What Was Left, page 12
They reached the US border after two days. His flight was less than twenty-four hours away. The line was even longer on the Mexico side. They sat in the queue of cars, breathing in the exhaust fumes of the motorhomes and 4WD SUVs and motorcycle tour groups. Peter asked what she was going to do next.
‘Not going back to that tollbooth, that’s for sure,’ Rachel said. She scratched a mosquito bite on the inside of her knee. ‘I don’t know.’
‘Maybe I’ll visit my grandma Rose—she lives near LA. Apply for jobs. My friend who did the same degree is working on a lynx-tracking project in Colorado. I might see if they have any openings. In the meantime I can waitress for a little while, stay with grandma. Save up some money.’
Peter reached over and put his hand on her knee, covering the mosquito bite, so she could no longer scratch it.
‘Come to Sydney,’ he said, and it didn’t sound like a question.
‘Why?’ Rachel asked. She turned to face him, taking her eyes from the bumper of the car in front.
‘So you can see in the New Year before everyone else.’
Rachel smiled, ‘Maybe if I cared about that—’
‘To be with me then?’
‘It’s a long fucking way to go!’
‘I know.’
‘I don’t know anyone else who lives there.’
‘I know.’
‘Can I even get work there? That I like? Don’t I need a visa?’
‘We can find out.’
Rachel drummed her fingers on the steering wheel. The line crept forwards, and she eased her foot off the brake. A US Customs agent appeared at her window. He gave them a form to fill out and took their passports.
‘I’ll think about it,’ she said. She twisted to lean the clipboard on the centre console, to fill out her license plate number and the number of days spent in Mexico.
She wanted him to say more, to try to talk her into it, to tell her how lost he would be without her, but he didn’t mention it again. Not that afternoon, or that night at the Motel 6 outside San Diego. Rachel took little things to remember him by: the matches from the motel room; a folded-up receipt from his jeans pocket; a crust of toast that he left on the table at breakfast the next morning—while he was in the toilet, she folded it up in a napkin and slipped it in her backpack.
They kissed in the car park of LAX, among flickering fluorescent lights and concrete and grime. He tried to give her gas money but she refused it. He looked as though he might cry; she swore to herself that she wouldn’t. And then she took him to security. They held hands until they parted, until the last moment. She drove out of the car park and hiccuped with tears. She would have looked strange, but people are used to that kind of sight at airports. She didn’t even know where to go next. She pulled over at a gas station, filled up the tank, bought an iced tea, and realised that she felt so tired she could have slept for a week, for a lifetime. She headed back onto the freeway, north again.
Freeway. Freedom. The word had all of a sudden lost its shine.
Bright light comes in through the blinds, waking Rachel. There is the sound of distant voices, and doors slam down the corridor. She blinks, still in that blurry place between imagined and real. She is surrounded by blonde timber and clean white walls. The hostel in Zurich. It comes back to her. Lola. Peter. Her father. She swings her legs over the edge of the bed onto the floor. The three other travellers that share her room have all gone, their possessions neatly folded on their beds. She stumbles down the hall to the shower. The building is like a ship; each room has a porthole to the hallway, and the bathrooms are windowless—all stainless steel and laminated lists of instructions in six languages.
Sandals must be worn in the showers!
Limit showers to five minutes or less!
All belongings left in the showers will be thrown out at the end of the day!
No more than four squares of toilet paper at once!
At least the water in the shower is hot. She should be grateful for some of the rules: she isn’t forced to look at old soap caked with hair while she washes herself clean.
The zoo is another train ride away. Rachel can’t remember the last time she visited a zoo; they have always made her sad. Even nowadays, when the bars have been replaced with walls and glass partitions, and zoos take part in breeding programs so that endangered animals don’t become extinct, there is something so manufactured about it all.
She is an hour early, so she wanders around looking at the exhibits. In the rainforest hall she spends the equivalent of five dollars on a coffee and sits at a table to drink it among tangled vines and the carefully reconstructed habitats of jungle-dwellers. It is like an espresso, only longer, with a golden-brown crema on the top. It comes on a tray with a small jug of milk and a bowl of sugar—not paper packets, but a proper little bowl. She savours it slowly, the bitterness and the hum of caffeine in the back of her throat. Even the humidity of the jungle has been recreated; Rachel sweats in her jumper and she can feel the frizz of her hair escaping its ponytail. It’s not the image she wants to present to Ben. She finishes the coffee and drinks the milk that remains in the jug. It coats her tongue, sweet and thick—the kind of milk that makes children tall, blonde and rosy-cheeked.
The coffee was a mistake. Her heart is racing. At ten to noon, she walks to the Lion and Tiger House. She circles the building. Of course, all of the big cats live inside, away from the cold. Inside, the place smells strong—not as bad as the monkeys and apes, but unpleasant still, like raw meat and musty fur. She never asked Ben what he looked like, she didn’t tell him how to spot her, and the place is crowded with families, solitary tourists like herself, and old couples who sit on the benches to rest their bones.
Rachel walks up to the lion enclosure. Behind thick glass, there are four of them: one male, three female. The lionesses lounge on different levels of stone ledges and tree trunks. They lick their fur and their eyes droop with boredom or sleep. The lion circles up high to the flaps that would take him outside, then down the walls to the glass in front. His sand-coloured fur flattens against the glass as he pads past on giant paws, and people gasp at his proximity. His mane is thick and his eyes glitter. Rachel wants to put her hand against the glass, to feel if it is warmer where he has just been.
‘Rachel?’
She spins around to face a man whose looks do not meet her expectations. He has blond hair cut close to his scalp and a scrubbed-pink face. He is about the same height as her, only more solid, and a young girl with reddish curls holds his hand.
‘Ben. Thanks for meeting me.’
‘This is my daughter, Ava. She doesn’t have school today, it’s a bank holiday, which is why I suggested the zoo. I promised her that we would come to see the lions.’
Rachel bends down. The girl studies her behind wire-framed glasses.
‘Do you like lions?’
‘I’m doing a report on them at school. I’m in the fourth class.’
‘I’ve just been admiring this lion. His fur is so beautiful. Golden-red.’
‘I have red hair.’
‘I see. Is it from your mother?’
‘My mother is dead,’ Ava says, and presses her face against the glass of the lion enclosure.’
Rachel’s face burns. ‘I’m sorry,’ she mumbles, unsure what else to say.
Ben shrugs. ‘Don’t worry. It’s not your fault. Will we sit down? Ava, you just stay where I can see you, okay?’
The girl nods, and Ben and Rachel sit on a bench close by.
‘I feel like an idiot,’ Rachel says, laying her coat across her lap.
‘Don’t worry. It happens all the time. Now tell me what you know about your father, what you need.’
Ben is mostly silent while she speaks, though he asks the occasional question and he holds his hand out to stop her when he thumbs a few notes into his Blackberry. His expression stays neutral. In front of the lions Ava hardly moves. Her face is pressed against the glass and her eyes follow the male as he makes his loop.
‘Do you think you can help me?’
Ben tilts his head back, shuts his eyes and sighs. He looks tired. Rachel can see a patch on the underside of his chin that he must have missed when he shaved this morning.
After a moment, he opens his eyes and looks up at the ceiling. ‘This isn’t my thing normally at all. I would say no. But it was Eli who asked, so I will say yes. I can’t guarantee anything. Don’t get your hopes up.’
Rachel smiles. She feels light for the first time in weeks.
‘Thank you,’ she says. ‘It means so much to me.’
Ben shrugs again. He looks uncomfortable. He takes a card out of his wallet and hands it to her.
‘My address is on there. Come in two days, I will show you what I’ve found. If there is nothing by then, then we have to give up. I have many other things that require my time.’
‘What time?’
‘Excuse me?’
‘What time would you like me to come?’
He leans forward to replace his wallet. ‘Come at six, stay for dinner,’ he says.
‘Are you sure?’
Ben gives a small, short nod. ‘Ava will like it.’
He stands and goes to crouch beside his daughter, who is still studying the lions. He whispers something to her and she smiles. They walk away, hand in hand, and look back to wave at Rachel, who still sits on the bench.
‘Daddy is going to buy me an ice-cream,’ Ava calls, and Rachel gives her the thumbs up.
‘See you soon,’ Rachel calls out, but her words are swallowed up by the echoes of the hall. She stays there on the bench for a long while afterwards.
Ava’s words have stayed with her. My mother is dead.
It is more than she has lost, of that much she is certain.
A crowd gathers around the lions now. Rachel stands from the bench and sees a plastic tray of raw meat pushed through the flap from outside. The lions edge around, sniff it and take the hacked up pieces in their sharp teeth. It is dead, whatever this animal is—was—but still they shake it in their jaws, slam it to the floor. Still they snarl as they tear the meat away from the bone.
After Peter left on a plane back to Sydney, Rachel ended up at her grandma’s apartment in Laguna Hills. She stayed with her mother’s mother, Rose, who was seventy-seven then but still independent. Rachel told Rose about Peter, and she explained that when she had dropped him off she felt like she was on a carnival ride where the walls spin and the centre drops out from underneath you. Rose first patted Rachel on the hand and then picked up her hand. She looked at the chipped and uneven fingernails, dirt from the weeks in Mexico still caught beneath them.
‘Let me give you a manicure, hon, that will make you feel better,’ Rose said, and as Rachel watched her get out the small, leather, zipped kit she knew that her grandma was right. Rose smoothed Jergens lotion into her skin and pushed down the cuticles with a little orange stick. It made Rachel feel eight years old again, when there was nothing she loved more than to get her tiny, clipped, short nails painted pink by grandma, who knew she’d get in trouble with her daughter but did it anyway.
Judy and Rose had always rubbed each other the wrong way. Rose never liked Gunther—she called him ‘the German’—and when he disappeared she couldn’t resist saying ‘I told you so’ to the daughter who failed to heed her warnings. Judy couldn’t bear the self-righteousness, the constant reminders of the only mistake she had ever made. It didn’t help that Judy watched Rose spoil Rachel and remembered her own childhood of meagre attention. Rachel’s uncle, Joshua, ran a commercial fishing boat in Alaska, never married, and drank to survive the winters. She met him, once, at her grandpa Ezra’s funeral. The other brother drowned when he was eighteen, caught in a rip swimming off the Oregon coast. Judy never talked about Jacob, but Rose did. There were pictures of him all around the house, suspended in youth like a frog in formaldehyde. Jacob would always be perfect. None of her other children could fill the hole that Jacob left.
When Rachel was a girl, her grandpa Ezra would go back to his bedroom when Rose began to talk about Jacob. Ezra and Rose had slept in different bedrooms for as long as Rachel could remember. He had been a quiet man with a pipe and carbon stains on his fingers, from typewriter ribbons. He had been a sportswriter for the LA Times; before that he’d worked for Rose’s dad; before that he’d been a farmer. He used to take Rachel to baseball games and Rachel tried to like the baseball as much as she liked the popcorn and ice-cream they bought between innings. She liked sitting next to him; she liked to watch him chew each mouthful purposefully before he swallowed. She liked to hear him talk about pinch hitters and fly balls and why the players always spit in the grass. She liked the way he kept her letters in a filing cabinet under ‘R’ and never threw any of them away.
Not long after Gunther left, Judy began to send Rachel to spend a month with Rose and Ezra every summer on her own. Judy could work longer hours, Esme could visit her family in El Salvador, and Rose and Ezra could spoil their only grandchild, give her manicures and baseball games. It was the same manicure kit. Some things never changed.
‘No colour grandma, just clear,’ Rachel said, and Rose winked—that funny wink she always did, where her tongue poked out of the corner of her mouth as she closed one eye. Her mouth was fringed with wrinkles from years of smoking cigarettes, but it was still painted scarlet every morning.
‘What are you going to do about him?’ Rose asked as she filed Rachel’s fingernails into perfect ovals.
‘I don’t know. He asked me to move to Australia, to be with him.’
‘And?’
‘I didn’t know. Maybe he was just saying it to make us both feel better.’
Rose got out the clear varnish, shook the bottle, and slapped it against her open palm. ‘Only one way to find out,’ she said, as she pulled out the tiny brush.
Rachel smiled. The varnish was such a strong smell—unmistakeable. She breathed it in and imagined the chemicals somehow altering her brain. ‘What’s that, grandma?’
Rose shook her head. She drew three stripes of shiny lacquer across each fingernail, then filled in the gaps.
‘Ask him,’ she leaned back to admire her handiwork. ‘You should have let me do them coral.’
She fanned her hands in the air, mimicking what she wanted Rachel to do. ‘Not all of us have the chance for that kind of love in our lives, hon. Don’t let it disappear because you’re too scared to jump in.’
Rachel nodded. She held her hands in front of her, fingers spread straight.
‘Don’t mess ’em up,’ Rose said. ‘I’m not fixing ’em.’
Later, when Rose went to play bridge at the clubhouse, Rachel lay down in the guest bedroom between sheets that still smelled like her grandpa—cigars and cough syrup and synthetics in a too-hot dryer. She thought of what grandma Rose had said—Not all of us have the chance for that kind of love.
Were Rose and Ezra ever in love, she wondered. Grandpa Ezra had been dead five years. Rachel remembered her grandma talking to Judy in the kitchen while they were still sitting Shiva.
‘I can’t feel sad,’ Rose had said. ‘I’ve used all my sadness up.’
When Ezra died, Rose stopped cooking; she never enjoyed it in the first place. She used the oven as extra cupboard space to store bags of pretzels and potato chips bought in bulk from Trader Joe’s. She hired a weekly cleaner—an expense that Ezra always baulked at. She played bridge, took a ballroom dance class, went on a cruise to the Bahamas.
In the filing cabinet of Ezra’s room, Rachel found the letters she had written to her grandfather, still filed under ‘R’, after Rabbi Goldman’s letters, before a section for receipts, and another for his retirement plan. The only R absent in Ezra’s file was the one he couldn’t escape: the R that was Rose.
When she woke she would call Peter, Rachel decided, if it was still daytime there, on the other side of the world. Her nails felt strange: thicker, a little numb. She stroked them with the pads of her other fingers and waited for the certainty that Peter was a chance worth taking.
Chapter 13
Rachel explores the streets of Zurich. She visits the museums and she walks along the riverbank. She window-shops the narrow streets of the old city where buildings close in on her. The churches and squares and overpriced boutiques – none of it appeals to her, just as the food doesn’t make her hungry. It seems like all of the chocolate in the world is here and she can’t bear the thought of it. She has to force herself just to eat the dry breakfast rolls at the hostel and something for dinner each night, just to keep going. People come here to shop, but that doesn’t interest her either. There is only one store that catches her eye on the day she is meant to meet Ben for dinner. She stands outside of the shop for a while, her nose centimetres from the glass. The window is dressed with beautiful, old-fashioned toys. They are familiar in a way that makes her nostalgic not just for her own childhood, but for her mother’s and her grandmother’s. There is a little painted man that whirls on a trapeze, a spinning top made from tin, colourful trains on an interconnecting track, flapping wooden cards on a ribbon, and a dog on wheels with a cord to roll it along the floor, making it wag its tail. The dog makes her think of Lola, who squeals and laughs whenever she sees a dog. She walks in and the bell above the door rings. Inside she must take off her coat. It is warm and smells of varnish and boiled meat.
‘Guten tag,’ says the woman behind the desk.
‘Hello,’ Rachel says. She always forgets and lapses into English.
‘May I help you?’ The woman stands from what must be her dinner. A small television flickers and there is the voice of an announcer—regardless of the language, it is unmistakably the news.
