On Tuesday afternoons, if I hadn’t done anything to offend Kathy, such as calling too often or not calling enough, I got to take Rina out for a couple of hours. The fact that I got to see her at all was, in essence, an act of charity on Kathy’s part. Throughout the separation proceedings, she never once played the card that I was a career criminal. She got custody, but she could also have had a restraining order to keep me away from Rina. The fact that she hadn’t was something for which I was deeply grateful.
When I pulled up, my daughter was waiting in front of the house we all used to live in, just south of the Boulevard, which meant that I didn’t have to see Kathy if she was there, or know that she’d left Rina alone, if she wasn’t there.
“You’ve grown an inch in a week,” I said as she climbed into the car.
“It’s your genes,” she said, settling in. “Mom’s like normal size.”
“She’s actually short,” I said, “but she makes up for it with the force of her will.”
“I need ice cream,” Rina said. She usually shies away from discussion of her mother, which shows that she’s smarter than I am. I hope she also shies away from discussing me with Kathy.
“I think ice cream is achievable.” My old neighborhood slid by, full of memories, some of them good. “Anyplace special?”
“Somewhere close. I have a lot of homework.”
I signaled for a right without replying, and Rina said, “I really do. Don’t get your feelings all hurt.”
Of course, my feelings weren’t hurt. I’m an adult. “What kind of homework?”
“Genetics.”
“In sixth grade?”
“I’m accelerated, Dad. You know that.”
“When I was in sixth grade we were looking at maps.”
“When you were in sixth grade,” Rina said, “most of the world hadn’t even
“Humor is a dominant trait,” I said.
“Brown eyes, too. That pisses Mom off, that I got your eye color.”
“Hard to imagine.”
“What?” She reached for the radio and I gently intercepted her hand. I loved my daughter but I hated her music.
“Your mother being pissed off,” I said, and then added “about eye color. But she’s dominant in other ways.”
“Mom’s lawyer would call that alienating the child from the custodial parent,” Rina said. “No music?”
“I meant it genetically, not emotionally.”
She made a sound I could only interpret as a scoff, sort of a burst of air. “You did not.”
“I did. Except for your eye color, you look just like her.” And she did; every time I looked at her I saw the girl I’d fallen in love with for life when I was sixteen and she was fifteen. Kathy and I had stayed together through high school and through her college and my sort-of college, and then we’d gotten married. And stayed married until it became inescapable that one of us was going to have to change, and that it was going to be me, and that I couldn’t. And none of it was anything I was proud of.
“You’re as beautiful as she is,” I said.
“Oh, I’m
“If by ‘nobody,’ you mean the boys at school, I’m glad to hear it. You’ll be fighting them off soon enough.”
“So why no music?”
“If we could find something we both agreed was music, it’d be fine.”
“No music, then.” She lifted the metal flap on her seatbelt and let it snap closed. Then she did it again. “What are you up to?”
“Freelancing,” I said. “Trying to stay out of houses with large dogs in them.”
“One way to do that,” she said, “would be not to go into houses that don’t belong to you.”
“Jesus,” I said. “I’d probably end up watching television.”
Rina said, “Millions of people do.”
I turned right on Ventura, heading for 31 Flavors. Rina stole a look at me and said, “What happened to your face?”
“A chandelier exploded.”
“You were under it?”
“Actually, I was swinging from it.”
“See, this is one of the things that makes me different from my friends,” she said. “When I ask them what their fathers do, they say something like banking or real estate. I say he swings on chandeliers in other people’s houses and comes home looking like he donated blood with his face.”
“Interesting guy.”
She slumped down in her seat, the sit-on-the lungs posture of teenage discontent. “That’s one way to look at it.”
“Is there another?”
She rolled her window down and rolled it up again. Then she said, “Never mind.”
I’m always happy to sidestep a real issue. “All right.”
“Why’d you have to be so honest with me when I was little? Why couldn’t you tell me you were a chef or something?”
“Well, I only work about two nights a month, for one thing. And it seemed like a good idea to tell you the truth.”
“Maybe that’s overrated.”
“Telling the truth?”
“Let’s drop it,” she said. “You know what I’m talking about.” She reached over and took my hand. “We don’t see each other enough. I promise not to pick a fight.”
“In that case,” I said. “You can listen to whatever you want.”
It took her less than five seconds to find something that sounded to me like a fender assembly plant being attacked by a bunch of guys with nail guns, but she nodded along with it. I decided to show her how much I loved her, so I reached over and turned it up.
Rina laughed, and I felt better than I had in days.
“Remember how you once told me that the most interesting questions about a society are the ones they don’t ask?” Rina had a double-thick double-chocolate double-malt in front of her, so viscous she couldn’t get it up the straw.
“The thought wasn’t original with me, but I probably said it.”
“So explain to me about Japanese horror movies.”
“Not really one of my fields,” I said. “But which ones? The old radioactive monsters-”
She shook her head as she dredged the straw through the shake and licked off the clump of glop that came up with it. She was wearing rimless glasses that I hadn’t seen before, and it almost broke my heart that I hadn’t known she had them. “No, those are easy to figure. The newer ones, you know,
“What’s hard to figure? They’re ghost stories.”
“Yeah, sure, but what’s with all the dead wet girls?”
“Ah. Dead wet girls. Well, first, they’re ghost stories, right? The dead wet girls are ghosts.”
“Dead wet girl ghosts.”
“Lots of Asian cultures, the Chinese and the Japanese, anyway, believe that the ghost of someone who was wronged before death is especially dangerous. Women and girls in Japan are sort of repressed. They’re relatively powerless. They can’t take revenge during their lifetime, so they’re more likely to bear a grudge after they’re dead. So the ghosts are female. And as for dead, well, they’re ghosts, so they’re dead by default. And my guess is that they’re young, meaning
