Steps and Exes

by Laura Kalpakian

  Who would have believed that Dorothy Robbins, the very pinnacle of convention, would have succumbed to what passed for charm in Celia Henry? Who would have believed that Dorothy would have gone swimmingly into the arms of Celia Henry and refused to leave her? Dorothy had likened herself to Ruth in the Bible. Victoria had laughed out loud. Then Dorothy added she was learning how to spit. This was not so funny. Whither thou spittest, there I shall spit?

  Even when—if—Dorothy returned to Bellevue, she would never be the same. It was over.

  While Eric and Ned continued to ignore her, Victoria rose and walked along the white carpet and through the white billowing drapes, out the sliding glass door to the balcony overlooking the lake. Nothing in her own life could ever be so cleanly picketed again.

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  where she lived. The fear is worse than the feat, isn’t that what Sunny had said? Maybe. But the feat could not be undone. And once confessed, Victoria’s marriage, her delight in her own defiance smashed up. The significance of her clandestine I do diminished to a tiny little speck of so what on the great horizon of life. She wanted to cry. She felt rather like Henry Westervelt must have felt, she imagined, stunned by the blow, then roused by the icy waters, flailing, crying out, going under, coming up and knowing in that final dreadful moment he would not—would not ever again—get back on board the Deo Volente, and all the old certainties were forever denied and the old dreams of defiance swept away.

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  A Change of Life

  Many mornings, the Pythagoras, its sails furled, would be anchored in sight of Useless Point. The boat’s varnished wooden hull reflected imperfectly the restless water which in turn reflected imperfectly the dome of sky. Mist thickened in the distant Sound as the sun rose slowly over Isadora’s great mountain. Sunny Jerome emerged from the cabin, ruffling her short hair. Eyeing her eagerly, a dozen seagulls, their beggarly instincts roused, left their perches on the rocks, circled overhead, skimming the surface of the water, plumping down eventually, close by the boat, floating, complacently certain that human hands would sooner or later reward them with garbage.

  Sunny crossed the short deck to the stern, looking toward the larger Sound, a Venus in overalls, the sailboat her half shell. She savored this moment, her favorite of her day. She turned back to Isadora as sunlight like thickened syrup ran down the dark sides of the mountain, and in the distance

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  the day’s first ferryboat plied toward Dog Bay, its horn echoing between islands.

  “Is that the ferry?” asked Grant, emerging from the cabin, bearing a mug of tea in each hand. Sunny reached for hers and lifted her face to be kissed. “We’re running late, sweets. I have to get back to the marina.” But he kept his arms around her. “We’re roofing and we have to get an early start. You can see what kind of day it’s going to be. Sunny. Like you.”

  He drank the hot tea in quick gulps, and weighed anchor while Sunny started the motor and they puttered noisily through the morning light toward the Useless dock. They kissed goodbye and Sunny climbed up, stood there waving to him while the Pythagoras chugged away. Other sailboats and pleasure crafts moored at the Useless dock bobbed in Pythagoras’ wake, but no one stirred this early.

  She started up the dock and the road toward Henry’s drive-way, stopping momentarily to watch an eagle swoop overhead. She turned to watch it fly out over the Point, cascade downward and in the space of a single breath, snatch from the water a fish whose curiosity had brought it too close to the surface. Writhing visibly in the eagle’s talons, the fish mounted high into the sky, out of its element altogether as the eagle soared. Then, suddenly, as suddenly as it had snatched the hapless fish, the eagle lost its grip and the fish plummeted back into the waters of the Sound.

  The fall was enough to kill it, thought Sunny, just as screeching brakes made her spin around and an old sedan barreled at her. Sunny jumped out of the way, falling in the process, rolling to the side of the road. The driver too veered, then plunged into the rhododendrons before the motor died. Sunny crawled out of the ditch, shaken, bruised, but nothing broken.

  The driver, a woman, hollered out the window. “You stupid bitch!” She tried to coax the engine back to life, without success.

  Sunny slowly got to her feet, brushing herself off. Still unsettled, she walked to the car, the front of it obscured in the rhododendrons, but the back boasted California plates. Old ones. I should have guessed, Sunny thought. The woman tried again and 254

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  again to get the ignition to turn over, while on the passenger’s side, the door creaked open and there came the sound of puking. The car that had very nearly struck Sunny was a Plymouth, perhaps twenty years old with a roof that might once have been a leather-look top, but which had peeled and flaked and cracked from the heat, and hung in short tongues, flapping over exposed metal. Of an indeterminate color, everything on the Plymouth had been softened, or battered or scabbed, pocked, mottled into an impression of beige.

  The ignition finally caught and the Plymouth coughed up a grainy pall of exhaust and protest as it backed out of the rhododendrons.

  “I’m looking for Henry’s House, Useless Point,” the driver called out without so much as a mumbled apology for her name calling or her reckless driving. “Do you know where it is?”

  Sunny pointed to the driveway which the woman had missed, overshot completely in her haste. The passenger was another woman, neither of them, Sunny noted with a mother’s eye, wearing seat belts.

  “It’s too early though. You can’t check in till after one, after the one o’clock ferry docks.”

  “Check in? Who said check in? What is this place?”

  “Henry’s House. Isn’t that what you’re looking for?”

  “Yeah. Thanks.” With a series of difficult maneuvers, the gears protesting, ground into reverse, the woman backed up and made a left up into the driveway. Curiosity got the better of Sunny and she followed the car up the long drive, choked in its exhaust. Brushing grit from her clothes, she followed the Plymouth into the wide welcoming arc, the graveled drive before Henry’s.

  The driver was out of the car. “Holy horseshit,” she cried, staring at the broad verandas and gleaming French doors, the balconies dripping with leafy wisteria vines and huge terra-cotta pots of red geraniums set at intervals, billowing too with lobelia so blue they looked to have been snipped from the midnight sky. Morning light rising cast long regal shadows on the lawn and across the drive. The driver wore tight jeans and a midriff T-shirt which accentuated her wiry little body. Her hair, in the

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  indeterminate stages of growing out, was yanked into a hard high knot, a sort of ponytail, and not till she turned around did Sunny realize this was not a woman of her own age, not a young woman at all, but someone at least forty, alert, darting eyes set in a sharp-featured face. She was so thin that her skin stretched across her col-larbones, attenuating and leaving uncushioned her ribs. The skin on her cheekbones too lay taut, insufficient to its task, frayed into creases at the corners of her eyes and pulled tightly at the mouth.

  “Henry’s House, huh?” she said to Sunny. “Who is Henry? Is he married?” She laughed harshly and turned to her passenger.

  “Wouldn’t you just know? Wouldn’t you just?”

  In reply the car door squealed plaintively. The passenger got out slowly. Unlike her companion, she was clad in clothes so voluminous they seemed to run off her body like lava and coagulate at her feet.

  When she turned round, Sunny was surprised to see that her coal-black hair contrasted sharply with her face, a ghastly artificial white, heightened by lipstick the color of a black plum. The eyes were heavily kohled, ringed and smudged in black, and the brows also blackened, plucked to perfection and on the right brow, perhaps half a dozen little rings followed t
he arch. From the girl’s nose there bloomed a huge bouquet of little rings dangling there like metallic mucous. Her clothes too were black, save for a heavy chain flapping against her thigh, and all this against the white of her skin reminded Sunny of newsprint, unrelieved black-and-white telling a story purporting to be the truth. These were by far the strangest people Sunny had seen since she left L.A.

  “Are you guests here?” Sunny asked.

  “Guests? What is it? A loony bin?”

  “Looks like a fucking loony bin,” observed the girl, slamming the car door shut and leaning against it. “Like you’d be fucking crazy in quilted rooms here.” She gazed out over the Sound, steeping now in the first full flush of morning. “No one’d ever hear you neither.”

  “I work here. Maybe I can help you. Are you looking for someone?”

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  “Elizabeth Henry,” said the woman. “Says here—” She dug down in the pocket of her jeans and withdrew a much-folded newspaper clipping which carried the indentation of her hipbone. She smoothed it out on the hood of the car. Many times folded, the creases had ripped. “Here. ‘Elizabeth Henry, daughter of Celia Henry of Henry’s House, Useless Point, Isadora Island, Washington.’” She pointed to the engagement picture of Bethie and Wade, their smiles smudged in the battered clipping now six months old. “Actually we’re looking for Wade.”

  “Shumley?”

  “Yeah, but his address just says Seattle. This place was easier to find. What is it?”

  “A bed-and-breakfast. Like a hotel, only it’s a house.”

  The woman folded up her clipping and slithered it down in her pocket. “In L.A., you wouldn’t let strangers into your house. Uh-uh.” Her lips roiled vehemently. “Not in Reseda. That’s in the Valley.”

  “Yes.” Sunny nodded. “I know.”

  “You from L.A.?” The woman brightened.

  “Sort of.”

  “Where can I find Wade? Lucky bastard. What a hell of a place, huh, Jennifer?”

  “I have to take a piss.”

  “Wade isn’t here, exactly. Not now, but—can I ask what you want with Wade?”

  “A little family matter.” She reached in over the dash and drew out a pack of cigarettes, offered one to the girl who leaned across the hood and took it. Then the girl got back in the car and slammed the door. “It’s a little matter of twelve years of child support.” She reached into her other pocket and withdrew a long tab from an adding machine, folded and refolded, and equally bearing the indentation of her other hip. “I did the math on it, see? I did the math on a machine so there’s no mistaking it. Eighteen thousand dollars.

  Give or take.” She folded it again. “I’m Lynette Shumley, Wade’s ex-wife.”

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  for them to wait here. She would be right back. She would bring someone she knew could help them.

  Could I help them? Oh yes indeed. Sunny introduced me as the mother of the bride and I was happy to help Lynette and Jennifer Shumley. They were looking for Wade. Wade Shumley, that lying fraud, had cracked a lot of bullshit whips about truth and lies, confronting the past, and I was joyed-over to know the old bullshit whip could cut two ways.

  There was no mistaking the girl. Never mind the metal rings jangling on her upper lip and punched along her brow, nor the fact that she didn’t have a beard and a mustache, her face was Wade’s face, same overbite, same chin; her walk was Wade’s walk and she had the same deep brown eyes. Certainly she bore scant resemblance to her mother. Tiny, coiled, ready to spring, her nerve endings all but extruding on the surface of her skin, Lynette Shumley was at the end of her tether. Jennifer was at the beginning of hers. I reckoned her to be about fifteen or sixteen, though she looked much older in ways not related to time. Pale, pissed off, her hair color out of a bootblack bottle, she was dead-white and dead-eyed when she ought to have been blooming.

  I told Lynette and Jennifer to drive back to Dog Bay and get in line for the next eastbound ferry. I’d follow and personally escort them to Wade’s house in Seattle. A regular travelers’ aid society.

  Mine was one of the last cars to get on the 10:10 ferry. I’d forgotten how fast the ferries fill up in summer when the San Juan Islands are crawling with vacationers, campers, boaters and sport fishers. I pulled my truck deep into the belly of the ferry-boat, got out and started up the stairs as its horns blared and it cast off from Dog Bay.

  I went from deck to deck, inside and out, looking for Lynette and Jennifer. In summer these ferries have a

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  carnival air about them—part of the appeal of the islands—large airy decks with booths and chairs and benches and wraparound windows, kids running up and down, keeping an eye out for whales, and being rewarded at least with the sight of seals and otters.

  Audiences oooh and aaah as people fling popcorn to the seagulls while they follow alongside the boat, amazing everyone with their stamina and skill at catching food in midair. Regulars on these runs have ongoing card games and young musicians play guitars and draw groups of singers to them. A violinist who keeps a summer home out here does his practicing on the way in. All over the ferry, passengers strike up conversations, even relationships, and in the midst of all this August camaraderie, I finally saw Lynette and Jennifer, huddled next to a window across from one another, talking to no one, not even each other.

  I offered to go for a round of coffees from the snack bar, and when I returned, I sat down next to Lynette and handed out the coffees.

  “Are you sure this is Sweet’n Low in here?” asked Jennifer. “I don’t want to get fat.” She blew on the coffee and I could see she had a mouthful of braces and a bolt in her tongue.

  “Hot coffee must be hell on that metal.”

  In reply she stuck her tongue out at me, dug in her pack for her headphones and Walkman, put the tape in and the head-phones on, and lay down. She rocked and twitched to a beat so percussive I could hear its bass over the rumble of the ferry and the noise of the crowd.

  “Your daughter is the image of her dad,” I said to Lynette. “I didn’t know Wade had a daughter. I didn’t know he’d been married.”

  “There’s probably lots you don’t know about Wade. Hell, there’s lots I don’t know. I haven’t heard from him in ten years. I wouldn’t have known where he was but Maggie sent me the clipping. Maggie, that’s Wade’s mother, she sent it to me. Some old army buddy of Arnie’s lives up here and his wife saw it and recognized the name and the picture. No great love ’tween me

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  and Maggie, or me and Arnie for that matter, but they used to dote on Jennifer. They were real fond of her when she was little.”

  I asked who Arnie was. Lynette looked at me quizzically and gave me another version of the tale Wade always told: the troubled young man flung from his home because his stepfather hated him and his mother was too weak to intervene.

  “Wade tells this story differently,” I said.

  “Drug addicts always do.”

  “He’s honest about that.” Proud of it, but I kept my mouth shut.

  “Do you know what being a drug addict means? It means he owed money. All the time. To everyone. It means he would steal his own mother blind. And he did. Lots of times. Finally, Maggie and Arnie told him never to come back. They were finished with him. Then Wade gave their address to dealers he owed money to, so Maggie and Arnie were getting robbed, sort of every three months. New TV—gone. New stereo—gone. They put grills on the windows and the thieves came in through the doors. It was a bad neighborhood, but not that bad. Finally Arnie bought a gun and shot one of them.

  The guy didn’t die or nothing, but Arnie told Wade, he was keeping the gun loaded and by the door and if Wade or any of his junkie friends showed up again, even if it was in broad daylight and carrying a big bouquet of flowers, Arnie’d shoot him on si
ght. So, yes, I guess you could say his stepfather threw him out. There’s some truth in that. Like there’s some truth in this.” She pulled her battered engagement announcement out. “Says Wade graduated from Northridge. Well, he went to CalState Northridge for a while, but he never graduated. And here, says his mother is Margaret Nash?” She pointed at the smudged newsprint. “Maggie hasn’t been Margaret Nash in fifty years.”

  Little pebbles of truth in the big ocean of lies, I thought.

  “I thought Wade was dead,” Lynette went on. “I thought he’d dropped off the face of the earth. Dead, jailed or straitjacketed, that’s the only choices junkies have. I got to admit, I didn’t think he’d go clean.”

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  “He’s been straight for eight years. He’s a sort of counselor now, helping others.” I wrestled that out with no irony. “He goes all around the Northwest with a sort of program for recovery. He’s very passionate about it.”

  Lynette snorted. “Oh yeah, passion. That was always Wade.

  Fucking dazzling. Passionate and persistent. Don’t get me wrong.

  It’s nice Wade’s straight and doing all this good work—” She paused and rested her gaze on her daughter, draped across the bench across from us, mouth open, legs apart. “But really, I don’t care. I just want to talk to him.”