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Time to go, and they were leaving at the same time. Kat had just decided that the evening really ought to continue, when suddenly Jacki stepped in. Her bulbous tummy came between them at the door.
“Zak has an early day tomorrow, don’t you, Zak?” Jacki nudged him out.
Zak frowned slightly, but, unable to deny a woman with such an awesome and unassailable physical presence, finally agreed, saying, “Oh. Yeah, I sure do.”
How could Kat not feel drawn to such a man, one who instantly honored Jacki’s demented sisterly requirements in spite of the fact that Kat stood panting after him not three feet away?
Once home, Kat took her shower and put on a nightie several guys had enjoyed, the white cotton one with Victorian buttons. Her little brass Buddha sat on its stand and her Zafu cushion awaited. Thirty minutes a day, she had been told to meditate. She went toward it but somehow veered off into bed instead. She had two new men to think about, and what to do about Leigh huddled like a lump of dough in her craw.
8
R ay drove the Porsche straight from his mother’s to Stokes Avenue in Downey, a distance of about fifteen miles. He took it at a steady sixty-eight, not wanting to attract any official attention. It was almost ten.
The internal pressure that had got him onto the freeway made him feel fresh and energetic. He felt exultant, actually, because he knew that he was doing the one thing that would relieve his misery and need. His mother’s cake, far too rich, had left a metallic echo in his mouth. Pineapple always tasted that way to him, like someone had sprinkled aluminum shavings onto fruit. He never had the heart to refuse his mother’s food-she made the offerings with so much love. He didn’t even like sweets anymore, but he tried at her house.
He hadn’t expected Esmé to tell him the truth. Stubborn at times as she was about changes to her precious house, she had a temper as volatile as his own and the same sense of privacy. But now-the tape-
He burped several times, checked his mirrors for patrol cars, and sped up. They had lasted only seven months in Downey before he came home one afternoon from school to find his mother tight-lipped and packing. He packed his two allotted boxes and drove with her to the next identical place a couple of towns over. He went to another school a lot like the old school, and there was a new bully, messed-up math courses that repeated what he already knew, the usual mountains to climb.
Revisiting these scenes felt like playing with an aching tooth, painful but irresistible. Maybe if something made sense, if he could understand-what?
Was his life simply a random series of events strung together but ultimately unrelated? Or did the series add up to something meaningful?
This red-haired girl on his doorstep tonight-what a time she had picked to decide to make up with Leigh. He hoped she would go home and get laid and forget about them.
He turned on the defroster to clear the ocean fog off his windshield.
“So where is she now?” he had asked Leigh once, referring to Kat.
“No idea. Sometimes people you care about get lost,” Leigh said. She sat on the rug in front of the fireplace in the great room, drying her hair, wearing her pink satin robe. She had given Ray a present that day, a silver-trimmed comb from the thirties. They had been married three months, and he thought he knew her well by then. She had married him on the rebound and he didn’t care because he knew-knew in his gut as well as his head-that she loved him anyway.
“That’s it?”
“No, that’s not it, but-off-limits, Ray.”
Kat’s timing couldn’t have been worse. She had the look of a crusader. She hadn’t liked what Ray Jackson told her.
Well, what else could he have said?
He took the off-ramp he had noted on the map, got lost, and had to pull over to figure out his way, stopping on a street like a million streets in L.A., lined with a row of dingy lookalike tract homes built in the early sixties, one-story houses with one tree in front, a wide driveway, and a double-car garage like almost all the houses he and his mother had rented long ago. In the daytime, relentless California sun would keep the shrubs and lawns brown-tinged, and the few living trees struggling for height. At night, residents hid behind blinds, too tired to socialize with their neighbors after fighting the traffic home.
He found his place on the map and negotiated his way out of the maze of replicant streets. Cruising past the gas stations and the chain-store strip mall that passed for a downtown, he took a left and slowed. The trees on Stokes Avenue had grown a lot-there had only been new twiggy things to protect the bare lawns from the hard sun when he lived there.
The house, a new color, paler, looked about the same, and good news, showed no lights in its windows. He parked several houses away. As soon as he stepped outside the Porsche he started worrying about the dark clothes, realizing he looked just like a criminal scoping the place out.
Do it fast. He rattled around in his pocket, searching for his keys, striding swiftly up the open walkway and onto the small porch. He tried key one. No luck. Key two. Nothing.
Sirens started the neighborhood dogs howling. For one electric second, Ray feared they were coming for him, so he stopped what he was doing, slowed his breathing, and listened. He stood frozen below an aluminum overhang by the front door, grateful for the cover. Fog rippled through the warm night air like steam.
The sirens got louder. Were they coming here? Was it possible? Bass notes of his heart thrumming in his chest, he peered past a scruffy acacia tree toward the street.
He closed his eyes as the sirens receded. His breathing once again functioned. As he stood trying to blend into the overgrown juniper bush beside the railing, a memory hit hard.
They had moved to Downey in September, so he began school toward the begi
Here stood their new place, but wacky, the kitchen on the left instead of right, his mother’s furniture, always lightweight so that you could move it easily, replaced by leaden-looking antiques.
Shocked, he couldn’t move anything except his eyes for a minute. Here stood his home, reversed. His present life, overhauled in a day. Unfamiliar furniture. Strange portraits on the walls: a man with a mustache, babies in dresses. At first he had shifted his books from one hip to the other, as if adjusting their weight could shift things right, but the setting remained deviant, looking-glass unreal.
Had his mother moved without him?
Left him behind?
She could move very fast but even she couldn’t make a house with a garage on the left into one with a garage on the right. Logic should have kicked in about then, that he had stepped into an identical house with a reversed house plan, on the same street, a few doors down from his own house. He didn’t belong at his new school. He didn’t belong here. Where was his home? Lost like him.
His eight-year-old self had stood with the door open behind him for a long time that afternoon, lawn sprinklers fizzing all around the yards behind him. Where was he? They moved so much, he didn’t know. He had walked into someone else’s house and now, unsettled, he doubted everything. Was this the right street? Had he gotten off the school bus at the wrong stop or taken the wrong bus entirely? How would he find their house? He didn’t know.