Keeper of the Keys

by Perri O'shaughnessy

  All three siblings and Leigh had attended California High School, “Cal High,” in Whittier. Jacki loved school, and caused Kat and Tom numerous problems later with her expectant teachers as they followed behind like muddy dogs trampling over her hallowed footsteps.

  Kat studied sporadically but did well enough to take a few advanced courses. Tom studied rarely, but excelled at sports and was therefore forgiven many transgressions, and managed to advance year by year in a predictable fashion. Like Kat, he appeared college bound, although if you asked him, he would say he planned to travel the world, goof off, surf, and skateboard through life.

  For some unknowable reason, in Kat’s junior year, a pack of senior girls decided to hate her. She never knew if it had to do with a brief fling she had with one of the point guards on the boys’ basketball team or if she had merely worn the wrong perfume one day. Or said something negative about a certain hairstyle. Or worn a T-shirt in the wrong color. At any rate, some days, when she missed the bus, she had to walk a long, long way home, a couple of miles, much of it up busy Whittier Boulevard. Tom and her best friend, Leigh, stayed late for sports or they would have walked together.

  Instead, she bore alone the greasy-faced boys who recognized her and offered her rides she knew better than to accept, and the middle-aged men who stopped, goggling, wanting her in their cars where they would have power and she would have none. God only knew what would happen if she ever accepted a ride from them.

  Many of those unhappy days, three girls followed her, harassing her. Kat thought about telling Jacki, but by then Jacki was in college, not living at home, useless. She told Leigh but Leigh, being Leigh, totally overreacted, insisting she get them expelled, kick their butts, etcetera, absurd suggestions in Kat’s opinion. She told Leigh she would, just to shut her up. She considered complaining to her mother, but Ma had problems of her own, an overworked husband and not enough money. And what would her mother do? Call their moms?

  Then one day, the girls had come up quite close behind her, so close they didn’t need to shout epithets, they could murmur them, intensely more menacing.

  “We could cut you right now,” one said.

  “Walk faster,” the last one warned, “or we’ll catch you.”

  She ran as fast as she could.

  “Why are you running?” Tom said, catching up to her as she ran, sweating, the last steep hill.

  “Where’d you come from?”

  “Got a reprieve today. Coach got food poisoning.”

  “Ah.” She slowed down.

  “It’s too hot to run.”

  “You’re so right.” She looked behind her, but the girls had disappeared, probably when they saw Tom, the quarterback, who, over six feet by the time he was fifteen, had the exaggerated musculature of a Batman comic character. She breathed deeply, trying to catch her breath. A jacaranda tree bloomed big and purple between the sidewalk and the street. Even in Whittier ’s yellow air, no doubt stunted by pollution, by dry soil, by neglect, these curbside trees displayed themselves like Vegas showgirls wearing their best feathers.

  “So why?”

  “No reason.”

  “Liar. You never run for no reason. You look like shit lately, Kat. Even Ma noticed.”

  “Thanks. I hate you, too. Did she tell you to talk to me?”

  He nodded.

  “I’ve got problems. Three of them. But you can’t tell Ma.”

  “Never.”

  Confiding in her younger brother for the first time in her life, trusting him for the first time, she told him everything.

  The skin on his jaw tightened, and she, horrified, realized she might have unleashed a bad, bad genie. “Promise me you won’t hurt them.”

  “Geez. Okay, but man, I don’t like things that force me to think hard.”

  However, he must have, because, amazingly, after that day the girls avoided her in the hallways. They didn’t follow her home. No nasty notes got taped to her locker.

  “What did you do?” Kat asked Tom after a few weeks.

  “Gave them something else to think about, the friendly attention of a couple of guys on the team who owed me. Make your enemy your friend, right? They won’t bother you again.”

  She had always thought of him as her little buddy. Right now, he was her hero. “Tommy, thank you. I mean it. If I were God, I’d put you in heaven.”

  “But that won’t help me right this minute. Right this minute, I have this big paper due in American History,” he said.

  “Done. And don’t worry, I’ll disguise it by spelling a few things wrong and making egregious grammatical errors.” She stayed up all night finishing his essay.

  After that, she depended on him for everything, confidences, a shoulder to cry on, a minor revenge to be taken.

  He protected her, but she had failed to protect him from falling in love with Leigh.

  Kat returned to her breath and was mindful for about one split second, and then she was mourning Tommy again, missing him, slumping, so sad. Then she moved into the next usual phase, hating herself just like Jacki said. It wasn’t all Leigh’s fault, as she well knew.

  She should make peace.

  Breathe ten times, in and out, observe the breath coming in cold at the nostrils. Thought coming, thought going, how much longer…

  The little oven timer rang. Phooey.

  Later still, not sleeping, she Googled Leigh Hubbel, now Jackson, discovered Leigh made custom furniture-of course!-and then sought out the husband, who had hundreds of mentions. Kat looked at a few, admiring the buildings and his face, which was vaguely Italian, strong-nosed, framed by a lot of dark hair. Then she downloaded a map but did not print out the directions because she liked maps and liked deciding some things for herself. Leigh and her husband lived in Topanga Canyon, in a fine house which sounded not far from what Jacki had described, but she had an office in Venice Beach, near Santa Monica, where Kat’s appraisal company had its office.

  Kat thought about haircuts, the ones they had gotten when they were fifteen.

  Leigh had long blonde hair then, a perfect platinum running like a rushing stream, glistening in sunshine down her back. The two girls had hit a designer haircutter on Greenleaf Boulevard. “I’ll give you two dollies a break on the price just for the pleasure of slipping my fingers through your hair,” the haircutter had said. Kat thought he was nasty but Leigh thought he was funny, and she liked funny. Maybe reading their minds, he trimmed Leigh’s hair respectfully, then crew-cutted Kat’s red hair into a short fuzz.

  Kat’s parents flipped, which Leigh loved. “It’s a fundamental requirement for kids our age to make our folks regret giving birth as often as possible.” She plucked at Kat’s scalp with fire-red fingernails. “When it grows back,” Leigh said, patting the fuzz critically, “let’s get that jerk to dye it blonde.”

  “Why would I?” She liked her fiery hair.

  “Men like it.”

  “I ask for a good reason and you lob me crap?”

  This was when she still loved Leigh more than anyone else, and long before Tom fell in love with Leigh.

  Kat had a home address for Leigh and her husband, and a phone number for Leigh’s business. She called Leigh’s business number and left a simple message, asking for a call back.

  3

  R ay left his mother’s by eight. The drive from Whittier to Topanga Canyon at that hour on a Sunday night took him an unusually grueling two hours due to a pileup on the 605. He pulled his blue Porsche into the expansive, decoratively paved driveway of his home, pushed the remote to open the garage, drove in, and turned the key to off. He sat in his car.

  He should be relieved. Leigh hadn’t said anything about anything to his mother. Instead, he felt a familiar-what he was starting to call-craziness. Confusion. His mother fed him, loved him, and never pried into his private life. She also never shared her own. He didn’t believe there wasn’t something behind all that moving they did, more than just wanting a change of scene or boredom. It didn
’t make sense. And he didn’t believe her when she claimed it did.

  At first, a year or so ago when he had started on the models, Leigh had laughed, saying he was saving a pile, doing his own therapy. Then things changed.

  He had a strong feeling that his work in the downstairs studio was important, but he didn’t know why. He even believed it could somehow bring him and Leigh closer together, help them resolve the issues driving them apart.

  Instead, his models destroyed what they had.

  Heaving himself out of the car, he clicked the remote lock. Outside, he pushed the button to close the garage door, carefully avoiding the light sensor, stepped onto the driveway, then stopped to study his house.

  The big home and eccentric plantings, bulleted by low-lighting that had taken him months to design, loomed over him, imposing, fearsome, if you had imagination. The house spoke to him, with grass-paper walls, sanded timbers, the glass lit from behind to act as a divider, all angles, sharpness, stone.

  Leigh hated what she called the razorblade feel of the outside iron fences and the minimalist furniture inside, saying all these affectations of design made her bones ache.

  She had never felt welcome here. He knew that. The painstaking hand-finished furniture she made mostly stayed in her shop and out of his realm, with a few personal exceptions. Walking up to the house, he brushed a spiderweb from the ornate woodwork flanking the eight-foot-high front door. Its key, an anachronism that looked Victorian, rattled on the same ring as his plastic-topped car key. He had intentionally bought an antique lock, and then found a locksmith to create the proper key. He had always loved keys. This one kept the frivolous away. No casual burglar could easily break through this particular conundrum. Hell, if someone did, I’d be the first to applaud him, Ray thought, pushing open the door.

  Inside, he barely glanced through a glass wall that showed sprawling brown-green hills, and in the far distance, the shimmering ocean, spotlighted by a large, low moon. He had the new fancy seamless corner windows, the better to expose the view and create a floating environment. The house, which he privately called “Eyrie,” had gotten him his start. Clients came there and were properly inspired and intimidated into paying the high prices his firm charged for its vision. If the place ever sold, over his dead body, he could retire and live a long, comfortable life on the proceeds.

  He dumped his keys on the massive slab table in the entryway. Negotiating his way toward the kitchen, he remembered his tight-lipped refusal of every one of Leigh’s suggestions. He should have encouraged her. Things could have gone so differently. He had been stingy, secretive, protective, like his mother. Strange, human, autonomic, to reenact in his personal life the same repression that had enraged him since childhood.

  The egomaniac poured himself a glass of Obester Sangiovese from the Half Moon Bay tasting room. He tasted it, but might as well have sipped water. The rich depth of this particular vintage was wasted on him in his present mood. Taking his glass along, grabbing a hunk of cheese and a few crackers, he headed toward his workshop.

  Stepping carefully down the treacherous staircase that he had designed without railings, that paid no heed to the fact that people got drunk and fell off, including himself one notable night, he entered his lair, a room nearly fifty feet long. He flipped on the overheads, concentrated halogen beams that kept the room warm without overheating.

  Right now, he had four models going of the earliest houses he could remember, the ones he had lived in from the time he was four until he turned eight years old. He sipped his drink, then he set his cut-crystal glass down. He ate cheese on a cracker, then picked the glue gun off a shelf at the end of the room. He wanted to tackle the railroad tracks behind the house on Dittmar, in Whittier. The house alone didn’t tell the whole story. Precisely, carefully, consulting the blueprints he had obtained a few months before, he laid a long line of hot glue behind the tiny lattice backyard fence. Every morning and many nights the train had roared by, sometimes more than a hundred cargo cars long.

  He had counted them endlessly. He should know.

  He stroked his chin. The bedroom window was too high for a little boy inside to see anything outside. Adjustments needed to be made to the elevation. The blueprints were wrong; he remembered his bedroom window, the white curtains Esmé put up every time, the old thrift-store bed that made his back hurt.

  He ate another cracker and set to work. However, the painful truth was, he couldn’t remember the details so well anymore. About midnight, he tried to sleep on the daybed, but couldn’t. Halogens burning down on him like pink-tinged eyes, he went to the bookshelf and knelt on the industrial carpet, pulling out a heavy plastic container that contained his deep past, pre-Leigh.

  His mother took few photos of him as a child. Each time they moved, he was allowed exactly two boxes for papers, toys, and books. He found his youthful drawings along with color photos of many faded houses that looked so similar now, so shabby to his educated eye, snapshots of him doing flips in various backyards, his mom hysterical while he nearly cracked his skull open. The tire swing at some house. Where? Maybe on Ceres Street?

  No pictures of his father. His mother must have retained feelings for him; she had never gone out with anyone else again. She wasn’t bad-looking even now for a woman in her late fifties, but she had that air: I’ve put that behind me.

  He imagined his father with a flat-toothed grin just like his, flanked by sharp canines. Leigh had called him vulpine once. He had been vaguely flattered. Another girl had once told him he looked like a young Jack Nicholson. Unearthing several pictures of himself in his teens, he wondered what he had really been thinking all those years when most of his energy went into fitting in. At Hillview he had been a doper. At Cal High he had made himself into a preppie. When they moved, he would start the new school circumspectly, laying low until he could figure out a harmless persona that would permit a smooth year.

  He regretted not knowing his father, if only to see the color of his eyes in memory, and whether the man had a mind for physics or physical labor. He moved on, to his small collection of plastic toys-colorful cars and trains.

  Also, he found a list on the endpaper of a book that he read over and over every summer of his life, wishing he could live it, an E. Nesbit story called The Phoenix and the Carpet. He didn’t know why his mother saved this particular favorite, but he felt grateful. She had read it to him several times. He thought maybe she loved it, too.

  Then, jumbled at the bottom of a box, he found the keys.

  He picked them up for inspection. Every house they stayed in, whenever they moved, he had kept the key. His mother, who held many day jobs, insisted he have a key to any house they lived in, so he did. She was always careful with keys. The houses were kept locked. Keys were precious. “Protectors,” she called them.

  His younger self had assembled the collection onto a large silver key ring, which jingled promisingly. Some of the keys still bore traces of labels in Magic Marker or squiggles on masking tape.

  He shook the key ring, enjoying its jingle. Then, opening the book to its blank front page, he read the addresses he had painstakingly printed, one after another and another:

  Norwalk, Whittier, Downey, Redondo Beach, Yorba Linda, Placentia, Fullerton.

  The list went on, scattering his past through all the bleak suburbs of Los Angeles and Orange County. Sometimes they only moved a few miles, from tract to tract. So his mother could keep her job?

  Eight schools by the time he started high school, he told himself again.

  Why?

  As he sat there, his chest filled with a nameless emotion, he heard the doorbell ring upstairs. He checked his watch: one-thirty. From a bin in the closet he grabbed a baseball bat, then jumped up the spiral stairs. He didn’t want to answer the door, but if he didn’t answer, they might think he wasn’t home and decide to break in. Imperiously, the bell rang again.

  Without turning on any lights on the main floor, he crept toward the front door. He
peered outside, then unlatched the lock.

  In burst James Hubbel, Leigh’s father. He must have come straight from work, because he wore his dark blue cop uniform and appeared tired. “Put the bat down,” Hubbel commanded.

  Ray put the bat down. “It’s late.”

  “I see you can’t sleep, either,” Hubbel said. “You think her mother and I are sleeping? You think that?”

  “What’s the problem, Jim?”

  “Where’s my daughter?”

  “Not home.”

  “This is no time to play games, Ray.”

  “Don’t tell me what to do.”

  “I’m not here because I insist on pancakes instead of eggs for breakfast!” Hubbel yelled. “I’m not here wondering why no grandkids yet!”

  Ray was happy he was still dressed. He would hate to be wearing his skivvies, facing this six foot three ex-Marine-turned-policeman with eyebrows as thick as overgrown grass. Leigh loved her father, describing him as a tough guy with a good heart.

  Hubbel pushed his way past Ray, more bully than heart at the moment, looking around. The living room, serene, bare, full of textured beiges, remained empty and did not speak. He went to the white granite fireplace, and pulled the LCD screen aside.

  “No sign of her in there,” Ray said. He knew this was not the right thing to say to Leigh’s father, and yet he could not help himself. He felt terribly defensive.

  “I’m going upstairs,” Hubbel said. He climbed the main stairway, the cantilevered concrete stairs that seemed to float upward, to the second floor. Ray heard him above, opening doors and drawers, slamming them shut. He sat down on the couch and stared dully at the fireplace. The uncurtained windows felt like black holes sucking out his insides. I’m having a breakdown, he thought, but found it hard to care.

  Moments later, Hubbel marched down the stairs again, long arms swinging. “This is goddamn dangerous, this stairway. You have a problem with rails?”

  “They’re ugly.”