Pink Smog (13 page)

But there was still the mystery of the notes I'd received. I was no closer to solving the second one. (Ben Hoopleson had not been any help at all. Basically you can't get much information out of a mime.) And there was still Staci. Winter had dumped her and I was the person he had gone to that day when she waited for him in front of the school.

“Hey, Louise!” she called. I was lacing up my skates after school waiting for Bobby and Lily.

“I need to talk to you.”

I squinted up at her, shielding my eyes. The sun was out again and it was harsh even though the air felt a little cold. Goose bumps studded my arms like armor.

“Yeah?” I snapped a decent-sized bubble at her but she ignored it.

“If you think that Wiggins has any interest in you, you're wrong. He told me what he thinks about you.”

I stood up to face her. My legs were shaking in the skates and I had to hold on to the stair railing. Low blood sugar, I told myself. I wanted to scream at her but my throat felt like I had swallowed a tablespoon of sand.

I felt warm fingers on my arm and turned to see Bobby standing there. Lily was behind him.

“You okay?” Bobby asked. Suddenly, because they were there, I was.

“I was just warning the queen of the geeks here to stay away from my boyfriend.”

“He's not your boyfriend,” I said. “Staci Nettles, he has no feelings for you whatsoever.”

She looked shocked for a second, then flipped her hair as if to restore her confidence. The long strands fell back in place in a perfect golden cascade.

“He told me how your dad paid him to watch out for you and how you tried to make a pass at him. You're completely gross.”

Then she walked away and I leaned against Bobby. “Paid him!”

“Wow,” he said. “She won't quit, will she?”

“Someday I'm going to figure out what to say to her to make her stop,” I told them, but they both looked at me skeptically and I wondered if I was wrong.

One night I heard my mom talking in her sleep. I went over and stroked her hair and told her she was dreaming but she kept mumbling. I leaned closer to make out the words.

“Tell that woman to leave! She's ruined my life. Tell her to go away! She's caused enough damage. Why does she have to stay in our house? Tell her to leave.”

“Mom?” I said softly. “Mom?”

“Tell her to leave.”

“I know,” I said. “I know how hard this is. Everything will be okay.” I didn't know if that was true but it seemed like the thing to murmur when someone you loved was having a nightmare. Maybe I would go and tell Purple Eyes to leave whether my dad admitted to her existence or not. I had to gather my strength for it. Not only was she scary as heck, I wasn't even sure if she was real or I had made her up in my crazy mind, along with Annabelle and Winter and the notes.

Then one night as I was coming home alone from Bobby's house, I felt someone grab me from behind and pull me into the stairwell. The small fingers covered my mouth as I struggled to break free. I knew who it was.

If Winter was my guardian angel, what was Annabelle? The thought made me nauseous and dizzy with fear.

She moved her hand and I whirled to face her—she held me only with her gaze. Her eyes were glossy, blank, unseeing. Her fingers were moving, the thumb of each hand tapping the other four fingers in succession and then again.

I could have run but I didn't. I just stared at her. My limbs felt like bags of sand.

“Your father left you. Your mother leaves every time she takes a drink. Your friends will go away, too. All I see ahead for you is darkness.”

“Stop!” I screamed. “Stop it! It's not true! That's not what life is! Why do you hate me so much?”

“I'm just a reflection of how you feel about yourself.”

“No,” I said. “No you're not.” I straightened out my spine and looked into her eyes. “I like myself now. No matter what my parents do, it doesn't mean that I'm not a good person or even that they don't love me.”

“But they're gone,” she said.

“Not all the way. They love me the best they can. And besides,” I said, my voice breaking, but only a little, “I can take care of myself if I have to. I can take care of myself and other people, too, and I am going to be okay.”

She seemed to evaporate then, because the next moment she had slipped out of my grasp and was gone. The pool was dazzling blue under the lights through the gate. It looked as if mermaids cut silver paths beneath the surface. There was a fat, mottled moon in the sky. The air smelled of flowers and citrus, even though it was nearing winter.
It's never winter in Los Angeles
. No matter what the little witch said, I knew love was real and I knew I was loved. Even if I had to mostly just love myself. Why else were we here except to love?

There was one thing more I had to do.
You must not be afraid
, the man in the turban had said. It had taken me a while to understand but I thought I finally did, not just with my head but with my heart.

Every night for a week I checked the parking space for number 13 and when I finally saw a black Porsche I went and knocked on the door. This time the woman answered. Her hair fell around her shoulders and her face was pale without makeup. She wore a silk kimono covered with large, red poppies and her feet were bare, the nails a little long and painted crimson. I felt suddenly cold when I looked at her and I wished I had brought Monroe to keep me warm, but of course, I couldn't have because of the dogs. They stood behind her in the darkened room, growling.

“Yes?” she asked. Her voice, even with the heavy, warm accent, sounded as cold as my goose-bumped arms felt.

“I need to talk to you,” I said. “About Charlie.”

“Who are you?”

“You know who I am. I'm his daughter. May I come in?”

She shook her head. “I'm sorry. That's impossible.” She started to shut the door and I wedged myself in so she couldn't.

“I talked to Annabelle. She told me who she is.”

“Annabelle has issues,” the woman said. “She isn't well. You can't listen to what she says.”

“Then help her,” I told her. “I don't want to hear her stories about my dad and I don't want her to attack me with those dogs or anything else. You need to control her. Winter can't do it alone. She messes with him, too. She made him into a zombie or something.”

She looked as if she were going to slap me across the face the way they do in soap operas with one long, graceful, disdainful smack.

I didn't flinch, though. I said, “If you don't want to hear the truth from me you might as well just move away. My dad's not here anymore. He's never coming back. Maybe he left because of us but maybe he left because of you and there's no reason for you and your family to stay here anymore and make us miserable.”

I don't know where that voice came from. It was so much stronger than I was but it wasn't me pretending to be someone else, someone in a movie, someone who was confident and sure of herself. It was my voice.

I moved away from the door frame and she slammed the door shut.

Inside the rooms I would never enter again was a photograph of my father with the woman who lived there. There was also, somewhere behind that door, a boy who had saved me more than once and more than he knew.

The next day I went to a craft store and bought a rhinestone gun and multicolored rhinestones, a bag of pink feathers, and as many fake flowers as I could afford. I gunned rhinestones and sewed flowers and glued feathers all over every piece of old clothing I owned. It might just seem like silly fashion but it mattered. It mattered because I believed it did.

When it got dark I went out and picked a bag full of flowers from the neighborhood gardens. I filled all my mom's empty liquor bottles with bouquets. Some of the roses were as big as my face. The pale yellow ones smelled like lemons, the purple ones smelled like lavender, and the orange ones smelled like honey. This mattered, too.

In the morning I went to the grocery store and bought ingredients to make pasta with pesto sauce and a spinach salad with walnuts and dried cranberries and balsamic vinegar from a recipe I'd found in the one old cookbook that hadn't been totally ruined in the fire when I was a kid. I found an old damask tablecloth and set the table with roses and candles and our best dishes. Then I put on a waiter jacket I had found in a thrift store and invited my mom to dinner. She wore a yellow dress and I put a rose in her hair. The TV stayed off that night and even though my mom drank too much wine and passed out on the couch at least she had filled her tummy with something good first. I took off her shoes and covered her with a blanket. Then I took the candles and roses into the bathroom and got in the tub with some bubbles and scattered petals. The empty feeling that was usually inside of me, like the dark space when the lights go out, wasn't there at all.

It was Christmas Eve and I had just gotten back from hanging out at Bobby's. I had promised my mom I'd spend the evening with her. I was going to make turkey sandwiches, green beans with candied almonds, yams with marshmallows, and cranberry sauce. There were a few twinkle lights strewn over the roof of our building and the air smelled vaguely of fir trees and wood smoke. I thought, if you squint at the lights the right way they look beautiful, like magic. I had put a strand of battery-operated Christmas lights around my neck and they made the rhinestones on my jean jacket sparkle.

That was when I saw Hypatia's Porsche driving away with a moving trailer attached to the back and I ran up the stairs to number 13. I peeked into the unit and the front room was completely empty. Even the curtains were gone. It was as if no one had been there at all.

As I was walking away I heard my name and turned around.

Winter was standing in the empty living room. I had no idea where he'd come from. I took one look at him and realized something that had been heavy and growing in my heart since I'd first seen him. Whatever love meant there was some version of it that I felt for Winter. And it didn't matter if he felt that for me or not or if it was real love or just my sadness about my dad that had turned into longing. Love, that elusive leading lady, plays too many parts to be typecast. Winter was my first love—if you didn't count the moment I curled my newborn fingers around Charlie's index finger and gazed up into his eyes—and he was moving away from me, too.

“You scared me!” I said.

“I stayed to say good-bye to this place. I always have this little ritual when we move, where I say good-bye to everything but I realized there is nothing to say good-bye to here. Nothing that mattered.”

We stood staring at each other and finally I couldn't stand it—something was welling up in my chest, ready to burst. It wasn't anger but I made it into that.

“My dad
paid
you to look out for me?” I said. I hadn't been able to get the thought out of my mind since Staci told me and I was afraid to ask Charlie about it when he called.

“What?” Winter blinked at me. He looked as if he'd grown taller since I'd seen him last. “Of course not.”

“That's what Staci Nettles said.”

“Like she knows anything.” He moved toward the doorway. He was carrying a small duffel bag and had a backpack on his shoulders.

“Charlie asked me to watch out for you, in his way, but I wanted to do it. Especially when I got to know you. It's what we're supposed to do.”

“We?”

He winked but he wasn't smiling. “Guardians. Angels. Right?”

So he was my angel. And he was leaving me.

“Where are you going?” I asked.

“I'm not sure. Out of this city anyway. My mom and Annabelle took off and I couldn't deal with them anymore. Besides, I turned eighteen today.”

“Happy birthday.”

I wanted to ask if he would be okay, if I could do anything. Would he be alone for his birthday? I wanted to give him a Christmas/birthday present and make him dinner. I wanted him to come live with us.

“Winter,” I said.

“Yeah.”

“Welcome Beauty, banish fear.”

“What?”

“Never mind. Thank you.”

He nodded and moved closer. He smelled like sand and tar and wind, gasoline and sawdust and oranges. He smelled like Los Angeles.

“I don't know if I can do this myself,” I said, meaning everything, meaning life.

“Yes you can. You can do anything you put your mind to. You just needed a little help through adolescence, which just basically sucks for everyone, even if their parents are sane.”

I smiled in spite of myself. I could see my reflection in his eyes.

“I lied. There's one thing that mattered,” he said. “Good-bye, Weetzie Bat.”

Then he leaned over and kissed the top of my head, pressing his face into my hair for just a second longer than an older brother or a father would, I told myself, with more intensity than would, say, just any old guardian angel.

The Christmas lights around my neck flashed on and off, illuminating our faces.

“There's no winter in L.A.,” he said softly and I wanted to point out the smell of pine trees and fires burning and the snow that frosted the distant mountains and the twinkling lights right in front of his eyes and the hot/cold peppermint of our mouths but I knew what he meant.

“Oh, and by the way, you might think I did the CPR on your mom that time, but you actually remembered more than you thought you did.”

He smiled at me, a shimmer of light, and then he was gone.

Maybe he was real. Maybe I'd made him up. Either way, he didn't think I needed him anymore. Maybe he was right.

On New Year's Eve Bobby and Lily and I climbed onto the roof of my building and made a nest out of flannel sleeping bags. We lay with our heads on each other's stomachs and watched the fireworks explode above our heads—burning chrysanthemums and fire fountains and heart-popping cherry bombs and shooting stars. Lily had stolen a bottle from her parents and we drank the cold, bitter white wine from plastic cups and chewed Bubble Yum to take the edge off.