When her eyes became accustomed to the darkness, she walked along the crunching gravel paths between the raised garden beds where a patchwork selection of plants grew: roses in semi-dormancy, forget-me-nots, pansies, and snapdragons already ripening at their tips. A cherry tomato, planted by the birds the summer before, bore tiny green fruit, hard as marbles.
Nothing and no one could stop spring. It would come because the planet spun and to prove it, all she had to do was close her eyes. The world tilted on its axis and the days lengthened. The alternation of the seasons could not be stopped by drunk drivers and birth fathers. The turning of the planet and the movement of the stars had never failed Lana. In a world of instantaneous change, any one or thing capable of creating the galaxies, ordering the comings and goings of comets and meteors, the falling of stars and the rising of the sun and moon, must be—before all else—constant. Utterly dependable. This was the god Lana believed in. She had been a bust as a Methodist, but God was still there, down deep, lodged and immovable in her.
When she went upstairs, she looked in on Beth and found her bed empty. Micki stood in the door of their shared bathroom, wearing a 10K tee shirt of Jack’s. Tiff stood behind her.
“She went to Kimmie’s.”
Behind Micki, Tiff nodded her head. “She said you wouldn’t mind.”
Carmino came with Lana’s car the next morning, and she drove him back to Urban Greenery and then turned up the hill to Arcadia School. She was not wearing her work clothes, the sporty Urban Greenery polo shirt and slacks. Instead she had taken particular care to choose an outfit that was stern, professional, and meant business, a wool skirt and blazer in a shade the saleswoman at Nordstrom had called crème anglaise, and a pale yellow pullover. No jewelry and her hair sleek. Her head hurt and she felt mean.
She went directly to Grace Mamoulian’s office. Grace looked up from behind a large bowl of narcissi, her plucked and arched brows rising like sash windows.
“Lana, what exciting news for Micki.” Grace came around from behind her desk with her manicure outstretched. She wore her signature brown, a knit suit with a high collar and brass buttons the size of half dollars. “It’s about time something good happened to her. Sit down, sit down.”
Grace moved the arrangement of narcissi aside. Their fragrance hit Lana’s brain like a blackjack. She stayed on her feet and clutched the leather strap of her handbag so hard she felt the stitching press into her palm. “I’m not here about Micki.”
“Oh.” The eyebrows dipped and came together. Grace went back to her desk chair.
She feels safer with four feet of walnut between us, Lana thought. Well, she isn’t. No one was safe around Lana that morning.
“What can you tell me about Kimmie Taylor?”
“Kimmie? Oh. You’re here about Beth?”
“Tell me about this girl.”
“Well, she’s new this year. Transferred from The Bishop’s School.”
“What kind of a girl is she?”
Grace’s guard went up almost as visibly as if she had drawn a brown cloak around her shoulders and over her head. “She and Beth are thick as thieves, aren’t they? They’ve always got their heads together, plotting. I’m surprised you haven’t met her.”
There was a note of censure in Grace Mamoulian’s voice. Lana sat down, composed herself, her hands in her lap, both feet on the floor as she awaited the answer to her question. From the next office she heard the secretaries and aides talking, their voices like murmurs in a theater as the curtain rises.
Grace cleared her throat and reached for a pen on her blotter. She turned it end over end. “Well, let’s see. She’s a fairly good student. Quite pretty. She seems . . . nice.” Grace Mamoulian’s laughter barked at Lana. “Girls this age aren’t easy to read, but then I don’t have to tell you that, do I? You have two of them, and so close together. I don’t know how you do it. And now this new . . . father.”
Lana was not aware of looking surprised but she must have.
Grace said, “Oh, the upper classes can’t stop talking about it. They all play ‘Ghost’ and that actress from Mistique is a great favorite with them.”
“What about her family?”
Grace pressed her lips together. “What’s happened, Lana? Why the questions?”
“I have two daughters here. I pay thousands of dollars a year in tuition and special fees. I contribute generously and regularly to the Arcadia endowment. I want you to tell me about this girl Kimmie.”
“Lana, there’s no need to be hostile. There are privacy issues. I’m sure you—”
“I don’t care what kind of issues there are, Grace. We’ve known each other a long time. You know the kind of woman I am and you know my girls.”
“Well.” Grace Mamoulian sat back, still playing with the pen. “Let me think a minute.” She patted the tip of it against her lips and then pressed the intercom button and asked her secretary to bring in Kimmie Taylor’s file.
Silence.
The atmosphere of the large and elegantly furnished office, with its wide walnut desk and built-in bookcases, the deep pile rug and shuttered windows, and the arrangement of expensive furniture, was both academic and feminine and intended to impress parents. Lana wondered how much of every tuition check was spent to ensure that impression.
“Here we are,” Grace said as she took the file from her secretary’s hand and opened it on the desk before her. She ran her gleaming, blood-brown fingernail down a page and looked up. “Her father fairly recently remarried. He lives in Orange County. A Realtor, very well to do, I think. Her mother is a makeup artist.”
“In San Diego?”
“Mmmm, yes.”
“What else?”
“She has a sister, Jules, who attends San Diego State.”
“What about her grades, disciplinary problems. Does she get into trouble?”
Grace Mamoulian looked affronted. “These files are private, Lana. I can’t tell you anything else without breaking confidentiality.”
“She could be wanted in five states and you wouldn’t tell me?”
Grace Mamoulian laughed, jolly as a toothache. “This is Arcadia. Our girls come from good families. There are problems occasionally, of course. We do live in the modern world. But there’s nothing in Kimmie Taylor’s record you need to worry about.” She sat back, closing the folder, and it was clear that she meant for their conversation to be over. “Is there something else?”
“I want to see Beth.” Lana stood up. “And Kimmie.”
“They’re in the middle of class. . . .”
“I know that but I still want to see them.”
Two deep hash marks appeared between Grace Mamoulian’s eyebrows and her squinched mouth made a fist. “I can let you see Beth, of course, but Kimmie . . .”
“I won’t take them off the school grounds. We’ll go outside and sit on the front steps.”
“No. I don’t think so. That would not be appropriate.” Grace Mamoulian looked trapped, and Lana felt better than she had all morning. What she asked was unusual, perhaps, but not outrageous. She was a parent and being a parent gave her certain rights. It flashed across Lana’s mind that this was what it meant to be a parent, to recognize her own legitimate authority and exercise her power where she had to. Score one for the embattled army of mommies.
“Grace, I have a family situation here that I can take care of quickly and painlessly if I see both girls together.”
“Very well. There’s a conference room, across from the front office. Why don’t you go and sit down in there and I’ll get a monitor to summon the girls.” Grace added coolly, “Will that suit you?”
When Beth and a slender, dark-haired girl came into the conference room about ten minutes later, Lana was standing at the window, watching the sunlight flash on the long, curving fronds of the palms that marked Arcadia’s main entrance. She had found a couple of aspirin in the bottom of her purse and swallowed them dry.
“Hi, Ma,” Beth said. It gra
tified Lana to hear the quiver of apprehension in her voice. “How come you want to see us?”
“Sit down. Both of you.” She waited a moment. “Introduce your friend, Beth.”
Beth sighed and slumped in her chair. “Ma, Kimmie. Kimmie, Ma.”
Lana looked at Kimmie Taylor and in that moment witnessed something extraordinary and chilling. The girl’s expression—which had been somewhere between sullen and suspicious when she entered the room—lifted and opened in a perfect imitation of what Lana later defined to herself as “charming youth.”
“Mrs. Porter, I’m so glad to meet you. Finally. My mother keeps saying, Have you met Beth’s mother, have you met Beth’s mother? Now I can finally say yes.”
Lana knew she had trouble on her hands.
“I need to talk to you both.”
Kimmie made a terrible strained and apologetic face. “Oh, gee, Mrs. Porter, I’m in the middle of a math test.”
“What about you, Beth?”
“Whatever.” She fidgeted, grabbed at her hair, and began braiding it. As she pulled the hair over and under her fingers, she turned her head away from Lana and stared at the floor. Her skin had a yellow, slightly greenish cast and her blue eyes were cupped by circles of fatigue. Unhealthy. Lana felt an instant twist of guilt as she thought of meals unprepared and conversations deferred.
“I didn’t give you permission to stay out last night.” Beth looked at her hands.
“It’s my fault, Mrs. Porter, I begged her to come. I’ve been so worried about this math test because I just totally don’t get the theorems. I mean the first ones, yeah, I learned those but since Christmas it’s gotten so hard and I feel like my brain’s exploding. D’you know what I mean? My mom’d help me but she’s an artist, not a math genius.” Kimmie smiled. “Don’t blame Beth, Mrs. Porter. Honest to God, she said she was supposed to stay home but I begged and begged.”
Lana could not prove Kimmie lied but she knew cunning and deceit when she heard them play a duet on a sour piano.
“Beth, from now on and indefinitely, you are forbidden to go to Kimmie’s house. She can visit at our place. If you have to study, you can do it at home.” Lana watched Beth; her gaze remained fixed on the floor. “We have a big house, Kimmie. Which you would know if Beth had ever invited you over.”
Kimmie giggled and rolled her eyes. “My mom will be, like, so glad to get us out of her hair.”
Beth folded her arms across her chest and slipped lower in her chair.
“Tell me about your family,” Lana said.
“Ma-a.”
“Well, my mom’s a makeup artist.” She chirped like the finches in the bottlebrush tree. “She commutes to L.A. a couple of days a week which is like such a bore, as you can imagine. She and my sister, Jules, and me live in a condo downtown. You guys are so lucky to have a house. I would give anything not to live downtown.”
Kimmie rolled her eyes and chirruped on while Beth watched and Lana listened with reluctant fascination.
“My dad lives in Orange County. He’s a real estate broker. And he’s got this new baby who is just the most adorable thing.
“My dad and me are real close, though.” Kimmie tossed back her limp, dark hair. “He’s super busy, of course. Plus having a baby—he wants to spend a bunch of time with him. Bond, you know? But he calls me at night and we have these great talks and he gives me advice about stuff. I can totally trust him to be straight with me.”
“Well,” Lana said. “You’re a lucky girl, then.”
Kimmie grinned and sat back like an attorney resting her case.
Outside the room Lana heard students passing in the hall, the rise and fall of excited female voices. She glanced up at the clock.
“Is that it?” Beth asked.
“No.” Lana’s hands tingled with the temptation to slap Beth for her insolent tone of voice. “You are forbidden, Beth—I am saying this now in front of Kimmie so there will be no misunderstanding—forbidden to go to Kimmie’s house. Under any circumstances.”
“Ma-a, you already said that.”
“Gosh,” Kimmie said, “is that forever, Mrs. Porter?”
Kimmie had a small, black tattoo on the back of her left hand between her thumb and forefinger. A cross. Otherwise she looked just like Beth in her plaid uniform skirt, white blouse, and navy blue vee-necked sweater. Probably she was just another girl, harmless and confused and growing up awkwardly in a sad family. It troubled Lana that she had only an instinctive dislike of her and could find nothing concrete to object to. She couldn’t blame her for not washing her hair, and half the girls at Arcadia had tattoos. Even Wendy had a flower inked on her ankle and a small star on her shoulder—the latter a birthday gift from her boys.
Relax, she told herself. Don’t overreact.
“Not forever, Kimmie. But until I’ve had a chance to talk to your mother.”
“That seems fair enough,” Kimmie said, standing up.
Beth stood beside her.
“Sit down, Beth—you’re not going anywhere.”
“She has a test, too,” Kimmie said.
“I do, Ma, honest.”
“You’re going to have to make it up.”
“Mrs. Porter, Dr. Williams isn’t going to like that. She is, like, so rigid.”
“Leave us, Kimmie.” Lana added, “Please.”
The minute the door closed behind Kimmie, Beth cried out, “Oh, my Jesus Christ, that was so horrible, that was just the worst thing you’ve ever done to me.” She sank as far down as she could in her chair, laid her head back, and stared at the ceiling. “You mortified me. You totally humiliated me in front of my best friend.”
“I thought Linda and Madison were your best friends.”
“You’re not going to turn into one of those mothers who tells their kids—”
“Be quiet, Beth, and listen to me.” Lana paused. “Sit up straight and look at me.”
Beth sighed, sat up, and stared at her, opening her eyes so insolently wide they looked ready to pop out.
“I don’t believe half of what Kimmie said. And even if it’s all true, you knew I didn’t want you to go out and you deliberately disobeyed me. What did you think my reaction would be? Just shine it on?”
“Well, I wasn’t going to hang around the house with Micki and Tiff. All they could talk about was this Eddie guy, her father, and how rich he must be and who he dates. Like Tiff’s all of a sudden her best friend all over again because supposedly this guy fucked . . .”
“Stop it.”
Beth gawked at her and laughed.
Lana looked down at the palm of her right hand. She rubbed her thumb in a circle at the center. Outside the window a gardener used a whining leaf blower, and the drone tunneled into her head and amped up her headache.
She spoke carefully. “I want you to cool off this friendship with Kimmie.”
“Why?” Beth sat up, tossing back her hair, jutting her jaw. “What’s the matter with her?”
“I don’t like the influence she’s having on you.”
“You don’t know her, you don’t know anything about her.”
“I don’t have to explain myself to you, Beth.”
“You are so unfair. So . . . arbitrary.”
Lana almost smiled. Inside this new and defiant Beth there was still a girl who loved words. It wasn’t much to give her hope, but it was something.
“I’m sorry you feel that way, but I’m not going to change my mind.”
Beth folded her arms across her chest and looked at the tabletop. “You want me to cut her. Just like Tiff did Micki? People have the right to choose their own friends, and I choose Kimmie. I like Kimmie and she understands me.”
If Lana tried to ground her, she would run away. Kids thought nothing of running off nowadays. They had seen everything on television and had the courage of fools.
“You’re hung over. That’s why you’re so pissy. Micki told me you went out last night and got smashed. She said you humiliated her in fro
nt of Tiff.” Beth sneered. “If Dad were alive he would be so mad at you.”
For an instant the fluorescent light in the conference room blinded Lana. She stood up.
“He never would have let the family get so fucked up.”
“The family isn’t—”
“We’re as bad as all the rest of them. We used to be perfect and now we’re shit. I wish it was you died, not him.”
Lana’s hand lashed out before her brain engaged. She felt the sting of her palm against Beth’s cheek, instantly pulled back, and covered her mouth with her hands. Stunned, Beth touched her cheek with her fingertips.
“Beth, I’m sorry—”
Cry, please cry, and then I’ll hold you and it will be as if . . .
Beth sniffed and shook her head, reached back, and lifted her hair off the back of her neck and then gave it a rebellious little toss. She was out of the room before Lana could think of anything to say.
Chapter Twenty-four
Sixty minutes later, Lana burst in on Mars in her office at the university. Reading her e-mail, she was dressed in aubergine sweats. Through the window behind her there was a view of an open, grassy space bordered by the campus’s signature eucalyptus trees. Without sitting down, Lana told her sister everything—about drinking with Wendy, Beth going to Kimmie’s overnight without permission, and the scene at the school.
“She said she wished I was dead.” Lana wiped her eyes with the back of her hand. She had begun the day perfectly groomed; now she felt like a bag lady. “And she meant it.”
“Right then, she did.”
“She’s right. I have screwed up. I’ve made a terrible mess of everything.”
“Stop feeling sorry for yourself.” Mars pulled a box of tissues from her lower desk drawer and slid it across the desk. “So you aren’t perfect. Big deal.”
Lana stared at her sister. “Have you been listening to me? Are we even in the same room?”
“Lana, Beth isn’t going to hate you forever for one slap.”
“It’s child abuse—neglect, too. I should have stayed home last night.”
“Spare me the breast-beating. You went out with a friend. And Beth took advantage and cut out on you.” She leaned across her desk. “Think back, Lannie, think of the times I broke curfew and stayed out all night, think about the dope I smoked and guys I fucked before I was eighteen. I’m not recommending any of this for Beth, believe me, but I’m just saying it’s not the end of the world if she gets a little wild.” Mars ran her fingers through her thick curls, shaking her head as if she needed to dislodge something. “What did you think was going to happen? Jack dies, you bawl and mope for a few days, and then get over it? It wasn’t just Jack that died. It was your old family that went with him. Now you’ve got to rebuild.”
The Edge Of The Sky Page 22
