Aftershock

by K. G. MacGregor

  Anna had expected a battle, but not one so hostile. “Honey, you’re a normal person who has gone through difficult times.” She recalled the nurse’s words. “You don’t have to feel ashamed about it. People shouldn’t be embarrassed about needing help.”

  “I can’t believe you’re doing this to me.”

  “Lily, please—” She heard a click, and then a dial tone. Staring at the now silent phone, Anna pressed her throbbing hand to her throbbing temple. She had never felt more helpless in all her life. After all the words they had exchanged, she sadly realized that she hadn’t even told Lily she loved her.

  And she still had no idea where Lily was, and if she was all right. Foregoing the intercom, she dialed the receptionist’s extension. “Wanda? It’s Anna. Do we have a record of incoming calls? I need to know where that last one came from.”

  Only twelve miles from her Brentwood home in Playa del Rey, Lily put the last touches on her makeup beneath the dim light in the small bathroom. The Waterways Lodge wasn’t fancy, but it had everything she needed to be on her own for a few days—long enough to let things chill at home.

  Ten miserable days had passed since she last talked with Anna. In that time, Lily had formulated her plan. Two days from now, she would call again and announce that she had gone two weeks without a drink. That should be enough to convince Anna that she had a grip on the situation, and if Anna still wanted her to get help, she would agree to talk to a counselor. In fact, these days alone had hardened her resolve to do whatever it took to make things right again, and to make up for the trouble she had caused these last few months.

  She walked out of her second-floor room and closed the door firmly behind her, already dreading her return at the end of the day. A flurry of new clients and filings at work had kept her distracted from the anguish that consumed her during her evening hours alone. Even her long nightly walks along the beach had offered little solace, though the wind and cool air seemed to clear her head somewhat. The walks had grown longer each night, as she dreaded the sleeplessness and solitude that caused her to dwell on her misery.

  This weekend was the Labor Day holiday. She wondered if they still had reservations for the Maui flight on Friday night at seven. And if Anna would still be willing to go.

  As with every morning since leaving home, she reached her office well before everyone else. Soon after she arrived, she heard someone else enter.

  “Lily, can we talk?” Tony came into her office and took a seat across from her.

  “It’s seven thirty on a Monday morning. I couldn’t have done something wrong already,” she joked nervously. She hoped Tony hadn’t found out about her troubles with Anna. The fewer people that knew about that, the better.

  “Lily, I don’t know how to tell you this, so I’m just going to say it straight out. I’m pulling you off the Esperanza case. I’d like for you to gather up all your files and notes and bring them to my office.”

  Surely she had heard wrong. “Tony, I’ve been working that case for more than two years. Why are you pulling it now?”

  “I got a call from Mrs. Esperanza on Friday night. She feels that you’re resisting her wishes.”

  “Goddamn right I am! You know as well as I do that it’s all going to start all over again, and it’s the kids who are going to pay.”

  “We aren’t social workers, Lily,” he said. “We’re lawyers, and we’re supposed to serve our clients.”

  “Who’s serving the kids, Tony? Tell me that.” She was fuming. “Two years, Tony! Two goddamn years! Those kids have been pulled out of their home four different times, twice because of their crazy father, and twice because of their careless mother. Neither one of them deserves to have those children.”

  “You’re not the judge here. It isn’t for you to decide. If they want their children back, it’s our job to deliver the best legal services we possibly can. Not to throw roadblocks in their way.”

  She glared at him angrily, and he glared right back. Until this very moment, she had never questioned her decision to become a lawyer. But if she couldn’t help protect kids like Sofia and Roberto, what was the point?

  Tony stood, and in a calmer voice, said, “Try to have the files in my office by the end of the day.”

  For the next hour and a half, Lily meticulously extracted each file, each note, each record—every single scrap of paper or electronic data byte that documented the Esperanza saga. When she had gotten it all together, she boxed it and dropped it wordlessly on the corner of Tony’s desk.

  She spent the next two hours stewing, occasionally looking at the case she and Tony would handle first thing tomorrow morning, that of Lon Phan, a Vietnamese immigrant seeking a stay of deportation for her ailing mother. Immigration law was complicated, but Lily felt certain they could make their case.

  Satisfied there was no more she could do in her office, Lily called their client to schedule one last briefing for this afternoon. She needed to get out of the office for a while, and could only take her car if it was work-related.

  Passing Pauline’s desk on the way out, she tersely said, “Would you let Tony know that I’ve gone to do a final briefing with Lon Phan?”

  From the corner of her eye, she saw Colleen emerge from Tony’s office carrying the Esperanza box. Anger roiled inside her as she realized Tony was handing off her case to his wife. “That certainly explains a lot,” she muttered, flinging open then banging the door on the way out.

  “I don’t think she’s walking tonight, boy. Maybe she’s watching the Dodgers, eh?” Anna scratched Chester behind his ears as he peered over the dashboard. Every night since learning where Lily was staying, Anna and Chester had driven by, parking a half block away in hopes of catching a glimpse. Six times in the past ten days they had spotted Lily on her late-night stroll from the beach. From this far away, it was impossible to see her face, but Anna could tell from the hanging head and slumped shoulders that Lily was sad.

  It wasn’t the seediest motel in LA, but Anna worried about her nonetheless. Most of the guests appeared to be sports fishermen, arriving in the evening from the marina shuttle. Lily probably kept to herself, and she was smart enough to walk along a well-traveled street coming back from the beach.

  Anna had resisted calling her at the legal clinic, but she worried every day that passed that the distance between them would become insurmountable. She wanted Lily to know that she loved her very much, and that she was there to offer whatever she needed, no matter what had transpired. “I can’t stand this, Chester. I’m going to call her tomorrow. You think that’s a good idea?”

  He thumped his tail against her leather seat.

  “Yeah, that’s what I thought.” She pulled out of the parking space and drove slowly by the motel, where Lily’s X3 was parked at the bottom of the staircase leading up to the second level. “Sweet dreams.”

  Chapter 12

  “Get out of the fucking way!” Lily screamed at the crawling line of cars in front of her. She had fallen asleep without setting the alarm, waking up only fifteen minutes before she was due in court. Luckily, Tony was co-chairing, but she knew he would be pissed at her for being late.

  She lost another twenty minutes looking for a parking space, but finally found a surface lot three blocks from the courthouse. “Sorry I’m late. How are we doing?” she whispered to Tony as she slipped into the seat beside him.

  Tony ignored her and continued taking notes. The government’s immigration attorney was wrapping up his arguments about why Lon Phan’s mother should be deported immediately, so at least she wasn’t late for her opening presentation.

  Tony stood to address the bench. “Your Honor, I’d like to request a short recess.”

  Lily followed him out of the courtroom with their client and they headed for one of the small attorney-client conference rooms. “Mrs. Phan, I need a word with Ms. Stewart in private. Will you excuse us? You can go get something to drink if you want. Five minutes.”

  As he closed the door, Lily b
raced herself for a stern reprimand. “Sorry I was late. Traffic was awful today, and then I couldn’t find a place to park.”

  “Lily, have a seat. We need to talk.” He held her chair as she slowly sat. “We were lucky today, because both of us had planned to be here. I don’t have to tell you what could have happened if this had been your case alone.”

  Their firm probably would have been fined by the court. She might have been disciplined by the bar. The worst-case scenario was that their client’s case could have been tossed out and Lon Phan’s ailing mother deported.

  “Yes, I know. I’m really sorry. It was just one of those days. I appreciate you carrying the ball. Did it go okay?” She was anxious for him to get on with his reprimand.

  “And you smell like liquor,” he added softly.

  Lily leaned back in her chair and looked away. She hadn’t realized that others could tell. “I . . . I admit that I had a couple of drinks last night. Losing the Esperanza case to Colleen was kind of hard to swallow.”

  “Lily, I know you’ve been through a lot. And I know the Esperanza kids mean a lot to you. What you have to understand is that the Braxton Street Law Clinic means a lot to me. I won’t have it tainted by shoddy work . . . or by a drunken attorney.”

  She absorbed his harsh words without meeting his eye.

  “As of right now, I’m putting you on indefinite suspension. Go home and get your act together. I can’t take a chance of letting this continue.”

  Stunned, she sat frozen in her chair as he picked up his briefcase and disappeared into the hallway.

  Anna returned the phone to its cradle and slumped in her chair. Lily was in court today, Pauline had said. From the receptionist’s cheery voice, she guessed that Lily had probably not told her coworkers about their troubles. Anna hoped they would be back together before anyone found out. She hadn’t said anything at all to her family, declining invitations over the past two weeks so she could avoid having to explain where Lily was. She had done the same when things had started to fall apart with Scott. The difference here was that she wanted to work through this with Lily, no matter how difficult it was.

  Marco appeared suddenly in the doorway of the conference room and dropped a folder on the table. “Remember those six cars you asked me about? I asked the LAPD to track the VINs, and you’ll never guess what I found.”

  She listened with growing fury for the next ten minutes as her sales manager took her through his findings. The vehicle identification numbers had shown up in the state’s database as registered vehicles, confirming they had been imported and delivered. The original invoices had been deliberately purged from the company’s database, but the VINs had shown up on the annual aggregate report from VW. Since the Sweeney books had no records of their sales, the vehicles should still be on the lot. Marco had discovered that all six vehicles were at one time registered to the same person, a Sherilyn Richardson, identified by the longtime receptionist as Gordon Sweeney’s youngest daughter. Mrs. Richardson—and probably someone else from within the company—had simply stolen six cars over the last two years. Anna directed Marco to turn the information over to their attorney for follow-up. Either Gordon Sweeney compensated Premier VW for the six vehicles, or his daughter was going to jail.

  Marco’s discovery was a tipping point for Anna. For the first time since she had taken over the business, she took stock of all the headaches and problems the ambitious moves had cost her and those she loved. And for what? Her vanity? More money than she could ever spend in a lifetime? Nothing she could possibly have gained from adding more dealerships to the Premier brand could be enough to make up for losing Lily . . . or for Lily losing herself.

  She picked up the phone and called her brother-in-law at his desk at the BMW dealership. “Hal? Something big just came up over here in VW Land. I need for you and Kim and Jonah to get on a plane Thursday night and fly to Maui.”

  “Anna, you’re not making any sense . . . but that doesn’t mean I’m going to argue with you.”

  “There’s nothing to make sense of. Lily and I had reservations, but I can’t go. I want you and Kim to go, and for both of you to relax on the beach for three days. I’ll see you Tuesday afternoon.” She hung up without waiting for an answer.

  That night, she and Chester watched from their vantage point up the street as Lily walked toward the Waterways Lodge. If possible, she appeared even sadder than she ever had before.

  Consumed with guilt from her realizations earlier that day, Anna made a move to exit the car and go to her. Then she saw the tall brown bag in Lily’s hand and stopped. The counselor had told her it might take a few weeks for Lily to hit bottom, and only then would she realize there was no way to go but up. Lily wasn’t ready to help herself yet, and bringing her home now was just asking for things to get worse.

  Lily sat up in bed and banged her head three times against the wall in frustration. Her anonymous neighbor answered back with a pounding of his own.

  “Sorry,” she yelled.

  She was more miserable than she had ever been in her life, saddened by what she had gone through and disgusted with herself for getting drunk again two nights ago. But things were different this morning. Something had struck her last night when the clerk handed her the tall bottle of tonic water in the brown bag and told her to drink one for him. She had come back to her room and emptied both bottles of vodka down the sink. Then she had donned her mother’s heavy sweater and returned to the beach, where she sat watching the planes roar over the ocean until the wee hours of the morning.

  As she had left her room, she glimpsed a car like Anna’s as it rounded the corner and spun out of sight. There were only a handful of Z8s in LA, but Anna wouldn’t have been in this neighborhood.

  Lily burrowed deep into the bed and pulled the covers over her head. The “Do not disturb” sign would ward off the housekeeper, and she had nowhere to be—and no way to get there, she realized. Since she wasn’t going to work anymore, she wasn’t allowed to drive at all.

  Her misery growing worse by the minute, she got up and dressed. The beach was too crowded for her tastes in the daytime, so she opted instead to kill the time until it thinned out by finally going through the box she had brought from her mother’s house after the funeral. For reasons she couldn’t explain, her birth mother, Karen Parker, had been on her mind a lot these last few days. Perhaps it was the solitude she felt, as though she wasn’t connected to a living soul.

  Her adoption file was moderately thick, since Eleanor had saved the court report in which Katharine Fortier had itemized the reasons the child should not be returned to her birth mother. Lily sat transfixed as she pored over the testimony and arguments. Growing up, she had talked with Eleanor from time to time about her fleeting memories of living with her mother. She vaguely recalled parties, with smoking and drinking, and even seeing naked people walking around. More vividly, she remembered the nasty taste and smell of beer on the breath of one of her mother’s boyfriends who had kissed her on the mouth. To this day, she hated beer.

  Reading the file today gave her a much fuller picture of the person her biological mother really was. She had always known the tale of how she had come to be declared a permanent ward of the state. There was the shoplifting arrest, then the time when Karen had left her by herself in the car for so long, and the final incident, in which her mother had hit a woman with a bottle and stolen her car. But Lily hadn’t known the extent of her mother’s encounters with law enforcement. There among the charges related to her neglect were several others for forgery and writing bad checks, and skipping out on restaurant and hotel charges. But the thing that shocked her most was the discovery of three arrests on public drunkenness.

  I am like her.

  Lily rummaged through her briefcase for her digital organizer, scanning the directory for Andrew Shively, the police sergeant from Kidz Kamp who had introduced her to kamikazes. She needed a favor from someone with access to a statewide database.

  Anna spun i
n her chair to grab the phone. “Anna Kaklis.”

  “Have I told you lately that I love you?”

  She smiled at her sister’s voice. “I thought you might be rather fond of me today. Are you packed?”

  “I am, and I’ve called a limo for the airport to come at four thirty. I was wondering if you’ve turned my husband loose yet.”

  “He left about twenty minutes ago. He should be home any minute.”

  “Good. I’m really sorry you and Lily couldn’t go. Actually, that’s a lie. I’m thrilled. Hal and I need a few days together.”

  “I hope you have a great time.”

  “We will, and we want you guys to come to dinner next weekend.”

  Anna hesitated. “I don’t know yet if we can. Things are crazy.” Since seeing Lily two nights ago, Anna had swung back and forth on a pendulum. The logical part of her said she was doing the right thing by waiting for Lily to take a step out of her abyss. But the emotional part of her wanted to drive down to the Waterways Lodge, help Lily gather her things and bring her back home where she belonged.

  “You two have to make time for each other. And for us. Where would we be without you?”

  “Let me talk with Lily.” She wasn’t above making up an excuse out of thin air. “She’s been swamped lately. She might just want to relax at home.”

  “You two have turned into hermits. We’ve seen you once since her mom died. Is everything all right?”

  Anna hated lying, but not as much as she would hate telling the truth. “We’re fine, just busy. That’s why you’re going to Maui and we’re not.”

  “I guess I shouldn’t be looking that gift horse in the mouth.”

  “You guys have fun, and take lots of pictures of Jonah at the beach.” She looked up to see Holly looming in her doorway. “I thought you were leaving early today.”