The Girls from Corona del Mar Read online

  “It will be true every morning for the rest of time,” I said, and I really felt, as an almost physical reality, that everything was going to be fine. Everything was going to be all right.

  But of course, when we woke up in the morning, Lorrie Ann was gone, and, mysteriously, she had taken the tea set with her.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  What Goes Up

  Almost three years later, when I was back in California, I arranged to see Arman.

  It had been a blessing, really, to have Lorrie Ann gone that morning. To wake up to the empty sublet, the garish colors of its un-matching furniture staring jauntily back at us in the gray light of the misty Istanbul morning. To be allowed to ignore her and everything that had happened in her life and make eggs and toast and coffee in our underwear and giggle over our good fortune: to love each other, to be getting married, to be having a baby. And in the kind of hypocrisy native to everyday living, I pretended that possibly Lorrie Ann might still go home. She had said she was going home. I wanted to believe that she still might, even though she had left without getting the money from Franklin, even though, as far as I knew, she didn’t have a way of getting back to the States. The note she had left said only: “Don’t fuck it up, you two. Franklin, you’re the real deal and I love you. I wish I could stay, but I’ve gotta go. Don’t be mad, Mia. We really were friends, you know. XOXO, Lolola.”

  At the time, I thought that it was her life, and that as much as I wanted to live it for her, she was going to have to do it on her own.

  But as the weeks and then months passed, I realized I had no way of getting in touch with her. None of my old numbers for her worked. She didn’t have a Facebook account. I had no idea what Portia’s last name was and so could not have tracked her down that way, even if she had returned to Portia, which I found doubtful after the defenestration of shoes. I tried calling Dana, who was sweet, but who had not heard from Lor in over a year. When Franklin and I got married later that year, I sent the invitation via e-mail to her old Yahoo account. Surely she had an e-mail account she checked regularly, I just didn’t know what it was, and I guessed it wasn’t her deeply odd, teenage handle: Mistress​O​Cats​Baby@​yahoo.​com.

  When Grant was born, I sent his birth pictures and a letter of apology to the same e-mail account. She was right, I wrote: actually being a mother blew everything else out of the water. She was right: there was nothing more important.

  I had, of course, been expecting to have a little girl, a treacherous little Inanna, a mimeograph of Lorrie Ann and myself. I did not know what it would be like to fall in love with a little boy. I did not know that his hair would be the color of applesauce with cinnamon and that in all his baby pictures he would look profoundly worried: his brow furrowed as he tiredly faced the camera, his chubby face as jowly as a seasoned politician’s.

  And so it came to pass that Franklin and Grant and I moved back to Southern California when Grant was two. We had published the Inanna cycle and it had gotten rave reviews. We’d even made money off it. We had also been offered a pair of positions at UCSD, which we took gratefully. It was easy to look up Arman, and if I’d truly thought he might have news of Lorrie Ann, I would have contacted him long before. But maybe because I was back in California again, he was newly on my mind. One day, I just looked up the number of his smoke shop, Pipe Dreams, called, and asked for Arman.

  The man who had picked up did not answer me, but seemed to be waiting for me to say more.

  “Arman?”

  “Who is this?”

  “It’s Mia,” I said, “Lorrie Ann’s friend.”

  “What the fuck do you want?”

  Apparently this was Arman. I was glad at least that his family had given him the smoke shop back.

  “I don’t know what I want,” I said. “I haven’t heard from Lorrie Ann in years, and I guess I just wondered if you knew what happened to her.”

  “No.” Arman sighed, then said something to someone in the background.

  “That’s too bad,” I said.

  “I wish her the best,” he said, “I really do. But I’m not surprised she hasn’t called me. I mean, would you? You know she left me in India, right? Fucking broke off my ass and in a foreign country.”

  “She told me she left you a thousand dollars.”

  There was a beat of silence, then Arman said, “Yeah, as a check that I couldn’t cash anywhere. I mean nowhere would take that fucking check. It was a nightmare.”

  “That sounds awful,” I said. “I’m sorry that happened to you.”

  “Long time ago,” he said. “But hey, you know, do you want to get coffee sometime and catch up?”

  I was surprised that he wanted to see me. Later I would realize that by calling him on his lie that Lorrie Ann had left him penniless in India, I had revealed that I had spoken to her more lately than he. How could he resist trying to find out what I knew?

  “Uh, sure,” I said.

  “There’s a Starbucks right around the corner from the shop,” he said. “Could you come by today?”

  “Not today,” I said. “I have Grant with me. My little boy.”

  “Oh Jeez, congratulations. Saturday then? Three o’clock?”

  As I prepared to make the drive north that Saturday, I realized that somewhere along the line I had gotten old. Not in a bad way. I was putting on tinted moisturizer in the hall mirror and going over the plan for the day. My youngest brother, Alex, and his new boyfriend were in town. I wasn’t wild about the boyfriend, who was a hipster with stylish dreadlocks and whose name was Rion, “with an ‘i,’ like ‘lion,’ ” he had told me proudly. We were going to meet them and my mother at the mall by our old house in Corona del Mar, but I was heading up early to meet Arman beforehand.

  “I don’t like you going alone,” Franklin said. He was eating flax pancakes and yogurt at the table while Grant sat in his booster seat, poking the yogurt with his plastic spoon.

  “I’m meeting a man with no legs in a Starbucks. What do you actually think is going to happen?”

  “I don’t know, I just wish I could be there.”

  “Go to the park with Grant. Swing on the swings,” I said, sliding the lever back of an earring through my ear. I looked in the mirror. I looked like a grown woman with a child. I looked educated. I looked taken care of. I looked soft.

  “You look great,” Franklin said, watching me appraise myself. “We’ll meet you by that big fountain at the mall at five?”

  “At five,” I said.

  Arman was sitting hunched over a table when I arrived. I waved at him and motioned that I was going to get a drink. It was startling seeing him—I had really only ever met him a few times, but I had heard so many stories about him and thought of him so often that a fictional Arman had begun to replace the real one in my mind. It was with a start that I recognized the curly broadness of his upper lip, the pug-dog roundness of his eyeballs. Mostly, seeing him made me viscerally remember Lorrie Ann in a way that was both exciting and painful.

  When I came to the table with my chamomile tea, he smiled at me with a genuine openness and gratitude that surprised me. “Thanks so much for coming,” he said.

  “It’s a trip to see you,” I said.

  “I know—it’s like seeing her, almost.”

  “I know.”

  “I realized when you called the other day,” he said, “that I’ve been slowly changing things in my mind. That I’ve been editing my memories of her. Like, I got used to telling people she left me broke in India because, you know, I wanted my family to give me the smoke shop back. I didn’t want them to know I had any money, right? So that became the official version, and it was only when you mentioned the check that I even remembered that it had happened that way. I felt like I was losing her because my mind kept changing her, you know?”

  “I know exactly what you mean,” I said. “I’ve replayed the same memories so many times that they’re practically threadbare.”

  “So when’s the last ti
me you talked to her?” he asked. His hair was down and loose all around his shoulders, and he tucked it behind his ears as he asked me. It made him look earnest and young.

  I told him about meeting up with Lorrie Ann in Istanbul, about her stories of Portia and her life as a party girl, about her sudden departure during the middle of the night, her vaguely enigmatic note—that shift to the past tense: we really were friends.

  “Yeah, she fucking loves to do that,” Arman said. “Leave in the middle of the night and leave a note.”

  I hadn’t realized until he said it that she’d done that to both of us.

  “I don’t get it,” I said. “Sometimes I think she was the best person I ever knew in my entire life. And other times, she seems just like a shithead.”

  “Well, she was fucked up,” he said.

  “I don’t like that—I don’t like just making it about the drugs.”

  “No, I don’t mean like she was wasted, I mean she was one of the most profoundly damaged people I’ve ever met,” Arman said, bobbing his head like a chicken in a succession of quick nods.

  “Was she?” I asked. She had come from such a happy family; she had always been so beautiful, so effortlessly suited to the world, such an adept swimmer, even in the cold Pacific. I had not really considered her as damaged.

  “I always wondered,” Arman said, “if maybe her dad didn’t, like, mess with her.”

  “Terry? No,” I said.

  “Somebody messed with her,” Arman insisted.

  “Nobody messed with her! I was there—I knew Terry. He wasn’t like that. Her family was incredibly happy. Tight-knit.”

  “Nobody knows anybody when it comes to shit like that,” Arman said.

  “Why do you even think this?”

  “Stuff she said, ways she was. She always got really bad bladder infections. Had just tons of problems with her vagina. Sometimes she was so tensed up she couldn’t have sex at all.”

  “That could have just been from the bad birth with Zach, though, right?”

  “But he wasn’t even born vaginally, so why would that make her vagina, like, hysterically sensitive?”

  “Hysterically sensitive?”

  “She couldn’t even wear tampons. Said it hurt her like crazy.”

  “Maybe she was just really tiny,” I said.

  “No, it was like an emotional thing. It came and went depending on how she felt. That’s why I think maybe Terry messed with her.”

  “But she never said anything to you, right?”

  Arman shook his head, his black hair glistening in the overhead track lighting. “But, like,” he went on, “she always used to talk about how guilty she felt over Terry’s death because she had been wishing for him to die and then he got in that accident.”

  Why would Lor have been wishing for Terry to die? Suddenly the peculiar clarity with which I could see each particular strand as part of the shimmering whole of Arman’s hair gave me the impression that I might be dreaming.

  “But I was there!” I said. “She wasn’t wishing that Terry would die. I mean, maybe she had like a fleeting thought because he’d grounded her or something. But she didn’t say anything at all to me about this.” I fussed with the crackly wrapping of the pack of madeleines I had bought. I remembered the way Lor had become withdrawn after Terry’s death. The sudden vegetarianism, the refusal to make fun of Brittany Slane.

  “I know, I know,” Arman said. “And who knows. Maybe I’m wrong. But I’d bet everything I’ve got that somebody messed with her, even if it wasn’t Terry.”

  Against my will, Arman’s words were causing massive tectonic shifts in my understanding of the past. That family that had been so secretive, so aloof, so together—I had thought they were bound together by their love for one another. I had thought Terry was cool! Suddenly his insistence on wearing top hats and big gold earrings well into his forties seemed stranger, almost sinisterly adolescent. I wondered whether Dana was embarrassed when he dressed like that for parent-teacher night. What if he had been messing with Lor?

  “This never happened,” I said.

  “Well, how else do you explain the fact that her uterus just busted open when she was in labor?”

  “The Misoprostol—” I began.

  “Come on,” he said, “really? You think just the Misoprostol?”

  It was true that most of the women with uterine ruptures resulting from Misoprostol had had previous cesareans. It had been one of the details about Zach’s birth story that always bothered me. “So what, you think she was so emotionally scarred by her father that it actually affected the tissues of her uterus?”

  “No,” Arman said, jerking his head back and giving me a stern stare, nostrils flared. “I think she must have had a bad D and C sometime when she was a kid. He wouldn’t have been able to take her to a real abortion clinic.”

  “This is crazy,” I said and hid my face by taking a sip of my tea. Was that why she had told Franklin she’d had an abortion? Was she talking about something that had happened before Zach?

  Even though the lights in the Starbucks were bright, I had the impression that I couldn’t see, but also that I could see too much. Whenever I looked at Arman’s face, I could see all his pores and I had to look away. I had always thought that Lorrie Ann was a victim of God. The idea that she was a victim of man was somehow much worse.

  “This is nuts,” I said.

  “It happens every day.”

  “But I was there!”

  “How else do you explain it then?”

  “Explain the uterine rupture?”

  “No,” he said, “explain how incredibly fucked up she was.”

  I just stared at him. There was that past tense again.

  “Yeah.” I swallowed. “She was pretty fucked up, I guess.”

  The whole night with my family, my mind was like a seagull flying against the wind in a storm. There was such a forceful logic to Arman’s theory—it explained all the tiny details of Lor’s life that just didn’t make sense: the uterine rupture, the weird lie about having an abortion, the fact, even, that she had chosen partners as safe and yet loser-ish as both Jim and Arman. And yet it seemed impossible that anything of the kind had happened. How often had I spent the night at her house? How often had she spent the night at mine? We told each other everything.

  Still, there wasn’t time to think about it. I was at a restaurant that sold twenty-dollar sandwiches toasting Alex for his new job, and watching my mother, who had blossomed into her role as grandmother in a way that I could never have expected, teach Grant how to scrunch up a straw wrapper and make it grow like a worm with drops of water. I was holding hands with Franklin under the table, I was laughing, I was asking Rion where he had gone to undergrad, I was insisting that we order dessert and conning my mother into sharing the cheesecake with me as she told me that my other brother, Max, had a new girlfriend who sold Kirby vacuum cleaners and was Wiccan. We all agreed this was a good thing: Maxie was simply too serious. After law school he had gotten a job with a big firm in New York and started working ninety hours a week and never coming home. We hoped his whacky girlfriend would lighten him up.

  After dinner, we all decided to walk around the mall, which was open air, a vaulted terra-cotta place, dotted with planters and palm trees. There was a koi pond, and so we took Grant there and sat around on metal chairs as he dashed along the edges of the pond, following the biggest koi, a thick, fat, red-orange fish with dull, silver eyes.

  “You’re a good mother,” my mom said. Franklin and Alex and Rion were talking boisterously about some new superhero movie that was going to come out.

  “Thank you,” I said. “That means the world to me, that you would say that. I want so badly to be a good mother.”

  “And Franklin is the best dad I’ve ever seen.”

  “I know,” I said. I was thinking about how scared my mother must have been to lose my father. She had been so young when I was born, only twenty, and my father had been a salesman,
made lots of money. Right away, he had bought them a big house, gave her a BMW, a Rolex. It was a dream, like a fairy tale. When she found out he was cheating, when I was two, she had confronted him and he had immediately suggested he move out, but it took years before he would give her a divorce. He was canny, and he knew that if he could show the court that for four years they had been separated but still married and my mother had been supporting herself, he wouldn’t have to pay any alimony, and so that was exactly what he did. I could still remember those years, when it was just my mother and me, eating pancakes for dinner. No wonder she had leaped at Paddy once the divorce came through. No wonder she had wanted a glass of wine at the end of the night.

  “You were a good mother too,” I said.

  “I wish I had been better,” she said, not looking at me but at Grant, who was on his stomach flat on the concrete beside the pond with his hand in the water, trying to pet the fish.

  “I don’t think I could have done any better,” I said. “If I had been in your situation.”

  My mother shrugged. “You play the hand you’re dealt.”

  Had Lor gotten clean or had she stayed addicted? Was she, even now, jamming some dull needle into a vein in a Paris bathroom as the next woman in line beat on the door? Girls didn’t come from perfectly happy families and then just become self-loathing heroin addicts. Did they?

  What was most alarming, in the end, was the vertiginous sense that I did not know Lorrie Ann, and, in fact, had never known her. I could not sort out who she might be in my head. “We really were friends,” she had written me.

  How, I kept thinking, how had she possibly left Zach? Having had a baby of my own now, I found it newly unfathomable. I reached over and squeezed my mother’s hand.

  “MOMMY!” Grant cried. “I touched it! I touched its EYEBALL!”

  That night, when Franklin and I were in bed, I turned to him. “Do you think someone molested Lorrie Ann?” I asked. “When we were girls?”

  “I didn’t know Lor,” Franklin said. “So I can’t say. Is this something Arman said?”