The Last Days of California: A Novel (19 page)

“Are you having fun?” she asked.

“Yeah,” I said. “It’s so nice here.” They always wanted to know if I was having fun. It made me sorry I didn’t have more fun.

“We’re about to go up,” she said. “We just came down for a minute to cool off.”

My father patted my back as he stepped out and asked if I was having fun. I told him I was and took off, swimming in and out of groups of kids and boys, listening while trying to appear uninterested.

“Here she comes, she’s coming this way,” one of the guys said, on my third lap. I swam a wide arc around a couple of kids playing colored eggs to avoid them. “And there she goes,” he said. Maybe I wasn’t unattractive. If I moved to Arizona, I might be popular. I might be on the dance team, kicking my legs in tall boots at pep rallies. I hadn’t made the dance team in Montgomery and didn’t know if I was going to try again. It seemed better to accept the one failure than to try a second time and fail, like I hadn’t learned my lesson.

I was wearing my cutest swimsuit, a black one-piece with ovals cut out of the sides, and a worn-in baseball cap that belonged to one of Elise’s ex-boyfriends. She had a lot of ex-boyfriend stuff—t-shirts and ball caps and koozies—and she usually wouldn’t say anything if I confiscated something until it was mine. I liked their t-shirts best, which were always thin and soft, tiny holes around the neck and waist. I didn’t know what they did to get them that way.

I got out and resumed my place next to my sister.

“Let’s order a drink,” she said, raising the flag on the back of her chair. “They’ve already gone. I’m sure Dad’s dying to get his hands on a slot machine. Raise the flag on your chair, too.”

Almost immediately, a pretty pool girl came over and Elise ordered two piña coladas. She didn’t ask to see our IDs. Elise signed her name and our room number and, a few minutes later, our drinks came in small white buckets: cold and sweet, I could hardly taste the liquor.

When they were empty, we put our flags back up. Elise signed our name and room number and fresh ones appeared like magic. The more I drank, the closer I looked at things—a beach ball spinning on the water, the pink and blue and yellow panels going round and round, a girl wading into the water with a cast on her arm, cocked at a ninety-degree angle. The dark spots in the clouds. Elise wouldn’t stop reading her magazine, so I got back in the pool. I swam toward the group of boys while one of them stepped steadily backward until he was right in front of me. I stood in three feet of water and said hello. He was tan with strong arms and a stomach full of well-defined muscles. He was old but I couldn’t tell how old because of the mirrored sunglasses and baseball cap.

He asked me a few questions and then I was in his arms, my neck thrown back so my hair dragged the water. My hat floated away and he fetched it and emptied the water out, set it back on my head.

“Is that your sister?” he asked, nodding at Elise.

“Yeah.”

“Why don’t you call her over?” he said, and I told him she’d come if she wanted to. I looked into his sunglasses, trying to see what he saw. There was only my face—my nose distortedly large, my hair slicked and smooth. I leaned back and he spun me in slow circles, first one way and then the other.

He started telling me about himself, how he’d started a website to help people find jobs, how it was becoming very successful. He was on a trip with friends and next they’d go to Las Vegas to play poker. I thought about the Las Vegas girl, wondered if they would encounter her somewhere, or pass her on the street.

I looked at Elise’s chair but she wasn’t in it. I found her talking to a lifeguard, a short boy with a red floaty slung over his shoulder.

“I’ll be right back,” I said, and swam over to her. “Come over here with me,” I said, interrupting her conversation. The guy was kind of fat for a lifeguard. If he could pass the test, I might pass, too.

“In a sec,” she said.

I swam back to the boys and Elise followed as the lifeguard climbed onto his perch.

We let them buy us a third drink and made plans to meet later, plans that Elise said we’d break if anything better came along, but I couldn’t imagine anything better coming along. The only thing that might be better than these boys were other boys.

At dinner, we
sat at a circular table too big for the four of us. It made me feel lonely and far away from everything. I concentrated on the alcohol moving in and out of parts of my body I’d never felt before. When the dining room went quiet, there was a buzz in my ears like a lightbulb.

Though I’d hardly said a word, it seemed unlikely that my mother wouldn’t know. I avoided her eyes. She would be angry and disappointed if she found out, and I didn’t want her to look at me differently. If I wasn’t the good daughter, I wouldn’t know what I was. I wasn’t popular or a cheerleader or a straight-A student. I wasn’t on the dance team. I wasn’t a member of the Student Council or even the Key Club. There were so many things I wasn’t that I had difficulty defining myself, especially in relation to Elise, who was so many things.

My father ordered a bottle of red wine and asked the waiter for four glasses.

“John,” my mother said. “These kids aren’t drinking.”

“It’s a special occasion,” he said. “Just for toasting.”

“Absolutely not,” she said.

The waiter came back with a bottle and poured an inch of wine in my father’s glass, waited for him to take a sip.

“Taste it,” Elise said, which he did, nodding pleasantly.

Then the waiter went around the table, pouring us each a quarter of a glass.

“We’re about ready to order,” my father said.

“I haven’t even opened my menu yet,” Elise said.

The waiter said he’d give us a few minutes and set the bottle down. Elise grabbed it and filled her glass. Then she filled mine, as well. My mother handed me hers and we swapped. When the dining room went quiet again, the buzz in my ears returned. It was oddly pleasant.

“We have a lot to celebrate,” my father said. “Tomorrow we go home.”

Elise and I looked at each other. Home was Montgomery. Home was our house and our school and our friends and our dog. It was the clothes in our closets and my sister’s boyfriends and the neighborhood where we rode our bikes down the middle of the street because there were hardly any cars.

“You mean Alabama?” Elise said.

“He means heaven,” I said, reaching for the breadbasket and knocking over my glass in the process. The wine spilled all over the white tablecloth, pooled in my plate.

“Nice job,” Elise said.

“Jess,” my father said, like I’d ruined everything, like everything had been going so well up till now. He got angry when I spilled things, when I swallowed water too fast and it went down the wrong way. It was like he thought I did these things on purpose.

The busboy took my plate away and brought a towel, sopped it up, but there was still red everywhere, terrible as blood.

My father opened his menu. “Order anything you want.”

“Can I ask you a question?” Elise said. Nothing good ever came after that. It was never
How would you like a bowl of ice cream?
Or
There’s a good movie playing
.
Why don’t we all go see it?

“What’s that?” he asked.

“How are we paying for this trip?”

“With the money we saved for this purpose,” he said.

“We know you lost your job,” she said, and I recalled a dinner, much like this one, after our father had gotten that job: white tablecloths and oversized menus,
Order anything you want.

“I can order the lobster?” I asked.

“Your father said you can order whatever you want,” my mother said.

“Have you been leaving the house in the morning and going to the park?” Elise asked. “Or the library?”

I couldn’t remember him with a briefcase at all.

“I need you to leave this table,” he said. “And I don’t want to see your face for the rest of the night.” He said “face” in a really nasty way, like it was the most horrible thing ever.

“And don’t you leave your room,” my mother said. “I’m gonna be up there to check on you in half an hour.”

My sister finished her wine and put her hands on the edge of the table like she was going to push. Then she stood and left as the waiter was walking over to take our order. He stood there smiling and we were all so tense I could feel how awkward we were making him. He shifted his weight from one foot to the other, asked if he should come back in a minute. Something about it was satisfying—he wasn’t a part of us, didn’t belong. We were unhappy together, miserable even, but it was ours.

“No, we’re ready,” my father said. Then he looked at my mother and asked what she wanted. She ordered the surf and turf with a salad and a loaded baked potato, and the rest of us followed suit.

I imagined my father at the kitchen table a few weeks from now opening the credit card bill, the smell of pot roast we’d be eating for days. My mother would have us bag up all our old clothes for the Ultcheys and the other families who had given their money away, as if they needed our worn-out clothes, while my father assured them that we would all be in heaven soon, that this was not the life He had intended for us. I wondered whether he really believed it, if he’d ever believed.

The busboy brought another basket of bread and my father tore off a piece. He spread a thick layer of butter on it and immediately dropped it on his shirt.

“Seems like I can’t hardly eat without getting something on me,” he said, dipping his napkin into his ice water. I watched as he rubbed his shirt until a large wet spot stuck to his chest.

When the salads came, we stabbed at the pieces of lettuce. I drank the little bit of wine in my glass and didn’t ask for more. After a while, my mother attempted to make pleasant conversation but neither my father nor I were interested. It must have been the quietest meal of my life. My father didn’t even pray when the steaks and lobster tails were placed before us.

After dinner, I pulled my mother aside and asked if I could get Brother Jessie’s number. I’d prepared an answer but she didn’t ask, just got out her phone and called it out to me.

When I got back
to the room, Elise wasn’t there. There was a note on the desk: “Meet me at the Irish bar. You can wear my blue dress.”

I sat on the bed, staring at Brother Jessie’s number. Though I saw him twice a week at church, and sometimes on Saturday mornings for breakfast in our kitchen, I’d never had any reason to call him. It made me nervous, talking on the phone to people I wasn’t used to talking on the phone to.

I hit the call button. On the second ring, he answered.

“Brother Jessie?” I said. “This is Jess Metcalf.”

“Jess,” he said, “it’s so good to hear from you. How are you?”

“I’m good.”

“That’s good to hear,” he said. His voice sounded different. People always sounded different on the phone; they used their phone voices. “So tell me, what’s happening?”

“We’re in Arizona. Somewhere around Phoenix, I think.”

He made some affirmative-sounding noises so I said other stuff—how it felt like we’d been driving for a very long time, how things weren’t going very well. I told him about the car accident, the flat tire. He said car trips were like that, accidents and flat tires, that those things weren’t out of the ordinary.

“It was a really bad accident,” I said. “A man died. I touched his neck, trying to feel for a pulse.”

“I’m sorry,” he said.

“And there was a little girl. I think she was in a coma.” I felt like crying, but if I started, it might go on forever. I’d cry for Tammy and the bird woman and the Las Vegas girl, for my mother and father and the baby Elise wouldn’t have and my cousin who had died before she’d figured out how to live.

“We’re all praying for y’all,” he said. “The whole congregation.”

“Thank you.”

“What you’re doing is a good thing.”

“Thank you,” I said again. And then, “How come? Why is it a good thing?”

He took a swallow of whatever he was drinking, ice clinking in his glass. “You’re spreading the word,” he said.

“We haven’t been spreading the word that much.”

“I’m sure you’re doing what you can.”

“No,” I said. “We’ve hardly talked to anyone.”

“Maybe your father thinks it’s best for you to concentrate on each other right now.”

“I don’t know what we’re doing. I feel kind of lost,” I said. I wanted to tell him everything, wanted him to say I was okay, that we were okay, but he wouldn’t. He’d be disappointed. He might be angry.

“It sounds like you’re about to make a breakthrough,” he said, the ice clinking again.

“It does?”

“Jess, forget about your family and the trip for a minute. Have you prepared yourself for Him?”

“That’s why I’m calling, I don’t feel prepared at all. I don’t even know if I want it to happen.”

He paused for a moment, as if to let this sink in, and said, “What if it’s not Him you’re doubting, but yourself?”

That sounded right. I had no reason to trust myself.

“There’s something you’re not telling me,” he said, and his baby, Rachel, started crying. She had some kind of deformity, one side of her face pocked with strawberries, a tumor eating up her eye. A benign tumor, my mother said, not life-threatening or even painful, though I didn’t know how she would know whether it was painful or not. The only time I’d held her, I put my hand over the bad side of her face to see what she would have looked like normal, what she was supposed to look like. She would have been a pretty baby.

His phone fell to the floor and he picked it up. “I’m sorry,” he said. “You still there?”

“I’m here.” I turned on the TV and pressed mute—no matter what station you left it on, it defaulted to the hotel’s channel. At the spa, a smiling brunette was giving a pretty Asian woman a facial. I wondered if they hired actors or if these were real employees.

“Tell me,” he said.

“Tell you what?”

“Tell me.”

“I don’t know what you want me to say.”

“How you violate yourself,” he whispered.

“What?”

“Do you want to be forgiven?” His voice cracked on the word “forgiven.” “We all want to be forgiven, Jess.” He breathed my name into the phone—
Jess, Jess
—as I sat there, unable to say anything. We were quiet for a long time, maybe ten seconds, and then he said my name louder, more clearly. I threw the phone across the room; it hit the wall and bounced off. I walked over and picked it up, knowing I hadn’t thrown it hard enough to break it. It made me hate myself. I was always worried about everything, how much a new phone would cost, how much trouble it would be to go to Verizon and get a new one. I wanted to break it and not think twice about breaking it. I wanted to be beautiful enough to demand expensive things and believe I was worthy of them.