by Lori Carson
“Of course I remember,” I say.
“He was incredulous! ‘You’ve got a roommate and a dog in that place?’ I didn’t know what he was talking about.” Her laugh is still a girlish bell.
“I think my apartment must have once been someone’s sewing room,” I say. “It was teeny-tiny.”
“You couldn’t turn around in there! You used to bathe with your dishes in the bathtub.”
“There was no kitchen sink. There was no kitchen!”
“I lived with Katherine. At the Normandy. Remember? We called it the Dorm-andy. And George, of course, that handsome boy. He was still a puppy.”
Cigarette smoke curls up over our heads. I ask her to crack the window. Nobody smokes anymore. “When are you going to quit those?” I ask, not bothering to hide my annoyance. “You look like Popeye the Sailor!”
She laughs at that. “You know, nicotine is actually very good for cognitive function.”
I roll my eyes at her. “I really do want you to quit!” I say. “I’m not kidding.”
“All right, all right,” she says, taking a final drag before dropping the cigarette out the window. “Take it easy.” She gives my shoulder a pat.
When we get to Reseda, we circle around awhile before finding the street. Some of the houses in the neighborhood have forlorn guard dogs behind chain-link fences and broken-down cars in the yard.
“There it is,” Jules says. We pull up to a small ranch near the corner and lock up the car.
When my dog appears at the door, she looks like a princess in the wrong part of town. The woman fostering her holds her by the collar. “Do you still like her?” she asks.
Is she kidding? Does she think I could look at that face and change my mind? “I certainly do,” I say, kneeling down to scratch her head. I haven’t had a dog since I was a kid. She pants a little and raises her ears. She has dark markings across her nose, like freckles. Her eyes are soulful and bright. “What a good girl you are,” I say, stroking her back. I dig into my pocket for the wad of cash and hand it to the foster woman. She counts it and grins. She has a gold crown in the place of an eyetooth.
“Okay,” she says, handing the leash to me. “You go with your new mommy now, Brown-Eyed Girl.”
Ninety-seven
Though I put the bungalow on the market only weeks after returning to Los Angeles, 2010 was not a good year to sell a house in need of repair, so I continue to live in Silver Lake. This morning, like most days, I carry my coffee out to the studio, Girl at my heels. I turn on my gear and stare at the first line of a song I’ve been stuck on all week.
If love isn’t love/What do I do now?
Late in the day, Alan calls. “How’s it going?” he asks. “We were just thinking about you.”
It’s evening there. I can hear the commotion of dishes being cleared away, Maeve asking the kids about homework. Girl is sitting at my feet, looking straight up into my eyes. I cup her head with the palm of my hand. “It’s going well,” I tell him.
“Glad to hear it,” Alan says. “Hang on a minute. Someone wants to say hello.”
When he puts Samantha on the phone, she asks me, “Did you finish your story yet?”
“Yes,” I tell her. “I finished it. Do you know what some people call it when you finish a story, Samantha?”
“What?”
“They say you’ve put it to bed.”
Ninety-eight
Good night, Little Fish.
Once I carried you in my belly and held you wrapped in a blanket in our garden, under a star. You were a ten-year-old girl with snow on her eyelashes and had a guinea pig named Z, whose fur was soft as a bunny’s. You sang a harmony to your father’s melody one miraculous night and were your grandfather’s chess partner, a girl who loved prime numbers, asked questions, and fell in love.
Your heart was broken the way every heart breaks, when a pet falls sick and dies, when someone you love doesn’t love you back, when you have a dream that, for whatever reason, never comes true.
But your heart became full, the way every heart becomes full, of wonder and appreciation for life’s beauty. Every spring, summer, fall, and winter, a surprise. Years of sunrises, stars and sandy beaches, books and music, skies with clouds that pass over, friendships that grow deep, laughter, and love, that most amazing gift, fleeting and miraculous as a comet.
In the original 1982, Minnow, you were a soul hovering, wherever it is that souls hover, and one day your soul passed over mine. We touched briefly, the way souls do, and though it didn’t last long, it changed me, and I never forgot you.
There’s no going back, but one day someone will read these words and won’t know what was true from what was invented. That’s what all memories are like, in time. When I’m gone, and Gabriel is gone, and everyone who knew us is gone, you will be still be in the world.
Dulce sueños, Minnow. Sweet dreams, my love. Ya te extraño, already I miss you.
Acknowledgments
To my friends and family, my early readers: your support and feedback helped immeasurably. Janet Rienstra, Paul Pimsler, Leslie Shipman, Ken and Cindy Carson, Meryl Kramer, Gregory Henry, Jacquie Leader, Kim Greist, Leon Ichaso, Gary Baker, Judith Ehrman-Shapiro, Dawn Dover, Edith Carson, Sherri Fischer, David Wecal, thank you, and especially Lisa Walker, for your generous encouragement, for reading every version, and for sharing your experiences of pregnancy and motherhood in the eighties.
Thank you to all the beautiful children I’ve had the privilege to know: Alex and Michael Carson; Matthew and Brayden Fischer; Max and Adam Ehrman-Shapiro; Ben Ehrman; Elizabeth, Bibi, and Madeline French; Aiden, Beatrice, and Will from East Ninety-fourth Street; Leo at five; and most especially, the delightful and lovely Chloe Carson.
Thank you to my fellow writers at the Writing S. group. Your wisdom never fails to inspire me. Thank you, Elisabeth Robinson, for our conversations about writing and the writing life, and especially for sending Sheila Gaffney my way. Sheila, I don’t know what I would have done without your insights. I’m very grateful for the afternoons we spent at my table, taking the book apart and putting it back together.
Dan Kirschen, thank you for your kind help in the day-to-day, and to all at ICM and William Morrow/HarperCollins, thank you for all you do.
To Lisa Bankoff, my amazing, smart, fun, kind agent. When I am asked how I found you, I always say it was a miracle—a cold query letter sent by e-mail, late one night, and answered thirty minutes later. Lisa, thank you for changing everything.
Last but not least, thank you, Kate Nintzel. You are a mind reader and brilliant editor. I don’t know how you do that. Thank you for carving away the excess and asking the right questions, for helping to bring the heart of my story into focus and Minnow into the world. I’m forever grateful.
About the Author
LORI CARSON is a singer-songwriter whose albums include Shelter, Where It Goes, Everything I Touch Runs Wild, and Another Year. A former member of the seminal band The Golden Palominos, she has contributed to the sound tracks of Bernardo Bertolucci’s Stealing Beauty, Kathryn Bigelow’s Strange Days, Keith Gordon’s Waking the Dead, and others. The Original 1982 is her first novel.
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Credits
Cover design by Mumtaz Mustafa
Cover illustrations: baby © by 4x6/istock; background/woman © by shutterstock
Copyright
This book is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogue are drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
THE ORIGINAL 1982. Copyright © 2013 by Lori Carson. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitte
d, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
FIRST EDITION
ISBN 978-0-06-224529-8
EPUB Edition © June 2013 ISBN 9780062245304
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