Elsinore Canyon (12 page)

“Oh my God?”

“I’m so glad to see you.”

“Same here.” My hands held hers. We laughed.

“Come see what I’m doing.” She led me back to the terminal and tilted it down for me.

Daddy Dearest, I’m in L.A. getting my phone and laptop replaced and synched. It’s going to take all day, so I’m also going to shop. In an unrelated development, please keep tomorrow open for Hollywood Nite in the media room!

It was addressed to Mr. Hamlet. She looked at it apprehensively. “Well, I really am getting some new hardware, but that’s not why I’m ditching everyone. Lie number five hundred and forty-three.” She clicked Send, and turned to me. “Don’t worry. It’ll be my lie, not yours.”

“I’m just worried that you need to tell it.”

“Horst, can you hang with me today?”

Yes I’d hang, until eternity. We left the store with an appointment for later to pick up her devices, and wandered out in the sunshine of a perfect L.A. day. We laughed and grabbed each other’s heads and twisted our fingers together for five full minutes before getting into my car. We had come together to untie some devilish knot, to fight fearlessly. I drove us west along Santa Monica Boulevard, king of the world, servant to none but the matchless Dana.

“What about lies number one through five hundred and forty-two?” I said. Dana was texting from my phone as she sat beside me. “Or whatever they are.”

“Are you counting?” she said as she set my phone down.

“No, you are. I’m just a good listener.”

“Yes, you are,” she smiled. “Well, believe it or not, Rosie Schrey said it best. I’m running for Stepdaughter of the Year.”

“Ah. Is it working?”

“It’s just that I’m not going to be the perfect little daughter for Aunt Claudia and Uncle Dad that I never was for my mother.”

Flashbacks to my injury summer. “You want me to help you be bad?”

“No, dear, I want you to stay just the way you are. You have a way of seeing things differently. It makes your world different.”

“I didn’t know that.”

“I need your world. I’m sure you’ve never had thoughts like the ones that are going through my head.”

“I want to hear. I’ve been wanting to hear.”

“I think my mom had some pretty wicked thoughts, too. I know she hated the happy pills.”

“We are talking about metaphorical pills?”

“Yes, of course.”

“Then I’m sure she’d love what you’ve been doing for the past month.”

“Where do you think I get my ideas?”

“Do you mean your mom alive, or the…?”

“Alive. Nothing’s happened since—Horst, about that night in the adobe. Do we still agree?”

“As far as I know, we do.”

“About what?”

“About everything we said. And saw, and swore to.”

“You haven’t backtracked in your mind?”

“No.”

“You don’t think we were drugged, or under mass hypnosis or anything?”

“No.”

“Then what…?”

“It was what it was.”

“Have you talked to Marcellus?”

“Not a word.”

“Horst,” she went on nervously, “I didn’t mean to drag you out with me today on false pretenses. Don’t get mad at me. I want to find out whether that ghost was a lying demon or whether my Aunt Claudia killed my mother.”

That knocked the wind out of me.

“Don’t,” she cut me off. “You’re the one who made me go down there. You saw what you saw. You said so. If all that’s possible, then why not what I’m telling you now?”

“Is that what happened on the roof?”

“A couple of things happened on the roof. Every time I look at Aunt Claudia now, I try to imagine how a person would do that. Doctor someone to death. How could you make a plan like that and keep going, how could you not stop yourself? How could you go through with it and live with yourself afterwards? But she never breaks when I’m around, she never lets go of a thing. I need to catch her out. Horst, pull over, will you? I want to sit on some grass.”

Her eternal aversion to seats and chairs. Anything for Dana. I parked at Beverly Hills High and we went up a soft slope where we could talk quietly. I climbed out of my chair and propped myself against a low wall. Dana snuggled next to me. “That’s better,” she said in a melancholy voice.

“What’s on your mind?”

She lifted her hands to her face and shuddered into tears. “I was so wrong!”

“Hey.”

“Listen! Towards my mom, when she was alive. From the moment I learned to question—the moment I learned to wound—I was the cruelest, most savage bitch in the world to her. Not a kind word, not a break, not a moment. Every little time she was vulnerable, I’d sink my fangs in.”

“Dana!”

“I never saw it until that night on the roof, and then it came flooding over me. All the things I cheated her of, and then the things death cheated her of. She didn’t get to see me graduate. She never got the chance for her and me to be friends.”

“But Dana, you’re not cruel—”

“Horst, you’ve got to believe me.” She squirmed away to face me. “You can’t tell me I’m full of shit now. I’m trying to con
fess
something.”

“All right, but just to say: you might be exaggerating. Everyone disses their parents.”

“You didn’t diss yours.”

Oho, that, that was something she would never know about. The horrible, pathetic fits I threw over my dependency. So bad I could barely stand to look at the concessions they got me. My car, my chair—things I hadn’t earned through work, but wrung from unwilling givers through fits—
fits
—of screaming and crying. It would be different in a few years, when I would have freedom and my own money. Meanwhile, Christ. Two years before, I had sawed the push handles off the back of my old chair when some Real Housewife in the Nordstrom on Third Street grabbed them and moved me out of her way like an abandoned shopping cart. Without asking me, without a word, shoved me three inches, after I had gotten myself washed and dressed and fed and out the door and down to that mall and parked on an upper level and wound my way through a multi-floor department store, all by myself do I need to say again, and then she pushed me three fucking inches as if I couldn’t travel that monumental distance on my own. As if I was so inert and sub-human that I couldn’t respond to a simple “Excuse me.” Clearing a path to the shoe department for herself and her fugly daughter, getting rid of this obstacle, this discarded, useless—Well, I made a scene for the ages when that happened, right on the spot—and that was nothing compared to the ear-splitting, cat-scaring, sweating, cussing, balled up rage that I unleashed on my grandparents for the next two weeks. They always insisted on whatever way was easier and thriftier for everyone, although they lived in relative leisure and wealth and had nothing else to spend their money on. But dig it—I got my expensive, ultralight chair, with no arm rests and no push handles. The low back stressed my core—fine, I had reason to keep it tight. “Yes, I did,” I said to Dana. “You don’t know what went on inside my house.”

“There was no ‘inside my house.’ I let loose wherever I felt like it. I made sure the entire world knew what a witty sadist I was.”

“I never saw it.”

“Just let me confess, will you?”

“All right, but one last thing—”

She glared.

“Just one. It was different with me. They’re my grandparents, and they took me in—”

“And my mom gave
birth
to me,” she exclaimed impatiently. “You know, I was born six months after my parents got married. Did you know that? And I wasn’t three months premature, Horst. As soon as I figured out what that meant, I jumped on my mom. I
jumped
on her, I gave her a hard time! I threw it in her face as if she’d committed some crime, having me six months after her wedding instead of having an abortion. Never asked how she felt, never asked if she was scared, if they tried to shame her, if her bastard father got on his high horse and belittled her over it. And I know he did.”

I had never met Dana’s grandfather, but I had attended his funeral. Come to think of it, Mrs. Hamlet had been upset about his death, but in a complicated way. “She understood you, Dana. She was a mom.”

That brought a fresh shower of tears. I put my arm around her, those smooth shoulders of hers and her parted hair—I seldom got to see the top of a girl’s head. I almost kissed it.

“She’s suffering, she’s alone,” she wept. “You saw her—you saw how sad that spirit was. I can’t unscatter her ashes, I’ve got nothing to show anyone who can do anything about it. They all think I’m just a mixed-up kid. The more time I spend trying to figure it out the less I do, and the less I do the guiltier I feel, and the guiltier I feel the more I hide from it all. Am I making sense?”

“Yeah. So does this mean you’re planning to do something now?”

“Something, yes. I don’t know how it’s going to end, but I have to get started.
They’re
not losing any time.”

“They’re not?”

“Horst, if you were to pick a few friends of mine to cheer me up and get me to talk about my problems and quit acting strange, who would it be?”

“Well, me obviously, and Heidi and Victor, and Cris, and Tim. Anyone else?”

“How about Rosie and Gale?”

I laughed hard. She gave me an evil, steady smile. “Oh no, you’re kidding.”

“They showed up yesterday acting all concerned—I know, can you imagine? Surprise, surprise, it turns out they’re spies—the worst ones in the universe. I asked them point-blank if Aunt Claudia and my dad sicced them on me and they copped to it.”

“Good lord.”

“Which also shows how clueless my aunt and dad are at recruiting spies. I mean, at least pick someone I’d talk to.”

I pushed a strand of that smooth, frothy hair behind her ear. “Why didn’t you call me sooner?”

Her eyes watered up.

“No, don’t.”

“I’m spooked. I’m sure there’s more than Rosie and Gale.”

“Drive to town and call me on a damn pay phone. I’ll jump in my car and be at your door in a heartbeat.”

She shook her head sadly as she grabbed my hand on her face. “I’ve been a terrible friend. Guilty, guilty, guilty.”

“Stop.”

“I’ve got so much to say to you, Horst—”

“You’ve said it. You’re saying it. You’re saying it with your eyes.”

“This is exactly what I did to my mother. You know, when I first started my period when I was thirteen, I went to some twitty friends and bought tampons myself and didn’t even tell her for months. Finally she discovered some bloody underpants of mine and I told her everything, and it had been hard, really hard hiding things and being confused and managing it all, and she looked kind of hurt and said, ‘What do you think mothers are for?’ There, I didn’t say that with my eyes, did I?”

“No.”

“That’s the sort of fluffy-wuffy you have to listen to if you want to be friends with a girl.”

“I know.” She had always been that way with me.

“Eeyah, forget about me—until I get this thing done for my mom.” She lowered her face into her hands. “Focus.”

“All right. On what?”

“A mind-fuck. We need to get to Century City.”

We picked up a big order from the place that had everyone’s favorite batter-fried orange chicken and laughed at our privilege—I hated handicapped parking, except on a sunny day on Beverly Drive. The glass towers we were headed for were close by. “So before we get there,” Dana said, “the thing that got me moving is something kind of intense I saw last night.”

“Something else?”

“No, not like that. It sounds stupid, Horst, but it was a DVD Rosie brought. There’s Dominic Cooper shedding genuine salt tears over Catherine Earnshaw’s ghost. The
ghost.
Of Catherine Earnshaw. Even if it wasn’t a ghost, it’s still a fictional character, and even if it wasn’t a fictional character it’d be dead for three hundred years. How many degrees of separation is that? If real-life Dominic Cooper had one-tenth the motive I have and someone pointed a camera at him, the audience would be running for the doors in terror. And here I am, my mom dead and my dad slutting around with the bitch who murdered her, and I’m just hating and waiting for answers to drop out of the sky. I wish someone would slap me.”

“Well, you’re not waiting for answers now, are you? You said—”

“That’s where we’re going. By the way, Horst, were you smart? Did you pack a bag? Because I wouldn’t exactly mind if you stayed in Elsinore Canyon for a day or two.”

“Am I smart, you ask?”

She smiled and punched my arm. I wasn’t smart, but I was one opportunistic prick.