Some Kind of Miracle (15 page)

“Sunny,” Dahlia said softly. Sunny didn’t look up even when Dahlia moved into the room and sat on the bed two feet from her. Her only movement was her arm reaching down to place another card, then another. “How
are
you?” Dahlia tried, but there was no reply. Today must have been a day that Sunny had downed the contents of the cup.

“Me?” Sunny asked, still not looking up. The rain was pounding hard against the small window. Dahlia saw Sunny’s jaw moving involuntarily back and forth, back and forth.

“Listen, I had an idea,” Dahlia said.

“Did you bring the little cards?” Sunny said. Of course Dahlia had brought the computer, because she knew it was a great way to get Sunny’s interest.

“I did bring them. And you can play with them, but first I thought I’d ask you a very important question.” There was a long silence. As Sunny continued to play, Dahlia looked down and realized that the rows of cards Sunny was laying out made no sense. There were reds on reds and blacks on blacks and bigger numbers underneath smaller numbers, but still Sunny methodically placed them where she wanted them to go, conforming to some system in her head, the tip of her tongue jutting out of the side of her mouth the way children’s tongues did when the children were concentrating hard.

“How would you like to come and stay at my house for a while?”

“What about your boyfriend?” Sunny asked, suddenly sounding very lucid.

“I broke up with him,” Dahlia said, and Sunny looked at her and emitted a mocking laugh.

“And they say
I’m
crazy,” she said, and her laughter shook the bed. “How’d you let that studmuffin out of your sight?” For an instant she was the lusty, leering Sunny that Dahlia remembered, and they laughed together, and Dahlia saw a flash of the old light in Sunny’s eyes.

“Well, now there’s more room in my house for
you
,” Dahlia said in a voice that was trying to sound positive and cheerful.

“‘Well, now there’s more room in my house for
you
,’” Sunny said, mocking Dahlia’s phony voice, as
if even in her hazy state she could see through Dahlia. The rain was coming down hard outside, and a big wind blew a branch of a nearby tree against Sunny’s window.

“I’m afraid of rain,” Sunny said, shuddering now as she gazed out.

“It can’t hurt you,” Dahlia said, trying to sound comforting. Rain or no rain, she was not walking out of this place without Sunny. I’m like Jack and the Beanstalk coming to capture the goose that laid the golden eggs, she thought. And I am not leaving without that goose.

“I could turn the little office at my house into a very nice bedroom, and you could stay for a while and we could…I don’t know. Hang out? Reminisce about the old days? Maybe even write songs together?”

Sunny didn’t answer. Just continued playing her mad version of solitaire.

“I mean, you’re an adult. You’re here voluntarily, right? So you can just leave whenever you want, right?”

“Yeah,” Sunny muttered. “Voluntarily.”

“I already asked for a few weeks’ worth of your meds, and I could help you pack and…” Dahlia opened the door of Sunny’s closet. There were only three hangers of clothes. One held the overalls and T-shirt she’d worn the other day, a second held the red parachute-fabric jogging suit, and the third held a flowery print muumuu. “Guess you don’t have a bag,” Dahlia said.

“Yeah, I do,” Sunny told her. She got up, walked to a drawer, and pulled out a Macy’s shopping bag.

“So do you want to leave?” Dahlia asked.

Sunny shrugged and offered what might be construed as a nod.

Within a minute Dahlia had the items in the closet folded and stacked in the Macy’s bag, after which she helped Sunny open the three drawers and empty their meager contents—underwear from the first, T-shirts from the second, and some Elvis CDs from the third—into the bag, too. It had taken less than three minutes to pack Sunny’s things. Dahlia wondered how many days it would have taken her to pack all her own belongings if she had to move out of her house.

“If I come with you, can I play with the little cards?” Sunny asked.

“The little cards are waiting in the van,” Dahlia said as they headed down the steps.

She’s right, Dahlia thought. I am the one who’s crazy. I don’t have any idea when she’s due for her next dose of medication or what happens if she doesn’t get it. She could be violent, she could have seizures, and I’m taking her home as if she were a stray puppy I found in the street. How desperate am I?

At the bottom of the steps, she helped Sunny into the van. “Here are the little cards,” she said, opening the computer on Sunny’s lap, turning it on, and pulling up the solitaire game.

“So how was your day so far?” she asked Sunny as she pulled the van away from the curb, trying to sound casual. It seemed like a good way to start. Sunny clicked at the laptop’s keyboard. “Did you take your morning meds?” Dahlia tried.

“Well, I took them, but I didn’t take them, if you know what I mean,” Sunny said.

“No, I don’t know what you mean,” Dahlia said.

“I mean, I took them from Grover but…” Sunny shoved her hand into the pocket of the jogging jacket she wore, then extracted it and held it out to Dahlia. There were a dozen or so of the same kind of pills Grover had put into the envelope he’d given Dahlia.

“I put ’em in there every other day, or on days when I don’t feel like being a zombie, or on days that have the letter
d
in them,” she said, and then she laughed a machine gun of a laugh. “Get it?”

“I get it,” Dahlia said with a strained smile. The rain had stopped, and the sun was breaking through. It was so bright that Dahlia reached into her purse to get out her dark glasses and then pulled down the visor to shield her eyes.

“But don’t worry,” Sunny said, “because I don’t need the pills. I’m okay without them.” Then she squinted against a ray of sun that blasted into her eyes, and as she pulled down the visor on the passenger side, she gasped, then bellowed, “Fucking bastards! Don’t you follow me here, or I’ll kill you!”

She was holding her hand up to cover the mirror in the visor on the passenger side. Car horns screamed as Dahlia accidentally veered across a lane while she reached to flip up the visor on Sunny’s side.

“Sunny, you’re okay. Nobody is there.”

Sunny whimpered as Dahlia drove nervously.

“Well,” Dahlia said, searching her brain for something to say, “maybe this is good. That you’re coming home with me, I mean. Maybe I can help you find a
medicine that doesn’t make you feel groggy but helps you not see people in the mirror.”

“How can I
not
see them when they’re
there
?” Sunny asked in a shrill voice. “No meds!” she shouted, rolling down the window of the van. Then she pulled one of her large, braless breasts out of her now-zipped-open jacket and waved it out the window at a truck driver, who honked his loud horn in reply.

Oh, God, Dahlia thought, finding herself in that inexplicable limbo between wanting to laugh and wanting to cry. This was not the way she’d imagined it would be to collect Sunny. All the way back to the house, Sunny stared out the window, and Dahlia felt her insides shaking.

The house was quiet as Dahlia put the key in the door, and she remembered now that Seth’s things would be gone from the closet. As soon as they were inside, Sunny plopped herself down on the piano bench and Dahlia went into the bedroom and opened the tiny closet she and Seth had shared. Two empty hangers, the wire ones with paper covers that had the logo of Owl Cleaners on them, were all that was left of him.

On the desk he’d left behind two large piles of the magazines he always read every week so he could check on which of his company’s clients were mentioned.
People, Us, Vanity Fair.
New ones, old ones he probably left there because he knew Dahlia loved to leaf through them and see which glamorous Hollywood personality was wearing what to the fancy parties she longed to attend.

Dahlia fought the impulse to rush to the phone,
track him down, and beg him to come back. Sunny was at the piano playing some boogie-woogie chords, and then she launched into a hot, sexy melody and hummed along. That’s a tune I could work with, Dahlia thought. But when she walked into the living room and looked at Sunny with her head thrown back and her eyes closed, off in the world of her tunes, she knew that this was a really bad idea and that she would regret it. What have I done? she thought. What in the hell have I done?

T
he sound of a siren screaming down Laurel Canyon woke Dahlia, and she opened one eye to look at the clock. It was already ten. She had to do a massage at noon, so she knew she’d better crawl out of bed and get dressed. Sunny. What was she going to do with Sunny while she worked? She hadn’t even thought that far ahead, hadn’t figured out the part about what their days would be like when she would have to go off to work and leave Sunny alone in the house.

Well, she wouldn’t worry too much, because Sunny certainly wasn’t a kid, Dahlia thought, making her way groggily toward the bathroom. This wasn’t like the time Seth left Lolly with Dahlia for a few hours when he had an emergency meeting and nobody to watch her. That whole day Dahlia had to keep reminding herself not to leave the kid in the car when she
went into the market or the cleaners. Sunny was a grown woman, for God’s sake. A crazy grown woman, granted, but she certainly knew how to take care of herself, and Dahlia ought to be able to find things for her to do.

She was still half asleep when she walked into the bathroom, but what she saw there woke her like a slap in the face. Those big letters that filled her bathroom mirror grabbed her attention.
Oh, no. Her ears rang with fear. Sunny’s studio audience was still out there for her, without her medication. They lived in every mirror and watched Sunny’s every move. And after all these years, Sunny was still writing her backward messages on the mirror, telling her demons to go to hell, just the way she had when she was a girl.

Dahlia hurried into the living room. It was quiet, and Sunny’s room was empty. Where could she have gone? There was no place to walk in these hills around the house. When she stepped outside the front door, the sun was shining and the air had the clear, brisk feeling that always came on the morning after a rain. A bluebird was washing and preening at a puddle in the driveway, and something must have fallen out of Dahlia’s car last night, because next to the bird she saw the flash of a shiny object. She walked over to see what it was.

“Oh, no,” she said in dismay as she knelt to pick up the rearview mirror from the van. It had been torn from the center of the front windshield. Next to it lay the side mirrors from both the right and left of her car. Seth would have known what to do now. He would
have calmed her and told her to think logically about where Sunny would be. Dahlia’s head hurt as she walked back to the house and into the kitchen to make some coffee.

It was through the kitchen window that she spotted Sunny lying spread-eagled in the leaves and the grass on the hill behind the house. Her first thought was panic. Maybe Sunny was dead. Her eyes were closed, and her face was tilted up toward the sun. But there was an ecstatic smile on her face. Dahlia opened the back screen door and let it slam behind her so Sunny would hear her coming.

“You okay?” she called out, and Sunny waved a little wave of her fingers without opening her eyes. She had her head thrown back like a sunbather in a commercial, and the Day-Glo hair matched the orange of the scattered California poppies growing wild near the spot where she was lying on the grassy hill. When she felt Dahlia’s shadow fall over her, she smiled.

“When I don’t take my meds, the jackass doctor in San Diego says, ‘Sunny, you’re rejecting sanity.’ But when I do take them, I stare, I drool, I limp, I sleep, I bloat, I get acne, and I twitch. So if I never take them, even though the studio audience watches every move I make, at least I
can
make moves. And I can lie in the sun and feel the heat on my skin.” She lifted her head now to look at Dahlia. “Would you take a pill that didn’t let you feel?”

“Sunny, you broke all the mirrors on my van,” Dahlia said.

“Well, I had to do that,” Sunny said, sitting up. “To protect your life from their snooping. They plot
against us. The studio audience judges us and decides who’s fat and who’s thin and who’s successful and who isn’t. But if they can’t see you, they can’t judge you or make decisions for you. So when there are no mirrors, they are foiled. Foiled! Ha. A funny word, because you can see yourself in foil, too, and they are on the other side of it. Never use foil. Only Saran Wrap.”

This was bad. Dahlia looked at her watch. She would go inside and cover all the mirrors with sheets and towels until she could get Sunny to a doctor someplace, but right this minute she had to get to her appointment. She had to work and get her hands on some money.

“Sunny, I have a client now, and I have to go to work,” she said. “I’ll just be gone for a few hours. Is it okay for me to leave you? Will you be okay if I do?”

“Oh, don’t worry about me,” Sunny said. “I have plenty to do around here.”

Dahlia was afraid to ask what that meant. She walked back to her bathroom and took a fast shower, and since she didn’t have time to remove the backward letters on her mirror, she managed to dry her hair and put on makeup by peering through them. Sunny was at the piano picking out some new tunes as Dahlia drove away in the van. She needed to find Sunny a doctor. Helene would know a good doctor. Dahlia would ask her what to do when she got out there.

Once, Dahlia remembered, after a lengthy hospitalization, the visit Sunny was making back home wasn’t supposed to be a visit. It was meant to be her tri
umphant return from the land of the lost, proof that she had turned the corner, shaken off the pesky illness, and triumphed the way people always do in movies. In retrospect Dahlia realized how the whole idea of the return had contained far too much hope and set up too many unrealistic expectations for it not to fail. But Dahlia had been a child then and Sunny’s ardent fan, so she became an eager party to the fiction. She was excited to help Uncle Max take down the mirror in Sunny’s bedroom and to hold an end of the new bedspread and help Aunt Ruthie spruce up the newly refurbished room that would welcome Sunny home to what Aunt Ruthie called “a fresh new life.”

Neighbors were arriving with cakes and cookies, eager to get a look at someone who had just spent six months in a mental hospital. Just the fact that Aunt Ruthie and Uncle Max threw a party to welcome Sunny made it clear, only in looking back, that they had no understanding of her condition. “Not exactly a party,” Dahlia heard Aunt Ruthie say a little apologetically, “just a few friends dropping over is all.”

But somehow, though it was Sunny’s first day of looking out of windows that didn’t have bars on them and her first day of dressing up in pretty new clothes that Aunt Ruthie had spent weeks buying and then laying out all over the new bedspread as a surprise, Sunny seemed to need no period of adjustment. She stood receiving the friends and neighbors in her mother’s living room like a visiting movie star. Dahlia remembered when she walked into her aunt’s living room, which was filled with cigarette smoke and chatter, and saw Sunny in a corner, how gorgeous her
cousin looked in a sleeveless, low-cut white dress. She held a cigarette in one hand and a Coca-Cola can in the other, and she was smiling up at a slim, dark-haired man. She looked astonishingly beautiful.

“Oh, my God!” Sunny had said, dropping the butt of her cigarette into the Coke can, which she handed to the man. Then she rushed to throw her arms around Dahlia, who could feel as she was held in a very tight embrace that Sunny’s body was emitting a low-frequency tremble. “My little baby cuz!” Sunny gushed, squeezing Dahlia harder. “You’re so womanish!” Sunny pulled away from the hug and looked right at Dahlia’s breasts, then put an arm around Dahlia’s shoulders and walked her toward the kitchen.

“Did you see him?” she asked Dahlia between clenched teeth, as though, if her lips didn’t move, nobody could hear her voice.

“The tall guy?” Dahlia asked giddily, smitten with Sunny’s beauty and flattered as she always was that somebody as brassy and exciting as Sunny was so focused on her.

“He’s Rita Horn’s nephew from Florida, Norman Burns. Well, he burns me, baby. And vice versa. Believe me, Rita didn’t bring him here to meet Ruthie Gordon’s nutcase daughter—they were just stopping in on their way to dinner. But that boy is drooling into his cream soda. He already asked me if I’d join them at dinner, and when I said I couldn’t leave the party, he asked me out for tomorrow night. Out of the booby hatch for four hours and already back in circulation,” she said, grinning. Dahlia knew that grin meant
Sunny would be naked with Rita Horn’s nephew before the weekend.

But she wasn’t. Because, in spite of all of the sexy patter, the medication that was making Sunny seem well enough for her doctors to allow her to come home also made her completely uninterested in sex. Yet somehow, despite her lack of interest, or maybe because of it, the brooding Norman Burns continued to be so wild about her that he took a summer job in L.A., just to be near her. And while he worked in a music store in Westwood by day, he spent every evening with Sunny, and they fell deeply in love.

“His favorite plays are by Tennessee Williams. He reads them to me and plays all the parts. He acts as if he’s all of those funny southern ladies with their insane ideas about the world. They’re not supposed to be funny, but they make me hysterical, and we both laugh,” she said. “The way I feel about him is the way you’re supposed to feel when you fall in love. I’m sure of it.”

Dahlia liked to be at the house when Norman came to pick Sunny up for a date, because she loved to watch his eyes take Sunny in each time he saw her wearing what was another new dress that Aunt Ruthie had bought her and altered that day. The tight yellow one, the off-the-shoulder gauzy white one. His eyes would squint in that way that said, I am devouring this glorious vision.

“I guess I’ll do it with him anyway, even though I don’t feel like it,” Sunny told Dahlia one night. Sunny was cleaning out her closet, which one of Sunny’s doctors had told Aunt Ruthie was a very good sign, since
one of the symptoms of schizophrenia was disorganization, and tackling the sorting of clothes was a sign that the illness was under control. “Girls do it all the time. I mean, they pretend it’s okay with them even if they don’t really feel sexy, and guys don’t even notice or care whether we like it or not. As long as we do it whenever they want. So I can just pretend I like it. I mean, that’s how women work it who are married. Right?”

She realized that Dahlia didn’t know the answer to that question, but she wasn’t really talking to Dahlia. She was trying hard to figure out a way to get Norman to ask her to marry him. And she was afraid if she resisted his advances much longer, he’d go back to Florida. She had his photos everywhere in her room and stroked them as if they were voodoo dolls, hoping that when she touched them, Norman could feel the strokes at work.

“He calls me Marilyn Monroe, and I call him Arthur Miller because he thinks I’m that beautiful, and he’s always so brainy and so gentle with me. He knows me like nobody ever has, and I know him. I can’t even explain the way we’re connected. It’s so exquisite and so powerful. I want to marry him, Dahl. I’ll bet if I could just cut back on the medication for a while…Or just, I don’t know, stop it for a few days…

“I mean, it’s great to be able to function almost like a real person, but I miss myself. Not just my sexy self but my funny self and my musical self. I’ve walked past the piano in the living room every day since I got here, and I haven’t sat down to play it once. This new medicine may let me walk without halting and talk
without drooling, but I miss the rush, the heat, the ‘ooohhh, baby’ feeling that I used to get when I was crazy. Imagine! I long to be crazy again.” Then she laughed and said, “That’s got to be a song title.”

Dahlia remembered regretting what she asked Sunny next, which was “Does Norman know about you?” She could tell when Sunny scowled and dropped the armful of blouses she’d been holding on to the bed with a thud that it had been a mistake.

“What’s to know? That I take a lot of pills? That I used to have a problem but now it’s okay? That’s all there is to know, Dahlia,” she said, in a way that made it clear the family wanted to convey the message to Norman that that silly old illness was a thing of the past. They were banding together to tell that story.

“Yeah. Okay,” Dahlia said, realizing that she was supposed to go along with this, too. Then one morning about a month later, when she stayed over in Sunny’s room, she was awakened by the sound of Sunny vomiting in the toilet, and that same day she found herself left out of several whispered conversations, and one day when she came over to bring Sunny some new lyrics she’d written, she was told that Sunny was out of town for a few days, but nobody would tell her where.

Later that same day, when her mother was making dinner and her father was helping in the kitchen, she overheard her mother saying, “What’s the point of telling him? Even if he did marry her, a baby would have probably come out deformed because of all the medication. When I was carrying Dahlia, I didn’t even take an aspirin. Remember?”

“I remember.”

“Who’s having a baby?” Dahlia asked as she came in and washed her hands at the kitchen sink just to have an excuse to be in the kitchen.