The Girls From Corona Del Mar (18 page)

Our system involved me looking at the cuneiform, which I could just barely read, as well as a copy of Franklin’s translation, most of which was done by hand and then photocopied for me. My reading level in cuneiform was about like a third grader’s: third graders can read Shakespeare in a technical sense, but in another sense they can’t read him at all. So I needed Franklin’s words in order to make sense of what I was reading, but I wasn’t only reading Franklin’s words: I was looking for
the reflection I got between the two when I read them side by side. And then I tried to write down that thing—that magic thing that hovered between the two of them. “Make your milk sweet and thick, my bridegroom,” Inanna sings. “My shepherd, I will drink your fresh milk … Let the milk of the goat flow in my sheepfold.”

I had never, not once in my entire life, figured my vagina as a sheepfold. I was both horrified and powerfully aroused by the idea.

I often told Franklin he was my lettuce planted by the water.

(Had I killed a little baby? Had I really done that? Was there really a little baby growing inside me now?)

I wondered if Lorrie Ann had loved Jim the way I loved Franklin. Had he been her lettuce planted by the water? Had they watched in wonder together as her belly grew swollen and ripe, sure that they were owed the springtime of their lives, the bloody harvest of live-born young? Did he say something suddenly, offhand, as he was getting ready for work, or as he was rinsing a dish, that cut through the corridors of her loneliness? (I picture the inside of Lorrie Ann as one large colonnade, entirely of polished Carrara marble, every surface glittering like frosted glass or like the teeth of unicorns. In my mind there are no footsteps, no one wandering in this temple, for Lorrie Ann is the temple itself and not its priestess.) I remember them enjoying each other, surely, laughing. Jim could make anyone laugh. But had he known her? Had he really seen her, that frightening, wonderful, terrifying thing that was Lorrie Ann?

“So you got high and went to the hospital,” I prompted. “And then Dunny drove you and your mom home again.”

“And we ordered from Papa John’s.”

“Dunny stayed for dinner?”

“Yes,” Lorrie Ann said. “She did.”

“Was Arman there?”

“Yes,” Lorrie Ann said. “He was.”

“This is the weirdest night I can even imagine,” I said.

“It was the weirdest night of my entire life. But at the same time completely normal. We were all just exhausted. I went to bed early, after we finished eating. Arman came in and just stroked my hair. He was really good at touching my hair, not like most men. He understood long hair because he had long hair, and he knew what felt good. He braided my hair and didn’t talk to me at all. It was so kind. It was the nicest anyone has ever been to me.”

I felt sure that I had been that nice to her, but I said nothing. I couldn’t bring to mind a specific time I had been nice to her. But I had, hadn’t I?

“But I guess Dunny and my mom stayed up talking,” Lor said, wetting her lips with her tongue. I could hear how dry her mouth was, how thick her spit. “I guess they stayed up to chat.”

Dana had confessed to Dunny that her Vicodin had gone missing and that it seemed to her like perhaps Lorrie Ann had been taking it. At first, she told Dunny, she had suspected Arman. After all, he seemed the drug addict type. But after some time observing her daughter, who rarely changed out of her pajamas, and who seemed content to spend all day every day watching
SpongeBob SquarePants
with her disabled son, Dana had realized that Lorrie Ann might have a problem. Did Dunny have any advice?

And so Dunny and Dana hatched a plan. Dunny confessed that she had already alerted Child Protective Services at the hospital and had recommended that Zach be taken from the home. She had worried about making this recommendation because she didn’t know how Dana would feel about it, but Dana reassured her that she thought this was for the best. Taking care of Zach was more than Lorrie Ann was capable of these days. “It would have been different if my son-in-law had lived,” Dana said. “He could have helped her.”

“I’m so sorry to hear that,” Dunny said. “I didn’t know he’d passed.”

“The war,” Dana said. “War does not determine who is right—only who is left. Bertrand Russell said that.”

Dunny, of course, had no idea who Bertrand Russell was. She only nodded, her brow knit, hoping to keep Dana from digressing into a rant. “I in no way blame her. I think she’s trying the best that she can. That’s what these systems are there for—a safety net. For when you just can’t do it on your own.”

“Exactly,” Dana said. “I couldn’t agree more. But what do you think we should do about the drugs?”

Dunny was more inclined to take the idea of Lorrie Ann as a drug addict seriously because of the way she had laughed at the hospital, had seemed so distracted, had been glassy eyed and distant all night. “You could ask her to take a drug test. You could confront her about the Vicodin. Have an intervention.”

And so Dunny explained to Dana what an intervention was, and Dana was enchanted. It seemed like exactly what was called for. The very next morning she asked Arman to help her with the intervention. And so it was that Arman gave Lorrie Ann the heads-up about what was coming.

Lorrie Ann was shocked. “Who all is going to be at this intervention?”

“Dude,” Arman said, “I don’t know! Dunny and your mom, I guess. I told them I hadn’t noticed anything but that you’d seemed a little depressed. What were you doing taking her pills, Lorrie baby?”

“I didn’t take her pills!” Lorrie Ann lied. “She’s just senile and she doesn’t remember when she takes them!”

Arman shrugged. “What do you wanna do?”

“I want to curl up into a ball and go to sleep for a thousand years.”

Arman was grinding up a 30 milligram oxycodone for her on a saucer. He laid the pill under a twenty-dollar bill to keep it from getting everywhere, then ground it to fine powder with the edge of his lighter. “Well, aside from sleeping for a thousand years.”

“Can’t I just say I don’t have a drug problem? How would they know?”

“Your mom is clueless,” Arman said. “But Dunny probably knows what high looks like.” He scraped the powder into two lines using his
Blockbuster card, rolled the twenty into a tube, and handed it over to Lorrie Ann.

“Why did that fucking bitch have to get involved?” Lorrie Ann asked, snorting one line up her right nostril, then the other up her left.

Arman just shrugged, tapped his lighter against his fake leg, looked out the window.

“This is the last thing I want to be dealing with,” Lorrie Ann said.

“You don’t have a problem,” Arman said. “I’ve seen people with problems. You just like to party.”

“Exactly. And it’s not like I’m fucking up or anything. Zipper firing me was some kind of act of God or something.”

“Of course,” Arman said.

“So maybe I just go in and I say, ‘Mom, I didn’t take your pills. I have no drug problem. This is all in your head.’ I mean, she is technically diagnosed as having psychosis, right?”

“What if they want you to take a drug test?” Arman asked. He had, in fact, been told by Dana that she and Dunny planned to challenge Lor to take a drug test if she tried to deny taking the pills.

“A drug test for what?” Lor asked. “Where would they even get one?”

“Maybe Dunny has them. They could test you for opiates with just a pee test.”

“They have that?”

Arman nodded, not looking at her, still slowly rubbing his lighter up and down the titanium pylon of his fake leg. It made a hollow scraping sound like sharpening a knife. “You could always, you know, just not show up,” he said.

“Where would I go?”

“To your brother’s?” Bobby was now living by himself in the Larkspur apartment.

“This is insane. They can’t make me take a drug test.”

“But what if they take Zach?” Arman said.

Because, of course, neither of them yet knew that Zach was already gone. In fact, as they spoke, Dunny was writing up her recommendation that Zach be removed from the home and faxing it over to Child
Protective Services. Earlier, she had been on the phone with the woman assigned to Zach, trying to arrange what nursing home facility he could be released to when he needed to leave the hospital.

“So what did you do?”

“I did what any woman would do,” Lor said. “I told the truth. I begged for their forgiveness. I said I would do better. That I would do anything to get to keep Zach.”

“And what happened?”

“They offered to send me to rehab. But when I found out that Zach was already gone, I just—what would the point be? Why would I even do that?”

“So then what?”

“It’s—I was so honest. I was so sure that if I just came clean everything would work out okay. And then when I found out that my mother had actually agreed to this plan of taking Zach away. That she had actually given a report about the conditions of the house to the new social worker. Oh, God, I thought I was going to throw up. Arman was just furious. I couldn’t even speak, but he was screaming, yelling, ‘Is this what family is to you, you
Brady Bunch
bitches? Where’s your loyalty?’ It was a mess. I wound up dragging him out of there and spending the night at his place.”

I imagined the two of them in the sudden silence of Arman’s apartment. I imagined him making her food—frozen fish sticks. I imagined her drinking Gatorade, the blue kind, and eating the fish sticks, and crying and crying over her lost son. “We came up with this idea,” she said, “that we would sell my car and sell Arman’s car and go to India.”

“India,” I said. “Why India?”

“I don’t know. I always loved
The Secret Garden
and
A Little Princess
. India seemed like a magical place. It seemed like a place you could lose yourself in.” She stretched, raising her arms above her head, and I could see there was a hole in the armpit of her sweater.

“Tigers and monkeys and turbaned men with soulful eyes?”

Lor stared at me blankly, said nothing.

“What?” I asked.

“I’m just trying to understand,” Lorrie Ann said slowly, as though she were in a dream, “why you would mock me right now. Are you angry at me? For what?”

“I’m not mocking you,” I said. But I was angry at her.

“You loved
The Secret Garden
too. We both did.” She reached out and put her hand on mine. I wondered if she had track marks. I wondered what track marks looked like.

“Yes, we did.” I heard a sound then in the hall and for a moment I thought it was Franklin coming home and panic swept through me in a wave. But whoever was in the hall walked past our door and unlocked another.

“Do you hate me?” Lorrie Ann asked.

“No, I don’t hate you,” I said. “But I don’t understand why you left. So Zach is in a home. Maybe that’s even a relief, not having to take care of him every single moment. You could at least visit him. You could at least do that much.”

Lorrie Ann’s face assumed a strange blankness. “I visited him once,” she said.

I waited for her to continue.

“Mia, the care he was getting there was worse than anything at my house. Worse. They changed him only every four hours, if that. He looked so thin. It was two weeks before they let me see him. And when he saw me, God, when he saw me, he just started crying and crying and crying. Mia, it was the most awful thing. It was like being eviscerated. It was the most awful day of my entire life.”

“Which is why I can’t understand how you left! How could you leave him?”

“I hate this fucking sentiment that you’re expressing. It’s a common one. The sacred child who must be cared for no matter what, no matter what the cost. You know, if this were a hundred years ago, Zach would have been left out in the woods. Because they knew—they knew
no baby deserved to suffer like that, and no mother deserved to suffer that way either. But we’ve lost that. We’ve completely lost our fucking minds, so now the ‘right thing to do’ is to make him suffer pain we wouldn’t wish on our worst enemy. That’s the civilized thing to do. To torture him to death inside his own body by refusing to let him die. He can’t even eat, Mia. He can’t eat! What animal is kept alive past the point where it can eat? It’s disgusting. It’s foul. I couldn’t watch it anymore. I couldn’t be part of it.”

“Okay,” I said, stunned by her anger, her fury.

“I should have ended it,” she said. “That would have been the right thing to do. To end it the right way. Where he would have been loved, and I could have—” she broke off, and I understood that she was having trouble speaking, couldn’t get the words out. “Held him,” she said finally.

There was a long slow stillness then. I thought about her feet, bleeding under the table.

“Tell me about India,” I said.

CHAPTER TWELVE

After selling her own car and Arman’s, after spending three hundred dollars in a sporting goods store on backpacks, after several blow-out fights with her mother and one long handwritten good-bye letter, after carefully hiding more than 400 milligrams of oxycodone inside a pack of ballpoint pens (the 30-milligram pills fit perfectly into the plastic barrels of the pens once the ink was removed, and through some obscure genius with an iron Arman was able to reseal the entire package of Bic pens so that it looked perfectly pristine), after a fifteen-hour flight to Dubai and a three-hour flight to Mumbai, after a multitude of tiny bottles of gin, after being sprayed with deet by distracted flight attendants, Lorrie Ann and Arman wandered into what seemed to them a half-demolished and largely abandoned airport.