The Shyster's Daughter, page 14
“Dad,” I say. “I’ll be fine.”
“Like hell you’re fine.” He rips the x-ray from the clipboard. The film makes a rippling sound like it could snap in two. “Look at you. Your knee looks like a goddamn melon. Where are your crutches?”
Truth is, we can’t afford a second opinion, but I get one anyway, from a surgeon no less. Dr. Amaya is top notch and has operated on the L.A. Kings hockey team, the Clippers basketball team, and UCLA and USC football players too. Uncle Dimitri asked around and found him. The surgeon is doing a favor by taking me on as a patient when I have no insurance, a favor he will most likely want to take back once my father’s checks begin to bounce.
The MRI reveals that I’ll need two pins in my knee and nearly an inch worth of bone filler to harden up in the shattered part of my shin. If all goes according to plan, my leg will once again be as long as the other and I should be able to walk without a cane or a limp. Of course this news does nothing to quell my anxiety that I’ll be the only junior at Cal State Bernardino seen dragging her leg around campus as if, like the hunchback character Quasimodo I’ve studied in a lit class, I’m on my way to the clock tower.
“You’ll be just fine,” Dr. Amaya says. “At least you’re in for some big money. By the looks of that water balloon on your knee, she must’ve been drag racing.”
I nod, not about to let it be known that the Samoan can’t be found. Turns out her license was expired, her plates too, and when the cops asked for her home number she gave them a 1-800 one which she claimed was her work.
That night, after we return from the doctor’s, against my father’s better judgment, he tries the number and holds out the phone so I may hear. The voice on the other end is a taped recording for free information on log cabin homes built for under fifteen grand in the Louisiana bayous.
The surgery takes place down on the basement floor of Dr. Amaya’s clinic. With such high profile patients, it only makes sense he has his own operating room. Even though his office is in Beverly Hills the fact I’m not in a hospital makes it seem like I’m south of the border, in Tijuana or Brazil, getting a cheap nose job or breast implants.
Afterward, when I come to, I’m face to face with the man who put me out, the anesthesiologist, actually more than one of him. I’m seeing blurry doubles—two manicured beards, two sets of shallow green eyes. I feel him take hold of my wrist. I feel him thumb my pulse.
“How are you feeling, Paula?”
My injured leg is mummified in gauze and the other is in some kind of brown cross between nylons and a knee-high sock that’s cutting off all circulation. Beforehand it was explained that I’d either wake up crying or cranky, and even in my drug-induced state I instantly know which mood I’m in by the way I grab the v-neck of the man’s scrubs, along with some of his salt and pepper chest hair.
When he winces, I only pull harder.
“Get this off me,” I demand. My post-op tantrum knows no bounds and with all my might I hoist my good leg a near inch or two off the gurney. “Do I look like the kind of girl who wears flesh colored pantyhose?”
My father, not the nurse, pushes me by wheelchair out of the clinic and to the car. On the drive back to Rex’s house, my father stops off at his lawyer’s office in Pasadena, the woman who represents him with the State Bar. He cracks the car windows as if like a dog or a baby I might suffocate. I’m still reeling from the anesthesia that has yet to wear off, and he could be in there for five minutes or five hours. But when he returns to the car I clearly see his face is all wrong at the news the State Bar is ready to settle.
“Those poutanas expect me to sell Secret Wish and admit to something I never goddamn did.”
The horse he paid forty grand for is now worth half a million and change. All it took was a lap around the Celebration stadium with a horseshoe of flowers adorning the animal’s neck. Standing in the winner’s circle, along with Secret Wish and Rhea’s secret lover Dumbo, was our last photo taken as a family.
I shut my eyes, hoping my father will think I’m sleeping. He isn’t big on conceding he’s ever made a mistake, which is why he stands little chance in ever getting my mother back. When she heard I’d been hit by a car, she burst into tears, rushing into the reasons why she couldn’t possibly fly out. Nicholas. Rhea. Her new job answering customer complaints at Duck River Electric. Saying I understood was the only way to stop her from listing everything in her life that’s above me. Of course there might be more to it. There might be the consequences she would most likely face seeing my father again after having recently found out she’s moved on with another man, a farmer no less, who, with his denim suspenders, rubber boots, and mini-tractor, fits seamlessly into my mother’s new rural lifestyle.
My father starts the car and gains his distance, his resentment building with every mile at the State Bar forcing his hand. What any other lawyer in deep trouble would see as a way out, my father sees as defeat.
For the next week and a half I lay trapped in my parents’ old bed with a torturous machine I’ve nicknamed The Mussolini, after the rabid Italian dictator. The muscles in my leg have already shut down and in order for my knee to regain all flexibility, every morning I must strap it in The Mussolini and adjust the knob that controls the range of motion in which it will be mechanically bent—increasing it by five degrees each day.
My father can’t bear to watch and before he goes to work he leaves two prescribed Vicodin and a glass of water spiked with a shot of ouzo to wash them down with. I only take one pill, sometimes I take none and simply sweat out the pain because I don’t want to become addicted.
Sometimes I leave my leg in there for an extra hour simply because I want to speed things up and be back to normal and back in school as soon as possible. The times when I am forced to get out of bed are even more excruciating. Crutches propping me upright, a fifteen foot trip to the bathroom takes over half an hour one way. Rex doesn’t work and agreed to be home during the morning shift when my father’s at the office. He agreed to lend a hand and help me out of bed or pass me my crutches, basically making sure that if I tip over I don’t spend the rest of the day twitching like road kill in the hallway. Only Rex is never here.
Shortly after my father leaves, Rex goes too, fringed in leather from the chaps, to the vest, to the tie around the wisp of his balding man’s pony tail. He jabs his head in the doorway, never stepping in the sick room, which smells like a giant Band Aid. Over the years he’s grown a goatee as if hair on his face offsets what he lacks on his head.
“I’m meeting my new lady friend at IHOP,” he says. “All you can eat pancakes.” His joke is a distasteful reference to his passion for morbidly obese women. “I’ll be home in a couple hours.”
What he means is he won’t return until right before my father gets back. He’s uncomfortable with me being here, and while I want nothing more than to leave, I’m hardly in any condition to get to the restroom much less out the front door. Rex’s mental state may not be so apparent on the exterior, but it most definitely shows in his choice of interior decor. Besides the Harley, his living room looks like the garden center at Target—a brand new rider lawn mower stands in for a couch and in one corner of the entryway, like a potted plant, is a top of the line weed whacker.
“You sure you don’t want that crazy bitch tracked down?” Rex asks. He cocks his head to the side and bangs the doorframe a couple of times with his fist. “Me and some buddies could give her a little refresher course on a pedestrian’s right of way.”
The picture of the fiercest motorcycle gang in the world chasing down the Samoan, surrounding her blue hatchback with their low roaring hogs, is tempting. But I don’t want to get my hopes up. The “buddies” Rex is referring to might be the imaginary voices he hears if he forgets to take his meds.
“I appreciate the offer,” I say. “But my dad says I’ve got to let it go. I’m supposed to focus on my recovery.”
Rex snorts on his way out, as if my father’s advice that he once paid through the nose for is now something worth laughing at.
In the bathroom that night when the toilet is on the fritz, I’ll find a packet of white powder taped conveniently inside the tank, in case the cops come calling. My father isn’t back from work yet. He doesn’t like coming home to a home that isn’t his. I’m sure he doesn’t know Rex is dealing dope, but I want him to. I want him to leave here, to find a place of his own even if it’s a studio apartment with no room for me and I have to heal up at the old Portuguese lady’s house.
From the outside patio there is cheering and clapping. Rex has company. He’s holding a support group for overeaters, what he calls a “cattle call,” where celery and carrot sticks and bottles of water are served. He shares his own bogus weight loss story, gaining the trust of the most vulnerable fat women who will give him their numbers after the meeting.
My father and I are the only ones who use this bathroom and before I hobble back to bed, I tear off and plug enough paper in the bowl that even a plunger couldn’t clear.
Much later I’ll be awakened to something like an argument or maybe the TV with the sound turned up too loudly. Maybe it’s both because nobody wants me to listen. I think I hear my father’s voice. I think I hear Rex’s. Something about a loan or wanting to be alone. For a moment the two of them sound like a couple in the heat of a romantic break-up. My father must’ve found the drugs or they’re fighting about something they both have a claim on. Only being screwed out of money or screwing another man’s woman bring men to such rage. Since my father is not big on large women, this might be all business—apples and almonds.
In time I will learn that my father has accused Rex of skimming the profits, close to a hundred grand, and because my father is in such a spot, because no one will believe a lawyer who’s under investigation by the State Bar, Rex will get away with it. I’ll find the proof filed away in a metal cabinet when I’m clearing out my father’s storage unit shortly after his death. The groves that were valued at a couple million, Rex will write my father a check for a few grand as a settlement, a decimal of what is owed him, and they will part with the kind of deep-rooted bitterness that only comes from enemies that were once friends.
Before I reach for my crutches, the house is quiet again.
The next morning, Rex and my father are gone like usual and there are no traces of a knock-down drag-out fight—no broken glass or dishes, no fist holes in the walls. The back yard equipment still stands upright in the living room, the weed whacker leans by its handle in the entryway, as do the recently purchased set of tiki torches, and I’m almost convinced by the sheer lack of physical evidence that I dreamed the whole thing. But I know different. I know my father, and he will be packed up and gone before I return later that day from an appointment with Dr. Amaya, an appointment he forgets all about. I drive myself with the seat reclined to stretch out my leg and enough pillows behind my back to stuff me in position at the wheel.
When I get home that evening his Mercedes diesel isn’t parked in the driveway so I continue on and cruise past the local Motel 6 on Katel-la Avenue. His car isn’t there. Next I go to the Bicycle Club all the way in Bell Gardens, a good half hour’s drive, where my father sometimes waits out the night when he can’t sleep, betting on cards. I don’t find him there either. I also don’t find him in front of Uncle Dimitri’s two bedroom cottage in Belmont Shore, the cozy little beach town where Erick also lives. When I do find my father’s car it will be in the last place I can think to look—parked in the driveway at Yia Yia’s house right beside Psycho Gil’s dark blue Mercury Cougar.
This comes as a complete shock, just as my mother had done to me years before when I was left with mere minutes to decide if I wanted to go with her to live in Tennessee or stay with my father. Where she gave me the illusion that I had a choice in the matter, my father has ditched me altogether. Though I will continue to try, part of me has never fully been able to forgive either one of them.
I see my father going home to his mother and the brother who lusted after his own sister-in-law and eventually took out that sexual obsession on her own two young daughters as the worst form of betrayal. The disappointment I feel for my father is crushing, it weakens my grip on the wheel, and I drive away more heartbroken than I have ever felt or will ever allow myself to feel again.
THE OPENING
My relationship with Professor Brown turns personal at the same time I start dodging my father’s calls. I won’t pick up, not just because I know where he’s staying. As I feared Dr. Amaya has sent the rest of my fifteen thousand dollar bill to collections and men who call themselves Forrest Green and John Johnston are leaving rude messages. “Pay up, Loser,” one of them says, “or else you’ll never buy another car or get another credit card for the rest of your life. Even bankruptcy can’t save you.”
Threats over money are worthless if you’re broke, if your part-time job at a lotion and bubble bath store barely covers the rent, if tuition and books are paid with student loans and breakfasts consist of Pop Tarts and dinners are flavored rice packets, two for a dollar. I’m getting around just fine now without crutches, without a limp. Hardly even a scar. On Saturday nights Lucia and I go out to Mimi’s Cafe where I splurge on a turkey burger just for the meat.
My father assumes I already know where he’s staying. Psycho Gil must’ve seen me with his night vision goggles. My father wants me to come over for dinner, Yia Yia misses me, like there’s a statute of limitations in the Priamos family for sexual molestation and incest and everybody else is past it, everybody but me. If my father has his reasons for moving in with Yia Yia and Psycho Gil I’m not ready to hear them. He could’ve stayed with Uncle Dimitri, there’s even a spare room at the Portuguese woman’s home where I rent a room. He could’ve done a lot of things besides sell me and my sister out.
My brief chats with Professor Brown after class intensify in the halls and turn into shared confidence by the time we reach his office, before I sit down on the loveseat he uses to nap on in between classes, and he closes the door. His eyes are what draw me in—dark and vulnerable—like a hurt little boy, their smallness offset by the longest set of lashes any woman would envy. Without having read any of his writing I sensed at first glance that he’d seen too much in his life early on, a suspicion that will eventually be confirmed after I read all of his books. Unlike others who’ve mined their own personal tragedies time and time again in thinly veiled novels, it doesn’t appear Professor Brown has come any closer to finding catharsis or peace. He seems forever haunted by his past. His near childlike anguish at his age in middle life intrigues me.
It keeps me coming back to his cramped office where we talk about my writing, we talk about his. He’s having trouble getting another book off the ground, something to do with being too preoccupied with the stresses of his home life. He has a wife, some sons, and a rumored problem with the bottle. Since he’s a rare species in the English department with his mountain man look of Levis and work boots, many of his students, most of them women, gossip why he never wears a ring.
Part of me wants him to strictly stay my mentor. He says he sees talent in me and has used and copied a couple of my stories as examples in class. I pay attention to his advice on writing, the three strikes rule—a writer must bring something up three times for it to stick in the reader’s mind. The other part of me stares too hard at what I should be ignoring. I stare at his forearms that within a few short weeks have muscled up like a horse’s hind leg.
“Steroids,” I tell my hunch to my sister on the phone one night. She’s pregnant and calls late when she has heartburn from the baby, from the father of her unborn child who works at Jack Daniels Distillery in Lynchburg and doesn’t come home until well after the bars close. If it weren’t for the time difference and her boyfriend being an alcoholic, she might not call so regularly. “His arms don’t hang straight at his sides like other guys. The muscles of his upper body make them flare out. How else could his arms get that big so fast?” I ask her.
Her end is silent, and I hear a gurgle in her throat. She clears it.
“You’re thinking about him too much,” she finally says. “You should hear yourself. Isn’t he married?”
“Wasn’t Dumbo?”
Rhea takes a loud sip of something. The adolescent nickname I gave her first adult-sized crush still proves irritating. She drinks a lot of fluids just like our mother when she was pregnant with Nick. At nearly six months, Rhea’s baby is already seven pounds. She’ll probably have it cesarean. They’re so close they even share the same pregnancy symptoms.
“The last thing you should be doing is comparing what I’ve already done with what you’d like to do. We’re two different people. Besides,” my sister adds like she’s dead serious. “An affair isn’t all that it’s cracked up to be. Hands down, those were the longest fifteen seconds of my life.”
Professor Brown signs two copies of his novels and a collection of short stories for me, and when I’m done reading those late at night or during my breaks at Bath & Body Works, he gives me some of his favorite writers’ books. He gives me Ernest Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast, a nonfiction account of his drinking days in Paris with other writers like Gertrude Stein and F. Scott Fitzgerald, a paperback I already own but am not about to let on that I do. He gives me an advance copy of Tim O’Brien’s In the Lake of the Woods, a dark love story about a Vietnam War vet who may or may not be responsible for his wife’s disappearance. And it’s signed by the author—To Jim and Holly, Peace. Holly. I hadn’t known her name before then. Inked permanently with her husband’s in the inside cover is the first proof she’s flesh and bone, since only school pictures of their three boys are tacked to the cork board above his desk, all of whom look like him. It’s enough to almost make me return the book before I do any more damage to the spine.
