“I’m okay,” Harry answered, “I’m on my way home.”
“Thank God you took a Breathalyzer.”
“Any news on the couple?”
“Harry, it’s not your fault. You know that.”
Harry’s bottom lip jutted forward. His eyes began to water. “Both?”
“The girl is alive, I think. I only know what the reporters tell me. Isn’t it crazy? I’ve got to watch TV to know what’s going on. Harry, there are going to be reporters at your house, don’t say anything.” Ainything.
“How do they know where I live?”
“They know every thing.” He sounded overwhelmed.
“I guess you’re earning your salary this week, Fields.”
“I guess so.” I gayess so.
“Should we, like, send flowers or something?” Fields’s response sounded something like “Krakatoa.” Then the line went dead.
7
sophia was seven minutes late for her lunch with Betsy Saunders, the thirteenth-richest woman in Los Angeles, as tabulated by the glossy giveaway, Sunset Boulevard. Most people wouldn’t notice seven minutes. Betsy would. She noticed every thing. If Sophia was wearing a new shirt or a different shade of lipstick. If she was tired or sad or happy, Betsy noticed. She was like a spider, tracking every thing that came near her web. It made it exhausting to be around her but not entirely unpleasant. There was, Sophia had to admit, something invigorating about being noticed so carefully. Especially now that she was of the age when men, who had once looked at her without fail, barely registered her presence. More important, it was Sophia’s job to like Betsy. Not only had she given millions to the museum, unlike most rich people, she actually enjoyed calling up her friends and berating them for not giving more. The words “It’s not like you can take it with you” came out of her mouth so often, Sophia’s assistant once had them printed on a coffee cup for her birthday present.
They were eating at L’Orangerie, a faux Georgian mansion flanked by fiberglass gargoyles and citronella torches lining the Belgian-block driveway. The walls inside were a brownish orange and every thing on the menu had something orange in it—duck à l’orange, fish poached in citrus, rack of lamb served with a cranberry-orange relish. Even the waiters wore orange vests, which, in Sophia’s opinion, made them look like construction workers. When she was feeling low, she saw hate in their Aztec eyes; other times, the place was a comfort, a throwback to the days when neither money nor calories were an issue. Though, as Sophia had learned from working with the very rich, money was always an issue. She knew for a fact, for example, that Betsy liked to eat at L’Orangerie only because she owned the parking lot attached to it. And while she’d grown accustomed to the yellowed armpits of Betsy’s silk shirts and the missing buttons on her Chanel suits, the first time she met her, she’d been shocked by the moth holes on the sleeve of her Bill Blass suit.
Sophia had requested the lunch to discuss an Agnes Martin that Betsy had promised the museum two years earlier, a bland sunscape from Martin’s early days in Santa Fe. A week earlier, the director of the museum, a slim-hipped German with unblinking blue eyes, had called Sophia into his office to say he’d heard that Betsy had promised the same painting to the Guggenheim.
“That can’t be,” Sophia said.
The director raised a pale eyebrow.
“She does this stuff when she feels neglected,” Sophia explained.
“Well, let’s un-neglect her.” He waved his hand as if to move a cobweb.
“An invitation from the director would mean more.”
“I’ve got a very busy schedule.” He neatened a pile of papers on his already spotless desk.
Betsy offered a white cheek rendered lineless by a surgeon’s scalpel. When Sophia bent to kiss it, she felt as if she’d been brushed by a moth’s wing. The fact that Betsy considered Sophia a friend made her unfireable at the museum but required a devotion that Sophia sometimes resented. Once a month, Betsy summoned her to dinner at her Bel Air mansion, a traditional Colonial filled with provocative contemporary art, which always struck Sophia as odd, like an octogenarian wearing a miniskirt. The guest list was random to the point of hostility. Betsy liked to sit at the head of the table and watch people struggle to make conversation. “It’s the Darwinian struggle to survive,” Betsy once explained to Sophia, “right there at my dinner table.” When the guests did happen to get along well, Sophia couldn’t shake the feeling that Betsy was angry.
“Well, well,” she’d say, glaring at them, “look at you.” Once, years before, a couple who had met at one of her parties actually got married. Betsy was still furious about it.
Sophia had gotten used to the old woman’s misanthropy, the casual references to “faggot” curators, “pathetic” painters, and “idiot” collectors, but Darius, with his natural manners and tendency to think the best of every one, was so taken aback by her vitriol he refused to go back.
“So,” Betsy put her hand on Sophia’s. “Tell me every thing.”
Sophia sighed. What was there to tell? Her life had not changed much since their last lunch. She had the same job, lived in the same house with the same husband. She could talk about books she had read or movies she had seen, but she knew that would bore Betsy. She could tell her about her midlife fantasies of selling the house, cashing in the pensions, and moving to Provence or Italy or that small town in the Mexican mountains where every body goes to drink. Once, she had even listed the house on one of those home-swap Internet sites but was so disappointed by other people ’s houses, their ugly couches and smug descriptions of the neighborhood—We live right next to the sweetest park and the best café!—that she took the listing down after a week.
Truth was, the most interesting thing in Sophia’s life were her children. Watching them figure out a place in the world was endlessly fascinating to her. She could happily spend all day with them without ever getting bored, and the conversation she most enjoyed with her husband was always, always about the girls. Was Miranda happy? Would Helen ever get over that silly Roy Beaudell? But Betsy would not be interested in that. Because she had never experienced it from her own mother, nor felt it toward her own, nothing bored her more than maternal love. What interested Betsy was gossip—the more malicious, the better. Nothing made her happier than hearing about another person’s misfortune. Once, in a moment of weakness, Sophia had made the mistake of confessing to a flirtation with one of Darius’s colleagues. Ever since that day, Betsy would ask, “How’s your marriage?” with a knowing leer that made Sophia cringe.
Safest of all was gossip from the art world, and in anticipation of her lunch, Sophia had made a few embarrassing phone calls to scrounge some up, beginning with the impending divorce of a German architect notorious for his taste in very young Asian girls.
“Ew,” Betsy said, wrinkling her nose, “remember the one he brought to the Biennial? Her skirt barely covered her twat.”
Sophia did not remember the barely covered twat of a young Asian girl. Only curators went to the Biennial. Sophia was in development. It was the kind of mistake Betsy made all the time, gaffes that seemed innocent on the surface but always made Sophia’s mood darken. She could have been a curator if she had ever finished her dissertation, “Render the Child: Flesh of Jesus in Early Florentine Renaissance Painting,” but how was she supposed to write at home with a small baby constantly needing attention? With her cold heart and millions of dollars, Betsy could have easily handed the baby off to a minion, but that had not been an option for Sophia. Or had it? Sometimes, she wondered if she had used the unplanned arrival of Miranda so early in the marriage as an excuse for her failure as an academic. Truth is, Miranda had been an easy baby, happy to lie calmly in her bassinet, playing with her own fingers while Sophia tortured herself at the computer. It wasn’t laziness that kept her from succeeding, it was ambition. She wanted so badly for her thoughts to soar and her words to sing, it paralyzed her. She’d write and rewrite a single sentence over and over until it no longe
r made sense, like a skier lost in a whiteout, no sense of up or down, sky or snow. Finally, she’d put it aside and go to the park with Miranda. Tomorrow, she’d think, when her mind was fresh, surely she’d be able to resolve the problem.
But the next day, when she read the sentence, she’d be appalled. How could she ever have thought the words acceptable? And so it went. Days and days would pass but she’d find herself no closer to an end. She was the snake eating itself. Sisyphus rolling the rock up the hill again and again. Darius, already an assistant professor, was full of advice in those days. “Don’t be so hard on yourself. It doesn’t have to be perfect.” But he was wrong. It did have to be perfect. The longer she took to write it, the more perfect it had to be. No wonder she had embraced childbearing with such ardor—it did not matter what kind of a mother she had been that day. Whether she had let the baby cry or left a wet diaper on too long, couldn’t find the burp after a feeding or bought jars of commercial food instead of using the food mill to grind fresh carrots, the child grew. Regardless. Not only that, she loved Sophia in a way nobody ever had. Who else lit up like a Roman candle when she walked into the room? Who else could stare lovingly into Sophia’s eyes for hours, endlessly entranced by the mute bond of mother and child? Who wouldn’t be more interested in the flesh of her own child than the bloodless flesh of Christ in a painting from the fifteenth century?
Sophia was on the verge of bringing up the Agnes Martin, when her cell phone began to vibrate. Betsy made a face. Usually, Sophia would let it go directly into voice mail but she was sufficiently irritated with Betsy for the Biennial comment that she decided to answer just as dessert—orange pound cake soaking in a puddle of melted Belgian chocolate—arrived. It was Darius. Something had happened to Helen. An accident. On the highway. The doctors were with her. She was alive. But. But? Sophia wanted to scream.
“You’ll want to get here as soon as possible,” Darius answered.
Sophia stood.
“My God,” Betsy said. “What’s wrong?”
She opened her mouth to answer but nothing came out.
Sophia drove cautiously, like a drunk overcompensating for impairment. Both her parents were alive, her grandparents had lived to reasonable old ages, and she had no close friends who had died untimely or freakish deaths—yet all her life Sophia had been silently steeling herself for disaster. Whenever she watched Darius or the girls leave for trips, her mind would immediately wander into the ways they could die—what if their plane, taking off from LAX, hit a flock of seagulls? She had read that a single bird caught in the engine turbine could cause the plane to stall mid-takeoff. What if the pilot of the plane was suicidal and slammed it into the ocean, determined to take with him as many as possible? What if a hijacker opened an emergency exit midair? The plane might stay aloft but every body within a five-foot radius would get sucked out of the door. What if the girls ate a hamburger infected with mad cow disease? What if they got bitten by a mosquito infected with West Nile virus? What if there was an earthquake and they were swimming in a pool and a live power line fell into the water? What if a deadly jelly fish stung them while they snorkeled in the Caribbean? What if a common cold turned into pneumonia, then septic shock? What if a crazy, unloved adolescent brought a shotgun to school one day? What if they interrupted the arc of a stray bullet in the drive-through at Poquito Más, their favorite Mexican takeout place? What if a chunk of concrete fell off the truck in front of them on the highway and smashed their windshield at eighty-five miles an hour? What if a rabid bat bit them on a camping trip? What if they stepped on a rattlesnake in the spring, when its venom was most potent? What about avian flu? Legionnaire’s disease? Cancers of the cervix, the colon, the esophagus, the pancreas. Skin cancer, bone cancer, uterine cancer. There were a million unthought-of ways that the people she loved could die. By thinking them through ahead of time, Sophia liked to think she had somehow prepared herself for a disaster when or if it happened. Driving to the hospital, Darius’s “but” ricocheting through her guts, she saw what a rank amateur she had been in the pessimism department. She hadn’t had a clue what it would feel like when something bad happened to her child.
In the hospital parking lot, a man and a woman walking across the street in surgical blue scrubs sent a wave of panic crashing through her. She parked at a cockeyed angle in front of the emergency room, under a large No Parking sign.
In the lobby, a rustic wooden cross with fake wormholes loomed over the foyer. Catholics. Good. Not because she was a believer, but she’d been raised in the faith and knew her way around it. “I’m looking for my daughter,” she said to the woman sitting behind the information desk. The woman looked startled. Sophia realized that she had just yelled at her.
“Name?” the woman asked wearily, as if people had been yelling at her all day.
“Helen,” Sophia answered meekly, as if to make up for yelling. “McMartin.”
Information appeared on the computer screen. “She’s in the ICU. Three floors up.”
Sophia followed her directions, rolling the letters—I…C…U—around in her head, trying to remember what they meant. They sounded collegial—something-something university? But she knew that wasn’t right. As the doors of the elevator closed, it came to her. Intensive care unit. Where they send the sickest. But not the dead. In the waiting room, Sophia found her husband and daughter looking pale and confused, as if they were recovering from a flu. When she got closer, she could see that the pupils of their eyes had shrunk to pinpricks. She hugged her daughter first.
“What happened?” she asked, dismayed by the flicker of blame dancing deep inside. If you had given her the car, none of this would have happened.
“There was an accident. A motorcycle and a car, that’s all we know.”
Darius listened with a detached expression on his face, as if he were trying to identify a far-off piece of music.
“Helen was in the car,” Sophia said.
Miranda shook her head. “No, she was on the motorcycle.”
“Who has a motorcycle?”
“I think it was the guy she was seeing. They asked us if we knew his next of kin. He might be dead. I don’t even know his last name. Just that he was older and in a band.”
“Helen had a boyfriend?”
“She didn’t want you guys to know about him. She thought you wouldn’t approve.”
Sophia sat down and put her hands over her eyes. She thought of all the times in her life she had misused the words she needed now. A boring cocktail party was a nightmare. A traffic jam was a disaster. Now she was left mute by the enormity of a true tragedy.
Helen’s surgeon—Dr. Rajiv Marjani—entered the waiting room. He offered his hand first to Darius, then Sophia. He was familiar with the father’s handshake. Brief. Firm. Dry. The grasp of a man trying hard to hold everything together. The mother took his hand between both of hers, looked straight into his eyes, and did not let go. He got the message. If something happened to his son, he’d probably do the same. The sister did not meet his eye at all, and he made a mental note to send a psychiatric social worker around for a consult. He didn’t like the girl’s color at all. Much too pale.
“I am very, very sorry for what has happened to your daughter and her friend,” Dr. Marjani began, secretly cursing himself for not being able to remember the patient’s name. Ever since the day he had gotten a shooting victim’s name wrong to a set of grieving parents, he had learned never to say the name without being completely sure. “I am afraid the young man died en route to the hospital.”
“The driver?” Sophia asked.
The doctor nodded.
“What about Helen?” Darius asked.
The doctor sighed. “May I give you a lesson in Brain Injury 101?” he asked. No one answered. As a family, the worst medical emergency they had experienced was what Sophia’s doctor called a “suspicious” Pap smear, which turned out to be nothing. Darius had once gone to the emergency room convinced his appendix had ruptured but h
alf a bottle of Mylanta later, he felt fine. Without waiting, Dr. Marjani removed a plastic model of a brain from his pocket. It was bright blue and the size of a large fist; he had bought it at the Museum of Natural History’s gift shop during an outing with his son. It added little to his presentation, but he liked to direct the attention of the family away from his own gaze, onto a neutral object. Sometimes, the pleading in their eyes was too much to bear.
“The brain needs oxygen to survive,” he began, “which it gets from red blood cells delivered through thousands of tiny blood vessels attached to its walls. When there is a traumatic blow to the head, such as your daughter suffered, the brain is rocked back and forth violently.” The doctor shook the model as if he were mixing a bottle of juice. “The movement tears those blood vessels away from the brain, causing it to swell, just as a finger slammed in a car door will swell in reaction to injury.”
He could see he had lost them. “Because the brain is encased by the hard shell of the skull, when it swells it has no place to go. The pressure caused by that swelling is what causes the oxygen to be cut off.”
“Helen’s brain is swelling?” Darius asked.
“Yes,” the doctor answered.
“Can you do anything to control it?”
“We have already drilled a hole into the skull to relieve the intercranial pressure.”
“You drilled a hole in Helen’s head?” Sophia asked.
“Oh, yes. Without that, she would be dead.”
“I need to sit,” Sophia said.
“Of course,” Dr. Marjani gestured to a seat, silently dismayed. Once they sat, you could count on an extra five minutes of talking, and already he had been called to consult on an accident at Presbyterian Memorial across town where a young man had botched trying to kill himself with a gun to the mouth. It was the type of injury Dr. Marjani specialized in, and the doctors there were hopeful they could still save the patient. He had promised to come if he could, but the truth was, his heart was never fully into saving suicides. There were too many other patients who had been blindsided by fate for him to spend his energy on someone who wanted to die. No, he would stay with this family and answer the best he could; if they still wanted him at Presbyterian, he’d consult by phone.
And Sometimes Why Page 7
