Time's Mouth, page 17
Cherry ran.
The child was only underwater for a second or two. Cherry found her, dark eyes open, thrashing, grabbing at the water, and pulled her out of the tub. She brought her to her naked body, hushing her. Cherry held the coughing baby to her chest as Opal began to cry.
That night, Cherry took the cash they kept at the back of the linen closet for emergencies, walked down to Melrose, and used a pay phone to call a taxi. It was 3:00 a.m. This was the right thing to do, the only choice. Her daughter had almost died because of her.
Cherry waited on the dark street, a small duffel bag cutting into her shoulder, and when the cab arrived, she asked the driver to take her to Barstow because for now it would be far enough. Ray wouldn’t look for her there.
She would emerge in a new place, with a new life. She would disappear. For them.
Picture it. The desolate street. The taxi pulling away. The numbers on the meter are as red as—cherries. The driver’s beaded seat cover. The tick-tick-tick of the blinker.
Picture Cherry in the backseat, glistening and vulnerable as a lung. In her bag is a single change of clothing and eleven stones.
With every passing moment, Opal is farther and farther away from her.
Part
THREE
9
NOW OPAL WAS FIFTEEN. RAY COULD HARDLY BELIEVE it: his daughter—a teenager.
Taller than all her friends, with a Barbie watch on one wrist and, on the other, a string of skulls inked with a ballpoint pen, Opal gave catcallers the finger and occasionally stopped by the nearby laundromat to help old ladies fold their sheets. She was a freshman at a magnet high school across town, where she was a straight-A student and had loads of friends; she ran the Dissidents Club. She told Ray they discussed activists and political rebels every Wednesday at lunch. Opal was also secretary of the Seinfeld Club (episode-viewing every Friday) and attended the Vegan Society’s potluck lunches. High school in 1996—high school in LA in 1996—was bizarre. A trip, as Opal might say.
Her oldest friend was a goth girl named Fab who’d moved in two doors down when the girls were seven. Fab was short for Fabiola—Fabiola Carlisle, her father from Ireland, her mother from Haiti. Fab, with her black lipstick, her scowl, and the black fishnets she wore as sleeves beneath her black Sisters of Mercy T-shirt, clearly wanted the world to mistake her for a monster, when in fact she was the kindest teenager Ray had ever met. Fabiola went to Fairfax High around the corner, a school that, according to Opal, should be razed. (“You know its architect designed prisons, right?”)
Whenever they saw each other, Opal and Fab flashed what looked like peace signs. It meant V-for-vagina, a joke that Ray didn’t quite get but which usually sent the girls into paroxysms of laughter. There were a lot of things Ray didn’t quite get about Opal and Fab, though he never gave up trying. Why did they buy disposable cameras to take photos of boys at bus stops? Why did they fake Australian accents when they went to the supermarket? Why did they thrust the air with their pelvises whenever Alanis Morissette came on the kitchen radio? He didn’t know why they circled full-time job listings in the classifieds with big red markers, or why they called each other Keanu Reeves, or why they put pennies in their Cokes. When they learned they were going to different high schools, they enacted an elaborate ritual and called it The Separation; Ray watched, bewildered, from the bathroom window as Opal buried a creepy doll in the backyard while Fab chanted the Jetsons theme song like a funeral dirge. Afterward, he applauded without thinking, surprised to find both girls crying. Opal’s eyes met her father’s through the window screen. “Da-ad!” she called out, but he could tell she was glad he was there. She was a good kid. He knew it for certain because he made sure he was around to witness her goodness.
The neighborhood had changed. Two years after the Northridge quake, people were ready to live in LA again. To live here, in fact—this was a desirable neighborhood. Their house was robbed twice in 1987 and once in 1988, and during the Riots an apartment complex one street east burned down to the ground. But everyone said all that was in the rearview mirror, that things were different. Crime in the area was down and real estate was up. Their own lease was ending. Ray was sure Mrs. Vartanian would raise the rent. He was afraid they would have to move.
Melrose was different now too. Gone were the panhandling punks and the bondage stores. Only one of the old vintage shops remained. A new one specialized in expensive denim with something called Talon zippers, and another resold celebrity clothing: at a Star is Worn, they listed on each tag the name of the celebrity who once owned the blazer or evening gown before it made its way to their racks. Other, seedier boutiques, with cloyingly sassy names like Girlfriends or Sweetheart, opened all the time, their salesgirls smoking cigarettes or talking on the cordless out front as they weaved around the mannequins on the sidewalk. These shops all sold the same cheap, tight dresses and blouses from the garment district; Opal said the fabric dye came off on your skin. She and Fab complained about these stores—their sameness, their shoddy wares—and about the tourists who shuffled cluelessly down the avenue, stopping in the middle of the sidewalk to snap photos of the restaurant shaped like a giant hamburger, which was pretty mediocre food-wise, Opal said.
Nevertheless, every other weekend or so, the girls paid their respects to Melrose. They were still so innocent. They shared a shake at Johnny Rockets. Fab might get her ear pierced (again) or buy those black rubber bracelets from Maya, a jewelry store adorned with carved masks and other tribal accoutrements. Opal saved enough money to get the jeans with the fancy zipper, and she always picked up some plastic bugs at Wacko, which only sold useless novelty items, as far as Ray knew. On Opal’s dresser, a line of fake cockroaches paraded toward a pink plastic baby the size of her thumb.
Ray didn’t understand any of it, but he loved it. He loved her. Opal was so funny, so smart, so sure of herself. She knew who she was, and she liked being different. Imagine that.
He didn’t have to. Here stood Opal at the stove, nearly as tall as he was, shaking bright orange cheese-dust into their macaroni. An early dinner because she would be volunteering that evening at her school—ushering for the musical.
She was handling the main dish tonight. Before leaving for work that morning, Ray had prepared the bruschetta as a side dish, a recipe he’d picked up in all his years of cooking dinner. He even had a special jar for it, and like Ebony from DataComp instructed him over a decade ago, he let it marinade for as long as possible. By now, the tomatoes would be garlicky and slurpy.
“Look at that,” he told Opal as he spooned the bruschetta onto the toasted bread. “Slurpy as a . . . snail. An Italian snail.”
She cringed. “Um, that makes no sense. It’s also disgusting.”
“Snails aren’t disgusting. Escargot, anyone?”
“It’s still bad. You lose.”
“Fine,” he said. “Your turn.”
This was their game. Bon-Mots. They tried to one-up each other with clever descriptions of things. It was pretentious; Ray was terrible at it, and Opal was too good at it, at least for a high school kid.
Opal smirked, glanced at the pot of now-orange macaroni. “Alka-Seltzer pack of cheese fizz,” she said.
“That’s not a bon-mot, that’s a poem.”
“It doesn’t work because cheese doesn’t fizz. But okay, yes, I’m a poetess.”
“You dig?” Ray said, and Opal rolled her eyes.
This was exactly what he’d envisioned when she was born: a daughter he could joke with, a child he knew well, a person he enjoyed spending time with. As they played their little parlor game, his mind flew above the scene. He watched it like a movie: Opal, three months into fifteen, her light brown hair unbrushed, her eyes that same rich dark brown she’d first greeted the world with, the daisy-print dress she called a baby doll falling just above her knees, men’s white gym socks pulled over her calves. No shoes, though her Pumas waited by the front door.
She hummed to herself, stirred the pasta, tapped the spoon on the side of the saucepan, rat-a-tat-tat. Outside, in the yard, the sunflower seeds they planted at the fence were pushing their green stalks from the soil. In a couple of months the flowers would tower over them both; he would make Opal stand next to the tallest one for a photo, and then, as he did every year, he would put one of the photos on the fridge. All summer long, she and Fab would lie out in the backyard, tanning themselves on the plastic chaise longues Fab bought at Kmart, reading aloud from a book of Anne Sexton poems. “She was a confessional poet,” Opal told Ray. “She used to model for a while too. She smoked through her readings.”
“Don’t smoke,” Ray said.
“I already tried it once with Svetlana.” That was a friend from school. “Don’t worry, it wasn’t for me.”
Now they carried their food to the small table in the breakfast nook, with ten minutes to eat before they had to leave. Ray tried to be home as much as possible; he still made Opal her school lunch, and if he wasn’t working he got up before she left for the bus, even though she said he didn’t have to. If he could, he liked to be home for dinner. When Opal was younger and he was still selling microfiche, he was always there to wake her on school mornings, shaking her bed and yelling, “Earthquake!” as she screamed for him to stop, laughing all the while. She used an alarm clock nowadays—and she never hit the snooze button. How had he raised someone so competent? So willing to be out in the world?
“I’ll do the dishes after I come back,” Ray said.
She nodded in gratitude and didn’t stop eating. Hunched over her plate like that, working on her food with the focus of a wolf, she looked just like—
Opal didn’t remember her mother. She only knew what Ray told her: that her mother’s name was Cherry, and that she left when Opal was very young. There really wasn’t much more to say. Opal thought her parents barely knew one another when Cherry got pregnant. Ray told her they never married. That Cherry only moved in with Ray right before she gave birth.
When Opal was five, he said, “Cherry didn’t feel well. In her brain.”
Opal thought her parents met when Ray first moved to LA, at a party near the airport, the airplanes flying low overhead, the engines so loud that their first conversation was barely audible. Somehow, Cherry managed to hear Ray ask for her phone number. Ray liked the story, though Opal asked for it only once, at age nine, and never again.
Their last conversation about Cherry was when Opal was eleven. Four years ago. They were driving in the car, a searing summer day, on their way to El Matador. The house had been sweltering, air still, curtains closed against the sun. Ray told Opal to hurry and put on her suit. They’d park on PCH if they had to, walk down to the beach.
They were nearing the end of the 10, headed into the tunnel to PCH, when Opal asked, “Why did Cherry leave?”
Ray had been waiting for her to ask that question again—it was normal for a kid to have questions.
“She suffered from mental illness,” he said, as planned.
They reached the tunnel, and it snuffed out the daylight like fingers over a match flame. When they emerged on the other side, the ocean would appear like a magic trick.
“She was nervous,” he said. “Afraid of stuff. She didn’t sleep. I think maybe she heard voices. That sort of thing.”
Opal said nothing and he knew she was holding her breath, making a wish.
They exited the tunnel and, as it always did, the water appeared on the left, a line of sweating blue. Ray heard Opal exhale. What was her wish?
The traffic crawled north, everyone in the city seeking relief from the heat. Opal had her window open, and she was looking toward the cliffs, away from Ray and the water.
“I barely knew your mother,” he said. “I know that sounds weird.”
“That’s why there’s only that one dinky photo album?”
“That’s right.”
“Why didn’t you take her to the doctor?”
“She refused. She didn’t want medication, either, which can help some people.”
Opal turned, finally. “Where did she go though?”
Ray kept his eyes on the road. This was the real question, wasn’t it?
“I searched and searched for her,” he said. “I never found her.”
Maybe that scared Opal a little, that Cherry disappeared. Or that her mother was mentally ill. Whatever it was, Ray’s answers must have satisfied Opal because she didn’t ask about Cherry again. The photo album was just a cheap paperback thing Rexall gave you for free when you developed your film; inside were photos of Opal’s first months of life, starting with the hospital room. There were only a few pictures of Cherry, the rest were all of Baby Opal. The album remained in her room, wedged into the bookshelf between a dictionary and a copy of The Way Things Work. He used to see her paging through the album, but that was years ago.
In Ray’s bedroom, on the table by his bed, next to the little portable television, sat a framed black-and-white photo of two people he called Robert and Marion. The couple stood, arms linked, in front of some sequoias, the sky white above them, Robert in stiff work pants and a plaid shirt, Marion in a sensible-looking dress with a collar and three buttons, her dark hair coifed in that 1950s way. Ray purchased the photo for a dollar at the Rose Bowl flea market when Opal was three.
“My mommy and daddy,” he said when he showed her the photo for the first time, right after he bought it, a few feet away from the antique dealer. The lie unspooled so easily. “Their names are Robert and Marion,” he said.
He told her later that Robert and Marion died within a year of one another when he was eighteen. His father to cancer, his mother in the house fire that destroyed everything; Ray said his father’s colleague gave him the photo. He had no siblings, he said. His parents were only children. He was orphaned.
A fairy tale, and Opal believed it.
“You’re my whole family, baby girl,” he liked to say. That part was true.
“Ready to go?” Opal said now, and he was brought back to the world: his daughter in the breakfast nook, Friday evening, 1996. He was thirty-eight. She, fifteen. Traffic to her school would be rough but what was a little car time in the scheme of things. Before he knew it she would move out and he wouldn’t get to see her all the time. He winced at the thought, a physical pain, imagining the loss.
Opal pushed away her plate and stood. Ray hurried to wipe his mouth with his napkin.
“In a year you’ll have your license,” he said, “and you’ll have no use for your old dad.”
“Don’t worry, I’ll still need your money.”
Then she did a little jig, her eyes wide and deranged, and he laughed.
Doctor Dale Howard preferred to be called Doc, and Ray complied, even though it made him feel like he was spending an hour with a salty sea captain instead of a therapist with multiple degrees. Isla Patricia swore by Doc’s methods. “It’ll seem insane,” she said, “but, trust me, you’ll feel incredible afterward. Like a marshmallow walking across more marshmallows.”
If Ray hadn’t felt anything quite that extreme after his first appointment, he had noticed a change. As the elevator descended to the parking garage, he laughed at his reflection in the mirrored doors: hair mussed, face reddish, clothes sloppy. His body felt loose and relaxed, as if he’d just smoked some hashish. He hadn’t felt that way, not without drugs, in years, probably not since his first months in LA, when Cherry was pregnant with Opal and they found their little house, when it seemed as if his true life had finally begun.
Although the feeling from Doc lasted only an hour or so, it was enough to bring him back for another appointment. Hopefully, this time, the effects would last. Even though Isla Patricia said it could take years working with Doc for Ray’s armor to break down (she was five years into her tutelage), Ray secretly hoped it would happen faster. The first time Isla used the phrase “emotional armor” he felt a shock of recognition. That was exactly what it was, like he was encased in metal and could barely breathe. He wanted to be rid of his armor, as soon as possible.
Not that Doc would discuss timelines.
“For now,” he said on that first visit, “we’ll just get to know one another, and you’ll get reacquainted with your breath and body.”
It wasn’t the kind of language Ray expected from a man who looked like Doc: pushing seventy, portly, his bushy white beard yellowed by nicotine. Then again, what kind of man would he expect to talk this way? Ray wondered what his own father looked like. If he was even alive—Ray didn’t know—had he ended up with a dirty Santa Claus beard just like Doc’s? His mother never spoke of his father, or not that he could recall. His father—nameless, faceless—was a stranger.
Doc’s waiting room was a small antechamber with one rickety chair and one rickety side table. In the corner, a tweed coat hung from a hat rack. The room reeked of wood cleaner, that fake pine tree scent obviously designed by someone who’d never smelled a real tree. Ray felt like he was inside van Gogh’s bedroom, which made no sense because that painting was cozy and inviting, whereas this was mere Europe-inspired claustrophobia.
He had to write that down, “Europe-inspired claustrophobia,” otherwise he’d forget to tell Opal during their next round of Bon-Mots.
“Raymond.”
Doc was standing in the open doorway. His previous patient, the same woman as last week, thin and nervous, her dark hair brushed smooth as a mink’s pelt, passed Ray on the way to the exit. No eye contact. If she was worried Ray had heard her in there, he had not. The walls of Doc’s back room were covered in carpet scraps and egg cartons.
“How’s it going?” Ray asked.
Doc grinned. “Surviving, my good man, I’m surviving!” He sighed. “The day is gorgeous, isn’t it?”
The thing about Doc was that he seemed genuinely thrilled to be alive. Last visit, he told Ray he started every morning “with a shit and a gag” and claimed it set him up for the day. Could that be the secret to life?
