Wild Child, page 2
“Oh, that?” she said. “That’s from when I was a kid.”
“A burn or what?”
“Bicycle.” She teased the syllables out, slow and sure.
His hand was on her knee, the warmth of the contact, and he rubbed the spot a moment before straightening up in the chair and draining his glass. “Looks like a burn,” he said.
“Nope. Just fell in the street.” She let out that laugh again and he drank it in. “You should’ve seen my training wheels—or the one of them. It was as flat”—flaat—“as if a truck had run me over.”
Her eyes flickered with the lingering seep of the memory and they both took a moment to picture it, the little girl with the wheel collapsed under her and the scraped knee—or it had to have been worse than that, punctured, shredded—and he didn’t think of Lisette or Angelle, not yet, because he was deep into the drift of the day, so deep there was nothing else but this deck and this slow sweet sun and the gull that was gone now. “You want something else?” he heard himself say. “Maybe a Rémy, just to cap it off? I mean, I’m wined out, but just, I don’t know, a taste of cognac?”
“Sure,” she said, “why not?” and she didn’t look at her watch and he didn’t look at his either.
And then the waiter was there with two snifters and a little square of dark chocolate for each of them, compliments of the house. Snifter, he was thinking as he revolved the glass in his hand, what a perfect designation for the thing, a name that spoke to function, and he said it aloud, “Isn’t it great that they have things like snifters, so you can stick your nose in it and sniff? And plus, it’s named for what it is, unlike, say, a napkin or a fork. You don’t nap napkins or fork forks, right?”
“Yeah,” she said, and the sun had leveled on her hair now, picking out the highlights and illuminating the lobe of one ear, “I guess. But I was telling you about Bettina? Did you know that guy she picked up I told you about—not the boyfriend, but the one-night stand? He got her pregnant.”
The waiter drifted by then, college kid, hair in his eyes, and asked if there’d be anything else. It was then that he thought to check his watch and the first little pulse of alarm began to make itself felt somewhere deep in the quiet lagoon of his brain: Angelle, the alarm said. Lisette. They had to be picked up at school after soccer practice every Wednesday because Wednesday was Allie’s day off and Martine wasn’t there to do it. Martine was in Paris, doing whatever she pleased. That much was clear. And today—today was Wednesday.
Angelle remembered waiting for him longer than usual that day.
He’d been late before—he was almost always late, because of work, because he had such a hectic schedule—but this time she’d already got through half her homework, the blue backpack canted away from her and her notebook spread open across her knees as she sat at the curb, and still he wasn’t there. The sun had sunk into the trees across the street and she felt a chill where she’d sweated through her shorts and T-shirt at soccer. Lisette’s team had finished before hers and for a while her sister had sat beside her, drawing big x’s and o’s in two different colors on a sheet of loose-leaf paper, but she’d got bored and run off to play on the swings with two other kids whose parents were late.
Every few minutes a car would round the turn at the top of the street, and her eyes would jump to it, but it wasn’t theirs. She watched a black SUV pull up in front of the school and saw Dani Mead and Sarah Schuster burst through the doors, laughing, their backpacks riding up off their shoulders and their hair swaying back and forth as they slid into the cavernous backseat and the door slammed shut. The car’s brake lights flashed and then it rolled slowly out of the parking lot and into the street, and she watched it till it disappeared round the corner. He was always working, she knew that, trying to dig himself out from under all the work he had piled up—that was his phrase, dig himself out, and she pictured him in his office surrounded by towering stacks of papers, papers like the Leaning Tower of Pisa, and a shovel in his hands as if he were one of those men in the orange jackets bent over a hole in the road—but still, she felt impatient. Felt cold. Hungry. And where was he?
Finally, after the last two kids had been picked up by their mothers and the sun reduced to a streak that ran across the tile roof of the school and up into the crowns of the palms behind it, after Lisette had come back to sit on the curb and whine and pout and complain like the baby she was (He’s just drunk, I bet that’s it, just drunk like Mom said) and she had to tell her she didn’t know what she was talking about, there he was. Lisette saw the car first. It appeared at the top of the street like a mirage, coming so slowly round the turn it might have been rolling under its own power, with nobody in it, and Angelle remembered what her father had told her about always setting the handbrake, always, no matter what. She hadn’t really wanted a lesson—she’d have to be sixteen for that—but they were up in the mountains, at the summer cabin, just after her mother had left for France, and there was nobody around. “You’re a big girl,” he’d told her, and she was, tall for her age—people always mistook her for an eighth grader or even a freshman. “Go ahead, it’s easy,” he told her. “Like bumper cars. Only you don’t bump anything.” And she’d laughed and he laughed and she got behind the wheel with him guiding her and her heart was pounding till she thought she was going to lift right out of the seat. Everything looked different through the windshield, yellow spots and dirt, the world wrapped in a bubble. The sun was in her eyes. The road was a black river, oozing through the dried-out weeds, the trees looming and receding as if a wave had passed through them. And the car crept down the road the way it was creeping now. Too slow. Much too slow.
When her father pulled up to the curb, she saw right away that something was wrong. He was smiling at them, or trying to smile, but his face was too heavy, his face weighed a thousand tons, carved of rock like the faces of the presidents on Mount Rushmore, and it distorted the smile till it was more like a grimace. A flare of anger rose in her—Lisette was right—and then it died away and she was scared. Just scared.
“Sorry,” he murmured, “sorry I’m late, I—” and he didn’t finish the thought or excuse or whatever it was because he was pushing open the door now, the driver’s door, and pulling himself out onto the pavement. He took a minute to remove his sunglasses and polish them on the tail of his shirt before leaning heavily against the side of the car. He gave her a weak smile—half a smile, not even half—and carefully fitted them back over his ears, though it was too dark for sunglasses, anybody could see that. Plus, these were his old sunglasses—two shining blue disks in wire frames that made his eyes disappear—which meant that he must have lost his good ones, the ones that had cost him two hundred and fifty dollars on sale at the Sunglass Hut. “Listen,” he said, as Lisette pulled open the rear door and flung her backpack across the seat, “I just—I forgot the time, is all. I’m sorry. I am. I really am.”
She gave him a look that was meant to burn into him, to make him feel what she was feeling, but she couldn’t tell if he was looking at her or not. “We’ve been sitting here since four,” she said, and she heard the hurt and accusation in her own voice. She pulled open the other door, the one right beside him, because she was going to sit in back as a demonstration of her disapproval—they’d both sit in back, she and Lisette, and nobody up front—when he stopped her with a gesture, reaching out suddenly to brush the hair away from her face.
“You’ve got to help me out here,” he said, and a pleading tone had come into his voice. “Because”—the words were stalling, congealing, sticking in his throat—“because, hey, why lie, huh? I wouldn’t lie to you.”
The sun faded. A car went up the street. There was a boy on a bicycle, a boy she knew, and he gave her a look as he cruised past, the wheels a blur.
“I was, I had lunch with Marcy, because, well, you know how hard I’ve been—and I just needed to kick back, you know?
Everybody does. It’s no sin.” A pause, his hand going to his pocket and then back to her hair again. “And we had some wine. Some wine with lunch.” He gazed off down the street then, as if he were looking for the tapering long-necked green bottles the wine had come in, as if he were going to produce them for evidence.
She just stood there staring at him, her jaw set, but she let his hand fall to her shoulder and give her a squeeze, the sort of squeeze he gave her when he was proud of her, when she got an A on a test or cleaned up the dishes all by herself without anybody asking.
“I know this is terrible,” he was saying, “I mean I hate to do this, I hate to … but Angelle, I’m asking you just this once, because the thing is?”—and here he tugged down the little blue discs so that she could see the dull sheen of his eyes focused on her—“I don’t think I can drive.”
When the valet brought the car round, the strangest thing happened, a little lapse, and it was because he wasn’t paying attention. He was distracted by Marcy in her low-slung Miata with the top down, the redness of it, a sleek thing, pin your ears back and fly, Marcy wheeling out of the lot with a wave and two fingers kissed to her lips, her hair lifting on the breeze. And there was the attendant, another college kid, shorter and darker than the one upstairs frowning over the tip but with the same haircut, as if they’d both been to the same barber or stylist or whatever, and the attendant had said something to him—Your car, sir; here’s your car, sir—and the strange thing was that for a second there he didn’t recognize it. Thought the kid was trying to put something over on him. Was this his car? Was this the sort of thing he’d own? This mud-splattered charcoal-gray SUV with the seriously depleted tires? And that dent in the front fender, the knee-high scrape that ran the length of the body as if some metallic claw had caught hold of it? Was this some kind of trick?
“Sir?”
“Yeah,” he’d said, staring up into the sky now, and where were his shades? “Yeah, what? What do you want?”
The smallest beat. “Your car. Sir.”
And then it all came clear to him the way these things do, and he flipped open his wallet to extract two singles—finger-softened money, money as soft and pliable as felt—and the valet accepted them and he was in the car, looking to connect the male end of the seatbelt to the female, and where was the damned thing? There was still a sliver of sun cutting in low over the ocean and he dug into the glove compartment for his old sunglasses, the emergency pair, because the new ones were someplace else altogether, apparently, and not in his pocket and not on the cord round his neck, and then he had them fitted over his ears and the radio was playing something with some real thump to it and he was rolling on out of the lot, looking to merge with the traffic on the boulevard.
That was when everything turned hard-edged and he knew he was drunk. He waited too long to merge—too cautious, too tentative—and the driver behind him laid on the horn and he had no choice but to give him the finger and he might have leaned his head out the window and barked something too, but the car came to life beneath him and somebody swerved wide and he was out in traffic. If he was thinking anything at all it probably had to do with his last DUI, which had come out of nowhere when he wasn’t even that drunk, or maybe not drunk at all. He’d been coming back from Johnny’s Rib Shack after working late, gnawing at a rib, a beer open between his legs, and he came down the slope beneath the underpass where you make a left to turn onto the freeway ramp and he was watching the light and didn’t see the mustard-colored Volvo stopped there in front of him until it was too late. And he was so upset with himself—and not just himself, but the world at large and the way it presented these problems to him, these impediments, the unforeseen and the unexpected just laid out there in front of him as if it were some kind of conspiracy—that he got out of the car, the radiator crushed and hissing and beer pissed all over his lap, and shouted, “All right, so sue me!” at the dazed woman behind the wheel of the other car. But that wasn’t going to happen now. Nothing was going to happen now.
The trees rolled by, people crossed at the crosswalk, lights turned yellow and then red and then green, and he was doing fine, just sailing, thinking he’d take the girls out for burritos or In-N-Out burgers on the way home, when a cop passed him going in the other direction and his heart froze like a block of ice and then thawed instantaneously, hammering so hard he thought it would punch right through his chest. Signal, signal, he told himself, keeping his eyes on the rearview, and he did, he signaled and made the first turn, a road he’d never been on before, and then he made the next turn after that, and the next, and when he looked up again he had no idea where he was.
Which was another reason why he was late, and there was Angelle giving him that hard cold judgmental look—her mother’s look exactly—because she was perfect, she was dutiful and put-upon and the single best kid in the world, in the history of the world, and he was a fuckup, pure and simple. It was wrong, what he asked her to do, but it happened nonetheless, and he guided her through each step, a straight shot on the way home, two and a half miles, that was all, and forget stopping at In-N-Out, they’d just go home and have a pizza delivered. He remembered going on in that vein, “Don’t you girls want pizza tonight? Huh, Lisette? Peppers and onions? And those little roasted artichokes? Or maybe you’d prefer wormheads, mashed wormheads?”—leaning over the seat to cajole her, make it all right and take the tightness out of her face, and he didn’t see the boy on the bicycle, didn’t know anything about him until Angelle let out a choked little cry and there was the heart-stopping thump of something glancing off the fender.
……
The courtroom smelled of wax, the same kind of wax they used on the floors at school, sweet and acrid at the same time, a smell that was almost comforting in its familiarity. But she wasn’t at school—she’d been excused for the morning—and she wasn’t here to be comforted or to feel comfortable either. She was here to listen to Mr. Apodaca and the judge and the D.A. and the members of the jury decide her father’s case and to testify in his behalf, tell what she knew, tell a kind of truth that wasn’t maybe whole and pure but necessary, a necessary truth. That was what Mr. Apodaca was calling it now, necessary, and she’d sat with him and her father in one of the unused rooms off the main corridor—another courtroom—while he went over the whole business one more time for her, just to be sure she understood.
Her father had held her hand on the way in and he sat beside her on one of the wooden benches as his attorney went over the details of that day after school, because he wanted to make sure they were all on the same page. Those were his words exactly—“I want to make sure we’re all on the same page on this”—as he loomed over her and her father, bracing himself on the gleaming wooden rail, his shoes competing with the floor for the brilliance of their shine, and she couldn’t help picturing some Mexican boy, some dropout from the high school, laboring over those shoes while Mr. Apodaca sat high in a leatherbacked chair, his feet in the stainless steel stirrups.
She pictured him behind his newspaper, looking stern, or going over his brief, the details, these details. When he was through, when he’d gone through everything, minute by minute, gesture by gesture, coaching her, quizzing her—“And what did he say? What did you say?”—he asked her father if he could have a minute alone with her.
That was when her father gave her hand a final squeeze and then dropped it and got up from the bench. He was wearing a new suit, a navy so dark and severe it made his skin look like raw dough, and he’d had his hair cut so tight round the ears it was as if a machine had been at work there, an edger or a riding mower like the one they used on the soccer field at school, only in miniature, and for an instant she imagined it, tiny people like in Gulliver’s Travels, buzzing round her father’s ears with their mowers and clippers and edgers. The tie he was wearing was the most boring one he owned, a blue fading to black, with no design, not even a stripe. His face was heavy, his crow’s-feet right there for all the world to see—gouges, tears, slits, a butcher’s shop of carved and abused skin—and for the first time she noticed the small gray dollop of loose flesh under his chin. It made him look old, worn-out, past his prime, as if he weren’t the hero anymore but playing the hero’s best friend, the one who never gets the girl and never gets the job. And what role was she playing? The star. She was the star here, and the more the attorney talked on and the heavier her father’s face got, the more it came home to her.
Mr. Apodaca said nothing, just let the silence hang in the room till the memory of her father’s footsteps had faded. Then he leaned over the back of the bench directly in front of her, the great seal of the State of California framed over the dais behind him, and he squeezed his eyes shut a moment so that when he opened them and fixed her with his gaze, there were tears there. Or the appearance of tears. His eyelashes were moist and the moistness picked each of them out individually until all she could think of was the stalks of cane against the fence in the back corner of the yard. “I want you to listen very carefully to what I’m about to say, Angelle,” he breathed, his voice so soft and constricted it was like the sound of the air being let out of a tire. “Because this concerns you and your sister. It could affect your whole life.”
Another pause. Her stomach was crawling. She didn’t want to say anything but he held the pause so long she had to bow her head and say, “Yeah. Yeah, I know.”
And then suddenly, without warning, his voice was lashing out at her: “But you don’t know it. Do you know what’s at stake here? Do you really?”
“No,” she said, and it was a whisper.
“Your father is going to plead no contest to the charge of driving under the influence. He was wrong, he admits it. And they’ll take away his driving privileges and he’ll have to go to counseling and find someone to drive you and your sister to school, and I don’t mean to minimize that, that’s very serious, but here’s the thing you may not know.” He held her eyes, though she wanted to look away.
