Deplorably, immaturely, I would have felt proud to tell her the way it ended. The way the police came and the ambulance, too, pointlessly. After strangling Lenny, I pushed his body down the spiral staircase. He didn’t go all the way down but landed in the middle, arms hanging between the slats and legs dangling, like a tangled marionette. That was where I left him. I told the police that I’d been sleeping off a miscarriage upstairs, and he must have come in, as he’d done a time or two in the past during one of his episodes, and I woke to feel his erection against my rear and I screamed and he jumped; he turned to run but tripped, because he was old and out of it, and this is where he landed, I said, indifferently pointing to the spot. The air in the house was thick with the smell of old blood. The men just wanted to get out of there. They didn’t question a thing.
I couldn’t stop thinking how I’d been so needy with Alice. I was disgusted that I had always been the one talking. I was disgusted that I’d felt complete with her and that she didn’t need me.
36
MONTHS PASSED AND I GREW less and less human, but in a wondrous way. At least it was wondrous to me.
My stomach was still sloped. I wasn’t eating much and yet I had a considerable gut. It seemed I was holding on to the fat, as I’d heard sometimes happened after a miscarriage. Then again, I had become appallingly sedentary. Days went by that I didn’t comb my hair.
I would never have to work again, or at least not for many years. It turned out Leonard’s watch was worth not only more than his whole life but more than those of his ancestors as well. I took the watch to an appraiser in the Valley. He was so shocked when I laid it on his velvet tray that I thought he might pass out. I could have taken it elsewhere for a second opinion, but I didn’t. He might have ripped me off, but at that price point, it really didn’t matter.
I thought about moving back to New York, to Charles Street. I could now, impossibly, afford the type of apartment that Big Sky’s friend owned. The one I coveted, with the sauna wood and the thick white towels in the linen closet. But I grew to love my place near the ocean. Love is not the right word.
Most days I walked along the water, or sat at its edge with my eyes closed, watching films inside my brain. I never wore shoes. I was a cat lady on the sand. Dogs ran past me.
Eleanor and I texted several times a week. I could manage any relationship over text message. She was back home with her mother, who was on many anti-psychotic drugs. Eleanor told me that Mary watched cartoons all day. Reruns of Three’s Company.
I wish I didn’t love her, she wrote one day.
You can’t unlove someone, I wrote. You can only hate them.
She’s too broken to hate.
I’m sorry, I wrote.
I was thinking maybe of coming out there, to say hi. Maybe we could go to Cold Spring…
She would write something like that and I would avoid her for days. She always understood. She pulled back, but it was only a matter of time before she would pitch forward again. I lived in fear of a knock on my new door. I hadn’t given anyone my new address. I paid for a post office box in town.
Then one day Eleanor told me she had met someone. A girl with a good family. For girls like us, a good family was something to die for. At length she sent me a picture of herself and a woman in her late thirties outside the Freedom Tower. The two of them holding hands and looking at each other. I was so happy for her that I cried.
Naturally and daily I thought of killing myself. Not with pills, as I’d always planned, but to drown in the ocean. I felt I was owed that final beauty. But the instinct for survival is tremendous, which is why I felt my mother was stronger than I ever could have imagined.
* * *
ONE TYPICALLY CLOUDLESS DAY I was in the Dunkin’ Donuts on La Cienega and there was a woman at the counter, a very tall Black woman with beautiful sneakers and calves that sprang.
—I want it sweet, sweet, sweet, she said. I thought her voice was magic. She didn’t once look at the man she was ordering from. You hear me? And black. Black like me.
Seated at two separate tables were a Mexican woman and an old white man with paint-stained carpenter pants and a t-shirt spotted with sweat.
—Hello, Billy, the Mexican woman said.
—Hey, Rosita, said the old white man. He never looked at her. You married yet?
—No. I don’t wantu.
Billy nodded like he knew she was lying. She had huge breasts with a cavern in between. An old dress with embroidered flowers.
—How ’bout you, Rosita said. You married yet.
—Me? Naw.
—So, Rosita said. See. Why you asking me if I’m married if you ain’t?
Billy acted like Rosita hadn’t said anything. At the counter the Black lady tested her coffee.
—Ain’t sweet enough, she bellowed. I said sweet!
It was that very moment that something hurtled into my body and tried to saw me apart from the inside. I thought I might finally die. But the pain subsided and I could once again hear Rosita and Billy talking about how the one good thing about Los Angeles was that your mailboxes didn’t get crushed by the snowplow and I clocked myself being surprised that either of them had ever lived somewhere other than this Dunkin’ Donuts, and because I needed to be punished for that thought, the pain came again. Something was cracking inside of my rear. Something was whipping me. My body was attacking itself. It got worse quickly until I could no longer stand up.
I called her. I hadn’t spoken to her since the Santa Monica Pier, but she was all I had left. She had always been the only thing I had left. I’d felt her beside me in bed when she was old enough to be a straight body. I’d felt her little lips against my neck. Her little legs kicking against mine.
I watched her Prius pull into the parking lot of the worst Dunkin’ Donuts in Los Angeles. I was hunched over a table. Nobody in there cared if I was dying.
She emerged from her car in a black bodysuit and saw me through the dirty window. It wasn’t her fault that my father had come inside another woman. The next contraction was the worst one yet. The pain started in my rear. If the sound of someone hitting a cymbal could be translated into a physical sensation, that’s what it felt like. It shot up through my stomach and out through my head. I buckled. And then Alice was inside, holding me, and I was screaming.
—Too much caffeine, Alice called out to the rubbernecking patrons.
* * *
SHE DROVE VERY FAST WHILE I stared out the window and occasionally convulsed in pain. I was trying not to look at her. I was trying to be perfect. I was about to have a child and yet I was mostly thinking of not scaring Alice away. She brought one hand to my leg and left it there and I was filled with tremendous gratitude.
At the base of the canyon I asked her if she knew we were sisters.
She told me that, at her mother’s funeral, one of her mother’s casual ex-lovers had insinuated something. Alice had asked around, but nobody really knew for sure. Her mother was very private.
—Have you always known? she asked me.
—For a long time, yes.
When Gosia died, I didn’t hear about it for over a week. Even in her death she was uncomplicated. She’d been skiing in Courchevel with someone who wasn’t my uncle. She had a stroke coming down a black. She was rushed to the hospital but gave out in the ambulance. She was sixty-three and well kept. Her platinum hair lush, her neck smooth and mostly unwrinkled. There was no funeral because she hadn’t wanted one, and there was no one stronger than her left standing so nobody went against her wishes. In the end she knew nobody wanted to make a fuss about anything. When someone was gone, there was nothing left to do. The carrying on was exhausting. The attending to tradition when you could be drinking wine and grieving in the sun.