She Came From Beyond!

by Nadine Darling

  “What is over?”

  “Everything. Didn’t I tell you? Didn’t I tell you that a person can’t be that crazy for that long without something happening?”

  Actually, I had no memory of her ever saying such a thing, but I didn’t say it aloud. I said, “What is over?” again, and it made TJ laugh.

  “Bitch tried to kill her father. Tried to set him on fire.”

  “Joan?”

  “The one and only,” said TJ. “Attorney Thomas is being very vague. At first all he would say is that there had been an altercation. Then it started to come out. Nail polish remover, my god. What a nutcase.”

  “Did anyone get hurt?” I asked. I thought of Joan’s father in his cowboy hat with his case of soup, and shuddered.

  “Everyone is fine. It was probably more for show than anything, not that that matters. She’s going away for a long time.”

  “You sound like Commissioner Gordon,” I said.

  “I don’t follow.”

  “After Batman catches a villain, in the cartoons or the comics or whatever, they always get the guy in cuffs and then Commissioner Gordon says, ‘you’re going away for a long time.’”

  “Oh.”

  Or maybe I was thinking about Scooby-Doo.

  “Where is she going?” I asked.

  “Same place for right now, on suicide watch. We’ll know more later. She’s not getting her hands on those kids, though, that’s for sure. Sabrina will be of age by the time it’s even a question.”

  “And what about me?”

  “You? You get to sleep in your bed tonight, is what. You living away isn’t a courtesy that anyone is concerned with now, believe me. Certainly not Attorney Thomas with his tail between his legs. The investigation will be dropped. It’s not a thing.”

  “But DCF and Joan are two different things, you’re the one who told me that.”

  “Will you relax and listen to me now? No one is following up, nothing new is coming forward, and your accuser is in the hatch. It’s not a thing. And even if it were a thing, they’ve had too many budget cuts down there to keep a handle on any of this piddling shit.”

  “So, budget cuts are the reason that I’m off the hook,” I said.

  “If you want to be literal,” said TJ. “But no one is asking you to be.”

  I DROVE HOME IN MY UNDERWEAR RIGHT THEN. I LEFT EVERYTHING I’D brought to the motel at the motel except for my wallet and shoes and keys and when I pulled up I remembered that I didn’t have my house key anymore, that I’d given it to TJ as a gesture of something, of goodwill or something, so I stood on an overturned flower pot and squeezed in through the bathroom window. The seat was up and one of my feet went right into the toilet and I dragged my one wet foot behind me through the house like Igor. The house sounded like sleeping babies.

  Harrison was on his side in bed. The babies were together on one side of him, on their backs and seeming to be holding hands like a small, sweet Hansel and Gretel. And Harrison startled when I wedged in behind him. A small startle, not the full-on karate move that some men do when you surprise them. He asked me if he was dreaming, and I told him no and not to wake the babies and that Joan had tried to set her father on fire.

  “Oh, Jesus,” said Harrison.

  “She wasn’t successful.”

  “Is that why you’re here?”

  “Yes,” I said, into his neck, “also, budget cuts.”

  24.

  WITH SO MUCH WISHING THAT EVERYTHING COULD HAVE JUST been a bad dream, having the whole business wash away like a bad dream seemed ominous, like that one period in a slasher film where the masked killer is presumed dead but is really just hanging out in the sewer plotting his revenge. I got one phone call from Dr. Chew offering me a free consultation, and by then I was so keen to repress everything I couldn’t even imagine what she would consult me on. Hardwood flooring?

  There was some talk of a lawsuit, but I don’t really know who was talking about it. TJ? I remember telling her that there was no money there and her getting so angry and saying, “I’ll tell you where the money is!”

  My Wikipedia page once again collapsed into boring facts and small, comforting lies, one of which suggested that my true birth mother was Suzanne Somers.

  I sat with Jamie and the babies, mostly, and watched cooking shows on BBC America. Everyone wanted to sit on my lap. Everyone wanted me to be their mother.

  I took a walk into downtown Troubadour by myself one afternoon while Harrison stayed with the kids, a walk in the slushy, almost-snow. I thought I might see a movie but I’d seen everything, even if it had just come out. The previous month had given me a kind of horrible, boring gift of premonition. I could guess the next line out of any actor’s mouth regardless of the circumstances and it made me feel strange and sick. So instead I walked to Forfeit Valley Medical to see my Aunt Jane.

  It had been a while; I fumbled through the directory looking for her office number. There was a Dr. Haken in room 85, but the name had three strikes through it and, written beside it in my aunt’s small, neat print: Dr. Swift. She was leaving for the day. I came up the hall to see her locking her door.

  “Dr. Haken isn’t here anymore,” she said, not looking up. I stood and waited until she did. She smiled in the way she always did, something forever lost in translation.

  “Ah,” she said. “Hi, kid.”

  SHE LOOKED GOOD. HER HAIR WAS VERY SHORT, LIKE MIA FARROW short, and I asked her about it, was it hard to do. She said that it wasn’t, because what was hair.

  “Vanity,” she said, around her cigarette. She was staying at the Monte Carlo.

  “I was just there,” I said.

  “Why?”

  “It’s complicated.”

  “Okay.”

  She wanted to buy me a drink. We walked to the hotel mainly in silence, although I asked about my cousin Avery and she said he was well. In school, she said, but she didn’t say where or for what. She mentioned that he was spending winter break with Keith. At first I didn’t know if she was implying something or if she just thought that I was already aware of something, but then I figured out that she was just saying the facts, that Avery was spending his winter break with Keith, the tired deposition of her life.

  We drank gin and tonics in the Monte Carlo Bar, which was plush and raspberry-colored and a little sticky, like a thrift store stuffed animal. I asked her how she liked Troubadour, and she seemed to shrug with her whole body.

  “Oh,” she said, “I hate people.”

  “This isn’t really the place to find anything,” I said.

  “It’s the same as any place. I should know; I’ve been everywhere. Avery and I were in Kunduz not too long ago.”

  “Kunduz.”

  “Afghanistan.”

  “Of course.”

  “Yeah, it’s all the same. Every place.”

  “Troubadour is the same as Afghanistan?”

  “Yes, but worse,” said Aunt Jane. “Troubadour is worse somehow.”

  “I understand.”

  Once when I was thirteen, I stayed with her and Avery for a summer and at times we were joined by a man named John who’d suffered deep third-degree burns when his wife, a woman named Lydia, had set him on fire. They were still together, the man and his wife. She was in jail at the time, but they were still together. John would go places with us, to the store, to the movies, whatever. Once at a restaurant a waitress had stared at him for forty-five minutes and when he left to use the men’s room she’d rushed over and asked Aunt Jane how he’d been burned.

  “In a fire,” said Aunt Jane, not raising her eyes from her newspaper. Maybe that was the only way you could live, I thought, by knowing that every place and everyone was the same.

  “This is more tonic than gin,” she said, peering into her glass.

  I said, “I know about it. I know about Pops.”

  “What? What about him?”

  “That he is my biological father.”

  Aunt Jane stared blankly for
a moment; it was enough for me to ask if she’d even known in the first place.

  “I knew,” she said. “I think I knew. I must’ve known.”

  “It was shocking.”

  “Well. You seem to have lived through it.”

  I wanted her to say something about blood and about our family, about the things that had been passed to me like a baton. Maybe even a curse. A family curse to liven things up a bit. Aunt Jane looked into her glass some more.

  “You look like my grandmother, man,” is what she said. “Your great grandmother. Her name was Anise. She was all right, not like that frigid bitch Rose. The same face and mouth.” She made a straight line with her hand and held it against the tip of her nose. “Everything from here down.”

  “I guess I knew,” she said, drinking. Once, as a kid, Avery and I went to meet her at the hospital, to eat lunch with her at the commissary—grilled cheese sandwiches and butterscotch pudding. As we walked down the hall, a red-faced man grabbed her arm hard, as though for balance. His whole life was in his face—what he was worth, what he would sacrifice, maybe even the reason he’d been born, and he’d said, “You’re telling me … you’re telling me forty percent? You’re telling me that there’s a forty percent chance he’ll die?”

  Aunt Jane, impervious to Avery and I cowering behind her, had looked into the man’s face, not at her arm or his digging grip, and said, “No, there’s a one hundred percent chance he’ll die. I’m saying there’s a forty percent chance that it’s the burns that will kill him.” I asked her if she remembered John and Lydia and she nodded without thinking. I asked her if they were still together.

  “Oh, of course,” she said. “Of course they are. Who else would have them?”

  “That’s something,” I said. “That seems like something, to go through all that and to still be together, no matter what people think.”

  “Oh,” said Aunt Jane. It was all she said for a long while, and I could tell that she wanted to be kind. Maybe kind was not the word.

  She said, “So often people will confuse survival with goodness or with purity, when it is just what our bodies know how to do. I think that it is … unwise to not make that distinction.”

  “I am probably pregnant again,” I said. I’m not sure why, but sitting there in the sunken bar of the Monte Carlo, my half-drank gin and tonic in my hand, I felt very strongly that another little swimmer had gotten through. I pictured it, a sperm in a top hat and bow tie and holding a bouquet of roses like the illustrations in Where Did I Come From?

  “Again?”

  “I gave birth to twins in October.”

  “Oh,” she didn’t say congratulations or anything. I really appreciated that.

  “Irish triplets,” I said. I meant to laugh afterward, but it came out like a gasp, all gurgling like a man who’d just been shot in the throat.

  On the way back home I found two magnet letters pushed up into the frozen earth, an H and an R. I pried them from the earth and walked home.

  In a fire, I thought, the way in which we all were burned.

  JUST AFTER THANKSGIVING, HARRISON AND I DROVE THE KIDS TO SAN Francisco for a weekend. Six hours in a minivan with twin babies, a three-year-old, and a teenager. We took advantage of a lot of rest stops.

  I took the family on the sad tour of my life: Here is the frame shop where Papa met Mimi. Here is the frame shop where Papa left Pop-Pop for Mimi. Here is the flat on Douglass Street where Pop-Pop ate himself to death. We went to the beach—too dangerous and cold for swimming, just fine for a Pronto Pup and a walk with the stroller. Sabrina and I went shopping in Union Square; we ate chowder out of bread bowls on Fisherman’s Wharf.

  “How could you ever leave a place like this?” asked Sab, over hot chocolates at Ghirardelli Square.

  “There are other places,” I said, and she rolled her eyes.

  Right before we drove home, we stopped at the aquarium in Golden Gate Park.

  “Any great whites?” asked Harrison.

  I told him about the time, years ago, when that aquarium was the first to keep a great white in captivity. Her name was Sandy. After less than four days she stopped swimming and they released her back into the ocean. Not far from where Mimi lived, I told the kids.

  And once, about ten years after that, they had a dead great white on display in a big frozen glass case right inside the main entrance. It had gotten caught in some fisherman’s net and died, and the fisherman had kept it on ice until he got back home because that’s what you do, you hoist around your frozen sharksicle like the ultimate trophy, like an oversized novelty check or love. Pops took me to see it; I wore acid-washed jeans and a Harley Davidson t-shirt. We stood there and stared at this rigid thing, its reflectionless eyes and frost-bitten dorsal fins. It was more than dead, somehow; it seemed impossible that it ever could have lived. Behind us the vague images of people, the flashing of their cameras, saying, “wouldn’t want to come across that guy in the water.”

  “Sounds depressing,” said Harrison.

  “It was,” I said. “It’s the kind of thing you have to see with your own eyes to know it’s for real. A real thing. Not a frozen husk that used to be a shark. Not a fish that gives up and stops swimming.”

  “Our shark could not be contained,” said Harrison.

  “Ours was one hell of a shark,” I said.

  His hand found mine and held.

  I DROVE SAB TO TWO NORTH TO SEE HER MOTHER ON CHRISTMAS EVE. It was late afternoon and snowing, and all of Troubadour was alight with that kind of false, tinsel-y goodwill that would evaporate in less than forty-eight hours when it was time for people to start punching each other in the faces over bath towels at the After Christmas Sales. For now all was quietly harmonious. Even the soul station was playing the standard carols, albeit sung by Boyz II Men and Gerald Levert. Sab was wearing long purple and black striped gloves with the fingers cut out, and a wooly hat that looked like a tiger with long ear flaps. She was biting her nails.

  “You don’t have to be worried,” I said.

  “I’m not,” said Sabrina. “I mean, there’s a difference between being worried about something important and just dreading some really awkward shit.”

  “How do you know it will be awkward?”

  “How could it not be awkward? What is she going to say to me? I love you? I want you to be happy? I’ve missed you?”

  “Yes,” I said. “Probably all of that.”

  “And what would that mean to me, any of it?”

  “Well, she is still your mother.”

  “That’s what everyone has been saying to me for eight months, like it’s an excuse for anything. But she doesn’t change. She doesn’t stick to anything. She acts out of selfishness and hurt feelings and she doesn’t change, and I’m supposed to love her because I came out of her vagina? I wish I’d come out of your vagina! If I’d had a choice I would have come out of YOUR vagina!”

  “That’s … very sweet,” I said.

  “People just … they tell you this bullshit about how you can make your own family or that there’s not just one way to make a family, but then they get caught up in where your blood is and where you came from and it doesn’t make any sense. It’s not fair. It’s a lie.”

  “Well.”

  “Just like going to see her on Christmas is a lie. I don’t even believe in God. Maybe she doesn’t either. So why do we have to act like we like each other? And what is this?”

  “A sweater.”

  “I know it’s a sweater, but why did we have to buy it for her? Because we’re supposed to? Why would you buy her a sweater after what she said you did to Jamie?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “Because she’s your mother.”

  “Well, I hate her. I fucking hate her.”

  “So, what? Do you just want to go and get ice cream instead? We’re already here.”

  Sab’s face, pale and cat-eyed beneath her tiger hat, went mean. “Can I tell her I hate her? Can I throw the sweater at her?”r />
  “I guess you can. If that’s what you have to do to feel okay.”

  “I don’t even know if I’m one of those people who can feel okay anymore.”

  “Well,” I said, “I guess you’d better throw that sweater at your mom and find out, then.”

  Sab got out of the car quick, the package in both hands like a machine gun, and I had to run to keep up with her, grasping at her shoulder and collar so she wouldn’t slip on the ice. The waiting room was empty. The nurse in the snowman sweater at the desk offered us a molasses cookie from a wooden hatbox and told us, in barely more than a whisper that Joan wanted to see the both of us.

  “Why?” I asked.

  “Oh, who knows?” said the nurse, too cheerfully, and it made me wonder how hard the eggnog was flowing in the break room.

  Joan was not behind glass, the way I’d imagined, or masked on a dolly like Hannibal Lecter. She was sitting on the edge of a narrow bed in a black hoodie and black sweatpants with little red bootie slippers on her feet. She was very thin, I noticed, and there was more gray in her hair than there had been the last time I’d seen her, when she was sitting in my lawyer’s office telling me about the time she’d killed a dog. She and Sab didn’t embrace. Sab bent down a little and Joan patted the back of her shoulder with an open palm and their faces grazed each other’s a bit, it seemed. Sab sat across from her mother in a hard-backed chair. I stood.

  “That’s for me?” said Joan.

  Sab was still gripping the present in her lap. She looked at me, and then held the gift out toward her mother.

  “Thank you,” said Joan, setting it on the bed beside her. “You shouldn’t have.”

  She looked up at me then, her smile placid and unnatural, “How are the babies?”

  “Big,” I said.

  “And how is Jamie?”

  “Bigger.”

  “Is he excited about Christmas?”

  “Yes.”

  “Excited for Santa to come?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “That’s wonderful,” said Joan in a dazed sort of way, as though she knew that something was wonderful but she couldn’t for the life of her remember what that thing was. She had a new kind of lizard stare, like a lizard staring at something that it wanted. She turned it on Sab again and asked her how school was going.