because of you i held my dead boy in my hands. he was blue he turned blue in my arms! do you know what its like to hold your dead baby in your arms!!!
Upon reading it, I threw the phone against the wall. It hit the frog vase with my father inside. The vase cracked into several pieces and all of my father’s ashes were lost to the floor, to the grains and crevices of the uncleanable wood. At first I tried to scoop them up. But my hand came back with dust and strands of hair and an uncooked lentil. So I vacuumed the whole area. It was less painful than I would have expected. My mother’s ashes remained intact on the mantel.
Eleanor walked in from the deck where she’d taken to sunning herself in the early afternoons.
—I heard a noise. Are you okay?
Since the miscarriage, she’d been attending to me so kindly. She never asked me about Lenny, about the way it happened. Just like her father, she was careful not to ire. She was a quiet, wonderful listener. In an eerie way, the girl and I loved each other. But that didn’t take away from the prison of it all.
Now that Lenny was gone, she’d floated the notion that she wouldn’t have to leave until his cousin up in San Francisco sold the place. I worried about the cousin coming for the watch, but I never heard a thing.
In fact, the only person who said anything, who made me feel culpable, was Kevin. Several days after Lenny’s death, Kevin approached me as I was getting out of my car. We said hello. It was the first time we’d seen each other in a while.
—I wanted to offer my condolences, he said.
—What do you mean?
—Lenny, I mean. Death in your house, Miss Joan.
He placed one of his elegant hands on my shoulder and looked at me. I willed my body not to tremble. He knew. I knew that he did.
—Don’t beat yourself up about it.
—About what?
—You know, he said. You couldn’t have saved him.
Later I would sit with that line. I would wonder which man Kevin was talking about. I could swear I’d seen something in his eyes. A flicker of my history.
—Sorry to know you’re going. I wish we could have gotten to know each other.
—We kept very different schedules, I said.
He smiled and regarded me. Since coming to California, I’d known two men—River and Kevin—both of whom looked at me in ways that didn’t repel me; that did, in fact, the opposite. They made me feel girlish and small and protected.
—You’re pretty, Kevin said. He said it very plainly, like it was an obvious thing but something which needed to be recorded in the atmosphere all the same. I struggled to remember if I had ever been called pretty.
I smiled and thanked him as though it were no big deal and yet it broke my heart in the holiest of ways. That man did more for me in one line than any man had ever done. The word pretty. That fucking word.
He nodded and backed away from me slowly, his eyes on me in a hallowed way, until he opened his underground door and disappeared. Three months later a private jet would go down over Musha Cay and I didn’t have to read the story to know that he had been on the flight. I felt that it was my fault, because he had shone a light on me.
Back in the house, Eleanor was waiting. Likely she’d been looking out the window. I was more frightened of Eleanor than I was of anyone coming after me for murder or, worse, theft. I worried that if I didn’t make a change, she and I would become partners of a sort, which was one of the reasons—besides the death of my child—that I was moving.
—You have to go home to your mother today, I said.
—No, Joan, please.
—Forgive her.
She began to convulse, saying please over and over again. I didn’t know what to do and so I took the red slip off my body. I stood essentially naked before the girl and took her into my arms, pressing her into my body as she wept. Then I pushed her back and handed my beloved dress to her. She was shocked. The only way I knew how to get people to leave was to give them things that meant something to me. I could afford to give up anything tangible. But I was scared to death to give my time or my heart.
She drove her body back into my arms and I stroked her hair and whispered in her ear, Eleanor. Do you hear me? I’d give the world to have my mother back. And she was a real cunt.
35
I FOUND A RENTAL IN the Palisades with a terrific view of the ocean. It was white and modern and almost entirely windowed. It was on stilts, hovering high above the houses beneath it. It wasn’t my taste but its clean lines and featureless rooms were blank and I craved blankness. It was preposterously expensive, but once again I had no one for whom to care.
For several weeks I barely left the place. I walked through the high-ceilinged rooms and opened one box every few days. I would unpack only half the box, get tired, and take a pill. I was terrifically lonely, but it was a familiar emotion. I missed Alice so much that I ached when I woke in the morning, imagining her doing sun salutations in her foul yard.
One rainy afternoon—God, how I hated that it never rained in Los Angeles—I rented a pickup and drove up to the Canyon to pick up the Ploum. I’d expected to leave it there, for Kevin or River or the new tenant of the hot house, but I had no furniture. And though I could afford to buy some, I felt the piece would work in my new glassy living room. It was garish and I missed it.
River was playing catch with Kurt when I drove up. He shielded his eyes from the sun and smiled.
—Joan, he said.
His smile was so pretty and his demeanor so light that even just being near him made me feel a modicum of peace.
He helped me load the couch into my truck. It was hotter than ever in the house. Without furniture it looked satanic. It felt like everything that had happened in the house was not real. To see it empty like that, I could talk myself into the idea that I hadn’t lost a child and killed a man in the house.
River made a big show of carrying the massive Ploum on his back, like Atlas. In the past I might have effusively complimented his strength. But this time I only looked down at my phone, disengaged. When he came back in, I thanked him and he stood there unsurely. I turned and walked to the kitchen window where I’d spent so much time looking to see if the coyotes were prowling.
Quietly and tentatively, River came up from behind and kissed me on the neck, the way Vic had done in Scotland. But when River did it, it felt cleansing. I didn’t turn around and he gently raised my arms and pressed my palms to the wall over my head. He threaded his fingers through mine. We made love; it was a tender and peaceful closure. When it was over, he held my body, both of us still standing. He had such strong arms. It was a good way to leave the house.
He wanted to come with me to see my place. I told him maybe next time. He looked a little wounded and I realized that true power came from not caring about anyone. That was the last time I would sleep with a man. I was through with the gender.
All I wanted was to see Alice, to tell her the way my childhood ended, the way our father met his end. I wanted to tell her why I’d walked through the world in corpse pose. I wanted to know if my mother’s intuition was correct. If my father was going to leave us for the woman over the oven and her unborn child.
I’d missed her as much as I hated her. I imagined what she would have said if I’d taken her upstairs and showed her the corpse of the old man. I dreamed of her brushing her hand along his cool chest and saying, Honestly, it’s all right. It was your only recourse.