—You have to go home to your mother today, I said.
—No, Joan, please.
—Forgive her.
She began to convulse, saying please over and over again. I didn’t know what to do and so I took the red slip off my body. I stood essentially naked before the girl and took her into my arms, pressing her into my body as she wept. Then I pushed her back and handed my beloved dress to her. She was shocked. The only way I knew how to get people to leave was to give them things that meant something to me. I could afford to give up anything tangible. But I was scared to death to give my time or my heart.
She drove her body back into my arms and I stroked her hair and whispered in her ear, Eleanor. Do you hear me? I’d give the world to have my mother back. And she was a real cunt.
35
I FOUND A RENTAL IN the Palisades with a terrific view of the ocean. It was white and modern and almost entirely windowed. It was on stilts, hovering high above the houses beneath it. It wasn’t my taste but its clean lines and featureless rooms were blank and I craved blankness. It was preposterously expensive, but once again I had no one for whom to care.
For several weeks I barely left the place. I walked through the high-ceilinged rooms and opened one box every few days. I would unpack only half the box, get tired, and take a pill. I was terrifically lonely, but it was a familiar emotion. I missed Alice so much that I ached when I woke in the morning, imagining her doing sun salutations in her foul yard.
One rainy afternoon—God, how I hated that it never rained in Los Angeles—I rented a pickup and drove up to the Canyon to pick up the Ploum. I’d expected to leave it there, for Kevin or River or the new tenant of the hot house, but I had no furniture. And though I could afford to buy some, I felt the piece would work in my new glassy living room. It was garish and I missed it.
River was playing catch with Kurt when I drove up. He shielded his eyes from the sun and smiled.
—Joan, he said.
His smile was so pretty and his demeanor so light that even just being near him made me feel a modicum of peace.
He helped me load the couch into my truck. It was hotter than ever in the house. Without furniture it looked satanic. It felt like everything that had happened in the house was not real. To see it empty like that, I could talk myself into the idea that I hadn’t lost a child and killed a man in the house.
River made a big show of carrying the massive Ploum on his back, like Atlas. In the past I might have effusively complimented his strength. But this time I only looked down at my phone, disengaged. When he came back in, I thanked him and he stood there unsurely. I turned and walked to the kitchen window where I’d spent so much time looking to see if the coyotes were prowling.
Quietly and tentatively, River came up from behind and kissed me on the neck, the way Vic had done in Scotland. But when River did it, it felt cleansing. I didn’t turn around and he gently raised my arms and pressed my palms to the wall over my head. He threaded his fingers through mine. We made love; it was a tender and peaceful closure. When it was over, he held my body, both of us still standing. He had such strong arms. It was a good way to leave the house.
He wanted to come with me to see my place. I told him maybe next time. He looked a little wounded and I realized that true power came from not caring about anyone. That was the last time I would sleep with a man. I was through with the gender.
All I wanted was to see Alice, to tell her the way my childhood ended, the way our father met his end. I wanted to tell her why I’d walked through the world in corpse pose. I wanted to know if my mother’s intuition was correct. If my father was going to leave us for the woman over the oven and her unborn child.
I’d missed her as much as I hated her. I imagined what she would have said if I’d taken her upstairs and showed her the corpse of the old man. I dreamed of her brushing her hand along his cool chest and saying, Honestly, it’s all right. It was your only recourse.
Deplorably, immaturely, I would have felt proud to tell her the way it ended. The way the police came and the ambulance, too, pointlessly. After strangling Lenny, I pushed his body down the spiral staircase. He didn’t go all the way down but landed in the middle, arms hanging between the slats and legs dangling, like a tangled marionette. That was where I left him. I told the police that I’d been sleeping off a miscarriage upstairs, and he must have come in, as he’d done a time or two in the past during one of his episodes, and I woke to feel his erection against my rear and I screamed and he jumped; he turned to run but tripped, because he was old and out of it, and this is where he landed, I said, indifferently pointing to the spot. The air in the house was thick with the smell of old blood. The men just wanted to get out of there. They didn’t question a thing.
I couldn’t stop thinking how I’d been so needy with Alice. I was disgusted that I had always been the one talking. I was disgusted that
