Death Gets a Time-Out

by Ayelet Waldman

  I patted her on the back, and she inhaled raggedly.

  “So what happened? Did you confront her with the information Jupiter gave you?”

  Lilly dashed her tears away with her fist. “No, he did. He was just supposed to talk to her. He was supposed to threaten her that he’d go to Polaris if she didn’t lay off me. But I guess something went horribly wrong. The next thing I knew, she was dead.”

  “Did he kill her?”

  She shrugged. “He must have. I would never have thought he could do something like that. I still can’t believe it. The only thing I can think of was that he was trying to convince her to stop blackmailing me, and she wouldn’t, and then somehow it got violent. He’d never have planned to hurt her. He’s just not that kind of person.”

  He hadn’t seemed capable of premeditated murder to me either, but the truth was neither Lilly nor I really knew what kind of person Jupiter was.

  Lilly drained the last of her coffee from her mug. I looked down at my own cup. I hadn’t touched it. I took a tentative sip and grimaced at the tepid bitterness. At that moment, a shrill voice screeched in my ear.

  “Ohmigod! It is her! It’s Lilly Green!”

  I looked over my shoulder and saw a small woman bearing down on us. She dodged the bank of plants and flung herself at our table, calling out, “It’s Lilly Green. It’s Lilly Green!”

  I looked at Lilly. She had carefully wiped her face of any expression. The woman skidded to a stop at our table. She was wearing a pair of turquoise hip-hugger jeans and a matching top that left her midriff bare. She was very thin, and the wrinkled skin around her pierced belly button betrayed her age.

  Lilly assumed a facsimile of the wide, unpretentious smile for which she was famous, and said, “Hi.”

  “Ohmigod! Ohmigod. Your hair! What happened to your beautiful hair?” Lilly didn’t answer, just raised her eyebrows. The woman didn’t seem to notice. “I am such a fan, Lilly. I’ve seen all your movies. Every one. Even that weird foreign one.”

  “Thank you,” Lilly said. “It’s so nice to meet you. I wish we could stay, but I’m afraid my friend has to be somewhere.” She gently kicked me under the table as she rose to her feet.

  I leapt up, a forced smile plastered to my face, and said, “Right! We’ve got to go pick up the kids.”

  “Ohmigod!” the woman said. “You do drive carpool! Just like it said in People magazine! That’s so great!”

  We beat a hasty retreat to the parking lot. “Where’s your car?” Lilly said.

  I pointed to my squalid Bratmobile.

  “Can you drive me?”

  “Why? Your car’s right there.” I lifted my hand but she grabbed it before I could indicate her car.

  “Don’t. I don’t want her to know which is mine. Let’s just take your car, okay?”

  “Okay.” We walked quickly over to my station wagon, and I opened the door for her. I tried to sweep the passenger seat clean of debris, but she pushed me aside impatiently, got in, and slammed the door. I walked around the car, got inside, and closed my own door. I looked over at her. She was leaning back against the headrest, her eyes closed, and her face pale and drawn.

  “Just drive,” she said.

  “Okay.”

  “I’m not being paranoid,” she said. “It’s just that if she saw my license plate, she could find out my address.”

  I pulled out of the parking lot and into the stream of traffic. “Lilly, I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but there are guys on half the street corners in L.A. selling maps to the stars’ homes.”

  She shrugged. “I just couldn’t bear the idea of that woman knowing anything about me. Even what kind of car I drive.”

  “How will you get it home?”

  “I’ll have someone pick it up.”

  I sighed, trying to imagine a life in which there was someone available at your beck and call to pick up a car you left in a random strip mall out in Pasadena. But then, that was the same life that left you open to being accosted by strangers in cafés. I thought about the price my friend had paid for her privacy, and the price Jupiter might have to pay for it. I sighed deeply. There was nothing about poor Lilly’s life to envy. Nothing at all.

  “I talked to Archer,” Lilly said suddenly.

  “Oh?” I kept my voice purposefully neutral.

  “At first he denied going to your house.”

  “What?” I sputtered.

  “Don’t worry, I told him I believed you,” she said.

  “You did?” I was somewhat mollified, but still irritated.

  “Yeah. And he admitted it, but said it was because he was trying to protect me.”

  “Oh.” I couldn’t think of anything else to say.

  She said, “I’m sorry, Juliet.”

  “That’s okay.”

  We sat for a while in a silence that grew slowly thicker and more uncomfortable. Finally, more to make conversation than anything else, I asked, “So, how did you and your mother end up in Mexico?”

  “Now that’s a story,” Lilly said. She pushed her shoes off and put her feet up, resting her chin on her knees.

  Her mother and father grew up together in Lubbock, Texas, where the soil was so arid that the flower of sixties activism withered and died before it had a chance to bloom into anything more than macramé and marijuana. When Trudy-Ann Nutt found herself pregnant at age eighteen, her boyfriend agreed to stay with her on one condition—that they exchange the passions of drag racing and high school football for VW buses and communal hot tubs. They hitched their way to L.A., and Lilly was born in a commune in Topanga Canyon, the same commune where Artie Jones had been living with his girlfriend, who would later give birth to Jupiter and abandon him to his father’s dubious care.

  “I have so few memories of that time in Topanga. I was only five when my mom and I cut out. My dad was in charge of one small corner of the garden—that I remember. He used to grow these tall bushy plants.” She laughed grimly. “Pot, I’m sure. I remember sleeping on a mattress on the floor with my mother. But not with my dad. I guess old Raymond found other places to sleep. It was like that. People kind of fell into bed with whoever was around. You know, that whole sixties free love kind of thing.” Lilly’s face grew thoughtful and she frowned slightly. “I don’t think my mother liked it, though. I can remember her crying at night, sometimes.”

  I remembered something I’d seen in a gossip column recently. The teaser was “When the cat’s away,” and the bit had mentioned a sighting of Raymond dining with a very young TV actress at a chi chi restaurant popular with the junior Hollywood set. Lilly’s stepmother Beverly had been on a political junket to Honduras, I believe. It didn’t look like Raymond had changed his ways much.

  “Is that why she and Polaris got together? Because your father was sleeping around?” I asked.

  She nodded. “I suppose so. At some point my father just kind of drifted away. I don’t know what happened; I just don’t have any more memories of him from that time.”

  “What about your stepmother? Was she around back then?”

  Lilly smiled. “I’m not sure exactly when she and my dad got together, but it was probably around that time, or soon after. I think they might have met in the commune, too. I don’t really know; at the time I was a lot closer to my mother—my biological mother—than to my dad.”

  “But you and your stepmother are close now, aren’t you?”

  Lilly nodded. “Very. I think of her as my mother. I mean, you know that. Most people don’t even know that she’s not my biological mother.”

  “And Polaris? How did he come into the picture, do you know?”

  Lilly grimaced. “All I really remember is that he started sleeping in the same room as my real mother and me, and then a whole bunch of us moved down to Mexico.”

  “Who moved there with you?”

  She wrinkled her brow. “My mother and Polaris. Of course, he was Artie back then. And at least a few other people. I don’t really remember the grow
n-ups. They weren’t around very much. I do remember one night, though.” She paused and seemed to be straining to grasp a faint wisp of memory. “They were all sitting around a table with a white tablecloth. The room was really dark, but I remember the tablecloth sort of glowing blue. That’s weird. How could a tablecloth glow?”

  “Maybe it was under a black light?”

  She smiled at me. “That must have been it! And there was a shoebox on the table. I remember that, too. I wasn’t allowed to touch it, though. I remember Artie saying that. He said that there were mushrooms in the box, but that Jupiter and I weren’t allowed to touch them, because they were special magic mushrooms.”

  I laughed. “Psychedelic mushrooms?”

  She nodded. “I think so. And you wonder why I’m such a neurotic mess. My parents sat around tripping on mushrooms while I played under the table . . .” Her voice trailed off as she remembered that other source for her neurosis.

  “I don’t think you’re a mess, Lilly. You’ve never seemed like a mess to me. On the contrary. You’ve always seemed absolutely sane, and incredibly sweet. Considering what you’ve gone through in your life, you’re a paragon of mental health.”

  Tears puddled in her eyes and clung to the thick, sooty eyelashes that contrasted so sharply with her fuzz of blond hair. “I’m an actress, Juliet. It’s all an act. I’m just a really good actress.”

  Thirteen

  IT would be difficult to imagine an upbringing more different from Lilly’s than my own. My parents had waited until they were in their forties to have their family. Lilly’s had been teenagers when she was born. Lilly’s childhood was spent frolicking with bands of half-naked children in communes in Topanga Canyon and Mexico. And mine? Watching Brady Bunch episodes in a split-level in Fair Lawn, New Jersey. Our parents’ political sensibilities may well have been more alike than different, however. Mine had made the uneasy transition from socialism to the Democratic Party back in the fifties, and had always been the most active of pacifists. They might have met Raymond and Trudy Ann at an antiwar rally, although my mother’s appearance would surely have caused Lilly’s some consternation. Her look has always been solidly Jewish Grandmother—permed hair, cardigan sweater with a wad of tissue peeping out the sleeve, and in the crook of her arm, a public television tote bag stuffed with knitting, boxes of raisins, and old copies of Dissent and Commentary.

  I couldn’t imagine having a parent who, like Lilly’s, practiced free love and did drugs. Until my mother instructed me to smoke pot, that is.

  “What did you say?” I said, sure that I’d misheard.

  “I’ve been doing research on this, and I have every confidence it will help.”

  “Ma. Let me get this straight. You want me to take an illegal drug for my morning sickness?”

  “Oh please. Don’t be so dramatic. It’s not a drug, it’s medicine. That’s why they call it medical marijuana.”

  I took the phone over to the couch and plopped heavily onto the cushions. I was going to need to sit down for this conversation. I’d woken up at dawn the day after my morning with Lilly and had spent a long half-hour in what had become an all-too-familiar position, on my knees in the bathroom. It was way too early in the morning to bother any of my friends, so I’d called my mother two time zones away to whine about how lousy I felt.

  “It’s illegal,” I said.

  “It is not. Not with a doctor’s note. Remember Marcia Feinman’s aunt, the one who lives in San Francisco?”

  I didn’t—it would take a government research grant to plot the tangled network of my mother’s friends and relatives, and all their ailments. “Sure,” I said.

  “Well, she has cancer. Poor thing. The woman is a mass of tumors. They’re chewing through her internal organs one at a time.” I winced. When it comes to diseases, Margie Applebaum has always had a way with words. “The chemo was making her so nauseated, poor thing, that she couldn’t keep a single thing down. The starvation was going to kill her before the cancer could. Her doctor wrote her a prescription for marijuana. It’s totally changed her life. I mean, the poor thing is still going to die, but at least now she can eat! She’s a member of a club. She goes there, she eats a brownie, and she feels a thousand times better.”

  “Mmm. A brownie.” I considered making a batch, but decided that just looking at a raw egg would make me throw up. “You know, call me crazy, Mom, but when they passed the medical marijuana law, I don’t think California’s voters envisioned pregnant women smoking pot.”

  “Well, why not?” She bristled. “It’s one of the most benign substances known to medicine! Chinese midwives have used it for centuries!”

  “Mom, how do you know this stuff?”

  “Oh for heaven’s sake. You think I’m an idiot? The Internet!”

  I laughed. “Of course, I don’t think you’re an idiot, and I am grateful to you for surfing the web on my behalf, but I’m not going to smoke pot. Honestly, Mom, you should hear the grief I get for drinking coffee. Do you really think my OB is going to let me toke up?”

  “Listen, little miss smarty pants. You know how many people die from taking Tylenol every year?” She didn’t wait for my answer, not that I could have given her one. “Over two thousand. You know how many people have ever died from using marijuana? None. Zip. Zero. But you do what you want. Spend the next nine months throwing up if you want. Just don’t come complaining to me.”

  “I won’t,” I said, my voice rising in response to hers. I bet she’d tell you that I started the fight. It was always like that.

  “Kiss my grandchildren for me,” she said, still yelling.

  “I will,” I shouted back.

  “Call me tomorrow.”

  “Fine!” I slammed down the phone.

  “Who was that?” a little voice said. I turned to find Isaac standing in the doorway. His face was swollen with sleep, and one leg of his Batman pajamas was hitched up above his knee. The Velcro cape had become detached from his shoulders and restuck itself on his tush.

  “Hey, you!” I said. “Come on up here.”

  He jumped up on the couch and burrowed into my side. I winced as his little toes dug into my belly. I moved his cape to its proper position and kissed the top of his head.

  “Who was that, Mama?”

  “Grandma.”

  “How come you always yell at Grandma?”

  “I do not always yell at her!”

  “Yes you do.”

  I considered this for a moment. “Well, because she always yells at me.”

  “You should use your words, Mama.”

  “Okay, buddy. From now on, I’ll use my words.” He snuggled in closer to me and I moved back a bit. “Careful of my tummy, honey,” I said.

  “Because of the baby?” he said. I sat up and stared at him.

  “How do you know about the baby?”

  “Ruby told me.”

  “How does Ruby know?”

  He shrugged. As far as he was concerned, Ruby knew everything. I picked him up and carried him into his sister’s bedroom. I dumped him on her bed and shook her awake.

  “Ruby, wake up,” I said. She pulled her pillow over her head. “Wake up, Rubes. It’s time for school.” She sat up, rubbing her eyes. When I finally got her alert enough to answer a question, I said, “How did you know I was going to have a baby?”

  “Because you’re fat, and you keep throwing up.”

  “But how did you know what that meant?”

  She shrugged and rubbed the sleep from her eyes. “That’s what happened when Isaac was in your tummy.”

  “You remember that? How can you possibly remember that? You were only two years old!”

  She shrugged. “I remember everything, Mama.”

  I sat down on the bed next to her and pulled a kid close to me with each arm. “Well, guys, how do you feel about having a new baby?”

  Isaac looked over at his older sister, as if looking for instructions on what emotion she would permit him under these ci
rcumstances. Ruby wrinkled her eyebrows and thought for a moment. “We’re okay with it,” she said. Isaac nodded.

  I breathed a sigh of relief and squeezed them close. I couldn’t help at that moment to compare my daughter to Lilly. Was Ruby’s memory unusually precise? Lilly’s was so foggy—although that surely was a result of the horrors she’d experienced. Still, memory was a strange thing. Would Ruby’s remain as acute, or would the memories that were so clear to her now fade with time? Then I had a truly horrible and self-indulgent thought. If I died now, would Ruby remember more of me than what dress I was wearing.

  Fourteen

  AL was coming up from Westminister for a meeting with the courier company that had retained him to investigate its employees. We had arranged to meet for breakfast after I dropped the kids off at school. I’d promised to give him a mini-lesson on the intricacies of workers’ compensation law and had done an hour or so of research the night before. People think that being a lawyer means that you have a wealth of laws, rules, and cases filed away in your memory. That’s a myth. The most important thing, really the only thing, that law school teaches you is where to look to find the answer to a legal question. That’s enough, frankly. A good lawyer doesn’t necessarily know anything at all—she’s just adept at research.

  Al and I made our discussion of insurers’ assumption of liability, wrongful termination, ERISA, and other scintillating topics more palatable with biscuits and sausage gravy. Then, as we sopped up the last of our meal, I told him about Lilly and her mother. When I was done, Al leaned heavily back in his chair, cupping his hands around his mug of coffee. He shook his head and said, “You going to Wasserman?”

  That was, of course, the ten-thousand-dollar question. Should I give this information to Jupiter’s defense attorney? I knew exactly what I would have done with Lilly’s story if I were the one representing Jupiter at trial. I would have used it to deflect attention away from my client. I would have argued that there was one person in Chloe’s life with a motive to kill her, one person whose future depended on her perpetual silence: Lilly Green. I would have subpoenaed the movie star and convinced the jury that hers was the finger that pulled the trigger. Not even the fact that Lilly was one of my very good friends would have dissuaded me.