The Girls From Corona Del Mar (31 page)

“I don’t think I could have done any better,” I said. “If I had been in your situation.”

My mother shrugged. “You play the hand you’re dealt.”

Had Lor gotten clean or had she stayed addicted? Was she, even now, jamming some dull needle into a vein in a Paris bathroom as the next
woman in line beat on the door? Girls didn’t come from perfectly happy families and then just become self-loathing heroin addicts. Did they?

What was most alarming, in the end, was the vertiginous sense that I did not know Lorrie Ann, and, in fact, had never known her. I could not sort out who she might be in my head. “We really were friends,” she had written me.

How, I kept thinking, how had she possibly left Zach? Having had a baby of my own now, I found it newly unfathomable. I reached over and squeezed my mother’s hand.

“MOMMY!” Grant cried. “I touched it! I touched its EYEBALL!”

That night, when Franklin and I were in bed, I turned to him. “Do you think someone molested Lorrie Ann?” I asked. “When we were girls?”

“I didn’t know Lor,” Franklin said. “So I can’t say. Is this something Arman said?”

“Yeah. It’s what he thinks.” The darkness outside our bedroom window seemed vast. There were rats that lived in the palm trees, I knew, that could jump like miniature kangaroos. I pictured hundreds of rats leaping about in the darkness in multiple chaotic directions. “What if I didn’t really know her? What if all those years I just saw what I expected to see, what I wanted to see?”

“You did,” he said. “You knew her.”

“Can anyone know anyone? Do you know me?”

“If I don’t,” Franklin said, rolling on top of me, “then I will devote the rest of my life to trying to know you.”

“And what if you never succeed?” I said.

“I still won’t ever stop trying,” Franklin said, looking down into my face, close up.

“What if I give you to the demons? The way Inanna betrayed Dumuzi?”

“I’ll come back.”

“Even from death?”

Franklin nodded, dragged a kiss across my cheek. “Even from death.”

——

The next morning, bleary eyed and putting coffee on to brew, with Grant clinging to my pajamaed leg, I discovered that every apple in the bag of apples had a single bite taken out of it. I held up the bag.

“Grant, did you do this?”

“Oh yeah!” he said happily.

When, how had he done this? I had just bought the apples the day before, and somehow, during the course of the afternoon, he had snuck in here, most likely multiple times, without being seen, taken a bite of each apple, and then replaced it neatly in the bag. He had even retied the twist tie.

“Why?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” he said, giggling.

It occurred to me that I knew Grant as little as I knew anyone and that this did not bother me at all. No, instead I found the unendingness of his strangeness to be a great comfort. There would always be more Grant to get to know. It was the greatest joy on earth, getting to know him.

Later I wrote to Lorrie Ann at [email protected]:

CHAPTER NINETEEN

A month later, she wrote back:

I was so stung by this that I did not know how to respond. I had thought that my last letter to her had been full of love. I wasn’t expecting her to be angry with me. I quickly went back and reread my letter. There had been a careless presumptuousness in the tone, it was true, that was caused by the fact I didn’t actually think she would ever receive it. My letter had suffered from the same self-conscious readerlessness of a diary entry, that performed quality.

Still, it didn’t seem like there was really anything in the letter itself that was so terrible. “My life is my own,” she had said. Did she think I was trying to make her life my life? Had I? Was I really this horrible, life-sucking little gremlin that went around using other people as
reflecting ponds so that I could admire myself? To think so was like the fulfillment of all my worst fears.

And yet, I could also imagine a reality in which Lor was forced to build the same kind of wall against me that she had built against Zach. Wasn’t that why she really hated me? Because I had dared to say it? You need to go home.

You need to go home and see your boy.

And she hadn’t. Instead, she had stolen my tea set and disappeared.

She was obviously telling me to mind my own business, and yet, I found I couldn’t.

Dana was surprised, but not unhappy, to hear from me. One Sunday, we arranged to meet at the Coco’s that had miraculously survived the changes in Corona del Mar, right on the corner of Narcissus and PCH. I remembered being a kid and going with my mom and Paddy and Max and Alex to that Coco’s. I always ordered the spaghetti. The inside had been completely redone, and very large murals of baked goods together with the obviously oversize booths and dinner chairs, which made the patrons look like children sitting in adult furniture, gave the inside a vaguely hallucinatory feel. Dana was already seated at a table toward the back and she waved to me across the room.

As soon as I saw her, I realized I had been thinking of her all wrong. When Lor had told me the stories of her life, about Zach and the Native Americans and Dunny, I had been picturing the Dana I had known when we were young: the navy blue eyeliner, the frizzy brown hair, the premature wrinkles. But something miraculous had happened to Dana.

Gone was the blue eyeliner. In fact, I don’t think she was wearing any makeup at all, and yet her face glowed with health and her skin was bright and soft looking. As she had aged, her cheekbones, which had always been high, became even more exaggerated, as had the heavy hoods of her eyelids. Her hair had turned entirely white, and she wore it down and loose around her shoulders. She was wearing a simple cream-colored tunic sweater, and, I saw when she stood up to greet me, tan
leggings and beaded moccasins. She wore no earrings, no wedding ring, no jewelry of any kind. As we sat again, she beamed at me with a smile bordering on the beatific.

“So good to see you, Mia,” she said, in a voice much softer than I remembered. “You look beautiful!”

Had Dana become some kind of saint? Or was this the relaxed serenity of the truly insane? “Thank you,” I said. “So do you—your hair! I love it.”

She reached up shyly to touch her hair, then leaned in and half whispered, “I love it too! My mother’s was white. I never thought mine would turn, but then it did.” She shrugged, smiled.

We ordered. Both of us got the spinach omelet, and for quite a while Dana kept me busy answering questions about myself: my career, Franklin, Grant. I didn’t know how to ask about Lor. I guess I assumed that probably Dana had heard as little from Lor as I had. Instead, I asked about Dana’s life. As it turned out, she had continued to be friends with Dunny and together the two of them had started a support group for parents of severely disabled children. She also volunteered two days a week at the library and had started a children’s program called Native World where they learned about the native peoples, plants, and animals of California. She and Dunny both visited Zach in the nursing home, usually twice a week.

She certainly did not seem psychotic. Could she possibly still be receiving disability from the state? It was not the kind of thing I felt comfortable asking about, and so I didn’t, though I did feel better that at least someone had been visiting Zach. At least he hadn’t been all alone. Dana transitioned to talking about Lor so breezily that I didn’t hear her for a moment and then suddenly came up short.

“And Lor’s doing well,” she said, “with that band of hers. I’m sure she sent you their first album. Joachim is doing good too. I think she’s finally really and truly happy, you know, which she deserves.”

“What?” I sputtered.

“After all those years,” Dana said, “although Jim was a saint, and I always thought Arman was a good boy too.”

“She has a band?”

“Yes,” Dana said, clearly confused. “You didn’t know?”

“No. No, I haven’t heard from her except one e-mail in the last three years. And she didn’t say anything about a band.”

“Well”—Dana laughed—“it’s not like you would hear them on the radio or anything.”

“Is she clean?” I asked.

“Oh, she’s been clean for ages now. That was just a phase.” Dana waved her hand dismissively, as though Lor had never even had a serious problem with drugs.

“Where is she living?” I asked.

“Iceland. She and Joachim travel around Europe with the band, but Iceland is their home base.”

“Joachim?”

“Her boyfriend,” she said. “A really wonderful man. Very tall.”

“Did you fly to see them?” I asked. “Did you visit them in Iceland?”

“No, not yet!” Dana said. “Though I keep threatening to.”

But she had said he was tall. Why would it occur to her to say that unless she had met him in person? Which meant that they must have come here, come back to California.

“When’s the last time they were out here?” I asked.

“Christmas,” Dana said. “They came out for a couple weeks. I guess they are doing quite well, so they came and visited and then took me and Dunny to Hawaii!”

“That’s wonderful!” I said, eyeing the glistening painting of a giant croissant behind her. It must have been nearly five feet tall. A painting of a croissant nearly as tall as myself. I felt dizzy. So Lor had come home after all. “I’m so glad she’s doing so well,” I said. “So she’s singing?”

“Yeah, she’s singing. Terry would have been so proud. Just so proud. I wish he were alive to see her.”

It suddenly seemed improbable that Terry had molested Lor. In fact, I was mortified that I had even written her with the question. And yet, what else explained it?

“I had no idea,” I said, trying to find something to say. “I talked to Arman a few months ago, but I guess he hadn’t heard from her either.”

“That boy is such a sweetheart,” she said, which I found to be a deeply odd characterization of Arman.