Surviving Valencia (21 page)

There are memories that come and go, memories with the hazy doubt of dreams. Once when I was about eight, I went downstairs into the laundry room. I was looking for my mother. Instead, I saw my father standing there by a basket of dirty laundry. He had a blue, wadded ball of fabric pressed to his face. What was he doing? He was inhaling.

“Dad?”

He spun around, letting go of what he was holding. Valencia’s Ms. Pac-man bikini undies fell to the floor.

“Don’t sneak up on people. Go upstairs and do your homework.” He looked at me like I disgusted him.

So I went upstairs and did my homework; I did not argue.

Now when I think of this, I tell myself it cannot fit. Like a spare part left over after some vehicle or appliance is reassembled. Was this valve really part of this? Well, it works better now without it.

It had been seven days since Jeb and I met in the Golden Dragon parking lot, and I had yet to hear back from him. He had either skipped town with my money or been a victim of some unfortunate circumstances. Figuring out which was high on my mental list of things to do. But not quite as high as readying our home for a baby.

In that time, Adrian and I went from a couple with a messy, crowded storage room to prospective parents standing in a periwinkle nursery. He had let me have my way on everything. It was outfitted with white Pottery Barn furniture and cashmere baby blankets. A copper Friendship mobile from The Abstract Home moved lithely above the crib. The closet had already begun to accumulate an adorable selection of boy clothing and girl clothing. Whichever we did not need could be saved for our next time around, or regifted, or, well, who could think that far ahead?

“I’m off to the post office,” I called to Adrian, grabbing my purse. With the installation of the gate and Frisky, our mailbox was out of commission. That felt lucky to me. Bad things had happened in that mailbox.

I had ordered, rush delivery, several baby items and about twenty maternity outfits. Hopefully something would be waiting there for me. Well, not the maternity clothes; they were from France and would surely take longer. I wondered if other pregnant women knew about French maternity clothes. I hoped not! They were so much better than the stuff we had here. It was like, in France, they realized you could still be a stylish woman even if you were expecting.

Expecting.

I just loved the sound of that. Anticipating that something new and different would happen. Wasn’t that the definition of expecting?

There’d been an unpleasant sensation lingering around me, ever since the visit to the psychic, that perhaps trouble was closer now than Minneapolis. I felt that perhaps someone had come for me that day. But when I told Adrian about the strange ending to my meeting, he said it confirmed that the psychic was a crook, and that she had panicked, unable to tell me my future. I liked this explanation better, yet now, driving to the post office, it sounded rather ludicrous.

I parked my car and stepped out into the sweltering day. My just-washed hair, still a bit damp in the back, became hot with sweat as I walked down the street, and then turned quickly chilly as I entered the air-conditioned post office.

“Hello,” I sang to the woman behind the counter. We’d been seeing a lot of one another since the fence went up. I wondered if she noticed anything different about me…

“Oh. Hello. How are you doing today, Mrs. Corbis?” She never sounded sincerely happy to see me.

“Just fine. And yourself?”

“Good. Thank you. Here you go,” she said, handing me a single letter.

No. Please, No.

I made no move to accept it, so she pushed it at me, her bony fingers forcibly sliding it across the counter. “This is all I have for you today. You’re going to have to get a P.O. box if you don’t install your mailbox somewhere we can reach it.”

I ignored her and carried the letter to the car so I could have some privacy.

I got in and locked my door. I reached in my handbag and put on my sunglasses. They always make me feel a little invisible and safe.

I looked at the letter for a long time, holding it by the edges, not wanted to touch it. The same handwriting. A generic stamp. A Minneapolis postmark. It seemed obvious that this letter was evil. I felt like the woman at the post office should have followed me, knocked on my car window, had some police officers with her and a finger pointing at me accusingly. But she was still inside, having an average, forgettable day, and here I was, seemingly also having an average, forgettable day. And until I opened it, it was just some letter.

I did the math in my head. This letter was postmarked on Friday. I had gone to the psychic on Saturday. Today was Monday. Could the person who sent this letter have been here in Savannah on Saturday? Well, yes. Or no.

I was going to tear it open with my fingernail, but I hesitated and instead pulled the keys from the ignition. I stuck the tip of one into the edge of the letter and carefully tore an opening across the top seam of the envelope. Nice and tidy. Still I could not bring myself to look inside. I just knew there was going to be something
really
bad inside. I set the letter on the passenger seat and started the car; I realized it must be well over a hundred degrees in there, considering I had the windows up.

I pointed the vents at my face, lifted up my sunglasses, closed my eyes. I breathed in the cool air, and when I began to feel a little better my right hand, a free agent, a crawling thing with a mind of its own, reached over to the seat beside me and retrieved the letter.

Yes. Yes. You can do this. Because you have to.

And I looked inside. My stomach twisted and turned. While I had feared I would find out something horrible about Jeb’s whereabouts, what I did not expect to find was a picture of just Jeb’s head, swollen and unreal, resting on a picnic table. It was so surreal that at first I thought it was a trick. I looked at it, momentarily puzzled at what I was seeing, not quite getting it. The reality of it then clicked, registered, and I grabbed my stomach. I turned the picture over, as shocked and disturbed by the strange sunny setting as I was by the macabre image.

I guess this guy must not have many neighbors
, I thought, holding my stomach. I feared my baby was being ruined.

Obviously taking matters into my own hands had gone too far. I called Adrian, barely able to speak.

“Honey,” I choked on my words.

“What’s the matter? What’s wrong?”

“Come to the post office.”

“I’m working on a painting.”

“Come right now.”

“Are you serious? I’m busy.”

“Come right now
. Come right now
.”

He changed. His voice changed and his demeanor changed. Somehow, he understood everything now. “Stay there. Wait for me. Don’t do anything. I’ll be right there. Just stay where you are.”

I put the picture back in the envelope and put the envelope facedown on my lap. I didn’t want it near me but also did not want it out of my reach. I tried to make my breathing come out evenly, brushed my tears away, afraid someone would see me crying hysterically and try to help me.

Moments later Adrian’s Audi came flying into the parking lot. He jumped out and ran to my passenger door. I forgot I had locked it.

“Let me in!” he said pounding on the window. I opened the door. He was sweating and panting, agitated nearly beyond recognition. His uproarious, disheveled state made me almost calm.

“I hired this guy,” I began. “A private investigator. And he went to Minneapolis a week ago…” And there I stopped, not sure how to proceed. I felt that nothing I was saying could make any sense to Adrian. I looked up at him, afraid to show him the picture, afraid he would hate me forever, never love me again, think this was all my fault.

“Adrian, get in. I don’t want to say all this with the door open.”

He got in and shut the door, and with shaking hands he reached into my lap for the envelope. Obviously the first thing he saw was that the envelope was addressed to him. He looked at me but did not comment on my opening his mail. Then he reached inside and pulled out the picture. He squinted at it and then, without warning, vomited all over the dashboard. It went into the vents and he shook his head, having the presence of mind to be annoyed with himself. He quickly opened his door and continued in the parking lot. I sat there watching the thick orange liquid roll down over the word AIRBAG and plop onto his leg. I looked around us, fearing someone would park nearby us at any moment.

“Do you want me to get out of here?” I asked him.

He ignored me, wretching out the door.

My impatience and paranoia were almost bubbling over. “Adrian, we need to get out of here.”

“Relax,” he whispered. He wiped at his mouth with his sleeve and opened the glove box.

“Should I call the police?” I asked him, after he’d cleaned the interior of the car and himself with a stack of Starbucks napkins I kept in the glove box. The hot car smelled terrible. He began to gag again.

“Adrian, let’s get out of here,” I said. “Let’s take your car. I’ll drive.”

“Okay,” he said, nodding. He picked up the envelope and photograph and followed me to his car.

“I don’t know where to start,” I said, turning down a side street, driving aimlessly. “Where do you want me to drive? You probably need to go home and change your clothes? Adrian, say something.”

He shook his head then turned to me, his green eyes locked into mine and now assured and cold. “Don’t call the police. Let me handle this.”

By the start of my sophomore year in high school, I had stopped mourning the loss of my brother and sister. I still missed them, I still thought of them, of course, but I was adjusting to my identity without them. I can look back before that time and see difficult times when I felt isolated or overwhelmed, when I had thought about how much easier it would be if they were there. I may have even believed that being without them was the cause of all my misery. After all, wasn’t there a time several years earlier when my family played Yahtzee and my mother made cupcakes for us? Weren’t there times when we were truly happy? Times when we lived up to the cheery sign hanging on our front door proclaiming us
The Loden Gang
.

Sure I got left at the grocery store when I was four and no one noticed I was missing until the deli supervisor dropped me off at home an hour later, but we also took those family trips I mentioned. There were bigger indications of authentic happiness too, like the treehouse my father built for Valencia and Van on their seventh birthdays. Throughout the years, warping in my parent’s backyard, it has stood like a giant, beckoning trophy of hand-forged Gemütlichkeit, advertising to all the world that Love Lives Here.

Growing up, I heard the story of the treehouse many, many times. As if just seeing its heaving dormers looming high above, casting black shadows on my sandbox, was not enough. Back in the day, back before stories involving the twins ground to a rusty halt, the treehouse story was a fixture of all get-togethers on our property. How could such a monstrosity not prompt some kind of explanation?

My father, or actually, the man he used to be, worked on that treehouse for months and months at night while the twins were sleeping, building it in the garage and telling them he was working on something boring like a garden shed. He then got all the pieces hauled up into the tree with pulleys and put them together while it was storming so no one could hear the nails being pounded in. That part, I think, was a lie.

Then my mom would step in and take over, telling of how she’d had to keep the twins out of the backyard for days so they wouldn’t see what was happening back there. (It wasn’t easy!) She would go on to describe how my dad set up the electricity by following the instructions in a twelve-page book he bought at a garage sale and wasn’t it a surprise that he didn’t cause the whole neighborhood to have a power outage. This story delighted everyone who heard it.

On the morning of their seventh birthdays (Van’s actually, since Valencia’s wasn’t technically until the next day) he woke them up early and said, “Do you want to see your new treehouse?” Well they didn’t believe him. But there it was. There were even geraniums in the window boxes! He had thought of everything. It had two rooms and was outfitted with carpeting, lights, and electrical outlets. They even had their own radio. And inside on a child sized table there were birthday cakes. Not one birthday cake, but two. One for each of them.
Twin
birthday cakes.  For the beautiful, the fortunate, the blessed Van and Valencia.

After they were gone, and I was trying to make sense of their loss, I wondered at times whether too much good fortune may have caused them to have some kind of cosmic implosion. I told myself when things were particularly grueling and difficult that my misfortune was my insurance policy and that I was saving my luck for later on in my life.

There are dozens and dozens of photos of that glorious birthday treehouse day. In one of them, if you look closely, you will see, parked against a withering lilac bush, a rusty little pram that looks like it was left over from the 1960’s. A burgundy buggy designed to hold twins. And in it you may notice a homely little bundle wrapped up in a poop-stained bed sheet. That’s me.

I was a month old. Which tells me, in a comforting sort of way, that, considering the building of the treehouse bookended my arrival by months, my father’s lack of interest in me started before he even met me. It was not necessarily because of something I did wrong. My mother on the other hand, grew to hate me. But wait, I am stumbling off course. My point is that, if I went back far enough, I could find evidence of normalcy and love. Evidence of parents who could be generous and kind. If not to me specifically, at least to our family as a whole. And for years I was caught between obsessing over the possibility of bringing it back and mourning its loss.

It had been easy to try to hold on to those memories, or rather, hard to let them go. They made me believe we could be happy. What is there besides happiness?

I used to do a lot of that believing-in-luck thing that children do: If the phone rings in exactly one minute, this last few years will be a bad dream that only I know about and everything will be okay. Valencia and Van won’t go to college. They’ll stay here.

A minute would pass and the phone would not ring, so I would revise it to five minutes instead.

I let it all go my sophomore year. I stopped missing everything I had lost and stopped thinking about how differently things could have gone. I was still aware of my parents’ disappointment and annoyance towards me, but I officially stopped expecting them to change their ways.

In letting go of all that bitterness and expectation, I was left with an empty hole that made me feel light enough to blow away.

One person in particular noticed the new me. It was my Algebra teacher, Mrs. Hoeney. Shortly into the school year, she called me after class and harshly demanded, “What’s the matter with you?”

I did not know her well and was stunned. “I don’t know,” I said.

“I told Dave Douglas that you are coming to see him. Do you know who Dave is?”

Of course I did. He was the guidance counselor. Not the one who told you whether you should be a veterinarian or a pastry chef, the one who helped you with your
problems
. Dave Douglas lived and breathed guidance counseling. We were to address him by his first name. He had plants in his office, hanging from macramé holders. He walked the halls a little too slowly, sipping tea from a mug that said
Fort Worth Stockyards
. There were rumors that he and a former teacher’s aide had gotten into trouble at a hot tub party once. He wore jeans and sandals with socks all year round, and he had a Rollie Fingers mustache. Until now I had avoided him, but I had not been oblivious to his strange syrup and cigarette smoke scented presence. I had literally had nightmares about him. And now I was going to be one the members of his club?

“I’m not interested in seeing Dave Douglas,” I told her.

“He’s interested in seeing you.”

I cringed. “How is this your place to get involved?”

“Watching out for my students is part of my job,” she said.

I wanted to argue that sitting in her class for a few hours a week didn’t make me
hers
. Instead I simply said, “No thank you. I’m going to pass on this opportunity.”

“Are you on drugs?” she asked me.

I started to laugh. I couldn’t help it.
Drugs?
It seemed that to adults, “drugs” looked like Good & Plenty candies. “Drugs” was a self-conscious, fuzzy idea balled up in their heads, put there by
Good Housekeeping
magazine. It was all-encompassing, with crack and marijuana being equally foreign and doomful. What they were
sure of
, though, was that we kids were taking them and they were the reason we were bad.

I had never used drugs in my life or even been to a party with them. Well, I had never been to a party, period.
But still
. In truth, the majority of the sophomores using drugs were in parents’ and teachers’ heads.

“Aren’t drugs scary and dangerous?” I asked. “I have heard that they turn good kids into monsters. What drug would you say I am behaving like I am on?”

“Very funny.”

I smiled. She responded with a smug, sneering smile meant to tell me she was tougher than I thought she was.

“I have to go to my next class,” I told her and walked out of there.

The next day I was called over the loudspeaker to the principal’s office. I was not surprised when I reached his office and saw Dave Douglas and Mrs. Hoeney seated in the cushy leather chairs beside his desk.

Being fifteen is a lot like having everyone you know drop you off at a psychiatric ward and tell the keepers that you are crazy. You are a defenseless victim and anything you say just makes them think you’re crazier. Resigning myself to my fate, I tried to clear my mind and soul of all traces of my essence, the way I heard prostitutes have to do. I began to feel like I was watching myself on television and I thought it must be working.

“Well, hello there! We’re going to get on fine,” said Dave, reaching out his hand to me and pulling me in for a pat-on-the-back-style hug. I held my breath, feeling completely violated. Apparently it was harder to remove yourself from the physical world than I had thought. The principal and Mrs. Hoeney smiled and nodded, and Dave escorted me down the hall to his office, a place I had previously only glimpsed.

It was a tiny interior office loaded down with coffee-ringed papers and crocheted pillows. There were
Far Side
clippings taped everywhere, and heavily piled shelves: Miniature motorcycles, a row of jade Buddhas, and tons of books about child psychiatry that any thinking person would have hidden out of our site. I began fantasizing about the garage sale I could have. An ashtray piled high with cigarette butts sat between us, for back in those days faculty could still smoke in their offices, and despite its filthy contents, the ashtray had a funky, old-fashioned look to it that I admired.
Two dollars
, I thought.

Dave Douglas waited for me to get settled in, then he leaned back and stretched, and either accidentally or on purpose to ease the tension, let go a small, stinky fart.

“Whoopsie,” he said, giggling like a ninny and popping his hand over his mouth as if he had just belched. It may be unladylike to say this, being that I hold a coveted position within the Savannah Junior League, but he was a total douche.

Right away, and again at the beginning of every subsequent session, he made a point to say, “You can tell me anything and it’s just between us.”

Right. None of this was between us. Every Tuesday and Thursday I was assigned to visit him. My classmates saw me get up, hand one of his passes (a big, bright orange slip of paper) to the study hall monitor, and go, obviously, to his office. If I didn’t show up, which happened one day when I was reading and forgot, he would buzz the study hall monitor and ask over the intercom where I was. And when I was in his office, any and all other students were free to watch me through the window in his door that he had ineffectively covered with a torn scrap of paper.

The second problem was that he had some very confusing techniques. After a couple of times without much to say, I tried helping the sessions move along by telling him about book reports I was working on. He kept interrupting with the most asinine questions: “Are
you
Boo Radley?”

“What? No, I’m a
girl
.”

“So you see yourself more in Scout?”

“Not really.”

“So maybe a little?”

“No.”

“Okay, alrighty. How did you
feel
about Atticus?”

“He was nice?”

“Yes, yes he was,” Dave Douglas agreed, scribbling on his yellow tablet, then returning to stare at me in anticipatory silence.

“So do you want to hear more about my book report?”

“No, that’s enough. You know I’m your friend, right?”

“Sure.”

“Are you feeling scared, or nervous?”

“No.”

“You know that your sister and brother did not go away because of something you did wrong, right?”

“Wrong right? That sounds funny.”

“You think it’s funny?”

“I meant the way that sounded. I didn’t mean what happened to them. Forget it.”

“You know, death is a lot of things, but I wouldn’t call it funny… I notice you’re wearing your sister’s class ring.”

I nodded. The garage sale never ended. I had discovered a box of bowling trophies in the corner, awaiting a shelf, and I mentally priced them at fifty cents apiece.

“Did they give that to you after your sister passed?”

“Passed?” I asked, pretending I did not understand what he meant.

“Um… After your sister died.”

“She’s not dead. She’s just missing.”

His eyes lit up.
Finally
, he was thinking,
she has exposed herself as delusional.
The break in the case every counselor dreams of. “What do you mean?” he asked, feigning concern.

“You
do
know that they never found her body, right Dave?”

“Oh. Really?” He scribbled on his notepad, clearly not familiar with the details of the case. He looked up at me, testing the situation, and asked, “What about your brother?”

I yawned. “What do you mean?”

“Do you think he’s ‘missing’ also?”