Corrupt Practices (23 page)

The emergency room physician, a young woman with the face of an earnest middle schooler and the attitude of a benevolent despot, is worried that my kidneys have shut down. She won’t let me leave until I prove I can urinate. So I pee into a cup, and the tests for blood in the urinary tract come back negative. She won’t let me drive home though I drove myself to the hospital. After a five-minute debate that I lose, I make the phone call. In years past I would have called Deanna, but now I call Lovely. It’s three thirty in the morning. I don’t know if her cell phone will be on. She answers in a voice that’s all at once groggy, annoyed, and worried, but as soon as I tell her what happened, she promises to get here as soon as she can.

After my attackers left the scene, I slid off the hood of the car and crawled on the pavement until I found my car key. It took me four tries to pull myself to my feet. Every breath was unbearable. By the time I got across the street, I was light-headed. I had to measure my breathing so I didn’t faint. I reeked of vomit. When I opened the car door and fell into my seat, I bellowed. I managed to start the car and drive myself to the hospital. Fortunately, it’s only a mile away from Deanna’s shop. I staggered into the ER and collapsed onto a bench before I could get to the reception desk.

The doctor said I was lucky. It seems that the assailants knew how to inflict maximum pain with minimum injury. Contusions, hematoma, a couple of cracked ribs that they can’t treat but that will heal with time. No other broken bones. No apparent internal bleeding. But I have to watch for light-headedness, shortness of breath, blood in the urine, a precipitous drop in blood pressure. Don’t take aspirin or other anti-inflammatory drugs no matter how much it hurts, because they can trigger bleeding.

After they examined me, I spent the rest of the time talking to the cops. I told them about my lawsuit against the Assembly and the attacker’s parting words. The officer in charge took down all the information and said that he’d try to run down customers of the coffee house that night, but I could tell that the authorities wouldn’t do much. How can they? I wasn’t killed or maimed, and the most information I can provide is that the attackers really knew what they were doing. The police certainly won’t learn anything from talking to Christopher McCarthy and his underlings.

Now, I watch the emergency patients trickle in. Health facts are supposed to be confidential, but all you have to do is listen. A morbidly obese middle-aged man was awoken by chest pains. An elderly woman fell while getting up to go to the bathroom; now she’s arguing with her daughter, who chides her for continuing to live alone. An infant has a temperature of 104.6; the father spends more time comforting his distraught wife than he does attending to the baby. Secrets revealed under harsh fluorescent lights.

At about three thirty, Lovely walks into the emergency waiting room. I try to stand using the chair arms for leverage, but sit back down from the pain in my ribs.

She reaches out her hands. “Hold onto me.”

“I can handle it.”

“I’m sure you can.” She takes my hands and helps me to my feet. She has a strong grip. When I’m upright, she latches onto my arm and pulls me close. “Lean on me.”

I feel a flood of embarrassment and try to pull away. “I stink like a garbage heap. Worse.”

She pulls me close again. “Don’t be a jackass. Let’s get you home. Tell me where you live.” I’m too tired to argue, too tired to talk.

When we reach my building, I ask her to drop me off in the passenger-loading zone near the entrance to the complex.

“I’m coming in,” she says.

“Pull into the next driveway. It leads to the garage. You can park in my space.”

As soon as she parks the car, I open the door and pull myself out, unable to stifle a groan. We walk—actually, I shuffle—to the elevator and down the corridor to my condo.

“Thanks,” I say. “You’ve been great.”

“I’m not leaving you alone.”

“You don’t have to—”

“I’m staying.”

I unlock the door and we go inside. I tell her that the sofa has a foldout bed and that I’ll help her with the linen after I clean up. I shower, doing my best to ignore the pain that comes with each move I make. When I return to the living room, she isn’t there. I assume that she changed her mind about staying. I limp to the bedroom and find her lying in my bed.

“I hate sleeping on fake beds,” she says. She lifts the blanket and top sheet. She’s fully clothed in her sweats. “Get in.”

I maneuver myself next to her. She slides close and gingerly presses her body against mine. It’s as though every inch of her is caressing me. With all that’s happened to me in the last five hours, I couldn’t have sex if I tried. But this isn’t about that. It’s about something else entirely.

I would’ve bet the deed to my condo plus ten years of SAG residuals that I wouldn’t get a minute of sleep. I drift off right away and sleep until one in the afternoon. When I awake, she’s gone.

During the past week, Lovely has visited my apartment often, checking in on me and bringing me food. She says she has a bright future as a Jewish mother. She hasn’t slept in my bed again.

The pain from the beating persists, and not only in body. My attackers might lurk around every street corner. I continually glance over my shoulder when I’m in my building’s underground parking lot. Once out in public, I gravitate toward crowds. I leave The Barrista and the law school well before dark. I double- and triple-check the door latches before I go to bed. Most nights, I get no more than three hours of sleep. When I do sleep, I have nightmares, the narration of which features the terrifying, eerily familiar voice of my assailant. The police have made no progress. My attackers were too adept, and the cops are too uninterested in what they consider an act of random street violence that resulted only in minor injury.

I go to the kitchen, rummage through a cabinet below the sink, and find an old thermos that I haven’t used in years. I rinse out the dust and gunk and fill it with black coffee from a pot that I brewed earlier. I didn’t sleep last night, and I have a long drive ahead of me. I’m counting on the coffee and the pain to keep me alert.

I get on the 405 freeway south and weave in and out of the congested lanes, hoping that the highway patrol isn’t lurking. Driving in the middle lane, I pass LAX, and at the last possible moment veer to the right and into the lane that feeds into the 105 freeway. I take the Inglewood exit, drive the side streets to Century, and get back on the 405, going north this time. I’m no expert at these things, but I must have lost anyone who might’ve been following me.

For the next ninety minutes, I fight the traffic snarls on Highway 101 west all the way to Oxnard, continually checking my rearview mirror. The traffic clears just past Ventura. The highway curves to the north along the coast, and I can see the ocean from my window for the next forty miles.

It takes me another half hour to reach Santa Barbara. I exit the freeway and turn onto the San Marcos Highway, drive through the city, and head up into Los Padres National Forest. The hillsides are blanketed with chaparral and oak woodlands interrupted by barren swaths of charred hillside, remnants of the deadly Gap Fire that raged through here a few years ago. I exit on Stagecoach Road and follow a narrow two-lane strip that about two miles up changes from bitumen to gravel. The three-mile drive up a steep grade taxes my car’s transmission. I compulsively check my rearview mirror. There’s no one behind me. The road levels off at the top, revealing an isolated ranch-style home that overlooks the vineyards and pastures of the Santa Ynez Valley. A ten-year-old maroon Ford Expedition is parked out front, two of its fenders dented. There’s a grassy area in the front yard with a termite-ridden picnic table that looks like it hasn’t been used in years.

I park my car on a patch of gravel and climb out gingerly. The long ride has made my body stiffen up. Walking on the uneven surface doesn’t help. I hobble to the front door and ring the doorbell three times, but no one answers. I walk around to the back toward what looks like a small guest cottage. Through the mesh door I see a potter’s wheel and floor-to-ceiling shelving filled with ceramics at various stages of completion. A woman sits hunched over a table near the back of the room. Wearing plastic goggles, she uses a Dremel tool to sand the glaze on a ceramic pot. I knock hard on the screen, making it rattle. I worry that I’ve startled her, but without looking up she says, “Hello, dear. Come inside and sit down,” and it’s my heart that pirouettes.

As soon as I step inside, the acrid odor of burning clay dust fills my nostrils. Avoiding stacks of tiles scattered on the floor, I cross the room, pull up a stool, and sit down at the table next to her. “How are you, Erica?”

She doesn’t answer right away, just continues to work on her project as if I’m not there. After a long time, she shuts off the power tool and removes her goggles. “My name’s Bette now.”

“Of course. I know that.”

“It’s my real name. I hated it back then.”

“I remember.”

“I don’t hate it anymore.”

“I’m glad.”

Erica Hatfield and I appeared in five movies together, the first when I was eight years old. Each time I was the star and she was a supporting player. The roles were beneath her. She should have resented me—so many of the adults resented me—but instead she looked after me better than my own mother did. She made sure that I didn’t work more than the state-mandated maximum and that I saw my tutor and did my homework. She shielded me from Harriet’s wild behavior. When our world exploded, we both became other people.

She turned fifty-five last January. I scrutinize her face for recognizable features. Her straight hair, once whatever color the script or the director or her whim dictated, is now a natural silver. She wears it short and pulled back behind her ears, unisexual—no, mannish. Her red potter’s apron covers a blue long-sleeved man’s shirt and jeans. Her face, without makeup, is scored with sharp wrinkles and stained with brown freckles. Her high cheekbones and pouty lower lip are the only remnants of her past beauty. She’s no longer the woman I described when my students asked me about
Doheny Beach Holiday.

“I’m sorry to trouble you,” I say. “I won’t stay long. I don’t think I was followed, but—”

“They shouldn’t see us together.” She really looks at me for the first time. “You’re hurt.”

“How did you know? They didn’t touch my face.”

She reaches out and caresses my cheek, a palpable reminder of the boy I was, the boy I abandoned. Her skin is coarse from working with her hands for so many years. I’d have expected to flinch at the suddenness of the gesture, at the roughness of her fingers, but nothing could feel more natural. I reach up and press her hand to my cheek for a moment.

I survey the room. “Your work is wonderful. They say you’re this generation’s Beatrice Wood.”

“Nonsense. This is just a way to keep busy. If people want to take the trouble and visit my studio, fine by me, but . . .”

“Anyway, they’re beautiful.” I place my hands on my knees to steady myself. “You know I’m a lawyer?”

“Of course. I’ve kept track of you.” She stands up and uses her hands to smooth out the wrinkles in her apron. She’s much smaller than I remember. Over the years, she’s become hard and angular. She walks over to a shelf and straightens some unglazed plates that don’t need straightening. She comes back and sits across from me. “I know why you’re here. It’s OK. You have to protect yourself.”

I don’t doubt her clairvoyant ability to divine why I’m here, but I have to say the words anyway. “I’m going to fight them. With the truth, if I have to. Unless you tell me not to. Because if the story comes out, you could . . . The statute of limitations hasn’t run. It never will.”

“You do whatever you have to do.” She takes my hand, an intense look of concern in her eyes. “Listen to me, though. It’s important. Make sure that the Assembly’s really doing what you think they are. Not just for my sake, but for yours. You were always so impulsive, Parky.”

“I was a kid. I’m a man now.”

She studies me for a long time. “No. You haven’t changed.”

“I’ll give that due consideration.”

“Now I really know that you’re a lawyer with that answer.” She smiles, and for a moment, she’s Erica again. I didn’t think such a light moment possible.

“How has your life been, Bette? Because mine’s been—”

Her smile fades. “You should go, Parker.”

“But I came all this way, and I just got here.” I sound like that kid, whiny and self-centered.

“We’ve survived all these years by staying apart.”

“I only wanted . . .” I exhale. “You’re right, of course.”

“Do take care. And remember. Be sure you know the truth.”