A Seahorse in the Thames (11 page)

I sigh. “Kind of,” I answer, and then I decide to take him into my confidence. I tell him about the check, about Gavin McNeil, about Priscilla and my Dad and our upcoming dinner.

I stop when it occurs to me I am not sure why I need to tell him all this.

“Well, I think it’s great that it looks like Priscilla and your dad are going to patch things up, especially after so many years, but I have to say I’m a little worried about you asking about that check.”

His tone surprises me. He sounds… like an older brother telling me to watch out.

“How come?” I ask, somewhat startled.

“Because it could be dangerous. You’re probably right that the check is related to a bribe of some kind. This McNeil guy might not like you asking him about it. Especially if he thinks that check has long been out of the picture.”

“Yes, but I can’t help but think that check is somehow related to what happened to Leanne and Rebecca, that Gavin McNeil is somehow mixed up in what happened to my sister. It’s not right what happened to those girls. It shouldn’t have happened.”

“But it was ruled an accident, right?”

“Yes. I am not saying Gavin killed his daughter and maimed Rebecca. I’m just saying if there hadn’t been a check, maybe there wouldn’t have been an accident.”

“Hmmm,” Stephen says. “Okay, but just think with me here a minute. If Gavin was involved in something unethical and Rebecca knew about it, then we have to assume it was also something criminal, if not corrupt. That makes him dangerous, Alexa.”

“But Gavin McNeil isn’t like that.”

“You really can’t know what Gavin McNeil is like, I don’t think. Am I right?”

I sigh because I have to admit it is possible I do not know Gavin McNeil at all. I remember him being well-off, always busy, and quick-tempered and that’s about it. “But Stephen, it’s not right what happened. I can’t just bury this. It would be like saying lies are better than the truth.”

“Look, I understand what you’re saying, Alexa. But you’re not a cop. And you don’t have the protection of the police. I want you to promise me that if you do end up talking with this guy that you do it in a public place and that you have someone with you.”

I stop to think for a moment as to whom I might ask. I have a couple of friends at work I could call, but involving my co-workers in this doesn’t appeal to me. Serafina would come if I asked her but she wouldn’t like the circumstances. Patrick would come if I begged him. He would probably like it if I begged him. That
really
doesn’t appeal to me. And I already know Priscilla won’t come.

“Would Priscilla go with you?” Stephen asks.

“Not likely. She doesn’t like this idea.”

“Then I will come.”

His offer floors me. “Stephen, I couldn’t ask that of you. You are recovering from surgery. You have a… a…”

“A brain tumor, yes. But that doesn’t mean I can’t come with you if you decide to meet this guy. In fact, I insist.”

“Really? You would come?”

“I said I insist.”

“Wow. Thanks, Stephen.”

“You’re welcome.”

A second of silence passes between us.

“So are you feeling okay?” I ask.

“I’ve felt better, but it’s tolerable.”

“Elbow and ankle sore?”

“Oh, yes. I am reminded every time I sneeze, cough and blow my nose that I have broken bones that are mending.”

“And the headaches?”

“What about them?”

So they have returned.

“Did you get some more Tylenol?”

“Actually, I was sent home from the hospital with some pretty powerful stuff but I try not to take it too often. Makes me loopy. I wake from a stupor to find that I’m watching
Sponge Bob Square Pants
and actually enjoying it.”

I can’t help but laugh.

“So you get your stitches out today?” he asks.

I am touched that he remembered. “Yes.”

“And then?”

“I am going to drive by my old neighborhood. I don’t plan to get out and ring the doorbell at the McNeil place. I just want to look.”

“Alexa, please be careful.”

“I will, I promise.”

“And you’ll call me if you make plans to meet Gavin?”

“I promise that, too.”

“Okay, then. I’d better go. The brown bits in my Lucky Charms are getting soggy.”

“All right. Bye, Stephen.”

“Bye. And Alexa?”

“Yes?”

“I am glad you called.”

I hang up the phone to get ready for my doctor’s appointment. You’d never guess by the smile on my face that I am dreading having those stitches pulled.

I
leave my place a little before nine, peeking in on Priscilla and Isabel on my way out. They are both in deep sleep. Isabel’s curly head is just touching Priscilla’s right shoulder. Clement’s head is under Isabel’s chin; eyes open, as if he is staring at the ceiling.

Having the stitches removed hurts less than I thought it would. Dr. Chou seems pleased with how my incision is healing. He tells me I can now start doing very simple range-of-motion exercises. Small arm circles at first with my elbow bent, then larger circles with a straight arm. He also tells me what he has already told me before: He wants to see me at three-month intervals for the next year to make sure the tumor does not make a reappearance.

I leave the clinic feeling very unworthy of such a trouble-free prognosis. It is so very different than Stephen’s. It doesn’t seem fair. Stephen seems like such a nice man. He doesn’t deserve this. But then who does deserve cancer?

The drive to Mount Helix takes only twenty minutes. Traffic on I-8 is manageable at 10 AM and I am soon winding my way up the hills of my old neighborhood. I haven’t been up here since I helped Mom move out the summer I graduated from college. All the trees seem taller, but other than that, the neighborhood hasn’t changed all that much.

Arriving at the curb of my old house fills me with a sense of nostalgia that surprises me. I loved this house. It is set at an angle with an inviting curved drive that is lined with Italian cypress trees and verbena bushes. A tall jacaranda tree still commands attention at the center of the smallish lawn. Peach-toned bougainvilleas adorn the west side and the little rose garden that Priscilla and I created when we were eleven is still thriving on the south side.

It was a house of many happy memories. I think sometimes Priscilla, my mom and even my dad, forget this because the sad ones were so extreme.

My parents bought his house when Rebecca was about a year old. Dad had started a new job with an electronics company that had just landed several multi-million dollar contracts with the Department of Defense. The new job was a quite a step up for my dad. I think it nearly doubled their income. For a creative outlet, Mom got a part-time job as an event planner for the convention center, downtown. My parents made many new friends and began attending a local Methodist church, though not regularly. When Rebecca turned three, my parents learned Mom was expecting another baby. Julian was born three weeks early, but with no other visible complications until the cord was cut and he was expected to manage his own circulatory system. His tiny heart was impossibly malformed. A heart-transplant probably could have saved him but he died before one could be located.

Mom and Dad hardly ever spoke of Julian. The knowledge of I possess of Julian came from Grandma Poole, who, while growing up, I saw once or twice a year when she came from Tucson to visit us. I don’t think my mom and Grandma Poole got along very well. It is hard for me to know for sure because Grandma died when Priscilla and I were nine and my memories of her are sketchy. But it seems to me she felt my mother had treated Dad badly when Julian died and this angered her because her son, my dad, was hurting as much as my mom was.

I know my parents’ marriage was tested during this time. I think they even separated for a few months, but they certainly moved past their grief and reconnected emotionally because four years later, Priscilla and I were born. My parents were hoping for a boy, were probably secretly convinced it was a boy, so it was quite a shock when two girls emerged from my mother’s body. Mom has told us how shocked she was. They didn’t even have a girl’s name picked out. Then suddenly she and Dad had to come up with
two
names.

When we were older, and after Priscilla’s falling out with Dad, Priscilla told me she thought our parents had given us ridiculous names. I had told her that was nonsense. I thought our names were beautiful. Elegant.

“C’mon, Lex. Alexa Ariana Marguerite. Priscilla Giselle Antoinette. What kind of names are those?”

I had been flabbergasted at first. I hadn’t known how Priscilla felt about our names. I thought having two middle names was unique and wonderful.

“They’re beautiful names,” I had said, defending our honor.

“They are preposterous names.”

“Priscilla, how can you say that?”

“Because it’s true, Lex. You know they wanted a boy! And what did God give them? Not one girl, but two. Two girls! So what do they do in response to God’s divine shenanigans? Throw it right back in his face with names that no kid would want announced over a loud speaker at their high school graduation.”

I had hotly disagreed with her but in the end, we had to simply stop talking about it. Priscilla was full of textbook teenage angst, and I perhaps was too, but her personality flaunted it and mine hid it. We were sixteen, young and untried, and Priscilla was adamant that our names were meant to mock heaven and I was adamant that our names were meant to indicate our intrinsic worth, despite the fact we were girls and not a boy. At our high school graduation ceremony two years later, Priscilla insisted her name be read off “Priscilla Poole.” No middle names. Not even the initials. There was nothing I could do except ask that my name be read off the same way. “Alexa Poole.”

We had that conversation about our names inside the house I am now gazing at. It’s one of those memories I do not enjoy recalling. We never talked about it again. I have no idea if Priscilla still feels this way.

I chase away this memory and sort through the others, the ones that make me happy. I think of sitting on Rebecca’s bed when she was a teenager and Priscilla and I were still young girls, on those rare occasions when she let us into her room. I remember the time when we were nine and Rebecca was sixteen and she had let us in so that we could watch her put on her make-up. It was a Saturday night and she had a date. Rebecca was in advice-dispensing mode that night. It was one of the infrequent times when she wasn’t picking on Priscilla or me or ignoring us or bossing us around.

The door was closed and she was putting on eye shadow the color of lilacs. She was preparing for a date with her then-latest boyfriend, Mike Somebody.

“This is how you kiss a boy,” she was saying in my memory. “Don’t pucker up your lips like they do in movies. Nobody does that. That would be like kissing an old, shriveled up potato.”

Priscilla and I properly grimaced at the thought.

“You tip your face up a bit and open your mouth just a little, like you’re going to say the word, ‘egg’.”

Priscilla and I had tried it out. “Egg,” we had said.

Rebecca had turned around to face us. “Don’t really say it!” she rebuked us.“
Like
you are going to say it.”

We had shut our egg-saying mouths in embarrassment.

“Then you wait until he comes close to you. You don’t close your eyes until you see him closing his.”

On the bed, Priscilla and I practiced slowly closing our eyes.

“When his lips touch yours, you have to move your head to the side a little bit or your teeth will click together and that’s just tacky.”

Priscilla and I tipped our heads to the side in obedience.

“Then if he puts his tongue in your mouth…”

But Rebecca had not finished because I had doubled over with disgust and yelled “Yuck!” Priscilla had just sat there, her face contorted with revulsion, too, but I could see in her eyes she was thinking, “So, that’s
really
how it’s done?”

“Wait till you’re my age, then we’ll see if you think it’s gross,” Rebecca had said, slipping on a huge hoop earning.

I am smiling as I remember this, Kissing Lessons on Rebecca’s bed. Then it occurs to me, as it usually does when I conjure up this memory, that by the time we were Rebecca’s age, she was twenty-three, living in a group home and not being kissed by anyone. This is why it is hard to come back to this house, why Priscilla probably had no desire to come here this morning. As good as some of the memories are, the bad ones always find a way to work themselves in. Because it was the bad ones that unraveled the family that lived in this house.

I don’t know who lives here now. I suppose if I walked up to the front door, rang the bell and asked whoever opened it if I could just peek inside this house that used to be mine, I would probably be invited in. But I actually don’t want to look inside it. I like remembering how it was. I really don’t want to see how it is now.

I drive away, turning on the next street and passing five houses before I pull up alongside the house where Leanne lived.

I notice first off that it is no longer off-white. It has been painted a soothing shade of coral. The red tile roof looks new. The evergreens in the front yard have been removed and a trio of palm trees that stand in their place are encircled by a kind of grass cover that I know hardly ever needs mowing. The garage is open and I see a Nissan Navigator parked inside. I also see several bikes; two of them look like they belong to children. Then a dog bounds out from the garage, a Scottish terrier, and a little boy comes running after it.

“Gizmo! Come back!” yells the little boy, who I guess to be about five.

But the little dog, obviously covetous of freedom, doesn’t listen. He dashes down the driveway and heads for the street.

Instinctively, I put my hand on the door handle. The dog trots across the street and the little boy chases after it. The approaching car I see in my rear view mirror will most likely slow down but I cannot take the chance that the little boy might not be seen. I throw open the door and run out to the middle of the street, holding up my hand like a traffic cop. The car slows down and the little boy continues to chase his dog, oblivious.

“Chase!” I hear a female voice. I turn and see a woman running down the McNeil driveway and into the street. “Oh dear God, thank you!” she yells to me as she runs past me. I step away, waving to the driver of the car who has stopped for the little drama. I walk back over to my car.

“Chase Michael McNeil! What have I told you about running into the street!” the woman says to the boy as she whisks the little dog into her arms.

“Gizmo wouldn’t listen!” the little boy named Chase replies.

“That doesn’t mean you can go running into the street after him!”

“But there were no cars!” the boy argues.

“Yes, there were! You didn’t even look. That lady over there stopped the car for you.”

They walk toward me and the woman is obviously grateful. I can’t help but think providence has smiled down on me this morning. If I am indeed about to stir up a hornet’s nest, at least I will begin by being the hero that saved Chase Michael McNeil.

“How can I ever thank you,” she says to me.

“No need, I am just glad I was here when I was.”

She notices my neat parking job and the fact that my car is not running.

“Are you looking for someone’s house?” she says. “Can I help you find it?”

It almost sounds like an invitation to be honest with her. Here goes.

“Actually, I was looking for your house.”

Her eyes widen a bit. Surely she thinks I am selling something.

“My name is Alexa Poole. My sister Rebecca and Leanne McNeil were best friends in high school. You must be married to Leanne’s brother, Kevin.”

“Oh my word!” she says, stunned. “Yes, yes I am. My name’s Lisa. And this is Chase. Please, won’t you come in?”

I think of what I promised Stephen earlier this morning. I told him I was just going to drive by the McNeil house. But I didn’t promise him I wouldn’t go in. I just promised him I would be careful.

Which I plan to be.

“Thank you,” I say in response. “That’s very kind.”

I haven’t been inside the McNeil house in I don’t know how long. Leanne was Rebecca’s friend, not mine. I came here once for a party, Leanne’s high school graduation reception. If we had gone to Leanne’s funeral, we would have come back here for refreshments, but Leanne’s funeral was four days after the accident and doctors had not yet said that Rebecca would survive. Leanne’s graduation party was probably the last time I was here.

Lisa sets the little dog down inside the entry way and Chase immediately heads up the stairs, no doubt embarrassed that the woman who caught him
not
looking both ways is now in his house.

“Please have a seat,” Lisa says, motioning me to a little room off the entry that is full of books, heavy cherry wood furniture and big, comfy chairs. I remember this room. It used to be Gavin McNeils’ study.

“Can I get you something to drink? Some coffee?” she asks.

“Err, sure. Coffee would be great.” I sit in one of the big chairs. Gizmo is at my feet sniffing my shoes and purse, no doubt intrigued by Margot’s and Humphrey’s lingering scent. I take in the room while I wait. By a bay window I see a long table with photographs displayed on it. There is a wedding photo of Lisa and Kevin. He looks very much the same in the photo as he did when he was twenty-one and visiting my sister after the accident. There is a family photo of Lisa, Kevin, Chase and two other children, a boy who looks about eight or nine and girl a couple years older than that. Next is a photo of Gavin and Lenore McNeil. Gavin is wearing a suit and Lenore, a soft pink double- breasted dress. She is wearing a corsage. Gavin looks the same. Lenore looks like she did after the accident. There, but not there. Last, I see Leanne’s senior picture from high school. She is wearing a white, tailored blouse and diamond earrings. She looks like she is ready to take on the world.

At that moment, Lisa returns with two steaming mugs and offers me one. Then she takes the chair opposite mine. “So how is your sister? Kevin has told me she survived the accident,” she says.

“Rebecca is doing well.” I am unsure of how much to say. “She lives in
a group home near Balboa Park. It’s a great place, really. It
gives her some measure of independence but then lots of assistance with the things she can’t manage on her own.”

“Yes, I think Kevin may have mentioned the place to me once. So are you in town for a visit, then?”

“No, actually, I still live in San Diego, I just haven’t been up in this neighborhood in quite a while.”