Losing Clementine

by Ashley Ream

  There was no traffic in the carpool lane. Brandon’s hybrid was old enough to have the HOV OKAY sticker on the bumper, and I was using it, heading back toward the city on the 10. Everything about this was like having a dislocated shoulder shoved back into the socket: you never want it to happen, but if it does, you just want to get it over with as quickly as possible.

  The ragged tops of palm trees were just visible over the sound-buffering walls that lined the freeway, and the only things to look at were brake lights and green highway signs. I veered left onto the 110, didn’t stay long, and took the 4th Street exit headed west.

  Ray lived in one of the neighborhoods surrounding MacArthur Park, which hadn’t been a place of play since anyone could remember. The green urban square surrounded by botanicas and no-name storefronts selling cell phones was full to the gills with the homeless and hopeless sleeping off whatever they’d bought. Skeleton kids circled around, waiting for them to come to and buy from them all over again. There were always police around the edges of the park, but they, too, had given up hope. They were only trying to contain it. Do what you do inside the park, and try not to let it spill into the streets too often.

  It did, of course.

  Ray lived and worked in one of the houses that had been beautiful almost a century before but had been skidding and sliding downhill for more than half that time. The building had been subdivided into four apartments, two up and two down. The upper apartments were serviced by two self-made staircases nailed to either side of the house in violation of safety codes and good sense. The yellow paint outside was peeling, exposing bare wood to the salty Southern California air. What hadn’t peeled off had aged and dirtied until it looked like the sort of stain that, were it on your upholstery, would make you throw the whole couch out.

  I parked against the curb. The front yard had a chain-link fence around it. Inside, the lawn was too far gone to resuscitate and, in any case, had been a bad idea in a coastal desert.

  “He has the apartments on the right,” Jenny said.

  “Both apartments?”

  “He works upstairs and lives downstairs. The whole place is his, actually. He rents out the other side.”

  I added slumlord to his list of accomplishments.

  “Nobody wanted to live in Venice, either,” she said. “You could buy a house for less than fifty thousand dollars twenty years ago. Now they’re worth more than a million.”

  I didn’t have anything to say about Ray’s real estate scheme.

  We were sitting with the engine off, looking out. “What now?” she asked.

  “We go in.”

  I opened my door.

  “He might not be home,” she called after me.

  I shut the door on her voice, going around to the passenger side. When I got there, she’d opened it a little, just enough so that it wasn’t latched. I pulled it open the rest of the way.

  She stayed put. I waited. The silence between us made the ambient noise louder.

  “I don’t want to get out,” she finally said to the windshield. “I didn’t even want him to call me back.”

  “I know,” I said.

  “Like if I don’t know, it’s not real or something?” She turned her head just enough to catch me in her peripheral vision. Tears were leaking out of her eyes, a slow drip that matched her nose. She sniffed loud and wet and wiped at her eyes with the heel of her palm.

  I wanted to offer her a tissue, but I didn’t have one.

  “Shit. Okay, let’s go.” Jenny got out so fast I had to take a step back to get out of her way. I shut the door after her and was going to press the LOCK button on the remote when she slipped her hand in mine and held on hard.

  I didn’t know how to respond to that. Holding hands with your sister was the sort of thing you were supposed to do in the dark under the covers after you’d sneaked downstairs to watch the Twilight Zone or when your mom was having one of her dark days and it scared you. Jenny was thirty years too late, and I couldn’t remember if I’d ever held hands with Ramona. I didn’t think I had. Maybe she’d wanted me to. Certainly at the end she’d have wanted me to.

  “What’s wrong?” Jenny asked.

  “Nothing.”

  “There’s his car.” She pointed down the narrow, broken drive that separated Ray’s house from a similarly rundown and subdivided house next door. At the far end of the drive, parked in front of a small detached garage, sat a black hybrid very much like the one I was driving. I didn’t like even having that much in common with him.

  Jenny wrapped her sweater around herself again with her one free hand. She looked cold, and it wasn’t cold. Los Angeles was putting on its best show. Clear, blue, and warm.

  I used my free hand to rattle the gate in the chain-link fence. It wasn’t locked, but I rattled and waited anyway. Jenny cocked her head. I made a show of what I was doing. I had learned my lesson with the German shepherd outside of Fresno. When I was satisfied we weren’t about to be mauled, I unlatched the gate and waited for Jenny to go through. Inside, I left it unlatched. I didn’t know what was going to happen, but I didn’t want to have our exit blocked.

  We stood on the walk that led up to what had been the front door. Now it ended at a plain expanse of newer wall between the two lower entrances. Cars drove past, and I could hear a helicopter not too far away. Police probably.

  “What time is it?”

  I looked at my watch. “A little after five.” The funeral would just be starting. Funerals usually started on time, I was pretty sure.

  “He’ll be upstairs. In his studio.”

  Upstairs meant up the narrow, too-steep steps that clung to the side of the house with a shaky grip. I went first, just in case the whole thing collapsed.

  At the top, I stood directly in front of the peephole and knocked. Something inside moved. I wasn’t, in retrospect, sure if I heard it move or if I sensed it move, but either way I knew something was in there and I knocked again.

  Nothing happened.

  “I know you’re in there, Ray.” Jenny was one step down from the landing, still holding on to herself, but her voice carried. “I know you got my messages.”

  I stepped back into the corner of the landing, making room for her to stand in front of the tiny one-way lens.

  She let go of her sweater with one hand and rapped her knuckles against the door in the same place I had.

  “Damn it, Ray.” She was pushing back tears, and her voice was sodden. “It’s Jenny. You know who it is. Open the door.” She pressed her forehead against the wood.

  I listened, watched for the shadow, kept an eye on the air currents. Nothing moved.

  “Maybe if you leave.” She said it quietly, and it took me a minute to realize she was talking to me. I was being kicked out, excused, and thanked for my service. I bit my tongue because it was the grown-up thing to do, though it was harder than it sounded. Hell of a time to learn a new skill.

  I slipped behind her on the landing and went down the steps more slowly than I had to, stopping halfway down. I leaned my back against the side of the building and crossed my arms. I was looking out across the small driveway that separated Ray’s tenement from the one next door. The concrete was cracked, but it was too dry even for weeds.

  When I was settled, Jenny knocked again. She pressed the left side of her body to the door, her back to me, a human privacy screen. “Ray, come on. It’s just me.”

  We both waited.

  “Ray,” she said again, “you can’t leave me out here, please. Please. We were going to go down to San Diego next weekend, remember? We were—” Her voice broke, and I watched her back curve forward as her chest collapsed and her tiny bird body sagged inside the oversized sweater. Sobs came up and out of her, making her gasp between words. “We were going to take the train.”

  She rolled her head over her right shoulder and let it flop back, banging against the door. I winced and looked down at my shoes. They were black for Carla’s funeral. I stared at them and listen
ed to Jenny sob and beg. I didn’t look up or go to her, because I had been there. I had begged, and I knew the humiliation of having to do it. Of standing on the wrong side of a car door in the middle of a parking lot with something bigger than a sheet of metal and glass between you and the lover inside and having to beg to be let in, beg because you didn’t want to be left there in the middle of the night, in the middle of the day, in the middle of the cold or the rain, because you were afraid, because you were sorry, because you didn’t want to be alone, and if he left surely no one would ever love you again. And standing there in public crying and asking for mercy was the surest sign that was true.

  Only the truly broken and unlovable are paraded like that for everyone to see. And no one was more broken and unlovable than me. No one ever had to beg like I had to beg. I was sure of it. For years and years I had believed that like I had never believed anything else. And I knew how bad it was to have people see, so I looked at my shoes that were black for Carla’s funeral and listened to Jenny sob at the top of the steps and pretended that I didn’t.

  “Ray. Ray, I don’t have a lot of time. We can talk about this, but I need—I need for you to come out, okay? Okay, Ray?”

  I remembered my mother begging my father. He must’ve threatened to leave a dozen times before he did. That was the thing. It never worked. How many men had I begged not to leave, and all of them, including Richard, eventually had, sometimes right there in the middle of the rain in the middle of the night in the middle of the parking lot, sometimes the next morning after not enough sleep and a blow job, sometimes days and months and even years later. We were Pritchard women. It seemed it was in our blood.

  Jenny hauled back and kicked the base of the flimsy plywood door with the toe of her black-and-white Chuck. The door rattled in its loose-fitting frame. The sound made me jump.

  “Open it. Open it and tell me it’s not true. Tell me!” She kicked again. The wood rattled harder. “Ray!”

  She was making enough noise to set the whole block on high alert, but no one came out to see. No one called the police. This wasn’t the kind of neighborhood that did that sort of thing. People here had too many problems to take on someone else’s.

  “Open the door. Why won’t you just open the door?!” She threw her body against the wood and sagged. “How could you do this to me? Who does this? Who?!”

  The thin layer of muscle over my ribs contracted. My chest wanted to cave in on itself. That door would not open. Not for her. Not now and probably not ever.

  “I could be sick. What if you made me sick? What if I have it?”

  Jenny bent forward, and I took two steps up, expecting her to double over and scream or cry or vomit or whatever she was going to do, but instead she turned on her heel and looked down at me. “You make him. You make him open the door.”

  I reached up toward her. “Come on. Let’s take you to the clinic.”

  “No one will want to be with me ever again,” she said.

  “That’s not true. Come on.”

  She moved toward me. I’d gotten what I’d come for, even if she hadn’t. I took her hand again and started down the steps, pulling her gently behind me.

  “They’re not closed yet, are they?” she asked.

  I had no idea. I hoped not. “No,” I said. “They’re not closed yet.”

  She held tight to my hand all the way down the stairs, across the yard, and through the unlatched gate. She held on while I unlocked the passenger door and opened it for her. I shook her hand a little, ready for her to climb inside, but she wouldn’t let loose. She took hold of my wrist with her other hand and held tight there, too. Her fingers were like cuffs, that thin and that strong.

  “Don’t leave me.”

  “What?”

  “Don’t leave me, okay? You can’t.”

  “I’m not leaving. I’m going to take you to the clinic.”

  “But after.”

  “I’ll take you back home,” I told her.

  She shook her head. “I don’t want to be alone. Take me back to your house. Please.”

  No, no, no, no.

  My freedom, my day, my release, my choice, my oblivion, my ending. No one relying on me. No one needing me. I’d given away my goddamn cat. All that was left in my apartment was a bed, some mustard that would never expire, and a clear, clean bottle of escape imported from Mexico.

  I looked over her left shoulder, hoping a way out would materialize there. She shook my arm.

  “You’re going to take me with you, right? You’re not going to leave me?”

  I looked at her. She was ready to crumple. She was made of nothing more substantial than tissue paper. She could blow away in the wind right then or dissolve in the rain.

  I felt responsibility throw a saddle over my back. It cinched around my stomach.

  “You can’t rely on me,” I told her. “I’m the worst possible person to rely on.”

  “I know.”

  A car rolled by on the street, slowing as it passed us and then picking up speed again. It stopped at the end of the block with its blinker on, waited too long with no traffic coming, and then turned.

  “You really don’t.” I tried to put enough weight into my words so that they could sink through the protective coating that was forming over her brain, keeping out all other pain. “Let’s go,” I said, putting my hand on her arm and pushing her toward the open door. She resisted, her lower body staying planted while my shove turned her top half. She looked like a swivel-waisted Barbie doll.

  “I want to go home with you,” she said. “I want to stay at your place tonight. Let me stay tonight.”

  My place. My place with my papers all laid out and my corpse in the bathtub by morning. I remembered I needed to turn the AC up.

  “Will your mother come out here?” I asked.

  “What?”

  “To take care of you,” I said. “I’ve heard the drugs they give you—I’ve heard you might need someone to check on you.”

  “I’m not going to call her. Why would I call her? I want to go home with you.”

  “I can’t take care of you,” I said.

  “I know. I’m not asking you to.”

  “You are.”

  “I’m not.”

  I took hold of her chin with my free hand and tilted it up, forcing her to look into my face.

  “I gave away Chuckles today. I gave away my cat. I am the sort of person who would give away her cat.”

  “We can get him back,” she said, blowing past my point without a sideways glance.

  “I can’t take care of him anymore. I can’t even take care of my cat.”

  “I know.”

  “You have to stop saying that.”

  “I know you stopped taking your medicines,” she said, “and I know you don’t have cancer.”

  I let go of her chin. I felt a flash of anger at her and shame over my lies, and I swallowed the part where I called her a sneak and a spy because I could do that much if not a lot else. She didn’t need my shit on top of her own.

  “I think you should start taking the pills again,” she said.

  Such a lovely, naive thought from a lovely, naive head that had not and would not turn on its owner like a sick animal.

  “I am not going to get better,” I said.

  “You don’t know that.”

  “I do know that.”

  Two doors down a woman walked out her front door. She had a teenage boy with her. She stopped to lock the door behind her while he continued on down the walk toward the street. His gate had an exaggerated lope, a self-conscious affectation meant to convey relaxed casualness. The woman caught up and then passed him, her steps quick and purposeful, making him drop the stroll to keep up. I heard the police helicopter make another pass, farther away than before. The normality was distracting.

  “I want to go home with you,” Jenny said, “and I think you need me to go with you, too.”

  “I don’t.”

  “You’re a bad l
iar. You should stop doing it so much.”

  “Jenny.”

  “You don’t have to pay me,” she said. “I’ll be your assistant for free.”

  “This isn’t about money.”

  “Would you take Ramona in?”

  “You don’t get to go there,” I said. There are places in a person’s past that are off-limits even to emotional pirates and plunderers.

  “Why not? She was my sister, too, wasn’t she?”

  Jenny had let go of my hand, and I couldn’t remember when exactly that had happened. Somewhere we’d moved from pleading conversation to argument, and she’d decided to fight with bare knuckles, which was more than unfair.

  “It’s not the same,” I said.

  “It is the same. It’s exactly the same. I’m your sister, and you’re mine, and she was, and we’re all in this together, so let me go home with you.”

  I shut the car door and pressed the button on the key chain. A faint click came from inside as the plunger dropped into the lock.

  I didn’t want to have this argument. I didn’t want to be here. Not on this street. Not in this city. Not on this plane of existence.

  “Clementine.”

  I ignored her.

  My plan was so good. So neat and clean. I had taken care of everything. No one needed me. No one was supposed to need me.

  “Clementine.”

  She reached for the door handle and pulled up uselessly.

  I had bought my own casket, for Christ’s sake. I got points for that. The universe owed me. I did my part. I did more than anyone in my shoes could possibly have been expected to do.

  “Clementine.”

  I had been responsible. Other people walked out in front of trains. I didn’t do that.

  “Clementine, open the damn door!” Jenny banged her fist on the passenger window. “You have to!”

  I looked down at the car keys in my hand. I could just open my door. One click of the button. I didn’t have to open hers. That was two clicks of the button. I could open mine and climb in and drive away with her screaming in the rearview mirror and things would almost be exactly the way they were three hours ago. Let her find her own way to the clinic. Let her find her own way home. Let her find her own way period.