Losing Clementine

by Ashley Ream

  I felt both furious and impotent, like a declawed cat.

  “I hope you won’t punish her,” he said. “Jenny is such a good artist. It was just too much for her to have a big sister like you and not get to know you. She said it was a big opportunity. I know she’s learned a lot from you.”

  “Yeah? Well, if I’d known she existed, she wouldn’t have had to sneak around washing my brushes and folding my damn underwear.”

  “She wanted to do it. She loved working for you. She was devastated when you let her go.”

  God. I had fired my own sister.

  “She wasn’t yours to withhold.” I was standing up, and I couldn’t remember when I’d done that. “It could’ve been different. What is wrong with you?”

  I wanted to shake him, to shake something, to shake it and shake it until the stuffing came out and there was nothing left. I wanted to tear it up and scream.

  “I didn’t have any choice. I had to hide.” He made his hands into little fists at his sides.

  “Bullshit!”

  I remembered after he’d left, when I realized he wasn’t coming back, kicking my bedroom door. I kicked it and kicked it with my little kid-size shoe until the hollow core at the bottom splintered and my sister cried and yelled for me to stop and my mother came running and I kept kicking until I fell down. I was crying and crying, and I didn’t want to be. I was angry, just as angry as I was right then all these years later.

  “No. It was all my fault. I couldn’t do it any other way.”

  “You’re just selfish. You’re a selfish, controlling coward!”

  “You don’t understand.”

  “How could I possibly understand? You ran off. You just ran off and left us all there like we didn’t even matter, like we were old clothes you were done with, something for the Goodwill!”

  He looked like he wanted to grab handfuls of his own hair.

  “I couldn’t take it anymore. You don’t know what it was like. I thought you would be okay. She always wanted to be a good mom, but when—when Ramona died—I knew I couldn’t ever contact you again. Not ever.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “I killed her! I killed Ramona and your mother.” Tears spilled down his pale, wrinkled cheeks, running down past the rimless lenses of his glasses. “I left you girls there. It’s all my fault she did what she did.”

  “I’m the one that found them! I saw the blood and the brains all over everything. And you were gone, and you never came back, not even then. I didn’t even know if you knew, if you cared!”

  He walked over to the side of the bed closest to the alarm clock and sank onto the mattress.

  “I prayed for them every night.”

  “Oh good,” I said. “That’s just great. I’m sure that was real helpful. Did you ever think about doing anything for me? Did you ever think that I needed you? The kid that was still alive!”

  “You had your aunt and uncle.”

  And then I did hit him. I ran over and shoved him hard in the chest. He fell backward onto his elbows. His bones were prominent under his skin and under my hands. It was like shoving a bird. He was weak, and that made me angrier. I was bigger and stronger and full of enough rage to fuel ten men. He put one arm up to block his face, and I kept coming. I slapped him and shoved him again and again until he was flat on his back, and his glasses had come off his face.

  And then I backed off. It wasn’t enough. It wasn’t nearly enough, but the only thing that would be enough would be to wrap my hands around his throat and squeeze until he turned purple and stopped breathing, and then maybe that wouldn’t be enough. This, I thought, this right here is how people end up stabbed two hundred times.

  I took two steps back. This wasn’t how I wanted to feel. He was supposed to make it okay. He was supposed to take all the bad feelings, the holes, and fix them, so I could die without that pain. And he didn’t. He didn’t at all. He talked about his pain. His feelings. He was at the center of his own story. I’d come all that way, so he could help me. And he couldn’t.

  I went into the bathroom. I made the water lukewarm and let it pool in my hands and rubbed it on my face, again and again. When I stood up and dried myself with the rough white hand towel, I looked in the mirror. I had been crying. My face was red and blotchy. I looked old. I had lines around my eyes and lines running away from my nose toward my chin. I had purple bruises under my eyes. That’s exactly how I felt, too. Old. Lined. Bruised.

  When I came back out, Jerry was standing next to the window, looking out on the street below. The cable news was still playing on the television. A country I did not care about was having elections.

  “You’re still here,” I said.

  “Did you want me to go?”

  “Do you have anything else to say?”

  He shook his head.

  “Then yeah,” I said. “I want you to go.”

  And he did.

  I spent the day at the city’s art museum. It was bigger and nicer than I would’ve thought it would be. I ate lunch in its cafeteria, which was set up in an enclosed two-story courtyard with a center fountain. That was nicer than I thought it would be, too. I had carrot soup and a pressed sandwich with melted white cheese and salami. Then I went back to the counter for a cookie and a coffee. I took my time. I went through all the rooms, even the African basket weaving that everyone else skips, and I tried very, very hard not to think about anything.

  5 Days

  “Congratulations,” the woman wearing a neckerchief with her company-branded chambray shirt told me. “Your flight today qualifies you for ten thousand bonus miles in our valued customer program.”

  “Swell,” I said. “Can I get a window seat?”

  “No, I’m afraid not.”

  The descent into L.A. seems to take longer than that into other cities. For ten minutes you’re low over the tangle of freeways and cloverleaf interchanges. Houses and buildings look like Monopoly pieces, and the bright blue pops of backyard swimming pools are everywhere. Angelenos play Name-That-Freeway with themselves and each other on the way down. The 210? The 605? The 10? The 405. Definitely the 405.

  When you take off from LAX, you soar over the open ocean, and when you land it’s a slow creep over urban sprawl. I think that means something, but I don’t know what.

  When I got home, Richard was still there. He was sitting on the floor with his laptop on his legs playing World of Warcraft. Chuckles was lying on the floor next to him, looking brushed, fed, and smug. When your face is shoved in like a deflated football, smug is an easy look to pull off.

  “How did it go?” Richard asked.

  I sank down next to him and then into him, letting my knees curl up and my head find his chest. We stayed there on the floor, letting the light change around us and the cat get bored and wander off and the Thai food take-out containers appear and collect around us.

  “I thought he would fix everything.”

  “Why did you think that?”

  “Because he’s my dad.”

  Richard leaned his head back against the wall and ran his hand over my forehead, brushing my bangs off my face. It felt warm and nice there with my head in his lap. “Parents aren’t magicians. When yours stick around, you learn that. Sometimes they’re even more fucked-up than you are.”

  “I was stupid,” I said.

  “No, you weren’t. You just didn’t get to learn that when everyone else did. You didn’t have any examples.”

  “When does everyone else learn it?”

  “College. Midtwenties at the latest.”

  “I dropped out of college.”

  “That’s the other part of your problem.”

  He smiled down at me. He had lines around his eyes, too, and his breath smelled good, like soap and pad thai. His thigh was muscled under my head, and I couldn’t help but notice how close his cock was.

  “You have to go back to Sheila,” I said.

  His smile dropped.

  “You do,” I
said. “You have to get over this guilt thing. It’s yours. You get to walk around with it, and you don’t get to give it to anyone else or use it against them. It’s not Sheila’s fault we had sex. Go back to her.”

  He didn’t say anything, and I was out of things to say. So I just lay there and let him pet my forehead.

  By nightfall he’d gone. Really gone. Back to her, I was pretty sure.

  I got up off the floor. I felt bruised and stiff and had to fumble for a light switch. It was quiet. Chuckles had found some cranny to hide in, and nothing made any noise, not even the refrigerator, which was too new to hum the way the old-fashioned ones did. I was barefoot and the polished concrete was cold under my feet. The air was dry, and I was glad for it after the midwestern swamp.

  I picked up the containers of leftovers and threw them out. I should’ve taken them out to the trash chute that emptied directly into the Dumpster, but I didn’t. The next morning the whole place would smell of rotten fish sauce.

  I turned on more light over my work space. Aside from the work in progress still propped on my easel, I had a dozen finished canvases from months ago leaning against the wall. I had intended to leave them to Jenny. She knew enough to be able to sell them. The money would be hers. Now I wasn’t sure. She was no longer merely herself but an extension of my past and my father. She had split into two people. There was the Jenny I thought I knew before and the Jenny I knew after. I had gone for closure, to tie everything up with a neat bow, and I had come home with nothing but a new mess.

  Maybe I would sell the paintings myself. I could have a studio sale, where buyers came to me. I wouldn’t have to choose a gallery or split the proceeds with them. I could do that. I would make a good bit of money, and then I could decide what to do with it. I was still considering that when the phone rang.

  I pulled off the piece of blue tape that was still stuck to it and picked it up.

  I didn’t know if I’d be wanted there. If I wasn’t, I would leave, but Elaine had called me from Carla’s house and asked me to come. To not go would’ve been a statement I wasn’t willing to make.

  I had known Carla for ten years. If our relationship was a child, it would be in the fifth grade, and I had still never been to her home. I couldn’t recall a conversation that wasn’t about the gallery, a show—a conversation that wasn’t, at its core, about me. I thought about that as I drove, and when I pulled up to her house, the one I’d never so much as imagined her having, I felt ashamed of myself.

  The driveway was full of cars, and I had to go a block down to find parking. Venice has always been the roughest of the beach communities. But in the past ten years or so, gentrification had taken hold. There are fancy gelato shops now and restaurants where it’s possible to spend a hundred dollars on dinner. During the real estate boom, people bought houses and condos for far too much money on the litter-prone streets that zigzag around what’s left of the duck-shit-choked canals that give the city its name. A city that isn’t even a city anymore. Los Angeles proper swallowed it and its tax base right up. But Venice’s history is like red paint on the walls: you can put coat after coat of beige on top, but it still shows through.

  Cars were stacked up nose to ass under NO PARKING signs with hours and restrictions so complicated they required a graphing calculator and a phase chart of the moon to understand. The strip of street that remained clear was only wide enough for one car at a time to pass, despite the fact that the street was two-way.

  I walked back to Carla’s in the dark. The houses were mostly hidden from the road behind high wooden fences that blocked them from the riffraff on the street. Adult trees with feathery leaves and drooping, whiplike branches hung over the sides and littered their detritus on the sidewalk. Jacarandas left purple confetti everywhere, including on parked cars, so that everything looked like the day after Mardi Gras.

  The gate that stretched across the driveway was open, and the last arrival to get in on the private parking was hanging well out past the sidewalk with its back bumper grazing the street’s gutter. The house was a small bungalow of the kind L.A. built by the bushel in the 1920s. The blinds, if there were any, were open, and the lights inside were on. There was also the porch light, a series of blue bulbs inside a minimalist water-wall fountain in the front yard, and a row of small lanterns along the slate footpath, as though all of that could be enough to keep the dark out. The front door was ajar, and I could hear voices above the splash of water.

  I stepped inside. Three-quarters of the faces were black. I didn’t recognize any of them. The rest were white. I knew them all. Art people. I wondered, for the first time, what that was like for her.

  “At home, she called herself ‘Token.’” I turned to find a young man with skin the exact shade of Carla’s standing next to me. “You know, after that cartoon character.”

  I didn’t know it.

  “Anyway, you get the idea,” he said. “You’re one of the gallery people?”

  It was a question and not a question.

  “Clementine Pritchard,” I said offering my hand.

  He took it. “Michael Jones, Carla’s partner’s son.”

  “I’m so sorry for your loss,” I said.

  “Thank you. Dad is planning the funeral. I’m sure he wishes he were here to greet you himself.”

  “Actually, I’ve never met your dad,” I said. “But he must be impressive to have been with Carla. She was impressive.”

  “Thank you for saying that.”

  “If there’s anything I can do.”

  I hated the words as they came out of my mouth, but I couldn’t help saying them. He wasn’t going to call on me, and I wouldn’t be much use to him if he did.

  “He’s holding up well, considering. My sister is helping him, so I stayed here to…” He gestured at the assembled crowd.

  “Keep order and play host” was what I guessed he meant.

  People had brought food. I could see through the small living room into the dining area. The table was full of the sorts of things you’re supposed to eat after someone dies. Cold cuts and pickles and potato casseroles. I wondered if people would eat salami in my honor.

  “Please excuse me,” he said.

  Someone new had just walked through the door. Color code indicated she was family.

  The house was warm all over. The walls were painted a deep terra-cotta and baskets hung over the leather sofa. If I’d paid more attention in my African and Asian art classes, I could’ve told you more, but I didn’t and I couldn’t. I wound my way through the crowd and passed several potted palms. The atmosphere was subdued, but no one was weeping. It had the feeling of a company party after a very bad earnings report.

  I went past the table and the food. A middle-aged woman with graying hair was up to her elbows in dishwater at the sink, and someone else was standing in front of the open fridge looking for a place to put another casserole dish.

  The sliding glass door that led out to the backyard was open, and more lights were on out there. They were attracting bugs.

  Everyone outside was standing in segregated groups. Elaine was in one. She looked over when I stepped down the stairs. I nodded to her and she to me. She didn’t motion me to join her, and I didn’t walk over. Our reconciliation was, it seemed, a private affair.

  In the end, I didn’t find anyone to talk to at all. Carla’s world was her family and the Taylor, and I wasn’t part of either of those. I watched the mourners from the sidelines. She had gone suddenly. A heart attack. She had been too young and not even the right sex for such a death. It was shocking, the sort of passing that should shake you up, and yet there was a sense of normalcy. People died. We knew what to do. We brought casseroles and cold cuts and fought for parking and arranged for a family member to greet guests at the door. We had a script for this, and even though we would all agree to enter a collective mild depression over the whole event, we would still go to Starbucks in the morning.

  Maybe that’s why Carla’s partner wasn’t
present. Maybe he wasn’t making funeral arrangements at that very moment. It was late, after all. Maybe he was just too sad, too racked with grief and sobs, to stand in her tiled kitchen and direct guests to where they might find spare toilet paper rolls. I hoped so, for Carla’s sake.

  I started not to feel good. I felt the blackness creeping in through the bottoms of my shoes and worming its way like a parasite under my skin. I could feel it coming on the way you feel the flu catching up to you and breathing down your neck. If this feeling had a Hollywood score, it would be jungle drumbeats, the kind that tell the audience that doom is impending. I wasn’t surprised. I accepted it. The only thing to do was to get home while I could still move under my own power.

  I walked around the side of the house and let myself out.

  4 Days

  Chuckles jumped up on the bed. I could feel his weight on the edge, the dimple it made in the mattress. He meowed. I felt his whiskers graze my bare leg as he sniffed me, and then the release as he jumped down and the dimple sprang back.

  I heard traffic outside the window.

  I told myself I didn’t have time for this. I had things to do. Time was running out. Tick-tock-tick-tock.

  I pushed up. I put my feet on the cold floor and breathed. It was a struggle. It was like being deep underwater where the pressure starts to collapse your lungs. I walked to the bathroom with Chuckles trotting beside me and turned on the water in the tub. I took the bottle of tranquilizers down from the shelf and took it with me to the water, setting it on the bath’s edge. I got in before it was full and let it fill up around me. First my hands were submerged, then my calves, leaving my thighs and knees poking up like a South Sea archipelago. I slipped lower and my thighs disappeared while my knees rose up like volcanoes coming out of the deep. I imagined them spurting lava, which I supposed would look a lot like hitting an artery. I let the water keep coming until it was almost at the edge of the tub. I had to stay very still to keep it from sloshing over. I looked at the bottle. It was beautiful in its simplicity. Clear glass with a white and blue label and a red seal on top. It was patriotic that way. The liquid inside was perfectly clear, too. It looked like water. Innocuous. Water, water everywhere.