Keeper of the Keys (25 page)

“Show her, Jack.”

“That’s strong stuff for a lady don’t like to drink much,” Jack said.

“Too true,” Eleanor said. “Maybe a beer’s about the right speed.”

“Who said I don’t like to drink?” Esmé said, rallying to the mood. “Now I’ve got a ride home. Okay, barkeep, I’ll have a stoplight tease. Please.”

Jack left them. They watched him flip bottles around sparkling glasses, dashing a little of this and that, pouring some of the other, but quickly turned to each other to catch up on gossip.

The moms complained about their kids’ crowded schedules, ex-husbands late with child support, nasty landlords. The unmarried discussed various dates, almost all bad but some humorous. Eleanor, the senior checker at Granada’s and the most-married so far, ruled the conversation, kidding around, taking the worst situations and wrestling some fun out of them.

One of the grizzled guys with hat hair on the other side of the bar came over and Eleanor drifted away with him. Esmé sat on her stool, smiling at the right times. Her mind wandered as she looked into the mirror behind the bar and watched the headlights of the cars on the boulevard, the red, white, green colors blurring like watercolors as the evening darkened. The noise level rose as more people came in, and she was vaguely aware of a sleeve brushing against her, someone leaning briefly into her back, bursts of laughter.

Esmé blew out a long breath. Where was her damn drink? Let it come. The bottles glittered. There she was in the mirror, dark-haired, neat, almost sixty years old. Not like thirty-six years before. She wondered what her friends would say if they knew this would be her first drink in all that time.

She sped up the road toward Avonbury Street, her foot pressed all the way down, singing as loud as she could, radio blasting, windows open. You couldn’t think back and remember an event like that, you recalled it in flashes, and that’s how she recalled it. A curb rising up to meet her, the sudden realization that she was on the wrong side of the road and that her tires were up on the curb of a central divider.

“Shit!”

She swung the wheel hard, slammed on her brakes, and backed up the empty road. Thank God, nobody there to witness this ridiculous thing. Back on the right side of the road again, she drove slowly, methodically, and when the car drifted across the center line she corrected carefully. She didn’t have far to go, only a couple of blocks to get home and make dinner. He’d be home in an hour.

How did she get so drunk? Oh, yeah. Mad at him. Stopped at the bar, saying to herself, to hell with being a responsible person! To hell with my screwed-up life!

In those days, she drank manhattans. To this day, she could not tell you what went into them. She had liked the name. Also, the drink had an attractive color, and came in a triangle-shaped glass she thought sophisticated.

Four. Five. She drank so much so fast she passed out for a second or two on the bar. When she awoke she ordered another one and was politely invited to leave. Someone wanted to call her a cab. She told him she would walk home, no problem.

She climbed into her car, the cheapest used automobile on the lot that day she and Henry went to buy one together.

They had fought, but Henry prevailed, as he always did. Logical, solid, respectable, smart, he could outtalk her, outsmart her, and leave her laughing while he did it. So things had been in the beginning. Later, they had skipped over the part where he made her laugh. He looked at her differently, and the way he looked at her made her dislike herself, and that made her act badly.

She hated this dinged-up car almost as much as she hated being married to a man named Henry, whom she called Hank because it sounded more manly. Everyone, right down to the flakiest housewife on the block, drove cars like this because of their fuel efficiency and budget pricing.

In those days, she didn’t care about money or budgets. She expected life to have some flair, drama. She never expected to get stuck in a mundane house in a suburb. What happened to that girl who planned to move to San Francisco as soon as she got out of school?

Giving in on a more glamorous car was giving up on her idea of herself. She smacked the wheel. But Henry, handsome Henry, talked her into everything, a fast wedding in Las Vegas when she had always pictured herself in a white satin gown, maybe getting married at a chic hotel overlooking the beach. Having a child. She had never thought of having a child, but along came Ray. And God, she loved little Ray.

Hurry home. She had taken longer at the bar than she’d expected. Now, weaving, she panicked a little. Where was their street? Squinting into the late afternoon sun, she tried to read the street signs, but she was seeing double.

A car honked behind her and she realized she was crawling along. At the next big intersection, eureka! She realized that she had gone too far by a few blocks. She pulled into the far left lane, careful to leave some space between herself and the divider, congratulating herself on finding her way back. Easy to miss the turn, an honest mistake anyone could make on a hot evening like this, when you’re upset, when the sun rakes through the windshield and directly into your eyes when you’re trying to drive straight, do an easy thing, get on home.

She waited for the green arrow. Arrows took so long. Turned up the radio again and sang a little, then sang a little louder. Why not have a good time? She was fine, fine, on her way home after a long day. Happy for her husband for once. He used to say he loved her smile. Even now, he didn’t want her to complain. He wanted happy. So, tonight she’d give him happy!

One hand on the radio tuner dial, one on the wheel, she pulled into the intersection. The U-turn cut too wide and again she found herself heading for a curb. She put her foot down.

On the accelerator.

The last thing Esmé remembered hearing was not the crash, not the windshield shattering: she heard a baby’s wail.

Jack placed three small shot glasses in front of her with three colored liquids, one green, one yellow, one red. “Here’s your tease. A stoplight.”

“Tell Esmé what’s in it,” Amy said. Esmé, caught up in the frenzy of noise around her, the high spirits, the cars outside, had already knocked back the first one, green, absolutely vile.

Jack explained. “Step one,” he said. “The green drink. You mix an ounce of melon liqueur or Apple Pucker schnapps and an ounce of vodka into a shaker. Heave it to and fro. Then you strain the mixture into a rocks glass.

“For the yellow shot, the halt, caution, do not enter the intersection stuff, you mix an ounce of vodka into a shaker, best available stuff that’s yellow-tinged, or add a little food coloring, shake well with a little ice, and strain that into a shot glass or rocks glass.

“Step three, you add an ounce of Hot Damn or Cherry Pucker to one of Bacardi 151 rum. Put those two ounces in a shaker, bounce ’em around, then strain them into a shot glass or rocks glass. That’s stop, baby,” Jack said, leaning close to Esmé, almost whispering. “For some reason, people who drink this stuff never do stop. Careful.”

By then she had thrown the murky bile to the back of her throat, swallowing a few times to get it all down.

“Hey, honey, sip that stuff,” Eleanor’s friend Carmen said, putting a restraining hand to her wrist, “or Ward’ll be calling in a replacement for you in the morning.”

Esmé shook her off. The red went down sweeter than melted butter.

“I’ll have another,” she said. “No. That was awful.”

“Now that is the truth,” Jack said. “I’ll fix you something nice to get the taste out.” He gave her a manhattan. Esmé felt herself loosening, as though rubber bands had been holding her brain in place and were popping off one by one. Now she was laughing, too. She felt young and adventurous.

“Another.”

“Sure, honey.” Jack mixed it for her. There were peanuts on the bar, but she ignored them even though she hadn’t had dinner. Eleanor had disappeared and her friends were all involved in their own conversations, but Esmé no longer felt alone. She was part of all this shifting light, this lubricated bonhomie. Everybody happy, like life should be.

“More.”

Amy and her big hunky friend Craig stuffed her rather awkwardly into the back seat of their car, Craig holding one arm, Amy the other. Craig drove her home. She had trouble opening her front door, so Craig worked the key.

“You sure you’re okay?” Amy asked, watching from outside of Craig’s car.

Esmé waved her hands sideways. “Better than okay,” she said. She shut the door in Craig’s concerned face. “I’m good,” she told the door.

She tried leaning against it to keep herself propped up but she was pretty dizzy and it felt better to slip down and feel the cool hardwood. She passed out in the entryway.

20

S
itting beside him so close she could smell Ray’s Pi aftershave and touch his shoulder each time he shifted, Kat studied the map. Just outside San Bernardino, they were heading east and most of the way out of the L.A. Basin. The Porsche’s outside temperature gauge showed a hundred four Fahrenheit on this Saturday afternoon in August. Not a single car they passed had the windows rolled down. The air carried a distinctly orange tinge. Little could be seen along the freeway—sound walls covered with ice plant, roofs. Not exactly scenic, but it got you there.

She said, “I went to Idyllwild on a field trip when I was in fourth grade. All I remember is bugs, dust, and manzanita. There’s no lake very close by. But one of the women in my office likes the place, and she told me it’s an artists’ town. A tourist town, prosperous these days.”

“It’s the closest mountain to L.A.,” Ray said. “Of course they would plant a town there, to escape to in the summer. It’ll be packed this time of year. And there’s some real forest, too, in the Mount San Jacinto park.”

“Did Leigh tell you about the ghost?”

“What ghost?”

“She claimed her parents’ cabin was haunted.”

“Then maybe she didn’t go there.”

“If there’s no sign of her, we’ll ask at the motels.”

“She could have just been passing through.”

“Going where?”

“I have one other idea,” Ray said. “She bought supplies for her work from a man who lives on a reservation somewhere around there, a Native American.” The Porsche whizzed into the middle lane and passed a slower car in the fast lane.

They did eighty on the uphill winding road, but Ray had his eyes fixed on the road and his hands squarely in the ten and two o’clock positions on the leather-covered steering wheel, so Kat just said, “What reservation?”

“I can’t remember.”

“Think!”

“I told you, I can’t remember.”

“This map doesn’t mark any Indian reservations.”

“It’s a highway map. What do you expect? Tell me about the Hubbel ghost.”

“He hovered in the air. He wore old-fashioned clothes.” She told him what she could remember, which wasn’t much. She did recall Tom relating a story or two. She guessed he had gone up there with Leigh, but this wasn’t information she thought Ray would appreciate, so kept those memories to herself.

She thought about the ghost up there with Tom, how he had laughed at the stories but came home looking remarkably chastened at the encounter. She thought about Tom, a ghost himself now.

The trip took nearly three hours, but the Porsche managed the twisty roads magnificently. Arid semi-desert turned to fir and pines, greener as they attained the higher elevations.

Kat closed her eyes and let her head be cuddled by the headrest. She worked to recapture more about the time when Leigh first told her of the ghost. It must have been soon after she fell for Tom. It was this very cabin that she had taken Tom to when they ran away together, benighted lovers, hiding out at her parents’ spooky getaway.

Leigh had claimed she and Tom had made love for the first time at the Idyllwild cabin in a room that turned out to be haunted. “I saw something, Kat, something creepy but I wanted him so bad I never said a word. I wonder if Tom saw it, too?”

“What did you see?” Kat, on the floor in Leigh’s girlhood bedroom, remembering her brother’s story, sat close to the faint breeze coming through the upstairs window on Franklin Street. It felt just like sitting directly inside the pink oven in the downstairs kitchen. Kat wore a tank top and cutoffs, but even in these minimal clothes her moist legs stuck to the hardwood floors.

At twenty-six, Leigh still lived at home. Her bedroom held the furniture she had grown up with that her grandparents had brought from Mississippi, heavy dark mahogany, probably modest in its time but rather admired these days, especially with the gaudy fabrics Leigh had draped over them. The walls, baby blue, were covered floor to ceiling with posters of—what else—furniture through the ages, William Morris designs in particular.

“A guy in old-fashioned overalls appeared,” Leigh said, completely seriously. “He didn’t make a sound, except to moan. He hovered at the foot of the bed while we went at it.”

“Overalls. Omigod, how horrifying!” Kat had reacted, and both young women found this hilarious.