by Lisa Tucker
But then Janice found an article that had an effect on her unlike anything else she’d ever read. It was just luck that she came upon this one because it was in a women’s magazine and she prided herself on never reading those. If she hadn’t been stuck in a long Labor Day line at the grocery store, she would never have opened the slick glossy, and she would never have known that Lucy Dobbins Keenan had finally given her own interview.
The article was billed as an “intimate chat” with the Academy Award–nominated actress, wife and mother, but the first few paragraphs were hardly what Janice would call intimate. All the questions were about the roles Lucy had played (Joan blah blah, Helena blah blah blah), and especially about the movie she had decided to do next: another war picture, this time about Vietnam, with Lucy playing a nurse on the battlefield who takes it upon herself to write letters to the girlfriends and wives and mothers of the men who die in her arms. Called Tell Laura I Love Her, it was being directed by one of Keenan’s former assistants. “My husband read the script first,” Lucy said. (Urgh.) “We both thought it was a beautiful story. It’s in preproduction right now, scouting for locations, getting the rest of the cast, hiring the crew. The shooting is set to begin in a few months and I’m eager to begin.”
The rest of the interview though really was about Lucy’s life. And it was three full pages—with pictures. Lucy sitting on the patio in her gorgeous garden. Lucy standing in her gigantic kitchen, with pots on the stove and a spoon in her hand. Lucy in the playroom. Lucy only twenty-four years old and yet the mother of growing children.
The little boy, who they called Jimmy, was four now. The baby girl, Dorothea, was already two. He had Lucy’s red hair; hers was brown like Charles’s. They both had rosy cheeks and creamy skin and sprinkles of freckles, and Janice thought they were just about the cutest kids she’d ever seen.
In the best picture, Lucy was sitting on a big blue and white love seat in the playroom with the little girl on her lap, and the boy next to her, holding her arm. And there was no denying it any longer: Lucy was happy. She was still as skinny as ever, but the expression on her face was open and radiant and content in a way that Janice had never seen, not in either of her movies and definitely not when they used to live in Venice.
Didn’t this have to mean Charles wasn’t the ogre Janice had made him out to be? No, Janice thought stubbornly, there must be some other explanation. Maybe he’s not home very much. After all, he wasn’t in any of the pictures, now, was he? Or maybe he’s home, but always shut away in his enormous office—three leather couches and a mahogany desk the size of most people’s beds—that Janice remembered from the article about their decorator, Eric Giles. True, Lucy talked about how they shared the task of caring for the kids, how they didn’t even have a nanny because they wanted to be there for all the moments of Jimmy’s and Dorothea’s lives, but Lucy might say that even if she did do ninety percent of the work. Janice had lived with her; she knew Lucy could do all the shopping and cooking and dishes and cleaning and never let on that she thought there was anything unfair about it. Hell, Lucy could get up early on Sunday and walk blocks to get apple donuts she didn’t even like. She’d done it nearly every Sunday when she lived with Janice.
At this point, Janice started to feel bad. She was still reading the interview—listening to Lucy talk about why they only had a weekly cleaning service, no servants: “I don’t want my children to grow up thinking that they can just drop their socks on the floor and someone else will take care of it”—but she was dying to get out of the grocery store. Wouldn’t this stupid line ever move? She thought about deserting her cart, but it wouldn’t help: she’d still have to pay for the magazine.
Lucy had really walked all those blocks on Sundays to get Janice’s favorite donuts. She’d really done almost all their housework. Whenever Janice tried to thank her, she said it was the least she could do. “You’re my friend,” Lucy would say. As though that explained everything.
Janice waited until she loaded all the groceries into her and Peter’s Datsun before she let herself cry. The worst was remembering the night Lucy told her she was getting married. The guilt was more than Janice could stand.
Lucy had been gone all weekend on her first trip with him. She’d confided that it would be their first time in bed too, which Janice thought was really weird, given what a playboy Keenan was rumored to be. Maybe it was some kind of game he played with young girls. Who knew with a guy like him, but Janice was fully prepared for Lucy to come home Sunday night devastated because he’d dumped her. She was ready to sympathize.
Instead Lucy walked in wearing an engagement ring and holding a bunch of pink roses. A big bunch. Four dozen, Lucy said, answering Janice’s question about how many.
Janice felt immediately annoyed. It seemed so unfair. Lucy didn’t even like roses, and she, Janice, loved them. She loved pink ones best of all.
But then she discovered the flowers were for her. Lucy had bought them.
She was very surprised. “Why?” she said softly, accepting them from Lucy’s hands.
“Because of all you’ve done for me. If it wasn’t for you, I might be sleeping on a bench or dead. If it wasn’t for you, I wouldn’t have gone to the party that day and I wouldn’t have met Charles.” Lucy put her arm around Janice and whispered, “Thank you for being the best friend I’ve ever had.”
Peter found his wife parked in the driveway of their brand-new fixer-upper, still crying.
“I have to see her. I’ve been a terrible friend.”
Janice had three current girlfriends, but Peter knew immediately she wasn’t talking about any of them.
“Good idea,” he said. He waited until much later, after they’d had dinner and done some work and Janice had read him most of the article about Lucy and told him lots of memories, good and bad, before he asked if this meant she’d finally changed her mind about Charles Keenan.
“Hell no,” she said. “What does that have to do with anything?”
The next morning, she started making phone calls, trying to track down Lucy. It wasn’t as easy as she hoped. She was still getting the runaround from publicists more than two weeks later, when she turned on the local news, while she was making dinner, and discovered that Lucy was in the hospital. Something had happened at the Keenan residence, and the police had been called, but other than that, the newscaster didn’t have any information. Lucy had been taken to UCLA by helicopter. Her condition wasn’t believed to be serious, but “stay tuned.”
Peter and Janice spent the next hour speculating what could have happened. A household accident was the most likely thing. The police being called was probably meaningless, especially as this was an upscale place like Malibu. The police would probably rush over if someone broke their foot.
Unless Charles had hit her. There was no evidence that he would, but no evidence that he wouldn’t either. As Janice told Peter, the guys who do are often the last guys you’d suspect.
“But you’ve suspected him forever,” Peter said dryly.
Janice shot him a dirty look, but she didn’t say anything. She’d just decided that she was going to the hospital to find out for herself. UCLA Med Center would be two hours from their house with traffic, but Peter didn’t object when Janice turned off the oven and said she was leaving now. He offered to drive her, but she said she really needed the time alone.
She needed to think about what to say to Lucy. She also needed to work out a way to convince them that she should be allowed to see Lucy, that she wasn’t just another fan or well-wisher or nut.
When she got to the hospital, there was a crowd of reporters outside, and she realized that this was going to be tough. No reporters had been let past the front desk of ICU. She overheard one of them complaining about it.
ICU. Lucy was in the ICU? Jesus, Janice thought, and her heart started pounding so hard she could feel it in her fingers.
She knew what floor the ICU was on because she’d had a social work client taken ther
e when her rundown apartment building caught fire. The elevators were flanked by hospital officials, so Janice took the stairs. All the way up, she felt her panic rising. What could have happened to her friend?
She came out of the stairwell right by the ICU nursing desk, where more hospital officials were stationed to keep the curious away from the actress. One of them stopped Janice, but before they could send her back downstairs, she heard a man mumble, “It’s all right,” and then Charles Keenan himself was standing next to her.
“Janice.” His voice was full of agony. “My poor Lucy.”
He was swaying with the weight of his grief, but he managed to lead her down the hall to Lucy’s room. Neither of them could go inside because the doctors were with her, but they could see her through the glass. Or they could see something: a small human form covered in bandages, tubes coming out everywhere: her arms, her nose, her mouth, her stomach, one that seemed to be attached to her leg.
Charles’s hands were flat on the glass; his head was hanging down. When Janice said his name, he turned around and looked at her, and that’s when she realized he was crying soundless tears, the tears of someone so heartbroken they have shrunken down and become nothing but their wish that this not be true, because it cannot be true if they are to continue to breathe and live.
Yet they continue to breathe because life is profoundly unfair. That’s what Janice thought when she looked at the horrified man in front of her. Of course she took him in her arms.
ten
SEPTEMBER 21, 1982, started as an ordinary day at the Keenan house. Charles’s mother, Margaret, was away in Florida, visiting some of her retiree friends, but this wasn’t unusual: she took trips like this several times a year. Dorothea woke up ridiculously early, but that wasn’t too unusual either, unfortunately.
At 5:14 a.m. Lucy discovered the little girl standing next to the bed, pulling on her arm. “Up, Mommy,” Dorothea said, and Lucy pulled her up and deposited her under the blanket, safely nestled between herself and the still sleeping Charles.
“Back to sleep,” Lucy whispered, closing her eyes.
Dorothea didn’t complain, but Lucy wasn’t surprised when she took a peek a minute later and the little girl was looking around. Dorothea never went back to sleep, but sometimes Lucy did. The key was to be very quiet and very, very boring. The key was not to do anything to give the little girl any hope that morning, and playtime, had already arrived.
Lucy was just drifting off again when she heard Dorothea laugh and say, “Daddy!”
He was tickling her foot. At 5:37, according to the big red numbers on the alarm clock.
“Charles,” she complained.
“It wasn’t me,” he said, lifting Dorothea over his head and bringing her back down to give her a tummy kiss. “She was tickling me first. Tell your mommy it’s not my fault.”
“Not Daddy,” Dorothea giggled.
“All right, all right,” Lucy said, but she couldn’t help smiling a little. “We can’t run all over the house though. We don’t want to wake up Jimmy. Today is his preschool trip to the firehouse, remember?”
Charles and Dorothea made a ssh sound.
“That’s right, you two. Now I’m going to get dressed and you lay here and be as quiet as mice.”
“Mickey isn’t particularly quiet,” Charles whispered to Dorothea. “Neither is Minnie. I think we can handle this.”
Lucy smiled again before she shut the door behind her and walked into her bathroom suite.
A half hour later, she was showered and dressed and ready to take Dorothea downstairs for breakfast. Charles would have fed her, but Dorothea pitched a fit if Lucy wasn’t there in the morning.
“I’ll make the coffee,” he said, standing and putting on his pants.
She leaned over and kissed him. Then Dorothea had to kiss him too. Her kisses were always accompanied by a wet smacking sound, and he always laughed.
When they got downstairs, Tigger was whimpering to be let out. Charles opened the sunroom door and the dog slowly walked into the bushes. He was a stray Jimmy had spotted limping along PCH, and Lucy had convinced Charles to give in when their son begged them to stop. The vet said the mutt was at least ten years old, but Jimmy named him Tigger anyway, bounce or no bounce.
By seven, the three of them were at the table in the breakfast room and Tigger was back in his basket. Dorothea was tearing up her scrambled eggs and bagel and scooting some into her mouth and some into the river of milk she’d made in the depression of her high-chair tray. Charles was looking at the newspaper, wearing his brand-new glasses. He’d never worn glasses before, but all of a sudden he needed them—and not just for reading, like Walter and some of his other friends, but all the time. The ophthalmologist had explained that in Charles’s case, the vision problem wasn’t actually new, but the eye muscles had been working hard to accommodate it. Now that he was getting older, the muscles were weakening. “Just chock it up to being over forty,” the ophthalmologist had said, trying to reassure both Lucy and Charles that it wasn’t anything to worry about and it had nothing to do with the slight dropsy on the right side, a condition Charles had had since childhood, which made that eye sometimes appear smaller. The glasses had thick black frames and an old-fashioned boxy shape. Lucy had convinced him they were the right choice when she said they made him look like a sexy genius.
Lucy herself was drinking her second cup of coffee, watching a gray bird standing in the dewy morning grass, listening to the monitor for signs that Jimmy’s cow alarm had mooed and he was up. He wanted to get ready all by himself, but if he was late for preschool, he’d miss the class trip. The teacher had sent home two notes about this. The bus the school had rented was leaving at precisely 8:30, returning at precisely 1:30. If any child wasn’t on it, the bus wouldn’t be able to wait.
Her little boy was so responsible. He arrived downstairs with his teeth brushed, his hair patted down and pushed out of his eyes (he still wasn’t good at figuring out a comb) and his red shorts and red T-shirt and even red socks already on.
Jimmy was wearing red because they were going to the firehouse. He said if the firemen needed someone to help, he wanted to be picked. He was the tallest boy in class anyway.
Charles told him that being the tallest and wearing red and having red hair would have to tip the scales in his favor.
“What’s ‘tip the scales,’ Daddy?”
“I’ll tell you on the way to school,” Charles said. “You need to feed Tigger first. Then come back and have some breakfast. We don’t have much time.”
After a minute, he put his paper down and looked at Lucy. “I was thinking of driving him to the firehouse.”
She told him that the school was going to the fire department headquarters, not the local station. An hour and a half drive, probably more with traffic. “By the time you got back here, you’d have to turn around and get him again.”
“I’ll wait there then. I don’t have that much to do today.”
“But why? Jimmy’s looking forward to going with his friends. They’re all going to have lunch at the big McDonald’s. He’s told me about it a hundred times.”
“He can still have lunch at McDonald’s with everyone. I’ll drive him there too.”
Lucy looked at him. “Is this about the bus?”
He nodded. “I’d rather not have him on it. They don’t have seat belts and the drivers are typically undertrained. I think he’ll be safer with me in the Mercedes.”
Lucy knew better than to argue the point. When it came to safety issues, Charles was implacable, but it was something she loved about him: that taking care of his family was always his top priority, no matter what. God knows he did have things to do today. He had a pile of scripts to read and dozens of phone calls to return from his secretary and his assistants and some budget problem he had to discuss with Walter, et cetera, et cetera. Her husband had an incredibly demanding job. Sometimes he was still working in his office long after she was in bed.
> “Do you want me to take the pumpkin with us?” he said, glancing at Dorothea. “You could have the time to yourself. A chance to get some of your work done.”
“Yeah!” Dorothea said and clapped her hands, splashing milk all over the tray.
The main thing Lucy needed to do was read the latest script revisions for Tell Laura I Love Her. Charles still wasn’t happy and was requesting even more changes to enhance Lucy’s role. He was very protective of her career, but it wasn’t a problem. All the directors and producers she’d worked with so far were people who respected her husband and would listen to him.
The free time sounded wonderful, but Lucy told him it was probably a bad idea. “It’s Jimmy’s day. Plus, she’s going to need her nap or she’ll be so cranky by dinner we won’t be able to eat.”
Jimmy was at the table, pouring his own bowl of cereal. Charles told him to hurry so they could follow right behind the bus. Before he could object, Charles threw in, “You can make faces at your friends and I’ll honk at them.”
Lucy had already handed Jimmy his little backpack and kissed him goodbye. They were walking out the door when Lucy said to Charles, “I’ll miss you.”
He put his arms around her and pulled her against him. “I was really looking forward to nap time,” he whispered.
“Maybe tonight,” she said, but she knew it was doubtful. By the time the kids were in bed, one of them, usually Lucy herself, was always too tired.
“If not, there’ll be other naps,” he said, kissing her ear.
“As long as you wear your glasses,” she said, and he smiled and winked at her. Then he and Jimmy got in the silver car, and she watched them head down the driveway and through the gates and disappear.
