The Girls from Corona del Mar Read online

  I was slack-jawed at her generosity of spirit.

  “More beer?” she said, just at the moment that Arman held out the bong to me.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Accidents Happen

  I got drunker that night than I had in years, and I had more fun than I’d had in even longer. We drank beers, shot the shit, told Arman all about Brittany Slane and her downy hair and constant, preposterous, but probably true, genealogical claims. I noted that Lorrie Ann no longer had any problem laughing at Brittany Slane. She didn’t seem to feel nearly as guilty as she used to. As the night progressed, she and Arman slowly began to act more and more like a couple, laughing at inside jokes, letting their hands rest easily on the other’s thigh or shoulder. There was something about the impropriety of Lorrie Ann’s relationship with Arman that reassured me: she would make sure that she got what she needed. Gone were the days of casserole blog posts and self-imposed sainthood.

  Lorrie Ann seemed happier than she had since before she married Jim. She was silly in a way I didn’t remember: making crazy voices, not just for Zach, but in general. She had even adopted weirdly exaggerated arm movements highly reminiscent of Chris Farley. She and Arman, who was also a musician, had been obsessively rehearsing adaptations of Boyz II Men songs with insanely complex harmonies, which they sang for me ad nauseum. “The nineties were dope!” Arman kept saying.

  Arman, as it turned out, was Armenian. I asked about how his family escaped, his story of coming to America. It seemed to surprise Lorrie Ann that there had been a massive genocide perpetrated against the Armenians. “What?” she cried. “I didn’t know! You all act like I’ve been to college or some shit.”

  “Don’t worry, baby,” Arman said, “we moved here when I was four. I’m about as Armenian as you are.”

  It was a silly night. We all took turns dancing in front of Zach, who laughed wildly. The stupider we looked, the more he laughed, and his laughter was so wonderful that we lost all inhibition. Elvis Costello was blaring from surprisingly good speakers, Arman was moonwalking (an eerie sight on his mechanical legs) and doing the grocery cart, I was doing the chicken dance, Lorrie Ann was doing some weird combination of the Macarena and the sprinkler, and Zach was laughing so hard sometimes we had to stop to make sure he could breathe okay.

  Zach was soon to have another operation on his calf muscles to lengthen them, and yet it did not seem that anyone expected this operation would make him able to walk. It was being done for its own sake or for some other reason I did not understand.

  Lorrie Ann, despite the three beers and small amount of pot she smoked that night, seemed to be a good mother, and genuinely cared for Zach. I witnessed their rather revolting bedtime ritual. He had a feeding tube now because he hadn’t been able to get enough nutrition from eating solids, and I had to look away from the place where it entered his abdomen. I was both touched and alarmed by how easily and naturally she tickled him, cajoled him, kissed him on the forehead, and in other ways covered his poor twisted body in small affections. He was, after all, her kid, and even more moving than seeing how much she loved him was seeing how much he loved her. Every time he looked at her, he got moon eyes and seemed to tremble with the excitement of looking at her beautiful face.

  I thought: Me too, kid. Me too.

  Late, late in the night, long after Zach had been put to bed, I noticed that Lorrie Ann had been gone from the room for an unusually long time. “Where is she?” I asked Arman.

  “Bathroom,” he said, reloading the bong.

  I crawled there on my hands and knees. How many beers had I had?

  “Lolola?” I called, tapping at the door with my fingernails.

  “What?” came her muffled voice. I could already tell, just by the timbre, that she’d been crying.

  “Please open up,” I said. “You can cry, but you aren’t allowed to cry alone.”

  The door cracked open and I could see her sitting on the toilet, blowing her nose into a wad of toilet paper in the bright yellow light of the bathroom.

  “It’s hard,” she said, suddenly hiccuping.

  “It must be so hard.”

  “He’s never going to grow up,” she hissed into the wad of toilet paper.

  There was nothing to say to that, there was nothing at all, and so I just pushed the bathroom door a little farther open and crawled in and crouched at her feet, hugging her ankles. I don’t think I understood until that moment that Zach wasn’t going to grow up, that he was going to stay like this, unable to walk or talk, wearing increasingly large Christmas sweaters, having his diaper changed. How long could it go on? How long was he expected to live? I was too afraid to ask.

  “And I miss Jim,” she said. “I miss him so much, and I’m also so mad at him that I can’t even stand to think about him. Fucking playing war games. Getting himself fucking blown up. What an idiot. What a fucking idiot! How could he? How could he leave us like that?”

  “I know,” I said, hugging her feet. “I know.”

  Arman found us like that: Lorrie Ann’s blue eyes glittering, myself prostrate at the feet of a goddess. He used two forearm crutches to help aid his balance on his mechanical legs. “There’s Goldschläger in my apartment,” he said, “and I’m willing to share.”

  I found out that night that Lorrie Ann had had her uterus removed when Zach was born. This was long after the Goldschläger. We were all sloppy drunk.

  “Oh yeah,” she said, “and it just killed Jim. He wanted to have another one. To try again.”

  “Why did they have to remove it?” I asked.

  “They don’t explain shit like that to you,” she said. “They just said that my uterus had been damaged too much to repair and so they removed it. I was unconscious when they did it.”

  Arman and I sat, thinking about that. I remembered Dana and the chili fries. A nightmare in which everyone is trying to be polite and doesn’t know what to say. That was what she had said.

  “I feel like,” Arman said, in a dreamy contemplative voice, “technology is causing new moral dilemmas.”

  Lorrie Ann nodded. “I know what you mean,” she said, but I had no idea anymore what they were even talking about. I was lying down with my cheek pressed into the industrial carpet, looking up at the Magritte poster, wondering if there was a face behind that apple, wondering where Lorrie Ann’s uterus had gone, where it physically had gone. Did they throw out things like that? Did they incinerate them? Did they make such items of the body vanish entirely from this world?

  “I love you,” I said suddenly. “I love you so much, Lorrie Ann!”

  “I love you too,” she said.

  “Promise?” I asked, because it seemed impossible that Lorrie Ann could really love me. She was so perfect, so beautiful.

  “Promise,” she said.

  I found that I did not worry as much about Lorrie Ann after that. It seemed to me that the bad luck vultures had come and gone. They had finished with her. Jim’s death had been the final blow, and she had survived, had perhaps even become better for it. We talked on the phone perhaps once a month, sometimes letting it go longer, but whenever we did talk there was an easy intimacy that it felt like we’d earned. This, this was what friendship was.

  ——

  I had just moved to Istanbul after getting my PhD when I got the call.

  “Mia,” she said, her voice quiet but vibrating with tension.

  “Hey Lolola,” I said, yawning and pouring myself a cup of coffee from the French press. The window was open; Franklin liked to keep the windows open, especially when we slept, and I remember that the breeze that came in was too cold, but tangy with salt from the Bosporus.

  “I don’t know what to do. I’m going to explain to you, and then you have to tell me what to do.”

  “Okay,” I said, easing myself into a chair at the kitchen. I knew then, as one always knows in such moments, that the news would be bad.

  “My mother is in the hospital and Zach is afraid of hospitals. He screams, bad,
whenever we have to go in one, and there’s no one to watch him. I can’t get ahold of anybody. What do I do?”

  “What about Arman?”

  “He’s not there. I don’t know where he is.”

  “What happened to your mom? Is she okay?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t know, that’s why I’ve got to get down there. It was the sheriff’s office that called me. Our apartment got broken into.”

  “The Larkspur place?”

  “Yeah.”

  The thought of someone breaking into the Larkspur place sent a ripple of outrage through me. I could feel the hairs on my arms stand on end.

  “Someone broke into your apartment and hurt your mother?”

  “I don’t know. I guess so. I don’t know,” Lorrie Ann said. “Just tell me what to do with Zach. I can’t leave him here, right? I can’t leave him in the car. If I take him to the hospital, he’ll start screaming. He screams and screams. It’s just awful when he does. For the last surgery they had to sedate him right away.”

  Franklin came up behind me then, began to rub my left shoulder with one of his huge, warm hands.

  “Can you call the hospital and just … I don’t know, explain? Get your mom’s nurse on the phone and at least ask what’s happened to her?”

  “Yeah, yeah, I can do that. I haven’t called. I just called you. I just needed you to tell me what to do.”

  “I know. I know. Okay, well, call the hospital. Where is she, Hoag? You know, maybe they have some sort of day care center there or some kind of—”

  “Right, okay, then I’ll call you back,” Lorrie Ann said, and hung up.

  As the story evolved over the next few hours and the next few weeks, it turned out that Bobby, Lorrie Ann’s older brother, had, without anyone quite being aware of it, gotten into a bit of trouble. Probably this should have been evident from the fact that he was thirty-two and still living in the gnome-filled apartment with Dana, but this state of affairs had been going on for so long that no one really questioned it anymore.

  Why hadn’t Bobby married?

  Was he gay?

  No, he didn’t seem to be gay. And he did always have a girlfriend, who was usually sweet enough, always in her mid-twenties, still struggling through undergraduate in an effort to one day become a teacher/​nurse/​counselor. These girls of his were often ponytailed with athletic legs tanned from being out and about. They were the sort of girls still young and pretty enough to get by looking all right in discount clothes from Marshalls and T.J.Maxx. In five years’ time, they would begin to look dumpy and uncared for, but Bobby managed to somehow get rid of them before this ever happened, and he seemed to have an almost unending supply of new ones to choose from.

  Bobby himself worked for a smaller, rival company to Junk to the Dump, and had risen in the ranks just enough to have control of his own truck and crew. It was a job he didn’t hate that paid decently and allowed him to bring home miraculous things that other people had thrown away: a chair shaped like a giant baseball glove, a statue of the Buddha, extremely cool bead curtains made of those Chinese coins with squares punched through the middle. He still fiddled with his Fender Stratocaster, but his days of playing in bands and trying to get gigs were long over. (Besides, everyone knew that Lorrie Ann, of the two of them, had been the inheritor of their father’s talent.)

  Evidently, though, this life had not been entirely satisfactory to Bobby, or else he had just begun dealing crystal meth and marijuana for no reason. According to Bobby, it was the latter: he had never meant to become a drug dealer—it just sort of happened. The normal party scene of his twenties had gradually morphed into something darker, but no less ordinary. The good ducks among his friends had married, had children, stopped drinking. The friends who remained unmarried, without careers, and ready to party every weekend with Bobby were naturally of a more sinister bent. There was something a little bit wrong with them. And that thing that was a little bit wrong with them caused them to sometimes want to do blow on the weekends with nineteen-year-old girls, and caused them to need to take several bong hits before work, and caused them to pursue these pleasures with a regularity no longer spontaneous, but routine. Bobby had gone from being someone who sometimes knew the right people to an outright hookup to a small-time drug dealer.

  And so one day, a dumb seventeen-year-old named Carlos had driven with his friend from Santa Ana to Corona del Mar and shot up a lot of speed while waiting for Bobby to leave for work. Once Bobby had finally left, driving off in his Jeep, Carlos had run up the stairs to the Swifts’ apartment, only to delightedly discover that the lock didn’t even need picking! The door was open!

  He had no idea that Bobby lived with his mother. He had no idea that Dana would be home. His intent was, thrillingly, to rob Bobby of either money or drugs. Already, one can imagine, Carlos was on edge, and the gnomes must have been a frightening surprise in their own right, so when Dana startled him by emerging from the kitchen in her bathrobe, he had grabbed the biggest gnome at his disposal and whacked her over the head with it. What was not explained was why he kept on whacking her, even after that gnome (ceramic) had broken, with another, lighter weight, but equally large wooden gnome. Kept on whacking her even when she was motionless on the floor.

  “I don’t know,” Bobby later told Lorrie Ann, “the kid must have been crazy high.”

  And while Carlos was successful in downing Dana, he did not carry out his mission, having become too spooked to do anything but run back downstairs, jump in his friend’s car, and shout, “Drive! Drive!”

  What I didn’t understand when Lorrie Ann first called me about the Zach-hospital problem was that, if it was nine o’clock in the morning in Istanbul, which it was, then it was eleven at night in California, which is precisely why Lorrie Ann did not know of any day care that would be open to take Zach while she made her way to the hospital. It was also why it upset her so much that she couldn’t find Arman. Where was he?

  Lorrie Ann had been notified so late in the evening only because Dana had not been found until Bobby came home that night around eight o’clock, her head swollen to almost twice its size and the color of an eggplant, but her breathing still coming, shallow but regular, her lips smeared against the pink shag carpet of the living room, shards of broken gnome all around her. Bobby, as anyone would, called 911. As he waited for the ambulance, however, he became concerned: cops would be coming and there was a half pound of crystal meth in his “bedroom”—really the same annexed corner of the living room that Lorrie Ann had used as a girl. He did not just want to flush it—really, there was too much of it to flush—so he ran down and put it in his car, thinking the cops would not, at least not right away, have any reason to ask to inspect his car. Then the paramedics arrived. There was a flurry of activity. Everyone agreed that Bobby should follow the ambulance in his own car to Hoag, where they were taking his mother.

  Once in the car, however, Bobby just did not feel good about driving all the drugs to such an official place as a hospital. He couldn’t put the drugs back upstairs; the house was still crawling with cops who were fingerprinting things and collecting evidence. It was a nightmare. He decided that the best thing to do was take a “slight” detour to his buddy Seth’s house in Mission Viejo and leave the drugs there. Seth, as it turned out, was only too delighted to play host to the drugs, and suggested that what Bobby really needed in order to brace himself for the hospital and recover from such a traumatic thing as finding his mother on the floor with a head the color of eggplant was to get a little high. Not a lot, just a little. Just a bump.

  And so it came to be that Bobby never returned to the hospital that night, but instead had his buddy Seth pretend to be the sheriff’s office and call Lorrie Ann, cryptically telling her to go to the hospital, where her mother was in critical condition.

  It took days to sort this full story out, especially as Bobby, out of shame, kept lying about his end of things. What ultimately happened that night was that Lorrie Ann was abl
e to find out the basics of her mother’s condition over the phone: traumatic brain injury, induced coma, a surgery called a ventriculostomy already performed, where a small tube had been inserted via a hole in the cranium into one of the ventricles to allow fluid to drain. It would take Lorrie Ann several hours to understand that they were talking about a hole they had made in her cranium, not just a hole that was naturally there, and it would take her longer still to realize that by “into one of the ventricles” they meant: into a part of the brain itself, a part they just hoped wasn’t very important. Lorrie Ann explained to the nurse that she had a child with severe CP and a phobia of hospitals. No, there was no special day care open at that time where Zach could stay while Lorrie Ann visited Dana. But, the nurse reassured her, her mother was not conscious and was stable for now, and so Lorrie Ann could come absolutely whenever she could make it there. “Even if it’s really late?” Lorrie Ann asked. The kindness of this nurse was making her break down crying.

  “Even if it’s the very middle of the night,” the sweet nurse said.

  ——

  And it was the very middle of the night, past the middle of the night, really, by the time Lorrie Ann made it there.

  Around three, she heard Arman come home. By that time, she had already begun drinking whiskey. Zach was in bed. He was sleeping. She wanted, badly, to leave him sleeping there while she went to the hospital, but she knew she absolutely could not. And so she poured herself a bowl of Lucky Charms and, while she was at it, she also poured, into a Winnie-the-Pooh mug, a couple of fingers of whiskey.

  Even though she did not know precisely where Arman was, she knew where he was. And every hour that he stayed out made her angrier and angrier, so that her blood was circulating through her body at what felt like twice its normal speed. When she heard him come home at three, she even debated whether or not she should go over there and knock. She might explode at him. She could, after all, be mature and wait until morning.