The Girls From Corona Del Mar (32 page)

“What’s the name of the band?” I asked.

“Amor Fati,” she said. “Which means—well, I forget what it means. She explained it all to me, but I can’t remember it. I’m sure you can look it up or she’ll explain it or whatever.”

Amor Fati. Iceland. Joachim. Suddenly, Lor was thrust right back into her old role in my life: the goddess, impossibly, untouchably beautiful and perfect. She was a fucking musician in fucking Iceland. Her hardships had been revealed, in the end, to be an illusion, a mistake, just a phase that added to her allure. There had never been any danger, just as Cinderella had never been in danger of remaining a maid forever.

“I know what it means,” I said, though there was a frog in my throat and the words were muddled.

“What?”

“I know what
amor fati
means,” I said.

Do we deserve the spring? Lor had asked. And I had thought that maybe I had finally caught up to Lor, understood her insight. But I didn’t. I still wanted there to be some connection between what we did and what we got. Just as I didn’t believe she deserved the horrors of Zach’s birth, or the hardships of Jim’s death, I did not believe that she now deserved to be a successful musician in Iceland with a boyfriend named Joachim. I did not believe she deserved to go on vacation in Hawaii while Zach languished in a nursing home. Was he nothing to her? Could it really be okay to walk away from that kind of love, from that kind of belonging? Was there no punishing God to call bullshit?

It also suddenly seemed clear that Lorrie Ann had never loved me the way that I loved her. I had assumed that she had stayed away from me out of shame: she knew that I disapproved of the drugs, of the lifestyle,
and so she stayed away. The idea that she was clean, that she was happy, that she was in love, that she was singing, and she did not want to talk to me, did not want to tell me her good news, did not want me to hear her music—well, it made me feel like an idiot for loving her. For thinking of her. For allowing her life to live inside my own like a ghost. She had come to California and she hadn’t even called me.

I replayed over and over again in my mind the moment we met at the Grand Bazaar in Istanbul. I had thought she called me at the time because she wanted to see me, needed me in her distress, but now I wondered if she hadn’t called me because she simply had no other choice. Perhaps she dreaded seeing me. Perhaps all night she had been planning only to borrow money and then disappear.

And then to take the tea set! Why take the fucking tea set?!

It wasn’t even clear, I realized, that Lorrie Ann was actually as happy as Dana said she was. Dana insisted that Jim was a saint, that Arman was a sweetheart. Maybe she had a permanent case of rose-colored glasses. How would Dana know if Lor was clean anyway?

And how big a deal was this band? Had they just made a CD on a four-track in their apartment, or were they actually signed by a real record label? And even if they were signed by a label, how hard could it be to get signed in a country the size of Iceland? It could easily be that Lor and her junkie boyfriend Joachim played once a week at a dive bar in Reykjavík and just made a big deal of it to Dana to make her feel better.

What wouldn’t we say to make our mothers feel better at this late date?

By the time Franklin came home that afternoon with Grant, I had downloaded and listened to both of Amor Fati’s albums. They were available on iTunes. The second album was better than the first, but they were both pretty good. I felt frantic and angry and sad, all at once. The records were by a real label. Amor Fati even had a website, a good one. They had tour dates posted. She was legit.

“Lorrie Ann’s a rock star,” I said, once Franklin had gotten himself a beer and settled down to watch football.

“Oh dear,” he said.

“I mean—a rock star! Really? A rock star?”

“She’s not a rock star,” Franklin said. “Right? I mean, she’s in a band or something?”

“Look at this,” I said, and I loaded one of their videos on YouTube and played it for him. It was a live performance in a huge, rolling field in Iceland. Lor was wearing a cream-colored, raw-silk dress, and was balanced on a stool with her guitar, which seemed giant, big as a boat compared to her, hugged to her chest. She sang with her eyes closed. The whole song, her eyes were closed. In one of the close-ups, I could see she still bit her nails. There were thousands of fans. They filled the entire valley, swaying, rapt, as she sang.

“Yeah,” Franklin said. “Okay, so she’s a rock star.”

“I know that I should just be happy for her.” Grant could sense my restlessness and kept trying to give me Clown Puppy, a horrifying dog-doll in blackface makeup, or what I argued was blackface, who lit up and told the names of red, blue, and yellow in three languages.

“I don’t want Clown Puppy,” I said.

“So, is Zach still alive?” Franklin asked.

“Yeah, and Dana and Dunny visit him.”

“Well, that’s good.”

“I agree,” I said, “but she’s coming back here. She’s visiting California! She took Dana and Dunny to Hawaii! What happened to the wall she built that was keeping her from thinking about Zach and making it impossible for her to ever return to the land of our girlhood or whatever that line of bullshit was?”

“I don’t know. I don’t know how she’s justifying it.” Franklin shrugged. “But I will say this, however it’s working, however she’s doing it, I doubt it’s good. Like spiritually, internally good.”

“So …?”

“So what?”

“What do I do?” I asked.

“Here, Daddy,” Grant said, handing him a little plastic truck. Franklin accepted it wordlessly.

“Well,” Franklin said to me, “what can you do? You can’t make her be what she doesn’t want to be. She wants to be a musician. Fine, she’s a musician. In fact, it seems like a kind of best-case scenario, really. Now all her tortured-ness has a purpose. She can be all weird and emo onstage.”

“This isn’t a joke,” I said.

“I know—I know,” Franklin said. “But, in all seriousness, how do you think people get to be musicians in the first place? Maybe that’s how it works—they make an increasingly devastating series of life decisions, and then some kind of crystallization process takes place, and they wind up suited to it.”

It actually wasn’t a bad hypothesis. “I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t want to keep thinking about it. Let’s just have a good Sunday.”

Dana was happy to give me the name and the address of the nursing home where Zach wound up. “He loves visitors,” she said.

She didn’t ask me why I was going. She didn’t act like it was surprising at all. I had worried she would ask, and I couldn’t imagine what I would say. The best articulation I could give, really, was what Lor herself had said: it was the only thing left to do.

I found a washed-up looking man with shoulder-length hair in a very worn gray suit, kneeling and praying softly by Zach’s bedside. He startled when he noticed I had entered the room and wrapped up his prayers quickly.

“Please God,” he said softly, “expel the devil from his body. Untwist his limbs from the evil demons that strangle them. Let him be filled with light and peace. Amen.” His voice was throaty and hoarse.

He looked at me furtively as he left the room, and his eyes were a
startling and possibly drunken turquoise against the red of his sunburned face. He looked insane. Was he possibly homeless? Some sort of wandering, homeless preacher? And yet he seemed harmless. How could his strange prayers harm anyone?

I stepped up to Zach’s bed. I had calculated in my mind: he was almost thirteen. He was still painfully thin, and he seemed scrunched down in his bed so it was difficult to get a sense of his full height. His eyes were open and he was looking at me. It was not difficult to imagine that demons were the ones who had done this to him. But really, I thought, remembering Lor, it was doctors who had done this.

“Hi. I don’t know if you remember me,” I said. “I was a friend of your mother’s.”

He looked so much like Lorrie Ann that it took my breath away. He even had that light dusting of halftone freckles across his upturned nose, the narrow jaw that turned his face into a heart. The expression in his eyes changed, as though he recognized me or had heard what I said.

“Your mom?” I said.

He turned his face away from me.

“Your mom misses you so much,” I said, though I did not know why I was saying this to him or whether it was the truth.

He gave a garbled yell and kept his face rigidly turned toward the wall.

“You don’t want to talk about her?” I asked. I felt like I had been kicked in the gut. All this time and I had never once wondered what Zach thought of Lor. If she had returned, it would have been to a son who hated her, who would possibly never forgive her.

“I won’t talk about her,” I said. “I promise.”

He turned back to me, appraising, perhaps curious why I was there if not to torture him with memories of his mother.

“I would like to be your friend,” I said.

Silence as he regarded me.

“I would like to come here and sit with you and get to know you. Maybe once a week. Would that be okay?”

Suddenly, his face broke open into what was unmistakably a grin, a wild, asymmetrical grin. He gave a happy sound that I instantly translated as a giggle.

“Do you still like dancing?” I asked.

Zach and I cobbled together some moments of communication that morning, and I danced shamelessly to some early Michael Jackson that I played off the tiny speaker on my iPhone. I also read him a Babar book that was sitting by the side of his bed. I wondered, then, might Zach find Babar a little boring by now?

I asked him this and he shouted something I interpreted as a yes. I told him that I would bring him a book for bigger boys called
The Hobbit
. He looked at me with weird concentration, like he was trying to poop, and suddenly I realized that he was slowly, meticulously nodding. It took everything he had to repeat such a small motion, but he was trying in order to show me he liked the idea. “It’s a really good book,” I gushed. “You’ll like it.”

At one point a nurse came in, who was quite bright and cheery, and invited me to step into the hall while she changed Zach, and I did, in case Zach had modesty about his privates, but I spied on her from the door. She treated him gently and with respect. There was no rash on Zach’s narrow buttocks. I was unable to understand what about this place was so terrible that Lor had been forced to flee.

Mostly we just sat together, sharing the morning sunlight that fell into his room and spilled across the floor as though to show off its abundance. Outside we could see a single palm tree that had been bent slightly by some storm or other. There was a blurry, human Zen to spending time with Zach, an honesty built from his inability to speak at all.

“I think you’re brave,” I said to him after a long silence.

Zach made a motion that was very much like a shrug.

Suddenly, I saw, behind a picture frame on Zach’s dresser, a little yellow teapot. I stood up, and approached it slowly, as though it were a rabbit that would run from me. It was from the very same set that I had
bought Bensu: I recognized the cunning little golden triangles against the bright yellow ceramic. Why would she give the tea set to Zach?

The moment I picked it up, he started screaming. A nurse ran in. “Oh,” she said, “please put it down. That is a special gift from his mother. She sent it in the mail. So sad. He broke all the other pieces so we keep that one piece for him and do not let him hold it.”

I set it down and Zach stopped yelling. He was panting, breathless, glaring at me. At first I thought he didn’t want me to touch it, this special relic from his mother. “Please don’t touch,” the nurse said, before leaving us alone again. Zach did not stop staring at me, did not even blink. I picked up the teapot, and he watched me.

I slowly walked it over to him and set it in his open hand. His fingers clenched around it so hard he almost dropped it, but I pushed it back into his hand. His movements were both clumsy and weirdly precise, and it reminded me of the frustration of playing one of those claw games where you try to grab the toy. I watched as he pulled the little teapot behind his head, then jerked his elbow down, hurling it at the wall, where it broke into shards of yellow, scattered on the floor.

“Whoops,” I said, and I swear to God he laughed.

I wanted badly to ask him about his mother, to try to understand her through his eyes, to achieve some kind of parallax, but I had promised him, I had said that I wouldn’t talk about her.

And really, I thought, there wasn’t anything left to say.

As I drove home that day, I felt excited. A new part of my life was beginning, here, nestled in the coves of the Pacific. If I had been so blinded by the idea of Lorrie Ann that I failed to see who she actually was, I had been just as blinded by who I thought I was. I didn’t need any longer to be the bad one, the sexy one, the wicked one. Or even the smart one, the good one, the pretty one. Instead, I was a young mother, and hardly anyone gave two shits what I did or who I was. I was absolutely free. Free to make friends with a boy who could not speak. Free to drive along PCH thinking nothing at all. Free to cut my hair off. Free to love my husband, who was lettuce planted by the water. Free to collect gnomes. Free to encode my children with whatever values and worldviews
I chose. Free to say whatever I was thinking. Free to be happy without reason. Free to trust I would be loved. But mostly, free to love.

When Zach died that winter of pneumonia, Lor did not come to the funeral. Dana tried lamely to excuse her, saying, “They’re on tour and they just can’t cancel the Berlin dates. They can’t. She was so sad she couldn’t come.”

“Um hmm,” I said, nodding.

“So sad,” Dana repeated.

I smiled at her, touched her shoulder through the thick, black cable-knit of her sweater. “But we’re here,” I said. “It’s a good funeral, Dana. You did such a nice job planning it out.”

“Thank you,” she said, nodding, tucking that gleaming white hair behind her pink little ears. Zach had been cremated, and Dana had hired a boat to take a small group of us out far enough from shore that we would be allowed to dump the remains. On board were myself, Franklin, and Grant; Dunny and Dunny’s girlfriend, a horsey-faced, good-natured woman, tall and built like a string bean; then Dana and Bobby.