Borderline

by Mishell Baker

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” he snapped at his wife.

  “I mean of all the people you could have cheated with all these years, you pick that one?”

  “Linda! For God’s sake! I would never touch her!”

  The sheer horror on his face made my hands go cold. I leaned on my cane to keep from falling, but then I felt the break, like glass shattering inside me: that swift protective alchemy that turns hurt to white-hot rage.

  “You can’t be serious,” Berenbaum said. “She’s not even—”

  “Not even a person?” I snarled between gritted teeth. “Like those ‘prisoners’ of yours? I am a person, goddamn it, and I AM STANDING! RIGHT! HERE!”

  I heard the sound of splintering safety glass, saw the spider­web of cracks. I hadn’t realized I’d started swinging the cane, but then it felt so good I couldn’t stop; I slammed it against that cherry-red finish, against the vinyl top, tearing it, against the side mirror, knocking it askew.

  I would have fallen then, if not for the wall behind me. David vaulted across the hoods of both cars in rapid succession and grabbed me, pinned my arms back against the wall, his face as stricken as though I’d tossed a baby down a flight of stairs.

  “Linda,” he said quietly. “Hit the garage door and call security.”

  She touched the switch on the wall, then disappeared into the house. With a soft clattering and humming, the garage door lifted into its track, letting in a slab of yellow sunlight. David picked me up and half carried, half dragged me toward the opening.

  “Let go of me!” I said in a panic, still clutching my cane with both hands. “You’re hurting me!”

  “I’m hurting you?” he said, his voice ragged.

  “It’s a goddamned car!” I screamed at him. “I’m a person! I’m a person!”

  But I wasn’t, a familiar voice whispered to me. Not to him. Not to anyone.

  He said nothing, just set me down ass-first on the driveway and turned to walk stiffly back into the garage. “Pull yourself together and get out of here,” he said as he went, still not looking at me. “We’re done.”

  “David,” I called after his back as he walked under the door. I wondered for a moment if I should get up and follow him, do something, but then the door began to rattle back down, and I realized that everything hurt too much for me to stand.

  There didn’t seem to be much point in moving, anyway. Even if I called a cab, security would get here first, and I certainly couldn’t outrun anyone on foot. I thought about calling Caryl, but given that I was already on probation, I didn’t want to explain why I was sprawled on my ass in her number one donor’s front yard.

  A Prius pulled up to the curb before long, repainted in officious black and white with HILLSTAR SECURITY on the side. A uniformed rent-a-cop got out and approached me with a stormy expression. He was heavyset with suede-colored skin and a broad nose. He did not look like the kind of person prone to sympathy, and contrary to what you see in the movies, giving attitude to law enforcement types never ends in hilarity.

  “You’re going to need to come with me,” he said.

  I tried to get to my feet, but it was complicated. I seemed to have wrenched something pretty badly during my explosion of violence, though I hadn’t noticed when I was still flooded with adrenaline.

  Rent-a-Cop stared at me suspiciously. “If you do not cooperate, I will have to encourage Mr. Berenbaum to press charges. You are guilty of malicious mischief, which means up to a year in jail and a fifty-thousand-dollar fine. Do you want to spend a year in jail, or do you want to move things along?”

  “I’m injured,” I said. “And as you can see, I am also an amputee. I am trying to get up, but I’m in a lot of pain.”

  “Do not try to play the victim, lady. You might as well take a blowtorch to the Liberty Bell. If you think you’re going to file a lawsuit, by the way, you had better think again.”

  “I would never—”

  “I don’t care how many limbs you’re missing; this is David Berenbaum you’re fucking with. Do you know how much money he and his wife gave to battered women’s shelters last year? He didn’t touch you, and no lawyer in the world could convince anyone otherwise.”

  This is the problem with security guards sometimes. Some of them have frustrated ideals and a tendency to editorialize when they have a bad guy in their sights. Thing is, though, he was right. Berenbaum hadn’t assaulted me. But the guard’s diatribe sounded so much like some of the stuff I was told about Professor Scott that my brain short-circuited. Suddenly I felt as though Berenbaum were responsible for my injuries. I gave up on standing and just started to sob.

  “Stop that,” said the guard. “That doesn’t work on me. Get up. Now.”

  I forced myself to my feet and bit my tongue. Rent-a-Cop was looking for a reason to throw me on the mercy of the LAPD, and I was close enough to a complete mental breakdown without having a slumber party behind bars in Lynwood.

  I painfully lurched my way over to the Prius and crawled into the backseat, still crying. I didn’t have a tissue, and so I took great pleasure in wiping the snotty back of my hand against the seat when he wasn’t looking.

  “Where is your vehicle?” he asked me.

  I resisted the urge to reply, Probably in an impound lot in Westwood somewhere, and instead just said, “I don’t have one.”

  “Where do you live?”

  “Near USC,” I said.

  “Do you have enough for bus fare?”

  I did not say, I have enough for a cab, jerk-off; I am not a bag lady. I just said, “Yes.”

  He dropped me off at the nearest bus stop, and a heavily outnumbered faction of my brain cells noticed that this was more courtesy than he really owed me. The rest of my mind was fully occupied with imagining humiliating ways for him to die.

  I called a cab, generating paranoid fantasies about the various people who were there waiting for the bus. I didn’t breathe quite normally until I was safe in the backseat of a private vehicular bubble. A fresh wave of sobs caught up to me, but I had plenty of time to dry my eyes before the cab pulled up at Residence Four. I looked up to the turret and could see my windows at the base of it. I had never been happier to see the shabby old place.

  When I limped wearily through the front door, I was greeted with the sight of my suitcase, zipped and standing in the entranceway. Song and Gloria were both sitting in the ­living room, giving me the same sad look, but I was pretty sure Gloria’s was an upended grin.

  “Caryl called me,” Song said, her sorrow mixed with the look women get when they know they’re about to get a beating. “I’m sorry, but she said that she’s decided you and the Arcadia Project are not a good fit for each other.”

  38

  I really should have been reporting news about prisoners and fey-on-fey violence, but when I found out I’d been fired, everything in my damaged brain scrambled like a credit card on a junkyard magnet.

  “No,” I finally managed to say.

  “I’ll need your fey glasses,” Song continued gently, “and I’ll need your phone back as well.”

  “I can’t leave here without calling a cab,” I said stiffly, even as I took the glasses and phone out of my pockets and handed them to Song.

  “I’ll call you a cab,” Song said.

  “Oh, honey,” said Gloria, shaking her head. “Why did you have to go and bust up Mr. Berenbaum’s car?”

  I turned to Gloria, my guts hollow. “Don’t pretend you’re sorry,” I said, “and don’t pretend you’ve never lost control. At least I didn’t stab anyone.”

  “Millie!” Gloria scolded. At least she finally got my name right.

  I saw Tjuan and Phil appear from the dining room, looming, watching. But my anger felt good; I clung to it like a shotgun in a room full of zombies.

  “I’m so sorry,” I said acidly. “Is it
unseemly for me to bring up the fact that Gloria stabbed two people to death? That she was elbow-deep in some guy’s blood, watched the light go out of his eyes, and still felt mad enough to do it again?” I turned to Gloria, who had gone pale and still. “Who was the second person? Someone else who pissed you off? Or just someone unfortunate enough to catch you holding the knife?”

  Now Teo and Stevie were leaning on the upstairs balustrade. I must have been loud. I couldn’t even tell.

  “I don’t remember it,” Gloria said, her voice pitched lower than usual. “And that isn’t—”

  “Bullshit,” I said. “I’ll bet you and your lawyers rehearsed the hell out of that. You sleep easy because you think those bastards deserved to die. And maybe they did, but tell that to some seven-year-old who loved one of them, or some father who never got to apologize. It was not your right to take those people out of the world. You do not get to decide.”

  Gloria’s eyes filled with tears. She didn’t move.

  Teo was coming down the stairs now, slowly. “Millie—”

  “Fuck you, virgin,” I said, halting him in his tracks. “If you ever meet your Echo, I hope she likes drinking dog slobber from ashtrays, because that’s what kissing you is like, you fucking self-hating pocho.”

  Teo slowly retreated back up the stairs. I was too far gone to read or care about the expression on his face.

  I turned back to Gloria then. “I used to think I knew who deserved to die, and I took it on myself to wipe her off the face of the earth. But even the nastiest bitch means something to someone. Fuck, even you have a boyfriend.”

  Phil made a hurt animal sound, and I waited for him to say something that I could turn inside out and throw back at him. But he didn’t.

  “Call a cab, Song,” I said, “and also, fuck you. Your baby’s ugly. Fuck you, too, Tjuan, while I’m at it, you paranoid, hostile dick, and fuck you, Stevie, for never saying hi or shutting off the goddamned faucet all the way, and fuck you, Gloria, for counting on your height to keep people from telling you what a two-faced, cloying little cunt you are. The whole crazy-ass lot of you have made my time here a seven-day cruise through all nine rings of hell.”

  I stormed out and was halfway down the sidewalk before I realized I’d left my suitcase. Damned if I was going to walk back in there to get it.

  • • •

  In case it isn’t clear, this was not a victory.

  I’ll admit, there are few highs quite like using words to turn your enemies into a stack of bloody cubes. But then you cool off, and that stack of minced flesh doesn’t just hop back together into a whole person. Long after you quit feeling that glorious rage, your words linger.

  Memory is a sketch artist, not a camera. People add and subtract whatever detail they need to. They say they forgive you, but they don’t.

  Don’t believe me? Just wait and see what your pal lobs back at you years later during an unrelated argument. There’s your diatribe, like a fly in amber.

  Even if what you said was true, that only makes it worse. Truth should be left in wrapped boxes for people to open when they’re ready. When it’s used as a blade, they vacuum-seal the pain somewhere deep inside, sealing the truth in with it, until it’s time to turn it inside out and cut someone else.

  I tried to forget the way Teo backed up the stairs, and how young Gloria looked, the end of her nose pink from tears. But I couldn’t, and when it comes down to it, I shouldn’t.

  Kids, please don’t try this at home.

  • • •

  With no phone, no other belongings, and no place to spend the night, I told the cabdriver to take me back to the Leishman Center. I was paid up through the end of the month, and so I guessed (correctly) that I’d be allowed back into my still-empty room without excessive bureaucracy. I had no things to unpack, so I just flopped onto the bed and stared at the ceiling. Dr. Davis showed up just before dinner, hovering gravely in the doorway. She looked older than I remembered, her sleek angled bob tucked behind her ears.

  “I’m a little disappointed to see you back here,” she said.

  “That makes two of us,” I said. I’d missed that bland voice.

  “Do you want to talk about what happened?”

  “Not even a little bit.”

  Dr. Davis hesitated, running her fingers through her hair. “You’ll need to start arranging another place to stay,” she said.

  I sat up. “Why? I can pay for a few more months.”

  “You checked yourself out a week ago, Millie, and someone had his father on a waiting list for a private room. He’ll be moving in at the first of the month.”

  Something squeezed at my insides, but I was too exhausted for full-fledged panic. “Where the hell am I supposed to go?”

  “I still have your grandparents’ phone number on file, if you’d like to call them.”

  “I don’t have a phone.”

  “You can use one of ours.”

  “To call Mississippi?”

  “Under the circumstances, yes.”

  I had only met my grandparents once as a child and hadn’t spoken to them in more than a decade. But there comes a point at which familial awkwardness seems like a fart in a storm.

  In a dead-end backwater like Graston, Mississippi, the money I had left could last me a hell of a long time. Sure, I’d never taste another fresh avocado, or watch another decent film. But I shoved that to the back of my mind, because when you’ve lived in L.A. for eight years, the word “homeless” is no longer abstract; it comes with vivid sense-memories of people you’ve passed that day on the street.

  It wasn’t eight p.m. yet in Mississippi, so I figured even old folks would still be awake. When someone picked up the phone, I was surprised at how instantly I recognized that dirt-and-worms voice.

  “Hi, Grandpa,” I said. “It’s Millie.”

  “I’ll be damned,” he said. I waited for more, but that was it.

  I knew Grandpa wasn’t one for small talk, so I cut to the chase. “California isn’t working out too well for me, so I wondered if I could stay with you and Granny for a bit while I figure out what to do next.”

  “You know your grandmother’s dead, right?”

  “I—I didn’t. I’m sorry.”

  There was another long silence, but I knew he hadn’t hung up, because I could hear a clock ticking loudly in the background. I remembered that damned clock, the way it had scared me as a kid.

  “Would be nice to have somebody in the house again,” he said. He coughed, a sound like nails rattling in a drawer.

  “I’d look for a job, of course, too,” I said. “I don’t want to be a burden. Do you know, is there any kind of work for a lady in Graston?” I was operating on the assumption that anything my grandfather considered fit for a lady was doable without legs.

  “Billy’s had a ‘Help Wanted’ sign in the window of the market since Lela got herself in trouble,” my grandfather said. In trouble meant single and pregnant, but I had no idea who Lela was. “How old are you now?” he asked.

  “Twenty-six.”

  “Billy’d be tickled to have you show up. No one’s come about the job so far but schoolkids and Negroes.”

  I stood there with the phone in my hand for a minute. Hearing casual bigotry from my flesh and blood was like turning over a rock in my yard and finding a swarm of white larvae. I felt filthy; I wondered how badly those mind-maggots had been gnawing away at my own thoughts of Tjuan, of Ellis and Inaya.

  Inaya. My train of thought jumped to a new track and barreled right through the paralysis. My surge of hope wasn’t enough to make me say what I should have said to my grandfather, but it was enough to make me fake saying “Hello? You still there?” and hang up on the old coot.

  I had one more card I could play, and if I played it right, I might not have to give up on L.A., or Valiant Studios, or finding
Claybriar, or any of it.

  39

  There was something exhilarating about finding a forgotten ace up my sleeve. The next morning, dressed in yesterday’s clothes, with nothing on me but my wallet, my cane, and my prosthetics, I prepared myself for a magic trick that would make Vivian’s Gotham Hall glamour look like Grandpa pulling a quarter out of my ear. I was about to re-create a life out of nothing. I was no fairy; I was no warlock; I was a god.

  I also might have been having a manic episode.

  I took a cab to the Target in Culver City, paid the driver to wait for me for twenty minutes, and withdrew some cash from a nearby ATM. Inside the Target I bought a backpack, as much food and water as I could fit into said backpack, and a prepaid phone. Next stop: library Internet to set up my phone service, print out a few Craigslist rental ads, and look up Ellis Barnes, PI.

  “Hi there, old friend,” I said brightly when he answered his phone. “I have some information for Inaya that will turn her world on its ear.”

  “What did you find out?”

  “I said I have information for her, not for you, but I’ve ­misplaced her number. Set up a meeting between her and me, and if she isn’t so blown away that she gives you a bonus, I will give you a hundred bucks out of my own pocket.”

  “That doesn’t mean a great deal to me,” said Ellis, “but I can tell it means something to you. I will speak to her and call you back.”

  I gave him my new number and browsed rental ads while I waited. I didn’t have to be homeless. I just had to leash my Emotion Mind and look at the facts. If you can find a lonely old lady who’s renting out a room of her house, she’ll often skip the background check if you charm her and tell her your tragic story. Month-to-month leases can bite both ways, but they are lifesavers for people with shady pasts.

  I jotted down several likely numbers and got halfway to the bus stop before Ellis called me back.

  “Inaya wants to know where to meet you.”