The doorbell rang. Sophia looked at the clock. An hour or ten hours might have passed since Darius left. Only seven o’clock in the evening. Still. Who dropped by uninvited at that time of day?
Through the window next to the front door, she saw Harry Harlow’s dumbly handsome face studying the lintel.
“Go away,” she said.
“Please.”
“No.” She shook her head. Was he spying on the house? Did he know that Darius had left?
“I need to talk to you,” Harry said.
Sophia saw a silver BMW parked in front of the house and opened the door. “Is that the car?” she used her chin to point to it.
“No.” Harry shook his head. “I traded it in. There wasn’t any damage but I didn’t want to drive it anymore.”
She looked into Harry’s eyes. The flecks of gray and orange were like the granite countertops all her friends used when they renovated their kitchens. Why would he do such a thing? He could so easily be lying and she would never know. “This is not a good night,” she said.
Harry hung his head and pressed his hand against his forehead, as if he were trying to shade his eyes from the sun. On the rare occasion a script had called for tears Harry had never been able to cry on demand, but now, standing on the McMartins’ front porch, he was unable to stifle the sulfurous sobs that rolled powerfully through his lungs, up the larynx, and out his throat. Sophia was both moved and appalled by the extravagance of his grief.
“Oh, for God’s sake”—she opened the door to let Harry in—“I’m the mother.” Harry stepped inside. Determined to gather himself, he pushed his palms against his eyes, inhaled deeply and drew himself to his full height, as if to salute a general. The tears passed so quickly, even he wondered if they had been an unconscious ploy to get inside the house. Monty, who usually kept his distance from strangers, nudged his nose into Harry’s crotch. “Monty!” Sophia chastised the dog, secretly pleased at its impertinence.
Sophia turned and headed toward the kitchen. Harry followed meekly behind. “I need a drink,” she said. “Do you want one?”
Harry shook his head. “No, thanks.”
Sophia scowled. Teetotalers depressed her.
“Maybe a beer.” He changed his mind.
“We don’t have beer.”
“Wine?”
Sophia chose a bottle of her cheapest red.
Watching her execute the quick half twist of the corkscrew followed by the thwock of the cork leaving the bottle, Harry understood that Sophia McMartin knew her way around a wine bottle.
“Why are you here?” Sophia handed him a glass.
“They fired me from the show and my wife left me.”
Sophia thought it might be a good time to point out how little a marriage and job compared to a daughter but settled for an unsympathetic “Mmmm.”
“Actually, it’s okay. I hated that show and my wife….” Harry shrugged.
Sophia took a sip of the wine and winced. It was barely fit for a pot of coq au vin. “I’m so glad we could be of service,” she said. When the girls became teenagers, she used to lecture them on the awfulness of sarcasm, but, what the hell, she was having a bad day.
“You hate me,” Harry said sadly.
“I don’t hate you. I hate what happened when you were driving your car.” If Harry were a different person she might have hated him, but five minutes in his presence was enough for Sophia to see that he was just another lost soul. His looks only barely covered it up. Something about his misery made her open up. “My husband left me, too.”
Harry’s eyes widened in surprise.
Sophia took another sip of wine. Once it aired, it wasn’t nearly so bad. Or maybe her expectations had merely fallen in line. “He wants to bring Helen home and I don’t. She’s not conscious and won’t ever be. After the accident, the doctors said her chances would be good if she awoke in twenty-four hours. Then it was a week. Then two weeks. Now they don’t look us in the eye anymore. Instead, they say, ‘She’s very sick.’ Like I didn’t know that.” The alcohol made it easy for her to talk. Once, on a plane trip back from Ireland, she’d sat next to a chemical engineer returning to Ottawa from his father’s funeral in Killarney. After three glasses of Aer Lingus’s complimentary Cabernet, she had confided her darkest thoughts about her marriage. I think I married too young. I’m not sure my husband has talent. I should have finished my dissertation. You can always have children. The engineer, a bland-looking man with wire-frame glasses, thin lips, a wife, and four children, shocked her by putting his hand on her thigh. “Tempting,” she’d lied. “But I don’t think so.”
“For what it’s worth,” Harry said, “I think you’re right.”
“I know I’m right,” Sophia answered.
“Is there anything I can do to help?”
“Such as?” Sophia asked.
“I don’t know.” Harry tried to think of what he could possibly offer. “Money?”
Sophia wondered if she should be offended. People always were when it came to money but she was more practical than that. The insurance from Darius’s job was supposedly covering the hospital stay, but already bills with shockingly high balances had begun to arrive daily at the house. At first, Sophia had opened them and made a few halfhearted efforts to sort through the arcane codes by calling the 800 number at the top of the page, but now, when they arrived, she threw them into a Nordstrom shopping bag in the broom closet and forgot about them.
“Can you drive me somewhere?”
“Anytime,” Harry answered.
“Now?”
Sophia saw Harry glance at the wineglass in her hand. “I’m not drunk,” she said defiantly. Harry wasn’t going to argue. He’d watched his mother enough to know exactly where Sophia was located on the drunkenness spectrum—seemingly lucid but prone to recklessness. And convictable if stopped by the police. Better him driving than her. “Where do you want to go?” he asked warily.
“None of your business,” she answered.
“Okay,” Harry answered. “Let’s go.”
Sophia hesitated. She hadn’t quite expected him to say yes.
By the time they arrived at Bobby Goralnick’s house, via an irrational set of directions printed off an Internet map site, the sky had turned the smudgy gray of an exurb night. “Drive slowly,” Sophia said, looking closely at the houses, half of which had been torn down, replaced by cedar-shingled McMansions too big for their lots. Bobby had lived behind a run-down split-level ranch mostly obscured by a clump of funereal evergreens. Beyond the shrubs, she could see the outlines of a roof. She tried to imagine the house through Helen’s eyes. To Sophia, it looked sad and neglected but Helen might have thought it romantic or, at the very least, exotic compared to the McMartins’ tidy Colonial and well-kept front yard. Sophia got out of the car. Harry followed.
“Who lives here?” he asked.
“Lived. Bobby Goralnick.”
“The kid?” She didn’t bother to correct him. Already, she was beginning to question the wisdom of the outing. What was she hoping to find? Bobby Goralnick’s dirty socks? A bong? The Collected Works of Immanuel Kant? She hadn’t had a drink after the bad wine back at her house and the thirst was terrible. Harry followed an unenthusiastic three feet behind her, but she was glad of the company. She never would have had the guts to do it without him. Sophia turned the handle on the door to Bobby’s house. It was locked.
“Oh, well,” Harry sighed with relief. “We tried.”
Sophia opened her purse, took out the key that Louis Carone had brought her, and put it in the lock.
“What are you doing?” Harry asked.
The door opened. Sophia stepped inside the dark house.
“I don’t think this is a good idea,” Harry said from the doorway.
Sophia found a light switch on the wall and flipped it back and forth a few times. Nothing. “Do you have a flashlight in the car?” she asked.
“Yes,” Harry answered without thinking. “I mean, n
o. I really think we should go.”
“The eyes adjust.”
“This is breaking and entering.”
“This is entering. I have a key.”
The outline of a couch and a television became visible. Beyond that was a door. To the bedroom? Sophia inhaled deeply through her nose. The air smelled of unwashed clothes and incompetent plumbing, but underneath something smelled familiar.
“Do you smell that?” she asked.
“I don’t smell anything,” Harry said miserably.
She closed her eyes and inhaled again. “Murphy Oil Soap. Someone has been cleaning.”
Sophia felt her way through the dark into the tiny kitchen. She didn’t tell Harry what else she knew, that the person who had done the cleaning was a woman and probably not the maid. She doubted Bobby had a house cleaner. Light from the street revealed an oil lamp and a box of matches on the kitchen counter. She lit the oil-soaked wick. A flame threw her shadow dramatically against the wall, illuminating a garbage bag distended by pizza boxes in the corner. Sophia opened a cabinet door. A dozen cans of white clam sauce were lined up next to a five-pound bag of sugar. She held the light closer to the bag. Sophia wasn’t a baker. When the girls were small, she’d made the occasional cake in the shape of a butterfly and, once, the number five, but the sadly lopsided results had always filled her with resentment—all that work for such mediocrity? The top of the bag had been clumsily opened so that a smattering of small white granules collected in the folds. A column of small brown ants marched up one side and down the other. Sophia frowned and closed the cabinet door.
In the living room, Harry was sitting awkwardly on the arm of the couch. He stood up when he saw her. “Can we go?”
“Soon,” she answered, passing him on her way to the bedroom.
The room smelled of mold. She raised a venetian blind and looked out the window at a chain-link fence and the back of someone’s garage. A sleeping bag lay crumpled on top of the mattress. Sophia put the lamp on the bedside table, stretched the sleeping bag the length of the bed, lay down, crossed her arms like an Egyptian mummy, and stared at the ceiling. A brown water stain surrounded a few small stalactites of plaster that had begun to peel and flake. If only the ceiling had collapsed on Bobby Goralnick in his sleep. Or the boiler had blown up or the mud slides had thundered down the Santa Monica mountains, engulfing the block, the house, the room, the bed. She could spend hours thinking of better ways for Bobby, né Virgil, to have died.
The elongated shadow of Harry appeared in the doorway. His face looked even more alien in that light. “Are you okay?” he asked.
“No,” she answered. Something about Harry’s comic gloom kept her honest.
Harry sat on the edge of the bed. “When I first moved to L.A., I lived in places like this.”
“Before your ship came in,” Sophia answered. She worried that he might lie next to her.
“Before my ship came in,” he repeated. “Is this making you feel better?” He twisted his spine to look at her.
“Not really. You?”
Harry shrugged. “I don’t matter.”
“Who does?” Sophia sat up. Lying next to him felt too intimate.
“Your daughter. She mattered.” Harry winced. He’d meant to say “matters.” Present tense.
Sophia startled Harry by standing suddenly and moving quickly toward the kitchen.
“What is it?” he asked, following her.
Without answering, she opened and closed drawers until she found a wad of cheap plastic grocery bags, the kind she used to automatically throw out until she was responsible for picking up a dog’s crap. Harry watched as she carefully placed the sugar in the bags. “Let’s go,” she said turning to him.
“Happily.”
Neither Harry nor Sophia noticed the red Mercury Sable parked across the street from Bobby Goralnick’s house on their way out. In the driver ’s seat, Misty Moon held her breath as they passed.
Harry turned the key to the ignition, or what used to be called a key but was now a small black thing the size of a matchbox with some kind of infrared doohickey that unlocked the doors and adjusted the rearview mirror, lumbar support, radio, and air-conditioner to levels preset by the driver. The engine came to life with a muted roar and Harry’s eyelids drooped momentarily with plea sure. What was it with men and the internal-combustion engine? Even Darius got that same moony look when a Ferrari passed them on the highway. It must be the promise of an easy escape. As if such a thing existed.
“Where to?” Harry asked. Sophia searched her wallet. After the policeman Louis Carone had left the house, she’d been so angry she had thrown his business card in the garbage, then fished it out five minutes later. Coffee grounds had stained a corner brown, but otherwise it was readable.
“Can I borrow your phone?”
Louis Carone answered on the first ring.
“Detective,” Sophia hesitated, suddenly unsure of herself. “It’s Sophia McMartin. Helen’s mother.”
“Yes?” he answered. Impossible to read.
“I, um, think I have some evidence for you.”
“What is it?”
“I’d rather bring it to you in person.”
“I’ll be in the office tomorrow.”
“What about tonight?”
“It’s almost nine.” His mood was suddenly clear—irritation with a dash of indignation. In the movies, she wanted to say, detectives worked all night. Instead, she looked out the window at the heavy traffic on the 405, her mind helplessly drawn to the unanswerable questions of city life: Where was every one going? How many hours of their lives had been spent sitting in traffic? Hundreds? Thousands? What might they have accomplished in that time? Why was she having these thoughts at this moment? She wanted to say something that would reveal the significance of what was lying between her feet at that moment but she sensed the policeman might be underwhelmed by the brick of sugar. Even Darius had shown remarkably little interest in finding out who put the sugar in Bobby’s gas tank when she finally told him about it. “Will it bring Helen back?” he’d asked. “Will obsessing on cutting-edge medically inappropriate treatments bring her back?” she’d wanted to answer, but had not.
“My caller ID says Harry Harlow,” the policeman interrupted her silence.
“I’m in his car.” Sophia glanced at Harry hunched over the steering wheel, driving like an old lady. Only after saying it aloud, did she understand how that must sound. Her irony detector, usually so well attuned to the perverse couplings of fate, had somehow slept through that one. It must have been the Merlot.
“Hold on,” Carone said, his voice suddenly alert.
In the background, Sophia heard voices talking excitedly.
“My kid loves that show.” Carone came back on the line. “Could you meet us at Marie Callender’s in twenty minutes?”
Twenty years in Los Angeles and she’d never been in the restaurant, but it was exactly as she might have imagined: laminated menus, gelatinous cherry pie on a slow carousel, crayons for the kids, a pendant light fixture for every booth, silverware tightly wrapped in white paper napkins, the faint smell of french fries and ammonia, and a weary waitress of Cycladic proportions. Through the outside window, she had seen Carone sitting in a booth across from a kid eating a piece of coconut cream pie. The child looked to be twelve, maybe thirteen, past the age of sugar-induced ecstasy, but incapable, for the time being, of carrying out his more destructive impulses. Seeing love and fury mixed so inextricably in the detective’s face, Sophia felt a wave of sympathy wash over her—why was it so hard to love purely?
When the child saw Harry and Sophia walking toward him, his eyes widened. Carone turned, rose, and held out his hand to Harry. “Mr. Harlow,” he said, “how are you?”
Mr. Harlow? Sophia could easily picture Carone leaning against the counter in her kitchen, glass of water in hand—May I call you Sophia?
“And who is this?” Harry squatted to say hello to the kid. Sophia winced.
That might have worked for a six-or seven-year-old, but teenagers, especially the young ones, want to be treated like equals.
“Uh…” The kid looked down at the floor.
“Zachary. Zach for short,” Carone said. “He’s a real fan.”
“Is he?” Harry asked.
“When are you going to come back?” Zach asked. “That new guy really sucks.”
“Right now I’m kind of enjoying my break.”
“Is it true the rats ate a woman alive?”
“Where did you hear that?” Harry asked.
“On the Internet. They also said that you had, like, gone crazy.”
“Maybe,” the policeman said, “you could talk to Zach about work in the television industry?”
“Dad.”
“I don’t mean on camera but, you know, behind the scenes as a cameraman or, what do you call it? A grip.”
A waitress appeared, pressing a menu against her ample chest. “Oh my God,” she said, staring at Harry, “are you who I think you are?”
“No.” Harry shook his head. “I’m not Brad Pitt.”
Everyone but Sophia laughed. How awful fame was, she thought, watching Harry drown in their sweaty stares. Sophia touched Carone on his arm. “Could we?” She gestured toward the grocery bag in her hand.
“Go,” Harry said, and nodded. “Zach and I will talk.”
Carone settled in a few booths away, his eyes still on Harry. “I didn’t know you and Mr. Harlow were friends.”
“We’re not. He’s just trying to expiate his guilt by pretending to give a shit about me.”
Carone forced his eyes back to Sophia and nodded slowly in the “Okay, I’m dealing with a crazy woman” way.
And Sometimes Why Page 24
