by C. J. Skuse
I lay back on the carpet, trying to take it all in. I wanted to cry, I wanted to shout, and I wanted to grab hold of that bitch’s scrawny neck and force her head down the nearest toilet. “He didn’t forget one single birthday, Beau. I knew he didn’t abandon us, I fucking knew it!” I yelled.
“Shhh,” said Beau. “He DID abandon us, Paisley. He gave up the right to freedom when he robbed that hotel….”
I sat up. I couldn’t believe what Beau was saying. “We were poor. Dad didn’t know what else to do….”
“You’re just quoting lines from the trial. He held a gun to a woman’s face. Him and his friends deserved what they got. Whichever way you look at it.”
I pouted. I’d watched that video over and over on TVArchivia before I got banned from the computer lab in whatever school I was in at the moment. Dad in his suit and handcuffs. His face creasing up when he talked about us. The judge looking at him above his half-moon glasses. Him being led away on the echo of “fifteen years.” He didn’t serve fifteen years; they let him out after eight. But we hadn’t seen him since we were six. And now we were sixteen. That made ten years. I always was good at subtraction.
“He’s still our family,” I told Beau, pulling tufts out of the carpet.
A car door slammed outside, and Beau sprang to his feet and meerkatted over to the window, looking for signs of the Skank. “I think she’s back from the salon.”
“Still terrified of her, I see.”
“You know what she’s like. If she sees the letters, she’ll fire Connie….”
“She won’t do a damn thing with me here. I ain’t afraid of no ghost.” I looked at him. “What time’s your curfew?”
“What curfew?” He licked his greasy fingers. “School then home. That’s it.”
Beau had the same haunted look on his face that he’d had as a kid back in Jersey. Whenever our parents were arguing. Whenever we hid in our tree house until Mom had passed out from shouting.
He was still at the window. “Oh, it’s not her. It’s Matt.”
“Who’s Matt?” I asked, carefully placing the letters back in the shoe box.
“The new gardener.”
“The new boyfriend, you mean.” I got up and joined him at the window. “So he’s the latest tomb raider, huh? The stud. Younger than the last one. She spent any more of our trust fund lately?”
“No,” he said. “Except the lake house. In Utah. I saw a picture of it in her desk drawer. Mirror Lake. She bought it a while back. It’s pretty remote.”
“Why the hell’d she buy in Utah?”
“For vacations, I guess. A retreat.”
“Yeah, somewhere she can retreat for her week-long benders.”
I tucked the box of letters under my arm. My eyes started stinging. “Why didn’t he come get us, Beau?”
“Dad? Because Virginia wouldn’t let him. He tried. Completed his parole, got a car, and drove all the way from Jersey. Says so in one of the letters.”
I looked at him. “He came here? He didn’t even know I was in boarding school back there?”
Beau shook his head. “He and Virginia had a fight. She got a restraining order, said he threatened her, tried to hit her, all kinds of stuff. It’s all in the letters.”
“She got a restraining order? What was he, some kind of wastoid?”
“No, he says he’d gotten his act together and came to get us. She was the one who called the cops, said he’d been drinking and wanted to hurt us. It wasn’t true. But she told him that if he set foot inside the state, she’d have him back in jail.”
“Bitch!” I yelled, pacing across the floor.
“Shhh …” Beau stuffed his hands in his pockets and bowed his head, his clean dark brown hair falling down over one cheek. “Look, she’s had a lot of problems lately.”
“Oh, what, California run out of Botox or something?”
“She checked herself into rehab a couple of weeks ago. Said it was the hardest thing ever …”
“I’ll bet it was. Probably realized they didn’t have an open bar.”
“It’s not just booze. She’s got all these pills in her medicine cabinet. Just like Mom.”
“Mmm. Well the apple never falls far, does it?”
Beau stuffed his hands down even deeper. “We’ve got to do something, don’t we?”
“Uh, yeah,” I said. “We’ve gotta find Dad. ASAFP.”
I could tell Beau didn’t want to do anything about it, but he knew I wouldn’t let it go.
“But I got school and stuff …”
“Which you hate,” I reminded him.
“Yeah, but—”
“But what?”
He sighed hard. “Well, all right, but we’ll just bail, okay? Just run away and that’s it. No need for revenge. You won’t … do anything, will you?”
I looked at him. “Do anything?”
“You know. No Paisley-esque parting shots, like in Beverly Hills.”
“That security guard had it coming, Beau. He’d been stalking us for weeks, up and down that mall. Just ’cause I got skulls on my backpack. Like that place wasn’t already crawling with wannabe Goths.”
“Yeah, but you made a laughingstock of the guy. Please, just this once, for me, can you not do anything to Virginia? She’s not the type to forget it. She’s not like the security guard. Our last gardener, Marvin, you know she sued him for sexual harassment?”
I sighed. “Yeah, you told me about that …”
“But it was her harassing him. She’s got a mind all her own, trust me.”
I laughed. “Yeah, a mind of her own but a vagina that belongs to the world.”
“Paisley …”
“All right, all right. So what you’re saying is, we should just disappear quietly?”
“Yeah,” said Beau, suddenly enthusiastic. “We can go find him, and she’ll never know where we are.”
I put my finger to my chin and tilted my head like I was really thinking hard. “Yeah. Running away is good; I’m on board with that.”
“Cool.”
Then I went up to him. “But as for the no-revenge thing?” I squeezed his eager, pitted little cheeks. “I don’t think so.”
He deflated like a Bubble Yum balloon and went back to look out the window.
I was only thinking of one thing as I walked along the hallway to my bedroom. We get out of here; we find our dad. That was all there was to it. My bag was already packed from school, but I unzipped the side and threw out the textbooks—why the hell did I haul them all the way across the country, anyway?—replacing them with two clean push-up bras, my favorite holey fishnets, some ripped blue jeans, and some rock T-shirts. Springsteen, Metallica, Bowie. I knew it’d impress the hell outta Dad if I was wearing one when we met up. Like father, like daughter. Apples and trees again.
There are a lot of shitty dads in the world, and as an armed robber mine would probably rank among them. But he never hit or hurt us, never locked us in a closet. And when he held up those people in that hotel, he wasn’t stealing their money to gamble it away on booze or drugs. He was stealing it for his family. He couldn’t see another way out. He wasn’t the perfect dad. Just my perfect dad.
I realized I’d used up the last of my cash on a veggie burger at LAX. I was pretty much broke.
I headed back into Beau’s room. He had three neat piles of clothes laid out on his bed—one for socks, one for underwear, one for jeans. His toothbrush and toothpaste were wrapped neatly beside them in a white washcloth. He could totally rock the whole “white and nerdy” thing sometimes.
“How much money you got?” I asked him.
“Uh, ‘bout seventy dollars. Why?
“I got about fifteen bucks in the world, that’s why.” I turned to leave.
“You seen my new razor?”
I turned back. “Uh, why?”
“I wanna shave before we go.”
I just looked at him. “As if. Your balls even dropped yet?”
He squinted a
t me. I walked back into my room and slumped down on my bed. We wouldn’t get far on eighty-five bucks. The lawn mower started up outside. I got up and looked out the window. Matt the gardener was walking up the edge of the small lawn, watching his own arm muscles tense as he pushed his throbbing engine along. He was good-looking in a comic-strip kind of way. But in the tradition of our grandmother’s gardeners, he was probably screwing her, so that made him a total ass clown.
Still no sign of the Skank. A little lightbulb came on in my head as to how we could fund our yellow-brick quest for Dad. I went back into the hallway and tried the door to her bedroom. The sound of a car pulling up came from outside. The front door banged. Then came the throaty cough, a memento from twenty years of smoking and another twenty trying to give it up.
That was her.
BEAU
SIX
9976 CAHUENGA BLVD EAST,
HOLLYWOOD, CALIFORNIA
I poked my head out from the other end of the hallway. Footsteps at the bottom of the staircase.
“I won’t be long. Help yourself to a beer from the fridge,” came Virginia’s voice. I darted back inside my room as Paisley darted back inside hers.
Seconds later, I poked my head out to see Virginia going into her room. I saw the shadow move around, heard the sound of drawers opening, her closet doors opening. Two bangs! as her high heels were thrown to the back. The flip-flop of her pool mules as she crossed to her en-suite bathroom. Water running, pounding the bathtub. The cloying scent of burning roses came wafting my way. This was her ritual after a long morning of doing nothing in Beverly Hills—she’d light all the candles around the tub and run the hot tap until the water was scorching. Then she’d go downstairs for a while to allow the water to cool and the candles to perfume the air.
She came out and shut the door. I pulled back.
“Beau? Are you home?”
It was all I could do not to answer. I bit down hard on my quivering tongue. She continued down the stairs. I stayed behind the door until I heard the distant sweep of the patio doors to the backyard. I went over to my window and saw her go outside, dressed in her red silk kimono and mules, barely hiding her white bikini underneath. She was talking to Matt and twizzling a length of her long black hair extensions. When she had settled on her chaise longue for her pre-soak sunbathe, I heard a little rattle at the end of the hall and poked my head out again. Virginia’s bedroom door was wide open, and Paisley was inside.
I was drawn to follow. “What are you doing?” I asked her in a forced whisper.
She was already rooting through drawers. “What do you think I’m doing? I’m funding our trip. Shut the door behind you.”
“Are you crazy? She’s already run her bath, she’ll be back up here any second.”
“I’m not scared of her.” She was hunched over Virginia’s dressing table, rummaging through crystal dishes full of trinkets and sundry bottles of antiwrinkle cream, bypassing them all in favor of the large red leather jewelry box. “And if I know our grandmother as well as I think I do, she’ll be busy screwing the gardener in the cabana, which gives me just enough time to do what I gotta do and get out before she even notices. Ooh, that’s pretty.”
She bent down to search through the bottom drawers of the bureau, her blonde hair running down her back in waves like octopus tentacles.
“God, Paisley, please don’t,” I said, my rib cage contracting like a trampoline that she was happily jumping on. I edged back out the door, leaning my face against the frame. “We’re so dead.”
“Stop being such a wuss. Why don’t you grow a pair and come help me?”
I tried to be strong and take a stand. Do the right thing. Walk away. Just walk away. But she was leaving, with or without me. And I didn’t want her going off on her own. And I didn’t want to stay here any longer if it meant she wasn’t coming back. Counting down the days until my sister flew in from school was how I got myself through. So I did what I always do. I did what Paisley told me to.
Cautiously I moved farther into the room and stood by one of the four posts of Virginia’s unmade bed. Paisley stood on the chaise longue beneath the window, which looked out on the back of the house and the valley below it, and began tugging at the Japanese silk drapes from Fukuoka. They wouldn’t come off their pole. So she started taking things off the high shelves. Ornaments, candlesticks dripping in years’ worth of hard wax, a clock, a diamond-encrusted snow globe with a little girl ice-skating inside. The chaise was draped in a black silk robe and several items of white lacy lingerie. Virginia’s pink patent leather belt with its huge gold buckle shaped like a lion’s mouth was curled up in the nook of the chaise. Paisley stepped all over them, leaving dusty marks.
“I’ve got some bubble wrap in my room. D’you want some?” I said.
She turned and looked at me in disbelief. “You would have bubble wrap for occasions like this, wouldn’t you? Grab me a bag from the closet.” She reached up farther, to a small wooden box at the very back of the top shelf.
“Bet you there’s a stash in here. Maybe it’s her emergency liposuction fund.”
I made for the closet next to the bathroom, the flickering light from the candles around the tub catching my eye. Steam rose in little drifts above the motionless water. Everything gleamed. The gold taps, the deep white tub, the gold claw feet.
I remembered when it had arrived from Italy. Paisley and I had sat at the top of the stairs, swinging our legs through the banisters, watching the men hoist it up. It was just after we’d done an update on our story with Oprah.
I took out a black beach bag with little white flowers sewn onto it and threw it up to my sister, who was still standing on the chaise. She caught it and began filling it up until it bulged and the handles wouldn’t meet. She stopped filling momentarily to admire the snow globe, giving it a little shake and watching the glitter float down on the small skating girl.
“Pais, I’m not kidding. She catches us, we’re dead. We’re beyond dead. We’re history. Come on, Paisley, please, let’s go. Put that down.”
“I’ll hear her coming,” she said.
“No, you won’t. You never hear her coming. And then all of a sudden she’s there, like … like a crack in the window letting in a chill.”
“Poetic, Beau.”
I went to take the snow globe from her but she moved away.
“No,” she said. “All this stuff was bought with the proceeds from OUR story. She got famous and rich because of US. This snow globe is ours. All these little knickknacks and trinkets are ours. That jewelry is ours. We’re taking it back.”
“All right, all right,” I said, backing off and returning to the door frame.
“I’m gonna need a bigger bag,” she said, throwing the snow globe down onto the silk bedclothes and marching out of the room with her swag.
The patio doors slid open downstairs.
“Shit, that’s her,” I said, edging farther back into the hallway and closing the bedroom door very gently behind me. Paisley came out of her room with her backpack and the swag bag and tried to get past me.
I blocked the way. “Paisley, we’ve got enough now. Let’s just go.”
“I’m not finished,” she said, trying to get past me again.
“Look, I’ll grab my stuff and we’ll go out my window, okay? We can be gone before she even knows what we’ve done. Shhh. I think I can hear her.”
“I’m getting the snow globe and then I’ll follow you down. Go start the Fiero,” she said, handing me both bags.
“What? You can’t take her car. She loves that thing.”
“Just do it.”
And she disappeared back into Virginia’s bedroom, leaving me standing there, dallying as usual. I checked for signs of anyone coming up the stairs, then ran along to my bedroom with the bags. I slid open my balcony door, my palms sweating on the handle, then stepped out onto the little balcony. Seeing no one around, I dropped my own backpack down onto the patio, followed by Paisley’s, the
n yanked one of my bedsheets free, tying it around the handles of the swag bag and easing it down, too. Reluctantly I climbed over the balcony and let myself over and down until I hung by my hands on the railings. I dropped down onto the edge of the patio and stumbled backward, falling flat onto the grass. Getting up, I checked around to make sure I was still alone, then grabbed hold of the bags, running along to the front of the house to dump them beside Virginia’s Fiero. My hands were shaking. I pulled the keys out of my pocket and fumbled to find the right one, then flung open the door.
I threw our packs into the back, tossed the swag bag into the foot well on the passenger’s side, then slid into the driver’s seat and started up the engine.
As I turned to look back toward the house for Paisley, I came face-to-face with Matt instead. He was crouched over, leaning on the open car door.
“Hey, Beau,” he said. “I could have sworn I just saw you ripping off your grandmother. That didn’t really happen, did it?”
I just looked at him. The engine was still rumbling. He stood up so his head disappeared above the car. “Out,” he ordered.
I got out but left the engine on.
“I think you got some explaining to do, don’t you?” he said, wrapping a thick, muscley arm around my neck. “Come on inside.”
And he marched me back into the house.
PAISLEY
SEVEN
9976 CAHUENGA BLVD EAST,
HOLLYWOOD, CALIFORNIA
“Just do it.”
I felt bad for ordering Beau around all the time, but I knew it was the only way he was ever going to do anything. He’d always been the same. If it were up to him, we’d still be in the womb.
I went back into the Skank’s room. The snow globe glinted on the other side of the bed. I made my way around to grab it and saw that the drawer of the nightstand was slightly open. Once, when me and Beau were little, we’d been snooping around in there and found this book with color photographs of people doing each other over car hoods.
But the book wasn’t in there anymore. Just a clean pile of lace panties. And on top of them, a shiny silver gun.
