Текст книги "Where It Began"

Автор книги: Ann Redisch Stampler

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Текущая страница: 7 (всего у книги 19 страниц)

XX

“VIVIAN,” I SAY WHEN SHE COMES WANDERING BACK in, dressed in her dowager-queen-in-mourning mauve outfit again and offering up People, Us, Cosmo, Glamour, and a paperback novel in which some teen bimbo overcomes her drinking problem. “What do you know about me having to talk to the police? And do I have a lawyer?”

As it turns out, Vivian, who spent her life pathetically devoted to making it on TV until she hooked up with my dad, after which she devoted herself to pretending to be rich and making really good mixed drinks instead, who wasn’t even all that convincing in dog food commercials, is a better actress than anybody gives her credit for. Because apparently she is pretty well versed in the specifics of what deep and serious trouble I am in but she decided it would be a bad idea to share this scary information with me beyond endless bleak hints just in case I would freak out and braid the thread from my stitches into an itty-bitty noose and hang myself.

In fact, armed men with badges have been beating down the door, and she isn’t letting them anywhere near me, with the complicity of the helpful, alien nurses who have adapted to life on Earth well enough to appreciate gifts of really nice perfume from Saks. The conversation I overheard between Bunny Shirt and Gun Lady was evidently one of many.

Many many.

Thanks to Vivian, as far as the outside world is concerned, I have been barely conscious all this time, and when I do emerge from my foggy state, I can barely hum “Old MacDonald Had a Farm” or chew Jell-O jewels without drooling.

The thing is, as much as I don’t want to have a meaningful dialogue with an armed person with handcuffs, I have to go home if I want any slight chance of ever seeing Billy. Billy even thinks that phoning me at the hospital is too risky for him, which, all right, being somewhat familiar with total paranoia, I can kind of see.

But my room at home is an electronic wonderland, and even in my altered state, I am prepared to text and message and learn to wipe my hard drive clean endlessly if that’s what I have to do to talk to him. My dad is pretty much comatose half the time, my mother is out shopping, and Juanita is only there two days a week. I am prepared to hang over the edge of the balcony above the canyon and send him sappy yet un-clingy smoke signals if that’s what it takes.

But going home, it turns out, is going to be a bigger production than just pulling out the tubes and wheeling me through the front entrance. Because of the teenage felon aspect of the situation, Vivian is pretty sure that I’m going to be charged with some kind of major crime as soon as I’m unplugged and we no longer have the nice ladies in the bunny-printed nurses’ uniforms repeating “closed head injury” over and over and running interference whenever law enforcement types show up.

“How is a child whose head got smashed against a tree supposed to deal with the police?” Vivian says to anyone who will listen, just in case they don’t have a handle on her version of the situation.

And then she says, “Look at you! How are you supposed to talk to them and not incriminate yourself in something really serious? He never said that you could drive that sports car of his, did he?”

And I go, Shit, Gabriella. You stole the car. You’re toast.

Because: Billy would never let me drive that car. Billy wouldn’t even let Kaps drive that car around the Winston School parking lot. And it is hard to see how I am going to avoid incriminating myself about taking the car since it seems somewhat obvious that this is how I ended up in the hospital surrounded by funeral-ready floral offerings and cheesy, ozone-wrecking Mylar balloons.

To accomplish at least the temporary postponement of consequences that are too scary to contemplate without feeling sicker than I already feel, my job is to pretend I am too out of it to think a straight thought.

Vivian, meanwhile, remains obsessively devoted to getting me to look semi-normal. Which, given my new goal of getting home and somehow getting Billy to want to see me, is not what you could call a bad thing. I really wish she would spend her time getting me a lawyer in between buying all the industrial-strength makeup, but I don’t get too far with this completely reasonable suggestion.

I keep trying to explain to her that even if she gets me to remember what I did and look like Miss Teen America, it’s not going to make it so I didn’t somehow total Billy’s car with like a 98% blood alcohol level.

But she’s not listening.

“Daddy is working on it,” she says. Which makes you wonder if she could even pick Daddy out of a lineup, because he would be the one standing there sipping the dry martini and not the one doing the meticulous research on the top ten criminal attorneys of the Los Angeles basin.

“Billy says I have to get a lawyer before I talk to the police.”

“You talked to Billy Nash?”

I let her marinate in this for a few seconds. Then I say, “Yeah, but you can’t tell anybody. He’s not supposed to talk to me.”

“Now there’s a surprise,” she says.

She is not even smiling.

You would think she would be happy about the (slight) return of Billy. But she is too busy protecting me from anyone who might think she has a funny-looking kid. Sitting there answering the phone and explaining to anybody who wants to see me that I am too debilitated and emotionally overwrought to see them. Telling Lisa and Anita and Huey and the kids who just want to see a train wreck when they get the chance, “Not yet, dear.”

As if I were anything other than numb and confused and waiting for Billy to figure out a way to call me again.

I can visualize the concerned faces on the other end of the line, Lisa and Anita and Huey and Huey’s mother with her herd of visiting therapy dogs all pulling on their leashes and, weirdly, Andie Bennett, who you figure would be functioning on the level of those dumb Piaget babies from psychology, forgetting I even exist the second I get stuck in a mechanical bed somewhere beyond her field of vision, all kind of frowning sympathetically and gently touching their end-call buttons.

It doesn’t matter.

It’s not as if they’re Billy.

XXI

WENDY SAYS, “THAT LOOKS LIKE PRINCE CHARMING.”

She is so enthralled with the artistic possibilities of occupational therapy with a patient over four years old that she has taken to making daily deliveries of actual, good art supplies. Then she makes me squeeze a squishy ball a couple of times and writes a chart note. And never is heard a discouraging word because I really want all that nice paper.

I say, “That’s my boyfriend.” Although, I admit, I have made him kind of glowing and unusually golden for a human. And then there’s the issue of the slightly green horse.

Wendy says, “Well, he sounds nice too.”

And I think: You can totally do this, Gabriella. Tell her. Just because he hasn’t been calling you every five minutes and he isn’t lurking by your bedside, doesn’t mean he’s not your boyfriend. Tell her.

I say, “That’s not my boyfriend on the phone.”

Wendy starts lining up the pencils on the tray table.

I say, “I don’t want him to see me when I look like this.” Which you have to give me points for, which is semi-true. “I want to look vaguely like myself and I want to be thinking straight before I even talk to him.”

Wendy says, “Oh,” like she almost believes it.

I almost believe it, too.

Eventually, though, even the perfume-smitten nurses can tell that no amount of communing with Ponytail Doc, who keeps showing up in my room trying to get me to tell her all the four-legged animals I can think of in thirty seconds, is going to get me to remember diddly about what happened; when I have exhausted the limits of playology and Wendy has taped my portraits of every medical resident, intern, janitor, and candy striper at Valley Mercy onto the walls of the staff lounge; when no one can figure out what possible reason there is for me to be sticking around, going up and down in the cool electric bed, having makeup sponged onto my face without being able to remember one single clue regarding how my face got that way, I get snuck out the side door of the hospital by the freight elevator, as if a bunch of paparazzi and the whole LAPD were just hanging around in the hospital lobby on the edge of their seats waiting for me to make an appearance.

I am completely petrified, huddled in the wheelchair, not even wearing my own clothes because Vivian thinks I look more pathetic in a hospital gown and she is going for the all-season pathetic look just in case. I am waiting for someone to arrest me and throw me in a tiny cell with one sixty-watt lightbulb and a window in the door to slide in Spam sandwiches with wedges of sad iceberg lettuce. I am waiting for someone in a uniform to grab the handles of the wheelchair out of Bunny Shirt’s hands and wheel me away.

But it doesn’t happen.

Bunny Shirt helps me into the backseat of the Mercedes when Vivian pulls it up to the valet service curb. Then Vivian guns the motor, and we’re out of there.

And when I finally get home, which is exactly the same as before, when I finally get into my exactly-the-same room, the only drama left is the drama of me lying in my exactly-the-same bed with my same laptop on my stomach, staring at my same dog-on-surfboard screensaver and waiting for Billy to show up online. Staring at the new cell phone and waiting for Billy to text. Staring at the landline and waiting for Billy to call. Waiting for the miraculous evaporation of Billy’s Have-a-Drunken-Girlfriend-Go-to-Jail Condition of Probation so he can come through my door and into my bedroom and hold my hand and stroke my hair and make things stay the same.

I want to be back in my After and not in some weird after-After Purgatory, waiting to find out if I am Saved or Damned.

Staring at the row of odd little presents that Andie Bennett has been sending and Vivian has lined up on my dresser, including a pink blown glass horse, a Peppermint Patty PEZ dispenser, and a mauve Kate Spade pencil case. And you really have to wonder if the Department of Probation would actually drag Billy off in leg irons if he sent me a freaking mauve pencil.

I close my eyes, but it doesn’t work.

I can’t even get my private home movies to work. I am not sure if this is because I no longer have the interesting drugs dripping into my veins or because now that I’m home and right here, right now, in real time, this is my life. This is Gabriella Gardiner’s ACTUAL Teen Life in the Three B’s uncut, happening to me minute by minute, without chemical enhancement. I can’t close my eyes and watch it because I’m stuck in it.

Except that Gabriella’s actual teen life consists of lying in my room waiting for Billy to show up, which might not even count as a life, if you think about it.

To make things even more bizarre while I’m lying here, completely terrified about what’s going to happen with me and Billy, not to mention me and the LAPD, it is as if after all those years of flying too low to be a blip on his radar, I’ve come up with something my dad can relate to: a problem with mixed drinks in it.

I am used to being in the house with my dad and feeling comfortably alone, not having any idea what he’s actually doing closed up in the den other than drinking. But all of a sudden, I’m his New Best Friend. All of a sudden, he starts coming downstairs and eating breakfast with me in my room, not saying much except for jolly, totally off-the-wall things about how much he likes pink grapefruit.

After the third day of this, he gets up from my desk chair and walks over to the side of the bed just as I’m sliding my tray off my lap. He puts his arm around my shoulder and he squinches up his eyes and it hits me that he is silently crying without the sobbing again. And even though all along, since it began, since Songbird Lane, since everything, I had pretty much thought it was the end of the world, I was wrong: The actual end of the world is this.

His arm is just resting there, not moving, like a dead eel. I just want him to say whatever it is he’s planning to say, assuming he’s planning to say something, so this whole freakish father-daughter episode will be over and he’ll reclaim the eel. But no, now there is some weird shaking thing going on too. I can’t tell if this is John’s rendition of Deep Emotion or if he is trying to pat me on the back but he can’t quite bring himself to do it.

And I go, Shit, Gabriella, this is your dad having a nervous breakdown. You’re supposed to feel something and do something and help him or something.

But I don’t. Short of wanting him to magically turn into someone who vaguely resembles an actual parent, all I want is for him to retract the eel and go away.

“Oh, Gabsy,” he says, like the guy hasn’t even noticed what people call me for the past seventeen years. “I can’t help but think that if only I’d wrestled with my own demons sooner, you wouldn’t be going through this.”

Right.

Unless, of course, he’s talking about the demon that makes him a sub-regular, totally incompetent businessman, which, if he could have managed to wrestle it into the corner and slide past its defeated husk and into the richer than richer-than-God category, I could have been popular even if geeky.

“It’s not like it’s genetic, Dad,” I say, just wanting him to take the eel and go back into the den, only the fish-head hand has grabbed onto my arm, hard.

“You are so wise for such a young person,” he says. Then he sighs with what sounds a lot like relief and he slinks away. Marking the end of our father-daughter breakfasts.

For a couple of days, I am so freaked out by the possibility I’ll run into him somewhere other than dinner where Vivian provides the complete antidote to any kind of emotional gushing, I only come out of my room to eat French toast in the kitchen really early with Juanita, like I always did before. Watching the telenovelas that got me my one and only flat-out A—other than the A’s in art that don’t even get calculated into your academic GPA—in Honors Spanish.

Juanita, who my mother has hired full time for the week supposedly to help with me but really so Vivian can go shopping without feeling too guilty, doesn’t go in for all this pointless affirmation: I don’t even think you go, girl translates as a Salvadorian expression. What she does is make me a lot of hot chocolate with high-cal whole milk she carries up the hill to our house in a little paper bag with contraband canned whipped cream and tiny marshmallows. Which is the highlight of my day.

This is so not turning into the best extended spring vacation ever.

XXII

THE ONLY PERSON WHO MANAGES TO GET THROUGH to me, despite Vivian’s best efforts to keep everyone away until my skin goes back to being unbruised and lifelike all on its own, is Lisa.

“The hospital said you weren’t there anymore. Thank God! You’re out of your coma. You remember me, right?” She sounds exactly the same.

“Duh. Who said I was in a coma?”

“Your mom. Kind of. And Gabby, people gossip. Everybody knows. Are you all right?”

It is hard to know which aspect of not all right to start with. “My face looks like it belongs in a body bag, but yeah. And no coma. I just don’t remember the crash.”

“Well, people can probably fill you in.”

“Yeah, people in police uniforms. I crashed Billy’s car, so apparently they’re interested.”

“What are you talking about?” Lisa says, clueless as ever. “I’m coming over there, okay?”

“Are you sure your mom will drive you over now that I’m Evil Delinquent Girl?”

“Gabby! You are not an evil, delinquent girl,” Lisa says, delusional but perpetually supportive.

But even if she refuses to believe I am a wayward, felonious teen, evidently I still qualify as a charity project, because her parents are letting her jump into the Saab every day to come see me, which is a little unnerving because they only ever let her drive it to community service and youth group at her church. Not only that, she is bringing Anita, who is generally only allowed to sit in cars driven by moms and people over the age of twenty-five who are related to her and have Volvos with front, back, side, rear, floor, and roof air bags.

Lisa seems to find this all extremely amusing. She says she hopes I’m ready for a whole lot of salvation because unless she brings me some on a regular basis, she is probably never going to get to drive a car somewhere other than church again until she graduates from college, gets a job, and buys herself one, a fact that she seems weirdly fine with. Then she starts beating herself up about how she’s a twit to talk about herself when I’m bedridden and mangled, and at the point when I am pretty sure she’s on the verge of hauling out our Lord and Savior, I tell her it’s okay but I’m too tired to talk.

Meanwhile, Anita keeps sending me text messages about how worried about me she is and am I having cognitive problems and do I want her to show me how to meditate or go back over the SAT flash cards we’ve already done. She doesn’t sound amused at all.

I’m not all that amused either. In fact, Anita’s text messages are making me crazy, not because there is anything inherently annoying about them, but because every time my phone makes its little got-a-text bleep noise, I think it might be Billy but it isn’t.

Meanwhile, Lisa and Anita show up at the front door with one of those Save the Children blankies they make for godless, impoverished children with no electricity or blankies, with my name embroidered on the yellow silk border.

“You don’t have to let them see you,” Vivian whispers, sticking her head into my room when they are pounding on the front door. “It’s not too late. Nobody has to see you like this. Do you want to put on more concealer?”

She is in the Vivian version of maternal frenzy, seriously concerned that my so-called friends will ditch me if they notice I’m not pageant-ready, trying to save me from this sorry fate—completely ignoring the actual looming disaster in which somebody shows up and arrests me for DUI and grand theft auto.

But I am only thinking Billy Billy Billy Billy Billy, so much so that all other thoughts, scary thoughts, no-lawyer-and-the-LAPD-is-on-its-way-with-sirens-blaring-and-handcuffs-at-the-ready thoughts, oh-no-I-look-like-crap-and-my-friends-won’t-like-me-anymore-and-I’ll-be-a-Bashed-in-Face-Pariah thoughts—except, whoops, that last one is Vivian’s thought, not my thought—have no space to hang out.

Vivian is prepared to barricade the door on my behalf, but eventually, still unconvinced, she gives way for the gift-wrapped goodies, the fuzzy knitted scarf, handmade dangle earrings, and a bunch of pastel aromatherapy candles with names like “Sea of Tranquility” and “Mellow Morning.” And all right, as miserable a cynical bitch as I feel like, boyfriend-less and very likely re-invisible, it still feels kind of good to be with people who actually don’t care how I look or what I did and still like me. Even if Vivian thinks they’re a couple of losers, not unlike the reappearing Old Me with the purple and green bruises that clash with the currently nonexistent New Me’s autumn season earth tones.

And did I mention board games?

“When I’m sick, I love to play board games,” Lisa says. “And you’re really good at board games.”

“I’m not sick.”

“Grumpy, aren’t we?” says Anita, making a face that is supposed to cheer me up and cajole me out of grumpiness but doesn’t. “Sanjiv says closed head injuries can affect your mood.”

“You talked to your brother about me?”

Anita shrugs and looks somewhat sheepish.

“Come on, Gabby,” Lisa says. “You got hit on the head. This is your excuse to kick back and be a kid again! Don’t you want to play Boggle?” Well, no. Battleship? No. Connect Four? Parcheesi? Candyland? Chutes and Ladders? Hungry Hungry Hippos? Checkers? Chinese Checkers? Mah-jongg? Chess?

“We should play Husker Du?” Anita says. “After a closed head injury, we should work on your memory.”

And it’s no better when Huey tags along, either.

Because Huey, as it turns out, is such a wreck in the presence of a banged up, debilitated person such as me, he can barely hold it together for long enough to figure out who done it in a game of Clue. Or maybe it’s just the shock of being in a girl’s bedroom.

“I’d leave him out,” Lisa says, “but he really wants to see you. And I might not get to be semi-alone with a boy in a car again for years.”

“You do know that your mother is insane, right?” I say. “No offense.”

Lisa sighs but doesn’t seem all that worked up about it.

“You call that insane,” Anita says. “Hello. Have you met my mother? She’s trying to establish a perfect simulation of small-town life in Punjab circa 1958. Only in Beverly Hills. And we all know how sane that it.”

We have all been so severely indoctrinated to respect insane cultural differences that Lisa and I don’t know what to say.

“Well, at least you don’t have to cover all your hair like Asha,” Lisa says weakly.

“Admit it’s insane,” Anita says.

We do.

Ironically, Asha, albeit covered head to toe, gets to jump into Huey’s car every time they have to go do yearbook business because Huey drove down to Culver City and had a meaningful dialogue with her dad.

Whereas the mere sight of me has reduced Huey to cringing in my desk chair, barely able to push Colonel Mustard around the board.

“Boys are such babies,” Lisa says.

“You look like you’re in so much pain,” Huey says, as if this or some variant of this is the only conversation starter he can think of. “How do you feel about . . .”—he scrapes Colonel Mustard into the library where he’s been before and doesn’t need to go again—“. . . everything?”

How do you feel about everything? You have to figure that if Huey had been born into my family, Vivian would have drowned him back when he was still a pup.

“And what’s up with your left arm?” he says.

“Huey!” Lisa says. “She’s going to make a full recovery. She’s lucky it’s not worse.”

“Lucky!” Huey basically howls. “Sorry, Lisa. I admire your outlook. No—I’d say I love your outlook. But lucky is not on the list of words that describe what happened to her.”

“Hello, I’m right here. Hello. Bed to Huey . . .”

“She’s a potter and look at her left arm!” he bellows.

Just to show him that there’s nothing to discuss, I do the wrecked person’s version of slithering out of bed. All right, so I have to will myself to smile when my feet graze the floor. All right, so I am somewhat limping. But if I suck it up and make myself put weight on my left foot, my walk isn’t noticeably all that weird. And it isn’t as if this is keeping me out of jazz dance ensemble. To keep being who I am, I just need both my hands to work.

I try to button up my robe, but this does not turn out as well as you would hope.

And I go, Gabriella, you don’t need to run around buttoning things up to show off. You can always tie the brace on your left wrist. Just not in front of anyone.

Huey, who is watching me make my way across my bedroom to the bathroom, for once puts down the camera.

He says, “How could you let this happen to you?”

I say, “I don’t know.”

Also, “Shut up.”

There are days of Clue and Monopoly marathons that I am pretty sure Lisa and Anita are conspiring to let me win. Days that last so long my mother makes Juanita stay late and cook us actual dinner instead of getting the bad Chinese takeout Vivian slaps on the table night after night. Days when I figure that I might actually die if Billy doesn’t call me.

Not to mention, Lisa and Anita want to talk about everything too.

“About what you told Lisa,” Anita says. “We should talk about it.”

“About you crashing Billy’s car . . . ,” Lisa says.

“Could we please, pretty please, pretty pretty please not talk about it?” I say. The thought of Anita trying to devise a scientifically perfect way to kick my brain into gear while Lisa prays for me is more than I can take.

“Not that we want to be pushy or intrude on your privacy,” Anita says. As if it didn’t take until tenth grade for her to blurt out that if her mother made her spend another Christmas vacation at a theme park, national park, or slogging through the Getty Museum showing off her Hindi language skills to an entourage from New Delhi one more time, she was going to run away by Greyhound bus and hide out in her brother Sanjiv’s co-op at UC Berkeley.

“We know that you’re a private person,” Lisa says, even though she, herself, has never uttered one single word about what she and Huey have been up to since seventh grade. Despite the fact that Anita and I are more than slightly curious.

“We want to support you,” Anita says. “But some things don’t make sense—”

“Can’t you just accept that I don’t remember anything and I’m not planning to remember anything any time soon and just leave it there?” It is the embarrassing and horrifying truth.

Lisa and Anita exchange looks and gape at me.

“Gabby, please just think about it—”

“We want to help, but—”

“I mean it,” I say. “So there’s nothing to talk about. And there isn’t going to be anything to talk about either.”

So Lisa and Anita just keep letting me be the tiny Monopoly top hat, and we just keep playing.