The Girls From Corona Del Mar (10 page)

“I don’t know,” Bobby later told Lorrie Ann, “the kid must have been crazy high.”

And while Carlos was successful in downing Dana, he did not carry out his mission, having become too spooked to do anything but run back downstairs, jump in his friend’s car, and shout, “Drive! Drive!”

What I didn’t understand when Lorrie Ann first called me about the Zach-hospital problem was that, if it was nine o’clock in the morning in Istanbul, which it was, then it was eleven at night in California, which is precisely why Lorrie Ann did not know of any day care that would be open to take Zach while she made her way to the hospital. It was also why it upset her so much that she couldn’t find Arman. Where was he?

Lorrie Ann had been notified so late in the evening only because Dana had not been found until Bobby came home that night around eight o’clock, her head swollen to almost twice its size and the color of an eggplant, but her breathing still coming, shallow but regular, her lips smeared against the pink shag carpet of the living room, shards of broken gnome all around her. Bobby, as anyone would, called 911. As he waited for the ambulance, however, he became concerned: cops would be coming and there was a half pound of crystal meth in his “bedroom”—really the same annexed corner of the living room that Lorrie Ann had used as a girl. He did not just want to flush it—really, there was too much of it to flush—so he ran down and put it in his car, thinking the cops would not, at least not right away, have any reason to ask to inspect his car. Then the paramedics arrived. There was a flurry of activity. Everyone agreed that Bobby should follow the ambulance in his own car to Hoag, where they were taking his mother.

Once in the car, however, Bobby just did not feel good about driving all the drugs to such an official place as a hospital. He couldn’t put the drugs back upstairs; the house was still crawling with cops who were
fingerprinting things and collecting evidence. It was a nightmare. He decided that the best thing to do was take a “slight” detour to his buddy Seth’s house in Mission Viejo and leave the drugs there. Seth, as it turned out, was only too delighted to play host to the drugs, and suggested that what Bobby really needed in order to brace himself for the hospital and recover from such a traumatic thing as finding his mother on the floor with a head the color of eggplant was to get a little high. Not a lot, just a little. Just a bump.

And so it came to be that Bobby never returned to the hospital that night, but instead had his buddy Seth pretend to be the sheriff’s office and call Lorrie Ann, cryptically telling her to go to the hospital, where her mother was in critical condition.

It took days to sort this full story out, especially as Bobby, out of shame, kept lying about his end of things. What ultimately happened that night was that Lorrie Ann was able to find out the basics of her mother’s condition over the phone: traumatic brain injury, induced coma, a surgery called a ventriculostomy already performed, where a small tube had been inserted via a hole in the cranium into one of the ventricles to allow fluid to drain. It would take Lorrie Ann several hours to understand that they were talking about a hole they had made in her cranium, not just a hole that was naturally there, and it would take her longer still to realize that by “into one of the ventricles” they meant: into a part of the brain itself, a part they just hoped wasn’t very important. Lorrie Ann explained to the nurse that she had a child with severe CP and a phobia of hospitals. No, there was no special day care open at that time where Zach could stay while Lorrie Ann visited Dana. But, the nurse reassured her, her mother was not conscious and was stable for now, and so Lorrie Ann could come absolutely whenever she could make it there. “Even if it’s really late?” Lorrie Ann asked. The kindness of this nurse was making her break down crying.

“Even if it’s the very middle of the night,” the sweet nurse said.

——

And it was the very middle of the night, past the middle of the night, really, by the time Lorrie Ann made it there.

Around three, she heard Arman come home. By that time, she had already begun drinking whiskey. Zach was in bed. He was sleeping. She wanted, badly, to leave him sleeping there while she went to the hospital, but she knew she absolutely could not. And so she poured herself a bowl of Lucky Charms and, while she was at it, she also poured, into a Winnie-the-Pooh mug, a couple of fingers of whiskey.

Even though she did not know precisely where Arman was, she knew where he was. And every hour that he stayed out made her angrier and angrier, so that her blood was circulating through her body at what felt like twice its normal speed. When she heard him come home at three, she even debated whether or not she should go over there and knock. She might explode at him. She could, after all, be mature and wait until morning.

But she was too angry for that, and so after just a few minutes, she was pounding at his door.

“Come in!”

She pushed the door open.

“What do you want?” he asked her. His eyes were bloodshot. She knew that if she got close to him, where he was sitting on the couch, she would smell pot on him and possibly other things, fruity perfume or the rawer, salty smell of sex. They were, as he constantly reminded her, “not in a relationship,” and so these trysts of his were perfectly within the rules.

“Can you just watch Zach while I go to the hospital? My mom’s in the ICU.”

Arman’s sneer melted completely. “Of course,” he said, scrambling to get to his feet, and quickly following her to her apartment, with his swinging gait, caused by the forearm crutches, but which Lorrie Ann now found charming, now loved.

“He’s asleep,” Lorrie Ann said. “You don’t have to stay up or anything, but if you could just sleep in my room so you can hear him if he wakes up?”

“What happened?” Arman asked.

Lorrie Ann told him about Dana’s head injury, about the tube inserted into her brain, about the induced coma. If she had had access to details, such as Bobby’s vivid and descriptive “eggplant,” she no doubt would have used them on Arman to make him feel bad, but she did not, and so her explanation was technical and unemotional.

“Why would someone break into your mom’s place and try to beat her to death with a gnome?” Arman asked.

“I don’t know,” Lorrie Ann said.

“I’m sorry, girl. I don’t know what to say. Just: embrace the suck.” Lorrie Ann understood that this was soldier slang and that it meant something along the lines of “The world is shitty, but we’ve got to deal with it.” She was too tired to accept Arman’s platitudes.

“Is that what you were out doing?” she asked. “Embracing the suck?”

“Every day I embrace the suck,” Arman said.

“Oh, bullshit,” Lorrie Ann said. “Fucking teenage girls that wander into your fucking stupid smoke shop does not count as embracing the suck.”

“First of all, they aren’t teenagers. They are fully in their twenties. And second of all, may I point out just one more time: I have no fucking legs.”

“Wah, wah, wah,” Lorrie Ann said. “Poor Arman got his legs blown off.”

“That’s right, bitch,” Arman said. “It sucks to have no legs.”

“Cry me a fucking river,” Lorrie Ann said, grabbing up her keys and stalking out of the apartment. She did not slam the front door, but she definitely closed it aggressively, before making her way to her car, saying a small prayer that she would not be pulled over for a DUI, and turning the key in the ignition.

It was dark in her mother’s room, and Lor approached the bed suddenly out of breath. She became aware of how much her mouth tasted of whiskey. I’m drunk, she thought. She stood at the side of the bed. Was
it her mother? Was she in the right room? In the bed was a small figure with a head swathed in bandages, tucked under a thin sheet, with many tubes going in and out. Lor simply could not recognize her mother’s face, not in the dark, not with all the bandages. She sat in the chair. Certainly the bandages around the head seemed to indicate that it was her mother, but what if there was another woman about the size of her mother who had also had a head trauma? Lor told herself to stop being silly and just admit to herself that this was her mother, but the more she sat there, the more she worried that she was sitting at the bedside of a total stranger.

Finally, she stood up and slowly peeled back the blanket, more of a sheet, really, from her mother’s feet. She saw the neon orange toenail polish, the thin white tan line on her mother’s second toe from the silver toe ring with a shamrock she habitually wore. What had they done with the toe ring? Cut it off? Something about the feet looked so forlorn. Her eyes had adjusted somewhat to the dark, but her vision was still drained of color, like one of those black-and-white photographs where only certain parts were colored in: there were her mother’s gray feet, the shadows rich and lustrous over her high arches, the toenails a sudden neon orange, breaking the gray scale.

She touched them, gently pushing her thumbs into the arches, wrapping her warm hands around them. She sat one hip on the edge of her mother’s bed and rubbed her feet, long and slow and mournfully. She thought of Zach’s feet, twisted and pointed as though he were mid-leap in a ballet. She thought of Jim’s feet, dead and cold in dress shoes under the ground. And then, of course, Arman had no feet at all.

She thought of her own feet, which for once were not aching, and the way they vibrated in her shoes slightly, as though they longed to have real contact with the ground, not the hospital floor, but real dirt, real earth. She thought about monkey feet and human hands and human feet. With a jerk, as though remembering an appointment, she remembered that human beings were animals. Nothing more than animals. It was because of this fact that Dana might die.

As Lor rubbed Dana’s feet, she whispered to her mother, “You are going to need these feet, Mom. You are going to wake up and you are going to walk and even run around again. You will need these beautiful feet.”

It was true; Dana’s feet were beautiful, far more beautiful than Lor’s. Dana was a perfect size six, with high arches and magnificently even toes, like a doll’s. Lor’s feet were wider and flatter and bigger than her mother’s. She pulled on Dana’s toes individually, rubbing the bulb of each between her fingers. Suddenly she remembered the night she refused to break my toe, and the image of my foot flashed before her, the horrible split bulb, the cracked asphalt, the sudden explosion of blood and screaming, but she pushed it away.

CHAPTER SEVEN

If anything, it was Istanbul that created distance between me and Lorrie Ann. The international calls were outrageously expensive, and Lorrie Ann’s dial-up connection in the sad, subsidized apartment was so slow it rendered Skype some kind of slow-motion, avant-garde collage. Lorrie Ann could hardly ever afford to call me, and I could afford to call her for only twenty minutes once a month or so. Franklin and I were living off a grant, and Turkey wasn’t as cheap as we’d been hoping. So I didn’t hear all that much about Lor’s life after Dana’s attack. I knew only that Dana recovered but was classified as disabled, and that she had moved in with Lorrie Ann and Zach, which actually solved some of Lorrie Ann’s babysitter problems. In fact, Lorrie Ann seemed preternaturally relaxed about all of this the few times I talked to her.

And so my life became my own again. The narrative concerned only myself, Franklin, and the wonders of ancient Sumer, and I did not have to worry about my opposite twin, who was unlucky, or who else was being punished for sins I did not understand. Left to my own devices, I was richly, deeply, quietly happy.

I was attending the excruciatingly boring reception at which I met Franklin only to steal food. This was back at UMich, during my second-to-last year there. I intended merely to gather a few cheese cubes and chocolate-covered strawberries on my miniature paper plate and snag a glass of wine before hightailing it back to my office, where I could put
some Queen on my fabulous new computer speakers and get back to work on my article. But the chair, a man I adored, whose name was Dr. Wooly, and who was perfectly rubicund and always smiling, much like a 1950s illustration of Santa Claus, insisted that I go shake hands with Franklin.

“It would be good for you to date someone like him,” Dr. Wooly said as he steered me by the elbow, his great mane of white Santa hair cascading down his tweed-clad shoulders. Normally, I rather enjoyed the avuncular way in which Dr. Wooly affected to advise me regarding my love life, but nothing Dr. Wooly could have said would have set me against Franklin so completely. I did not like doing things that were “good for me.” Not even yoga.

And Franklin himself turned out to be a complete snooze. He was nice. He shook my hand. He was, of course, very red haired, a true ginger, with hair the color of Cheetos and skin absolutely covered in freckles of a more muted orange. He was of slightly above average height and with an unusually athletic build. I noted that he was good looking, despite his freckles, but good looking was not everything for me, was not even a must. The most interesting thing about Franklin looks-wise were his eyes, which were an almost iridescent brown that was dangerously close to being orange, like a Halloween cat’s. I have never, before or since, met someone with eyes that color.