Touchy Subjects (30 page)

He drove her all the way back to the Hollywood Hills Hotel. There was one moment, when they paused at a red light, when she thought of asking how long a person, a family member, would have to be gone before he could be reported as missing. But then the lights changed.

She apologized for putting the officer to the trouble and asked him to let her off anywhere, she could walk, but he told her this was not a walking kind of city.

Such an odd word for it,
missing,
she thought as she sat on the thin hotel mattress. Maybe Arthur wasn't missing them at all; maybe he was incommunicado. Now there was a grand phrase. Maybe her brother was alive and well in his condo,just around the corner from the Hollywood Hills Hotel, and living such a wonderful new life that he couldn't be bothered to write home about it. Selfish bastard.

A shriek, outside in the street. The window was dusty above the air conditioner; she pressed her face to it. On the street two young men on Rollerblades were greeting each other with loud cries. The black guy had short white hair. They kissed on both cheeks, then slid off in opposite directions.

That wasn't it, was it? Not enough of a reason to never come home. Niniane had always known Arthur wasn't the marrying kind, even though it had taken her nearly thirty-five years to put words on it. She had tried to bring it up once, but he'd changed the subject, which was fair enough. And their parents must have known, too, in their way. Nothing was said, but they never nagged him with questions about girlfriends.

Maybe Arthur had somebody over here. Maybe that was enough for him.
A chosen family—that
was the phrase, she'd read it in a magazine. But he was kidding himself because you couldn't unchoose your old family. You couldn't just walk away, not when they'd never done anything to deserve it.

Niniane had always thought her brother liked her. But how little he knew of her anymore. He'd been away for her breakup with Mark, and her promodon, and that time she had the ovarian cyst and for a month thought she was dying. Whereas, to give them their due, her parents had always been there. Sunday after Sunday. Always on the same sofa in the same front room in the same terraced house on the same street in Limerick, the same sofa both she and Arthur had clung to when they were learning to walk. Her father getting balder and more taciturn, her mother rather more irritable since her hip operation, but both still there, in their places. And so was Niniane. Her own job, her own flat, but a daughter still, a daughter till the end.

She put her few possessions in her bag and went outside to hail a taxi.

The worst pictures always came when she was only half awake, or stuck in traffic. Arthur in prison, crouched in the corner of a cell. Arthur shooting up in an alley, his hairless arms pockmarked with holes. Arthur hawking himself on a street corner, bony with disease. What was it, his mystery? What was so bad that he couldn't lift the phone?

It occurred to her for the first time that he was dead. Doris Day's only brother died of epilepsy when she was thirty-three. These things happened. Was that relief Niniane felt, that curious surge in her throat? It couldn't be. She felt sick with shame. She pressed her face against the sweaty glass of the cab window.

Light-headed, she walked through the white corridors of LA Self-Storage. Fluorescent strips crackled overhead. The only sound was the pant of the air-conditioning. She thought if she turned a corner and bumped into a stranger she might scream. But who else would come here on a Sunday evening? She whispered the chorus of "Hotel California" to give herself courage. This place was like a prison for misbehaving furniture.

She came to 2011 at last; it looked like all the other doors. The key was in her hand. What could furniture tell her? Arthur always had good taste, but there wouldn't be some vault of treasures. There wouldn't be a film of the missing years.

For a moment, as she slid the key into the door, she hoped it wouldn't open.

Niniane felt for the light switch and flicked it on. The locker was about ten by ten by ten feet of nothing. She stepped in, as if to search the bare corners. Nothing at all. She shut the door behind her back and for a moment feared she'd locked herself in. She was more alone than she'd ever been. There weren't even gaps in the dust to hint at whatever Arthur had once kept here; not even the marks of his size-thirteen feet from the day he must have taken it all away.

Niniane let herself slide down the door till she was sitting on her heels. She began to cry, slow and grudging, like loosening a tooth. The hard walls multiplied her breath. In between sobs she kept listening for footsteps.

At the pay phone, various options ran through her head as the receiver played "Greensleeves" in her ear, but each seemed more improbable than the last. If she missed this flight home, she had no way of paying for another. If she went to the police, they would look embarrassed for her and tell her to come back with some evidence that a crime had been committed. No known associates. No last address.

"But I'm his sister, I swear," she told the voice at the other end of the phone. "You must still have his address, because he's paying for one of your storage lockers, he must be, or else you'd have changed the lock, wouldn't you?"

The voice sounded computer-generated.

"Will you at least take my address in Ireland?" she butted in. "Just in case. I don't know, in case he ever stops paying or something. I'm his sister," she repeated, like a bad actress from a soap. "He'd want me to know where he was."

Which was a lie, she thought, as she jammed the phone onto the hook. She had no idea what Arthur wanted. Most likely she would never find out if the empty locker meant that he was dead, with his bank account slowly draining, or that he was living high on a hill with all his chairs and lamps around him, rich enough not to mind paying for an empty locker, too careless to remember where he had left the key.

"The airport, now, please," she repeated to the taximan, who was barely visible behind the smoked glass. Niniane lay back against the sticky leather and let the traffic draw her into its slipstream.
L
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U
D
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G
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L
S
, said a neon sign,
N
O
W
H
I
R
I
N
G
. N
O
W
there would be a quick way to change her life.

The sky was full of planes, crisscrossing like fireflies. In the far distance she caught a glimpse of the famous white letters lit up on the hill. If she hadn't known they said
Hollywood
she would have had no idea:
No Food,
she would have read, maybe, or
Hullaballoo,
or
Home Now.

At the airport, Niniane was told that her bag had just arrived from Pittsburgh. She stood in line to pick it up, then queued again to check it in for Shannon. In Duty Free, she bought her parents a $19.95 gilt Oscar that had a hopeful, dazed expression. She would bring it over next Sunday. It would give them something to talk about so they wouldn't have to talk about Arthur. She would see it on the mantelpiece every Sunday for the rest of her parents' lives, and someday she would have to decide whether to give it to Oxfam with the rest of their stuff or take it home and put it on her own mantelpiece.

She had a window seat. All night she stared out at darkness or read Proust. When the sun came up over Shannon, hurting her eyes, she had finally got as far as the bit about the madeleine.

The American pilot announced that they would be landing momentarily. Niniane's head shot up out of her doze; for a second, she misunderstood his use of the word and believed him, thought the plane was only going to dip down like a bird onto the runway, gather strength for a moment, then wing away to somewhere else entirely.

When she emerged from Customs there were people waiting with cardboard signs held against their chests like X-rays. None of them had her name on. Trunks and totes spilled along the conveyor belt, climbing over each other at corners. She edged into the crowd, watching the procession of bags. A sign over the conveyor belt said in red letters,
A
L
L
B
A
G
G
A
G
E
L
O
O
K
S
T
H
E
S
A
M
E
,
B
E
S
U
R
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Y
O
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H
A
V
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Y
O
U
R
O
W
N
.

May blew smoke out of the car window.

Her younger sister made an irritated sound between her teeth.

"I'm blowing it away from you," May told her.

"It comes right back in," said Martie. She leaned her elbows on the steering wheel and looked through the darkness between the streetlamps. "You told him to be at the corner of Fourth and Leroy at two, yeah?"

May inhaled, ignoring the question.

"Fifteen's way too young to go to clubs," observed Martie, tucking her hair behind one ear.

"I don't know," said May thoughtfully. "You're not even eighteen yet and you're totally middle-aged."

That was an old insult. Martie rolled her eyes. "Yeah, well Laz is so immature. Dad shouldn't let him start clubbing yet, that's all I'm saying. When I heard Laz asking him, on the phone, I said let me talk to Dad, but he hung up."

May flicked the remains of her cigarette into the gutter. Somewhere close by a siren yowled.

Martie was peering up at a dented sign. "It says 'No Stopping,' but I can't tell if it applies when it's two a.m. Do you think we'll get towed?"

"Not as long as we're sitting in the car," said her elder sister, deadpan.

"If the traffic cops come by, I could always drive round the block."

May yawned.

"I guess Dad was feeling guilty about being away for Laz's birthday, so that's why he said he could go clubbing," said Martie.

"Yeah, well the man's always feeling guilty about something."

Martie gave her big sister a wary look. "It's not easy," she began, "it can't be easy for Dad, holding everything together."

"Does he?" asked May.

"Well, we all do. I mean, he may not do the cooking and laundry and stuff, but he's still in charge. And it's hard when he's got to be on the road so much—"

"Oh, right, yeah, choking down all those Texas sirloins, I weep for him."

"He's not in Texas," said Martie, "he's in New Mexico."

May got out another cigarette, contemplated it, then shoved it back in the box.

"Are you still thinking of giving up the day after your twenty-first?" asked Martie.

"Not if you remind me about it even one more time." May combed her long pale hair with both hands.

Silence fell, at least in the old Pontiac. Outside the streets droned and screamed in their nighttime way.

"Actually, I don't think Laz gives a shit that Dad's away for his birthday," remarked May at last. "I wouldn't have, when I was his age. Normal fifteen-year-olds don't want to celebrate with their parents, or go on synchronized swimming courses or whatever it was you did for your fifteenth."

"Life Saving," Martie told her coldly.

"The boy wants to go to some under-eighteens hiphop juice-bar thing where they won't even sell him a Bud, that doesn't seem like a problem to me, except that he better get his ass in gear," said May, slapping the side of the car, "because I've got a party to go to."

"I said you should have called a cab."

"I'm broke till payday. Besides, Dad only lets you use the car when he's away so long as you give me and Laz rides."

"You could use it yourself if you'd take some lessons," Martie pointed out.

"There's no point learning to drive in New York," said May witheringly. "Besides, next year I'll be off to Amsterdam and it's all bikes there."

"Motorbikes?"

"No, just bicycles."

Martie's eyebrows went up. "What are you going to do in Amsterdam?"

"I don't know. Hang out. It's just a fabulous city."

"You've never been," Martie pointed out.

"I've heard a lot about it."

Martie tapped a tune on the steering wheel. "It'll be weird if you go."

"Not if. When."

"When, then."

May yawned. "You're always complaining I never clean up round the apartment."

"Yeah, but when you're gone, there'll still be Laz, and his mess will probably expand to fill the place."

"Oh, admit it," said May, "you love playing Martyr Mommie."

Martie gave her elder sister a bruised look. Then she scanned the street again, on both sides, as if their brother might be lurking in the shadows. "This thing you're going to tonight," she said, "is it a dyke party?"

Her sister sighed. "It's just a party. With some dykes at it. I hope."

"Is Telisse going?"

"I don't know. She's not really doing the dyke thing anymore, anyway."

"Oh."

"Why," her sister teased her, "did you like Telisse?"

"No, I just thought you did," said Martie stiffly. She checked her watch in the yellow streetlight. "Come on, Laz," she muttered. "I bet he's doing this deliberately. Testing our limits."

"God, you're so parental," May hooted. "No wonder Laz hates you."

"He does not."

"He so does! He's always telling you to get off his case. 'Get her off my fuckin' case, May!' he says to me." May's imitation of her brother's voice was gruff with testosterone.