The Tin Horse: A Novel (15 page)

Kay Devereaux wasn’t my sister. It was the only thing that made sense!

Yet another explanation kept whispering in my mind, one that made me feel like I’d been punched in the gut. When I couldn’t stand being in the house anymore, I got in the car and started driving.

AM I ALREADY AT
Victorville? The diner where Paul and I liked to stop is still there, just off the highway. I use the ladies’ room, get the date shake to go, and take a sip. Ah, the blend of dates, milk, and ice cream turns out to
be one of the few revisited pleasures that’s as good as I remember. I place the shake in the Jag’s cupholder to enjoy as I drive home.

But instead of heading back to L.A., I obey Maxene, the name (after the middle Andrews sister) I’ve given the car’s smooth-voiced navigator. Just for the heck of it, I’d programmed Maxene for Colorado Springs. Of course, I won’t really drive that far. But Las Vegas—why not go there? Spend a day or two, see a show, play the slots? Is there anyone I need to call, anything to reschedule? I’m not meeting with Diane, the young attorney I mentor, until next week. And I taped my commentary for the legal affairs show on the public radio station yesterday.

Vegas, yes! I’ll buy myself a toothbrush. And a swimsuit. One of the things I remember most fondly from trips we took to Las Vegas with the kids was swimming in those turquoise pools. Though I know that, unlike the date shake, which has held up to my memory of it, Las Vegas long ago stopped being the place I loved in the fifties and sixties, when you could still feel the desert grit beneath the glitz.

Vegas in those days was my cousin Ivan, a small-time operator who lived there and always treated us to a dinner at a steakhouse and introduced us to his latest lady friend. At least I reassured myself that he was small-time, involved in nothing worse than gambling scams. If he’d been doing anything really unsavory, wouldn’t he have been able to afford something better than the series of modest apartments where he lived? And his ladies were invariably girl-next-door types from the Midwest.

Ivan was one reason we went to Vegas a couple of times a year. My parents had sponsored him to come from Romania in the late 1930s, and I felt responsible for him. And I like to play blackjack and the slots; gambling, after all, is something of a family pastime. Best of all, Las Vegas was a cheap, quick family getaway. I’m sure neither of my kids would set foot in Vegas these days—Carol’s idea of a vacation involves backpacks and national parks, and Ronnie gravitates toward places where the entertainment features
museos
and string quartets, not feather boas—but we had some great times there.

Was I drawn to Las Vegas for another reason? I wonder now, sipping my date shake and pushing the car to eighty-five on the straight, flat interstate. Did I go because it seemed like a place where Barbara might have
ended up? That’s one of the futures I imagined for her, as a Las Vegas showgirl. Or she might have become a New York socialite or the wife of a fabulously wealthy oil sheik with homes in half the capitals of Europe—Barbara wouldn’t have settled for anything small and ordinary. Not that I spent every minute thinking about her; I didn’t have time. My missing sister was simply another instrument in my usual symphony of Paul and the kids and work and politics … an oboe, perhaps, sad and autumnal, that shaded every other tone.

No, I didn’t
look
for her in Vegas, not like Mama peering into every store on her walks through Hollywood. Yet the one time I thought I spotted her, I took off like a runner exploding from the starting blocks, as if my muscles had been primed for just that moment. It was 1958, almost twenty years since she’d left. I was walking on the Strip with the kids. Carol was seven then and Ronnie four. Something about a woman walking half a block ahead of us, her back or her stride, riveted my attention, and I dropped my kids’ hands and raced after her. “Barbara?”

She didn’t react.

“Barbara!” I touched the woman’s shoulder, and she turned. What was I thinking? This woman was barely twenty-five, whereas Barbara would have been nearly forty by then, the same as me. “Sorry,” I stammered, and hurried back to my kids.

Ronnie was blubbering and Carol trying to be the reassuring big sister, although her eyes had gone wide in alarm. I hugged them, keeping my arms around them even when Carol squirmed and complained, “It’s too hot, Mommy.” I needed the comfort of my kids’ sweaty bodies against the disappointment that the woman wasn’t Barbara—and the jab of deeper hurt that shocked me in that moment with its force: while Barbara remained “missing” to us, she could have gotten in touch with our family anytime. But she didn’t want to see us.

She didn’t want to see me
.

A PIT STOP AT
a Denny’s outside Barstow. I sit at the counter and order a slice of apple pie, not really wanting it but to “pay” for using the bathroom. The pie tastes great, though, and I take my time enjoying it.

I’m surprised, when I return to the car, to notice the first hint of dusk. It’s not even five, but of course it’s November. Well, I’m halfway to Vegas already; if I turn around now, I’ll hit rush hour traffic in L.A. As long as I have to drive after dark, it’s better with my lousy night vision to be on a straight-shot highway through the desert, I reason.

The austere landscape makes me think of the wild, beautiful desert photograph that Alan Yardley gave me, a black and white shot, all light and shadow. Yardley, when I went to ask him about Barbara, struck me as the gentlest man I’d ever met. I learned later, from Philip, that all the while Yardley was meeting my gaze with his sad, compassionate eyes, he was lying to me. I hung the photo in every office in which I worked—now it’s above my desk at home—to remind me that trust must be earned, not blindly given.

Yet obviously I gave my trust too easily. As I race across the desert, the knowledge I’ve tried to push away all afternoon—the other explanation for Philip’s card among my mother’s papers and for the letter from Carl Logan in his file—worms into my mind: Barbara
was
living as Kay Devereaux in Colorado Springs. Philip found out, and he told Mama and Papa. And they all kept it from me!

“No!” I scream in the privacy of the car, the night, the desert.

It’s no more than a second’s inattention, but the Jag swerves, and I’m bumping over rough terrain, seeing nothing but shadows ahead of me. I pump the brakes. The car slows but continues to lurch forward. There’s a scraping metallic shriek, and I sail over the edge of something.

I get walloped in the chest and rammed back against the seat. Then everything stops.

WHAT COMES NEXT IS
a blur of pain and people in uniforms, first the Highway Patrol and paramedics, then white-coated doctors and nurses at the Barstow hospital.

I’m lucky, the emergency room doctor tells me; it looks like my worst injury is a cracked rib from the airbag slamming into me. Beyond that, “you’re going to get some colorful bruises.” They’ll keep me overnight for observation, but I should be able to go home in the morning. He leaves,
and a nurse who’s been standing by says she’ll take care of moving me into a hospital room.

Groggily, as I’m wheeled on a gurney, I wonder about the damage to my car. And hell, I’ll have to call Ronnie to come here tomorrow and pick me up. But before I get out the words, the nurse says, “I hope you don’t mind. Your cell phone rang while the doctor was treating you, and I answered. It was your grandson. He’s on his way here. Hope that was okay,” she says again.

“Fine,” I mumble, my voice thick with whatever they gave me for pain. My grandson? But Ronnie’s son, Brian, is in Argentina, working as a photojournalist. Then I remember that Dylan, Carol’s son, moved to Los Angeles a few months ago; a former minor-league baseball player, he got a job coaching at Culver City High School.

It must be Dylan who called.

Still, the last thing the nurse says, as the drugs and shock drag me into sleep, mystifies me. “Your grandson must have ESP. He called because he was worried about you.” ESP, indeed. What else would make Dylan worry about me?

HE
’
S THERE IN THE
morning. The nurse who wakes me says, “Okay if your grandson comes in? He spent the night in the lounge.”

“Sure.” I’m touched—and so shaken up and vulnerable, in the wake of the accident, that tears spring to my eyes. I reach to brush them away, and flinch. Ow! I must have gotten a shiner.

A moment later, a young man—well, a blurry shape in the doorway, I don’t know what they did with my glasses—enters the room and calls out loudly, “Grandma!”

But it’s not my grandson. It’s Josh. He hurries over to my bedside, whispers, “I had to say I was related, or they wouldn’t have told me anything. And I didn’t know how to reach anyone in your family.” Once he’s gotten that out, he takes a good look at me and adds, with real alarm, “Elaine, are you all right?”

“Better than I look. Really. Damn airbag.” I try to laugh, but it hurts.

“Guess I oughta see the other guy, right?” he says.

“The Sierra Club will probably revoke my membership for what I did to the desert.”

And my poor Jag! I ask Josh if he can find out what happened to it, if it was towed somewhere or is still sitting amid rocks and cacti. He rushes off, clearly grateful to have a task, and returns in fifteen minutes with the news that the car was taken to a Highway Patrol lot. I have no doubt the Jag is going to need extensive body work, but I’m hoping it suffered no serious internal damage. That turns out to be the case for me, I learn from the doctor, who comes by a few minutes later.

This morning’s doctor, a soft-voiced blond woman, explains the difference between a broken rib and one that’s merely cracked; I’m fortunate to have gotten the latter. She advises me not to stint on the Aleve because the biggest danger is that if it hurts too much to breathe and I avoid taking deep breaths, I can develop pneumonia.

The doctor is followed by a social worker who quizzes me about who’ll take care of me when I go home. I placate her by saying I’ll stay at my son’s, though I have no intention of doing that; I can manage on my own. An aide helps me dress, and I’m good to go—more or, in this case, less. After the discomfort of getting out of bed and putting my arms into sleeves, I don’t argue when the aide wants to transport me to Josh’s car in a wheelchair, and I stifle a gasp when she and Josh help me get from the wheelchair to the passenger seat.

I’m reasonably comfortable once I’m settled in the car, a brown Subaru whose rear seat is jumbled with books, clothes, and fast-food wrappers (in striking contrast to the passenger seat, which he must have tidied up). Nevertheless, it’s obvious that my plan of being on my own isn’t going to work. As Josh drives—at a crawl, trying to avoid any bumps—toward the highway, I get on my phone and ask Ronnie if I can stay at his house for the next few days. That takes a while, as I have to assure him I’m not critically injured, explain why my archivist, of all people, picked me up at the hospital, and tell a half-truth about what I was doing in Barstow: “I got stir-crazy and felt like driving.” Next I call my insurance company, report the accident, and arrange for them to tow the car to my dealer in L.A. And I leave a message for Harriet that I couldn’t get to water aerobics this morning; we let each other know when we can’t make it.

By the time I drop the phone into my purse, we’ve driven at least twenty miles, and I’m exhausted.

“Doing okay?” Josh says.

“Fine.”

“Temperature okay? You want me to turn on the air-conditioning?”

“No, it’s fine.”

“How about some music? I’ve got Ella Fitzgerald,
The Great American Songbook
.”

“I love Ella.” Oh, I miss the abrasive Josh; his solicitude is driving me bonkers.

“I’m so sorry about—”

“I’m just going to close my eyes for a few minutes, okay?”

“Sure, of course. I’ll shut up.”

Ella starts crooning “Something’s Gotta Give,” and I must actually doze off, because the next time I look out the window, we’re driving through the endless suburban sprawl between Riverside and Los Angeles.

“Almost home,” I say.

“Can I ask you a question?” Josh says. “When you drove out here yesterday, you weren’t by any chance going to Colorado Springs?”

“No. Las Vegas.”

“
You
like Vegas?”

“Have you ever even been to Las Vegas?”

“Sure. But, you know, it’s crass and shallow and phony. Well …” He shoots me a grin. “Guess Vegas has a lot going for it after all … Um, look, I really am sorry about yesterday. I took it for granted that after Philip Marlowe found your sister, she came home. Or at least she got in touch with you,” he adds, clearly torn between his genuine concern for me and his rabid curiosity.

I have no doubt which is going to win. Maybe I’m just woozy with painkillers—or touched by his having driven all the way to Barstow and spending the night in the hospital lounge—but I don’t mind trusting him with the real answer. “No, she didn’t. I never knew what happened to her.”

“You didn’t know that he found her in Colorado Springs? Your parents didn’t tell you about that letter from the hotel detective?”

“It must have turned out not to be my sister after all.” Or maybe, I think, as Ella croons “Love for Sale,” they found out something else, something Carl Logan confided when Philip called, that made them decide to cut her off—say, she wasn’t just performing in the revue at the hotel but providing extra services for male hotel guests?

“Why did she leave?” Josh asks. “Did something happen?”

“No.” What happened to push Barbara out the door is something I’ve revealed to only a handful of people—Aunt Pearl, Mama and Papa, Paul … and Philip.

“Enough about me,” I say. “Tell me about your family.”

“My family?”

I brought it up to change the subject, but it occurs to me that while Josh has talked about his doctoral studies, and I’ve heard all about meeting his Vietnamese girlfriend’s family last month, I know very little about him. “You have parents, don’t you?”

“My family, okay. Know the scene in
Annie Hall
where Woody Allen meets the Carol Kane character and sums her up? ‘New York, Jewish, left-wing, father with the Ben Shahn drawings’?”