Pasadena Page 14

  Luke pulls an envelope out of his messenger bag. “I had these printed from the slides. I haven’t looked at them yet. I figured I should wait for you guys.”

  “Thanks.”

  He nods and unseals the envelope. A stack of 8 x 10 black-and-white glossies slides out onto the table.

  “They should be chronological by time code,” he says.

  Joey and I are transfixed, the sharp photographs on the table erasing our last view of Maggie lying cold in a mahogany box.

  I reach out and touch a photo. Maggie by the pool, blowing a ring of smoke. She looks so alive. The time stamp in the corner says she will be for another ninety minutes.

  We sit there, letting Luke flip through image after image.

  Maggie smoking, waving at him, calling him to her. Nothing we haven’t seen before.

  “That’s when I went inside,” Luke says. “And this is when I came out.”

  There are three photos left. Slow exposure. Dreamy. “I left the shutter open a long time to shoot by streetlamp,” he explains. “I wanted to capture the moment.”

  The time stamp reads 10:35. 37. 40.

  Three landscapes, forming a panoramic view of the yard after dark. The lamp in Maggie’s pool house window glows like a fairy light, diffuse and unreal. The bright lights along the side of the house put the narrow walkway and the recycling bins in a pool of sharp focus. The rest of the house is dark. Everyone asleep except . . .

  “Huh.”

  Luke sees it too. He leans forward.

  “What?” Joey asks.

  “There.” He taps an upstairs window, at a point of light, no bigger than a Christmas-tree bulb.

  “What’s that?” Joey asks.

  Luke shrugs. “Cigarette, most likely. See the way it’s kind of dragging across the page, streaky?”

  “Moving,” Joey says with a nod. “I don’t get it. Maggie never left the pool house and the Kims don’t smoke.”

  “Maybe one of them does,” I say. “When his nurse isn’t on duty.”

  “What?” Luke asks.

  I smile sadly. “Don’t you recognize it? That’s Parker’s room. ‘Resting calmly on anxiety meds by ten thirty p.m.,’” I quote Violetta’s journal. “Ten minutes later, he’s having a smoke. Twenty minutes after that, Maggie’s dead.”

  Luke is crying silently. Joey hands him a napkin. “What, you think Parker saw something?”

  I uncurl my legs from beneath me. “I’m betting on it.”

  • • •

  Violetta lets us in. Today the AC is turned on, a chill hush that sends goose bumps up my arms and makes the house sound like it’s sighing.

  “The Kims are resting upstairs,” she says. “Parker and I are out back for pool therapy.” She turns, water dripping from her matronly swimsuit, despite the towel wrapped around her waist. She walks out to the pool without waiting to see what we do.

  Joey and I exchange shrugs and follow her outside.

  By the time we get there, Violetta is halfway down the pool steps, cradling Parker in her arms. He looks like a baby scarecrow, skinny legs curled up against Violetta’s chest. His black swim trunks hit the water and cling to him, making him look even thinner. He catches sight of us and frowns.

  “Returning to the scene of the crime?” I say.

  “What do you want?” Parker snaps back.

  “I want to know what happened to Maggie,” I say. Sometimes honesty works.

  Parker pushes away from Violetta, pulling himself to sit on a middle step, legs drifting in front of him, blue water lapping against his narrow chest. “She died,” he says, squinting at me in the sunlight. I’ve got my shades on, as does Joey. So I let him squint up at us, knowing he can only see his own reflection in our lenses, weak and young.

  “Is that so hard to understand?” he demands. “Maggie got drunk, got high, and she died.”

  “So it was an accident?” I ask, coming to crouch poolside.

  He looks uncomfortable and shrugs, turning away. “How should I know?” he asks.

  I reach into my purse and pull out Luke’s photograph. I nod at the time stamp and point to the glowing ember. “You were, what, halfway through a cigarette? Had to open a window so your parents wouldn’t smell it, right?”

  “I don’t smoke,” Parker says. Violetta cuts him a look.

  “So, this is someone else in your room at ten thirty at night?”

  “That’s private,” Parker says. He looks very young.

  Violetta wades over to look at the picture. “Smoking? Parker, how many times have I told you? Cigarettes will kill you.”

  Parker’s shoulder’s hunch. “It’s not a cigarette. It was medicinal.”

  Joey and I exchange a look. “Medical marijuana?” I ask.

  Parker shrugs and looks away.

  Violetta relaxes. “That’s right. That’s the night we ran out of flunitrazepam and Valium.”

  I feel Joey come alert beside me.

  Violetta prattles on, glad to have a break in her miserable day, I imagine. She laughs. “I swear those pharm guys are getting lazy, miscounting the order like that. I had to rewrite my log and everything,” she says, shaking her head. “Sorry, Parker. You scared me for a second there. You can never be too careful with that stuff.”

  Parker keeps his eyes on the water.

  “All right, that’s enough PT for today,” she tells him. “Do you want out?”

  Parker doesn’t respond.

  “He just lost his sister. Talk to him,” Violetta says to me. “Parker, mijo, it’s good to have friends.” The word falls flat in the still air, but she doesn’t seem to notice. She makes sure he’s settled on the steps, half in, half out of the water, and climbs out of the pool. “I’ll be back,” she says, and leaves the three of us alone.

  The pool filter turns on, making a tinkling whirlpool of the water. Parker stares at the light dancing off the wavelets, reflecting in rings and stars on his skin.

  “You watched her die,” I say. “You gave her the drugs, then you smoked a joint and watched her die. Why?”

  Parker shrugs, eyes still on the water that killed his sister. “What was I supposed to do?”

  “Call for help. Get your parents!” A heat is rising in me. I push it back down. I want to understand.

  “Did you know Maggie got into Brown?” Parker asks.

  I take a deep breath. “I just found out.”

  “Yeah,” Parker sighed. “She was going to tell you when you got back in town. Accepted a full year early. But no financial aid. Dad makes too much on paper.”

  I nod but don’t say anything. Joey paces the deck behind me, looking up at the sun.

  “I’m due for another surgery this fall. A hundred fifty grand, only twenty percent covered by insurance. Do you know how much it costs to go to Brown?”

  I sit down, feeling sick. “About as much as an underinsured brain surgery?”

  “Yeah.” Parker hiccups and I see that he’s crying. “What Violetta said about smoke killing me is true. The crap from all the wildfires is bad; cigarettes are worse. I started smoking because one good case of pneumonia in these shit lungs and I’d be off the surgery list, maybe even off life support.”

  “That’s crazy,” Joey says, not wanting to understand. But I do.

  “Funerals are cheaper than treatment, Joe.”

  Joey looks at me, and I feel something inside me break. That look on his face, I know it well: a kid who never knew the world could be so ugly.

  I take his hand and try to draw him down to sit beside me. He pulls away.

  “A lot cheaper,” Parker says. “And Maggie knew it. She also knew it would kill my mom to lose me. But her?” He shrugs his thin shoulders. “Maybe not so much.”

  I take off my shoes and slip my feet into the water. It’s cold, even on a hot
day like today. I shiver until my legs get used to the idea.

  Until I get used to the idea.

  “She didn’t call me.”

  Parker hangs his head. “She didn’t want you to stop her.”

  “And Luke Liu?” I ask.

  Parker looks at me with a pained smile. “She said he was her guardian angel. He couldn’t be on duty if she was going to go through with it.”

  “So she slept with him, and sent him home . . .”

  “I think she loved him . . . maybe,” Parker says, as if hoping for that small comfort.

  What a bitter pill, hope.

  “Oh, Maggie,” I sigh. Hating her. Hating Parker. “Did you know she gave Edina Rodriguez your grandmother’s necklace?”

  Parker sobs, a tear splashing onto his cheek. “For two weeks. For safekeeping. She didn’t want my mother to have to bury it with her.”

  Right. That was Maggie. Selfless, thoughtful Maggie.

  Someone I barely knew. Someone I would never know now.

  I feel the bile rise in me, feel the hurt, the stomach-clenching ache of loss and anger. For a moment, I’m glad she’s dead. Glad I don’t have to see her, to know how she lied to me. How she left a trail of confusion so I couldn’t see the truth until it was too late.

  They say suicide is a choice. Like the boy with the melting Popsicle versus the girl with the sunshine smile.

  Maggie chose Parker over me.

  The trouble is, she left us both behind.

  “Why shouldn’t I just push you into the deep end and let you drown?” I ask him, acid at the back of my throat. He’s guilty after all, but it’s survivor’s guilt. He outlived Maggie. And that’s unforgivable.

  Parker shrugs. “I can swim, Jude. But if I couldn’t, then Maggie would have died for nothing.”

  I laugh and shake my head. Wishing the murderous thought away.

  Beside us, Joey sits, all but forgotten. He turns to Parker. “The cemetery. That was your idea?”

  “No,” Parker says wistfully. “That was all Maggie. She and my folks bought that plot for me when I turned twelve. I wasn’t doing so well, and Maggie said we could still watch movies together from the afterlife.”

  Joey blinks his eyes dry. “Are you going to tell your parents?”

  Parker shakes his head. “What’s the good in that? They’d never look at me the same way again without seeing her.”

  A bitterness fills my mouth that words won’t wash away. “You mean the way they never saw her, only you?”

  Parker hangs his head and a tear falls, rippling the water.

  I can’t blame him for being a coward. Lord knows I’ve been one too . . . with my mother, Roy, Joey . . .

  We sit there for a while, the guilty and the guilt-ridden, turning browner in the hot Pasadena sun, pondering the point of it all.

  But you should never question the dead. Their stance, by default, is inarguable.

  Around us, the air roasts, filled with the ticking of air conditioners, the drip-drip of condensation, the warm-hay smell of dried palm trees and sunburnt pavement.

  Maggie kills herself so her brother can live. And he lets it happen. Too afraid to stop her, too afraid to die. Like there weren’t a million other options in between. A million of them, and they all would have kept her alive.

  But none of that matters now. Some decisions you can’t unmake. Some harms can’t be undone.

  Maggie’s suicide, Roy’s lechery, Dane’s infidelity. My rape.

  All water under a very long bridge.

  At last, I reach into my purse and pull out the strand of pearls. “Give these to your mother,” I tell Parker, and drop them on the deck of the pool. I rise to my feet. “I’m going home.”

  “God, I can’t wait to get out of this place and go to college.”

  Maggie and I were poolside yet again, at the start of our junior year, propped up on our elbows, toes dangling in the water.

  Up at the main house, the cavalcade of concerned friends was making an appearance. Parker was home from the hospital. Not a surgery this time, just observation after a bad fever. In honor of his return, Maggie was smoking her nasty filterless cigarettes and blowing the smoke toward the house.

  “One more year after this one,” I reminded her. The future, as they say, was wide open.

  “Do you know where you want to go?” she asked me.

  I laughed. “Who cares, as long as it’s not here?”

  “You surprise me,” she said. “I always took you for an Oxy girl.”

  “Guess again.” Going to school within five miles of home, even to Occidental, was out of the question. “Besides, you’re going back east. Wouldn’t you miss me?”

  Maggie sighed and leaned back on her lounge chair, taking a luxuriant drag from her smoke. “Darling,” she said after she inhaled, “I’ll miss all the little people. Do you hear me?” She sat up suddenly, sunglasses glinting in the afternoon light. “Darling”—she blew me a theatrical kiss—“I’ll miss you all!”

  18

  I’ll take you home,” Joey says, jogging after me through the Kims’ side gate and onto the street.

  I turn around to face him. “No, Joe. Not this time.”

  His face creases. “Jude? What’s going on?”

  I take a step toward him. In my heels, I come level to his chin. I put a hand on his right cheek and kiss him on the other. “Thank you. For being with me through all this. You can go now. I’ll be all right.”

  But Joey doesn’t leave. He looks down at me and puts his arms around my shoulders. He doesn’t pull me to him. That’s a distance I’ll have to close myself.

  “Well, maybe I’m not all right,” he says. “Did you ever think of that? Maybe I need you here with me.”

  I can’t look him in the eye. I needed Maggie, not the other way around. I don’t want to do the same thing to Joey. Not if there’s a choice.

  “You don’t deserve a train wreck like me, Joey. Find a girl who knows how to love you the right way.”

  His arms fall away like dead leaves in autumn. “You mean a kid, like Amanda Liu?”

  I think of Luke’s little sister, young and naïve, untouched by all this bitterness. “Yes. Like her. You’re a good guy, Joey. You deserve a little innocence.”

  Joey seems to cave in on himself, shoulders collapsing like a scarecrow without its straw. After a moment, he steps forward and presses a kiss to my forehead.

  I can feel the sorrow in it. The pain.

  “I guess it didn’t work, then,” he says when he steps back.

  “What didn’t?”

  “Being there for you. Being good.”

  Something shifts in my chest. That hollowness from this morning that I thought was because of Maggie. It was Joey all along.

  I feel it like a physical pain. The sound of a heart trying to beat again. Trying and falling short.

  “Almost,” I tell him. “It almost did.”

  Joey makes a study of the sidewalk, cracked and wavering in the heat. With a little shrug, he pulls himself upright and reaches into his shirt pocket. “Here.”

  I hesitate, staring at the photograph in his hand: a little girl, nine years old, wearing a sundress and a smile as big as the sky.

  Me. The way I used to be.

  My throat tightens. “That was Maggie’s.”

  “It was stuck between the pages of my book.”

  That dog-eared copy of Cyrano sitting on his dashboard. The one he’s been driving around with all week. I’d thought it was a reminder of Maggie, of their friendship. I guess I was wrong.

  And just like that, it falls into place. The last piece of the puzzle. Maggie knew what she was doing the night she died. She had always known.

  The pearls given to comfort Edina, held in trust for her mother.

  Seducing Luke Liu.r />
  Sending me three thousand miles away.

  Making plans to hang out with Joey so he’d be the one to find her. Knowing how I would turn to him.

  Every one of her affairs had been put in order. Including mine. The right picture in the right hands at the right moment.

  Maggie Kim’s bequest to me. A chance to be happy again.

  All I have to do is reach out and take it.

  Joey is looking at me, trying to see that little girl in the person standing before him, the way Maggie wanted him to see her. The way only she ever saw me.

  But that little girl’s not here anymore.

  And that’s what I loved about Maggie. She had hope for me, even though it was lost.

  “It’s a nice picture,” Joey says.

  “I know.” I reach for the print with cold fingers.

  Joey starts to say something and, for a moment, we are both tethered to the photograph of the little girl with the impossible smile. The one Edina had called “happy.” It trembles between our fingers.

  And then he lets it go.

  I take a deep breath.

  “I want to go home, Joey.”

  He kisses me on the forehead again, releasing me.

  “Then go.”

  I hear his shoes scrape the sidewalk, the buzz of a passing plane, the click of the air-conditioning units struggling up and down the block. He starts his car and I could stop him, tell him I was wrong, tell him I want to give us a try.

  But I’m not that girl. Not even Maggie could change that.

  When he drives away, I don’t look back.

  19

  There’s unexpected furniture on the little patch of dead earth we call a front lawn. Not much. A folding chair, some TV trays, a portable radio, littering the yellow grass like the end of a yard sale. I recognize it all as Roy’s.

  I kick off my shoes coming up the walk and enter the house through the front door.

  The living room is empty. Music is playing in my mother’s room. The door is shut.

  I pass through the house. The kitchen is spotless, and the bath mats have been washed and hung over the bathroom shower rod to dry.