Losing Clementine (30 page)

I opened the book. There were a few clippings from my early days, not many. There were a few reviews in art sections, most of them not more than mentions. They were starting to age and turn yellow, and the glue that was holding them down was hard and brittle. I turned a page and a clipping came loose and slipped down into the valley of the binding. The clippings got more numerous within the last five years and stopped being newsprint and started being computer printouts from Web sites. Someone had highlighted my name in the photo captions. One of the last articles, which had run more than a year before, had a picture of me taken at my studio. Jenny was in the background. They'd highlighted her name, too.

I closed the book.

Jerry and Charlene were bringing platters of food to the table.

“You didn't have any trouble finding me,” I said. “You were a lot harder to find.”

“Well,” Charlene said, “none of us is famous like you are.”

“I'm surprised you didn't send away for my autograph,” I said.

“Don't talk to my wife like that.” It was the first thing Jerry had said since we'd come in the door. He didn't look at me when he said it, but he said it nonetheless. “Sit down and let's have a nice dinner.”

Charlene went back to the counter for glasses of tea. Jerry sat down at the table and put a napkin in his lap. I sat, too. My only other option was throwing china, and I was saving that for when I really needed it. Jerry picked up the plate of meat and held it out for me to pick from.

“Excuse me,” I said. “I need to use the restroom.”

I didn't wait for directions. I went down the plastic runner past the family photos lining the hallway. Some of them were school pictures of a girl taken maybe twenty years ago judging by the haircut and the clothes. I stopped. I'd never thought about them having other children. She looked familiar. My stomach started to swirl again. The girl got older the farther down the hallway I went, and the farther I went the more familiar she got. And I thought it was because she was my sister, my half sister, and that she was familiar just the way Jerry had been at the end of the row of cubicles. I thought maybe my brain recognized kin and blood even when I'd never seen it before, but the girl went from grade school to junior high to high school, and then I knew. I reached up and took the last photo in the series off the wall.

When I turned, Jerry was standing there at the end of the hall watching me. The paper napkin was still tucked into the waistband of his pants.

“She didn't want you to know.”

I looked from him back at the photo in my hands. It was Jenny. Jenny Pritchard, no relation.

I woke up in a hotel room in the city. I'd taken a cab the night before, run right out of there because I didn't know what else to do. I'd wanted to score something like I used to in the old days, back in New York, when I was young and immortal and pickled in vodka and cocaine, but I hadn't scored in years. More than years. A decade. I'd grown up. I didn't know how anymore. I'd been medicating myself at the pharmacy with an insurance card, and I didn't even have that.

Fuck
.

I was wrung out. I was the kind of tired that sleep wouldn't fix. I wanted to lie there in a puddle of betrayal and self-pity, but I hadn't eaten the night before. I was hungry. I sat up. I reserved the right to feel pitiful and betrayed, but I would do it with eggs.

There was a room service menu beside the bed. I opened it and dialed.

I turned on the news and let it drone while I waited for my food. When it came, my milk was still in its little cardboard carton, the same shape as Jerry's house. I looked at the expiration date. It would still be drinkable after I was dead. I didn't know how to feel about that. I didn't feel much. Somehow it seemed like there were more pressing issues.

There was an early hurricane forming in the mid-Atlantic. I watched the colored swirl on CNN and listened to the anchors trying to drum up end-of-the-world excitement. I picked up another piece of bacon. I wasn't hungry, but it was there. Bacon is one of those things you shouldn't waste.

There was a knock. I'd forgotten to put the
DO NOT DISTURB
sign on the knob.

Fuck again
.

I got up and padded to the door without my pants. I wasn't in the mood for pants, and you didn't need pants to tell the housekeeper to go away.

On the other side of the door, Jerry was wearing his pants. Khakis with athletic shoes and a polo shirt tucked in. He looked me in the face, which I suppose was better than looking at my underwear.

“Oh. I can wait,” he said, “until you're decent.”

“I'm never going to be decent. How did you find me?”

“I called Jenny. She paid all your bills before, you know, online. So she looked up your credit card. There was a charge from this hotel on it.”

Ratted out by the Internet.

“Jenny has known all this time?”

“Not always. Since she was in art school. Charlene told her.”

I turned and walked back into the room, leaving the door open. He could follow me if he wanted. He did, but he hung back by the bathroom, not quite willing to commit.

“Why didn't she tell me?”

“I asked her not to.”

Of course he did.

“Well, that just fucking explains everything, doesn't it?”

He didn't say anything. He looked as if he wished he had something to do with his hands, a hat to hold maybe.

I sat on the edge of the bed with the messed-up sheets and the dirty room service tray. I was so angry I didn't know what to do.

“So how did this work?” I asked. “Did she call you and tell you what I was doing? Thinking? Feeling?”

The humiliation of what Jenny had access to burned in my cheeks and brought tears to my eyes. The thing about being crazy is that you know you're crazy even when you can't do anything about it. You know how you look to other people, and the shame of it is almost worse than the thing itself.

“No.” Jerry shook his head. “She only told us when you had shows and things, when there was an article about you in the paper. But it wasn't… She didn't tell us personal things, if that's what you're thinking. She didn't even tell us she wanted to work for you until she'd done it. We didn't ask… I told her she had to quit. That it wasn't right, and it was just going to hurt everybody.”

I felt both furious and impotent, like a declawed cat.

“I hope you won't punish her,” he said. “Jenny is such a good artist. It was just too much for her to have a big sister like you and not get to know you. She said it was a big opportunity. I know she's learned a lot from you.”

“Yeah? Well, if I'd known she existed, she wouldn't have had to sneak around washing my brushes and folding my damn underwear.”

“She wanted to do it. She loved working for you. She was devastated when you let her go.”

God. I had fired my own sister.

“She wasn't yours to withhold.” I was standing up, and I couldn't remember when I'd done that. “It could've been different. What is wrong with you?”

I wanted to shake him, to shake something, to shake it and shake it until the stuffing came out and there was nothing left. I wanted to tear it up and scream.

“I didn't have any choice. I had to hide.” He made his hands into little fists at his sides.

“Bullshit!”

I remembered after he'd left, when I realized he wasn't coming back, kicking my bedroom door. I kicked it and kicked it with my little kid-size shoe until the hollow core at the bottom splintered and my sister cried and yelled for me to stop and my mother came running and I kept kicking until I fell down. I was crying and crying, and I didn't want to be. I was angry, just as angry as I was right then all these years later.

“No. It was all my fault. I couldn't do it any other way.”

“You're just selfish. You're a selfish, controlling coward!”

“You don't understand.”

“How could I possibly understand? You ran off. You just ran off and left us all there like we didn't even matter, like we were old clothes you were done with, something for the Goodwill!”

He looked like he wanted to grab handfuls of his own hair.

“I couldn't take it anymore. You don't know what it was like. I thought you would be okay. She always wanted to be a good mom, but when—when Ramona died—I knew I couldn't ever contact you again. Not ever.”

“What are you talking about?”

“I killed her! I killed Ramona and your mother.” Tears spilled down his pale, wrinkled cheeks, running down past the rimless lenses of his glasses. “I left you girls there. It's all my fault she did what she did.”

“I'm the one that found them! I saw the blood and the brains all over everything. And you were gone, and you never came back, not even then. I didn't even know if you knew, if you cared!”

He walked over to the side of the bed closest to the alarm clock and sank onto the mattress.

“I prayed for them every night.”

“Oh good,” I said. “That's just great. I'm sure that was real helpful. Did you ever think about doing anything for me? Did you ever think that I needed you? The kid that was still alive!”

“You had your aunt and uncle.”

And then I did hit him. I ran over and shoved him hard in the chest. He fell backward onto his elbows. His bones were prominent under his skin and under my hands. It was like shoving a bird. He was weak, and that made me angrier. I was bigger and stronger and full of enough rage to fuel ten men. He put one arm up to block his face, and I kept coming. I slapped him and shoved him again and again until he was flat on his back, and his glasses had come off his face.

And then I backed off. It wasn't enough. It wasn't nearly enough, but the only thing that would be enough would be to wrap my hands around his throat and squeeze until he turned purple and stopped breathing, and then maybe that wouldn't be enough. This, I thought, this right here is how people end up stabbed two hundred times.

I took two steps back. This wasn't how I wanted to feel. He was supposed to make it okay. He was supposed to take all the bad feelings, the holes, and fix them, so I could die without that pain. And he didn't. He didn't at all. He talked about his pain. His feelings. He was at the center of his own story. I'd come all that way, so he could help me. And he couldn't.

I went into the bathroom. I made the water lukewarm and let it pool in my hands and rubbed it on my face, again and again. When I stood up and dried myself with the rough white hand towel, I looked in the mirror. I had been crying. My face was red and blotchy. I looked old. I had lines around my eyes and lines running away from my nose toward my chin. I had purple bruises under my eyes. That's exactly how I felt, too. Old. Lined. Bruised.

When I came back out, Jerry was standing next to the window, looking out on the street below. The cable news was still playing on the television. A country I did not care about was having elections.

“You're still here,” I said.

“Did you want me to go?”

“Do you have anything else to say?”

He shook his head.

“Then yeah,” I said. “I want you to go.”

And he did.

I spent the day at the city's art museum. It was bigger and nicer than I would've thought it would be. I ate lunch in its cafeteria, which was set up in an enclosed two-story courtyard with a center fountain. That was nicer than I thought it would be, too. I had carrot soup and a pressed sandwich with melted white cheese and salami. Then I went back to the counter for a cookie and a coffee. I took my time. I went through all the rooms, even the African basket weaving that everyone else skips, and I tried very, very hard not to think about anything.

“Congratulations,” the woman wearing a neckerchief with her company-branded chambray shirt told me. “Your flight today qualifies you for ten thousand bonus miles in our valued customer program.”

“Swell,” I said. “Can I get a window seat?”

“No, I'm afraid not.”

The descent into L.A. seems to take longer than that into other cities. For ten minutes you're low over the tangle of freeways and cloverleaf interchanges. Houses and buildings look like Monopoly pieces, and the bright blue pops of backyard swimming pools are everywhere. Angelenos play Name-That-Freeway with themselves and each other on the way down. The 210? The 605? The 10? The 405. Definitely the 405.

When you take off from LAX, you soar over the open ocean, and when you land it's a slow creep over urban sprawl. I think that means something, but I don't know what.

When I got home, Richard was still there. He was sitting on the floor with his laptop on his legs playing
World of Warcraft
. Chuckles was lying on the floor next to him, looking brushed, fed, and smug. When your face is shoved in like a deflated football, smug is an easy look to pull off.