For the moment she decided to let it rest. Maybe her dad really was just a sad old man reaching out to his daughter, and maybe Joey had done whatever he’d done all alone, without any help. Maybe.
“I need to see you,” her father said. “Can you and I get together?”
“Things feel too mixed up right now,” she said.
“You’re not alone there. But I need to see you, Lydia. Please.”
“Honestly?” she said. “The other day, after seeing Moberg, I started driving toward Rio Vista but turned around. I guess I wasn’t ready for that.”
“Okay.”
“I’m still not.”
Lydia sighed into the phone. She was contemplating hanging up when her dad spun the conversation into a new direction.
“Does David know about this whole thing with Joey?”
“David?”
“He should be taking precautions. Who knows what Joey was up to. Or who else was involved. Let me talk to him, will you? I’ll feel better about it if I don’t have to worry about you.”
Lydia froze. “You aren’t talking to David.”
“He’s a nice man, your David. Sounds from here like he’s treating you okay.”
She looked around her bathroom, at David’s razor on the sill, his black shampoo bottle in the shower caddy, a few of his hairs on the porcelain sink, and suddenly felt disturbed by how deeply entwined their lives had become.
“Tell me you’re not talking to David,” she said.
“I understand you’re worried. But don’t be. He’s a nice man, like I said.”
She’d known her father had been trying to get in touch with her but also assumed that David had been curt with him in their exchanges over the phone. But apparently not.
“You cannot speak to him,” she said.
“He knows, Lydia. You hear me? David already knows. That should change things, I would think.”
“You told him?”
“Of course not,” he said. “We talked about it, but then we talked about a lot.”
“You talked? When?”
Her father waited.
“Answer me,” she said, more shrill than she’d intended. “How much does David know?”
“Everything, Lydia. He knew everything long before he and I ever talked. He’s a stand-up guy. Maybe give him credit—”
“Don’t call here again.”
Click.
In the living room Lydia scooped up Raj’s cigarettes and lifted the window and climbed out to the small section of shingled rooftop that sloped over the porch. It was bitter cold tonight, yet she hardly noticed that she was wearing only a beaten gray T-shirt, jeans, and holey woolen socks. Under the lights below a man was walking a potbellied pig and the pig sprayed piss all over a fallen trash can.
For the next hour Lydia smoked on her roof alone, hardly able to feel the frozen air around her. At one point Raj leaned out to check on her, but she shook her head and he disappeared back inside. Through the barren trees she could see the cartoonish reach of the Cash Register Building over downtown, and she could hear cars tearing past on Colfax, their studded tires waiting for winter’s final thaw.
She thought back on her years with David and reassured herself that, with the exception of the memory of those hours beneath the sink when she was a ten-year-old girl, she’d given herself entirely over to him, and still that hadn’t been enough. He had to take the one thing she’d wanted—the one thing she’d needed—to keep for herself. And then to discuss it in secret with her father only added to the betrayal.
Before long, a gray sedan bounced through the potholed street below and backed into a parking space. David climbed out.
Lydia’s heart jumped and she crawled through the window. Raj was still inside, reading the newspaper with his feet on the coffee table.
“Was that David?” he said, scratching his cheek. “On the phone.”
“He just pulled up, Raj. Sorry about all this, but you should go.”
Raj grabbed his coat and hat and hugged her before slipping out. She imagined him brushing past David on the stairs.
The apartment door had barely closed before David had it open again. He set his bags on the couch and tried to kiss Lydia on the cheek, but she dodged his lips.
“Okay,” he said, his breath hiding beneath clean mint gum. “Did I do something?”
She grunted. Part of her wondered if she just didn’t care enough to fight, as if David had just given her the reason she needed to abandon this version of her life.
“So,” David said, leaning to catch her eye, “are you going to tell me what’s happening here?”
She pulled on a sweater and a pair of sneakers, scooped up her jean jacket, and walked past him to the door. He began to reach for her, saying words she could scarcely hear, but she shook him off and pulled away.
“Lydia? Please talk to me.”
As she stepped out of their apartment, her voice ripped through the building: “Don’t ever talk to my father again!”
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Lydia stepped inside the Supper Club, a steamy, velvety bar a few blocks from Bright Ideas where her late-shift comrades almost always ended up. Her hands and feet were so cold she could barely feel them, but the jukebox was cozy with crooners and sliding into a buttoned red booth made her feel warmer already. All she really wanted tonight were some comrades with whom to drink—there were always comrades with whom to drink—and in due time she was four hot toddies deep, listening to them chat about bounced checks and student loans and eviction notices, the cheapest vacations they’d ever taken, the worst rural Greyhound stations, their previous lives in Buddhist monasteries and Catholic convents and the American military, the best way to sprinkle Top Ramen’s magic golden flavor powder into a boiling pot of noodles without it clumping into paste. She heard someone say, “Never shop at a place with a parking lot,” and she couldn’t have agreed more.
The night had been going well enough for her to have almost forgotten why she was plunging her face into hot whiskey when suddenly one of her bespectacled, ponytailed comrades dragged the drunken bliss right out of her.
“Hey, bad news,” he said. “We had to make Hi Guy leave the store tonight.”
“Hi Guy?” she said. “You kicked him out?”
“It sucked. I thought you’d want to know.”
“Hi Guy?” she said again, and slapped her forehead.
“I know.”
Hi Guy was among the sweetest of the BookFrogs. A lanky man in his fifties, he parked himself most days in an old orange chair in Bright Ideas’ magazine section and muttered a gleeful Hi to anyone who came within five feet of his stretched-out legs. Over and over, Hi, Hi, Hi, with rarely another word. For whatever reason—Plath theorized it was pheromones—no one else ever sat in that chair, even when Hi Guy wasn’t around. He had beautiful teeth and shiny skin and flotsam in his hair. His eyes were milky and Plath once told Lydia that he read books upside down—that he was born with upside-down eyes. Plath wasn’t kidding. Lydia wasn’t so sure.
“You really made him leave,” she said. “Hi Guy?”
“He wrapped one of our newspapers around a fifth of gin and sat there drinking it,” he said, “which was, you know, whatever, but then an hour later he pissed his pants and started falling all over the place. He crashed into a fancy lady drinking her fancy coffee. She got burned. Not burned-burned, but made uncomfortable, which for a power tool like her was as bad as getting burned.”
“Where’d he go?” she said.
“I steered him toward the train station but I doubt he made it. It’s cold out there tonight,” he added, downcast.
Then Lydia was standing up, listing to the left.
“I’m just gonna check real quick,” she said, as if she were just running to the bathroom, and the next thing she knew she was slamming her drink and wandering alone over the icy sidewalks of Lower Downtown. Someone said, “Lydia fucking rocks,” as she teetered out of the bar.
He
r long rubbery legs seemed to drag a few feet behind her, and by the time they caught up she was scanning the rows of benches inside Union Station. She lifted blankets and newspapers off snoring faces—sorry, whoops, sorry—but none belonged to Hi Guy. Soon she was circling the streets and alleys around the station. Finally she found him, huddled against a low cement wall that bracketed the plaza of an office building.
“Hi Guy?”
“Hi.”
He groaned and rolled under a ripped gray blanket.
“You okay?”
“Hi—” he started to say, but his voice was interrupted by vomit. Lydia knelt next to him and wiped his cheek with her sleeve. She asked again if he was okay and he sighed hi and gently closed his eyes. She put her hand on his shoulder and looked out at the traffic lights bobbing on their wires, and then she heard herself talking about David’s collusion with her intrusive father and this lost city of her childhood, and how she’d spent more time hiding beneath sinks than anyone she knew, maybe anyone in history, and she vowed to read To the Lighthouse again and to give Gravity’s Rainbow another chance—
“Don’t cry,” he said.
She stopped talking and only then realized her cheeks were wet with tears and freezing cold. Somehow Hi Guy made her feel safe, so she nodded and told him all about Joey, about finding him hanging and finding his books and his messages and his suit—
“I’ll take that suit.”
She looked at him. “You want Joey’s suit?”
“His adoption suit.”
“Adoption suit?” she said, craning over him. “What does that mean?”
“That’s what he called it. He wore it to meet his mama.”
Lydia felt her enthusiasm fizz and with it a flash of sobriety. Hi Guy, with his days upon days of meditative sitting, would certainly have seen more happening between the bookstore’s cracks than anyone else. It wasn’t surprising that he knew Joey had been tracking down his foster mother.
“You’re talking about his foster mom? Mrs. Molina?”
“Not foster suit.” His eyes fought to stay open. He stretched his legs until they rustled a twiggy sleeping bush. “Adoption suit.”
“His biological mom?”
Hi Guy nodded.
“Did they meet?”
Hi Guy shook his head no.
“Broke the boy’s heart. Standing on Broadway in that badass suit. Like prom king. But. She. Did. Not. Show.”
Hi Guy closed his eyes until he’d stored enough energy to speak. “Kid had nothing,” he mumbled, then his eyes stayed closed and he fell into a coughing fit and didn’t say anything else. Soon he started snoring. His shopping cart was parked against the plaza wall, and inside it she found two right-handed mittens and a few wool blankets and a sleeping bag. She sunk Hi Guy’s hands into the mittens, triple-wrapped his body, and gently rolled him near a steaming sidewalk grate where he’d be warm.
Though Lydia was drunk and cold enough to contemplate spooning up to him, instead she wandered in the direction of home. Before long she found herself lost in a forgotten neighborhood north of downtown. The streetlights were mostly shot out and the storefronts trapped behind cages and chains. Awnings flapped in rags above her, looking like windblown pages. She rambled through the dark. When she saw a man standing in the middle of the sidewalk a block or so ahead, looking massive and menacing, she cut into a nearby alley. The man had been standing still and seemed to be staring right at her, though in truth she couldn’t tell if she was looking at his back or his front or if he was even a man at all.
She snugged her satchel closer. She listened for his footsteps but heard nothing. At the end of the alley she turned right, and this street seemed even darker, more desolate, than the last. She walked faster. She heard somewhere a percussive train. She smelled the horsey grind of the Purina factory. A block or two ahead she could see the red glow of a giant neon Benjamin Moore paint sign and she knew there was an old jazz joint nearby, so she sprinted toward the sign, feeling chased, hearing footsteps echo off the low brick and stucco buildings around her. She didn’t stop until she found the bar and made it inside and even then she rushed past all the people drinking and eating late-night burritos and, with no shortage of gumption, called David collect from a pay phone by the bathrooms.
“I’m coming,” he said as soon as he answered, but it was difficult to hear him over the jazz, so she shouted the name of the bar into the receiver as if casting a desperate spell: El Chapultepec!
“Got it!” he shouted. “What’s wrong, anyway? Lydia—what is it?”
“You knew.”
“I knew?”
She rested her forehead on the side of the pay phone, against layers of graffiti stickers.
“You knew, David. About me.”
“Just sit tight. I’m on my way.”
She ordered a beer and stood by the door, sipping and splitting her sight between the sidewalk outside and an old lady on a small stage playing a stand-up bass and wailing into the smoke.
When David’s sedan pulled up in front, Lydia slid into the passenger seat, still holding her bottle of beer. She took a slug and parked it between her thighs.
“You okay?” he said.
“I don’t want to do this,” she said, shaking her head.
“Do what, Lydia?” He flapped at the air between them. “This?”
She turned away. Outside, passing trees were skeletal with winter.
“You sounded scared on the phone,” he said. “Did something happen?”
“I’m fine. Just cold.”
He turned the heating vents toward her and steered through downtown.
“Listen,” he said after a while, “I have a few things I need to tell you.”
“Does it have to be tonight, David?”
“You don’t have to say anything, but it has to be tonight,” he said. “For starters, I just want to be clear that I’m not mad at you—”
“You’re not mad at me?”
“For hiding your childhood from me, Lydia.”
“Is that so?”
“You might be mad,” he said, “but I’m not. Just listen. I’m sure you have your reasons for keeping it to yourself.”
“I do.”
“But honestly I’m a little hurt that you don’t feel like you can share this stuff with me. It makes me feel like the asshole boyfriend, like you can’t trust me, or like I’m doing something to keep you in your place. I’m not that guy, Lydia.”
“I know you’re not,” she said, staring out at the streets, lamp-lit and cold and empty of life.
“Besides which,” he said, “your dad didn’t tell me anything that I didn’t already know.”
“You really already knew?” she managed to say, unable to take her eyes off the taillights glowing like embers in the darkness ahead.
“About Little Lydia? I really did.”
“That’s shitty, David. It’s humiliating.”
“I grew up here too. The Hammerman was part of my childhood. More than Blinky the Clown or John Elway. I was terrified of him. We all were.”
“When did you figure it out?”
“Two years ago, maybe? I saw one of those ‘On This Day in Denver’ segments on the news. As soon as they showed that famous picture, the one from Life magazine, I could tell the girl was you. You look totally different now, of course, but I’ve seen that same expression on your face. I think you were at the bookstore, so I called you right away but you weren’t free. I guess I decided not to call back.”
She waited for him to go on, but he left it alone.
“Is that why you’ve been so nice to me?” she asked.
“I hope not.”
Lydia wasn’t sure if this made David a better or worse person, or what this now meant for them as a couple.
“Was it on one of your work trips?” she asked, more meekly than she’d intended. “When you met my father?”
“I didn’t plan it. He’d been calling a lot, so when I found myself driving near Rio
Vista an impulse carried me to a phone book. It seemed the right thing to do. I asked him to meet me at an ice-cream shop on Main Street. I bought him a coffee. He didn’t have any money. Scratch that. He had four cents.”
“Four cents.”
“He emptied his pockets to show me. He didn’t know there was an ice-cream shop in town. I got the impression he hadn’t been out in public anywhere except maybe the grocery store. I mean in years. He hasn’t worked in a while, apparently.”
“What did you talk about?”
“Not much. He seems like a really lonely, isolated guy. He really needs someone.”
“You shouldn’t have snuck around me like that.”
“I know,” he said, “but he’s your only family. I wanted to meet him.”
Lydia touched the cold window glass. David glanced sidelong at her as he drove.
“He said he was going to keep calling,” he continued. “He really wants to see you. What if we were to go visit him together? Take a weekend—”
“You know,” she said, “I’m just not ready for this.”
“I just think—”
“I’m really not ready for this, David.”
“Fine.”
They stopped at a red light and waited for it to change. The manholes steamed below.
“Are you going to tell me about the guy who’s been calling?” David said. “After you ran out tonight he left a bunch of messages on the machine, wanting to know if you were okay.”
She kept staring straight ahead.
“His name is Raj,” she said. “I’m not screwing him.”
“Raj,” he said. “Okay.”
“We’ve held hands. As friends. He slept in your sleeping bag one night. On the floor.”
“Of our bedroom?”
“We’re friends, David. As kids we spent every day together.”
“Before?”
“Before.”
David rolled his shoulders and breathed through his nose.
“Joey had a picture of the two of us,” she said, as if it were a natural fact. “Of Raj and me, when we were ten.”
Midnight at the Bright Ideas Bookstore Page 18
