front door.
Cowardly then, cowardly now.
Though she had called Liz. She had. She had agonized, and then she had called. And now…it was true, what she’d said to Jim earlier. She just had to wait. Waiting was, after all, something to do; it was its own small kind of solution.
On the other side of the cooking island Jim chopped shallots, and Donald stood at the sink washing lettuce. They had been together thirty years, longer than any other couple she knew. Jim looked up. For a moment, he seemed surprised that she was watching him, and then he gave her a smile and waved at her, and she waved back.
24
C
hristmas was ten days away, and Liz could delay no longer. Thursday morning, after dropping Lauren at the hospital, she headed to the mall to do her shopping. Every bit of it, with any luck.
It was hard to park, at not even nine o’clock. She cut the engine and wrote out a list, trying to put the things she wanted in the order in which she’d arrive at the stores that sold them, reminding herself as she did this of the short interval just after her father’s retirement when he took over the weekly grocery shopping: he memorized the layout of Safeway and wrote his lists in aisle-by-aisle order, starting with meat and ending with produce. The novelty wore off, though, the pleasure of being so efficient, and soon Liz’s mother was the shopper again.
They’d come for dinner Sunday night, and her father had talked a lot, as he always did under pressure, and her mother had contrived to spend almost the entire predinner period working in the kitchen—Liz wasn’t sure she addressed a single word to Lauren all evening. Except when she came in: she rushed at Lauren and cried, “My girl,” hugging her tightly but avoiding eye contact altogether.
Liz got out of the van and locked up. Seventeen was the number of items on her list, but it wasn’t as bad as it looked: she was going to get iTunes gift cards for all the nieces and nephews.
The list had her starting at Nordstrom, though, and she had not bargained on the ground-floor bustle, on the women in Santa hats spraying perfume, on the young mothers trying to push writhing, stroller-bound toddlers from counter to counter, their chipper determination weakening already. In front of the entrance to the up escalator an elderly couple stood in a paralysis of befuddlement that Liz saw might last several minutes. The elevator instead then, but to reach it she had to make her way through men’s shoes, and the gleaming wingtips, the truffle-brown oxfords, the Rockports, the Børns, the Josef Seibels, the Mephistos, the Johnston & Murphys—she was overwhelmed by them, by their pathos. There was something so touching about men’s shoes, how huge and hopeful looking they were. She gave a hovering salesman a go-away glance, and she lifted a shoe to her face and breathed in the smells of leather and cork. She set the shoe down again. Brody’s feet were gigantic; he was barely six feet tall, and he wore a size twelve. Her second or third date with him, twenty-odd years ago, she’d blurted out something about how big his feet were—totally out of the blue—and then she’d burst into mortified laughter. What a goof she’d been then. She remembered it as if it had been someone other than she sitting beside him at Candlestick Park, watching the Giants, happy she could impress him with her baseball expertise.
The woman Liz had been then, the girl—she’d hung out in bars, gotten drunk most weekends, dated men who were about as dependable as puppies. Her adult self more closely resembled her teenage self than it did that person. She’d even slept around some, though in a moderate, good-girl way; despite her efforts, she was pretty much of a fuddy-duddy even then. She’d meet guys and want to cook dinner for them, but they had trouble sitting still long enough; they’d be like
chew, chew,
and then
Wow, that was great, wanna go out?
Brody was older, solid. He knew what he wanted. He wanted who she’d have become if she hadn’t detoured into the semiwild life; and so she detoured out of it and became herself.
She gave up on Nordstrom for now, instead entering the vast terrain of chain boutiques. They were all around her: Papyrus, Brookstone, J. Jill, Claire’s, the Body Shop, See’s Candies, Sunglass Hut. In the atrium she looked up and saw that the sky was a wicked shade of near white. She felt out of kilter, chided herself for beginning to lose her resolve.
She walked. Walking was good, and walking quickly was even better; it was something like an antidote to despair.
Despair in a store.
This was a phrase of Sarabeth’s: it was what you felt when you had time, money, desire…but you couldn’t
buy
anything. Counterintuitively, you prolonged your stay, waiting for something to change. It wouldn’t.
How long ago had Sarabeth called Liz—undergrounded her? It was last week sometime; Liz wasn’t sure when. The holidays were always so insane.
She arrived at the Apple store. There were about ten people in line, and she understood it would only get worse, but she couldn’t make herself go in. You could get iTunes cards almost anywhere now, couldn’t you? She walked on, slowing only as she approached the Santa area, and then there he was, Santa himself: sitting on a huge sherbet-colored Candy Land version of a throne. It was like a prop for a play, a movie:
Santa, the Musical!
The photographer’s assistant was dressed as an elf, an elf holding a clipboard; Liz watched as she bent to help a very young woman with a stroller. Liz decided to watch one Santa visit, wait through one photo op, then turn around and get to work. But when the young mother at last lifted up her child, Liz saw not the toddler she’d expected but a tiny sleeping newborn, dressed for the occasion in a fuzzy red suit and a long, fur-trimmed red cap, and Liz wanted to scream: she felt she might well scream.
She headed for the nearest exit. Outside, she discovered that she’d been sweating; she felt it as the cool air hit her face. She found a tissue in her purse and blotted her forehead, her upper lip. She watched people coming across from the parking structure, women mostly, alone or in pairs. Women chatting, women with handbags hanging from their forearms. She backed up until she’d reached the rough surface of the mall building, and she closed her eyes. Barely moving, she turned her head back and forth until she felt the stucco scraping lightly against her scalp.
They sat in a circle. The faces were mostly different from when Lauren had started, more than three weeks ago. Casey was gone. Morgan was gone. Angus was on partial but absent today. Abby was gone—back to intensive care because her vital signs had tanked. Lucas remained, but he was gone, too—gone to Lauren, anyway: he had avoided her since the day she was released from inpatient. Today there were two new kids: a boy with bruises on his face, a girl with bandaged wrists. Ivan was leading, and because of the newcomers he went through the privacy rules yet again. Wrapping it up, he said, “And finally, we won’t tell your parents what you say here unless we feel you’re in imminent danger.”
“And all you have to do to keep him quiet,” Callie said, “is give him a blow job.”
She was a few seats away from Lauren, on one of the ugly corduroy couches, and she made a point now of looking at Lauren and sliding her tongue back and forth over her top lip. This really bothered Lauren, which was probably why Callie did it. Dr. Lewis said sometimes abused kids felt that the only way to connect with people was to be sexual. This morning, Callie had told Lauren that when she was in seventh grade she’d sold hand jobs to boys during audiovisual presentations. Lauren didn’t know why Callie came to her with these stories, but in some psycho part of herself she was sort of flattered. “I think it’s human nature,” Dr. Lewis had said about this, “to be curious about the ways people can get into trouble.”
Ivan looked around the room. “Does anyone have a reaction to what Callie said?”
“Slut,” said a boy named Nick.
“She was pissed,” Lauren said. Her face warmed, but she went on. “Because you can just walk out of here, and we can’t.”
“I didn’t say that,” Callie said.
“It’s true, though,” Ivan said. “I can just walk out of here. What do you have to do to walk out of here?”
“Work,” Nick said.
Ivan nodded, but Lauren thought this wasn’t really true. Some people stayed because there was nowhere else to go. Callie: her fourth foster mom had said she was finished. Lucas: his parents couldn’t be reached, seemed to have vanished, and the only other potential adult in his life was a great-uncle in Utica, New York, who was trying to figure out if he had enough money to send Lucas to boarding school.
Lauren, in fact,
could
walk out of here—did walk out of here each afternoon, and would walk out of here for the last time tomorrow. Something had happened, though: she wanted to stay. Not just until Christmas, but for the rest of high school. Her parents and the school district had decided that she didn’t have to return to school until January, but January would come faster than she could stand, and she didn’t want to go back. To her dismay, tears edged out of her eyes.
“Lauren,” Ivan said, “do you have something you want to share?”
“Her ass,” Lucas said.
Everyone turned to look at him; he’d barely spoken all week. Lauren felt sick.
“Wow,” Callie said at last, breaking the silence, “that was really hostile,” but she said it like a Valley Girl,
rilly hostile,
and Lauren felt worse.
“Lauren?” Ivan said.
All eyes were on her except Lucas’s. “What did I do to you?” she heard herself say. She regretted it immediately and pinched her eyes closed for a moment.
“Yeah,” Callie said, “what did she?” and Lauren wondered if in some part of her fucked-up self Callie was actually on her side.
The group was silent. Ivan was watching Lucas, and now he brought his hands together in front of his lips and said, “I think there are some questions for you, Lucas.”
“Fuck you,” Lucas said.
Ivan tapped his hands against his chin. “I’m hearing a lot of anger today.”
Lauren stifled a giggle, then melted into tears. She sat there crying: fat assed, ugly, pathetic.
Lucas shoved his chair back a few feet. Now he was outside the circle but not outside the group—to leave the group he’d have to leave the room, and that wasn’t allowed.
“What does anger feel like?” Ivan said.
“Like you want to kill someone.”
“Like someone wants to kill you.”
“That’s fear.”
“Maybe for you.”
“Sometimes anger goes with feeling hurt,” Ivan said. “Sometimes kids say angry things to each other when they’re hurting.”
“Gag me,” Callie said, but Lucas blushed and stared into his lap, and Lauren remembered the moment a few days before she was released when he sort of cried in front of her. She remembered the way the tears clung to his eyes, tiny pools in front of a look of sadness that was there and then not there and then there again, like even inside himself he didn’t know how he felt. When the tears finally surged, they trailed slowly down his cheeks, but the rest of him looked just the same. And what did she do? She left the room.
Someone began talking about something else, and she let herself go—not more crying, but a spiral into what she and Dr. Lewis called the Bad Feeling. It was where she’d been living for a long time. She knew it very well: like a room, like a jail cell. It was the place where she hated herself the most. It was the place where she could feel like puking at any time.
But: your parents gone, no forwarding address. She couldn’t imagine it.
Lucas stared into his lap.
When the session was over everyone stood. Some would go to art, some to yoga, some to music. Some saw their shrinks. She’d seen Dr. Lewis first thing this morning, and though she’d stood, too, she hung around the emptying circle, looking half at Ivan and half at Lucas, who had not moved.
Lucas knew she was still there—she could tell, maybe from how determined he seemed not to look anywhere but down. Ivan was on his feet: watching the dispersing kids, glancing at Lucas, smiling across the ring of chairs at Lauren. Was it the same day Lucas cried that she thought the jack of diamonds looked like Jeff Shannon? Ivan had been playing cards with Casey. And now Casey was gone. On her last day, she’d motioned Lauren into her room and pulled up her pant leg to reveal a huge number of cut marks on her shin—some faint and white, some crooked, some shiny red. She said, “You have to decide every day not to do it.”
Lucas leaned forward and rested his forearms on his legs. Lauren walked around the outside of the chairs and sat on the one nearest him. He looked at her, then looked away again. She didn’t know what to do—she felt sort of idiotic sitting here, but she wasn’t going to just leave him, not this time.
The Oiron holiday celebration was in a ballroom at the Palo Alto Sheraton, on the last Saturday night of the party season. There were several hundred people there, eating and laughing and sipping better champagne than you’d think would be served at a corporate party, because Russ’s brother-in-law owned a winery in Napa.
But Brody couldn’t really enjoy it. Liz hadn’t wanted to come, and they’d fought over whether or not it was OK to leave the kids—to leave Lauren—home alone. “What do you think will happen?” he’d asked her, and the answer had hung in the air between them, unspoken.
They’d spent the first part of the party together, but now she was on the other side of the dance floor, talking to Mike Patterson’s wife. In bed last night he’d approached her, just a hand on her hip, but she’d stiffened and moved away. They hadn’t made love in a long time—certainly not since Lauren had come home. Maybe not since the night he left the bed as soon as he was finished.
That night, the way he was: he remembered a period early on when she sometimes wanted it that way. “Be rough with me,” she’d say. “Fuck me.” Proper Liz! Other times, she’d tell him to pretend they’d just met. Or either of them might whisper to the other, “You’re not allowed to move until I say so.” They were adventurous then, playful. Now you couldn’t even call what they did making love. Or not always, anyway. Plenty of times it was just having sex. Like having lunch. Just something you did because you needed to.
He scanned the ballroom. Russ was standing near the bar with an exquisite young Asian woman, who had the most perfect mouth Brody had ever seen. She was maybe twenty-five, and she gazed at Russ with a dreamy expression on her face, as if she’d float away if he removed his arm from her waist.
A waiter passed with a tray, and Brody helped himself to more champagne. He knew he should eat, but he felt stubborn about it, imagining Liz would tell him the same thing.
He looked at Russ and his date again. How would it be to have a girl like that—to feel, even briefly, less your usual self than her happy idea of you?