Raj wandered around the small apartment hugging the doughnut box under his arm. His blue jeans were hacked at the shins and he wore tube socks and black leather sandals despite the cold. She couldn’t help but notice that he was slightly plump, as he’d always been, yet he was still attractive and had an aura of comfort and solidity. When he paused in front of her books—each one a dusty time capsule of the hours she’d spent within it—Lydia grew self-conscious of her secondhand shelves, doubled up with books, some tripled, and the sight of them left her feeling obsessive and antisocial. But as she studied Raj’s profile, watching him hug his doughnuts, she thought he appeared equally obsessive, equally antisocial.
“You do anything but read?” he said.
“Not much.”
“Sounds nice.”
Raj poked around her apartment, and at one point he stopped in front of David’s meager shelf of books—fat programming manuals and a few collegiate musts, like The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test and Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas—and picked up a little robot that David had made out of bottle caps. Perhaps Raj was reminded of his childhood, lost now, spent building plastic model cars in his bedroom.
“How are your parents anyway, Raj? They doing okay?”
“I guess they’re fine,” he said, shrugging. “I worry sometimes about my mom. She never takes a break. She burned her hand recently, really bad this time, but the next day she was right back at work, wearing this mitten of gauze. The woman refuses to take a day off.”
“So same as always,” Lydia said with a pensive grin.
“Same as always: Dad’s a crab and Mom’s a smiling wreck. You should stop in and see them sometime. Really. If you can handle it.”
“I’ve driven by,” she said, shrugging. “Just never stopped.”
Which was true. Countless times, Lydia had passed Gas ’n Donuts while taking the Colfax bus, or riding shotgun with David, or heading on thrift-store excursions with Plath, but her nostalgia for the place had never been strong enough to outweigh her dread of dredging up the past. Despite the paint peeling from its façade, the building itself had remained a deco landmark, with wraparound neon and curved stucco walls and glass bricks lining either side of its entrance. She’d seen Mr. Patel a few times through the street-side windows, slogging around under the smoke-stained American flag that still hung on the wall over the counter. He’d grown a thicker beard and a gut the size of an engine block, and even from a distance she could tell that he still wore those stretched white T-shirts and frayed gray hairnets, and he still carried himself exactly as he had when she was a girl—which is to say he moved through the world like he wanted to kick its ass. As for Mrs. Patel, Lydia had only seen her in passing once: smiling wide and wearing an apron over her sari, politely holding open the door for a customer who was carrying a box of doughnuts and a cardboard tray of coffee—just as she always had when Lydia was a girl.
“I really should stop and say hi,” she said. “You’re right.”
“They’d love to see you. I’m telling you, that place is like a time warp. Nothing’s changed.”
She watched Raj with a wistful smile. “Don’t take this the wrong way,” she said, “but you seem the same, too. Unchanged. In a good way.”
“Okay,” Raj said, nodding with mild amusement, “my turn. Don’t take this the wrong way, but I thought you’d be way different. You don’t seem screwed up at all.”
“We’re all screwed up, Raj. Modern living.”
“But look at this place. It’s all so grounded. No dirty dishes in the sink. No lipstick on the windows. No pet tarantulas. You really pulled your shit together.”
“I work at a bookstore,” she said. “That’s not exactly corporate law.”
“But I expected you to be curled up in an asylum somewhere. I was actually kind of hoping for that.”
“So you could save me?”
A grin cracked his lips. “So we’d have more in common.”
Raj leaned against the bay window and looked out. From the right angle during the winter, when the leaves were stripped from the trees, the golden dome of the capitol could be seen gleaming in the distance.
“Can I ask you something?” she said, and the words came in a burst, before she had a chance to stop them. “What was it like for you after I left? I wrote you all those letters, but you weren’t able to write back, so that’s something I’ve always wondered about. If you even remember, I mean.”
“What was it like?” he said, turning his head but not turning around.
“For you.”
“Horrible. Not like it was for you, but still really horrible.”
“I figured,” she said. “That’s okay. You don’t need to—”
“Let’s see,” Raj said. “Right after the murders, I guess the worst part for me was knowing what you’d been through but not being able to see you. I begged to go to the hospital, but your dad wouldn’t allow any visitors. So my parents and I sat around the shop and watched the news and listened to the rumors, just like everyone else in the city. You wouldn’t believe the stories. The Hammerman was scarier than anything. At night he tapped his hammer on our bedroom windows, on the pipes beneath our slumber parties. We pictured him with jet-black hammer tattoos on both arms. After the murders, when Carol’s house was on the market, kids in the neighborhood would dare each other to sneak inside and climb under the sink and chant the Hammerman ten times. Like Bloody Mary? No one made it past five. You couldn’t pay me enough. He could’ve been anyone, you know? Because he never got caught.”
“I heard,” she said.
“And you came up a lot, too. Always Little Lydia, just like on the news. In class we made calendars and recipe books to raise money for you. And the memorial at school—man alive. That was just intense.”
“How so?”
“People started showing up outside of Little Flower and constructing this makeshift memorial for Carol. All these little gifts, mostly from strangers, just kind of sprouted against the playground fence, and before long the flowers and balloons and ribbons and cards got to be overwhelming. We were encouraged by the nuns to try to forget what had happened, yet all day long, out the classroom windows, we could see strangers piling these reminders against the chain-link. Candles and photos and teddy bears. Posters that people would sign. Then one day it started to snow, that wet, slushy snow that always ruined recess, and Sister Noreen told us to run out to the playground and carry the shrine inside, one stuffed animal at a time, one crayoned note, and soon we couldn’t help it, we were all crying, every single one of us, and setting up the shrine on bleachers in the gym. It’s such a strong memory, running in and out of the school, all of us in tears together, and the nuns bawling too, and—”
Raj stopped abruptly and blinked for a minute. He seemed as surprised as Lydia about this manic flow of memory.
“I don’t know what to say, Raj.”
“Heavy-duty, right?” He looped a finger into the back pocket of his jeans. “Anyway, I brought something to show you. I wasn’t sure you’d seen it.”
From his pocket he pulled out a folded page of a magazine and handed it to her. It was heavily creased and ripped along the margin, and on one side was a faded advertisement for Prell shampoo. On the other, a striking halftone photo from an ancient issue of Life magazine, of a little survivor named Lydia, wrapped in a blanket, surrounded by police, being carried down a snowy stoop by her father. The sight of it sent a jolt through her and she let it fall to the coffee table, facedown.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I thought it might be— I don’t know.”
“It’s fine,” she said. “It’s just hard for me to look at.”
“Me too, to be honest,” Raj said. “Those first months you were gone were the hardest, probably. That was before I got any of your letters. It didn’t help that my parents were already hanging on by a thread. Without you, I realized, I had no life outside of home and the gas station, and my life at home had been a disaster for a long time alre
ady.”
“I remember,” she said.
“Not a great advertisement for arranged marriage, you know, even if it wasn’t technically arranged.”
“Wasn’t there a haircut fight?” Lydia said, somewhat out of nowhere, smiling grimly, glad for the change of subject. “I vaguely remember a haircut fight.”
“Oh my god,” Raj said, “that was the worst.”
“Your mom cut off all of her hair and your dad—what? Lost it?”
“In a nutshell,” Raj said, nodding in a way that seemed half-embarrassed, half-amused. “So do you remember the scene in Rosemary’s Baby when Mia Farrow cuts off all of her hair? She goes out and gets that pixie cut, right?”
“Vidal Sassoon,” she said. “Big moment in the history of hair. Cassavetes played her husband.”
“Exactly,” Raj said, nodding, impressed. “So Rosemary comes home from the salon, all cute and demure and excited to show him her new short haircut, and do you remember what he says to her? Don’t tell me you paid for that. I swear to you, Lydia, my dad had that exact reaction when my mom came home with her shiny little— What do you call that haircut? Not a bob, but a Dorothy Hamill thing—”
“A wedge?”
“A wedge, yes. My mom was all excited, and my dad basically said, Don’t tell me you paid for that. Maybe not those exact words, but he was pissed. It wasn’t even drastic, right? Every third woman had that ’do. Both of my parents were born in California, but my dad still expected her to be this medieval village woman. For a while I think she even slept on the couch. Anyway, it was really hard on us when you left. My mom always loved you so much.”
“I always loved your mom,” Lydia said.
“She really couldn’t take it,” he said. “She’d just gotten so sick of all the violence in the neighborhood, and what happened to you just brought it all closer to home. When I was growing up, you know how she and my dad always kind of babied me—”
“Kind of babied you? Raj of the Doughnuts.”
“Believe me,” he said, smiling. “It only got worse once you were gone. They were so worried about me, and my mom talked about not being able to live in America anymore, it was too violent, all that.” Raj shifted into his mom’s soft voice, no accent, but with long, drawn-out vowels. “People here are crazy, Raj! Not to mention all the hassles she dealt with every day on Colfax. Remember, there were always these little scuffles out on the sidewalk, a knife fight at the bus stop one day, or my dad would have to push some drunk out the door or call the police on some asshole trying to steal gas. When she was growing up in Southern California, all of her relatives who’d visited from Gujarat would talk about what it was like back in India, telling her these stories about perfect little villages and the open countryside full of wildflowers and waterfalls—total cartoon, right? A poster in an Indian restaurant. For a while, all she talked about was moving there, but of course my dad refused to even consider it. So then she decided I would go with her, and we’d try to find a business to buy in the village where her aunties and grandparents lived, but my dad put his foot down. I really think that if I would’ve gone with her, we never would’ve come back to the States.”
“So she went anyway?”
“She did,” he said. “I think she just needed a reality check because she came back before long, and her hair had grown out some, and she’d gotten rid of all that women’s lib talk. She probably realized that everywhere has its problems, you know? Maybe Colfax wasn’t so bad.”
“My dad basically had the same reaction,” Lydia said, nodding her head, subdued by the direction this visit had gone in. “He did the exact same thing: got out of town the second he could. Rio Vista was his India. Only we never came back.”
“I’ve never really thought about it like that, but it totally makes sense,” Raj said. “You can’t really blame them, worrying about their kids. Wanting to raise us somewhere safe.”
“We were so much happier in Denver,” she said, “with the library and the doughnut shop and everything, at least for a while. So much happier—and then we just weren’t.”
Lydia glanced at the magazine page still facedown on the table, and when she looked up she caught Raj staring at her. She picked it up and turned it in her hands. She didn’t need to say, All because of this, because Raj was looking at the picture now as well, and she could tell exactly what he was thinking: All because of this.
CHAPTER TWELVE
The photograph earned front-page spreads across the West and even made Life magazine’s The Year in Pictures, just opposite the image of an American army helicopter tilting away from a crowd of refugees. The freelance photographer, tipped by a pal in the Denver Police Department, popped his shutter just as Tomas lunged down the porch steps of the house next door to the O’Tooles’, where he and Lydia had gone to wait for help. The photo captured them plunging through the crowd of paramedics and cops, with Lydia glancing up at the camera, eyes wide with terror, face masked with blood, limbs knotted around her father. A gray blanket dragged behind her, and one of the cops could be seen reaching down to lift it out of the snow.
For days after the photo was taken, Lydia inhabited a hospital room crowded with flowers and balloons and yarn-tied get-well cards. In addition to all the bedside visits from doctors and nurses, she’d been interviewed by a pair of bossy policemen who smoked too much and could never quite figure out how to work their tape recorder. Worst of all, the cops kept leading her dad away from her bedside, and whenever he returned he looked scraped out, as if they were collecting little pieces of his soul in jars somewhere. Before long the policemen were replaced by women who wore turtleneck sweaters and beaded necklaces and looked like teachers. They were kind and brushed her hair and always asked how she felt. She’d look at her dad—fiddling with the bandage on his palm, scratching at his beard—and tell the women that she felt just fine. No nightmares? She’d smile and lie. None that she noticed. No sadness? She missed her friends, was all. No pain? The stitches on her forehead were beginning to itch. Once when her dad was out on a Jell-O run, they asked her if she knew anything about his special friends, but when Lydia said What friends? they just fluffed her pillow and encouraged her to get some sleep.
Soon Lydia was walking through the hospital lobby, squeezing the hands of nurses as Tomas steered her into the backseat of the used station wagon he’d purchased during one of her naps. He told her to hide under the duffel bags and blankets back there, and doing so felt like the most natural thing she’d done in ages.
—No one’s allowed to see us, he said. All part of the deal.
Three hours later the rest of the deal was clear as they dragged their bags into a two-bedroom A-frame cabin in the hills north of Rio Vista. Tomas had apparently arranged to buy the cabin, along with its massive workshop and eight acres of juniper pine, sight unseen. The place had been unoccupied for years and it had cost him practically nothing, but in order to call it home he still had to cash in nearly every cent of Rose’s life insurance. Though it would take him another six months to sell their house in Denver, and he spent a lot of that time in a financial panic, never once did he mention returning to the city.
At first, the ten-year-old Lydia thought the move to Rio Vista was an adventure worthy of a storybook. Tomas loaded their grocery cart with TV dinners and candy bags and ordered a set of Holly Hobby bedroom furniture from the old brick J. C. Penney outlet in Colorado Springs. He assured her that until the following fall—seven months away—she didn’t even have to think about school or homework or making friends. Everything about this new life carried the feeling of a dream, especially the tiny town of Rio Vista. The valley smelled of campfires and freezer frost, and Main Street’s wooden sidewalks clopped beneath her feet as she ran. Behind town, the Arkansas River roared south, its rocky banks stapled with railroad tracks and mining chutes. The mist rising off the river was so eerie, the mountain peaks so soaring, that she often felt as if she and her father had moved to a paragraph in a fairy tale—
/> Except that during all of their time together Lydia found it upsetting that they never spoke about That Night, especially because it felt as if it had slithered forward in time and consumed every other night in her life. Sometimes she would hear her father crying in the shower, or she’d catch him pulling the phone into the pantry and whispering in the dark. Once when he fell asleep against a tumble of pillows on the floor, she looked at him over the top of her book—his beard growing gray and scraggly, his wool sweater unraveling, his horn-rims sitting crooked on his nose—and whispered it, just to see:
—the Hammerman, dad. where’s the Hammerman?
He groaned in his sleep and she wondered if his nightmares were as bad as her own.
Lydia’s fairy tale in Rio Vista fully lost its shine when Tomas, after tapping his remaining savings, decided to take the only job he could find: working as a corrections officer at the state prison on the southern limits of town. When he shared the news over toaster waffles one evening, Lydia was full of complaints. Not only was Tomas compromising himself—a phrase she’d heard him say a zillion times—but he would have to be gone all night.
—We all start on graveyard.
—but i’ll be alone.
—I thought you were okay.
—i am.
—Then what’s the problem?
The problem was, Lydia soon discovered, that being alone all night gave her ample time to think—not only about her seven-month vacation coming to an end, but also about the one thing she wasn’t supposed to be thinking about: That Night.
Lydia started fifth grade about the same time that Tomas started his prison job, and during the first week of school, Mrs. Wahl, the busty PE teacher with a platinum lid and satin jogging suits, took special pity on her and set aside time after school to train her in the art of personal hygiene. Ever since moving to the mountains, neither she nor Tomas had shown much interest in taming her tangled hair, and coupled with the forehead scar and the fresh jump in her eyeballs, she’d begun to look wilder than she really was. (In the mirror alone at night, in fact, she sometimes sensed a petrifying resemblance to Carol O’Toole.) But taming her appearance was the least of her worries. Because Lydia was the new kid in town, her classmates tended to either study her every move or want to kick her ass. She didn’t quite understand if these scabby mountain kids were supposed to be her friends like Raj, like Carol—god: Carol!—but she never had the luxury of sorting such questions out. When they circled her in the weedy lot behind the playground and interrogated her about where she got that forehead scar, she couldn’t tell them the truth, of course, and before long she felt like a permanent balloon had been inflated between herself and everyone else on earth.
Midnight at the Bright Ideas Bookstore Page 12
