Lola, California

by Edie Meidav

  “The chorus. I love it.” He looks at Javier with cloudy eyes. “There is no way for you to get me to see my daughter?”

  “This is the first time you ask that plainly.”

  “Well, yes, I do need sleep now. But later, I’m asking, can you see what you can do?”

  “It means calling that lawyer you don’t like.”

  “But I could die before they kill me. Would the people in charge call that win-win?” And Vic chokes on the urge to disgorge.

  Once he calms, the guard leans forward. “Please, Vic. Sorry to say this. Today you’re scaring me a little.”

  “The only person I scare these days is,” and Vic falls asleep on the last word, his cheek skintight and shiny, his mouth open in a death mask.

  NINETEENTH OF DECEMBER, 2008 4:40 P.M.

  After they have come back from her deposition on behalf of Vic, Lana is strung out. It is not her fault that she cannot help how cold she must turn toward Dirk. Emotional possum, Rose used to call it, and maybe Rose’s presence gets Lana back to former habits but who cares when Dirk, that afternoon, seems to hear the message scrambled? “You’re an animal,” he tells Lana. “You go lick your wounds.”

  “I’m not sure I like that.” Lana stretches, pretending indifference. In California you can stir away a bad moment by tending to the twisting needs of the spine. She actually hates being called an animal: her mother and one of the millionaires and Rose had all, at different moments, called her an animal. When they used to climb plum trees, Rose liked singing this song, from one of the Oakland lesbian song-writers whose records they’d play, a tease but true:

  Go back into the darkness

  Like the wild thing that you are

  Your teeth are far too sharp, my love

  I’m afraid you’ll go too far.

  One more person with that animal need to call Lana an animal.

  Years ago, in a surge, using a phrase she’d picked up from a lisping television psychologist going on about unfulfilling relationships, Lana had shouted at her mother dependence enrages you. They had stood in their entry hall at the base of the stairs before the hall mirror. Mary stopped before repeating the exact words back to Lana with such scary sarcasm, one Lana had never guessed could live inside a mother, sounding almost hysterical. A bit later her mother told her not to be such an animal. Lana couldn’t understand the statement since she had felt at the height of sophistication in saying dependence could enrage a person.

  “I’m not interested in continuing this conversation,” Mary had said, putting out a flat hand in her face: “You’re rude, you’re aggressive and I—” but had cut herself off, fleeing the continuation, controlling it as she always did, already heading back up the stairs, sounding almost tearful. “Never mind.”

  Lana, lamely, at the base of the stairs, disarmed, had not known what to say. She had yelled up toward her mother: “You’re the animal,” the echo already unsatisfying.

  “I mean an animal in the best sense.” Dirk tries softening it, now squeezing her good foot halfheartedly. “Because most other women—”

  Hearing of other women does not rank high on Lana’s list. Especially not the women inscribed in Dirkian annals as she has understood them, a football field filled with ready happy braless sorts and their lustrous eyes all linking Dirk and Dirkian Dance to the eternity of their issues and salvation.

  Dirk can’t exit the idea. Lana an animal gifted at self-cure. “You’re a starfish—your ankle will grow back stronger than ever.”

  “Right,” she says, wanting to be the kind of person who always believed in fairytales. “Or maybe I’m like a lizard.”

  “Maybe it’s a message?”

  “What,” she says, unable to relinquish coldness, his hands understanding her tone, lifting as if burned by ice.

  “Stop running so much, right?” He says this when he doesn’t know half of what she has been doing recently, the lawyer and her pearls and Lana saying for history that Vic had, in fact, been prone to temporary insanity. This morning Rose had promised that, with the boost of Lana’s testimony, some kind of petition for a stay is now on its way to the governor. Dirk sighs. “You don’t need it warmer here?”

  “Not in the least.”

  At night he comes back to lay hands on both ankles in healing supplication all before checking his watch and going on to the next meeting. Because no way can Dirk mess up the Hope Springs engagement. Big things could grow at Hope; look how great that she can continue to stay in such a spa; it will help her recuperate. She doesn’t tell him that Hogan gave her a room that has nothing to do with Dirk and his gig.

  “Sorry, honey,” says Dirk, a new phrase for him. He has become her new sorry honey. It seems to serve Dirk’s divine ceremonies better if he sleeps alone, the better to meditate the next day, keeping himself pure like some Sugar Ray Leonard of the spiritualists, a comparison she cannot keep herself from pointing out, though there was the example of Gandhi sleeping with virgins. When Dirk turns a confused face at her, she says of course she understands.

  “So how you guys doing? You okay? Like it here?” Lana asks the two young faces in her room, the two of them a little breathless, worried or pleased at having been summoned so quickly from a duel.

  The boys say they are thrilled, a bit too uniform in the response. “We’re having the time of our lives,” says Tee, imitating some pop hero.

  “Why?” asks Lana, the painkiller she had popped once Dirk left the room starting its floatwork, helping ears detach from scalp, head from body, worry from reality: in such a float a person could feel generous and calm and in this calm Lana musses Tee’s hair as he warms to his subject, excited about the waterslide Hogan showed them, the reptile cemetery and snakevine labyrinth out back. They like Hogan letting them feed mice to the anaconda and the chain-smoking waitress Zabelle with her cigarette hanging out of her mouth even as she buttons Tee’s coat. They try not telling their mother too much about all the free fries and milkshakes and pie they’re getting in the diner. Sedge also doesn’t tell her what he has already expressed several times in space-robot talk to the undefensive ears of Lestrion: the best part of this Hope place is how quickly they can find mama.

  “You miss anything of our old life?”

  Of course Sedge says their grandparents, Jennie and BJ, plus a few of their friends up north. Plus looking for gold at the river or running with their dog Cad on the beach or trying to hide from the loggers in the forest, plus having to wait for cows crossing the highway.

  “My leg may be messed up,” their mother tells the boys. “But we won’t stay forever. This is in-between time.” Their faces flicker just a bit. Of course they want permanence and no kid ever really understands the idea of the in-between, especially not her boys with their clear on-off switches. She tries to be clearer. “When mama says it’s time to go, you’ll say yes, right?”

  “Sure,” yaps Sedge, always a bad liar.

  The loneliness of seeing a Rose who goes in and out of being old-time Rose is what Lana blames for how she has started to add into the mix her popping of stronger pills, all with the cheer of a kid chewing one of those fruit-flavored cuddly-bear vitamins never as good as you imagine. That night, the first in a long time, bruised, tender and floaty, she tries telling her bathed, pajama’d boys a bedtime story but Sedge interrupts, head combed slick on her waist, Tee’s head on her hip with the rest of him melting off the bed.

  “Mama, this is the best vacation we ever had,” says Sedge.

  “Plus I love you,” says Tee with what Sedge calls his brother’s gargly-cheese voice. The words startle her since Tee has never professed love—at least within her hearing—and may be using a phrase inserted into him by the alien masquerading as her old friend Rose.

  “I should be more of a mother lion,” she says, thinking aloud. She hasn’t protected them from foreign influence.

  “Why?” Sedge rushes to her defense. “We need you to protect us from lions. Not be one.”

  “Yeah. W
e almost got chewed to death!” Tee snaps his jaws.

  “And you saved us!” Sedge spins the story to bring her closer.

  “Yeah, Maamih!”

  In the boys snuggle, damp heads filled with rescripting, the happiness of the obvious lie sutured around the three: she has been enough to protect them, having saved them from imaginable doom, having done right by that strangest of duties which is claiming to be a parent who can protect children from their own worst impulses, not to mention those of others.

  NINETEENTH OF DECEMBER, 2008 7:03 P.M.

  “You’re telling her?” Tee asks his brother in a screech, resorting to their private language for the last part of the sentence.

  “Too freaky,” says Sedge. He has found a box of animal crackers in the room and holds them to his chest, not intending any direct theft. From within their tanks, live reptiles stare and maybe it’s these savvy captives or the blue fluorescent tubes that make it seem ordinary laws don’t intrude much here. “Think Hogan’s coming back?” Sedge has climbed onto a sofa tucked against the wall and peeks out.

  “He said he was going to get a faucet or something,” Tee says. “It’s hot in here. I’m dying. I can’t breathe. You think there’s air-conditioning?”

  “Hogan looks weird,” Sedge points out, changing topics because he hadn’t heard anything about a faucet.

  The thought of Hogan’s weird face falls into the middle of their diversion.

  “Does Hogan shave his head?” Tee asks for the twentieth time. He is trying to tug open curtains different than most, a vertical accordion fold squeezed narrow and wide. He can’t see where they attach so he yanks harder.

  “You’re going to tear that whole thing down. We better go before anyone finds us here?”

  Sedge’s hand creeps with no real intent into the animal crackers because he is nervous about the way Tee is trying to wrench the curtains open, working with his weight, until a creak out in the hallway makes them both freeze.

  There’s the closet, Tee signals with his head so they can make a quick break for it, pulling the door closed to find inside a scary dark.

  “No light?” Sedge whispers, claustrophobia crawling up the sides of his throat, especially when Tee scrabbles a finger over the narrow walls. “Maybe it’s a pull thing,” Sedge keeps whispering, unable to rise from his perch on the ground but trying. “Maybe I should sit on you, try to reach the switch?”

  “But he’ll see light from under the door!” Tee whispers, at the same second tripping over Sedge’s attempt to get up, only by accident slamming his hand into some ball that turns a red light up.

  “That is wow,” says Sedge.

  “Wow.”

  A closet with clippings pasted to the wall. They have found themselves inside something like one of those dioramas that always won the blue ribbon each year at Yalina’s little dink of a science fair.

  “Read it, whizkid.”

  This being one of the biggest of their mother’s worries, that Tee at nine still cannot read, that he gazes with respect at text, seeing tails and twigs with strong personalities but for years, with spectacular feats of memory, has been clever at faking the actual act of reading. Up in Yalina, after Tee’s years in a Sudbury school, the special-ed woman had called him dyslexic because of the way letters jump around, making it not worth his bother to get words to march in line or snooze. Now might be one of those times when reading could be worth the bother but Tee can’t all of a sudden whip the alphabet beasts and get sentences to behave.

  Meanwhile Sedge’s lips are moving.

  “Read with me!” Tee can’t quit how plaintive he sounds.

  “See mama’s name?” says Sedge.

  “That’s why we’re here?”

  “Maybe Hogan put this up after we got here.”

  “But it’s old, right?” Tee scratches at the sepia lacquer over one of the newspaper articles so that tiny amber worms curl off. “We’re like Encyclopedia Brown in the middle of a case.”

  “Should we tell mama?”

  They look at each other already knowing what a wrong move that would be.

  “Anyway, she probably knows,” says Tee, shrugging, offhand and fake.

  Out in the room, one of the animals they don’t know the name of—the meerkat or hedgehog? an albino dragon?—lets out a weird yelp, an unsettling backward sound, something like a rat swallowing a kitten.

  “I’m creeped,” Sedge admits, knowing his twin would prefer him to stay more contained, but how can he when a molten lead pit in his stomach could gulp him whole and Lestrion seems busy in some remote galaxy, not coming to anyone’s aid. Sometimes Lestrion gets unreachable, heading off to accomplish heroic tasks of rescue and triumph before returning to Sedge.

  “Someone’s coming,” says Tee.

  No keys, just rustling. “Come in, ma’am,” the guy outside says. “Here’s my whole whoop-de-doo.”

  “Just wanted to locate the kids,” their mother says, worry fringing her voice. Did she just stumble over her crutches? “O thanks.”

  “Boys are okay. They love it here. Probably they’re with Rose or Zabelle or Garville.”

  “Who?”

  “You know how people feel when they don’t have kids, they get angel dust off them. Garville is one of those guys, friend of Zabelle’s down in the diner, the waitress?”

  “You’re saying decent people?”

  “As much as Dirk.”

  “That was unnecessary.”

  They hear him laugh for the first time. “But your boys love our playground. They could stay there hours.”

  “I thought that was a junkyard. That metal stuff out back’s a playground?”

  They can’t hear Hogan’s response to this or what their mother says back, something to do with the boys getting hungry or needing some tending. Sedge finds himself grabbing Tee’s fingers but for once Tee isn’t getting upset.

  There is more movement. “This one’s a velociraptor,” Hogan says. “Has the weirdest mating habits of the bunch. The female goes into heat, rubs its legs, then eats the first males who dare mating with her. Then it makes this kind of music—”

  —he lets out an odd keening sound.

  “She’s going to be so mad,” Sedge hisses. “What if they find us?”

  Tee, more pragmatic, quiets Sedge by pinching his arm hard.

  “So, ma’am?” Hogan’s voice nearby. “There’s a guy in the governor’s office.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “La Misión de Nuestro Señor Dolorísimo.”

  They sense the chill of her silence and in this second, what Sedge wouldn’t give for a keyhole.

  “Your dad,” says Hogan. “In Old Parcel?”

  She still says nothing. Then: “What has Rose been talking to you about? Something I don’t know?”

  Sedge’s mind churns over the possibilities. Does this mean they have some new grandpa somewhere? Someone other than grandpa BJ up north? But this new grandpa lives in an old parcel, bound in brown paper, wrapped with twine, waiting for someone to pick him up.

  “Your boys, ma’am,” Hogan is saying almost as if he knows they are in his closet. He changes the subject in one of those sneaky adult ways. “Amazing. You got one who takes in everything. So observant. I’d hire him to pilot a submarine. And the other’s so brave.”

  “You’re saying lawless,” she says. “Tee’s a rebel. No one could invent a law he wouldn’t want to break.”

  TWENTIETH OF DECEMBER, 2008 10:20 A.M.

  “Let’s talk straight—” said by Hogan the morning he stops ma’aming her, the morning he takes Lana by the half-finished, roofless cob-bale temple for a walk, cocking his head at her when she can’t stop coughing, though she can’t help it, the air burns her throat.

  “What’s that haze?”

  “They’re evacuating people two exits down,” Hogan says. “We’ll be okay. This always happens, it’s just feds being cautious since the fire grew overnight.”

  “Grew?”
>
  “Wind around here’s bad as someone throwing a light switch.”

  Some internal devil had convinced her to leave bed yesterday and this morning she should be trying to sleep off last night’s headache, one that continues into today without a pill in sight and Rose gone AWOL and no one around to get her a prescription. Each step Lana takes makes claws hook into her bad shin, the throb unignorable. “You brought me here to shuck corn?” she says.

  “You’re helping.” His smile could not be trickier. “The biggest event of the anniversary’s happening tonight. Your Dirk’s trance dance thingamajig.” When this gets no traction, he stops the pretext. “Look, you and I are practically friends here. I’m not going to pussyfoot. You know your father has, what, five days left? Before he sizzles?”

  “Thanks.” Seating herself on the stone fence. “I thought you and Rose were supposed to be satisfied.”

  “I’m not talking about Rose. You didn’t ask but I want to give you my take.” When she says nothing he goes on. “Basically you’re the kind of person who likes mating with the kind of responsibility Rose shows.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “She may want to be more a wild woman but you want to, I’m sorry, have sex with reliability itself.”

  “Hey.” This guy doesn’t know her and dares to talk too straight. “I thought the idea was I’d help out and then everyone would leave me alone. You guys would be satisfied.” Shucking corn, silk off shaft, hands well-practiced.

  “I’m not talking we guys. Did you hear yesterday Vic asked for a punishment true to what the feds were using at the time of his act?”

  “No.”

  “Guy’s asking for electric. Doesn’t want injection.”

  “Okay.”

  “My theory’s a guy’s desperate asking for old Tom Ed. Know what I mean? I’m talking about our human capacity for suffering.” He watches her hands grabbing one more ear and another from the pile. “It’s not like we’re animals can chew off bad legs.”