In the freeze Lana saw and heard and smelled more acutely than she had for months. Along Triesta Way, the leaves on the liquid am-bars turned scarlet and yellow overnight and shone like Halloween lights. For the first time in thirteen months, she believed she had a future worth living.
She decided to give a New Year’s party to celebrate the turn of the century with family and good friends, the kind of party she and Jack had often given together, with plenty to eat and drink. At midnight they would all walk down the hill to Presidio Park where crowds of people always gathered to watch the fireworks from Sea World.
She assumed there would be fireworks.
Chapter Three
Midafternoon on New Year’s Eve and Lana was in Von’s doing last-minute shopping. Maybe the carts held more champagne than was typical of a Friday night, maybe kids ran around more sugar-hyped than normal, but afterwards what would stay with Lana was the everydayness of the scene. She stood in the produce section, checking her list, looking down at the fresh salad greens and wondering which would be cheaper, the supermarket mix or prepackaged.
“Lana?” A familiar female voice and a hand on her shoulder. “Are you okay?”
Heaven save me, Lana thought.
It was Grace Mamoulian, dressed in her signature brown ensemble and sounding sympathetic. Lana wondered when people would stop taking this tone with her.
“Holidays are hard, aren’t they? Thank goodness this Millennium thing’ll be over by tomorrow. Unless the world ends, in which case it really will be over and it won’t make any difference.” Grace smiled to make sure Lana knew this was a joke.
Lana did not have time for conversation with someone she did not like. A crowd would descend on Triesta Way in a few hours. She opened her mouth to wish Grace a polite happy New Year and good-bye but she did not get a chance.
“I’ve been meaning to call.”
Micki.
Lana lifted the plastic top covering the designer greens, and using the tongs provided, began to scoop the leaves into a plastic bag.
“It’s probably nothing but it’s been nagging my mind. I wonder if you know someone who drives a blue-green Jaguar sedan. New, I think. A beautiful car, I have to say.”
Lana twisted a tie around the plastic bag and reached for another.
“Last week, before vacation, I saw Micki talking to someone in a blue Jaguar.”
Lana stopped scooping and looked at Grace.
“After school. I saw it parked in front of the Unitarian Church and I assumed it was someone from the congregation.” Grace shook her head. “Actually, I saw her talking to him twice.”
“A man?”
“I suppose it could have been a woman but I got the impression it was a man.”
They moved away from the lettuce to make room for a pregnant woman with a small, sticky-faced boy in the cart’s kid-carry seat. Over the loudspeaker Frank Sinatra told Lana to have a merry little Christmas. Lana tested an avocado for ripeness.
Grace said, “I would have called you about this, only the end of the semester is always hectic. It’s probably nothing, but you learn to be suspicious in my business. Hypervigilant, I guess you’d call it.”
Grace had seen the car from her office window across the expanse of lawn and playground surrounding Arcadia School, through the branches of several eucalyptus trees, and between the bars of an old-fashioned, spear-point iron fence. Wendy drove a new blue-green Lexus. At such a distance it could easily be mistaken for a Jaguar.
“I think I know who it was,” Lana said.
Grace smiled. “Then I’m not going to think about it anymore.” Her teeth were so white and even Lana wondered if they were her own. “Micki’s come through the last year better than I think any one of us would have expected. She’s grown up a bit and that’s good, but . . .” She let the qualification hang in the air.
Lana felt the absence of Jack like a ghost limb.
“God, the last thing I want to do is add to your worries.” Grace touched Lana’s shoulder lightly, as if she expected to be scorched. “And this Millennium thing, Y2K.” She rolled her eyes and while they stood in the crowded checkout line, they talked about their plans for that evening. Grace and her husband were meeting friends at La Costa and spending the night.
Lana told her about the party.
“Well, enjoy yourselves—you deserve it. And don’t worry about the Jag thing. I’m sure it’s nothing.”
It was to be an old-fashioned party with kids and adults, games and movies and music. Jack had loved these and said they made him feel like he lived in Minnesota. There would be food sufficient to feed a small nation and afterwards care packages for everyone to take home. Lana had roasted a shamefully expensive rib roast and a pork loin the day before. Kathryn had promised her sausage lasagna and a case of champagne—she and Dom could afford it; Mars was responsible for gourmet bread and cheeses and patés and a case of Killian’s Irish Red. Wendy and Michael were bringing tequila and margarita mix and a cooked Virginia ham. The whole run-and-read club was coming, all her favorite people.
As she scrubbed Idahos the size of shoes, Lana watched Mars walk around the garden, following the gravel paths lined with basketball-sized granite rocks a million years old. Lana had sent her out to cut flowers for the centerpiece. Mars had an artist’s touch and would arrange them with more style and elegance than Lana could come up with on her best day.
And this was not one of those. She had tried to dismiss Grace’s mysterious car and driver, but they hung around the fringe of Lana’s mind, a niggling worry. Much closer in was Jack. She kept thinking that in a backward way she was giving this party for him, not herself, not her friends.
In the garden, Mars was singing. Lana could not hear her but she knew that Connie Francis body language: “Where the boys are . . .” A perfect song for Mars. She sat on a wooden bench and lit a cigarette although Lana had told her plenty of times that nicotine was a poison to plants as well as humans. Around her at the end of long, drooping branches, red and yellow roses still bloomed gallantly because Lana had not found the will to prune them. The pink and yellow buddleia bushes along the garage wall were tall enough to sway like willows, and dust-colored bracts, crinkly and light as tissue paper, covered the bougainvillea that grew at the corner of the shade house.
The garden was still untidy. She should go out and work. But it had lost its ability to soothe. She left the hands-on work to Carmino and his crew. Lana felt more at home in her office than anywhere else in the world.
Squinting, with the cigarette pinched between her lips and the sun flashing in her autumn-colored hair, Mars removed the bone combs at her temples, bent forward, and ran her hands up through the thick curls, tossing them back as if to ease the weight, and dug the combs in again.
According to the family mythology, which their mother did nothing to discourage, Mars’s father had been a Hollywood heavy-hitter along the lines of Irving Thalberg, Darryl F. Zanuck, or Louis B. Mayer. Certainly in personality and appearance, she was nothing like her fair and milky-skinned sisters.
Through the window, Lana watched Mars crush her cigarette on the gravel path, step away and then back. She picked up the butt and slipped it in her shirt pocket.
Bless you, dear girl.
Lana loved both her sisters, but especially Mars.
If she had seen her sister in a crowd she would have known instantly that she was a personage. Just standing still deciding which flowers to cut, she looked like the most important person to whom the roses had ever bent their stems. Lana could not remember a time when she had not felt pallid and forgettable beside her vivid sister. She was clean-cut and preppy plain with what Jack called the High Wasp look: even features, smooth, fair hair with a slight wave on the ends, blue eyes that were neither soulful nor startling, just the clear blue of the plumbago flower. Her nose was neither a pug nor a hook, just straight and excellent for breathing. Her chin was strong and her high cheekbones held her skin in place without calling attent
ion to themselves.
Wendy said she looked like she should sail yachts and ride horses, but Mars belonged in a chariot riding off to war or leading her people to freedom. Of the three of them, Kathryn most resembled Stella. She was the starlet.
Lana wrapped the potatoes in aluminum foil and put them on the oven rack. As she crossed through potatoes on her list, Gala barked once, came out from under the round oak kitchen table, and hurried to the back door, tail swishing. Micki and Beth rushed in, out of breath and rosy-cheeked as milkmaids.
“We brought the ice,” Beth said in a tone naturally several notes lower than her sister’s. “Can you pay me back?”
“Ice costs more than a dollar and a half and it’s just frozen water,” Micki said. “What a rook.”
“We’re paying for the cost of the energy it takes to freeze it,” Beth said, always a little bit the pedant.
“So? It’s still a rook.” Micki dumped her icy armload into the big cooler Lana had placed just outside the kitchen on the back porch which served as a mudroom, laundry room, and general junk collection area. She came back to Lana and draped her arms around her neck. “Hi, Gorgeous.”
“Gorgeous yourself,” Lana said and kissed her cheek. “Beth, you put your ice in the washing machine. We’ll do beer and wine in there and soft drinks in the cooler, like always.”
Because of their coloring, Micki and Beth were always assumed to be biological sisters. Beth’s eyes were the same clear blue as Lana’s; Micki’s were also blue but very dark, the pupils ringed with a band of black that gave her the deep-eyed look of a wild animal. Both were streaky, fawn-and-gold, southern California blondes—their hair hung long and straight to just below their shoulder blades. Recently Micki had dyed a magenta streak in hers. Lana wished she hadn’t done it, but she let it be.
Micki sat at the kitchen table. She bent her head forward and pulled several strands of magenta hair forward, peering at them critically.
“You think I should do my whole head?”
“Not if you want to live past fifteen,” Lana said.
“That’s child abuse, Ma. I could get you hauled up on charges.”
“Speaking of which, you still have my MasterCard.”
“There’s this girl at school? She has half her head green and half blue. It looks extremely hot.”
“My card, Micki.”
Micki pulled the plastic charge card from the pocket of her carefully torn Levi’s and tossed it on the lazy Susan.
“Ma,” Beth said from behind the refrigerator door, “how come we’re having a party and there’s nothing to eat? Didn’t you buy any chips or nuts?”
“She hides ’em. Like always.”
“Wendy’s bringing most of that stuff.”
“Meanwhile, I’m starving,” Beth said.
“Make yourself a sandwich,” Lana said as she prepared to slice the pork loin. “You can have some of this and there’s plenty of clean lettuce.”
She watched her daughters make sandwiches, and listened to the noise of their bickering—“Gimme that . . . you took . . . I want.” She hated the universe for denying Jack the sights and sounds of his beautiful daughters. She would have given anything right then for the freedom, the permission, to raise her fist and scream at God, but after more than a year she had become skilled at pretending life was back to fine on Triesta Way. Sometimes she convinced herself.
Lana said, “I met Grace Mamoulian at Von’s today.”
Micki groaned. “What have I done now?”
“You oughta see what she wears to work,” Beth said.
“Everything she owns is turd brown.”
Lana had also wondered about Grace Mamoulian’s penchant for brown clothing. “She saw you talking to Wendy.”
“Who?” Micki asked. “Me? When?”
“In front of the Unitarian Church.”
Micki made a face. “Grace Mamoulian’s crazy.”
Lana wished she were not so busy, wished she could stop and pursue the matter of the Lexus or Jaguar or whatever it was, because at the back of her party-harried mind, a flag of caution had gone up. She was fairly certain Micki was not telling the whole truth. But Micki was a skilled liar and Lana had to pay attention, concentrate, to catch her bending the bow of truth as it suited her. She made a mental note to get back to the matter later.
Jack would not have procrastinated.
Chapter Four
Stella arrived just as Lana was heading upstairs for a fifteen-minute soak in the tub before the hordes arrived.
“Am I early?” She looked miffed. As if she had not been told that the party began at eight. As if she had been purposely misled, and it was Lana’s fault there was no one there to admire her in black chiffon and the diamond earrings Stan had given her for their first anniversary. Tall and thin as a runway model.
No way I’ll look that good at seventy-two, Lana thought.
“Hi, Ma. You look great.” She bent forward and kissed Stella’s pink and carefully powdered cheek, engulfed in the fragrance of Shalimar, a scent Lana recalled from her childhood when she had sneaked into her mother’s bedroom in the cottage next to the Hollywood Cafe and sprayed herself. Such a heavy, clingy scent. Stella could always smell it on her afterwards. “That stuff doesn’t come out of a tap,” she would say. “I don’t pay good money so you can take a bath in it.”
Stella followed Lana upstairs and sat on the bed watching her undress. She crossed her legs and swung her narrow, patent-leathered foot back and forth with barely concealed impatience while a pleased little smile tilted up the corners of her mouth.
Lana asked, “Out with it, Ma. What’s up?”
“Have you talked to your sister today?”
“Mars?”
Stella rolled her eyes.
“If you mean Kathryn,” Lana said, “Tinera called a bit ago to say they’d be late.” Lana fixed her mother with a stare. “Ma?”
Stella waggled her plucked and waxed eyebrows.
“No! I don’t believe it. She swore she wouldn’t have any more after Colette. That’s eight years ago.”
“There have been miscarriages.”
Lana sat beside Stella on the bed. “I didn’t know that. She never told me.”
“Well, what do you expect?” Stella fluffed up the curls of her champagne-colored hair. “She knows your attitude.”
Dom Firenzi was in his mid-fifties, almost twenty years older than Kathryn, whom he had claimed to have fallen in love with the first time he saw her behind the costume jewelry counter at Nordstrom. Lana believed him. Her sister was beautiful, fine-featured and delicate as a porcelain figure in a shop window. It was harder to understand why Kathryn loved a man old enough to be her father, short and stocky and rigid as an Old Country patriarch. He had grown up hard in Providence, in the city’s Italian ghetto, but when he came to California a combination of brains, will, and ruthlessness had made him a successful contractor and businessman. The tough little Sicilian kid was still present, however, like a shadow image on a television screen and just as irritating. Lana and Mars had analyzed the chemistry between Kathryn and Dom and concluded that it was his domineering, the rigidity they found so unattractive, that attracted Kathryn. Dom took care of her; he made sure she never had to think for herself.
Dom wanted sons more than anything in the world but he doted on the eldest of his three daughters, a quiet girl named for Dom’s mother, Tinera. She still wore her hair in braids but had been aptly described by Beth as “over the hill at eleven.” Nichole, nine, and Colette, eight, were almost unnaturally quiet and well-behaved. None of them resembled their mother. If someone had set them down in a Sicilian village circa 1900, their dark hair and eyes would have looked perfectly in place.
Lana asked Stella, “How far along is she? Has she been to the doctor?”
“You are behind the times, Lana.” Stella floated her large, graceful hands dismissively. “These days you just take a home pregnancy test and wait until the end of the first trimester to
see the doctor.”
While her mother talked about how motherhood suited Kathryn and what a good provider and devoted father Dom was, Lana went into the bathroom and turned on the shower. She stripped and stepped into the stream of hot water. For thirty seconds she let it pour against her face. Better a good scalding than say what she wanted to, that Dom was a troglodyte bully with his head up his butt.
Stella was convinced her youngest daughter had made a stunningly successful marriage, and no amount of debate was going to change her mind. As Mars said, Stella had always been a sucker for a rich, testosterone-heavy, A-type male. Particularly if he had a lot of chest hair.
Casa Firenzi was a dictatorship. A benevolent one, Lana supposed. Mostly. But Dom’s wife and daughters barely took an independent breath or dared a creative thought without his interference.
Why did this matter so much to Lana? Mars said she should let Kathryn live her own life, fall out of her own trees. But Lana had begun watching out for her little sister when Stan’s boozing and Stella’s narcissism and Mars’s demand for independence collided, creating firestorms that scorched them all. If Kathryn was sheltered and indulged, Lana knew it was partly her fault for having begun it years ago. She still protected her—how could she stop after almost thirty-four years?
She stepped out of the shower and grabbed a towel in time to hear the doorbell and, a moment later, Micki yelling up the stairs that Wendy and Michael had arrived and when did she want Michael to start making margaritas?
“Immediately,” Lana yelled.
The Edge Of The Sky Page 3
