The Ruins of California (41 page)

“I came back to get you,” I said finally. “I never should have left Hawaii without you. But I was too afraid of what you’d say. And I was too messed up myself.”

“You’re bringing me home?”

“Yeah.”

“Wasn’t it Christmas already?”

“That doesn’t matter.”

“Home where?”

“Wolfback.”

“Wolf bane.”

I didn’t laugh. “Who’s the girl in my room?”

“You.”

We didn’t call Dad—we decided not to. Maybe that was the final payment we extracted after enduring a lifetime of him. At the airport we got tickets for the next flight, for later that night, a red-eye. We checked a few bags—the only thing Whitman cared about was his backpack and the stuff in it that he thought was keeping him alive. Tickets in hand, we drove into town, to a big Marriott to kill some time. Whitman kept cranking the window down on the old Valiant, like he needed the wind on his face to stay awake. He was drinking a beer, too. “Drinking and driving is a Hawaiian tradition,” he said.

“I remember.”

At the big Marriott, there were umbrellas in the colored drinks
and soft Don Ho–type music, half-Hawaiian and half something else—watered down. Maybe that was a good thing. The whole world could use some watering down.

“That was Sugar in my room,” I said. “Wasn’t it?”

“Kennan.”

We went to Tin Tin’s in Chinatown for dinner, and Whitman went into the bathroom with his backpack, then nodded off when the food came. “I like it here. I’m happy. Hawaii…” He could barely finish a sentence. “Of course, I’m needing more and more junk to keep that feeling going.”

“I think you need a divorce,” I said.

“From who?”

“From junk.”

“I thought you were going to say from Dad.”

“That, too.” And then he laughed—a horrible new laugh. Only junkies laugh like that, or old drunks, almost as if something happens in their throats and disconnects their laugh from anything real inside them. The throat laughs. But it’s an empty-shell sound, unfeeling, not even attempting authenticity, a big show, a big fake machine gun of a laugh. Nobody should ever have to hear a brother sound like that. “Tell you what,” he said, really fake but with a serious face. “You go to college and I’ll get clean. Think how happy Marguerite would be.”

“I’m already in college,” I said.

“Oh, right.”

I
t wasn’t hard getting him on the plane, except he’d wander off at the airport and I’d have to bring him back to the gate. The backpack somehow became my responsibility, and I was guarding it, and
worrying about it, and wondering if I was going to be arrested, and always fretting that Whitman would need it, like one of those shaking people on TV. But it wasn’t really like that. He didn’t shake. He mostly slept. As it turned out, the flight home was the easy part. The rest was worse—the treatment programs that didn’t work, the halfway houses that couldn’t hold him, the dour predictions of specialists, and the sadness, the horrible sadness in Whitman’s eyes, like he’d lost everything that he cared about. The way my father fumbled around and couldn’t keep up the act anymore that he didn’t care about anybody but himself. When he gave up the act, he was mostly mad. But all his rage couldn’t really make a dent in Whitman.

Eventually Justine got through. I’m not sure how. Or what she said, exactly. But Whitman spent a weekend with her in Carmel Valley and immediately checked in to a hospital in Santa Fe, and whatever happened at Justine’s or that hospital worked. He came back—alive again, all the ingredients back together, whole but arranged in a slightly different way. He talked about heroin as if it were an old love that had been left and replaced with something else, something enduring—not a person or even a passion, really, but almost a sense of timelessness and space, a place that Whitman could always get to because he and Justine had cleared a path to it inside him. After that, he stayed with Patricia in Ojala for a while and seemed to mend whatever had broken between them. Then, in the late spring, he arrived at Wolfback, to be with me and Dad. We laughed a lot, cooked for each other. Whitman and I took hikes, and he told me the names of all of the plants. My father talked about building a guest cottage, away from the main house. He wanted Whitman to stay there. I didn’t say too much or try to steer Whitman toward that or away. At the end of the summer, he found a small house to rent in an olive grove in Napa. His friend
Ross came to visit, and then stayed. Whitman and Ross seemed happy together, and suited, like good friends. Were they gay? It seems strange now, but in those days we didn’t ask. And it didn’t matter. They were settled and comfortable and committed in a way that my father never had been.

“I knew you’d wind up living here someday,” Dad said to me in late November. He’d seen Evie for dinner and then come home early to help me study for midterms. He was shuffling around in his horrible monogrammed velvet slippers and green silk robe—and was still so handsome that it didn’t seem fair. He was cheerful, as happy as I’d ever seen him, and he buzzed around his kitchen with the espresso machine making all those sucking sounds, fiddling with a new recipe for brioche as though he were experimenting on a nuclear bomb. Maybe he was happy because Whitman was nearby, in Napa, and gardening again, and talking with a kind of firmness and resolve that he’d never had before. Maybe Dad was happy because I was imprisoned in my subterranean lair, studying for exams and playing his old flamenco records too loudly. Or maybe he was happy because Apple was going public and he’d make another fortune that he’d spend as fast as he could. Ronald Reagan was going to be our next president—and Dad seemed to feel this was a diabolically enchanting turn of events. Things with Madam X had stabilized. They were outlaws again, loving in secret—in hotels and friends’ yachts and borrowed pieds-à-terre, always on the fly. She was still married. He seemed to like her better that way. And it would make the whole thing easier when he met somebody new.

“I’ve known since you were little,” he said. “Remember that walk on the beach, when we came to the ridge for the first time? You were so tiny and wearing those white corrective shoes that
must have weighed ten pounds each. You were so adorable with those two braids on the sides of your head. And you looked up at me like I was a god, like I was the greatest man you’d ever know. I knew we’d live together someday—right here on the ridge. Or I dreamed we could. And I pulled it off. I’m very proud of that. Ours is a great love story, isn’t it, Inez?”

I smiled.

“I don’t deserve you, do I?”

I made a harrumph sound. “You didn’t deserve any of us,” I said, grabbing a coffee and one of his experimental brioches to take down to my lair. “But that’s life.”

Later, when I was tired of studying, I called Robbie’s number in Provo—the number that Boo had given me two years before. “She doesn’t live in this dorm anymore,” a young girl’s voice said. I recognized something familiar about the voice—a kindness, an openness, a willingness to help me. “Let’s see if I can find her in the BYU directory,” she said. There was a short pause. “Yep, here she is. Robyn Morrison. At Deseret Towers.”

I dialed the number right away.

“Robbie, it’s Inez.”

“You’re kidding! Hello!”

She acted like it was nothing, like she’d just missed me. She acted like I’d never dumped her, or replaced her with Shelley, or grown up too fast, or tried to throw my life away. “I’m so glad you called!” she cried out. “My gosh! You sound exactly the same.”

“I am.”

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

A
nn Godoff, my editor, is as elegant and bright as a lit match. I hope books aren’t like cigarettes—and that lighting three of mine in a row is okay. My debt to Ann, in any case, is now so profound it’s beyond my ability to describe. Thanks to Liza Darnton at Penguin Press, too, for logistical assists and great manners, and to Maureen Sugden for copyediting and amazing soap-opera connoisseurship.

Alan Rifkin read this book in draft and his comments were astute and invaluable. Judith McBean inspired me in many quiet but significant ways, as did Sandra Anderson, Linda Cannon, Jeffrey Chin, Adelaide Gore, Robert Hemmes, Mark Hougard, Leo and Marlys Keoshian, Leah Levy, Tom Lubinski, Danielle Mirabella, Dana Osborn, Michael Phillips, Rochelle Racchi, Sonie Richardson, and Albert Schreck. I’d like to thank Barb Mehner for being unforgettable. And Barbara Keller, a.k.a. Blue Icon—I’m sad we never met. I’d also like to thank my husband, Bill Powers, who bursts with good ideas and kindness, and our son, Liam, for his
creativity and good cheer. Tess Batac has taken care of me through many pages now with patience and a sense of fun.

Flip Brophy, my agent at Sterling Lord Literistic, doesn’t come to visit me anymore since I moved to the hinterlands, but I still love her. The Sinclairs and the Spiegels, along with Nora Gallagher, are new friends but have the grace and understanding of old ones.

In addition to my immediate and extended family (of Sherrills, Boninis, Easons, Powerses, and Shallcrosses), I’ve been buoyed by various unofficial support groups, especially The Glams (Clara, Geraldine, Sally, Elsa), who make me laugh hard at lunch and express interest in my characters long after I’ve grown sick of them. I’d also like to acknowledge my debt to the Parlayers (Julie, Stebe, and U.U.), who remember the TV grid on Thursday nights in 1975 and who have taught me how to bet exacta boxes and wheels. And as always, without my cousin Leslee Sherrill in my life, where would I be?

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

M
ARTHA
S
HERRILL
is the author of
The Buddha from Brooklyn
, a work of nonfiction, and
My Last Movie Star
, a novel. She was raised in Los Angeles and now lives in Massachusetts with her husband and son.