“Hi.” I clutch Thor, now squirming, and wish he’d be still.
“Helloooo?” she drawls as if to say, This should be interesting.
It takes me a few seconds to find my bearings and the right words. “Sharon. We were arrested… John and I. They kept him… the police… they brought me here. I, I have nowhere else to go.”
“What…? Come in.” She sounds unhappy yet resigned.
I wave to Detective Tomlinson and step in.
“I thought you were in Oregon, Dawn.” Sharon lights a cigarette and squints through the rising smoke.
“I was. I was there for five months. I worked as a CNA again. But… well…” I trail off, hating what I’m about to say. “John talked me into coming back and… you know… I came back.” The words are hollow. I have nothing to say that will make my actions seem reasonable. Nothing to offer that makes sense… other than… I love him… But that all-consuming first love is really just an aching, confused memory—one that, despite the pain, I’ve been hoping to bring back to life for a couple years now. That’s why I came back—because the love is supposed to come back. But she knows all this, I think.
Sharon stubs out her cigarette and lights another. “What happened?”
“I don’t know, Sharon. The police busted down the door. There were guns pointed at us. First I thought a bomb went off and we were dead! They took us into the station and kept me in a room for hours, asking questions about people. They said it was about murder!”
She watches me intently through the acrid haze of her smoke. “All right. Well…” She sighs deeply. “Did they say he did it?”
I am shocked at her question. “No! They didn’t. They only said it was about murders. They showed me pictures of people I didn’t know and the house where they found the bodies bludgeoned a few days ago.” My voice is shaking. I don’t want to tell her I’ve been at that house, or about Eddie.
“What bodies? Where?”
“On Wonderland. It’s been all over the news.” I motion for her to turn on the television.
“Wait. Wait.” Sharon’s hands shoot up to her temples, and her thumbs rub circles hard into her scalp. She shakes her head to regroup. “Wait. Okay. Let’s see. First things first: when’s the last time you’ve eaten?”
“Uh, I don’t know. Since before we were arrested, I guess.”
“All right. You find the news, and I’ll get you something to eat.”
The rest of the day we are glued to the television and the headlining murders. We’re interrupted only by the dogs, John L and Pokie, who obliviously play tug-of-war with an old sock while Thor barks and nips at their heels. There isn’t any news of John’s arrest yet, and we can only speculate why. Sharon pulls out one of my nightgowns that she has packed in a corner dresser of my old room, and we change. The evening falls somberly, not much more said between us, cigarettes and a dim sense of routine from our past keeping us sane.
It is late; the stress is exhausting. Sharon digs into her stash of Valium from the bathroom drawer for us to get some sleep. We decide to make a last surf through the channels for the eleven o’clock news. The phone rings. We jump. John.
Sharon walks stiffly over to the small wooden telephone table and lifts the handle of the red rotary phone. “Hello? Yes.” There is a pause. “Hi. Uh-huh. Uh-huh. Now calm down… I don’t have that kind of money, John! Yes, she’s here. Just a minute.” Sharon hands me the phone, her face drawn and worried.
“Hello.”
“Baby. Listen, please. You two gotta help me!”
“Okay, John. How?”
“Listen. I’m in jail, and I only got a minute. Someone just threatened to kill me! You have to get me out!”
“John. I don’t have any money. What…?”
“Can’t you and Sharon scrape something up? Sell something? I don’t know… Just do it. If I’m in here much longer, I’ll die!”
“Okay. I’ll ask…”
“I gotta go, baby. Baby, please… I love you!”
“I love you too, John.”
Click.
Sharon lets out an audible sigh as I hang up the phone. Snapping open her needlepoint cigarette case, she lights another and sits down to think.
“He says he’s going to be killed if we don’t do something!”
“He told me. I don’t know what he expects us to do about it. He’s already stolen everything of value I have. Everything of Grandma’s—her china, her silver—and I’ll be damned if he thinks I’m going to my parents or anyone else again for a loan!”
I don’t know about Sharon’s things being missing, but I know John is a thief. My jewelry, missing items from Michelle’s, the suitcase at the airport… I recall a time I heard the dogs in the background when John was on the phone with me in Oregon. Still, I feel as if we have to do something. “He sounds scared, Sharon.” I’m out on a limb. “I believe him. There are bad people out there.”
“I know, but…” Her tone softens. “There’s nothing I can do.”
“Me either.” We don’t speak for a long while, both of us chain-smoking as if each cigarette might bring a fresh idea, but no solution comes.
“Well,” she says, finally giving in to emotional exhaustion. “We might as well go to bed.”
I wake the next day to Sharon’s voice on the phone as she calls in sick to work. “Family emergency.” Her words, starchy, cardboardlike, clear some time off with the doctor’s office.
“Morning.” I shuffle out of my old bedroom with mixed feelings of comfort from my things that still adorn the walls, but also pain from the memories of my attempted suicide and the bitter last days here. “Any news from John?”
“Nope. Nada.” Sharon’s tone is controlled and even. “Fresh strawberries in the fridge. Cream on the top shelf.”
I dole out a bowl for each of us with lots of sugar, and we sit down with the dogs to methodically peruse the daily news flashes. We jump every time the phone rings, thinking it is John or news of something worse. We pass the time playing rummy and catching up with each other’s lives.
“David, Karen, and Jamie moved away about six months ago. Thank God!” Sounding a little like her old self, Sharon exhales a blast of smoke with relief. “That’s the only good news I’ve had in a while.”
I laugh, enjoying for a moment some lightheartedness of the past, and I play a good bluff game of cards. “Are you all right, Sharon?” I finally ask. I feel a sense of heaviness from her that parallels mine. We haven’t spoken in a long time. I remember so many things John told me about how she didn’t care about me anymore and then, on the phone with him in Oregon, about her willingness to try and start over together with the promise of no drugs. My affection for her is real, and in my mind we are all supposed to have a fresh start… together. He said Sharon too! I remind myself of our conversations when he begged me to come back to LA, and I wonder if she knows this was going to be his last big deal… for us.
“I’m fine.” Her high-pitched tone strains as it always does when she has to talk about her feelings. “Like I’ve always told you, Dawn, the best you can do is to take all the garbage from life, stick it in a box, and put it away in a closet—somewhere where you don’t have to look at it—and get on with things.”
“Like organizing?”
“Exactly. I’ve been fine. Trust me.”
Sensitive to Sharon’s personality, I leave it at that and, as usual, we don’t speak anymore of such things, instead playing cards until bedtime. We go to sleep with no further word from John.