The Girls From Corona Del Mar (27 page)

“So Jim died in Sumer,” Lorrie Ann said wonderingly.

I realized that what she said was true, and I felt ashamed that I had wanted to keep Sumer from her.

“Jim died in Sumer,” I agreed, and for a moment we all looked at the tablecloth, as though Jim could be discerned in the weft of the fabric. As if that was where he had disappeared to.

“I’m going,” Lorrie Ann said suddenly, “to be going through withdrawal soon.”

Franklin and I both sat up slightly straighter. “Oh?” This was the first time Lorrie Ann had mentioned her drug addiction in front of Franklin and I noted with interest that she was canny enough to understand that I had squealed on her while she was in the bathroom.

“I was wondering if I could do that here.”

“Of course,” Franklin said, then caught my eye. “Right?”

“Of course,” I said. “Does that—I mean, what exactly does that entail?”

“It will be like I have the flu for about three days. Maybe less. No raving. No hallucinating. Just lots of diarrhea and fever.”

Franklin laughed, a little nervous at her honesty, or else delighted—it was hard to say.

“You’re welcome to stay here,” he said.

“Thank you,” she said, beaming at him, and then looked over at me
and reached out to take my hand. She squeezed it and looked into my eyes. “I am very lucky that you agreed to meet me today,” she said.

“Don’t be silly,” I said.

“But,” she said, “is there like a corner store where I could buy some provisions?”

“Provisions?”

“Whatever the equivalent of Imodium A-D is? And some candy bars, maybe? And some juice?”

“There’s a corner store maybe three blocks away,” Franklin offered.

“Perfect. I’ll go. Can I just borrow some shoes from you, Mia?” she asked.

“You don’t like the slippers with the pom-poms?” I asked, laughing. “I just thought—”

“No, I know, I have no idea why I bought them. But I don’t think any of my shoes will fit you—they’ll all be way too big.”

“Don’t you have any sandals or anything?” Lor asked, slipping her cardigan on and getting up from the table. “Flip-flops?”

I didn’t know what to say for a moment. “You know I don’t wear sandals,” I said. My little toe had never become something remotely resembling a toe again. It was just a wad of flesh like chewing gum appended to my foot. Even the little nail had come off and refused to grow back.

“Oh God, I forgot—your toe.”

Franklin was standing and surveying the sink full of dishes, stretching his arms above his head. “Yeah, I’ll never forgive Paddy for that one.”

“Paddy?” Lorrie Ann asked.

And suddenly I knew everything that was going to happen.

“For running over her toe like that. I mean,” Franklin said, “I know it was an accident, but still. The guy’s a lush.”

Lorrie Ann stared at me hard. “You told him that Paddy ran over your toe?”

“I’ll go with you to the store,” I said, reaching a hand for her elbow, trying my best to psychically impel her to just let it alone.

“No,” Lorrie Ann said, swatting me away with her hands. “What, Mia, do you lie to him about everything?”

“Lie to me?” Franklin asked, turning fully from the sink now. Because I was facing Lorrie Ann, my back was to him, but I could feel him come up behind me and place a hand on my waist. That was his first instinct: to protect me from her.

“Honestly, Mia, I thought maybe you knew what you were doing,” Lorrie Ann said, “but then, all night we’ve been talking and—he’s great! He’s fucking fantastic! He’s one of the best guys I’ve ever met in my entire life and you are fucking this up.”

“I don’t know what this is about,” Franklin said, making a circular motion with his hand in the air between me and Lorrie Ann on the word “this,” “but she isn’t fucking anything up.”

I couldn’t speak. Lorrie Ann’s hair was shining like gold in the candlelight. She was so beautiful.

“She broke her own toe with a hammer. She had an abortion in high school and she couldn’t get it scheduled except for the day before we had a championship game in softball, so she broke her own toe to get out of playing in the game.”

I closed my eyes.

“I know about the abortion,” Franklin said. He squeezed my waist.

We both waited to see if he would say anything more, but he didn’t. Outside, I could hear a gaggle of teenagers laughing and talking together in Turkish. It was Saturday night. It came back to me in a flash: what it was like to be young and going out to a party on a Saturday night, your pulse quickening with the desire that something, anything happen.

“She’s pregnant. The test came back positive. But she didn’t want to tell you,” Lorrie Ann said.

I felt Franklin’s hand drop from my waist and I turned to him. “I’m sorry, baby. I’m sorry,” I said. “I just needed time to think about it.”

“You’re pregnant?” he asked, and his voice almost cracked. He looked confused, like a dog that has been hit for no reason.

But I couldn’t stop. It was a kind of logorrhea, the words that kept
spilling from my mouth: “And we’ve joked about the two-body problem before, but I just thought if this could happen after the book comes out then it would be a different story, and I don’t mind giving up my career, but how could I ask you to give up yours?”

“You’re going way too fast for me,” Franklin said. “Are you pregnant?”

I nodded.

His face crumpled, and he hid behind his hands. After a moment, he rubbed his face as though to wipe the expression off it. His eyes were wide and staring. He was furious.

“I’m sorry,” I said.

“So you really did lie to me?”

“She was going to take another test next week and tell you the truth,” Lorrie Ann offered.

“Shut up, Lolola,” I said.

“I’m going for a walk,” Franklin said, and snapped the dish towel that was in his hands so that it landed in the sink.

I held my face still as best I could and looked at the floor.

And then he was gone.

Yes or No, plus or minus, life or death. We were supposed to decide these things by what? Having conversations? Slamming doors?

I had taken Space’s body to be cremated at the vet, but then, by some sort of voodoo or spell, I found myself unable to pick up her ashes. I don’t know what they do with the unclaimed ashes of the bodies of dogs. I suppose they throw them in the garbage.

When they sent Jim back there were only pieces of him, and Lorrie Ann was not allowed to see them. They could have been pieces of anybody. Jim had in fact described for her the process by which locals were often hired to rove the city streets with trash bags, looking for human pieces. Sometimes there would be a piece big enough that you could tell which part of the body it had come from: a piece of scalp, an ear, a portion of a hand. But often they were simply chunks of meat like the stew beef you could buy at the supermarket. Iraqi men would wander
around, their right hands protected by plastic grocery bags, their left hands clutching garbage bags held open to collect the pieces, bent over to scan the ground like chickens searching for grain.

They gathered whatever could be found and then divided it by the number of soldiers that were known to have died. They sent the small clumps of stew meat back to the States in metal coffins, as though the stew meat could be equated with the human form in any satisfying math.

How tiny was the being inside me? The size of a pea? Of a kidney bean?

How could something that small feel so much to me like something that had a will? Like something that wanted to live?

“I’m sorry,” Lorrie Ann said, in the reverberating silence that followed the slamming of the front door and the exit of the love of my life.

“You are the most selfish person I’ve ever known,” I said.

“Mia.”

“Get the fuck out of my house.”

She just stood there, primly holding the back of her chair as though waiting for the maître d’ to pull it from the table for her. “Get the fuck out,” I said again.

“Maybe in a minute, when you’re less mad, it might be better if I were here.”

I walked over to the table, poured the last of the wine into my already full glass, brought it to my lips, and gulped.

“Maybe you need a friend,” she said, eyeing me.

“You aren’t my friend,” I said. “We haven’t lived in the same state, let alone the same city, since we were eighteen years old. The fact that I thought we were friends was delusional. I don’t understand you. I can’t make peace with your decisions. I can’t make you my friend again just by telling you a secret, okay? Because you’re just going to fucking betray me by blurting it all out!”

“There is some way,” Lorrie Ann said, carefully, as though she were stepping around a mine, “in which we are friends. We’ve known each
other for an awfully long time. That counts for something. And maybe I told Franklin because I
am
your friend.”

“It doesn’t count for enough,” I said, and tossed back the rest of the wine in my glass. “You told Franklin because you’re high enough to think that you know best about someone else’s life, when you don’t know anything. But you know what, you’ve always thought you were better than everybody. Hell, I thought you were better than everybody! I had this whole mythology about you and how fucking perfect you were. But how did that help you? It didn’t do a fucking thing. It didn’t matter how much I loved you—my love was just this sort of selfish indulgence, this thing I was doing for myself. When I came back to try to help when Zach was born, I was in the way. I’ve always just been in the way for you. That’s why you don’t think it’s any big deal to betray me.”

Outside I could still hear the sounds of laughing groups of girls and guys, wandering from bar to bar. Istanbul had become a happening place to be. A destination. A party city. That was how Lorrie Ann had wound up here, after all.

“I know it doesn’t seem like it right now,” Lorrie Ann said into the silence of the kitchen, for it had been some time since either of us spoke, “but it’s a happy thing when a child is conceived. No matter what. It’s a joyful thing.”

I just stared at her. She tucked some loose strands of hair behind her ears. “Maybe you could let me celebrate with you.”

“I’ve just lost the love of my life,” I said.

“Don’t be melodramatic,” Lorrie Ann said. “He went for a walk. He’ll be back. And when he comes back, he’ll love you just as much as he did when he left.”

“God, you’re so sane—it’s awful!” I said, and slumped down in a chair. Lorrie Ann just laughed. “Honestly, though,” I said, “if there is a time in my life that I get to be melodramatic, isn’t this it?”

“No,” Lorrie Ann said, coming to sit with me, “you never get to be melodramatic ever again.”

“Why is that?”

“Because,” she said, and reached out a hand, pressed her palm against my tummy, “you’re gonna have a baby.”

“You don’t know that,” I said.

“You’re pregnant, Mia,” she repeated, smiling at me.

“He didn’t smile. Even for a second. I know it’s too much to expect, but I thought maybe he would be happy.”

“He didn’t have much of a chance,” Lorrie Ann pointed out.

“I know,” I said. “I just wanted so badly for him to be happy.”

The way Jim had been happy.

The way Dumuzi had been happy.

I wanted, more than anything, I realized, for Franklin to look at me with wonder, startled, the way the first man who ever bit into a peach must have looked: alarmed to realize that life was so good, so sweet, so abundant. I wanted to be that magic for Franklin.

We had never talked about having children of our own, though. I had made a joke once that if we had children we should raise them speaking Latin like Montaigne and I felt that something about it had made him uncomfortable: maybe he had laughed too much, or not enough, but either way I got the feeling that he felt I was proposing having children, when of course I had not been, I wouldn’t have dared. Not knowing that the idea of children had been what drove a wedge between him and Elizabeth, Elizabeth who had an abundance of dark hair, which she kept tied back like a prairie woman and who had an unnaturally large and perfect mouth like Julia Roberts.

Whatever it is that hurts you, don’t talk to anyone about it.

I looked at Lorrie Ann in the candlelight, which was now low and guttering, and in her face I could almost see the ghost of Zach’s features. That had been the worst thing about Zach really: how much he looked like her. A distorted, howling
galla
made of Lorrie Ann’s own beautiful face. Where was he now? What hands smoothed his brow? It was too terrible to even think about, let alone speak of.

I felt then that I would kill to protect the tiny bean inside of me,
the plus sign, the zygote. I didn’t know why—it wasn’t so much that I wanted to become a mother or to have a child. It wasn’t anything to do with the Gerber baby or with the way an infant’s head smelled or with tiny shoes. It wasn’t anything I could name.

“I just get the feeling,” I croaked to Lorrie Ann, “that it wants to live.”

She nodded quickly as though she knew exactly what I was talking about, and suddenly I found that I was howling like an animal that has been mortally wounded, and Lorrie Ann’s arms were around me, and I was fifteen again, and she was my friend.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN