Now I set the glasses on the table and filled Alice’s cup first. As I did so, I saw out of the corner of my eye a blur of activity in Eleanor’s lap. I thought she was going to shoot Alice. I thought of the time her father had me on all fours, going in and out of me, his hands lightly gripping my waist. Not making any noises because he was too happy, too scared it would all end if he made an unpalatable move. I thought of his warm breath in my ear and the glee in his eyes. I thought of what he had done to his daughter and his wife.
—Eleanor, I said. I said it so calmly and sweetly that it shocked her, that she let the gun drop in her lap.
Alice realized what had been about to happen, what might, in fact, still happen. She screamed and then she began to cry. I had never seen someone look so beautiful while they cried. But it made her seem immature. It was such a stupid thing. To be afraid of a little girl with a gun that she didn’t know how to use.
Then Alice pitched forward and projectile-vomited onto the girl’s face. The stink was immediate and terrible. Eleanor stood and screamed and the gun dropped to the floor. The vomit—the color and texture of oatmeal—was in the girl’s eyes, coating her eyelashes; it covered her entire nose and mouth, and as she was screaming, the vomit was seeping into her mouth. She tried to wipe the vomit from her eyes and crouched down, blindly grabbing for the gun on the floor. I picked it up like it was nothing and walked into the kitchen. I placed the gun behind the toaster and ran warm water and soaked a rag and came back and knelt beside the girl.
I noticed then a gold locket around her neck. I didn’t have to open it to know it contained a picture of her little brother, crudely cut into a circle.
—Oh, Eleanor, I said into her ear. Oh, you poor, poor thing.
24
ELEANOR SHOWERED THE VOMIT OFF. When she came out of the bathroom, she looked like the age that I was when I died. The gun hadn’t been loaded after all. I didn’t know what to do with it, so I put it inside my potbellied stove. I laid it across the crystals. When it became clear the girl was no longer a threat, Alice, in shock, went home. It hurt me that she did but I acted like it didn’t.
That night the girl and I spoke until the early morning. The guilt I felt was enormous. I did what I had to do. I told her the grand calamity of my childhood. As with her father before her, it bound her to me in a way that erased any hostility. There was no way to hear my story and still hate me. And like her father before her, she was going to keep me company. Alice, I knew, might abandon me at any point, but this girl would never.
Over the next few weeks she stayed with me. She never left. It happened slowly. Every day I hoped it would end. She slept downstairs on the couch. My parents hadn’t allowed sleepovers. They didn’t think there was any reason for them. For someone to come into our home and in the morning go into our refrigerator for orange juice. They thought it was unseemly. I began to feel the same way and the feeling only deepened over the years.
Eleanor and I talked every night, late into the night. Sometimes I liked it but mostly I felt like I couldn’t breathe. It went on like that for so long that I lost track. Alice called or wrote every few days and I told her the girl was still here. I could tell that she was appalled.
Thankfully I had a job. I could drop her off in Santa Monica or Zuma Beach and leave her there for the day. But the moment I clocked out, she expected me to collect her. I was in an emotional jail.
Still, I owed it to this child not to turn her away. Turning her away would have been the same thing the world had done to me. I needed to be her Gosia. But I couldn’t face the notion that I might have to care for her indefinitely. I knew I would sooner kill her. Because sometimes it’s better to kill someone than to leave them.
One day, behind her back, I called in sick to work. Eleanor, as though she knew, told me she didn’t want to go anywhere. She was too depressed and wanted to stay in the house. I was terrified that she would hitchhike to the café and find that I wasn’t there. But I had to take the risk because I felt I would otherwise lose Alice. I hated Alice for not wanting to be near the girl. That she thought of me differently now, as one half of a strange couple.
Two hours later I was in Alice’s car, the air-conditioning blasting wetly. We drove down Abbot Kinney looking for parking. She was taking me to a yoga class that she said would make everything better. Her hair was pulled up into a high, dark bun. She wore no makeup and I wanted to kill her. But first I wanted to put her in a cage, fatten her up, feed her hormones and pig cheeks and Fanta. Knock her teeth out and shave her eyebrows. I wanted her to die ugly.
She told me she’d missed me, but she didn’t apologize or explain why she hadn’t been in touch.
Every so often she would look at me, at my belly, and say, I cannot believe you’re fucking pregnant.
I was terrified that she would leave me. She asked me to tell her everything that had been going on and I explained how I couldn’t do anything just yet, how I had to let her stay. I didn’t say how much I’d begun to feel for the girl, how she was a mirror of me. I couldn’t yet tell Alice about what had happened in my tenth year. She might, at this too early stage, leave me for good.
Abbot Kinney made me feel old. The girls on the sidewalk in their cowboy hats and the boys in their baseball caps and the skateboards and the surfboards on top of Volkswagens. If you were poor in Venice, you had to be beautiful, and if you were old, you had to be rich.
Alice slipped her dusty Prius between two G-wagons. She was an excellent parker.
She said she needed a coffee and led me up a ramp and through an alley to a line of people waiting outside a building that looked like a greenhouse garage. It had very high ceilings and bicycles on the walls and women with asymmetrical hair, men in red plaid shirts pouring hot water into Chemexes. We ordered our coffees and waited too long for them. So many men looked at Alice as we waited in line.
—Where is the little freak now?
—At home—the house. I tell her I’m going to work even when I’m not and then I drop her off for excursions. Trancas Canyon, Encino, etcetera.
—She lets you leave the house?
I laughed.
—Joan. Why are you doing this?
—I feel bad for her.
—Just as you did for her father.
—No. This is different.
—She’s probably in love with you.
—Please, I said. But I was grateful she considered me someone who could be loved.
—Let’s go, she said. This class will reset your head. It might knock some sense into you. You might go home and tell the little barnacle to fuck off.
* * *
THE STUDIO SMELLED OF RAW onions. The walls were lime green and the mats were threadbare rubber, even worse than the ones at the famous studio. Some yogis seem to believe that the cheaper the yoga accoutrements, the better the practice, but this was different.
At the head of the room a rangy instructor pulled his Christly hair into a topknot. His lips were buttered with balm, his neck snaked with tendons.
Alice and I took two places next to each other. Aside from the instructor there was only one man, skinny, in long black shorts and a white tee. He adjusted his towel at the top corner of his mat. I felt sorry for him but didn’t know why. Soon others trickled in. The instructor dimmed the lights and it felt like evening.