“But you had that dream, Bev. No one else. You.”
Bev shook my hands off her shoulders and faced me. “It’s not real, kid. Any of it.”
She got up, walked toward the door, then looked back one last time. “Don’t get me wrong. I had fun, but I’m done with all the bullshit.”
Tanner waited outside. Bev melted into his arms, and they walked away toward his room.
We all get weak from time to time. I hoped that Tanner would bring her back to her center, but the next morning, both were gone.
By noon that next day, I’d formed a Re-welcome Team to bring them back, but Daya arrived at camp minutes before our departure and told us the news: the car that Beverly and Tanner had taken was destroyed by a logging truck. No one could have survived the accident.
I mourned my Beverly, but her death only strengthened my resolve. If she’d stayed pure on God’s Hill, she’d still be alive.
* * *
“Do you really work for public radio?”
Lakshmi pulled her earbud out and turned away from the journal. She’d glanced back only once during the entire hour and felt confident Beverly hadn’t seen her looking. Since nothing actually played through her headphones, she’d heard the shuffling of the group’s departure hugs and had planned on bumping into Beverly on the way out, but here the woman was, all alone, once again flawless in pink, this time a tasteful sundress. Two other people sat at a table in the far corner, but no one from Beverly’s group remained.
Lakshmi didn’t bother feigning surprise. “I’m slightly more than an intern and slightly less than everything else, but they do pay me.”
Beverly shook her head, then reached for the check on Lakshmi’s table. “Then this is on me.”
The waitress got the message from only a nod and a series of hand gestures.
“So you’ve decided I’m not a Dayan, Mrs. Chandler?”
“You sat here the whole time without singing, masturbating, or pulling a gun. No way you’re a Dayan.” She signed a credit card slip and closed the waiter’s checkbook with a crisp snap. “The Japanese garden is lovely in the afternoon. Shall we?”
Lakshmi caught up with the spry socialite on the sidewalk outside the door.
“I have to apologize,” Beverly started, leading Lakshmi through a gate, down a wooden path surrounded by bright-green bamboo, and into a refined area devoted to the plants and lifestyle of the Japanese countryside, “but had you shown up at my house and said you wanted to talk about my life as Beverly Bangs, I would have broken open a bottle of wine and gotten out the film projector.”
She stopped at a stone bench with an exquisite view of another tea house, this styled in feudal Japanese, and brushed the bench before sitting on the stone.
“But the freaking Dayans. Even twenty years later, there’s still a part of me that’s up on that hill. It’s Lakshmi, right? Lakshmi Anjale?”
Lakshmi nodded. “That’s right.”
“Indian?”
“I was born in Birmingham, England, but my parents were from India.”
“As Lakshmi was Vishnu’s wife, I assume you were brought up as a Hindu?”
Lakshmi held back the shudder that ran through her shoulders, not because of the religion itself but because of how her father, Dr. Anjale, refused to embrace any of its peaceful messages. It’d taken her years to understand that he would have applied the same strict conservative values to any theology on the planet, but the damage had been done. “I was.”
“I’m less familiar with the surname Anjale, but I believe it’s close to gift in Sanskrit, right?”
Lakshmi laughed. “I have no idea. I’m not big on Sanskrit.”
Beverly smiled. “I’ve been around. A spiritual wanderer, I like to say. I grew up Protestant, tried Buddhism, dabbled in Scientology, spent half the nineties with the Dayans, and eventually found a happy medium.”
“Are you still—”
“Religious?” Beverly looked out toward a water wheel that spread ripples across the surface of a koi pond. “I prefer spiritual.”
“Do you believe in God?”
“I believe in love, Lakshmi. Do you?”
“Not with the girls I’ve met in LA.”
A chuckle escaped Beverly’s serious demeanor; then business mode returned. “This is all off the record.” She wasn’t asking. “No recordings and no notes. I’ll answer your questions, but if anything said here today ever comes up on the radio, in writing, or even in some bullshit internet forum, my lawyer will sue you and every other Anjale he can find all the way back to India.”
“Brilliant, thanks,” Lakshmi said, more excited about the concession than the threat of legal action. “Before we begin, why the sudden change?”
Beverly cocked her head to one side and smiled. “As I said, I left part of myself up on that hill. I’ve never been strong enough to go back and get it. The least I can do is help Maya’s family understand what it was like. Ready?”
Normally Lakshmi would both record and take notes, letting the act of writing solidify the words in her mind. She commanded herself to remember every syllable. “When you are.”
Beverly looked down at her spotless nails. “What would you like to know?”
Given the constraints, Lakshmi went big. “What happened to Linda Sperry’s body?”
A small gasp of surprise escaped Beverly’s lips. “Most people start with the basics. Why’d I join? Did I know it was a cult? What were the orgies like? Why did I leave?”
“Okay,” Lakshmi said. “Why did you join?”
Beverly tapped Lakshmi on the leg. “Midlife whatever. I was drunk and high most of the time, and I was pissing away the money I’d made in an industry I was both ashamed of and too old for. Then a friend invited me to a party and I met Desmond Pratten.”
“Did he show you the face of God?”
Like the first time Lakshmi’d mentioned Maya Aronson in the woman’s rose garden, Beverly looked shocked. “Who have you been talking to?”
Lakshmi told her about Maya’s journal, though not the way it had been found. When she finished, Beverly looked amused.
“Hard to believe a diary survived this long, especially after Linda died. Once we got to Oregon, Daya went out of her way to destroy all written records. But that’s not what we were talking about.”
A hummingbird buzzed past, stopping to inspect a cherry tree months past its bloom.
“Should have been here in March,” Beverly said, facing outward, leaving Lakshmi unsure whether she’d addressed her or the bird. “Sakura season is heavenly.”
“Mrs. Chandler—”
“I never saw the face of God, Lakshmi. Not the first time Desmond tried to share his ‘knowing,’ not later with Daya, not ever.” Beverly laughed slightly. “But Maya, first time out of the gate, ‘I saw the face of God, God touched me, I get a new name.’ ”
“Forgive me for saying so,” Lakshmi started, “but you seem a bit—”
“Jealous? Oh yes, I was. I wanted that experience like a flower wants the sun. Everyone who got the ‘knowing’ said it was better than sex. And it answered any question.”
“Like what?”
“Like, is there really a God? If there was, that meant that everything Linda said would come true. And you have to remember, Linda said the world would end in the horrors of nuclear fallout. So yes, I was jealous that Desmond took to Maya so quickly. I only got her involved because I needed someone I knew to see if I was crazy or not. She showed up and became Magda all of a sudden.”
“Is that why you left?”
“I left because it was all”—she looked around, checking the sidewalk, then lowered her voice—“a giant load of crap. After three years, I finally figured it out.”
She stood and stretched out. Lakshmi rose as well. They walked down the path toward the Japanese tea house. “Because of Tanner?”
“Wow, you really do know everything. No, I left because of your first question.”
Lakshmi had almost forgotten the first
thing she’d asked. “Linda’s ascension?”
Beverly nodded. “Oh yes, our sainted Linda, the woman who predicted the very date the world would end. The night before we were supposed to move to Oregon, she gets up off her deathbed and says her bit about the end of the world. Man, did that piss Daya off.”
Her hand rose to her mouth, as if the words had escaped on their own and she wanted to grab them back. “I need to watch myself. The polite society of Pasadena has expectations. I can’t afford to break character.” Her hand returned to her side. “Have you ever felt you’re two people, Lakshmi? One public and one personal?”
“Only my entire life,” Lakshmi answered, suddenly back in a car with her father in her teens, an immigrant in America’s Connecticut with no mother and a sexual awakening that couldn’t be explored. She looked around the serene garden, remembering that she finally had her own apartment and the freedom to be whoever she wanted. Hell, she’d even seen a peacock an hour before. “Until moving to LA.”
“Good for you.” Beverly squinted against the sun. “I often wonder if it’s a holdover from my time on the hill. The need to be happy, to understand, to do as I’m told despite every logical thought in my brain. We lied so much and so often. It’s how we got what we wanted, even when lying to ourselves.”
Lakshmi felt they were veering off topic. “So the night Linda ascended—”
Beverly fell back into her story. “She made her big speech, and Daya and I pushed her back into the house. Daya started screaming at the woman, about how her dream would ruin everything, but Linda kept repeating the date. Daya told me to go and get Desmond, so I left the room and waited in the hall, not sure if I should go back in, until Desmond came back out with a ‘sacred’ mission.”
“A what?”
“ ‘Linda needs her plants,’ he said. I knew what he meant, of course. Even near the end, Linda spent her days either painting or planting, and she kept a collection of potted plants on the porch below her balcony. She’d planned on taking them to Oregon to seed the original fields. Long story short, since I shared a horticultural interest, I got to spend half an hour carrying potted plants from the balcony to the study.”
“Through the house?”
“No, the study had a retractable set of stairs that led down to the hillside porch below the balcony. So I traipsed back and forth, bringing pot after pot. Each time I’d see Linda, I’d ask how she was. Daya would pat Linda’s hand and say she was improving, but I didn’t see any difference. Eventually, they told me she’d fallen asleep. They even credited the fact that I’d brought fresh lavender into the room, said I was helping.”
“And where was Maya in all of this?”
“No idea. I didn’t see anyone but Desmond and Daya at the time. Finally, after the last plant was up, they told me to get some sleep. I went over to the bedrooms, took a shower, then fell asleep.”
“When did you wake up?”
“When everyone started screaming about the miracle. I went down the hall and heard the story, how Maya had seen Linda laying in her bed in a white nightgown. Daya mentioned that they’d moved Linda to her bed after I’d gone to sleep.”
“But you didn’t believe them?”
Beverly laughed again, shaking her head. “No, I did. It made sense to let the old woman sleep in her bed. It wasn’t until a month later that I remembered how Linda’d been wearing a light-purple nightgown that evening. Lilac, she would have called it, not white.”
Lakshmi didn’t see the significance. “Surely Maya could have seen lilac and called it white, right?”
“Oh yes. That’s what I assumed. But later that morning, when I mentioned we should take Linda’s plants to God’s Hill, Daya told me the plants should stay there, with Linda.”
Lakshmi’s jaw dropped. “You mean, you think Linda is buried on the property?”
“She sure as hell didn’t ascend.”
“Who owns the property now?”
“No idea, but Desmond would never let Linda’s house fall into someone else’s hands.”
Lakshmi did mental math. Driving to the hills over West Hollywood from Pasadena in the middle of rush hour meant over sixty minutes of white-knuckled traffic.
“Any chance you remember the address?”
CHAPTER
35
CAITIE, USE YOUR BRAIN.
Matthew Bergman never used the phrase use your head. Heads are just bone cages for the brain, he’d say. Your brain’s got everything you need to stay out of trouble.
“What about head butts?” Caitlin said, possibly aloud. She wasn’t sure. Her brain was sending mixed messages.
Message one, she’d awoken in a small wood-paneled room, fully dressed in Dayan red on top of a neatly made single bed. Her brain made peace with this setting. She’d been on God’s Hill, then the explosion, then hands. Someone had brought her here.
Message two was the troublemaker. Her father sat on the end of the bed near her feet. Maybe forty-five, wearing a gray sport coat over a white button-down, slacks underneath, his LAPD detective badge clipped on his belt, he lit a cigarette and exhaled.
“Head butts will hurt you just as much as whoever you’re hitting, maybe even worse. It’s a bad gamble, used only in life-or-death situations.”
“Is that what this is, Daddy?” she said, her words slow and chunky.
“You tell me, Slugger. Use your brain.”
“I miss you, so much.”
“Me too, but we don’t have time for that. Assess the situation—and show your work.”
Caitlin tried to prop herself up but lost to dizziness. “Well, I’m talking to my dead father, so I’ve either got a head wound, possibly from a head butt—”
“Or?”
She lay back down and ran her fingertips over her scalp. No damage, but the sensation sent ripples of pleasure down her spine.
“Or I’m super high,” she said with a giggle. “Sorry, Daddy.”
He smiled. “Nothing to be sorry about, kid. I mean, a woman of your intelligence needs to lay off the weed in general, but you’re gonna be fine if you get out of here.”
Hearing his voice again, being in his presence, brought a warmth across her whole body, and she smiled until tears formed in her eyes.
“How are you, Daddy?”
“Don’t worry about me, Caitie. Assess the situation.”
“But you’re here. Can you stay?”
He shook his head. “Sorry.”
“So am I.”
“What do you have to be sorry about?”
“I went looking for Mama Maya.”
He laughed. “Of course you did. What’d you find?”
The good feeling disappeared. “She didn’t want me.”
He shook his head. “Maya wasn’t ready to be a mom. That doesn’t mean she didn’t want you.”
The tears started to flow. “She didn’t want me, even when she cleaned up her life. She never wanted me.”
Her chest convulsed and she shook through the tears. Whatever trip she was on had taken a turn, and vomit came out with a cough.
“Turn your head,” her dad said, “or you’ll choke.”
Caitlin’s head lolled to one side, and more vomit came. “You don’t have to do this,” she said between the heaves.
Hands grabbed her face and brushed vomit from her cheek. “Try to breathe.”
“You’re not even my real father,” she said, then her stomach took over again.
“Don’t die on me, Caitlin.”
She opened her eyes to look up at her father’s face. But Matthew Bergman wasn’t the one keeping her from suffocating on her own sick. She blinked twice, now seeing a young woman, roughly the same age as she’d been when she received She Taught Me to Fly for her birthday.
“You’re gonna be okay,” the face said, though her eyes said anything but. “You’re gonna be fine. Promise.”
“You promise?” Caitlin thought, maybe out loud, maybe not.
“Promise,” the girl repea
ted. “I’m Promise.”
CHAPTER
36
“YOU SURE IT’S her rental, Tom? I mean, you’re positive?”
Johnny knocked his AC up a notch and sped up to fifty. He hated crossing bridges, always had. The green girders of the McCullough over the North Bend Channel had been there for years, but that didn’t make him feel any better and he hadn’t slept much.
Tom’s voice came through the speaker loud enough to make Johnny lower the volume, his ears still aching from the previous night’s explosion. “You said to find green pickups. I got a Dodge Fifteen Hundred with Washington plates and a Hertz sticker in the window.”
“How about a white Jeep?”
Seconds after the Dayan motor pool went up, he’d seen the reporter running through the field. Then all hell had broken looser, a firefight had ensued, and he’d dived into the woods. He’d had his own retreat to worry about but had caught sight of a white Jeep Wrangler tearing ass in the opposite direction with Caitlin Bergman in the passenger seat.
“Shit, I don’t know,” Tom said. “You only said to look for the Fifteen Hundred. You want me to check the whole lot again?”
“Sit your dumb ass on that truck, Tom. I’ll be there in five.”
“Don’t you have to work today?”
Johnny hung up and gunned it off the bridge into North Bend.
Two stoplights and five minutes later, he pulled into the casino’s parking lot.
Sure enough, Stupid Tom had located Caitlin Bergman’s rental truck. Johnny parked behind Tom’s two-tone sedan and hopped out.
“I looked around,” Tom said, sliding off the back bumper of the 1500. “I didn’t see any Wranglers.”
“Let’s go.” Johnny started walking toward the hotel’s check-in desk. For once, Tom hadn’t fucked up. Maybe he wasn’t the world’s biggest dumbass.
Tom caught up. “What are you thinking?”
“Your cousin still working in housekeeping?”
“Far as I know.”
“She working today?”
Tom shrugged. “Why?”
Still a dumbass. “’Cause she can tell us what room number Bergman’s in, and we can sit on the room and the truck until she goes somewhere. Come on, stupid. Let’s get this bitch.”
Sins of the Mother Page 17
