Melancholy seemed to ooze from the box as I piled Dad’s things back inside. I set the journals on top; I’d have to ask my mother if I could keep them and the little metal puzzle, which I put into my pocket. By then it was nearly noon, so I called her.
“Hello, Mother.”
“Oh, hi, sweetie!”
“Are you going to be home this afternoon? I want to bring the box of stuff back and take a look at those photos.”
“Sure! Come right up.”
There was one more thing I wanted to check; a last-ditch chance but I couldn’t ignore it. “I want to drive past the old house first. What was our address when we lived in Glendale?”
“You mean the house on Louise?”
“Did we ever live in another house in Glendale?” How could she irritate me so much with so little effort? I wondered.
“Well, no, of course not!” she snapped.
“Then the house on Louise must be the one I want.”
She sighed dramatically and rattled off the address. “When will you be done?” she asked.
“In a couple of hours. I’ll bring the box by about. two.”
“All right,” she replied, her voice a little sharp. “We can have lunch.”
I hoped it wouldn’t be the same minuscule meal of fruit I’d seen abandoned on her breakfast plate the previous morning, but I didn’t think I should refuse. “I’ll see you then.” Hanging up was a relief. She still made me feel unreasonable and clumsy even on the phone. I hoped I’d get the last of what I needed from her today, so I could go home as soon as possible. Any good feeling I’d had for my hometown was curdling fast.
The house on North Louise Street would be my last shot at finding any trace of my father’s ghost, short of dumb luck. I couldn’t think of any other places he might linger, and the house was a long shot as it was. The strangeness in his office made me think he wasn’t going to be found just haunting around, but I might find a loop or some other trace that might tell me something.
I’d kind of expected something more. impressive, but once I got to it, it was just a house. Plain California stucco on a narrower lot than its neighbors, palm trees at the curb, a long driveway on one side to a garage in the back. It was only a few blocks, a short walk, from what was now Paul Arkmanian’s office.
My memory saw the house as much larger than its narrow two stories. I sat and stared at it a moment, the house looking just the same in both the Grey and the normal so it seemed to be sitting in a pale shadow of itself. Wind chimes and shiny crystals hung from the porch rafters and in the windows. A rainbow-striped flag made a curtain for one pane on the upper floor. Subtle signals of the private life the residents kept quietly confined within the walls they’d cleaned of any trace of previous tenants. There weren’t any particular lines of energy or gleams of residual emotion clinging to the house. No one loved it, or hated it, or lingered in it. It was just shelter, nothing more.
I got out of the car and walked across the street to look more closely at the house, but nothing changed. There were no ghosts here, no extraordinary extrusion of the grid or traces of more than passing emotional storms. It was as clear as scrubbed glass. Curtains twitched in nearby windows and I sighed, knowing it was only a matter of minutes before one neighbor or another called the cops to investigate me and my obsession with the house on Louise Street. I shrugged and went back to my car.
I wasn’t any closer to talking to my father or figuring out what had tied us both to the Grey or when or how. I could almost understand, in a confused sort of way, why he’d written his suicide note to me—or at least not to my mother—but that didn’t answer the questions I had. Disappointed, I turned the car around and headed back to Hollywood and up the hills to my mother’s stormy white villa.
CHAPTER 13
My mother was on the terrace, practicing a complex yoga pose when I arrived. She looked like a scarlet pretzel wrapped in green energy tissue. She untied herself as I entered with the box on my hip.
“I’ll be done in just a minute, sweetie. You can put that on the kitchen counter and sit down out here.” Then she wriggled into a more tortuous position than before and became very quiet.
I put the box down on one of the empty chairs—petty rebellion, that—and sat down on another, surveying the table for signs of lunch. It was just on two o’clock according to my watch, so her lack of preparation wasn’t due to me. She just wasn’t ready, which was no different from my childhood; if we had an appointment that furthered her ideas for my life, she’d be sure to have me dressed and prepped at least an hour before we needed to be gone. I would sit or stand, careful not to muss my audition clothes, until she was ready, which would always be in the nick of time, or just past it. We would rush to auditions and photo shoots in a flurry of shouting and speeding and narrowly missed traffic accidents. If we were too late, the drive home would be a misery of recrimination.
I shook off the urge to grind my teeth and put my booted feet up on the empty table while I waited. Ten minutes later, my mother unwound herself and trotted over to glare at me as she wiped her face on a designer towel.
“Really, Harper, I taught you better manners than that. Get your feet off the table. Now.”
I left them where they were. “I thought we were having lunch.”
“We certainly won’t be having anything if your feet are on the table, Snippet.”
I wanted the things from the box too much to tell her off. Narrowing my eyes in annoyance, I lowered my feet back to the ground.
My mother gave me a plastic smile and headed into the house. “Come on inside. Bring the box.”
Shaking my head at myself in disgust, I picked up the box and carried it into the kitchen. She pointed to the end of the spotless granite counter.
“Just put it there. You can make a salad while I take a quick shower. Be right back, sweetie,” she added, and whisked off, leaving me standing in the middle of the kitchen, too stunned to shoot her.
I was still trying to decide if I should make the salad or dump the entire contents of the fridge on her terrace when a round, black-haired woman about my age bustled into the room.
She stopped and blinked at me. “Oh. Hello. You’re. Veronica’s daughter, right?”
I blinked back. “Yes. Are you a friend of hers?”
The woman laughed. “No, I’m the maid! I’m Venezia—Vinny. She was in such a hurry to get me out of the house today, I left my bag, so I came back for it. I think she’s too excited about you coming to see her.”
“She doesn’t act like it. She just told me to make salad while she takes a shower. ”
Vinny snorted. “Salad! Feh! Rabbits eat salad! Crazy woman. Here, I’ll make the salad. You sit down.”
“No, you’re off duty. You shouldn’t do that,” I protested as she headed for the gleaming steel fridge. I followed her.
She turned to give me a deprecating snort over her shoulder and pointed at the dining table. “You’re the guest. You don’t make lunch! Sit down. Crazy woman. ” she added, shaking her head and piling food on the counter. “Five years, I never see her eat anything but fruit and mineral water and crackers and drink wine. Today she has salad—proper damn salad.” She flung the refrigerator door wide and pointed at the full racks. “You see all this? This is not for her. This is for that man,” she added. She rolled her eyes. “Crazy!”