Pasadena Page 8

I take her hand in mine. “Because ever since Maggie died, I’ve felt alone. I’m starting to see I’m not the only one.”

  Eppie looks at me then, really looks, and I wonder what she sees. Someone like Scott who can’t let go? A delusional girl with a death grip on the past? Or a friend? She squeezes my hand.

  “Do you know why I went to New Jersey?” There were a few reasons, but I would only share one. “To see my dad. On neutral ground, at my aunt’s place.”

  Eppie shifts positions, trying to follow the change of subject.

  “It was . . . bad when my folks split up. I haven’t seen him in four years,” I explain.

  Eppie relaxes. This is quid pro quo. Secrets are better shared, so I’m giving her one of mine.

  “How’d it go?” she asks. The spotlight is on me now. She breathes deeper. I don’t. But I keep going.

  “It didn’t. Maggie died before I could see him. And she’s the one who encouraged me to go.”

  Eppie’s face crumples with dismay. “I’m sorry, babe. That sucks.”

  “It’s fine,” I lie. “He’s remarried. Some woman with a daughter my age. They sent me wedding pictures after the fact. A surprise elopement to an island somewhere. I guess you can’t get there from LAX, or they’d have asked me to come. Right?”

  Eppie is giving me soft eyes. “That’s bogus,” she says.

  “Yeah.”

  We sit for a moment in raw silence. Quid pro quo’s a bitch.

  “You’re not getting too heavy over here, are you?” It’s Eppie’s dad, Mike, come to check on us.

  Mike has an easy way about him that’s a thousand miles distant from my own parents. I can imagine my mother at this party if she’d stayed, voice pitched too high, tottering around in inappropriate shoes for a barefoot, flip-flop night. She’d be oh-so-friendly to everyone while they laughed behind her back. My dad would just sit in his car, dialing the cops.

  But Mike takes a swig from his beer and says, “Come on, Shasta’s reading cards.” He reaches out a rough, weathered hand and pulls me to my feet. Eppie waves good-bye and steals the chance to recover herself while I follow Mike through the crowd.

  Tallulah and Dane are here. She’s perched on his lounge chair like a teacup on the edge of a shelf. Dane lazes back, a drink in one hand, the other playing with her hair. I’ve seen it before, the Appearance. She’s counting the minutes until she’s been here Long Enough and can leave. Dane’s got his hand on her and his eyes on the girls dancing near the fire pit. He looks like a lion in a cage, each stroke of her hair like the lazy swish of a tail.

  I follow his gaze through a mosh of blond- and red-haired girls from school, and spot Luke Liu on the far side of the fire. He’s drunk. It doesn’t take more than a look to know it. He’s in his uptight Windbreaker with the unironic ’80s Nehru collar over a polo and pressed jeans, but there’s a bottle in his hand and his face is red the way some Asian people get with their inability to metabolize alcohol quickly.

  Maggie never turned red. She’d had too much practice, or better makeup.

  I wave, but Luke doesn’t see me, his eyes intense and watery, glaring into the flames of the pit, as if daring the fire to stand up and fight. No point in questioning him tonight. I doubt he can string a sentence together, let alone a coherent thought.

  I wonder where Joey is.

  A twist, a turn, and Mike pulls me inside the house toward the sunroom that backs onto the yard. Outside, the heathens leap and thrash to Hank’s music. Inside, there’s a short line for the bathroom and the telltale scent of pot seeping from under a closed door down the darkened hallway. A sharp giggle verifies the illicit goings-on.

  That’s the thing about Blue House: Mike doesn’t judge. Hell, it’s probably his stash.

  Shasta is sitting on the old plaid sofa that faces the French doors as we enter. For an LA girlfriend, she’s surprisingly age-appropriate for Mike. A weathered, sun-bleached blonde in an Indian-print caftan and shorts, she’s got the cards laid out before her in a Celtic cross, a cross pattern of six cards, four down the side. Tiffany Green, one of the girls from my French class last year, is staring at the cards, wide-eyed with the spiritual insight she’s just received.

  “That’s so freaky!” she exclaims. “I . . . Wow, freaky! I’ll have to think about that! Thanks!”

  She rises unsteadily, bringing a plastic cup with her, and shakes her head as she stumbles out the door.

  “Milady,” Mike says, and urges me toward the sofa.

  “Hey, Jude,” Shasta greets me, and scoops the cards into a pile again. “Shuffle and ask away,” she says, handing me the deck.

  I tap the cards into shape, but I don’t shuffle, not knowing what to ask.

  Who killed Maggie? Why did she die? Will I be pretty or rich? And what would it mean if I got an answer, anyway? Nothing that would hold up in a court of law. Seriously, Your Honor, a fortune-teller told me the butler did it.

  “Oh, boy,” Shasta says. She’s good at reading more than just tarot cards, apparently. She takes the deck away from me and picks up both of my hands in her own.

  “You poor, poor thing,” she says. She turns my palms faceup and rubs her thumbs over them. It would be creepy if it wasn’t so soothing. “You’re not ready for answers, kitten,” she tells me. “It’s just too hard right now. I know what that’s like. People die and you’re left there looking for a reason. Poor thing,” she croons again.

  I feel a sigh building in my chest. I look at the cards on the table. I should ask a question. Just a simple question.

  Suddenly, Shasta stops rubbing my hands. She squeezes them tight and looks at me earnestly. “Do you want to get high, hon? It might help.”

  “No, thanks,” I tell her, and try not to shake my head at the kindness of hippies. “But don’t let me stop you,” I add.

  She doesn’t. She leaves me on the couch, staring at the cards. I flip over the one on top of the deck. It shows a picture of a man in a tunic with a hobo bindle over one shoulder, a dog at his feet, about to traipse happily off a cliff. Beneath the picture a caption reads “The Fool.”

  But the card is upside down. I’m going on a journey, and I don’t have a leg to stand on.

  A sudden movement in the window catches my eye.

  Outside, by the fire, Joey has joined the dance.

  “I’m glad you’re not here all summer,” Maggie said to me. She blew a smoke ring from her stinking Ukrainian cigarette and adjusted her sunglasses with a painted fingernail.

  We were decked out in swimsuits and cutoff shorts, cleaning out pitchers in the sink of her pool house, prepping them for a second batch of teenage hangovers and regrets. I washed while Maggie dried with one lackluster hand and smoked with the other.

  Outside, in her parents’ backyard, half the student body was partying, drinking spiked lemonade and strawberry daiquiris made from a cheap mix. Her parents and Parker were gone for some weekend church retreat and school had just let out for the summer.

  Next year, we’d all be seniors, masters of our universe. Maggie bought the vodka and let us splash in her pool, we provided the rest.

  “I’ll miss you, too,” I said back.

  “Don’t be a dolt. I’m gonna miss you, but you’re lucky. You see all those fools. Mark Draper just did a cannonball. Jesus. Does anybody do that anymore?”

  “Apparently Mark Draper does.”

  Maggie pulled down her shades to fix me with a look. “That’s what I mean. This is the future of America, Jude. We’re college-bound and pathetic. Most of these guys are just looking to skate into UCLA or a CSU somewhere.” She looked out the window and shook her head. “Seriously, we’re killing off brain cells just looking at these idiots.”

  “Well, you have summer school, don’t you?”

  Maggie was infamous for taking extra classes at Pasadena City College every summer. I didn’t kno
w why. She still sat next to me in AP English each fall, but it made her feel cosmopolitan, as she put it.

  “Do you see what I mean?” Maggie said, drawing deeply on her cigarette, then flicking it into the sink. I listened to it sizzle into a wet cinder beneath the soapsuds. “You get to go back east. I have to go to fricking PCC just to talk to anybody who isn’t a troglodyte.”

  “Hey, I’d be happy to hang out all summer. Me leaving was your idea.”

  “Yeah, well, not telling your mom about Roy was yours. Leaving is the next best thing.”

  To running, I wanted to say. When things got bad in my family, my mom ran from my dad. I didn’t want to be like her, but there I was, packing to go.

  “You need to work some shit out, Jude. See your dad. Curse him out, or give him a hug—whatever it takes. You can still hook up with Joey next year. He’d look good in a tux.”

  “Prom? Really?”

  Maggie sighed. “You’re seventeen, Jude. Live a little.” She looked out the window and lit another cigarette. “I’ll try to do the same. Even with this lot.”

  She wasn’t wrong. It was my turn to sigh. “Well, these are your friends,” I pointed out.

  Maggie wrapped an arm around me. “You’re my friend. Joey’s my friend. Dane, Tally, Eppie, Hank, Edina. With a handful of exceptions, the rest are just”—she waved her free arm around me, her silver bauble bracelets clashing with the gesture—“extras. And not very good ones at that. Jesus.” She pointed out the window just in time for me to see Mark Draper dive back into the pool and lose his swim trunks.

  “Charming,” Maggie drawled.

  I laughed. “We are truly blessed.”

  “Come on,” she said. She yanked off her bikini top and dropped her shorts on her way out the door. “Let’s show them how it’s really done.”

  It took me a second to follow. When I did, my clothes stayed on.

  Blue House after midnight. Out in the yard, kids are drunk and dancing, or slipping off to make out. I go splash some water on my face in the suddenly empty bathroom, and wander back outside.

  I want to go to sleep, but not here, and not at home. The thought of calling my mother to come get me is repugnant, so I return to my perch overlooking the city and wish I had a vice. Ice water and memories do not an Irish wake make.

  But Maggie was my vice. All my bad habits and rash decisions balled up into one beautiful girl. She would have danced around the fire, and I would have watched her, laughing. She would have taken a hit from Shasta’s little glass pipe, still cold from the freezer, and not even coughed. She would have walked up to Joey and put her arms around him from behind and said, “Take me away from here,” and he would have seen it as a seduction, a rescue. An apology.

  But I’m not like Maggie. I never was.

  I pull out my phone, and dial home.

  10

  I’m not good for much the next day. I wake up with a headache pounding the back of my skull, and a scream in my throat. I miss my life before this weekend. I miss Maggie. Her death hangs in front of me like a weighted curtain I’m powerless to lift.

  It’s early, my mom and Roy are still asleep. It was a big night for her, picking me up from an actual party. The house is quiet.

  I lie in bed and stare Death in the face. A tear streaks down to my pillow. My hands clench.

  I’m sick with anger, with the need to turn back the clock, to erase eternity. Orpheus went to the underworld to snatch back Eurydice. Superman flew backward around the earth to resurrect Lois Lane.

  Me, I sit up, slide my legs out from under the covers, put one foot on the floor, then the other, and will myself to stand.

  I pull some clothes from my dresser, and shuffle down the hall to the bathroom. I turn on the shower and take a long hot piss while the water warms up. When I flush, the water pressure from the showerhead dips. This is wildfire season and our plumbing is sympathetic to the needs of the fire department.

  I step into the shower, head still beating like a drum, and feel the water on my face like tepid tears. I turn it up as hot and strong as it can go, hoping to scour the pain away, to feel something on the outside instead of this burning futility within, but as I said, it’s fire season. The water sputters rather than blasts, and gets no hotter than a cup of vending-machine coffee.

  Maggie’s funeral is tomorrow. I need caffeine and something black to wear. That means the mall, or Maggie’s closet.

  Mrs. Kim said I could have anything. The pearls are already around Edina’s undeserving neck. But there’s a certain dress and hat that might still be waiting for me.

  I climb out of the shower. Pull on my shorts and a tank. Grab a Diet Coke from the fridge for breakfast.

  Fortified, I head out the front door, my spare set of Maggie’s pool house keys in hand.

  “I think it’s sexy.”

  “I think you look like a widow in a bad movie,” I told her.

  Maggie stuck her tongue out at me from behind the black birdcage veil she was wearing. “Tally and I picked it up in NoHo.”

  God knew there were enough thrift stores and costume resale places around this city for the two of them to play dress up for the rest of their lives. “Tally’s a poser. She dresses like a Connecticut housewife.”

  Maggie turned to me and vamped, hips thrust out at an angle, one hand thrown back in a casual fake laugh. The black sheath and pumps made her look like Jackie O, complete with pearl choker.

  “I think she’s got style,” she said. “Tally’s traditional. She’s just growing into it.”

  “So, in another twenty years, the twinsets and pearls will make sense. But her boyfriend will still be a pretty-boy jackhole. Like I said, poser.”

  Maggie clucked her tongue and struck another pose. “Dane’s not so bad, really. They’re kind of like Beauty and the Beast.”

  “But who’s who?” I snarked. “Mags, seriously, ditch the hat.”

  Maggie adjusted the pillbox on her head, humor fading. “Are you kidding? I’d rather go naked, like Godiva, avec chapeau.”

  I step outside my house. Joey is waiting for me on the curb, an extra-large latte in each hand. I could kiss him. But I have my pride.

  Maggie once told me Joey tamed a wild squirrel with bits of food and a safe place to rest in his backyard. Eventually, it was eating out of his hand. But wild is as wild does. One day, it bit him, and that was that. I hope I don’t do the same thing.

  I leave my unopened soda on the front steps.

  “You didn’t say hello last night,” Joey says.

  “I thought you weren’t speaking to me.”

  “Maybe I would’ve. If you’d said hello.”

  We look at each other for a moment. In the light of day, he’s got shadows under his eyes. Just like me. I almost laugh. That’s the thing about parties—everybody looks happy.

  Everybody’s lying.

  I step closer and say, “Hello.”

  He hands me one of the drinks wordlessly and we climb into the car.

  “Maggie’s,” I say. “Then Luke’s.”

  “Your wish is my . . .” He lets the sentence hang.

  I reach out and squeeze his hand. We don’t let go until we get to Maggie’s.

  • • •

  The hat is there but the dress is gone. Who says you can’t take it with you?

  “We gave it to the funeral director to . . .” Mrs. Kim’s hands flutter around her face like pale butterflies. “Oh, I wish I had known you wanted it.”

  “No, it’s perfect,” I tell her, and ask to keep the hat.

  “Certainly, certainly,” Mrs. Kim says, already looking around for something else to do or say. “There was one thing, though. A strand of pearls. They were my mother’s. She gave them to Maggie before she died.”

  The words hit hard and Mrs. Kim sits down suddenly on the couch. Burying her daughter w
ith her dead mother’s pearls. Sometimes the circle of life is more of a noose.

  “Edina has them,” I say, sitting beside her.

  Joey stands in the living room doorway like a bodyguard.

  “Edina? Who’s Edina?” Mrs. Kim asks.

  Joey and I exchange a glance. I shrug. “Another friend. Maybe Maggie gave them to her?”

  “Ha.” Mrs. Kim laughs derisively. As if Maggie might have done it against her express wishes, to hurt her. Maybe she had.

  “I could be wrong,” I say. “If they turn up, I’ll let you know.”

  For a moment, Mrs. Kim looks paler than usual. “The . . . the coroner called today.”

  Joey leans forward. I stiffen. “Oh?” The strain in my voice is obvious.

  Mrs. Kim shakes her head, staring at the pattern in the carpet at her feet. “I don’t understand it. They say they found drugs in her. Did she do drugs?”

  The look she gives me is so raw with grief that my voice catches in my throat.

  When I clear it, she’s still waiting, begging me for an answer. “No, Mrs. Kim,” I say. “No, she didn’t do drugs. She never touched them.” It’s the sort of lie you tell a mother. Aside from pot, it’s also the truth.

  “Then how did this happen?” she asks. “Valium, they say, Vicodin, Rohypnol. Where would that come from? Where would she—” She breaks off suddenly, remembering something, or overwhelmed with grief, and in an instant, Mrs. Kim the starlet is back. Placid, poised, impossible to read.

  “Mrs. Kim?”

  She looks at me for a moment, her emotions brushed off like so many flies. She pats my leg. “Thank you, dear,” she says. “I’ve got the service information in my office. Let me get it for you.” She rises and totters off, looking old.

  “That’s hard-core,” Joey says. Even he’s surprised.

  Maggie didn’t do drugs like that. It has to be a mistake.

  “Note to self,” I tell him. “Get a closer look at the coroner’s report.”

  “So, I’m your secretary now?” he asks.

  “Nope. You’re my better half.”