Debbie Doesn't Do It Anymore (9780385538398) (28 page)

“Do you know my name?” I asked, feeling numb and reckless.

“They call you Debbie Dare in the cast list, but your real name is Sandra Peel. I always loved Theon but you were better for him than I could have ever been.”

Her eyes were on mine like some kind of emotional predator tracking down a simple nod.

“Hey, Deb,” Myron Palmer said after Moana wandered off. Standing next to him was a mousy woman wearing a loose, dark green shift. Her face was once pretty and her gestures recalled that younger beauty.

“I wanted to thank you for letting me be a pallbearer,” Myron said. “You know, I really liked Theon and, and, and I styled myself after him as much as I could.”

“Thank you, Myron.”

I shook his hand, which was both soft and strong, and then offered the same gesture to the woman he was with.
She took the proffered hand and said, “You have my condolences, Mrs. Pinkney.”

“Have we met?”

“No. I'm Myron's friend Nora.”

“Brathwait?”

“He told you about me?”

“You were the love of his life. I don't think he's had a single day where he hasn't thought of you.”

“Your speech was beautiful,” she said. “Myron and I have just reconnected over Facebook recently. I'm trying to get him to leave this profession and do something else—maybe still in film.”

Our middle-aged Russian housekeeper, Julia Slatkin, came up after half an hour.

“I am so sorry for you, my child,” she said.

“You didn't have to come to this zoo, Julia.”

“I love you and your people,” she said. “Theon was a good man. He was a man and so he was always a little lost. Men are like boys and sometimes the only thing we can do is put them to bed.”

I hadn't even been worried about crying until she spoke those words.

“He did awful things,” I said.

“And he has paid for them,” she replied with Jude-like certainty. “There's only so much revenge that God can ask on any man's soul.”

“Those were really nice words you spoke up there,” hunched-over Kip Rhinehart said after what seemed like hours of pity and commiserations.

I was thinking of how lovely it would be to sit down in the polar bear room, bring my father's pistol (the pistol that failed to save his life) to my temple, and pull the trigger.…

“I heard,” Kip, the canyon cowboy, went on, “that you're havin' money troubles and might not be able to make that mortgage. If that's so you're welcome to come up and live in one'a my rooms. It gets a little lonely up there and … and I wouldn't bother you or anything. I'm kinda old for that nonsense.”

I was imagining the red spray across the white fabric that I chose to accent my ebony skin.

“You think about what I said,” Kip muttered after I thanked him.

Linda Love came up with a small band of directors. They said the right words but didn't really mean them. A has-been actor was just that in their business. Neelo Brown shook my hand and kissed my cheek. He'd been an awkward adolescent—a virgin at eighteen. It was decided among his aunties that I would be the one to initiate him into the sexual life. I took him down to Ensenada for his birthday and came into his room after a night of dinner and trying to teach him how to dance. I did it to build his confidence but after that he was always a little in love with me.

Anna Karin, Newly, Perry Mendelson, Chas and Darla the accountants, and my son's guardian, Delilah, came up
singularly and in pairs. All the while I was thinking about Suicide—that handsome man who joined me every once in a while, all silence and smiles.

Toward the end of the procession two men wearing identical suits and faces approached me. They were pale and thin, of equal and normal height, but still they seemed small. Their eyes were barely gray and their lips … nonexistent. The one on the left walked up to me and took my hand. “John,” he said, and then moved my hand to his brother, who said, “Ronald.”

“Threadley,” they both said together. It was like a routine from an old-time vaudeville act.

“We rarely involve ourselves with the day-to-day,” Ronald said.

“But we felt driven to come here and say our good-byes to your husband,” John added.

“It's not the business he brought us,” Ronald said.

“…  but his belief in our ability to provide the requisite care,” the brother added.

I wondered which one was born first and if they'd die on the same day.

I thanked them and smiled for them. I almost told them that we'd be seeing each other soon.

Before the coffin was sealed I tucked Myrtle May's unopened diary next to Theon's heart. The night-blue-and-chrome hearse was parked outside. People had been drifting away toward the burial site. It was up on a hill, I
was told, a place where anyone visiting could look out on the faraway mountains or down on the valley where Theon grunted and strained and came on command.

Almost everyone had gone. I was standing in front of the chapel waiting for Lewis to come with a car for me. The Threadley brothers were there, and Lana too.

I felt the weight of the past week or so lift from me. The day was sunny and gorgeous. I said good-bye to the world then and there. It would be my last day and that was a deep relief.

I could finally let go.

“Bitch!” a woman yelled.

I turned to my right. A light-skinned black woman wearing jeans and a pink blouse was rushing at me. There was something in her hand. I knew immediately what was happening. The woman was certainly Annabella Atoll, Rash's girlfriend. She had, I imagined, come from a background like mine and saw Rash as a good partner to move away from what she was. He saw in her a life that he had missed, but when she sloughed off the old skin he lost interest and then met me.

The knife arced down across the left side of my face, slicing through skin and eye with razor-sharp accuracy. Then almost immediately came the upthrust under my right breast. There was pain but not that much.

The twins were amazing. One of them tackled Annabella. Her strength was fueled by hate-driven adrenaline, though, and she almost threw him off. But Lana grabbed something and hit my would-be killer in the head—twice.
While my friend and one twin subdued Annabella, the other twin lowered me to the ground and applied pressure to the wounds.

I could hear my rasping breath and see Suicide just behind John—or maybe it was Ronald. There was screaming and hollering and I was back in the living room where my father stumbled in and died. My good eye was open wide; I knew this but saw nothing. The world around me was moving but I was absolutely still. This contradiction seemed like a great revelation to me.

Waking up in Neelo's clinic was not a big surprise, not really. There were oxygen tubes in my nostrils and other plastic hoses down my throat. My left eye was bandaged and a searing pain ran down that side of my face.

“Sandy?” Lana Leer said. She was looking down at me with fear in her eyes.

I tried to smile but I don't think she could tell.

“You're gonna be okay,” she said in a voice that was anything but certain. “They arrested that crazy bitch and put her in jail. Neelo says that your eye and lung got cut up pretty bad but—”

“That's enough for right now,” Jude Lyon said, interrupting my chatterbox friend.

I turned to see his concerned countenance. The person of interest smiled at me. There was no promise in that smile but I felt his caring. I could see the coldness in his eyes beyond the everyday human attention. There was also
an inkling I had that something had changed in the person he was seeing.

“Your friend the doctor is doing all that he can,” Jude said. “That woman cut you up pretty bad but you're in good hands.”

After that I passed into unconsciousness. For all intents and purposes I was dead.

When I awoke again the tubes were gone but my eye was still bandaged. Neelo came to see me soon after I'd regained consciousness.

“You're gonna be all right, Aunt Deb,” he said, showing more relief than I felt. “It was tough going there for a while. We had to drain your lungs every day for three weeks and you were on life support for half that time. I'm actually surprised that you survived.

“I brought in seven specialists to operate on that eye. We still don't know how your vision will be affected. But you're gonna live, Aunt Deb. You know I love you. It would have killed me if you died.”

After that day the visitors started coming. It was like Theon's death procession but over a greater length of time. Neelo's words stuck with me.

Rash didn't come but sent a note with Lana.

A few days later a woman lawyer named Katya Corvine came to get me to put on record that I was having an affair with Rash. I agreed and also documented that I bore no ill will toward my attacker.

There was a noticeable scar down the left side of my face, and when the eye patch was removed I saw an odd double image out of that eye. My face in the mirror looked a little off because of my impaired vision and disfigurement. But to me it was all good. The wounds inflicted were like a surgeon's incisions, cutting out a deep, ancient infection.

I no longer wanted to die.

When Delilah and Edison were allowed in to see me I told my son that we would live together on a mountain overlooking the ocean.

“What about Mama Delilah?” my caring boy asked.

Kip Rhinehart had already agreed to all three of us living in his abandoned school.

“She can live with us as long as she wants.”

Edison cheered. Delilah had already agreed.

Delilah and Edison drove me from the canyon and as soon as I was better I got a job as a waitress at a seafood house on the Pacific Coast Highway.

One day, a little more than a year after Theon's funeral, Edison was sitting on my lap as we watched the sun settle into the Pacific. He ran a finger down the trail of the scar on my face.

“Does it hurt you, Mama?” he asked.

“No, baby,” I said. “It reminds me.”

“Of what?”

“When I feel it going down my face I think that it's a road my life took to this place.”

“A scary road with ghosts?”

“No. It's just the way I had to go to get here with you.”

“And Mama Delilah an' Uncle Kip,” he added.

“Yes.”

There was a seriousness beyond Eddie's tender years in his face. And farther than that, beyond this childhood wisdom, there was a lovely California sunset and I felt that I had arrived at a place where no one could bring me down on my knees.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

WALTER MOSLEY is the author of more than forty-one books, most notably twelve Easy Rawlins mysteries, the first of which,
Devil in a Blue Dress
, was made into an acclaimed film starring Denzel Washington.
Always Outnumbered
was an HBO film starring Laurence Fishburne, adapted from his first Socrates Fortlow novel. A native of Los Angeles and a graduate of Johnson State College, he lives in Brooklyn, New York. He is the winner of numerous awards, including an O. Henry Award, a Grammy Award, and PEN America's Lifetime Achievement Award.