“Finally! Is Beth okay?”
“Yeah, she’s okay. Pretty upset, though. I’m sorry I took so long to call. I’ve got so much to tell you but we need to be sitting down. It’s been crazy. How’s Mom?”
“In your bed.”
“Kathryn?”
“Gone.”
Lana sighed.
“Dom’s your friend for life.”
“Yeah,” Lana said. “I bet.”
“Just tell me—”
“Later. When I get home. For now, I need you to get me Grace Mamoulian’s home number. It’s in the blue address book. Somewhere on my desk.”
“You expect me to find it? Jesus, Lana, how do you—”
“It’s there. Keep looking.”
Grace did not answer on the first ring-through. Lana got her message machine. “Grace, it’s Lana Porter. Emergency. Call me on my cell.” She left her number and hung up, counted to ten, and called again. It was the middle of the night and Grace was probably in bed trying to pretend that the phone wasn’t ringing. Lana left more or less the same message the second time. Hung up and called again. This time Grace answered.
“Who is this?”
“Lana Porter.”
“Lana? What in the name of—”
“It’s Kimmie Taylor.”
“Who?”
“Kimmie. Taylor. Your student. She’s in the emergency room at Harbor View.”
“Christ, Lana, why’re you calling me? What about her mother? It’s almost—”
“I’m calling you because for the last six weeks Kimmie has been living alone in a condo in the Gaslamp.”
“That’s impossible. I spoke to her mother just a couple of weeks—”
“Her sister does an excellent imitation. I’m told she’s a drama major at State.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Tonight Kimmie’s in emergency. She was doing crystal and had a seizure. She’s lucky to be alive.”
“But I can’t understand . . .”
“Don’t bother understanding. Just call her father—you have his Irvine number, don’t you?”
“I suppose it’s on the computer.”
“Can you access from home?”
“Of course.”
“Then call him and tell him to get down here. Now.”
Derek Taylor was a short, slender man, nattily dressed even at half past four in the morning. He had a tanned and wind-bitten seafarer’s face with deep, vertical lines scoring the cheeks. He probably sails every weekend, Lana thought, when she saw him walk into the waiting room wearing topsiders. And he’s probably never invited Kimmie to go along.
“Where’s my daughter?”
“They’ve taken her upstairs for observation,” Lana said. “She’ll have to be here a couple of days.”
He moved toward the admitting window.
Beth said, “Can I speak to you, please?”
“Who’re you?” He squinted at her. “Were you part of this?” Beth looked at Lana and then nodded. “I’m her friend.”
“And?”
Lana said, “I’d listen to her if I were you.”
“But I’m not you, whoever you are.”
“Lana Porter. This is Beth, my daughter.”
He did not acknowledge the introduction. “I got woke up in the middle of the night, phone woke my wife and my son and he’s probably still screaming, and I’ve driven two hours from Laguna Niguel—”
“Why don’t you love Kimmie anymore?”
Derek Taylor looked stunned and then angry. “What’s going on here? Where’s my wife? My ex-wife?”
“No one knows,” Lana said. “Kimmie’s been living alone since Christmas.”
“Christ!” He sat down on one of the plastic waiting room chairs. “That bitch.” He tapped his fist against his mouth and muttered to himself.
From what Beth had told Lana, this man had ignored his responsibilities as a father and virtually abandoned Kimmie. Lana had expected to despise him, but now she saw that he was probably not the demon father he had been painted. There were things he knew and things he didn’t, truths he avoided seeing like all the rest of them. Problems everywhere and nothing simple. Being a father or a mother in Y2K: there was hardly a job more difficult. And yet everyone wanted to do it—from this man with his Mussolini-faced baby to Jack with Dom and Kathryn, herself, and Eddie lined up between.
She leaned forward and rested her head on her arms folded across her knees, too exhausted to speak.
“Tell me what you know,” Derek Taylor said to Beth. “Don’t bother covering up or lying—”
“She doesn’t lie, Mr. Taylor.”
“Yeah, right. Just tell me.”
Lana listened as Beth told Kimmie’s father what she had told Lana, Michael, and the police. But at the end she added, “I’m her only friend, Mr. Taylor, and she tells me things.”
“What kind of things.”
“She loves you.” She told him the stories Kimmie made up about tickets to rock concerts, midnight phone calls, and a vacation in Tahiti.
“Well,” he said, “she gets that lying from her mother.”
“But, see, she wants—”
“Come on, Beth.” Lana looked at her watch. She was so tired her vision blurred. “It’s almost morning, time to go home.”
Derek Taylor avoided her eyes when he spoke in his abrupt and irritated way. “I want to thank you, for taking care of my daughter.” Lana supposed he meant it but there was no telling from either his voice or demeanor.
“Can she go and live with you?” Beth asked. “In Laguna Niguel? She could help your wife with the baby—I bet she could use help.”
He looked at her as if she were speaking a language he did not understand.
“Come on, Beth,” Lana said, and put her arm around Beth’s shoulder. “Time to go home.”
2002
Chapter Thirty-seven
When Lana talked about the first several weeks of the year 2000, she said that she and her daughters had gone a little crazy. Her friends, Mars, and her therapist denied this, but it was only by using words like mad and crazy and totally wacko that Lana could understand how close she had come to losing her daughters. Eventually, the puzzle pieces began to draw together and Lana thought she understood. Even so, her missteps—stumbling through fear and inattention—did not lose their sickening power. They all went zany for a while.
Two days after the scene at the condo, Wendy had called Jessie and given her an outline of what had happened. Jessie then insisted that Lana and the girls had to go into therapy. “You should have done it a year ago,” she said. When Lana continued to hold out for reasons she could never explain adequately to anyone, including herself, the whole run-and-read club ganged up on her. Jessie recommended a woman in La Jolla, just up the road from Urban Greenery, a seasoned family therapist; worn down, Lana made the first appointment and felt such relief afterward that she told Mars it was as if every pore in her body opened wide and screamed thank you.
During their first session, a one-on-one, the therapist, a large, relaxed woman named Frances, helped Lana see that while she had been searching for the secret weapon that would make her a good mother, she had overlooked the strengths she had, her willingness and diligence, the love she had for her daughters.
In Frances’s comfortably decorated corner office with large, sunny windows overlooking a busy La Jolla street, it was as if muscles held taut for months finally let go. Lana did not sit down in Frances’s office, she sank into the embrace of the cushions and heaved a great sigh of relief.
After she had told Frances what was happening, she said, “When Jack was alive, we all got along so well.”
“Is that what you mean about a family that works? It gets along?”
“Well, yes.”
“Are you saying that before Jack died, you never had fights?” Frances looked skeptical.
“Oh, yeah, of course we did. And the kids weren’t always good. But it all worked, like a machine that was oiled,
and when he died he took the oil.”
Sometimes Lana left Frances’s office thinking they were going in circles and positive that therapy was a waste of money.
Beth and Micki went along with Lana to see Frances, and from their first family session, it was as if a window had been opened in a tightly closed room baking under a hot sun. Back on Triesta Way they breathed more easily, the house seemed less claustrophobic and, ultimately, less haunted.
Micki thrived at Balboa High School. No one called her “reject” or “trash-can kid.” Her grades were good enough to satisfy Lana and by the time she was seventeen she was looking ahead to entering the University of California at Santa Cruz. She thought she would like to study horticulture, maybe go to the ends of the earth searching for substances in bushes and trees that would save the world from disease. But she was also attracted to theater and wanted to go on the stage, be a New Yorker. Beth said she belonged to the Career of the Month Club. Lana said she could do anything she wanted but secretly hoped she would decide on a more prosaic career. Maybe a doctor or lawyer or teacher.
The girls had graduated from family therapy after three months. Now it was Lana and Frances, one-on-one, once a week.
“I’m afraid for Micki.” As she had always been. Frances helped her understand that her fear had been based less on Micki herself than on Lana’s own interpretation of what it meant to be adopted.
“Why don’t you tell her you’re afraid for her?”
Lana shook her head.
“Why not?”
“I don’t want her to know.”
“And why is that?”
Lana thought about quitting therapy but kept going back every week. Afterwards she would sometimes visit her mother or drop in on Mars at the university but nothing she did could fully erase Frances’s questions. She pondered them all week long but rarely felt like she learned anything from the effort.
However, she did tell Micki she was afraid for her and made her laugh and spread her arms wide.
“Look at me, Ma. I’m a survivor.”
And so was Beth. Why hadn’t Lana seen this before?
She decided she wasn’t very good at therapy.
During the two years since he had entered their lives, Eddie French had been absent more than present. But he called Micki two or three times a month from European capitals, India, Japan, and South Korea. There was never a word from Barbara, and Lana no longer worried there would be. Lana accepted the fact that she was not a forever-inferior substitute for the woman who had given birth to her. And with this had come permission to like Eddie French.
“Which doesn’t mean I want him living with us,” she told Frances. “Not that he wants to. He and Micki are friends, but Jack’s her father.”
“He doesn’t need protecting, then?”
“I guess he never did.”
Jack was with Lana all the time. She was as much an agnostic as she’d ever been and did not believe his spirit actually kept her company. But she felt his presence through her memories, sometimes so powerfully she imagined that if she turned around she would see him standing behind her, his warm hand on her shoulder. The girls liked to talk about him and said they heard his voice in their heads, advising and directing and applauding. She went to Frances’s office and said she was angry with them all the time.
“Why is that?”
“I envy them. I want to hear his voice. Why do they get it?”
“Have you told them that?”
“Should I?”
“What do you think?”
“I don’t know if it would do any good for them to know I was jealous.”
“Would it hurt them?”
“I’m their mother.”
Frances had a soft laugh and a pretty smile; she was one of the warmest and most reassuring people Lana had ever met. But she often made Lana as mad as her girls did. I must be wacko, she thought. Once a week she paid one hundred and twenty dollars an hour so this woman could ask her irritating questions.
Beth had tried to contact Kimmie through her father, who said his daughter lived in West Hollywood with his ex. He gave her a number but when she called, a recorded message told her the phone had been disconnected. A few months later, just about the time Beth had stopped wondering aloud what had become of her friend, she got a postcard without a return address, announcing that Kimmie and her mother had moved to New York where her mother had a fabulous new job doing makeup for the top fashion models. Kimmie was going to be a model and had already signed a contract. Beth gave Lana the card to read; the bravado and false cheer, the lies, reached into Lana and twisted her heart.
It was not long before Beth was hanging out with her old friends and the basketball coach accepted her back with both hands extended. Her marks improved, she ate better, but still she was different. Changed.
“In what way?” Frances asked.
Lana had been in therapy for more than a year and she was used to the questions, the questions that never stopped, that had no purpose but to confuse and drive her around the bend and into the nut house. As far as Lana knew, Frances did not have opinions or a life outside the four walls of her office on Herschel Avenue. Lana’s best guess was that she slept on the couch, kept her clothes in the closet, and spent her nonworking hours making up lists of impossible-to-answer questions for Lana Porter.
Most of the time, Lana sat in a chair facing her therapist, but sometimes she was overtaken by restless energy and had to get up and move around. She stood now, looking out the window at the people in shorts and tank tops, the woman walking a standard poodle.
Frances asked, “How is she different?”
It was hard to speak the answer. If she didn’t say it, she could pretend it was not true. “There’s something sad in her now. It’s like she went somewhere and saw something and it changed her.” Her voice cracked. “She’s not innocent anymore.”
“Is loss of innocence a bad thing?”
“It wasn’t the guys and the drugs. I mean, they were bad but it was the way they all just walked away from Kimmie. That was evil, that was a touch of something really dark and nasty, and it’s left a mark on her. She told me this guy named Tex French-kissed her. She said it was disgusting but if he’d done it again, she wouldn’t have minded too much.”
Frances sighed. “The gate has to open, Lana. Eventually. There would have been no story if Adam and Eve hadn’t lost their place in the garden.”
What the hell was that supposed to mean?
She asked, “Am I ever going to get this?”
“I think you’ve already got it, Lana.”
For the first time since Lana had known her, Frances stepped out from behind her desk and came to stand beside her at the window. She rested her arm on Lana’s back and patted gently.
“Your girls are doing well. Beth’s going to get a basketball scholarship to wherever she wants to go. Micki’s heading off to UC–Santa Cruz, full of ambition.”
“But we fight—”
“Of course you do. And then you make up.”
True.
“Not all mothers and daughters do, you know. In some families the resentments simmer along for years. But not in yours. Why do you think that is?”
It was not the first time Lana had wondered about this. She thought it was because, when they stood away from whatever they were arguing about—field trips or clothes or Micki’s smoking—they knew the truth. That they loved each other. Though their world had changed, that fact had not.
“Lana, I don’t think I’ve ever met a parent who did not claim to love his or her children. Look at Kimmie’s father. But the rage and resentment goes on. Why doesn’t that happen at the Porter house?”
Lana started to say she did not know. Frances stopped her with a cautionary finger.
“You always say you don’t know. But you do. You do.”
Down on the street, the woman was feeding her poodle an ice cream cone and a woman and small child had stopped to watch.
“
I think we really know each other.” But they had not always. Lana said, more to herself than to Frances, “So maybe what happened wasn’t the worst. It made us stop pretending.”
“Exactly,” Frances said, and returned to her desk. “You’re not going to stop having troubles with your girls. Believe me, Lana, if Jack had lived even he would not have been able to stop them. Kids and their parents, and especially girls and their mothers, always disagree; there is always the pull of one generation against the other. You know that from your own experience. You wanted your mother to keep the Hollywood Cafe, but she wanted to sell it so she could put that part of her life behind her forever. Well, she sold it but she’s still the same old Stella, as you have said so often. Nothing has really changed except she has fewer manicures.”
“But Jack took something with him—”
“He took himself, Lana, his physical presence, and when he did, you three got confused for a time and forgot how to be honest with each other.”
Lana wasn’t sure she understood. It could not be so simple.
Frances laughed. “This is graduation day, Lana. You don’t need me anymore.”
Chapter Thirty-eight
Buster surprised everyone by living until January 2002. And then, one mild morning, Lana went down to the kitchen before first light and when she rattled the dog dishes Gala came running, but Buster did not stick his face through the pet door and look around as if to ask if she was serious about this food business. With a sinking heart Lana fed Gala, and then went into her garden and walked the paths until she found him curled in the morning’s first sunlight at the foot of an olive tree. Lana knelt beside him and ran her hands down the curve of his cold back. She imagined that he had not felt good the night before and planned ahead—she was convinced some animals could do this. He knew he wanted to feel the sun on his body first thing so he settled down in the bed of mint that grew at the base of the olive and fell asleep.
It had been as easy as that. She kissed his bony old forehead and felt a mixture of sorrow and relief.
He had grown light with age, easy to lift and carry to the wheelbarrow in the shade house. She laid him down gently and went indoors. In the guest room she rummaged in a wicker chest for a blanket she had been saving for this purpose, an old blue wool blanket she had when she was a child. Worn smooth and almost silky by time, when she pressed it against her nose she still caught a faint scent of whatever it was she had loved when she was little and carried it around with her and would not sleep without it. In the shade house she wrapped Buster in the blanket and then carried his body to the 4Runner and laid it on the back seat.
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