“You’re running late as usual,” Stella said. “Good Lord, what are you going to do with that hair?”
Lana wondered how many people were murdered on New Year’s Eve.
That night drink flowed freely, the food was superbly extravagant, and the spacious old house held everyone comfortably: kids upstairs and in their own living room playing music and videos, adults in the kitchen and smoking on the front porch, someone in the backyard smoking pot—Lana caught a deserty whiff every now and then but she couldn’t see who was smoking, although she suspected Mars and her current boy lover, a postdoc in the chemistry department at UCSD. For part of the evening, Stella huddled with Dom in the corner of the adult living room. Lana caught sight of them from behind: his thick, salt-and-pepper head, his muscular back and shoulders straining his dark blue sport coat, Stella glamorous and flirty. Hatching something.
Near midnight, as the guests were getting ready to walk down to Presidio Park to see the fireworks, Lana cornered Kathryn in the upstairs hall.
“You’ve been avoiding me,” she said.
Kathryn opened her blue eyes wide.
“Ma says you’re pregnant.”
“God, that woman. We ought to duct tape her mouth.” Kathryn’s voice was high and sweet, modulated to offend no one. “Anyway, I was going to tell you. Tonight.”
“You have three.”
“Dom says you’re jealous.”
Lana smiled and pressed the soles of her feet against the floor. “You told me you wanted to go back to school. You had those catalogs. You said you were tired of being an appendage.”
Kathryn laughed and floated her hands, exactly mirroring Stella’s gesture. “Don’t nag me, Lana. He wants a son so much, you have to understand. I just want to make him happy.”
“Yes, but what about you?”
Kathryn laughed, a high, light sound of ripples and trills as musical as the song of a mockingbird.
New Year’s Eve, 1999: if the date was portentous, if half the world waited for some great event to mark the Millenium (“The faux Millenium,” as Mars called it), the weather in San Diego was unaware of the hype. The night was clear and mild, more like spring than midwinter, and as Lana and her crowd of family and friends walked through the silent streets down to Presidio Park, the span of the Milky Way was faintly visible in the moonless, midnight sky. Lana could pick out Orion and, faintly, Cassiopeia. Jack had been in the Air Force before they met and called this constellation The Flying Bra for the fun of making his daughters giggle.
“You sure about these fireworks, Lana?” someone asked.
“Of course,” she said. “Haven’t you been watching the television? The whole world is having fireworks.”
But the streets of Mission Hills were empty and most of the houses dark except for the occasional blue glow of a television flickering through a window or screen door. From one house Lana heard Latin music and laughter; but with that exception, the neighborhood seemed to have decided not to celebrate Y2K and gone to bed early. Lana wondered if they were all just bloody relieved to see the old century go. She knew she was.
“Don’t you think it’s a little peculiar?” Kathryn said. “Where is everyone?”
Mars laughed. “What do you expect? It’s San Diego.”
Malcolm, the current boy-toy, walked ahead with the teenagers. Where he feels most comfortable, Lana thought and bit her lower lip. Was this what living on the edge of a crater had done to her, turned her bitter? She didn’t want to be bitter. She wanted to be as Jack was, warm and reassuring. Maybe Malcolm was only being thoughtful, as Mars said he was, giving the sisters a chance to be together. They walked with their arms draped over each other’s shoulders like winners after a soccer match. Three sisters, Lana thought—one mother but three different fathers.
She could hardly remember her own, Norman Coates, but he must have been bland. Between Kathryn and Mars, Lana felt beige and plain. Generic wheat bread between a croissant and a loaf of Russian rye.
Dom called to Kathryn from the other side of the street and she left them.
Mars muttered, “Why doesn’t she just wear a choke chain?”
A moment later, Kathryn returned. “Dom wants to know if you’re sure there’ll be fireworks, Lana. He doesn’t want to walk down there for nothing.”
“Well, of course there will. During the summer, Sea World has them every night. You can set your clock by them. You know they’ll do it up big for this kind of occasion.” There had to be fireworks for the turn of the century. The faux Millennium.
Looking west from the top of the hill, Lana saw a band of light at the horizon, iridescent as radium, marking the point where the sky touched the edge of the sea. She thought of all the places in the world where the fireworks had already happened, and partygoers were just waking up on the first morning of a new century; she wished she were in one of those cities starting her life again. In the new century she would travel through space and time untouched by Jack. In the twenty-first century that Jack would never know, she might stop hurting and no longer need to pretend.
The party ambled down the hill and into the tree-dark silence of Presidio Park. On the Fourth of July this prime lookout was crammed with people and illegally parked cars, but tonight they had it to themselves. A drift of cold air rustled the needles of the pine trees and Lana shivered; a sense of uneasiness that she realized had been building in her since she stepped from the house into the unusually quiet neighborhood brought up the flesh at the back of her neck.
How could there not be fireworks on this night of worldwide celebration?
Around her, Lana heard people asking each other what time it was. Dom fussed to Kathryn about how he didn’t like to sleep away from home. It wasn’t yet midnight but Lana heard Micki, Beth, and their friends saying it was stupid to hang around the park when no one else was there. Obviously there would not be fireworks. They began to wander back up the hill in the direction of home, grousing.
“You could have called the Visitors’ Bureau, Lana—they would have told you.” Dom sounded sulky. “Nobody’s here, nothing’s going to happen.”
From down on the freeway, Lana heard blaring horns and rising up from somewhere in Old Town, the strains of “Auld Lang Syne” and a pop like a firecracker or a champagne cork. Mars went looking for Malcolm, and around Lana, people began to hug and kiss each other.
“Happy New Year, Lana.” Wendy hugged her hard. “Let’s have a good year, okay?”
Beth broke away from her friends and ran back to Lana and threw her arms around her. “I love you, Mommy,” she said, squeezing tight.
“Oh, me, too, Bethy. Me, too.” Lana brushed aside Beth’s fringe of bangs to kiss her forehead. Under the manufactured fragrance of shampoo and rinse and sweet soap, a breath of something sun-touched and creamy, a smell that reminded Lana of Jack, filled her eyes and stopped her voice. She had to clear her throat to speak. “We’re going to have a good year, Beth. I promise you a good year.”
“Me, too, Ma.”
“Where’s your sister?”
Beth shrugged.
Micki’s particular friend, Tiff, was already at the top of the hill. Lana thought Micki must be with her.
From the corner of her eye, Lana saw Tinera stand on tiptoe and whisper in Kathryn’s ear.
Kathryn looked at Lana, frowning. “Did Micki come with us?”
“She didn’t, Aunt Lana,” Tinera said in an excited and important voice. “She said she’d seen enough fireworks to last forever. She said they were boring.”
Lana scanned the backs moving away from her, aware of a sudden crowding in her mind and the cinch across her chest. She saw Micki’s best friend, Tiff, at the edge of the park where the streetlights began and called to her, telling her to wait a minute.
“I thought Micki was with you,” Lana said when she reached her. “Where is she?”
Tiff stared at her feet in their glittery, backless, stack-heeled sandals; her toenail polish looked black.
At Lana’s side Tinera announced in a singsong, tattletale voice, “She’s at the house talking to a man.”
“A man? What man?”
“He knew her name. He was in a Jaguar convertible. Micki said it was to die for.”
Grace Mamoulian’s image flashed across her mind, and as it did, Lana remembered seeing the beautiful car with its stunning starburst hubcaps early in the evening, parked in front of the Andersons’ across the street. She had assumed it belonged to someone visiting them.
As Lana hurried up the hill and out of the park, Mars called after her, “Hey, it’s a neighbor.... Someone has a new car. . . .”
But what did Mars know about the way disaster strikes, the suddenness with which it rips love out of your arms and scatters its bleeding parts across an intersection?
Lana began to run, aware of the others coming after her. She ran up the middle of the street, past the laughing, ambling teens and the silent houses. She was out of breath when she turned the corner onto Triesta Way in time to see a set of taillights the color of blood disappear around the curve onto Presidio Drive.
Without thinking, she cried after it, “Micki!”
“I’m here, Ma.” She sat on the front steps, resting her elbows on her knees, tugging a handful of magenta hair. “Don’t have a cow.”
Air rushed out of Lana. She rested her fists against her hipbones and bent over, the breath burning her throat and lungs.
“How were the fireworks?”
Behind Lana, Tinera said, “San Diego’s the only city in the entire world that didn’t have fireworks.”
“Who was that?” Lana asked when she could breathe.
“Who?”
“You know perfectly well.” Lana heard echoes of her mother in that phrase. She looked at the house and saw Stella behind the screen door watching the scene with Gala beside her.
“In the Jaguar. Who was he?”
“Oh. Him.” Micki acted calm and bored now. “Jesus, all he asked was directions.” She stood up. “You are, like, so predictable. I knew you’d make a big deal of it.” She glared at her cousin Tinera. “And you are such a snitch.”
“That car was parked in front of the Andersons’ half the night,” Lana said, forcing down fear and rage and impotence.
Damn you, Jack. For not being here.
She knew what Micki was trying to do, consciously or not. Make her feel paranoid. Antiquated. She bore down on the balls of her feet to keep from screaming. “And this guy chooses midnight to ask for directions? Who was he?”
“He knew your name,” Tinera said in a prissy voice that made Lana want to tie her to the railroad tracks. “I heard him ask if your name was Michelle. Don’t say he didn’t.”
“So?”
“Is that true?”
“Ma, what’s the big deal? Look around you.”
Lana saw how safe the street was with its attractive homes and well-tended yards, no litter, no derelicts. Next door, the Tillmans’ Newfoundland watched the scene through their side gate.
“He’s been hanging around school, too,” Beth said. “I saw him there last week and—”
“Fuck you, Beth.”
Lana heard Dom mutter somewhere behind her.
She said, “Go inside, Mick. We’ll talk about it later.”
“But I didn’t do anything,” she wailed.
You don’t have to do anything, Lana wanted to say. You just have to be your own pretty, innocent self. She wanted to rip into her daughter with the truth, to remind her of every monstrous tabloid story of kidnapped girls, raped and disfigured and ruined girls. She wanted to scream at Micki that she must run from a stranger who knows her name, who sits in his car and watches her school and her house.
“Get real, Ma.” Micki stood up, looking down at Lana from the third step. “I talk to strangers all the time. How am I supposed to avoid them? Wear a gag?”
When Micki was little, four or five, she could not jump from the third stair. She would stand on it, bending her skinny knees and swinging her arms, trying to summon courage and never quite managing to do it. What a day it had been when she called Lana outside to show her that she wasn’t afraid anymore. Now she stood on the third stair, formidable in her outrage, afraid of nothing.
“What am I supposed to do?” The more she talked, the more muscle and punch was in her voice. “You want me to take, like, a vow of silence. Be like a nun?”
“You know what I mean.”
“I’m fifteen years old.” She was on a roll now as her voice climbed the scale toward a shriek, a sound Lana could not endure for long. Where had Micki learned this? How had she become so good at fighting? “I don’t need you to tell me what I have to do all the time. I can take care of myself.”
Against a syringe full of heroin? Against a gun in your ribs and a hand between your legs? If this did not end soon, Lana thought she might be sick.
“You’re very capable, Micki, I agree.” Where had she found this phony, adult voice? “But we do need to talk. Go to your room and I’ll be up in a few minutes.”
“What about the party?” Micki’s face was bright pink in the porch light. “What about my friends?”
“For you, the party’s over.”
Micki cried, “That is so stupid. You are so stupid.”
“Be that as it may, I’m still your mother and—”
“You are not. You’re not my mother.” Micki charged up onto the porch, whirled, and screamed at Lana. “My real mother wouldn’t treat me this way.”
Behind her, Lana heard a sharp intake of breath from someone who had never heard Micki play her trump card—the potentially perfect birth mother. Micki’s jaw muscles clenched. Some part of Lana felt sorry for her, for the mess of emotion she had got herself twisted up in; another part wished she and Jack had been patient enough to wait for their own sweet-natured and tractable Beth. Let someone else raise this temperamental spawn of strangers.
She didn’t mean her thoughts—they were only thoughts. Jack would understand.
“That does it,” Dom said. “We’re going. Kids, get your stuff.” Lana turned to look at him and met the faces, gawking and curious, waiting to see what would happen next.
“I wish you were dead, not Daddy.”
Lana turned in time to see Beth leap the steps two at a time, dart across the porch, and punch her fist into Micki’s shoulder, banging her back against the screen door.
Stella screeched, Gala began barking.
“Leave me alone,” Micki yelled and shoved Beth hard.
Beth staggered, teetered on her heels, circling her arms, lost her balance, and toppled backwards down the steps, arms wheeling and her back arched. Kathryn moved forward to break her fall and got halfway up the stairs. But Beth was Lana’s twenty-first-century girl, her athlete and Valkyrie. When her strong, broad shoulders hit Kathryn square in the chest, Kathryn let out a whoosh of air and fell hard onto the cement. She curled into herself and lay still.
Chapter Five
The fall from the stairs did not kill Kathryn. After two or three terrifying seconds of stillness, she stirred and moaned and tried to get up, but Dom would not let her move. He had to get her to the hospital immediately and, of course, Stella had to follow after him in her own car. Dom shunted his three daughters off on Mars, who drove them back to the ranch in Malcolm’s sedan, Malcolm following in her two-seater Mercedes. Lana said there was plenty of room at her house and there was no need for both of them to drive all the way out to the ranch; but Dom was not speaking to Lana and so that was that. In fifteen minutes they were gone, leaving Lana and the rest of her guests looking at each other, embarrassed and wondering what to say and do next. In another twenty minutes, most had muttered their thanks and apologies and commiserations and fled for home. A couple of Lana’s run-and-read club friends stayed to help clean up. Wendy washed and bandaged Beth’s scrapes.
When Stella called near two A.M. to say that Kathryn had miscarried and Dom ha
d taken her home, only Wendy and Michael were still at the house.
Lana hung up the phone, slumped against the kitchen wall, and slid to the floor. Wendy sat beside her and in silence they finished off a bottle of Pinot Grigio while Michael dozed in Jack’s chair in the grownups’ living room.
“Poor Micki.” Lana said, “There’s going to be hell to pay for this.”
Wendy and Michael went home a little later and Lana prowled the downstairs, picking up overlooked coffee cups and plastic champagne flutes. It had been a good party while it lasted. She straightened stacks of magazines and fluffed couch pillows; she did whatever she could to avoid going upstairs and not until she felt afloat with fatigue did she check the locks, turn off the lights, and start up to bed.
Halfway up, she stopped and sat with her head in her hands. Not crying. She had gone beyond the country of tears into a wide, empty region where tears could not begin to express the desolation.
Lana looked in on Beth first. She had flung herself across the bed wearing sweats and a pair of Jack’s old gym socks. She had appropriated all of these when Lana finally got around to emptying his chest of drawers. Beth lay on her stomach, her face pressed into the pillow so that her mouth was reshaped into the soft pout, the damp and seashell-pink, kissy mouth Lana remembered from her babyhood. She must have cried herself to sleep.
And I wasn’t here, Lana thought. I didn’t even nurse her scrapes. She had stayed downstairs cleaning and putting away because it was easier than being up here.
Micki sat in her windowseat, her comforter around her shoulders.
“It’s late,” Lana said, turning back the bed. “Here. Get in.”
As if grateful to be told, Micki dragged herself and the comforter across the room and into bed. Her hair was tangled where she had been tugging on it, and her face, like Beth’s, was rashy from crying.
“I’m sorry, Ma. I didn’t mean . . . what I said.”
Lana sighed.
Of course she meant her words. At the time she exploded she had meant every insult from the depths of her heart.
The Edge Of The Sky Page 4
