The Wonder Bread Summer: A Novel

by Jessica Anya Blau

  Billy told Allie a long and interesting story of being born in Middlesex, moving to the States at age three, then returning to Britain when he was seven. His words hit Allie in damp little pats as he spoke. Eventually his voice rocked Allie into the most peaceful sleep she’d had since Marc broke up with her.

  When she woke in the morning, Billy Idol was gone. Beside Allie’s head, on Biltmore stationery, was a note written in all capital letters:

  DEAR CHINA-BLACKIE,

  THANKS FOR THE FUN, THANKS FOR THE COKE, THANKS FOR THE GAB. YOU ARE A DOLL EVEN THOUGH YOUR MUM IS A BIT OF A WANKER. HERE’S THE BEEPER NUMBER FOR IAN, MY MANAGER. CALL HIM IF YOU’RE EVER IN TROUBLE AND YOU NEED MY HELP.

  LOVE, BILLY

  Allie’s heart fluttered. Here it was, written proof that someone, Billy Idol even, was ready to help her. She would save this number for a real emergency. For now she was okay moving on by herself. She was off to Los Angeles to find her father. Hopefully, she’d get to him before Vice Versa did.

  Chapter 10

  There was a moment, as she was driving into Los Angeles, when Allie felt a pang of loneliness slice up through her core. Now that she and Kathy had “broken up,” Allie didn’t have a single friend in L.A. All her friends at Berkeley had strong hometown ties: framed pictures of Senior Cut Day in high school, loads of people who would come visiting, long-distance phone bills that were higher than their rent. Allie loved looking through their photo albums, seeing pictures of groups that were so big everyone’s head appeared to be the size of a ladybug, hearing about Thanksgiving holiday when friends would travel in packs, visiting house after house late into the night until they had eaten dessert maybe fifteen times. Allie had never had a pack. The only people in L.A. that she might be able to call friends now were Jorge, Consuela, and Roger. And she had only known them for hours.

  Still, since Allie had no idea where to find her father, and Roger was stuck in the hospital, that was probably as good a place to start as any. She could sit in Roger’s hospital room, make amends for almost having killed him, and use the phone until her father finally picked up.

  Once she got on the 405, traffic came to a dead stop. Allie could have played Chinese Fire Drill by herself. When she first heard about Chinese Fire Drills, she had tried to convince Wai Po to do one. They were in Wai Po’s car, a spotless four-door red thing that smelled like vinyl. (Wai Po told Allie she kept the car in good shape so Allie could have it when she turned sixteen. When Wai Po died, Penny sold the car and kept the money, using a portion of it to buy a one-way ticket to Wisconsin to join Mighty Zamboni, which was based there.)

  “You just put the car in park,” Allie had told her grandmother, “and then we get out, run a full circle around the car, and get back in again.”

  “WHY?” Wai Po had said, in her usual shout.

  “For fun,” Allie had said. “You do it at a stop sign.”

  “BUT WHY IS THIS FUN? I AM OLD WOMAN. IT IS NO FUN TO GET IN AND OUT OF CAR AND IT IS NO FUN TO RUN AROUND CAR.”

  Wai Po was fifty-five at the time, and to seven-year-old Allie that did seem old. She agreed that ancient, hobbled Wai Po, who had the posture of a troll, should not gallop around the car. But now that Allie was twenty, her mother was thirty-eight, and her father was forty-eight, fifty-five didn’t seem that far gone.

  Allie put the car in neutral in the middle of a river of automobiles that filled her rearview mirror and stretched out in front of her as far as she could see. Heat waves undulated off the cars. The man on her right was picking his nose. Did he think that no one was looking through his glass windows? On her left was a bald man in a red convertible. Allie rolled down her window and leaned out.

  “Hey there!” she shouted.

  The man turned and smiled at Allie as if he’d like to get off at the next exit and get to know her. “Hey!” he said.

  “Do you know how I get to Cedars-Sinai hospital?”

  The man’s face changed, his hopes dashed. “Just get off at Santa Monica Boulevard,” he said. “It’ll be easy from there.”

  “Thanks!” Allie waved and turned her head. She could feel the man staring at her, his desire was like an invisible net trying to entangle her. Allie rolled up the window as if that could protect her from his gaze.

  Allie pulled up the emergency brake and sat in the silence thinking about her night with Billy Idol. If anything could erase the stain of Marc, it was being naked with Billy Idol a second time. And yet why was Marc slinking back into her thoughts?

  The traffic inched ahead. Allie released the emergency brake and let the car roll. She played a little game, trying to see how long she could inch forward in traffic without shifting into gear or hitting the brake. The bald man beside her kept apace even though he could have moved up in his lane, ahead of Allie.

  Allie was about to declare herself a winner in the no-gear/no-brake game when her windshield exploded with a thunderous crash and Allie felt something large, warm, and heavy, like a bag of laundry, slam into her head. It happened too quickly for her to scream. Carefully, she lifted her hand and felt her head for blood or bullet holes. And then she opened her eyes to what was possibly the ugliest creature she had ever seen sitting on the passenger seat: an enormous black bird with a featherless neck and head that were pink like a fresh-picked scab. Its beak was arced like an old man’s nose and it was screeching like an old woman, shaking puzzle piece–shaped bits of glass off its wings.

  Allie was still too surprised to know what to do. Her head felt lumpy and warm, as though giant bruises were bubbling up. A small group of people rushed to the car before she had sense enough to get out, and now they stood gathered around her: a blondish family, two black men, and the bald man, of course, who was taking pictures with a camera the size of a brick, which hung from a thick black strap around his neck.

  Allie turned off the engine, opened the door, and got out of the car. The Wonder Bread bag was on the floor below the bird. Her purse was next to the bird on the seat. Allie hoped the bird wouldn’t leave droppings on her purse.

  “Thing looks like a condor,” one of the black guys said.

  “I bet you’re right!” the blond father said, and he patted the man on the back as if he’d just discovered gold.

  “You okay?” The bald man put one hand on Allie’s upper arm, then let go as he clicked off more photos of the bird.

  “I think so.” Allie touched her head again.

  The bird hopped onto the driver’s seat and banged its beak against the driver’s-side window. The tapping had an urgency to it, like the clicking before a bomb goes off. The crowd laughed.

  “Go out the front! There’s no window!” Allie yelled at the bird. Everyone laughed again.

  The bird hopped onto the console between the seats and spread its wings. They were probably longer than Allie’s legs—feathered tips touched each side of the car. The bird started to squall and flap, creating a chaos and tension that reminded Allie of stirred-up dirty lake water.

  A siren sounded in the distance. Allie’s heart beat so powerfully she thought it might be visible through her two shirts. She ran to the other side of the car, opened the door, and grabbed her purse and the bread bag off the floor. The bird leaped forward onto the hood of the car just as Allie was closing the door. Allie could hear the clicking of the bald man’s camera. She looked down into the mass of jewel-colored cars to see if the siren was coming closer. There it was, a cop car, in the breakdown lane. And traffic was starting to roll.

  The bird looked back at Allie, still and upright, like it was posing for a picture. Then it dropped dead, beak-first. The crowd gasped. Allie knew that if she had been anywhere but Los Angeles, people would have stuck around and tried to revive the bird, or maybe they would have checked to make sure it was truly dead. But traffic ruled here, and traffic that was moving forward could never be ignored.

  Allie grabbed the giant bird in both hands, the bread bag dangling from her right fist, her purse sliding off her left shoulder
into the crook of her arm. The bird was much heavier than she imagined, more like an eight-year-old than a baby. She went to the trunk, opened it, and dropped the bird on top of Beth’s school books, which had been there since the end of the semester, and two empty Tanqueray bottles from when Beth had hosted a T and T party outside the football stadium sometime last fall.

  Cars were moving around Allie, like river water around a giant boulder. She slammed the trunk shut, rushed to the driver’s seat, brushed the round-edged glass out onto the freeway, then got in the car. Her Candie’s crunched the glass underfoot as she shifted herself into place. She started the car, put it in drive, and moved forward. Even at twenty miles an hour, the wind made her eyes tear up and snarled her hair. Allie wished she had a scarf, like Grace Kelly in that movie when she cruised down the curvy, cliff-side roads in Monaco. And she wished she had sunglasses, too. With the Los Angeles haze coming right at her, Allie’s eyes felt as though she was in a smoke-filled bar. She put her hand on her forehead and felt the hot olive that had suddenly grown there. She would have cried, maybe. But her eyes were too dry and at that moment she needed to just get to the hospital. Along with the phone, there’d be food there. A bathroom. After she found her father, she could call Beth again to make sure things were still cool with Rosie. She might even call Marc and find out if he’d made any progress on getting money out of the bar so he could pay her back. Of course, all this was dependent on Roger being glad to see her. And after what Allie had done, almost killing him by smashing an open palm of cocaine in his face, she couldn’t blame him if he didn’t want to talk to her.

  Chapter 11

  Roger squealed and tapped his head pointer against the board that was placed on a tray across his lap. He didn’t appear to be wearing a hospital gown: his chest, arms, and shoulders were bare above the sheet tucked under his armpits. He was hairier than Allie would have imagined—somehow the growth of body hair seemed incongruent with life in a wheelchair. In his useless, flaccid arms were wires and tubes, taped against the openings where they entered his veins, and his wrists were bound with soft, white binds to the arms on the bed. Machinery lit up and beeped all around him, giving the impression that Roger was in dire circumstances, but Roger’s vigorous banging against the word YES gave Allie confidence that he would be all right.

  “Remember me?” Allie said, and she dropped into the molded plastic chair beside the bed. Roger slammed more rapidly on the YES.

  “I’m really sorry,” Allie said. “I’m really sorry this happened.” She looked down at the bag of coke, then tucked it under the chair with her purse.

  NO NO NO NO, Roger tapped.

  “I feel like it was my fault. I gave you way too much.”

  NO NO NO NO, Roger tapped.

  “Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes,” Allie said. “I was an idiot. Irresponsible. I almost killed you.” Allie dropped her head in shame. She was embarrassed by everything: the fact that she had lost $7,000 to a man who apparently didn’t love her, lifted her shirt for Jonas so he could see her breasts, and stolen the coke. Now Allie understood why her mother didn’t leave until Wai Po had died. It was hard to mess up with that cranky, choppy voice yelling at you about what you should and shouldn’t do. But when it felt like no one was watching over you, the bad stuff became easy.

  “I’m such an idiot,” Allie said.

  Roger stared at her silently, his pointer resting on the NO.

  A nurse walked in. Allie stood to give her more room. “Is he going to be okay?” Allie asked.

  The nurse was reading Roger’s chart. She went to the tubes, checked everything as if they were wires in a car engine. “Yup.” Her hips flared out like a bell. When she moved, they swung from side to side. Her oatmeal-colored hair was pulled back into a tight bun. Her face looked older than her figure.

  “No surgery?” Allie asked.

  “Oh, he’s had surgery,” the nurse said. “They put a stent in his artery.” She was writing in the chart now.

  “So now he’s fine?” Allie asked.

  “Like new,” the nurse said, and she looked up and smiled.

  “You’re like new!” Allie said to Roger, and she couldn’t stop herself from thinking: If not a little heavier, balder, more waxy-looking, and pinniped with limbs that don’t quite function like new.

  Roger tapped on the YES. The bell-shaped nurse swung her way out of the room, and Allie scooted the chair closer toward Roger’s head and sat.

  “Roger, can I talk to you about something?” Allie guessed that a guy who did a palm-full of coke, produced porno, and funded camps for underprivileged children would somehow be able to understand the dilemma she was in without passing judgment.

  The pointer clunked down heavily on the YES. Roger gave a panting smile.

  Allie started with Marc and the loss of her money, lingered over the cocaine, touched down on the penises (Jonas, Jet, Billy Idol), and then ended with the lump on her forehead, or, more specifically, the condor crashing through the windshield of the Prelude and currently resting in peace, she hoped, in the trunk. There was something liberating about talking to someone who couldn’t interrupt with questions, ideas, instructions, or a coherent reaction. Roger’s response to each point on her list was the same walrus-like honk as he raised his pointer in the air.

  “So what do you think I should do?” Allie asked.

  H-O-W, Roger tapped.

  “How,” Allie said.

  “B-I-G,” Roger tapped.

  “How big?” Allie said. “How big what? Penises? Coke?” She held up the bread bag. Roger didn’t respond. “Santa Barbara County Bowl? Jet? Jet’s short, like this.” Allie held her hand an inch over her head. She could feel that her hair was fluffed up into a wild, wiry puff from the ride with no windshield. Still no response from Roger.

  “The bird?” Allie asked, and Roger trumpeted.

  “Big,” Allie said. “Enormous. Like something out of a dream. Or a nightmare. You know?”

  YES, YES, YES, Roger tapped. O-K, Roger tapped.

  “Okay?” Allie asked. And then Roger tapped out the word think. “Can I use your phone while you’re thinking?” Allie asked, and Roger trumpeted.

  Allie used the bedside phone to call her father. After dialing his home so many times last night, she had memorized the number.

  “Hello?” Her father’s voice wasn’t booming.

  “Dad?” Allie said uncertainly. The calm voice was unsettling.

  “Yeah?”

  “Why are you home? I thought you were reopening the restaurant.”

  “I got people down there working. They don’t need me hanging around telling them how to do their jobs.”

  “But that’s what you do,” Allie said. “You hang around and boss people.”

  There was silence for a moment and then her father said, “Sweetheart, when are you coming home?”

  “You mean to your home?”

  Silence, and then, “Yes, your father would love to see you.”

  “You want to see me?” It felt like a wire cable was running through Allie’s spine—straightening her, alerting her.

  “Yes. Of course.”

  “Well, where do you live now, Dad? I don’t even know where you live.”

  “You got a pen?”

  Allie dug through her purse and pulled out a pen and a magazine subscription card. “Okay, go ahead.”

  “Thirty-nine twenty-six Las Trachas Avenue.”

  “Where is that?”

  “In the Hollywood Hills. Just off Sunset.” Allie heard a rumbling in the background and then her father said, “Wait. It’s 5926. I was confused.”

  “You were confused about your own address?”

  “Old age,” Frank said, and his voice sounded soft and worn.

  “Dad, are you okay?” The wire in Allie’s spine tightened, yanked upward.

  “When are you coming to see me, sweetheart?”

  Allie stopped talking and waited for something to be revealed through the air on the phone.
Her father had never called her sweetheart before. She couldn’t help but be touched even though her heart, her stomach, and her vibrating spine were telling her that something was terribly wrong. Was Vice Versa sitting there with a gun to Frank’s head?

  “I’m going to stop off and see some friends,” Allie said, “and then I’ll get there as soon as I can.” She was gathering time enough to come up with a plan.

  “So I’ll see you today?”

  “Uh, yeah. Dad, where’s the new restaurant?”

  “Sonoma Boulevard in Venice.”

  “Same name?”

  “Of course.”

  “So, maybe we should meet there, right?” Vice Versa couldn’t kill them in the middle of an under-construction restaurant. There would be at least twenty people on the site working to get the place ready.

  “I’m not going in today, sweetheart. Just come home.”

  Frank never called any of his residences home. It was always the apartment, or the condo, or the house.

  “Okay, Dad,” Allie said. “I’ll see you at home.”

  Allie hung up the phone and looked at Roger.

  “Either he has a gun to his head and someone is telling him to tell me to come home or he had a stroke.”

  Roger stared at Allie for a moment with his wet, droopy eyes. A small bubble of spit sat on his dangling lower lip. He let the pointer drop on the letter G.

  “Gun,” Allie said, and when Roger trumpeted in the air she felt a swirly shifting inside herself. Her father was large. She just hoped he was larger than Vice Versa and, somehow, bulletproof.

  It took twenty-seven minutes for Roger to convince Allie, through frantic tap-spelling, that she should not call the police and send them over to her father’s house. His final message: “No police. Ever.” Jorge and a few “helpers” were on their way over, Allie learned. They would get the situation under control.