Be Frank With Me (8 page)

“Wow,” I said. “You could live up here. Does your mother come here a lot?”

“Not so much. The ladder scares her. When the son moved the old lady out, he just left all her stuff, see?” He opened another drawer to show me brushes with dried-paint evidence of use on the handles but whose bristles had been so well cared for they were as soft and immaculate as they must have been in the shop. There were tubes of paints and pastels and balls of string and wire and clamps and a hammer and nails and many blue tin cups of tacks segregated by color, all laid out in their drawers as if they were in a shop window in Paris. I say that like I've been to Paris. I haven't, except in movies, or my dreams.

“I don't know if it was too much trouble to move out, or if it made the old lady too sad to bring it with her. She didn't want to sell the place but her son didn't want her anywhere near that ladder again. My mom said she couldn't bear to pitch everything because the old lady had it all arranged so beautifully and she was about to be dead but her materials were still so alive with potential. Then of course I came along and by the time I was three my mother was pretty sure I was going to be famous for something someday. Since that something might be painting, she kept everything like it was. My mother bought a lot of art back then, too. We don't have that anymore. But thanks to us keeping all the old lady's stuff here, the potential for us having it again is alive even if the old lady is dead.”

I reached for one of the brushes. “Oh, don't touch,” he said.

“I'm sorry. I forgot to ask. Is it yours?”

“I told you all this stuff belongs to the old lady.”

“I thought she was dead.”

“She is, probably. A lot of the pieces in museums used to belong to people who are dead but you aren't allowed to touch them, either. Here, let me show you my favorite thing up here.” He darted across the loft to a big wire basket on the top rail of the waist-high fence that separated us from the concrete floor a dozen feet below. He flung the basket over the edge, and I gasped. “Don't worry. It's attached to this pulley, see? It's how you get groceries and stuff up and down, since the ladder is so dangerous.”

I came to the fence and peered over. “That's quite a drop. You be careful,” I said. “If you fell over you'd break your neck, and probably every other bone in your body.”

“I couldn't fall over that. It's too high. I'd have to jump it.” Frank leaned his elbows on the top of the fence and looked over.

“Don't even think that,” I said. “And please, don't lean on it. What if it gives way?”

“My mother says the same thing. She doesn't like it when I come up here because she's sure I'll manage to find a way to fall like my uncle Julian did. So I have to curate my collection when she isn't looking.”

Uh-oh. “Wait. Are you not allowed up here?”

“I'm not not allowed. I'm just strongly discouraged from coming here alone. And besides, you're here. Now step this way, please, to the gallery.” He backed away, palms up and fingers waggling like a tour guide, to a corner of the loft where he'd put his tack collection to good use attaching a crazy quilt of postcards to the studs. He took a magnifying glass from a hook on the wall by the exhibit and handed it to me. “Use this,” he said, “to savor the details.”

So I did. Had to, almost. There were so many details in every four-by-six-inch card that it was hard to appreciate the whole of any of them. There was a sidewalk mosaic of the
Mona Lisa
which, when
magnified, proved constructed entirely of buttons. A tower built of every crazy, broken-down material delight a city dump offers—bicycle parts and rusted bedsprings, discarded water tanks and twisted pipes, limbless dolls and worn-out brooms. There was a multilevel tree house constructed of scrap lumber and lengths of firewood, with windows of bottle butts and crystal punch bowls and a door made from a metal highway sign that read
REST AREA, THIS EXIT. NEXT EXIT
47
MILES
. I moved from postcard to postcard, increasingly boggled by the too-much muchness of it all. At last I lowered the magnifying glass and stepped away from the wall. “What a trip! I want to meet your Xander.”

“No you don't,” Frank said. “He'll only disappoint you.”

“How would he disappoint me? I don't even know him.”

He shrugged. “That's what my mother says about Xander. Also, that he's too good at too many things to ever succeed at anything.”

I was going to press him for details, but he held a finger up. “Shhh.”

After a moment or two of intense listening, I said, “I don't hear anything.”

“She's stopped typing,” he said, and was through the trapdoor, down the ladder, and out the door like a shot. I hurried after him and cleared the garage door just in time to hear Frank shout “Mama!” with all the joy and intensity and sweet, pure love that makes a woman's womb ache if she doesn't have children of her own. Mimi had just stepped outside the sliding glass door. She smiled at Frank as he hurtled across the yard. Frank launched himself into her arms.

It's kind of unimaginable the carnage caused by the locomotive force of one slight nine-year-old boy traveling at the speed of light, colliding with his tiny mother, midfifties, a little off balance because she was twisting around to close the door behind herself. He hit her with enough velocity to explode that antique sheet of cracked glass into about a million lacerating diamonds.

I've seen a lot of blood in my day, but never quite that much.

F
RANK AND
I
had been in the emergency room for a couple of minutes, listening to the symphony of shushes, clicks, and beeps coming from all the monitoring equipment hooked up to Mimi and other unseen patients sequestered in curtained-off cubbies. I'd told the expedient fib that I was Mimi's daughter and Frank was my brother so they would let us come see her together. I was more than a little nervous about Frank blowing our cover.

“Is she asleep?” Frank asked, not in a whisper.

“Shhh. Looks that way.”

An emergency room nurse whisked past us. “Don't worry. She's okay. Just tired.”

Mimi didn't exactly look okay—one of her eyebrows had been shaved off and the skin seamed back together there, and her head was wrapped in a wimple of bandages. Frank put his goggles on and gripped my hand like it was the only thing tethering him to this earth.

“You all right?” I asked.

“Mama,” he said with all the urgency that odd, flat voice of his could summon. Mimi's eyes popped open and I held his hand more tightly, just in case he was thinking of rushing her again. “What's that thing you're wearing?”

“They gave me this nice clean gown to put on when I got here,” Mimi said. “My other clothes were dirty.”

“You call that a gown? I'd better check you for brain damage.”

“What?” The emergency room nurse had reappeared by then.

“One of the EMS guys taught Frank how to check for brain damage,” I said.

“He gave me his special little flashlight, see?” Frank said, pulling a penlight from his pocket and holding it forth on his flattened palm for all to admire. “He said I was a natural. He also likes my coat.” He was still wearing his white cotton duster, now smeared with Mimi's blood.

“That's nice,” Mimi said. She sounded so calm that I suspected the tube taped to her left forearm contained morphine rather than saline. “Please do check me for brain damage, Monkey. The doctors might have missed something.”

Frank handed his goggles to me, moved the visitor's chair to the head of Mimi's bed, and climbed up so he'd be tall enough to shine his light down into her pupils. “Nurse,” he said. “Come closer. Let me show you how this is done.”

I was about to suggest to Frank that maybe the nurse knew already, but from the indulgent way she smiled and came to his elbow I imagined she had lots of experience with people in bloody white coats showing her how to do things she already knew how to do.

“See her pupil contract when I do this? That's a good sign,” Frank said. “With brain damage, I get no response when I flash the light. If the pupils are different sizes, then we've got real trouble. The injuries we have here are minor. Superficial scalp lacerations, swelling and bruising, maybe a concussion. We'll keep tabs on her for the next twenty-four hours to make sure she doesn't show evidence of an intracranial bleed.” Frank hopped down without turning anything over or bringing the bed curtain down with him. So that was a relief.

“Is that so?” the nurse asked. She winked at me.

“That's what the paramedic said,” Frank said.

“Pretty much word for word,” I added. “Frank has an incredible memory.”

“Maybe Frank should go to medical school. The triage nurse says he's told her plenty about cholera outbreaks in London in the nineteenth century.”

“John Snow proved it a waterborne illness by tracing the
1854
outbreak to London's Broad Street well,” Frank said. “He removed the pump handle and within days the outbreak ended. Would it be all right if I checked you for brain damage, too?”

“Sure,” she said, and settled on the chair Frank had carried over.

Holding that penlight somehow freed him to study her face closely. “You look like Tinkerbell,” he said, then snapped his light on. It was true. She had blue eyes, a pert nose, and pink lipstick, plus lots of blond hair done up in an elaborately casual topknot.

“Thank you,” she said. “Does that mean I'll live forever and never get old?” I wasn't surprised by her question. She had a smooth, unworried brow that looked suspiciously younger than her hands.

“I'm just saying you don't have brain damage,” Frank said.

“Well, if I'm not going to be young forever, then I'd better get back to work.” She checked the bag of fluid flowing into Mimi's arm and made notations on her chart.

“My father was a doctor,” Mimi said. “Frank would love medical school. But first he has to make it through elementary school.”

“Winston Churchill failed the sixth grade,” Frank said. “Noël Coward—”

“Frank,” I said. “The nurse is busy.”

“Oh, that's okay,” Tinkerbell said. “I'm done. So, Frank, just to be extra sure your grandmother's brain is in good shape, we're sending her upstairs for an MRI. That stands for magnetic resonance imaging. It's a way of taking pictures inside her brain without actually having to poke a hole in her skull to see how everything looks on the inside.”

“My grandmother?” Frank said. “My grandmother died in
1976
. You could look inside her skull through one of the eye sockets without having to poke a hole, but I doubt there'd be much to see in there anymore.” He plunged both his hands into his hair, as if he needed to make sure his own brain was still under there someplace.

“It's okay, Frank,” Mimi said. Then, to Tinkerbell, “He's my son.”

“Oh.” Tinkerbell's eyes flicked from Mimi to Frank to me. “I thought—oh, forget what I thought. Doesn't matter.”

By then Frank had uprooted a tuft of hair. I took it from him and slid it into my pocket, but not before everyone else had seen it, too. “Stop that,” I murmured, aiming for the tone my mother used on me when I cracked my knuckles in church. I didn't want to make a big deal of it.

“I'd better see where we are on that MRI list,” Tinkerbell said, hanging Mimi's chart on the end of her cot and smiling overbrightly before slipping away.

“You two should get going,” Mimi said.

“I don't want to leave you here alone,” I said.

“This is not a negotiation. You and Frank need to clear out. Now.”

“You aren't coming with us?” Frank asked.

“The doctors need to keep an eye on me here tonight. Alice needs you at home. She's afraid of being by herself.”

“It's true,” I volunteered. “I'm terrified of the dark.”

“There's nothing in the dark to be afraid of,” Frank said. “It's out there, and we're in here. You're safe as long as I'm with you.”

“I'm lucky to have you then, huh, Frank?” I said.

“Yes,” he said.

“So am I,” Mimi said. “I love you, Frank.”

Frank didn't answer. I could see his shoulders rising. “We need to go, Frank,” I said. “You heard your mother.”

Frank threw his shoulders back when I said that, saluted smartly and said, “Aye-aye, Alice! Tell me, do you have the stupid parking ticket, or are we doomed?”

“
DO YOU NEED
me to fly out?” Mr. Vargas asked when I called the next night, after Mimi had been released from the hospital. It was pushing midnight in New York. I'd hoped he'd still be awake but I could tell by the groggy sound of his voice that he must have been asleep for a while already.

“No. Don't worry. I have everything under control now. Sorry to call so late, but I wanted to give you a heads-up in case word leaked out.”

“Did anybody recognize her?”

“I don't think so.”

“Is she okay?”

While I was formulating my answer, Mimi asked, “Who are you talking to?” I was in the living room, alone I thought, watching a smeary-looking evening settle over the city through the plastic I'd taped over the hole where the door used to be. By some miracle Frank was sleeping, and had been since just before Mimi got home from the hospital in the late afternoon.

As for the patient, I'd convinced Mimi to change out of the blood-encrusted cardigan and jeans she'd worn to the hospital and into a set of my sweats. From my dealings with the laundry I gathered Mimi didn't own gym clothes. She slept in lacy white cotton nightgowns that I worried would be ruined if her bandages oozed. Mimi was surprisingly okay with wearing my sweats but refused to let me help her change into them. She did let me tuck her into bed, though, where she'd conked out right away. But like Lazarus, she had risen again and materialized behind me, her hands swallowed by my sweatshirt's overlong sleeves, her hollow-eyed, bandaged head shrouded in its gray hood, a crimson
NEBRASKA
emblazoned across her chest. I almost fainted when I saw her.

“It's Mr. Vargas,” I said. “I didn't want him to worry, in case word got out you'd been hurt. The nurse told me I should fix an ice pack for you to hold to your stitches to keep the swelling down. Now that you're up I'll do that.”

“Give me the phone.”

I helped Mimi settle on the sofa and handed her the phone. My hands were shaking as I put a soft pillow behind her back and covered her legs against the draft leaking in the taped-up door. I hustled off to the kitchen to scoop cubes from the ice machine into the ice pack Frank had found for me the night before. It was a pink plaid
bag—tartan!—with a metal screw top that looked like something used to cure hangovers in a Doris Day movie. “Why do you even have this?” I'd asked him.

“I requested it for my sixth birthday.”

“Why?”

“It was so hot that year. I wore it to school tied to my head with a burgundy Hermès scarf that belonged to my grandmother. Shall I get the scarf?”

“I think we can make do without it,” I said. “Thanks, anyway.”

As I stood at the sink adding a little tap water to the bag so it would shape to Mimi's face more easily, I stared out the window at Los Angeles in the first stages of its nocturnal twinkle. To the east I saw fireworks splayed across the sky, over by the Hollywood Bowl or maybe Dodger Stadium. I thought it might be a concert or a ball game, but then I noticed explosions down at the beach near Santa Monica, and then to the west, above the hills of Malibu. I realized then that it was the Fourth of July.

By the time I was back in the living room Mimi was off the phone and tears were dribbling down her face. I put the ice pack down fast and rustled up a box of tissues.

“Where's Frank?” she said.

“Sleeping,” I said. “Are you okay?”

“Sleeping? Still? How is that possible?”

“I wrapped him up tight in a comforter, put him on the floor in the family room, piled couch cushions on top of him, and turned the TV to the Korean language channel. Is anything wrong? Does anything hurt?”

“Everything hurts.”

“Here's your ice pack. I'll check and see if it's time for another pain pill.”

“It's not that kind of pain.” Mimi pushed back the sweatshirt hood and tilted her less-swollen eye at the ice pack in her hands. “This is
Frank's,” she said. “He wanted it for his birthday. First I bought him one of those blue gel packs you keep in the freezer, and he was so disappointed. It took forever to find this one. I almost didn't buy it. ‘What's wrong with pink?' Frank asked me when I told him how I'd hesitated. ‘Pink is the navy blue of India.'” She took a tissue from the box and mopped her face. “I can't stop wondering what will happen to Frank if something happens to me.”

“But you're fine,” I said. “The doctors said so. And I'm here.”

“Now. I'm fine now. You're here now.” She collapsed against the back of the couch. “When I had money, I didn't worry so much about Frank. Someone will take in a rich kid, even if he's weird.”

“I'm not leaving. You'll have money again. Frank's not weird. He's different.”

She snorted, then winced and pressed the ice pack to her eyebrow. “At least you didn't say ‘special.' Isaac was so right about you. You're quite the Pollyanna.” The way she said it didn't sound flattering. Sometimes it was hard for me to fathom why Mr. Vargas was so fond of her.

“How did it go last night, anyway?” she asked. “I was too wrung out to ask you when I got home from the hospital.”

“No complaints.”

For some reason that made her cry again. No leaking tears this time, though. Gut-wrenching sobs.

“Is there anybody you want me to call?” I said. “Relatives? Frank's dad?” Alice, I thought. Shut up already.

She pulled herself together enough to say, “My relatives are all dead. Frank's dad is not an option.” She put the pack in her lap, blew her nose gingerly, then stared, glassy-eyed, out the hole where the sliding door had been. She got so still I couldn't see her breathe. I was a little worried she'd slipped away with her eyes open, like people do in the movies, and was fighting the urge to go find a mirror to hold under her nostrils when she said, “Fireworks.”

“Yes,” I said. “It's nice that they're high enough to see over the wall.”

“I bought this house for the views. Can you believe that? Also I knew my mother would hate it.”

“Did she?”

She put the ice pack back on her eyebrow and sighed. “She was dead by the time I bought it. But every day I hear her complaining about one thing or another, so it's like she's still right here with me. I've lived here more than half my life now. I'm older now than my mother was when she died.”

She seemed to expect me to answer, so I coughed up, “Well, if you've stayed so long, you must really love it here.”

“I hate it here. It was crazy to buy this place. I laughed when the real estate agent showed it to me. ‘I'm too famous to live anywhere that has windows where walls should be,' I said. He assured me this house would work for me because the driveway was so steep and the road that led to it wasn't on maps thirty years ago. ‘If you were still married to a movie star, your privacy might be a concern. But nobody cares about writers. You'll be fine.' Ha! I don't know why I listened to him.” She held the ice pack to her brow again. “Not that many people care about writers, but for the ones who do—no driveway is too steep.”