“Bingo, Lone Ranger.”
Lana led Tinera to the bedroom door, thinking all the time of the revolver behind her, feeling its barrel like an index finger prodding the hollow of her back.
Kathryn said, “I told you I want her—”
“No.” Kathryn would not shoot her; still, Lana’s legs felt weak as she walked Tinera to the door and out into the hall. She let out a relieved sigh and leaned against the wall.
She asked Tinera, “Do you know how to unlock Nichole and Colette’s rooms?”
“Daddy has the key.”
“Did he lock them in?”
Tinera nodded.
“Why not you?”
Tinera looked miserable. “He wanted me to see. To learn.”
“He told you that?”
She nodded.
Lana thought she would throw up. She swallowed hard. “Here’s what you do. You go help the girls climb out their bedroom windows.”
Tinera backed up a step, shaking her head.
“Honey, you have to do it.”
“He’ll get mad.”
“I’ll take care of your father.”
“What if she kills him?” She began to cry again.
“She won’t. You know she won’t.”
“Then why—”
“Tinera, it’s not the time to talk now. I want you to take your sisters out into my car. And then you stay with them.”
“What about Mama?”
“Just wait for us there.”
“But Daddy—”
“Do as I ask, Tinera. I won’t let anything bad happen to you, not to any of you.”
Kathryn watched Lana come back into the bedroom. “Now what?” she asked and smiled sheepishly. She whispered, giggling, “To tell you the truth, I haven’t figured how to get out of this situation.”
“It’s a doozy, all right,” Lana said.
The Santa Ana blew through the open windows and from across the lawn and driveway Lana heard the sound of a horse. She drew aside the pale rose organdy sheers to see Jacaranda chasing his imagination around the paddock in the starlight, his luxuriant mane and tail catching the moonlight, flying as if he sensed he was in danger.
She spoke to the closet. “You can’t kill the horse, Dom.”
“I can do what I want. I own him.”
“Well, not exactly,” Lana said. “I don’t know how it is in Rhode Island, but here in California you only own half of him. And even if you ignore that, you still don’t want to kill him.” Lana felt as if she were reading from a script. The words just came to her and she said them. “Think about this, Dom. If you kill the horse, I’ll go to my friend who works for the Union Tribune.” Jilly’s beat was entertainment but Dom didn’t need to know that. “I’ll tell her the whole story and you probably won’t be on the front page of section one, but I’ll bet you make it big, maybe headlines and a picture, in the city section. Lots of people read that section, Dom. Thousands and thousands. Your pal Father Kelly reads the city section. If you’re lucky, you might even get on television. One of those human interest pieces with Kathryn crying and Tinera and poor Jacaranda . . .”
Something slammed against the closet door. “Get out of my life, you bitch. This is my house and you’re trespassing—”
“I was invited, Dom. And what I’m doing is called mop up—this is called crisis management.”
“And I didn’t start it,” Kathryn screamed. “You said you’d kill him. You said you’d blow his brains out.”
“You used that horse to murder my son.”
“It wasn’t a son,” Kathryn said. “It was an embryo.”
“You don’t know.”
“But I do,” Lana said, yelling over both of them. “I’ve had miscarriages, Dom. I had four of them so don’t tell me what’s a son and what’s a daughter. It’s blood and slime and a clot of cells, that’s it.”
After more than fifteen years the loss of those children, who for days or weeks had lived so brightly in Lana’s imagination, still brought a stab of pain like no other. But they were never really children except in the way a dream or a wish is real.
She heard a car door slam. The girls were in the Toyota.
She leaned down and whispered in Kathryn’s ear. “You go.”
Kathryn shook her head and Lana wanted to throttle her.
“Look, I’m giving you a way out. Otherwise you’ll sit here until you dry up and blow away. You and the kids can come to my house. We’ll figure something out after that.”
She stretched out her hand for the revolver. Kathryn still would not give it to her.
“Now,” Lana said.
Kathryn lowered her eyebrows and tried to look fierce, but it wasn’t hard to understand why Dom did not take her seriously. Even angry, she looked pretty and vulnerable.
Lana wiggled her fingers.
Kathryn engaged the safety and slapped the revolver onto her palm. As Lana felt its cold weight, a lead ball dropped in her stomach and her knees knocked as she walked to the corner of the bedroom farthest from the closet, broke the gun, and removed the bullets from the cylinder, then closed the gun as carefully and quietly as she could. She stuffed the bullets deep in the pocket of her parka vest as she walked back to Kathryn, who still sat on the chair in front of the closet. She gestured for her to get up and go into the hall.
“The girls are in the car,” she murmured, close to Kathryn’s ear. “Go out to them and lock the doors. Don’t let anyone in except me.”
Kathryn nodded, turned to go, and Lana grabbed her forearm.
“Quietly. I want him to think you’re still here.”
Lana returned to the bedroom and sat as Kathryn had, resting her hands on the back of the chair, holding the revolver steady. It probably was not normal to feel so calm under such circumstances. Maybe she was in shock. No, she was just calm. And confident. Which might mean she was just as crazy as her sister, but she did not think so. Dom was a bully and the one thing a bully could not handle was someone who refused to be bullied. She looked at her watch. It was almost midnight. On the television Jay Leno was talking to someone Lana did not recognize.
Dom said, “Kathryn?”
“I have the gun now.”
She watched the knob of the closet door turn. Dom’s shoulders and gray, drawn face appeared. He looked around the room.
“Where is she?”
“In my car.”
He stepped out of the closet and moved toward the bedroom door, fast for someone so stocky.
Lana yelled, “Stop right there.”
He turned on her, an icy fury in his eyes.
Now’s the time to get nervous, Lana thought. But her senses felt clear and acute like a hawk’s, diving.
“I will shoot you. I won’t kill you, Dom, but I’m as good a shot as Kathryn and you know it. I will shoot and I will hurt you if you give me any trouble.”
“You and Mars. If it weren’t for you—”
“What? You think if it weren’t for us, Kathryn’d be your brood bitch?”
“You’ll never shoot me.” His mouth twisted to the right in a spasm of humor. “She would. My Kathryn’s got fire but you’re too busy hosing everything down to have any of your own.” He swaggered out into the hall. Lana followed and caught up with him and jammed the muzzle of the .38 into the small of his back.
He stopped.
“People change, Dom. Even good old dependable Lana. I might surprise you and turn out to be an honest-to-goodness firecracker.” She hoped he believed her because if he didn’t he could turn around fast, grab the gun, and it would all be over. A turn-and-grab move was the kind of thing gangsters did in movies all the time. It helped to think of Dom as a henchman out of The Godfather. “Go into the living room and sit down. Let’s see if we can deal.”
I’ll make you an offer you can’t refuse. If I can think of one.
Dom walked into the big living room with its heavy drapes and velvet couches and sat on the edge of a couch under an oil painting of
a Gypsy girl with a cart and pony.
Such bad art. How could Kathryn tolerate it on her walls?
Lana sat on an ornately carved wooden chair Kathryn had told her was a bishop’s chair and a valuable antique. Mostly it was uncomfortable, which was good. She did not want to relax. The situation might be terrible in its particulars, but it was almost worth it for the exhilarating run of ice through her veins. She could not keep Eddie French out of their lives. She could not figure out what to do about Beth. But Tres Palomas was a rare vision of the black-and-white world, and black and white was like order forms and inventory and accounting ledgers. She could handle black and white.
She reached under a tasseled shade and turned on a lamp that spilled a circle of yellow light in their corner of the room. In the lamplight his face looked more saturnine than ever. Ten feet of Persian carpet separated them.
Lana said, “I’m going to take her home and get the kids calmed down. I’ll talk to her, find out what she wants, what would make her happy.”
“What about me? Don’t I get to be happy?”
Lana thought a moment. “Why can’t you both be happy? Or at least try to be? Seems like it’s been all about you, Dom. If you were to work with a professional—”
“You don’t know what you’re talking about.” He shook his head with such determination that his thick hair moved from its smooth wave and fell across his forehead. “Stuff like this, personal, we keep in the family. It’s nobody else’s business. That’s our way.”
The revolver was heavy and Lana’s wrists had begun to hurt.
“Dom, you may not believe it, but I value family as much as you do. And this thing you’ve got going here, it’s not a family, it’s a dictatorship. If you want to save anything, you’re going to have to get help.”
“I could divorce her. After today she wouldn’t have a chance in court.”
“But you don’t believe in divorce. You told me no one in your family has ever been divorced.”
He scratched his stubbled, blue-black jaw.
“You’re a well-known man in San Diego. Father Kelly thinks you’re Mr. Catholic San Diego. And I know you have competitors who’d like to see you in trouble. Remember the bidding war you got into with the Vegas Company? Made the paper, big time.” Her gun hand felt ready to cramp. She shifted her grip minutely, hoping Dom would not notice. “I think I could ruin your reputation if I really tried.”
“I’m not afraid of your threats.”
Maybe he wasn’t, but neither was he foolish enough to take a chance.
Lana watched his eyes move from her face to the gun and back again. “Go ahead, take her, take ’em all. I’ll be over tomorrow.”
“And you won’t kill Jacaranda.”
“How can I? You’ve got the gun?”
She looked at the revolver shining in her hand. This was not the only gun in the house. He might have plenty of firepower elsewhere. At the least, a rifle. “If you really want your family back, you’ll swear.”
She saw his Adam’s apple bob.
“On your mother’s name. On Tinera’s name.” The two Tineras.
“Jesus, woman—”
“You’ll lose her forever if you hurt that animal.”
“Goddamn it, she killed my baby. A father has rights in this society.”
“Tell it to the shrink.”
He closed his eyes and tipped against the back of the couch.
“Swear, Dom. On the two Tineras.”
He looked at Lana with such precise and undisguised loathing it struck her that, until that moment, she had never been hated. People disliked her sometimes but this was hate and it felt like a weapon aimed at her head. She forced herself not to cringe.
“I swear.”
Chapter T hirty
For fifteen minutes Micki had been watching the perspiration circles under Ms. Hoffman’s arms grow to the size of salad plates. She wore shields under her blouse—Micki could see their outline—but apparently she just soaked right through them. Why? Hot flashes? It couldn’t be nerves because the class was discussing The Scarlet Letter, which Hoffman could practically recite from memory. Was all that moisture streaming from her pores just an unfortunate biological fact? God, she thought, life is unfair.
People die, people sweat, your aunt and cousins move in with you, and there’s some huge disaster no one really talks about. And Micki was supposed to concentrate on The Scarlet Letter.
She couldn’t get behind Hester Prynne. Why didn’t she just move to New York or New Amsterdam—whatever? Did she have more than one blouse? Did they all have the red “A” on them?
And what did it matter anyway?
Micki’s home had turned into a boarding house since Aunt Kathryn and all came to live with them. At first Micki felt sorry for her cousins, especially Tinera, but when she tried to say so, Tinera blew her off. Aunt Kathryn was meeting with Uncle Dom today at Jessie Ward’s office. Accidentally on purpose, Micki had heard Kathryn on the phone telling him they could only talk to him with a third person present. Like a referee. Micki had been surprised to hear her aunt stand up for herself, and even more surprised that her Uncle Dom agreed to her terms.
She was glad Dom was not her father.
As far as Micki could tell, crummy fathers far outnumbered the good. Tiff’s mom had raised her alone since she was two and her father went off to sail around the world. They were still married, and he came back to San Diego every now and then. Tiff barely knew him. There were girls whose fathers lived at home but never talked to them or drank too much or yelled all the time. Worse than beating and drinking had been the story her grandmother once told about her father. She had been the youngest of fourteen children, raised on an apple orchard in Idaho. Her father called her “the little one” because he could not remember her name.
Micki’s father—Jack—had lots of names for her: Tricky Micki, Michelle ma belle. He had been the best dad; there would never be another like him.
Ms. Hoffman was talking about sin and temptation and retribution, making The Scarlet Letter more complicated than it had to be. The way Micki saw it, the story showed what happened when people didn’t tell the truth. If the Rev loved Hester, he would have told the truth and saved them all a world of trouble. Forget all the sin stuff. Micki wasn’t even sure she believed in it, and she wasn’t going to worry about it now. She had enough going on between her ears.
Fathers—good, bad, dead, alive—they filled up her brain and never gave up. The night before, she barely slept at all for thinking of Eddie French. She wished she had words to describe the feeling in her stomach when he looked at her. She saw him, and at the same time she saw herself—not exactly the same, but deeply familiar. Scary.
On Sunday they had gone to brunch alone at the Catamaran. Micki felt happy and self-conscious at the same time. She wondered if people at other tables knew they were father and daughter. He had reserved a window table overlooking Mission Bay. She ate a whole plate of lobster chunks off the buffet and told him about the family trip to Maine where she saw a cook drop live, squirming lobsters into a pot of cold water to cook them. She had asked her father why they didn’t scramble out—what good were those claws if not to rescue themselves? Jack said the lobster didn’t know he was cooking until it was too late.
Micki worried that her mother was a bit like a lobster. If she didn’t stop pretending everything was okay, she might never be able to get real again. And if Beth hung out with Kimmie and her lowlife friends much longer something bad would happen to her, too.
Eddie was easy to talk to. Time went quickly over brunch and later, walking beside the bay dotted with sailboats and the sand where children built castles like it was June, not January. But she still did not understand what he wanted. To know her, he said. To be part of her life. Sometimes this made sense and other times—like when she remembered fifth grade and thought about The Fives—it amazed her and made her suspicious.
She wanted to trust Eddie but maybe he was a liar, a chea
t. Maybe a player.
Her father, Jack, never hid things or disguised them or pointed her in the wrong direction. What she learned from him was that so long as she knew the truth, it was as good as finding the North Star. The truth kept her from getting crazy lost, boiling up in a pot like a lobster.
Her mom seemed to believe that if she kept on acting like everything was fine and they were still the perfect Porters, it would magically happen that way. Like a fairy godmother waving her wand around. Micki had decided that her mom was just generally afraid of the truth; she must have been this way when Micki’s father was alive, but no one noticed then because he balanced her out. Like on scales.
Micki heard her name.
“Are you with us today?” Ms. Hoffman’s yellow-green eyes sparkled in Micki’s direction.
Micki blinked and nodded.
“Then will you give us your opinion, please?”
Micki cleared her throat and looked at Tiff beside her, doodling Audrey Hepburn faces with big eyes and thick bangs.
Ms. Hoffman asked, not unkindly. “Did you enjoy the book, Micki, or did you simply rent the movie version as most of your classmates seem to have done?”
“I didn’t see the movie,” she said honestly.
“Is it too much to hope that you actually read the book?”
“I couldn’t understand parts of it.” Like most books written before 1950, The Scarlet Letter had too many words. This was not what Ms. Hoffman wanted to hear. “The sentences were hard. Too long.”
Ms. Hoffman lifted her eyebrows.
“I liked what it was about.”
“Would you care to share what that was? In simple sentences, of course.”
Her mom said Ms. Hoffman spoke archly. To Micki she was just sort of sarcastic all the time.
“If you don’t tell the truth you can get sick and ruin your life. Even die.”
Ms. Hoffman smiled, showing her large, white teeth. “In part, you are correct. What else? Anyone?” She raised her eyebrows and scanned the class. When no one volunteered, she walked to the windows and for a moment watched the eucalyptus bordering the school grounds rock in the wind. “I think we should just shut the school during Santa Anas.”
The Edge Of The Sky Page 28
