Commonwealth (26 page)

Later, after the argument with Leo, she and Albie had gone out the back door without ever seeing Ariel or Button. They were only going as far as the cabin at the back of the property, and they passed John Hollinger in the backyard on their way. He was wearing a perfectly crumpled summer suit and was smoking a cigarette. He was taking in the beauty of the night. “Isn't this place something,” he said to them in wonder.

Franny and Albie kept the lights in the cabin off and drank the gin, passing the bottle back and forth between them. No one thought to look for them there, but then there was a good chance that no one had thought to look for them at all. Instead, Leo and his guests would be sitting on the screened-in porch on the other side of the lawn, smoking and drinking the gin the Hollingers had brought. Leo would be railing about Franny's crazy ex-stepbrother who had shown up out of nowhere in a rage, but he wouldn't mention what the stepbrother might have been mad about.

“Did you tell Jeanette you were coming?” Franny asked him.

“No, no.” Albie shook his head in the dark. “Jeanette would have wanted to come with me, and Jeanette really would have killed him.”

“Not him,” Franny said. The burn of the gin was pleasant and familiar. She realized now she'd been saving this drink for the necessary occasion. “It was my fault.”

“Yeah,” Albie said. “But I wouldn't let Jeanette kill you.”

“Quick errand of mercy,” Franny said when she got back in the car. She explained the situation to Caroline and their father. “Let me drop the two of you off at the house and I'll go check on her. It shouldn't take long.”

“That was Albie on the phone just now?” Fix said.

“That was him.”

“That's crazy!” Caroline said. “What are the chances?” Even Caroline was impressed.

The chances were unremarkable. Franny and Albie were friends. She and Kumar had gone to his wedding. She had a picture of his daughter Charlotte on her refrigerator. Most years they remembered each other's birthdays.

“Well, I can't speak for your sister but you aren't dropping
me
off at the house,” Fix said. “I haven't seen Teresa Cousins in a dog's age.”

“Since when do you know Teresa Cousins?” Caroline asked. The four girls used to talk about it in their bunk beds at night when they were all together for the summer, how perfect it would be if Caroline and Franny's father could marry Holly and Jeanette's mother. Then everything would be settled.

“When Albie burned down the school. Haven't I ever told you that story? Your mother called and asked me to get him out of Juvenile as a favor to her, like I was in the business of doing your mother favors.”

“We know this part,” Caroline said. “Get to the Teresa part.”

Fix shook his head. “It's amazing when you think about it, those guys in Juvenile releasing him to me. They didn't know me from Adam. I just showed them my badge and said I was there to pick up Albert Cousins. Two minutes later I'm signing for the kid and they're handing him over. I would bet they don't do it like that now, at least not with a juvenile. There were two or three other boys in his gang if I remember, a couple of blacks and a Mexican. The desk sergeant asked me if I wanted them too.”

“What did you do with them?” Franny said. How could she have heard a story so many times and just now realize that all of the interesting parts had been left out?

“I left them there. I didn't want the one kid, I sure as hell wasn't going to take all four of them. I remember he'd gone to the hospital first. He had a burn on his back from where his T-shirt caught fire. They gave him a scrub top to wear but he still stank of smoke. I made him keep the windows down in the car.”

“You've got a cold heart, Pops,” Caroline said.

“Cold heart my ass. I saved that kid. I was the one who got him out. I took him over to the fire station to see your uncle Tom. He
was working Westchester then, all the way out by LAX. I was stuck in that airport traffic with Bert Cousins's kid who smelled like a charcoal pit. He and Uncle Tom had their heart-to-heart about arson. You know your uncle was a childhood arsonist, used to burn things up all the time. Not schools, mind you, just empty lots and little things no one cared about. Lots of firemen got their start setting fires. They learn to set them, then they learn to put them out. Tom explained all that to Albie and then I drove him back to Torrance. It was a whole goddamn day in the car.”

“And that's when you met Teresa Cousins,” Caroline said.

“And that's when I met Teresa Cousins. Nice woman, I remember that. She'd really been through it but she kept her head up. That kid of hers, though, he was a wolf.”

“He improved,” Franny said.

“I'll say he's improved. First I find out he broke up your engagement to the Jew—” Fix held up his hand. “Wait, I did it again, sorry, the drunk, and now he's worried about his mother.”

“We weren't engaged,” Franny said.

“Franny,” Caroline said. “Let Albie have his due.”

“Same house out in Torrance?” Fix asked.

Franny read him the address.

He nodded. “Same house. I'll tell you how to get there. We can do the whole thing on surface streets.”

All the stories go with you, Franny thought, closing her eyes. All the things I didn't listen to, won't remember, never got right, wasn't around for. All the ways to get to Torrance.

In Virginia, the six children had shared two bedrooms and a single cat, picked food from one another's plates and indiscriminately used the same bath towels, but in California everything was separate. Holly and Cal and Albie and Jeanette had never been invited to Fix Keating's house, just as Caroline and Franny had never
seen where Teresa Cousins lived. Bert and Teresa bought the house in Torrance in the sixties when Bert took the job in the Los Angeles D.A.'s office: it wasn't too far from downtown or too far from the beach. There were three bedrooms, one for Bert and Teresa, one for Cal, and one for Holly. When Jeanette and Albie came along everybody shared. It was the starter house, the port from which they planned to embark on their grand life. In the end, everyone left but Teresa, first Bert then Cal then Albie then Holly and finally Jeanette. Jeanette started talking that last year before college when she and Teresa lived alone together. They had a good time, made each other laugh, which surprised them both.

In truth, the story didn't turn out to be such a bad one. While Teresa went to work day after day and year after year at the D.A.'s office, Torrance improved. The neighborhood, which had once been a place to leave as soon as there was money, became up-and-coming, and then fully arrived. Teresa planted a succulent garden in a rock bed with plans she took from a magazine. She added a deck. She turned the boys' room into a den. Real estate agents left handwritten notes in her mailbox asking her if she was interested in selling and she put the notes in the recycle bin. Teresa liked her job as a paralegal and she was good at it. The lawyers were always telling her to go to law school—she was smarter than most of them—but she wanted none of it. She stayed with the county until she was seventy-two, leaving with one of those plush California pensions that would eventually drive the state into bankruptcy. Lawyers who had long since moved on to other jobs came back to raise a glass to Teresa at her retirement party. They chipped in together and bought her a watch.

Once a year she went to New York to see Jeanette and Fodé and the children. She loved them but New York overwhelmed her. Californians were used to their own houses and cars and lawns.
She missed the sprawl. She saved up her money and bought a ticket to Switzerland to see Holly at the Zen center. For ten days she sat beside her oldest living child on a cushion and did nothing but breathe. Teresa liked the breathing up to a point but then the silence overwhelmed her. She considered the life of her daughters in terms of Goldilocks coming into the cottage of the three bears: too hot and too cold, too hard and too soft. She kept her opinions to herself, wanting most of all to not be seen as critical. Albie came back to Torrance two or three times a year. She would make up a list of the things that needed taking care of and he would tick them off, putting a new motor in the garage door and flushing out the hot water heater. After a life of scraping by in odd jobs, Albie had, by necessity, become a person who could do absolutely anything. These days he worked for a company up in Walnut Creek that made bicycles. He liked that. At Christmas he sent his mother a plane ticket so that she could come and sit around a tree with him and his daughter and his wife. Sometimes the popcorn and the fireplace and the endless hands of Go Fish would overwhelm her and she would have to excuse herself and go to the bathroom just to stand beside the sink for a minute and cry. Afterwards she'd rinse her face and dry it off again, coming back to the living room good as new. It was what she had hoped for but never for a minute what she'd expected.

Teresa dated a few lawyers after Bert left, a couple of cops, none of them married. That was her rule and she never broke it, not even for a drink after work, which, as they were quick to remind her, was all they were asking for. Around the time Jeanette left for college Teresa fell in love with Jim Chen, a public defender of all things, and they had ten good years before he had a heart attack in the parking lot outside the county courthouse. There were people all over the place, people who saw him fall and called 911.
A secretary who had taken a life-saving course when her children were small did CPR until the ambulance came, but sometimes all the right things are as useless as nothing at all. Life, Teresa knew by now, was a series of losses. It was other things too, better things, but the losses were as solid and dependable as the earth itself.

Now there was this thing in her stomach that was doubling her over, enough pain to make her shake, and then it would pull back and let her breathe. If she'd had the sense to go to her doctor three days ago when it started she could have driven herself over, but after three days of not eating she was too weak to drive anywhere. She could call Fodé and ask him what to do, Fodé was a doctor, but she was perfectly capable of having that conversation in her head without bothering him on the other side of the country: he would tell her she should call a friend and go to the hospital, or, short of that, call an ambulance. She didn't want to do either of those things. She was so tired she felt lucky to make it to the bathroom, to the kitchen for a glass of water, and then back to bed again. She was eighty-two years old. She imagined her children might use this particular stomach pain to answer their questions about whether or not she could continue to live alone in her house or whether she'd have to move to a facility up north someplace near Albie. She couldn't go to Jeanette, people moved to Brooklyn to fall in love and write novels and have children, not to get old, and she couldn't go to Holly, though she imagined dying in the Zen center might come with spiritual advantages.

Then on the second day it occurred to her that maybe this pain, whatever it was, could answer the question of her future in a larger way: maybe this pain that felt like it was killing her would actually kill her. Her appendix was still in there somewhere, and while appendicitis seemed like the kind of thing schoolchildren died of on camping trips, it was possible that hers had hung around all these
years in order to detonate late in the game. That wouldn't be the worst thing, would it? Peritonitis? Not as quick as dear Jim Chen going out in a parking lot, but still. When she was having a better moment she found the key to the lockbox, the title to her car, her will. Only a person in deep denial about the future would work her entire life in the legal profession without having a good will. Everything she had was divided three ways. The house, long since paid for, had ticked steadily up in value, and there were savings. Once the kids were out of school she never spent what came in. She laid everything out on the kitchen table and sat down to write a note. She didn't want it to seem like a suicide note because she was most definitely not committing suicide, but she thought whoever came to the house eventually should find more than the car keys and her body. She looked at the pad of paper she used to make grocery lists. The top was lined with cheerful daisies dancing in their pots above a series of chaotic pink letters that spelled out
Things To Do
. She had never stopped to think about how stupid it was to buy a pad of paper that said
Things To Do
but she didn't have the energy to go look for a plain white sheet. The pain was ramping up again and she wanted to go back to bed.

Not feeling great.

Just in case.

Love, Mom

That was good enough.

Albie was the single distraction from what, on the third day, she had rather hazily decided was a very intelligent plan. He had called too many times to check on her, and how she explained the situation to him had everything to do with where the phone call fell in the cycle of pain. A few times she simply hadn't answered.
The idea of picking up the phone had overwhelmed her. But then she did answer, and he told her to get up and open the front door. He said that Franny Keating was coming over to see her.

“Franny Keating?”

“She's in town visiting her father. I asked her to come over and check on you.”

“I know people who can check on me,” Teresa said, sounding pathetic even to herself. She
did
have friends, she had just made a decision to stay home and experiment with dying.

“I'm sure you do but I was tired of waiting for you to call them. Go open your door. She's going to be there in a minute.”

Teresa hung up the phone and looked down at herself in her zip-front cotton robe, what her mother had called a model's coat back in Virginia. She'd been wearing it for three days and it had been crushed by restless sleep and perspiration. She hadn't taken a bath or brushed her teeth or looked in a mirror since this all began. Franny Keating coming to the house was not the same as Beverly Keating coming to the house, but at this moment Teresa was having a hard time distinguishing the two of them in her mind. Beverly Keating, who was Beverly Cousins, who was now Beverly-something-else, Teresa couldn't remember what Jeanette had told her other than she'd married again after Bert. Beverly-Something-Else was so bone-crushingly beautiful that even now, fifty years later, it hurt to think of it. Beverly was always in the pictures the children brought back from summer, as if Catherine Deneuve happened to wander by while they were playing in the pool or swinging in swings and stepped accidentally into the frame as the shutter snapped. She did not want to die thinking of Beverly Keating's beauty. Beverly was younger than Teresa too, not by a lot but it mattered. Beverly wouldn't even be eighty yet.