Away for the Weekend

“Well, who is it?” demands Paulette.

Beth looks back at the phone. “I don’t know. It doesn’t recognize the number.”

“For God’s sake, answer it!” orders Hattie. “Find out who it is.”

“Maybe it’s the driver,” suggests Lucinda. “You know, explaining why he’s late.”

And maybe if she stalls long enough, Gabriela will give up for now.

“It’s probably one of my friends. They must’ve gotten a new phone.”

“But they wouldn’t be calling you now,” says Isla. “They know you’re busy.”

The song continues playing.

Paulette takes a step towards her. “Are you going to answer that, or what?”

Beth takes a step back. “But why would the driver be calling me?”

“It doesn’t matter.” Hattie pokes her. “For God’s sake, Gabby. Just answer the phone! It could be important.”

Beth turns so that the others are looking at her back. To her relief, it isn’t Gabriela. It also isn’t the driver. The driver has a deep, rich voice that makes you feel as if you’re sitting by a fire on a snowy afternoon. The driver is always calm, even when someone cuts him off. This voice is high and thin, and belongs to someone who is almost never calm.

“Thank God I finally got through to someone!” screeches Taffeta MacKenzie. “What the hell is wrong with everyone today? Did they all throw their phones into the ocean?”

“I’m sorry,” says Beth. “Who is this?”

“Who do you think it is?” snaps Taffeta. “Your fairy godmother?”

“Ms MacKenzie?” ventures Beth.

“Where are the others? Why don’t they answer their phones?”

The others move closer, their whispers like the buzzing of bees. What is it? What’s the matter? What does she want?

“But their phones didn’t ri—”

“There’s been a change of plan. This is not supposed to happen, of course. For what that damn limo costs, it should be as infallible as the Pope.”

“Something’s happened to the car?” guesses Beth.

“Yes, something’s happened to the car. It’s broken down. On the freeway! He can’t break down in town. Or near a garage. Oh, no. He has to break down on the freaking freeway. What was he even doing there?”

“I’m sorry. I—”

“You’ll have to take a cab. Go out on Sunset and grab the first cab you see.”

“Bu—”

“I’ll pay for it when it gets here.”

The line goes dead.

Traffic is heavy, but moving fast. In the few minutes it took them to reach the main road, more than half a dozen cabs have gone by, but now there isn’t one. They wait. And wait.

“How can there not be one single cab?” moans Isla.

“There’s some kind of curse on us.” Hattie is looking at Beth.

“You can say that again.” Paulette is alternately shaking her phone and holding it to her ear. “This is, like, totally dead.”

“I knew I’d have time to go back and look at those shoes again,” grumbles Hattie.

“Why couldn’t she have called us a cab?” complains Nicki. “It’s not like we know our way around.”

Beth, still nervous that the man in the Panama hat is going to show up again, isn’t listening. She looks up the road. There are several buses coming, but still no sign of a cab. Beth sighs. She doesn’t notice Aricely, Jayne, Esmeralda, Delila and herself hurrying along on the other side of the street because, just as a bus starts to move towards the stop a few feet away from them, a car parked further up the road suddenly shoots into traffic – so that she can now see the small red sports car parked behind it.

The bus moves up to the kerb. The doors open. It will come as no surprise to learn that – along with drugs, sex, germs, vitamin deficiencies, sink holes, falling airline debris, cell phone radiation and killer bees – riding on public transport in Los Angeles is among the thousands of things that Beth’s mother has warned her about. According to Lillian, the only people who use it are people who have no choice – the poor, the criminal and the insane. There have been horror stories: robberies, knifings, infections, violent outbursts – even hijackings. Didn’t Aunt Joyce have her wallet taken right out of her bag? But for once Beth doesn’t heed her mother’s advice. Panic overrides Lillian’s dark prophecies. She doesn’t know what the man in the sports car wants, but she doesn’t really want to find out… “Come on!” she orders.

Hattie, Isla, Nicki and Paulette all look at her as if she’s mad, which is an understandable reaction.

Lucinda follows her on.

Remedios sits at a café near the bus stop. Her wig sits on top of several burger boxes in a garbage can on the corner. The only thing on her head now is a baseball cap with the inscription: Have a Nice Day! She watches Beth and Lucinda disappear inside the bus, the door shutting behind them so quickly you’d think they were tiny fish being swallowed by a whale. And she watches Gabriela sprint through the stilled vehicles, Delila behind her, and – thinking that she sees Beth – straight past Remedios and up a side street.

Remedios is feeling pretty pleased with herself. Otto knows that she paused time and traffic and got Gabriela across the boulevard as she was supposed to, but he doesn’t know that, because of her, Gabriela thought she saw Beth going up into the hills and followed. Nor does he know that Beth saw him, and got so scared she jumped onto the bus that just happened to come along before the swap back could be made. He’ll know that his plan has been thwarted, but he won’t know whom to blame. She really is one very accomplished angel. Remedios turns her head enough to be able to see the red sports car, its driver still trying to figure out what just happened. Resisting the temptation to wave at him, she slips from her seat and is gone.

Sodom and Gomorrah, what in the name of God’s blue sky is Beth doing? She’s getting on a bus! Why in Heaven is she getting on a bus? You might think that Otto, having experienced it for quite a long time now, is beyond being surprised by human behaviour, but it seems that he isn’t. She was supposed to wait for the taxi – which, of course, wouldn’t appear until Gabriela was right beside her, but instead she’s getting on a bus! And not just any bus – she’s getting on the wrong bus! He feels like shouting at her. “Are you crazy? Where do you think you’re going? You’re headed for the ocean!” She’s supposed to be going to The City of Angels College of Fashion and Design, not the verdammte sea. Why would she do something so stupid?

Otto watches Beth vanish into the moving billboard that is the westbound Metro, its body covered with a teaser for a popular TV show and bored-looking faces at the windows; and then he glimpses Gabriela striding into the hills. Fire, flood, famine and plagues of locust, rodents and disease! He bangs his head against the steering wheel, just as if he’s a real Californian. How could Remedios have blown such a simple task? Beth was standing there, waiting for a cab that wasn’t going to come. Gabriela was charging through the traffic as if it were no more than a mirage. They should have stood within inches of each other. They might even have touched! For the love of Lot, how much easier could it be? And, instead, what happened? Beth got on the bus before Gabriela reached the sidewalk, and Gabriela, guided no doubt by the illogic peculiar to teenage girls, kept right on going.

It is, of course, unseemly for an angel to groan out loud, but Otto is definitely tempted. He should, perhaps, be above such petty emotions as anger and the childish desire to push Remedios Cienfuegos y Mendoza into the Pacific Ocean, but Divine Beings have never been short of a temper – and he isn’t above anything at the moment; he’s right down in the thick of it: traffic, crowds, pollution and enough noise to make it a major miracle that the dead manage to sleep at all. And it hasn’t even occurred to him yet that Remedios’ failure to swap the girls back was deliberate.

Otto stares at the smiling, toothy faces painted on the back of the bus as it lumbers up the road. This is all his worst fears of what might happen to Beth parading around Los Angeles in the body of Gabriela Menz come true. Does she even know where she’s going? Will she know when she gets there? And what if she doesn’t get there?