Hope and Other Luxuries (69 page)

Where is she?
I wondered.

My imagination brought me images of a dim parking lot at night: lumpy, crumbly, poorly laid asphalt. I saw black potholes cratering down to the dirt. Light glittered off broken glass.

Where am I?
I wondered.

Outside a windowless honky-tonk bar.

That honky-tonk—what is it like?

Like a view through binoculars that comes into focus, the scene before me began to clear. I saw a squat, square, one-story cinderblock building, with a string or two of those old big-bulb Christmas lights tacked up along the frame of the scuffed-up door. There was a sign beside the building up on a thick iron pole, the kind of sign with those black plastic moveable letters:

FRI 1 7TH, RAPSCALLIONS
$1 DRAFT BEER

And there was the young woman who was singing to me. She didn't care who saw her. She was striding toward that shiny custom-painted crew-cab pickup in her favorite pair of tight jeans, a leather jacket, and Lucchese cowboy boots. She had a baseball bat in one hand and a pigsticker knife in the other.

Then she took a wide swing at the left headlight: a loud, musical shower of glass.

Yes!
I cheered.
Let the consequences fall where they may!

And then the woman—let's call her Amanda—she sees her ex come charging out of the bar. And her ex—let's call him Brad . . .

Another song came on over the loudspeakers. Another person wanted to tell me a story. But I closed my laptop, threw away my latte, and walked out.

Exquisite prose in a coffee shop? Who were they
kidding
?

I drove home through the hazy late-summer heat and turned the last corner. Such a litter of small, smudged Hyundais clustered these days outside the tired ranch house! Four Hyundais in four different colors.
Each, more or less, with its own designated parking place. One Hyundai was missing: the silver one. Joe, of course, was at work.

And one Hyundai—the tan one—was pulled into a clumsy tangent with the curb. It was facing the wrong way—again!

That was Elena's car. Late at night, she had roused herself from her stupor and gone out with friends. Now, worries fluttered up and clutched at me. Had Elena been drinking, even with all her meds? Was she drunk when she drove home last night?

And why was the tan Hyundai even here? Elena was supposed to be at her therapist's appointment!

Valerie was kneeling on the living room floor next to Gemma's exercise bouncer. She glanced up and saw the look in my eyes.

“I tried,” she told me. “She wouldn't budge.”

I marched past her and pushed open Elena's bedroom door.

For a few seconds, the darkness disoriented me, and I couldn't immediately register whether anyone was there. Shutters and shades kept Elena's room in a state of perpetual twilight.

“Elena!” I barked, snapping on the light.

“Ugggghhh . . . ,” groaned the bed by way of answer.

I stepped gingerly across sliding mounds of brightly colored laundry. Elena's closet appeared to have burped its contents out into the room. The closet itself was open and empty of everything but some boxes, a few pink plastic hangers, and a red satin prom dress held up by one white loop.

“Elena!” I said again, prodding the one living mound in the room. It was sharing the bed with half a suitcase's worth of underwear and pajama sets, two blankets, three pillows, Genny, and Tor. The old terrier rolled a cautious eye up at me, decided she didn't need the drama, jumped down, and walked stiffly from the room. The old cat gave a stretch, flipped onto his back, and closed his eyes again. He was going to ride it out.

Various groans and snarls had been rising steadily from the mound of purple blanket. Now it gave a sudden lurch, and Elena's face appeared, creased from the wrinkles on her pillow.

“What?!”
she demanded, rubbing her eyes. “Leave me alone! I just got to sleep!”

“It's noon,” I said. “You've
been
asleep. You slept through your therapy appointment!”

“Oh.” Elena blinked for a few seconds. “Why didn't you wake me up?” she asked.

I felt my frustration rising in a suffocating wave. And here I was, shouting already: “Why is it
our
job to wake you up?”

“Fine, forget I asked then,” Elena grumbled. “I can't stand that lady anyway.”

“
You
picked her! So find another therapist you like!”

“I will. When I wake up.” And Elena rolled over. She muttered, “Why do you always have to yell at me first thing every morning?”

Why?
Why did
my
life have to be like this? Why did it have to run like this, day after day after
day
?

“It is
not
the first thing in the morning!” I said. “Your sister and father and I have been up for hours! You missed another appointment with Bea, and that means we have to pay another seventy-five dollars for
nothing
. You know the insurance company doesn't pay their share when you miss an appointment!”

Elena grumbled into her pillow at this. It might have been an apology or an admission of guilt.

Then again, it might not.

“And another thing. You parked facing traffic again. They've already left us a warning. Next time, it'll be a ticket!
Why
is it so hard for you to turn your car around? Were you drinking last night? Were you drunk?”

“
No
, I wasn't drinking!” Elena cried, and when she did it, I realized that her loud, angry voice was only matching my own. “I was spending a little quiet time with Meghan. We were eating
Mexican food
, if you have to know!”

She spit out the words
Mexican food
with pained and vicious hatred, in the tone of voice I might use for maggots in the trash can. Implied but still included in her virulent hostility were the tacos last night, all meals on all nights, and me, for being the person who made her eat.

It seemed, during the course of these last few weeks, that all food had become my fault again, even if I wasn't there to serve it to her. I fell silent in the face of such resentment. How did her therapists stand it?

In the silence, Elena rolled over and hitched the blanket up to her chin. “Turn out the light,” she muttered.

“But—no! Elena, you have to get up. You need to”—I hesitated, then decided to brave it out—“You need to eat some breakfast! You need to take your morning pills, or you'll get withdrawal symptoms again—God only knows what they're doing to your brain! You need to park that car
correctly
, and you need to call up Bea and reschedule.”

And before she could sit up and rip into me again, I picked my way back across the loose laundry and out the door.

“Come on, Genny, you need to go outside,” I said to the little terrier as I came back into the living room. I went outside with her and sat on the patio and thought gloomy thoughts while she trotted and nosed her way around the yard.

The back door opened. I looked up, hoping for an olive branch, but it wasn't Elena, it was Valerie. She had a pack of cigarettes in one hand and a Shirley Jackson novel in the other.

“I don't suppose she's eating,” I said as Valerie fished for her lighter. She shook her head and concentrated on that first long, luxurious drag.

“Nope,” she said, and then exhaled in a steady gray stream. “She's back in her room again.”

I sat there for another minute, building courage for the next salvo, until my desire to say the angry things I probably shouldn't say exceeded my desire to avoid a fight. Then, once again, I marched inside, pushed open the bedroom door, and flicked on the light.

“Mom! Turn it out!”

“You need to get up.”

“I did everything! I parked the car. I called Bea. Tomorrow at eleven thirty.”

“Did you take your medicine?”

“
Yes
, I took my medicine!”

“Did you eat your breakfast?”

Silence.

“You need to get up, Elena. You need to eat. You need to do
something
”—I kicked at the laundry—“with this messy room.”

Elena pulled the blanket over her face.

“I'll do it later, I promise,” she said. “Meghan and I ate a huge meal at four o'clock in the morning. That makes it breakfast.”

She subsided into a mound again. I stood in the doorway, struck with pain. Now that she wasn't yelling and I was no longer angry, the Elena in this room and the Elena in my laptop suddenly felt frighteningly close.

“Please get up,” I tried in a softer tone. “We miss you! We haven't seen much of you lately. Come out to the couch and spend some time with us. You can tell me how Meghan's been. I haven't seen her in ages.”

The mound on the bed quivered slightly.

“Meghan's okay,” it finally said.

Could this inert lump really be my quick, bright daughter Elena, the girl who could turn a five-minute trip to the drugstore into three different thrilling, gossipy stories lasting ten minutes apiece? “Mom! Guess
what
!” She would be so excited she would almost be jumping out of her skin with the need to tell.

And I could never guess.

“I've been trying to work on the memoir,” I said. “There's something I need help with.”

The blanket quivered again. But that was all.

This had worked longer than any other appeal. It had worked even better than time with Gemma. Elena wanted her memoir to happen as much as she wanted anything in the world. But for the last couple of weeks, even this appeal hadn't worked.

“I'll help later,” her muffled voice said at last. “I'll get up and help you with it. Promise I will. Just let me sleep for an hour.”

I left the room. And I didn't see her for the rest of the day.

Late that night, after Joe had already gone to bed, I was walking through the house, collecting dishes for the dishwasher. I paused in the hallway. From behind Elena's closed door came laughter. There was a certain sound, playful and confiding, in the tone of her voice. Elena was flirting with someone on the phone.

At least she's awake
, I thought, walking away.

A few minutes later, her bedroom door opened, the bathroom door shut, and the shower came on. Elena was up at last.

Maybe she would finally help me with the memoir. That was good. Since leaving the coffee shop, I hadn't done a thing. So I started the dishwasher, picked up my laptop, and settled down in the living room to wait.

Genny came galloping in from the backyard and jumped up into my lap. Valerie walked in behind her, yawning.

“This woman is a genius,” she said firmly, holding up the Shirley Jackson book. “I'm reading this for the fourth time. Every sentence is amazing.”

“Too right you are,” I agreed. “I'd die happy if I could have written her last novel.”

Valerie put the book down on the coffee table. “So. I'm off to bed. And why are you still awake, woman? Didn't Dad go to bed, like, an hour ago?”

I stretched and sighed. “Your sister's up. Maybe we can finally get some work done.”

Valerie pulled out her phone and looked at it. “At eleven o'clock? Screw that! Make her get her work done tomorrow morning.”

She disappeared down the hall, and I heard the door to her bedroom slide shut across the carpet and click into place. Of all of us, Valerie was the quietest at shutting a door. She was the one who had to live with the consequences if she wasn't.

Genny put her fuzzy head down on my knee, and huffed, and I scratched her wiry coat. Maybe it would be a good thing that Elena and I would have this time together after everybody else was in bed. In spite of the nagging and yelling I did, she was still wonderfully candid about the details of her illness when we worked together on her story. That honesty impressed me as much as it saddened me.

But when Elena came into the living room, it was clear that she wasn't ready to work. She was wearing a minidress so tiny that I could only stare.

Where had
that
thing come from?

“Oh, hey,” she said, surprised but not pleased to see me, and she went over to her purse and hunted for her keys.

I pondered various comments and rejected several.

“So, you said you'd help me with the memoir,” I started off in as neutral a tone as possible.

“Oh, yeah. Can we do that tomorrow? I'm headed over to Lisa's. She's having a bad time.”

“Lisa's,” I echoed, trying to catch her gaze with mine, but her eyes kept sliding past my face. “Look, I don't want you to go, Elena. Not this late. And certainly not looking like
that
.”

Elena tottered by me on high heels into the kitchen and came back with a bottle of water. Her legs were like matchsticks. The dress was made to hug a rear end, but there was no rear end there to hug.

“It's just Lisa,” she muttered. “It's the only thing I have that's clean.”

Maybe
, I thought.

“You haven't eaten all day!” I pointed out.

“That's the other reason I'm going. I told her I'd stop by McDonald's and pick something up.” She paused in the doorway, and her voice softened. “Really, Mom, it's just Lisa. Just for an hour. We'll eat and everything, don't worry. And I'll help you with the book tomorrow. I promise.”

I spread my hands. “Elena, I can't believe you. I'm not this stupid, really. You weren't talking to Lisa, and you're not going to see Lisa—not dressed like
that
, anyway.”

Elena drew herself up and folded her arms. They were like matchsticks, too.

“Just because I tell you things,” she said, “now you think you know everything about me. You know I used to make a habit of telling lies, so now you disbelieve everything I say! I wouldn't have started this book with you if I knew you'd end up calling me a liar all the time.”