I pulled my sweater close and stared up at the veiled moon. I heard laughter from the house, Marvel and Ed in their bedroom watching Leno. I’d just reddened her hair for the fall, Autumn Flame. I shivered under the wet sheets of fog on the picnic table, still smelling dye on my hands, thinking of the infant Achilles. But this was no intentional trial, and the only stars in the sky were lines of planes coming into Burbank from the west.
I thought how it was sunset right now in Hawaii, and hot curried noon in Bombay. That’s where I should be. I would dye my hair black and wear sunglasses, I would forget all about Olivia, Marvel, my mother, all of it. Why couldn’t she tell me she was leaving? Did she think it didn’t matter to me, didn’t she know how entirely I depended on her? I felt hope slipping out from between my fingers like fish juice.
Was I the party jinx, a piece of space junk jettisoned from a capsule? No one to see me, no one to notice. I wished I was back with Ray, that he could hold me down with his eyes, bring me to earth again. It made me nauseous, to float, weightless and spinning in the moon rocks’ white glare, the silent funeral of the cypresses. No more jacaranda bloom. It was a landscape Van Gogh could have painted.
I was tired of the moon staring at me so indifferently, tired of the lunar landscape with the white rocks. What I needed was more cover. I slipped through the cyclone fence, careful to close the gate without making noise. The unpicked oranges spread their resinous scent in the moist air, reminding me of her. And then I thought of my mother and her teeth, her vitamin C. My ridiculous life. I crunched through the leaves heaped on the unswept sidewalks, humming a sweet-sad Jobim tune. Back to sucking dew off the sails. I should have known how it would end.
I should know enough by now not to expect anything from life, instead of giving in to Stockholm syndrome.
A white dog emerged from the mist and I called him, glad for a little company. Another stray. But he started barking at me, so intently that his front legs lifted off the sidewalk. “Don’t bark, it’s okay.” I moved toward him, to pet him, but another dog appeared, a brown one, then a third, a blue-eyed husky.
The brown one showed his teeth. The big husky barked. I didn’t know if I should keep walking or back slowly away.
“Go home,” I said. They were blocking my path. I yelled, hoping to scare them off, or that someone would hear, but the houses turned their blank garage faces to the street. “Go home!” I started to back away, but now the little one ran forward, lunged, snapped at my leg.
“Please, someone, come get your dogs!” I begged, but the sound of my voice caromed off the houses, shut down tight behind iron bars and block fences, security doors. And as the brown dog came at me, growling, I remembered what I’d managed to forget for just a few months—that it would always be like this. The brown dog sank its teeth through my jeans.
I screamed for help. It seemed to excite them, the husky knocked me to the ground, biting the arms I’d held up to protect my face. I screamed, knowing there was no one. It was a dream I’d had before, but now there was no awakening, and I prayed to Jesus the hopeless way people pray who know there is no God.
Then—shouts in Spanish. Shoes pounded the ground. Metal clanged on bone. Teeth letting off, sharp painful barks. Snarling, whimpering, toenails scrambling on asphalt, ringing blows of a shovel. A man’s face peered into mine, pockmarked, dark with alarm. I didn’t know what he was saying, but he helped me up, put his arm around my waist, led me to his house. They had a row of china ducks on the windowsill. They were watching boxing in Spanish. His wife’s frantic hands, clean towel running red. Her husband dialed the phone.
ED DROVE ME to the emergency room, a washcloth across my face and a towel on my lap to soak up the blood from my arms. He gave me a nip of the glove compartment Jim Beam. I knew it was bad if Ed was sharing his booze. He wouldn’t come with me past the reception area of Emergency. There were limits. I wasn’t his child, after all. He took a seat on the waiting room bench and looked up at the TV bolted into the wall, Leno shaking hands with the next guest. He hadn’t missed much at all.
I was shaking as the woman filled out a chart. Then the redheaded nurse led me back. I told her it was my birthday, that I was fifteen, that Ed wasn’t my father. She squeezed my hand and had me lie down on a crisp narrow bed, then gave me a shot, something good to relax me, or maybe because it was my birthday. I didn’t tell her just how nice it felt. If you had to get mauled, at least there were drugs. She stripped off my clothes, and the shreds of cashmere made me cry.
“Don’t throw it away,” I begged. “Give it to me.”
I held the bits of my luxurious life against the good side of my face as she cleaned out the wounds, injecting a beautiful numbness. She said if it hurt, just tell her. The redheaded angel. I loved nurses and hospitals. If only I could just lie inside a wrapping of gauze and have this gentle woman care for me. Katherine Drew, her tag said.
“You’re lucky, we’ve got Dr. Singh on tonight,” Katherine Drew said. “His father was a tailor. He does custom work. He’s the best.” Her mouth smiled, but her eyes pitied me.
The doctor came in, speaking with a lilt that sounded like joking, a movie I once saw starring Peter Sellers. But Dr. Singh’s brown eyes carried the weight of all the emergencies he had ever seen, the blood, the torn flesh, the fever and gunshots, it was a wonder he could open them at all. He began to sew, starting with my face. I wondered if he was from Bombay, if he knew it was noon there right now. The needle was curved, the thread black. Nurse Drew held my hand. I almost passed out and she brought me apple juice sweet as cough syrup. She told me if they didn’t find the dogs I’d have to come back.
Whenever I came close to feeling anything, I asked for another shot. No point in trying to be brave. No Vikings here. On the ceiling of the emergency room was a poster of fish. I wanted to go down under the sea, drift in the coral and kelp, hair like seaweed, ride on a manta ray in silent flight. Come with me, Mother. She loved to swim, her hair like a fan, musical staff for a mermaid’s song. They sang on the rocks, combing their hair. Mother. . . . My tears flowed from nowhere, like a spring from a rock. All I wanted was her cool hand on my forehead. What else was there ever? Where you were, there was my home.
Thirty-two stitches later, Ed made his appearance, gray-faced, baseball cap in hand. “Can she go now? I gotta work in the morning.”
The redheaded Nurse Drew held my hand while she gave Ed Turlock instructions about cleaning my sutures with hydrogen peroxide and ordered him to bring me back in two days to check healing, then back in a week to have the stitches removed. He nodded but he wasn’t listening, explaining as he signed the papers that I was only his foster kid, it was a county health plan.
We didn’t talk on the ride back. I watched the passing signs. Pic N Save, Psychic Adviser, AA. Hair Odyssey. Fish World. If I were his daughter he would have come with me. But I didn’t want to be his daughter. I was thankful I didn’t possess a single drop of his blood. I cradled the bloody cashmere in my hands.
When we got home, Marvel was waiting in the kitchen in her dirty blue robe, hair Autumn Flame. “What the hell were you thinking?” She waved her plump hands in the air. If it hadn’t been for the bandages, she would have smacked me. “Walking around all hours of the night. What did you expect?”