When Violetta answers the door, I head around back, to the pool house.
Maggie’s pain-in-the-ass brother, Parker, is sitting on the terrace in his high-backed wheelchair, staring at the roses. Behind him, through the French doors, I can see my mother joining a sofa full of mourners. Better her than me.
“Parker’s in the hospital again.” Maggie delivered the news in a neutral tone. Like directions to the nearest post office, a common destination devoid of any emotional drama.
“Oh?” We were on the phone, so I couldn’t read her face for clues on how to react.
Parker had been in and out of the hospital since he was eight years old, when the tumor squeezing his brain like an accordion was finally big enough to show up on his pediatrician’s radar. Every so many months, he went in for tests. Occasionally it was for longer, more complicated surgeries to shift his skull plates around and make room for his unwanted tenant.
“Mommy Dearest and Father Knows Best are beside themselves again,” she continued, and now I could hear the sigh over the phone.
Maggie didn’t hate the disease that was slowly killing her brother—there was no point, it couldn’t be changed. And she didn’t hate Parker, even though he was the sort of self-centered prick who would merit it. She understood: being a favorite case study of world-renowned surgeons with God complexes can make you a prick from a very young age. She didn’t even hate the extra attention Parker got from the ’rents or the medical set.
She was Maggie Kim. She grabbed plenty of attention on her own.
What she did hate was how her parents handled everything. They’d go crazy whenever Parker was due for a new test, never mind a new surgery. Relatives came to town. Concerned friends. Her folks milked the overwrought parent act for all it was worth.
“It’s like a practice wake over here,” she told me. “You should see the way my mom looks at me, like it’s my fault I’m healthy. I swear, if Parker could’ve been fixed with a brain donation, my mom would’ve sliced me up for spare parts ages ago.” She sighed. “I actually offered once.”
“Offered what?”
“To take his place. I was, like, eight. Parker was so scared, and they were all walking around like he was already dead. So I said I’d get the surgery instead.”
I stifle a snort.
“Don’t laugh. I meant it at the time. Dumb kid that I was. And you know what she said? ‘I wish you could.’”
We were both silent for a moment. “Well, you did offer,” I said.
“I know. But that’s kind of shitty, right?”
“Yeah. But your parents suck. That’s nothing new,” I said.
“Oh, you want new?” she laughed morbidly. “This time, my mom’s found religion. There’s a minister. In my house. When he showed up with his little congregation of professional mourners, that was the last straw. Come over and help me. I’m moving into the pool house.”
I skirt the edge of the swimming pool and raise a hand to block the sun. “Hey, Park and Ride,” I say.
From his spot on the terrace, Parker doesn’t bat an eye. “Fuck you, Jude. Good morning.”
I can’t help but smile. Maybe it started as jealousy over Maggie, but I’ve come to enjoy our little sparring sessions. “Did you know every high school has a body count?”
Parker is a sophomore in the world of the homeschooled and tutored. He’s a high school on wheels.
“Do tell,” he says, but he’s not looking at me. He’s staring at the roses, white and frowsy, petals falling to the ground like snow. I’ve interrupted a private meditation.
“I’d have put my money on you,” I say. But he still doesn’t look up. From this angle, even with those black-rimmed glasses in the way, I can see the parts of him that look like Maggie. I clear the sudden catch in my throat and turn away. “Just came to pick something up.”
“And you can see how much I care.”
I almost laugh. His voice sounds as gruff as mine.
I open the pool house door and step inside. Nothing has changed. I go to the bookshelf where Maggie kept a shoe box full of photos, the ones she bothered printing, and the ones so old they were developed at a drugstore a century ago.
I perch on the sofa with the box in my lap and shuffle through the stack inside. Luke Liu would wet his pants if he knew this was here for the taking. And he can have it, as far as I’m concerned, minus one little photo I don’t want Edina’s filthy little eyes on again.
What started as a quick shuffle slows down as I flip through Maggie’s former life.
There she is in the dress she wore for the spring dance, back when Keith was still her man. And the two of us, punked out for Halloween. This box is like a time machine, drawing me backward. There are pictures from before I ever knew Maggie. One with her whole family on what must be a vacation in Korea, judging from the signage behind them. She’s a skinny kid with a glossy bowl cut, standing half hidden by Parker’s wheelchair. And an even earlier one, back before the wheelchair and the surgeries, when Parker was just a little boy. Brother and sister huddled on the doorstep of this very house back in its prime, the two of them grinning as the Popsicles in their hands run red and orange onto the ground like finger-painted sunshine. On the back, Mrs. Kim’s flowing cursive lists their ages: Maggie, 7, Parker, 5.
I touch the photo. Maggie’s brown eyes sparkle back at me. The bowl cuts, the sugar-stained smiles. She and Parker could almost be twins.
I close the box. Whatever Maggie did with my picture, it isn’t here. Just one more mystery she’ll take to her grave.
Parker’s missing from the terrace when I leave the pool house. I make it back to the car just as my mother opens the Kims’ front door.
She shuts it carefully behind her. “That was hard,” she says.
“Tell me about it.”
She gives me a tired smile and climbs into the driver’s seat. “There but for the grace of God,” she says.
Translation: Don’t kill yourself, Jude.
She doesn’t have to worry about that. The two of us have already been plenty of places where angels would fear to tread, and I haven’t done it yet.
“Did you know Maggie got into Brown?”
“Yeah, early admission.”
There’s a headache starting behind my left eye. I don’t want to talk anymore.
“Such a bright girl,” my mother says.
“Like the sun,” I agree.
My mother’s lips twist as if she’s keeping something clamped down. She thinks I’m being sarcastic, bitter.
Good guesses. But I mean what I say.
I slump in my seat. The pain has moved to both my eyes.
“I saw you outside with Parker,” my mother says. “How’s he holding up?”
I shrug. “Parker is Parker.”
“This must be hard for him,” she says. “I know they were close.” Which goes to show how little she actually knows.
Start the car, I think. Just start the car.
Instead, she turns and looks at me.
“What about you, hon? How are you feeling?”
I close my eyes against the ache in my brow, my temples, rising up the back of my neck.
“I’m fine,” I say, opening them again. “Let’s just go.”
She sighs. One of those deep, loin-girding exhales that I’ve grown so used to. It’s the sound of tolerance. “You don’t sound fine.”
“Please,” I say. “I have a headache. Just . . .” I mimic her sigh. Like mother, like daughter.
Another twist of the lips.
She turns the key in the ignition, and pulls out onto the road.
9
July is going out in a blaze of glory, and the fires have marched from here to Malibu. All across the LA Basin, the sunset is gory with smoke and a deep red haze.
Eppie and I stand on the bluff at the e
dge of Blue House’s backyard and watch the sky over Eagle Rock dim into night. Behind us, Hank’s band is playing something fast and guitar-filled, wordless and loud, bouncing their sound off the back wall of the house. Blue House leans to the left as if it’s dancing, a two-story drunk of a clapboard shack painted every single shade of blue. Eppie’s dad bought out the remainders at a paint store years ago. Whenever the wind and sun strip the wood of color, he slaps on another layer.
I had to ask my mom for a ride here tonight. She loved it. After pre-manicure weirdness and a lunch chaser, it was yet another chance to “participate,” as the counselors call it, to play the supportive parent. She didn’t even mention a curfew, bless her heart. Just said to call her when I was ready to come home. It was easier than chasing after Joey. He’s around here somewhere. Just not around me.
Eppie clacks her plastic cup against mine and I can smell the alcohol spiking her 7Up. I’m a water-over-ice girl, myself, but I like the way the booze rises warm and sharp off Eppie’s breath. It makes me feel like someone else, like we’re both other people in another place that’s not quite so fucked up.
“Here’s to the simple things,” she says.
“Tic-tac-toe and algebra.” We hoist our glasses and drink.
“Still mooning over Maggie?” she asks me after a second sip.
I look out at the moon hanging low and bloated in the eastern sky. “Is that supposed to be a pun?”
Eppie grins. “Naw, girl, just a question. I’m worried about you.”
“I know. But don’t be. I’m a big girl.”
“Yeah.” Eppie drops the grin. “But so was Maggie.”
“What’s your deepest, darkest secret?” I ask suddenly. It’s been on my mind since seeing Keith this morning. I’d been so sure my best friend shared everything with me. But she hadn’t.
If I’d thought about it, there were lots of little hints, morsels of secrets surrounding her, like crumbs from an earlier meal. Sure, she’d told me about Dane the minute it happened, and I thought I knew about her own dalliances, up until Luke. But there was Scott, who used to want her, and maybe still did, despite what Keith believed.
And what was it Edina had asked me the other night? Did she ever talk about me? She hadn’t, not really. Or maybe I just hadn’t asked.
Eppie flinches. “Wow. That’s a big question. And we’re not even high. I don’t think I can answer that.”
“You can’t answer, or you won’t?” I ask.
She looks at me for a minute, no longer laughing it off. “Won’t. It’s none of your business.”
I nod. “Fair enough. But is there anybody you would tell?”
Eppie takes a long time to answer. When she does, her drink sits forgotten on the lawn and she shivers as she says it. “Maggie. Maggie knew.”
I laugh and I know it sounds bitter. “Yeah, she was the one I told too. It’s like the end of the King Midas fable, the guy with the golden touch that kills everything he loves? There’s another myth where he’s punished with donkey ears. He keeps them hidden under his crown, but someone catches him with his ears out and Midas swears him to secrecy. But this guy can’t keep a secret that huge, so he runs out into a field, digs a hole in the ground, and shouts into the hole, ‘The king has the ears of an ass!’” Eppie smirks at that, but she’s listening. “So he shouts his heart out, then fills in the hole, burying the secret, or so he thinks. Over time, reeds grow over the hole, and when the wind blows hard enough through them, it sounds like they’re saying ‘The king has the ears of an ass!’”
Eppie starts laughing outright and I join her because it feels better than making my point. But, when the laughter stops, she asks me, “What’s that got to do with anything?”
“Maggie. We all told her our secrets, every single one of us. And now we’re filling in the hole. What do you think the reeds will say when the wind blows?”
Eppie smiles, then frowns, attempts another smile and fails. “It’s just a story, and not a very good one, Jude. It doesn’t make sense.”
“Maybe we just have to be listening,” I say.
Whatever happened to Maggie, she might have been telling us all along, and I’d missed it, mistaking it for so much wind.
So I tell Eppie another story, this one not so old.
“How many months before you start to show if you’re pregnant?” Maggie asked.
We were lying out by the pool again, our perpetual California pose. Towels draped on lounge chairs laid flat for sunbathing and catnaps.
I peeled open an eye. “Five months? Maybe four if you’re rail thin, or six if you’re tall?”
Maggie sat up, looking at her mother’s roses. Explosions of white and pink flowers made the upper terrace look like a French dessert.
“How far along can you be and still get an abortion?” Her voice was neutral, matter-of-fact, but I could hear the strain in it. It was the same voice she used when she talked about Parker’s surgeries, careful not to care.
I turned to look at her—almond skin, perfect hair, perfect body. Her stomach was as flat as her voice.
“Three months.”
Maggie looked at me. “And you know this why?”
I pulled on my sunglasses and shrugged. “You’re the one who asked. I know things.”
She snorted, then looked alarmed. “Sweetie, you weren’t . . .” She petered out like a vapor trail of concern.
“Knocked up?” I asked, eyeing her over my shades. “No. My aunt miscarried a few years ago. She was four months along and I couldn’t tell she was pregnant. I got curious and looked it up. And the abortion thing is . . . bonus-round trivia. Late-term abortions, women’s rights . . . Don’t you watch the news?”
Maggie lay back down on the lounge chair. “It’s bad for my complexion.”
“Right.”
We were silent for a while. The cackle of wild parrots filled the warm Saturday sky. Legend had it a pet store burned down and those were the escapees, a mass of feral noisemakers thriving in the not-quite-tropical desert air. But the truth was there were several of these colonies all over Southern California. That’s a lot of pet stores burning down for no good reason.
I looked up and caught a flicker of green and yellow in the distance. They screeched and clacked like geese in a box of castanets before flying on to another berth.
“Why do you ask?” I said in the descending quiet.
Maggie grimaced, a flash of white teeth, lipstick vanishing into a thin line. She shook her head. “I’m a little slutty, Jude, but I’m not stupid. Parker got the genetic short straw this time, but any child of mine could turn out to be partly cloudy with a chance of tumors too. Who needs that at seventeen?” She sighed. “Besides, there are other people in the world. People I’m concerned about.”
“Anyone I know?”
“Can we ever really know anyone?” she parried.
I softened my tone, giving in. “Sure. I know you, Saint Margaret, patron of lost causes.”
The tension left her shoulders and she gave me a wry smile. “I think that’s you, dear. Saint Jude.”
I had to laugh. “I am a lost cause,” I agreed.
Maggie grinned. “That makes two of us.”
Eppie gazes down at the city lights.
I’d taken a chance—maybe she knew something I didn’t. Maybe Maggie had been pregnant and depressed and I’d missed all of it. Because I’d needed Maggie Kim to be invincible and sure of herself. Because she was my shield from the world.
“I saw Keith this morning,” I continue.
Eppie sounds far away when she says, “Oh, yeah. He and Scott couldn’t be here tonight. How are they?”
“He’s fine, but I hear Scott’s a mess. He had a thing with Maggie. I thought it was over. But maybe it wasn’t. Then I remembered, he was home on leave last year when Maggie started asking me those questions, and it
kind of made sense.”
“It wasn’t Maggie,” Eppie tells me. “Not everything is about her.”
She’s so quiet, I can barely hear her. I lean in, pulling up my hood to block the sounds of the party. The music is loud, out of place here on the edge of the world. “What?”
The sky tilts as I try to rack focus from one story to another. Eppie. Not Maggie after all.
She takes a deep breath, and when she speaks, it’s like she’s pulling water from a well deep inside her. “It was spring break. Hank and I went down to Mexico to surf Rosarito right after his grandma died. He was having a hard time and we wanted to relax, take a load off for a while.” She laughs nervously and pulls out another clove cigarette. “Mexican condoms,” she says, and shrugs. “It was . . . tough, Jude. I mean, we love each other, but we’re kids. We just couldn’t have handled it.”
A real friend would have known, or guessed. But Hank and Eppie had been drama-free in my book and I’ve been tearing out every page that doesn’t say “Maggie.” I’ve seen so much, it’s hard to admit I’ve been blind.
“I didn’t know,” I say.
She shrugs. “Nobody did. Except Maggie. I went to her for advice. I guess she just seemed more worldly than the rest of us.”
“Did she help?” I ask, thinking of how little Maggie really knew, how she had come to me in turn.
But Eppie nods. “It always helps, to have a friend listen. But it was still hard. Very hard.” She shakes her head, remembering. “Say, don’t bring it up with Hank, all right? He doesn’t need to go through it again.”
I hear the reprimand in her words, even though she doesn’t say it. He doesn’t need to relive it, but neither does she.
“I won’t,” I promise.
Eppie is one of the last good ones. She deserves to be happy. I’d hoped that was already the case, but she had me fooled.
Now I’m starting to wonder if Maggie was the only real innocent in our circle, or did she have other secrets of her own?
“Why are you digging this up, Jude?” Eppie asks. She sounds angry and defeated and sad.
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