Текст книги "Sing"
Автор книги: C. D. Reiss
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Текущая страница: 4 (всего у книги 10 страниц)
CHAPTER 14.
MONICA
I took a white-knuckled drive up the five freeway, past all signs of civilization, past subdivision after subdivision, up a bifurcated mountain and back down it, the bestfuckingthingever drinking gas like a frat boy at a kegger. Everything was dead, flat, dry. Then it hit. Castaic. Burned dry. All the garage doors faced the street like mouths stretched into a closed grimace, and front yards that had not been flattened by concrete were neglected and brown or tamed and green, with sad blowup snowmen and fat, jolly Santas placed wherever they landed, scorched by the sun, smiling in the unforgiving landscape. Even the mountains ringing the town looked compacted under the weight of the sky.
Or maybe that was just me.
Big girl pants.
Maria Souza-Faulkner had two settings. Park, which meant she was passive, sweet and slept seventeen hours a day, and Fourth Gear, which meant she was in full on rage with an eye to wiping the world of sin. Kevin had suggested she was bipolar. I’d laughed, not because he was so wrong, but because she’d never do something as sensible as see a doctor to figure out why she was crazy. Dad had loved her through all of it, when he was around, so obviously, there was no need to fix what was functioning just fine.
The house, a one story beige box with a two car garage and a front door set back twenty feet behind it, had fallen out of repair. Dad wouldn’t have allowed it, and spent his time in the states painting, plastering and gardening. The young citrus he’d planted had a few leaves on the twiggy branches and the front lawn looked like an infield. I didn’t know how long she’d been stuck in park, but judging from the look of the place, it had been at least through the beginning of the summer.
My mother answered the door in a long polyester thing that fell over her curves in a way that was modest, but sexual at the same time. Like me, she had a body that was hard to hide, and unlike me, she kept trying. She was a Brazilian beauty my dad had met on some unholy peacetime mission. Five eleven. Early fifties. Darker skin than I’d been given, but the same dark eyes and hair. Catholic as only a South American girl can be. And that was the rub. She believed in the infallibility of the Pope and the virginity of Mary long after anyone else with a brain had moved on.
“Hi, ma.”
She hugged me warmly, and after a second, I hugged her back, but she held on longer than I thought she would. Maybe this wouldn’t be so bad. We’d just forgive each other. She moved out of the way and I stepped inside.
She saw the car. My immediate reaction was to make excuses for it. It was borrowed. I was returning it. I didn’t ask for it. Then I decided to shut up. I didn’t come to fight and I didn’t come to lie.
She closed the door without saying anything.
The house was hermetically sealed against the desert heat and dust, and the artificially cooled air was stale and thin. Everything was beige. Dad had hated beige, but my mother insisted, and when she insisted, she got what she wanted.
Well, everything permanent was beige. It seemed like whatever had been moved in was a color, and a bright one. African masks and Mexican blankets. A hand-carved teak partition blocked a window draped in Ikat fabric. Stacks of travel books stood in front of the stuffed bookcases. It looked like my mother had gotten the shit stamped out of her passport.
“You came,” she said.
“Yeah.” The couch had a pillow on one end with a case that matched the bed sheet balled up at the end of it. She was sleeping on it, probably regularly.
“I don’t think we can save the house,” she said.
I had a speech prepared, so I spit it out. “I didn’t come because of the house. It’s not that I can’t move or get an apartment or whatever. I just find it hard to believe you’d let the place go. I got worried about you.”
“Oh, Monya,” she said, calling me by my grandmother’s name. “All this way for nothing.” She put her hand on the doorknob.
This was her. She’d kick me out and waste away rather than admit there was a problem. And though she seemed healthy, if older, I could tell sunshine and butterflies weren’t the order of the day.
“Come on, Mom. I’m here. Make me some tea.”
Her hand slipped from the knob. She glanced out the window as she turned, to the white Jaguar in the street, as if she didn’t trust it and didn’t like it. As she walked me to the kitchen, I saw more third world knicknakery, and clean, beige rectangles spotting the walls. It wasn’t until she indicated my seat that I realized what those rectangles represented. They were where the pictures of Dad had been.
And as she put a copper pot on the stove and got out a mug with I LOST MY HEART IN BELIZE scripted across it, it all became clear. The tchotchke. The missing pictures of Dad. The depression. The multiple mortgages.
“Still waitressing?” she asked.
“Yep. You still doing the books for the church?”
“What’s his name?” she asked, not answering my question. “You didn’t buy that car on a waitresses salary.”
“I don’t make a salary. I make tips.” I paused. What kind of answer was that? That was the answer of a woman ashamed of who she was, and I’d given that up. “His name is Jonathan. I hope we’re not going to argue about it.”
“As long as it’s not that other guy. I didn’t like him.”
“Does yours have a name?”
She didn’t answer, just dicked with some floral canisters that may or may not have been full of expired tea.
“Mom, is there anyone out here you can talk to? The priest? Someone in the choir?”
“It’s not that easy.”
“Is it the rector that dumped you?”
“For the love of all that is holy, Monya. That is—“
“A totally reasonable assumption. Except for the obvious world travel that’s happening. You’re sleeping until afternoon so I know you’re not working for him. You can’t talk to anyone, and all your friends are there.”
“I don’t want to.”
The teapot whistled.
“I’ll be gone in a few hours. So you might as well tell me.”
She put the mug of hot liquid in front of me and left the room. I started to follow, but saw her open a door in the china cabinet and crouch down, rummaging through old dishes and cookbooks, until she came up with a brown paper expanding file.
I sat back down, and she slapped it in front of me.
“This is what you came for. All my paperwork. Take it. No, I don’t want to lose the house. I love that house as much as you do. If I didn’t love it, I would have sold it and kicked you to the street for being an indolent, disrespectful bitch two years ago.”
“Don’t hold back, ma. Tell me how you really feel.”
She didn’t say anything else, but she didn’t laugh and forgive me either. That was it. That was what she’d wanted to say. And it wasn’t as bad as I’d feared. I didn’t get crushed under the weight of her disapproval.
But she was right. Despite my initial protestations, I wanted to save the house. I slid the folder to me.
“I’m sorry about whatever his name is,” I said. “It looks like you guys had a good time together.”
“I don’t want to talk about it.”
“Okay.”
I unspooled the string from the felt disk and flipped open the envelope.
I don’t know anything about finance. Numbers only interested me insofar as they related to sound vibrations, but once I spread the papers across the table and stacked them into a narrative I could get my head around, one thing was abundantly clear.
My mother had blown about three quarters of a million dollars travelling the globe.
The house I lived in had been purchased for 95K in the mid nineties, and paid in full twenty years later with my dad’s life insurance. But Echo Park had been in the nascent stages of a renaissance when my parents had bought it, and since then, more and more people like Dr. Thorensen had moved in next to artists, Hispanic families and gang members.
According to a bank located in Colorado, my little house on a hill was worth six hundred and fifty thousand dollars. I knew this, because my mother had cashed out every dime, and then some, piggy backing mortgages and loans. She’d attempted to squeeze almost another hundred grand in equity out of the thing when I’d had those permits opened. As if there were going to be actual improvements.
She’d bailed on her job in February. She’d been at that church since I was in high school, and had a salary good enough to make all her obligations, if barely, but without that job, it all tumbled on her. I imagined the gentleman in question was the cause of her slide.
“You’re a goddamn genius, ma.”
“Watch your mouth.”
“You know you’ll never pay this back?”
“They won’t miss it. It’s a bank.”
“It’s about four banks. Mom, Christ—“
“Mouth.”
“I can’t even get my head around what to do.” I collected the papers. I wanted to slam and bang them to illustrate my annoyance, but they only made shuffling sounds. “Can you just tell me what happened? Because you didn’t raise me to do stuff like this.”
She put her fists on her hips. “Like what?”
“Stealing. This is stealing.”
“Not if I let them have that house.”
“It’s not worth seven hundred thousand dollars.”
“The appraisers said it was, so it is. That’s what things are worth. What experts say they’re worth. People like us, we’re nothing. Our opinions don’t mean anything. And you agree. In your heart you know it. You think the house isn’t worth anything because you love it and if you love it, it’s garbage right? Well, how much would you pay for it? Huh? How much for your father’s trees? How much for the porch your father and I sat on after you were in bed?”
“Mom—“
“How much for the kitchen where I cooked for you? How much for the side door you snuck into after curfew as if I didn’t know? Or the bathroom where I miscarried two babies? How much is it worth, Monya? Even that cracked foundation your father promised to fix a hundred times before he shipped himself across the world. That house was where I waited for him. Where he wasn’t when I found out I had cancer? How much would a stranger pay for those years? If my life there wasn’t worth seven hundred thousand dollars, what was my life worth?”
I couldn’t take it any more. Her face was red and strained. Her voice had his a crescendo, and I had been a neglectful, indolent bitch. I bolted up from the chair and put my arms around her and let her cry.
“It’s okay, ma. We’ll fix it.”
“I can’t. I tried everything.”
“I have friends who are lawyers. I can—“
I could have them look at the paperwork, maybe explain the situation. But I stopped myself. Jonathan was going to offer to buy the house, no doubt, and I didn’t want him to. I didn’t want to go down a road where he started bailing out my family, then my friends. I didn’t want him to trade Jessica’s financial distress for mine. I could soothe my mother for the moment, but in the end, we’d have to let the house go. I’d tell Jonathan I was ok with it. Make it out like it wasn’t a big deal.
A call came in. Still holding my mother, I slipped the phone out of my pocket. Margie. I missed it by a second and put it back in my pocket while it went to voicemail.
“Let me see what I can do,” I said. She sniffed and stood up straight.
“There’s nothing to do. I’m sorry you have to move.”
“I’ll live.” I waved it off, but I knew I wasn’t convincing. So I changed the subject. “I should have come around sooner.”
“Yes. You should have.”
“I’m sorry.”
A text blooped. My mother and I looked at each other expectantly.
“This the man with the car?” The tone did not bode well for an intelligent conversation. If I had just learned to stop calling myself a whore, my mother hadn’t. She was in a depressive phase but that could change on a dime.
“No it’s his sister, probably.”
I looked. It was a text from Margie, as I expected.
—Where the fuck are you?—
The next one came immediately after.
—He’s bleeding into his chest. Bad suture ripped tissue—
It took me sixty seconds to say goodbye to my mother, promise her I’d do my best for her, scoop up the papers, and get in the car.
CHAPTER 15.
MONICA
I texted Margie that I’d be there in two hours. It was getting dark already, and I’d hit Los Angeles right around rush hour, which would literally double the time it would take me to get to Sequoia. The hospital was inside a knot of traffic arteries that made it hard to move toward or away from during peak hours. Either poor planning for the sake of the ambulances and women in labor, but if you wanted a central, urban hospital accessible from the five points of LA, it was prime real estate.
And Jonathan was in the middle of the best cardiac unit in the country, if the internet was to be believed. Whatever happened, I was sure it would be rectified in no time at all. I worried that he might face unpleasantness, and that I wouldn’t be there for him. But he’d be fine. I was sure, positive as a matter of fact, that it wasn’t a big deal.
I finally got into the waiting room at 7pm, and was redirected to intensive care. I didn’t shake, nor did I panic, because in ten years, this was going to be funny.
But when I got to intensive care, it didn’t look like anyone was laughing. Fiona blew past me without greeting. Deirdre smiled at me, but she wasn’t like the rest of them. She couldn’t hide her concern. Sheila, who always came off motherly and kind was talking to Margie like she wanted to bite her head off. Doing my own roll call, I counted off. Carrie not coming. Leanne in Asia. Theresa hadn’t been around in days. Eileen stood by Margie, twisting her diamond ring around her finger with her thumb. Her pumps had been traded for sneakers days ago, when her medication had been upped. She waved to me, but didn’t call me over.
Margie’s presence made me bold. I walked forward.
“This is unacceptable,” Sheila spoke in clipped vowels and hard consonants, he finger pointed at Margie’s throat. “And you treat it like another day in the park. This hospital fucked up. They as good as killed him.”
I gasped, and the three of them paused, glanced, ignored.
“Thanks for the drama,” Margie said to Sheila. “It’s exactly what we need.”
“You need to start a filing a malpractice suit immediately.”
“Like hell.”
“You’re losing your guts.”
“I want us focusing on Jonathan. Not legal battles. Let them do an inquiry—
“And start the cover-up.”
“This is not TV—“
“I’ll hire my own counsel.”
“Exactly what he needs.”
“You—“
“I agree with Margie,” I said. Six light eyes turned to face me and I got my first ever case of stage fright. “It’s going to take years to sue. A week isn’t going to make a difference.”
Sheila turned her head, but didn’t commit the rest of her body to face me. She’s been kind to me from the minute I met her, but I had the feeling that was about to change.
“Who are you?” she spit out.
She knew goddamn well who I was. Nobody.
I walked away and wasn’t followed. Good. Fucking Drazens, all of them. Except the one.
I didn’t know the nurses in the ICU, so I went to the desk and put a harmless look on my face.
“Hi,” I said to the dark-skinned woman with an armful of charts. “I’m looking for Jonathan Drazen’s room?”
“He’s down in x-ray. Come back in an hour.”
I had two choices. Go back and try and find out what I needed from the Family Drazen, or wait in the cafeteria until Jonathan came back. I knew Margie would tell me everything once she shook Sheila, and Sheila herself might even calm down enough to be nice to me. But there was no reason I had to stand there and be abused while I waited.
As I walked into the cafeteria, I saw Daddy Drazen sitting with a long-haired man in sandals, who had his two year-old daughter on his knee. The man was talking fast with his head down. Declan leaned into hear, and put his hand on the man’s shoulder. He didn’t quite seem like a sociopath, which didn’t mean much of anything. I wasn’t an expert on either Declan or abnormal psychology.
I got in line for a cup of tea. A song percolated in my head. I went to get my notebook, but dig as I might, it wasn’t in my bag. I must have left it home. Damn it. I took out a Sharpie and got ready to write it on my arm.
“Monica?”
I heard my name as I spaced out to the music in my head, trying to get words and rhythm to match.
“Dr. Thorensen. I mean, Brad. Hi.” He had a white lab coat over his suit, with a nametag clipped to the lapel. “I’ve never seen you at work before.”
“What are you doing down here?”
“Getting something to eat. I just got in.”
He took me by the elbow and sat me down at an empty table. We sat knee to knee on the same side of it.
“What?” I said.
“I just had to open a transplant assessment of Mr. Drazen.”
I don’t know what I must have looked like. Maybe blank, because a sort of vacuity took hold of me, where I expected more information to be poured into my brain. Or maybe I looked puzzled.
“I don’t understand. It was a bad suture. I know Sheila’s pissed but....”
But I’d assumed she was flying off the handle. But I’d thought he got x-rays all the time. But I thought it was a complication, not ruination. But I was hanging on to my optimism because I missed it.
He glanced around, then back to me.
“Say it,” I said. “I don’t want to hear it from anyone else.”
“It was a suture inside his heart. The tearing’s very bad. He’s bleeding faster than they can pump it out. If they go in and patch him up...well. They can’t. There’s no room. And the tear has moved into his left ventricle.”
“Are you going to fix it?” I panicked. It was the panic of someone whose anxiety was a show, because I knew everything was going to be okay. For sure, there was an easy fix for all this, and Jonathan and I would laugh about how silly I was to worry so much. I couldn’t wait for that laughter. I told the story in my head over an imaginary Thanksgiving dinner, describing the goosebumps on my arms, the dry feeling in my mouth, the sudden breathlessness in my lungs. I’d wax dramatic about holding back tears, and Jonathan would laugh that laugh from deep in his chest, and tears would stream down his own face.
“I don’t know,” Brad said.
“What do you mean you don’t know?”
“We’re still doing the assessment. I have a lot of forms to fill out. I have to talk to the rest of the cardiac team. It’s tricky.”
“What’s fucking tricky, Brad? You’re either fixing it or you’re filling out fucking paperwork.”
“Take it easy.”
“I’m not taking it easy. I will burn your fucking house down if you don’t tell me right now why you assholes can’t fix it immediately.”
He took my wrists and held me to a sitting position. I knew he wouldn’t have done that unless he knew me, and the privilege of whatever information I’d already gotten was courtesy of a few hours of City of Dis.
“There’s a good chance, and I don’t know for sure, because I need to review everything with the committee, but I’m pretty sure he’ll need a transplant.”
“Okay,” I said. I breathed, which I’d forgotten to do. That was a thing. It was a course of action. “Then give him one.”
“We need a heart, and his blood type? AB negative? It’s rare. He needs to get on the list. Monica, I hope I’m wrong. If the surgical team believe they can go back in and fix it, then this whole conversation is moot.”
His eyes, deep blue and a little bloodshot, as if he’d been up too many hours, did not waver from mine. He had the confidence of a man who had held a human heart in his hands and made it beat again. A man who had made life and death happen, and for whom Jonathan was just another patient, another puzzle to solve, another career challenge.
I slipped my hands down until I could hold his hands. I squeezed them and closed my eyes.
“I want you to understand something,” I said. “That man. He’s not some boyfriend in a line of them. He is my alpha and omega. He is the sky over me. Without him, I’m lost. There’s no one else, no one whose soul balances mine the way his does. I waited my life for him, and when he came I didn’t recognize him. Not until very recently. If I lose him I swear, as God is my witness, I will be alone. No man can match him.”
When I opened my eyes, Brad was looking at our clasped hands, head down.
“I didn’t know,” he said.
“I only live next door.”
He looked back up to me. “I’ll do my best, Monica. I can’t promise anything. If he needs a new heart, I want you to be ready for a rough time. He doesn’t have forever to bleed into himself, and healthy hearts don’t come all that often. You need to sleep and eat and live your life while you wait.”
I smirked. “My life is with him, Brad. That’s how I live it. The rest is unnecessary complication.” I felt like Jonathan was there with me, having quoted him.
We sat like that for a few seconds, where I tried to transmit my seriousness. It felt good to just sit with someone and be, even if it couldn’t last.
His cellphone beeped. He didn’t even look at it but let go of my hands.
“That’s my office. I have to go.”
“Will you let me know?”
“You’ll know, Monica. You’ll know.” He stood. “Just the sleeping and eating. Do those. Okay?”
My tea was cold. My granola bar looked more and more like a slab of pressed shit.
“After I see him. Then I’ll go home and go to bed.”
He looked at his watch. “Come with me. Hurry.”
He waved and walked off, hand feeling into his pocket for his phone before he’d even turned around completely. I scuttled behind.
Examination rooms inside offices inside suites inside wards, around corners and up secret stairs, I followed Brad to x-ray. He spoke to a lady in a pink smock while texting, and Pink Smock gave him the name of yet another space I never would have found on my own, and in that space was a gurney. On it was Jonathan.
I assumed Brad said good-bye, because by the time I was standing over my lover, Brad was gone.
Jonathan was either sleeping or unconscious, pale as death, an altar to IV tower gods. I took his hand, pressing my palm to his. He did not respond. It was just warm enough, which was the only way I knew he wasn’t lost. I stayed there until Pink Smock and an orderly came to push him away. I went with them, just to make sure he was okay.
