Rag and Bone (13 page)

“It’s probably the church she was looking for the night she turned up here,” I said, and related what she had told me. “Maybe she went to arrange marriage counseling.”

“Don’t be sarcastic about her faith,” Elena said. “It turned her life around.”

“Finding Jesus isn’t what turned her life around,” I said. “It was the fact that Pete was in prison. I compared their rap sheets. She does fine when he’s locked up, but once he’s out, she slips.”

She digested this in silence.

“What about Angel?” I asked Edith. “Did you get anything helpful from him?”

“No. I’ve rarely met a child as self-possessed as your nephew,” she said. “In the old days, they used to call kids like him ‘invulnerables.’”

“What kind of kid would that be?” I asked.

“Kids who become high achievers when all the cards are stacked against them. They’re not only very smart, they’re able to find some inner resource that keeps hope alive for them in the most desperate situations, and without much encouragement from the adults in their lives.”

“Are you saying he isn’t being affected by a drug addict dad and a battered mom?”

“Of course it affects him, Henry, but it hasn’t destroyed him.”

“That’s only a matter of time,” I said. “Vicky’s a write-off. We can at least save Angel.”

“What are you talking about?” Elena asked.

“I know family lawyers, kids’ rights advocates. We could get custody—”

“Absolutely not,” she said angrily. “I’m not going to drag my daughter though a custody fight.”

“Any mother who keeps dragging her child back into a dangerous situation doesn’t deserve custody. Edith, what do you think?”

“Where do you think Angel comes by his invulnerability?” she replied. “Your entire family shows remarkable resilience. Look at your own life.”

“Are you saying that Vicky is one of these invulnerables?”

“She survived her own traumatic childhood and has managed to keep herself and Angel intact as a family against some very tough odds.”

“Going back to Pete doesn’t say much about her judgment.”

“Life is trial and error,” Edith replied. “Vicky is still a young woman. Don’t discount her ability to learn from her experiences.”

“But she’s had this experience over and over again.”

“All that means is she hasn’t hit bottom yet.”

“Why should Angel have to hit it with her?”

“It’s to protect him that she might finally realize she has to leave Pete for good,” Edith said. “Trying to take Angel away from her would be the worst thing you could do.”

“For both of them,” my sister added. “Whatever her faults, she is his mother, Henry. You don’t seem to understand how important that is.”

Outnumbered, I conceded. “Then what do you suggest we do?”

“Edith is right, Vicky has to make her mistakes,” Elena said.

“She knows we’re here, and she knows she can come back. We’ll just have to wait.”

Edith offered any help she could give us and we said our goodbyes. Elena and I continued the discussion over coffee. I was determined to make sure that Angel did not suffer further because his mother was stuck in the rut of dysfunction, but Elena was just as determined that Vicky find her way back to us on her own.

“I wanted to give Vicky the childhood I owed her, but it’s too late for that,” she said. “I can at least try to give the respect she deserves as an adult.”

“She’s not an adult,” I countered. “At least she’s not making adult decisions going back to this guy—”

“She loves him,” Elena said, sipping her coffee, as if that settled everything.

“Oh, come on,” I said. “This is pathology, not
Romeo and Juliet.”

“That’s where you’re wrong,” she said. “You know the Russian poet, Joseph Brodsky?”

“What about him?”

She pulled her bathrobe around her shoulders and said, “He wrote that no loneliness is deeper than the memory of miracles. Isn’t that what love seems like, Henry? A miracle? Something that strikes out of nowhere and transforms our life. That’s how I feel about my daughter.” She touched my hand. “That’s how you feel about Angelito. Vicky must feel the same way about Pete. Hard to let go of an experience that powerful or the hope it will repeat itself. I see that now. There’s nothing we can do to help her as long as she still has that hope.”

“And Angel? He stays hostage to her romantic fantasies?”

She cocked her head and studied me. “Why do you dislike her so much?”

“She reminds me of Mom, Angel is like me, and I see history repeating itself. A kid left on his own while the woman who should be protecting him is off chasing some delusion. Religious in Mom’s case, religious and romantic in Vicky’s.”

“What was Mom supposed to do?”

“Leave him,” I said, and heard all the repressed bitterness of forty years in my voice.

“And go where?” Elena asked softly. “She had a grade-school education, no job skills and her family was far away.”

“I would’ve starved in the street before going back to him,” I said. I didn’t have to say who—she knew I meant our father.

Elena closed her hand around mine. “We wouldn’t have starved but something worse might have happened. Instead, she stayed with him and here we are, more or less intact.”

“More or less,” I said. “I would like something better for Angel.”

She sighed. “What do you want to do? Take Angel away from her? That’s just exchanging one kind of suffering for another.”

“It would be better in the long run.”

“You can’t possibly know what kind of damage he would sustain if we put him through a custody fight. Besides, Henry, I know a little about family law, too, and whatever else she is, Vicky is not an unfit mother.”

“She will be if she becomes readdicted to crack.”

“You seem determined to think the worst of her. We’re not going to interfere.”

“All right, fine. What about trying to find Jesusita Trujillo? You said Vicky’s close to her. Maybe we can at least maintain a line of communication with Vicky and Angel through her. That’s not interference.”

After a moment, she said, “No, it’s not. It’s actually a pretty good idea for us to get to know the other side of the family. Were you able to locate her?”

“I called off my investigator when Vicky turned up here. I’ll put him back on it.”

She nodded. “I’m going to fly home today. There doesn’t seem much point in me staying.”

“I understand. I’ll let you know as soon as I find Jesusita.”

She stood up. “I want you to promise me something, Henry.”

I thought I knew what was coming. “I know, no interference.”

“That wasn’t what I was going to ask,” she said. “I want you to promise me that if Vicky ever needs your help, you’ll put aside your feelings and help her.”

“I don’t have to like her, I just have to love her. Is that it?”

“What?”

“Nothing,” I said. “I promise, Elena. Whatever she needs.”

Elena went off to shower and pack. I put a slice of bread into the toaster and poured another cup of coffee. The phone rang. Thinking Vicky might have come to her senses, I grabbed the receiver. It was John.

“Hey, you and Angel ready for a little
béisbol
?”

“John,” I said. “Actually, there’s a problem.”

“What’s wrong?”

I told him that Vicky and Angel had disappeared and that I wanted to spend time with Elena before she flew back north. “I’m sorry about the game. I’ll pay for the tickets.”

“Nah, one of my brothers will take ’em. I feel bad for Angelito. What do you think is gonna happen?”

“I think Vicky will reconcile with her husband and they’ll put each other and Angel through hell.”

“They’re his parents, man. They won’t do that.”

“You’re very idealistic about family,” I said. “Not me. I’ve seen the damage it can do. Listen, John, maybe we can talk later.”

After a moment, he said in a quiet, hurt voice, “I know you’re feeling bad, but don’t blow me off. I care about you.”

“I’m sorry. I care about you, too. You know that.”

“Come and have dinner with me tonight,” he said. “I promise I’ll make you feel better.”

“What time?”

“Like around seven?”

“Good,” I said. “And John? I feel better already. Should I bring anything?”

He laughed. “How about a toothbrush?”

Mount Washington was one of those neighborhoods that tourists to L.A. never see and that even most residents would have been unable to find on the map. It was a hills-and-flats neighborhood. The flats were a backwater of light industry and poor people; warehouses and small, shabby residences on treeless streets where walls were scarred by gang graffiti, and the few businesses had bars on the windows and closed when the sun went down. This was Third World L.A., populated by Central American immigrants. The men could be found standing on street corners hoping to be hired for a day’s work as cut-rate gardeners or painters. Street vendors pushed their carts down the street selling
helados
and
elote
—ice cream and roasted corn. Small children with large dark eyes played in dirt yards behind high Cyclone fences. I wondered, as I ascended the street that led to John’s house, whether Angelito would end up in a neighborhood like this one.

In the hills, the houses were bigger and commanded greater privacy and nicer views, but unlike comparable neighborhoods, there was not the stunning disparity between hillside wealth and flatland poverty. Rather the hills seemed inhabited by old-fashioned L.A. bohemians, the kind of people who had always given the city its reputation for benign looniness—health cultists, guru followers, past-life regressionists, mediums and spiritualists of every stripe. Their houses were hidden among the trees like hermits, or worshipfully faced the sun with broad decks and multilevel terraces where neglected gardens scented the air with roses and jasmine.

I followed John’s directions to a rutted private road that plunged through a thickness of manzanita, eucalyptus and pine. His was the third driveway off the road. The driveway ascended up a small hill and dead-ended at a clearing where his truck was parked. I emerged from my car to dusty silence and still light. All that was visible of his house was a flight of redwood stairs that disappeared into a stand of pine trees, the edge of a deck and, in the shadows, the glint of glass. I climbed the first steps and discovered there was not one, but two flights of stairs. The first ended at a landing, from which I could see, in the gloaming of the trees, concrete pilings. I started up the second flight and heard music. At the top of stairs, I came out onto the deck I had seen from below. The glint of glass was revealed as a sliding door set into a wall made, like the rest of the house, of weathered redwood. Through the glass I saw a large, sparsely furnished room with a hardwood floor and a stone fireplace. I slid the door open, walked inside and called out above the music, “John?”

He emerged from the kitchen wiping his hands on a dish towel that he tossed over his shoulder. He was wearing freshly pressed khakis and a midnight-blue pocket T-shirt that showed off his biceps and broad chest. His hair was brushed and his face was shaved and he had never looked handsomer. He turned down the stereo and met me at the threshold.

“Hey,” he said, giving me a hug. He had steeped himself in cologne. “You made it.”

I held out the bouquet of white roses I had purchased from a flower shop where the clerk had winked and told me what a lucky gal my girlfriend was.

“These are for you.”

He took them with a warm smile. “They’re nice, Henry. Thank you.”

I looked around the room. The ceiling went up a second level where, behind a railing constructed, he later told me, of posts salvaged from a Victorian staircase, there was a loft bedroom. I could make out the edge of a bed covered with a quilt, an iron floor lamp and an old, unpainted dresser. This room was furnished with a swaybacked brown leather sofa so old that the leather was cracked; a couple of newer armchairs, one deep green leather, the other striped canvas in a vaguely southwestern design. There was a big frayed Indian rug in front of the fireplace and a cane-backed rocking chair beside it. On the plank coffee table was a scattering of newspapers, mail, a coffee cup. Built-in bookshelves held books on architecture, landscaping and baseball, and framed snapshots that I guessed were family pictures. Off to the side a door was partly opened to reveal a smaller bedroom. The kitchen was also partly visible and I assumed there was a bathroom somewhere, but I realized that these four rooms were basically all there was to the house. The high ceiling made it seemed larger, while clerestory windows and skylights filled it with light and lightness. The air smelled faintly of lemon wood polish. Tree branches scraped gently against the outside walls.

“This is like a grown-up version of a treehouse.”

John grinned. “That was the idea. I built it myself mostly out of salvaged material. I lived in a tent down where the cars are parked for months. I love it up here.”

“Was this where you lived when you were married?”

“No, Suzie got that house. This is mine. I put in the second bedroom for my son when he comes down from school. Come into the kitchen with me.”

The walls of the kitchen were painted a warm orange, the tile was blue and white. On the stove was a skillet with rice and peas in tomato sauce. A handpainted ceramic bowl on the counter held a green salad. There was a second, glass bowl in which two pieces of fish were marinating in a clear oil. A door opened out to the deck, where there was a grill and a small wrought-iron table set with pale green plates and blue glasses. I was aware that the things in John’s house had not been chosen at random, but the effect was casual rather than calculated, and though the eye that had arranged them was masculine, it was also capable of delicacy.

John came up behind me and put his arms around my waist. “What are you looking at?”

“The guy who put this house together is an artist,” I said.

“Thanks,” he said, relaxing into my body. “Since I started contracting, I’ve become interested in all kinds of design—architecture, landscape, interiors—but I don’t have the education and I’m too old to go back now. Anyway, I like what I do.”