The Best American Short Stories 2013 (35 page)

She broke his nose. Her poor father who was only trying to protect his little girl from statutory rape at the hands of the druggie boy she adored. The weird sexual territoriality of fathers, some ancient holdover from the days of dowries and bloody marital sheets. Even then, she knew it was about his ego,
his
deflowered honor, not hers. When Sammy overdosed and she came crawling back home, strung out and incoherent, her father wouldn’t let her in the house or even talk to her. He sent her to Utah, where Angelica was.

During the moral inventory phase of the twelve steps, she called her father and apologized.

“I’m sorry I broke your nose and put you through all that worry and mess,” she said.

He seemed dumbfounded. “I don’t even like to think about that,” he said. “As far as I’m concerned, it never happened. You are what you are now, and that’s who my daughter is. You. Not that other person.”

“But I have to make amends, Dad,” she said.

He said, “You can’t make amends for something that never happened.”

As the sedan reached the end of the lane and the house reared up before them, Cora forced herself to take deep breaths. Josiah parked and opened the passenger door for her, and she followed him past a row of topiaries and rose bushes, the heads of the flowers bowed by the rain. The house was a giant whitewashed box of sparkling stone, vaguely French Regency, wrought-iron balconies jutting from huge, blue-shuttered casement windows. As she and Josiah walked to the front door, a series of motion-sensor floodlights clicked on, one after the other, dogging their steps.

Yvonne Borneo was waiting for them in the vestibule.

“Cora!” she exclaimed. “You made it!”

Then she hugged Cora. She wore silk lounge pants and a gauzy tunic, and Cora, chin pressed against the novelist’s dry, soft neck, smelled lily of the valley and starch.

“Thank you for having me,” Cora said. During their embrace, Josiah had vaporized; they were alone in a high-ceilinged foyer of slate and marble.

“You are
such
a tiny thing,” Yvonne said, sorrowfully looking Cora up and down.

Dinner was dished out by Josiah: skirt steak and buttered carrots and parsley potatoes on ceramic serving platters. When he produced a bottle of red wine and plucked Cora’s glass by its stem, she held up her hand.

“No,” she said. “No, thank you.”

“It’s an excellent wine,” he said.

“I don’t drink.”

She’d been saying this for fifteen years, and the reaction was always the same: a wide-eyed, almost abject solicitude as the implications of the statement were processed. Then an abashed hush. Josiah poured her a glass of water.

As soon as Josiah left the room, Yvonne leaned forward slightly and looked at Cora. A centerpiece of bare black branches sat between them. She gently pushed it aside.

“I wanted to have you over to apologize to you, in person,” she said, “for leaving so abruptly last night.”

“Oh, no,” Cora said. “No, I understand. I figured you had to get going.”

Yvonne kept gazing at her. “It was hard for me,” she said slowly, “to see someone in that condition.”

“Of course,” Cora said.

“How is DJ?”

“Well, they’ve got her on a forty-eight-hour hold. So . . .” Cora shrugged. “I guess at least she’s detoxing right now. And maybe she’ll have a shelter bed by the time she’s out.”

Yvonne looked down. “I don’t know how you do it,” she murmured. “Every single day. How you don’t lose hope.”

Cora surprised herself by saying, “Oh, I do. I just pretend that I don’t.”

Yvonne looked up, staring at her sharply, and Cora had a peculiar sensation of loosening, uncurling, and pushing off with a fortifying heedlessness that was liberating and bleak. If she still drank, she would have taken a gulp of wine at that moment. In her mind she saw money, coins and coins of it, running through her fingers.

“May I ask you a question?” Yvonne said.

Cora nodded.

“Why did you leave home?”

Cora had told the story of her downward spiral in front of countless donors. After years of twelve-step testimony she could easily slide into the instructive, talking-points tone this spiel seemed to demand. She always began with a disclaimer:
My parents weren’t abusive. Which makes me different from most runaways
. Measured, wide-eyed, absolving everyone of everything.
I made a choice
. And she opened her mouth to say it again and found that she couldn’t.

What she heard herself saying instead was “I was in love with an older guy, and I wanted to have sex with him.”

Yvonne’s fingers closed around the stem of her wineglass. She frowned.

“And that’s why you left home?”

“Pretty much,” Cora said. “My parents didn’t let me date. They were really, really afraid I’d turn into a slut. I mean,
preoccupied
with the possibility I’d turn into a slut. As in, every rule they made revolved around protecting me from that fate. And, um, I wanted to have sex. So.”

Yvonne looked grave and slightly stricken.

Cora kept going. “And this guy got me into drugs, and then he overdosed and I just went crazy. I kind of wanted to die with him. And I think it was mourning, the whole time I was on the street like that. I could say to you that I was a bad, bad girl and experimenting and rebelling, or whatever, but I really do think it was my way of mourning. And I could say there was one big, defining experience that changed me and made it okay, but there wasn’t. It’s still not okay. It’ll never be okay. I just eventually stopped mourning.”

Yvonne said, “But you got off the drugs. You made a life for yourself.”

“The other thing was a life too.”

Yvonne looked dismayed. “But what kind of life? Strung out, on the streets? Addicted to drugs?” Her voice trailed off, and she toyed with her fork.

Cora laughed, meanly. She was suddenly very angry. She had been waiting, she realized, for this chance since the moment they had met. Since before.

“Believe me,” she said. Her voice was deliberate and low, feeling its way. “No one would do drugs if they weren’t fun. The drugs are what I miss the most.”

She laughed again, this time with disbelief at having said it out loud. But it was true.

Yvonne gracefully nudged her glass aside and cradled her chin in one long-fingered hand.

“I wouldn’t really know,” she said evenly.

Cora blurted out, “I was with your daughter at Ravenswood.”

Yvonne stared.

“I don’t know how long she was there. I was only there for a month. That’s the way it worked, you know, if your parents couldn’t afford to keep paying, they’d get told you were cured. And if your parents were rich enough, you were never cured.”

In the dimness Yvonne’s face seemed to tighten into facets, like a diamond, each outraged angle giving off light. And Cora kept going. She couldn’t stop.

“That place was, excuse me, a mind fuck. They made up a diagnosis and made you try to fit it. Which may have been what they did to Angelica. Who I only saw once or twice, because I was stuck in a tiny padded room, alone, most of the time.”

Her voice was unrecognizable to her ears: ragged, lashing, corrosive. Almost breaking. When she yelled at City Hall, it was mostly a put-on: she was angry, but she also knew she had to seem sane, galvanizing, in the right. Now she was simply ranting. Ranting at the millionaire who had invited her to dinner. And she couldn’t stop.

“I was a junkie when I went in there,” she said. “Like your daughter. And as soon as I got out, I couldn’t
wait
to go do some drugs. I felt
lucky
to be out of that place and doing drugs again.”

She was out of breath. For years she had counseled parents, engineered reconciliations, built bridges for girls to reconnect with their estranged families. Even if those families had made terrible mistakes, like sending their daughters to offshore boot camps, beating them, disowning them for getting raped or pregnant. No matter how awful the parents had been, they clung to Cora; they called her and told her how much they loved their daughters. They said things like, “You don’t have to tell me where she is; just tell her that I love her.” They cried. They listened to her with the chastened raptness of converts. They did what she suggested. And if their daughters came back or pulled themselves clear and forgave their parents, Cora thanked God she’d been patient, bitten her tongue, refused to say the very things she was now saying to Yvonne Borneo.

Yvonne picked up her napkin.

“Let me stop you right there, please, Cora,” she said. Her voice was calm.

“I still—”

“Please,” Yvonne said. “Please.”

She waited until Cora became uncomfortable enough with the silence to sit back, with poor grace, and say, “All right.”

“I think,” Yvonne said, “I wanted to meet you because I knew something about your past. I knew you were a runaway. And on some level I wanted to see you and find out about you. I wanted to find out why you survived and my daughter didn’t.”

She folded her hands and cleared her throat, and when she resumed speaking her voice slackened, sagging with the dead weight of futile certainty. “It’s because she was schizophrenic, that’s what you’d tell me. And maybe you’d be right. But let me ask you this. If the situations were reversed, if you had been the one to die, and if Angelica were sitting in front of your parents right now and saying how awful Ravenswood was, what a mistake they made, what would your parents tell her?”

Cora’s mouth was parched. The bitten shreds of her lips stuck together when she tried to separate them.

“I don’t know,” she said.

Yvonne’s mouth stretched into a desolate smile.

“I’ll tell you,” she said. “They’d say exactly what I’m about to. They’d say, ‘My daughter was an ocean underneath an ocean.’ And it would be true. I see these girls on the streets, girls like DJ, the girls in your drop-in, and I know every single one of them is someone’s daughter. And to their own parents, every single one of them is an ocean underneath an ocean.” She tapped her index finger on the table in rhythm with the words. “Fathoms and fathoms deep. A complete mystery. My daughter is completely unfathomable to me. And certainly, if I may say so, to you.”

Cora balled her fists under the table. She knew she should be mollified—if this were a TV show, she would be cowed before the unassailable authority of maternal privilege—but she was furious, burning, convinced that nothing had ever made her angrier than this: this artful abdication of responsibility, this consigning of every lost daughter to a communal slag heap of pretty Persephones. She remembered her father’s voice on the phone, telling her, “You can’t make amends for something that never happened.” How matter-of-factly he had absolved her of everything. How she wished she could accept his words as a gift and pretend they didn’t feel like a swift and brutal erasure of her entire adolescence as though it were some wartime atrocity, a stack of bodies to be buried and sprinkled with lime. He had excised a part of her and left it on the cutting-room floor. And when he reminisced about her growing up, as he occasionally did on her birthday and when he’d been drinking late at night and watching sentimental films on American Movie Classics, he selectively focused on those childhood behaviors that predicted and explained Cora’s choice of career. How she’d always had a charitable bent. Defended smaller children from bullies. Brought home injured baby birds. Cried when starving Ethiopians were on the news. A Florence Nightingale whitewash, obscuring the simple fact that she cared about homeless junkie underage prostitutes because she used to be one. She knew what it was like to be Angelica in a way Yvonne Borneo could never know.

“My parents,” she said, “would never say that. Because I am not the same person as your daughter. I don’t look at what happened to Angelica and think
there but for the grace of God go I
. We’re all different. We’re all different people!”

She was sputtering now, losing her eloquence, letting herself go in a way she never had before, and in her mind she saw the drop-in shuttered, saw herself somewhere else, working in an art store, maybe, or walking the streets of a strange city, or telling an entirely new subset of people what she used to be and what it meant, giving it a new spin, all the dead and dying girls of the Mission as distant and abstract to her as Bosnian war orphans, as famine victims, far away and someone else’s problem, and she remembered how, at the moment the phone rang in her apartment the night before, there was a panicked, nonsensical moment in which she thought, she
knew
, it was Angelica. It was Angelica, calling to tell her something about her mother. To say be gentle with her, because she’s in pain. Every moment of the day she’s in pain. And Cora lifted her eyes from her plate and said, “You’re not going to give me any money, are you?” When her voice shook, she didn’t know if it was with despair or relief.

Honey, you are
never
getting out of here
.

She was dimly aware of the thin and careful form of Yvonne Borneo getting up from her chair and walking around the table. Then there was a hand on her shoulder—experimental, inquisitive, in the manner of a cat testing its balance on some unfamiliar surface.

Cora peered through her fingers. The novelist’s face was inches from her own. Her brown eyes were very still and steady. Cora knew she was being shown something, that Yvonne was allowing some skimmed-away sediment to settle and collect in her dark eyes, in the grooves of her face, in the curves of her mouth. The look she gave Cora conveyed neither reproach nor remorse. What did it convey? Cora would never really know. She could only register something old and muddied and orphaned between them, a helpless moat of transference, brimming with the run-off of two people whose primary identities were, in the eyes of each other, not that of philanthropist and beneficiary, or writer and caregiver, but of someone else’s mother and someone else’s child. And it was this—this ancient ooze of crossed signals, this morass of things unsaid—that made Cora lower her forehead to Yvonne’s shoulder and whisper, “She loved you. I could
tell
that she loved you,” as the novelist stroked her hair the way Cora once imagined her stroking the head of a fox stole, automatically, with the phantom tenderness of a hand toward an object that is not the right thing at all, but is soft at least, and warm.