Pasadena (13 page)

I take off my shoes and slip my feet into the water. It's cold, even on a hot day like today. I shiver until my legs get used to the idea.

Until I get used to the idea.

“She didn't call me.”

Parker hangs his head. “She didn't want you to stop her.”

“And Luke Liu?” I ask.

Parker looks at me with a pained smile. “She said he was her guardian angel. He couldn't be on duty if she was going to go through with it.”

“So she slept with him, and sent him home . . .”

“I think she loved him . . . maybe,” Parker says, as if hoping for that small comfort.

What a bitter pill, hope.

“Oh, Maggie,” I sigh. Hating her. Hating Parker. “Did you know she gave Edina Rodriguez your grandmother's necklace?”

Parker sobs, a tear splashing onto his cheek. “For two
weeks. For safekeeping. She didn't want my mother to have to bury it with her.”

Right. That was Maggie. Selfless, thoughtful Maggie.

Someone I barely knew. Someone I would never know now.

I feel the bile rise in me, feel the hurt, the stomach-clenching ache of loss and anger. For a moment, I'm glad she's dead. Glad I don't have to see her, to know how she lied to me. How she left a trail of confusion so I couldn't see the truth until it was too late.

They say suicide is a choice. Like the boy with the melting Popsicle versus the girl with the sunshine smile.

Maggie chose Parker over me.

The trouble is, she left us both behind.

“Why shouldn't I just push you into the deep end and let you drown?” I ask him, acid at the back of my throat. He's guilty after all, but it's survivor's guilt. He outlived Maggie. And that's unforgivable.

Parker shrugs. “I can swim, Jude. But if I couldn't, then Maggie would have died for nothing.”

I laugh and shake my head. Wishing the murderous thought away.

Beside us, Joey sits, all but forgotten. He turns to Parker. “The cemetery. That was your idea?”

“No,” Parker says wistfully. “That was all Maggie.
She and my folks bought that plot for me when I turned twelve. I wasn't doing so well, and Maggie said we could still watch movies together from the afterlife.”

Joey blinks his eyes dry. “Are you going to tell your parents?”

Parker shakes his head. “What's the good in that? They'd never look at me the same way again without seeing her.”

A bitterness fills my mouth that words won't wash away. “You mean the way they never saw her, only you?”

Parker hangs his head and a tear falls, rippling the water.

I can't blame him for being a coward. Lord knows I've been one too . . . with my mother, Roy, Joey . . .

We sit there for a while, the guilty and the guilt-ridden, turning browner in the hot Pasadena sun, pondering the point of it all.

But you should never question the dead. Their stance, by default, is inarguable.

Around us, the air roasts, filled with the ticking of air conditioners, the drip-drip of condensation, the warm-hay smell of dried palm trees and sunburnt pavement.

Maggie kills herself so her brother can live. And he lets it happen. Too afraid to stop her, too afraid to die.
Like there weren't a million other options in between. A million of them, and they all would have kept her alive.

But none of that matters now. Some decisions you can't unmake. Some harms can't be undone.

Maggie's suicide, Roy's lechery, Dane's infidelity. My rape.

All water under a very long bridge.

At last, I reach into my purse and pull out the strand of pearls. “Give these to your mother,” I tell Parker, and drop them on the deck of the pool. I rise to my feet. “I'm going home.”

“God, I can't wait to get out of this place and go to college.”

Maggie and I were poolside yet again, at the start of our junior year, propped up on our elbows, toes dangling in the water.

Up at the main house, the cavalcade of concerned friends was making an appearance. Parker was home from the hospital. Not a surgery this time, just observation after a bad fever. In honor of his return, Maggie was smoking her nasty filterless cigarettes and blowing the smoke toward the house.

“One more year after this one,” I reminded her. The future, as they say, was wide open.

“Do you know where you want to go?” she asked me.

I laughed. “Who cares, as long as it's not here?”

“You surprise me,” she said. “I always took you for an Oxy girl.”

“Guess again.” Going to school within five miles of home, even to Occidental, was out of the question. “Besides, you're going back east. Wouldn't you miss me?”

Maggie sighed and leaned back on her lounge chair, taking a luxuriant drag from her smoke. “Darling,” she said after she inhaled, “I'll miss all the little people. Do you hear me?” She sat up suddenly, sunglasses glinting in the afternoon light. “Darling”—she blew me a theatrical kiss—“I'll miss you all!”

I
'll take you home,” Joey says, jogging after me through the Kims' side gate and onto the street.

I turn around to face him. “No, Joe. Not this time.”

His face creases. “Jude? What's going on?”

I take a step toward him. In my heels, I come level to his chin. I put a hand on his right cheek and kiss him on the other. “Thank you. For being with me through all this. You can go now. I'll be all right.”

But Joey doesn't leave. He looks down at me and puts his arms around my shoulders. He doesn't pull me to him. That's a distance I'll have to close myself.

“Well, maybe
I'm
not all right,” he says. “Did you ever think of that? Maybe I need you here with me.”

I can't look him in the eye. I needed Maggie, not the other way around. I don't want to do the same thing to Joey. Not if there's a choice.

“You don't deserve a train wreck like me, Joey. Find a girl who knows how to love you the right way.”

His arms fall away like dead leaves in autumn. “You mean a kid, like Amanda Liu?”

I think of Luke's little sister, young and naïve, untouched by all this bitterness. “Yes. Like her. You're a good guy, Joey. You deserve a little innocence.”

Joey seems to cave in on himself, shoulders collapsing like a scarecrow without its straw. After a moment, he steps forward and presses a kiss to my forehead.

I can feel the sorrow in it. The pain.

“I guess it didn't work, then,” he says when he steps back.

“What didn't?”

“Being there for you. Being good.”

Something shifts in my chest. That hollowness from this morning that I thought was because of Maggie. It was Joey all along.

I feel it like a physical pain. The sound of a heart trying to beat again. Trying and falling short.

“Almost,” I tell him. “It almost did.”

Joey makes a study of the sidewalk, cracked and
wavering in the heat. With a little shrug, he pulls himself upright and reaches into his shirt pocket. “Here.”

I hesitate, staring at the photograph in his hand: a little girl, nine years old, wearing a sundress and a smile as big as the sky.

Me. The way I used to be.

My throat tightens. “That was Maggie's.”

“It was stuck between the pages of my book.”

That dog-eared copy of
Cyrano
sitting on his dashboard. The one he's been driving around with all week. I'd thought it was a reminder of Maggie, of their friendship. I guess I was wrong.

And just like that, it falls into place. The last piece of the puzzle. Maggie knew what she was doing the night she died. She had always known.

The pearls given to comfort Edina, held in trust for her mother.

Seducing Luke Liu.

Sending me three thousand miles away.

Making plans to hang out with Joey so he'd be the one to find her. Knowing how I would turn to him.

Every one of her affairs had been put in order. Including mine. The right picture in the right hands at the right moment.

Maggie Kim's bequest to me. A chance to be happy again.

All I have to do is reach out and take it.

Joey is looking at me, trying to see that little girl in the person standing before him, the way Maggie wanted him to see her. The way only she ever saw me.

But that little girl's not here anymore.

And that's what I loved about Maggie. She had hope for me, even though it was lost.

“It's a nice picture,” Joey says.

“I know.” I reach for the print with cold fingers.

Joey starts to say something and, for a moment, we are both tethered to the photograph of the little girl with the impossible smile. The one Edina had called “happy.” It trembles between our fingers.

And then he lets it go.

I take a deep breath.

“I want to go home, Joey.”

He kisses me on the forehead again, releasing me.

“Then go.”

I hear his shoes scrape the sidewalk, the buzz of a passing plane, the click of the air-conditioning units struggling up and down the block. He starts his car and I could stop him, tell him I was wrong, tell him I want to give us a try.

But I'm not that girl. Not even Maggie could change that.

When he drives away, I don't look back.

T
here's unexpected furniture on the little patch of dead earth we call a front lawn. Not much. A folding chair, some TV trays, a portable radio, littering the yellow grass like the end of a yard sale. I recognize it all as Roy's.

I kick off my shoes coming up the walk and enter the house through the front door.

The living room is empty. Music is playing in my mother's room. The door is shut.

I pass through the house. The kitchen is spotless, and the bath mats have been washed and hung over the bathroom shower rod to dry.

It's my mother's post-partum ritual. When something ends, you clean house and wait for the next thing to begin.
When I was born, my father said, she even polished the silverware.

I go to my room and change out of my black dress and fake pearls. It feels like a costume coming off, like a layer of pretense being torn away. I'd shower if the bath mats weren't hanging. Instead, I go into the bathroom and wash my face.

In the mirror, I look twelve years old again. The denim shorts and faded T-shirt remind me of summers back east, when there were three of us in my family. When family was more than just a word.

I turn away from the mirror and go sit outside.

On the front steps, I watch Roy's belongings become a part of the landscape, and wonder if my mother kicked him out, or begged him to stay. And how long it'll be before he, or some opportunistic Dumpster diver, comes along to claim his junk.

A warm breeze rustles across the grass, bringing the scent of baked hay and ash.

I'm still sitting there when the music stops and my mother comes out to join me.

“Roy's gone,” she says by way of greeting. My mother looks different when she's single. Cleaner, somehow. Whole-grain bread instead of brioche.

“Good riddance,” I say.

“It's just you and me now.”

We sit for a moment in silence, watching the grass die in the heat of the sun. “I'm so sorry about Maggie,” she says. “And about Roy.”

I take a deep breath and let her have her piece.

“I didn't see it, or I'd have stopped it,” she promises.

I could say the same about Maggie's suicide. I would have stopped it, but I chose not to see.

“I want you to know,” she tells me, “I'm going to keep trying. I want to be a better mother to you.”

The way I want to be a better daughter, a better girlfriend. A better friend.

“Sure,” I say. “You'll try. I'll try. We'll all try.” It's a familiar tune. I dance the steps without even counting. Because some of us don't get second chances.

It's my mother's turn to sigh, and she does so, exhaustedly. “Why do you blame me for everything?” she asks in a thin, weary voice.

“Not everything, Mom. Just the one thing. Isn't that enough?” I don't know why I say it. I can lay blame at my mother's feet, at my father's. At Maggie's, at Parker's. At mine. But I'm angry, and she's an old familiar target for the blow.

This cues her exit. Every time, my mother stands up, looks out into the middle distance, and walks away. But not today.

Maybe because a girl my age is dead, someone my mother knew. Someone I loved.

Maybe because it's a Thursday and the yard is full of trash.

But she doesn't leave. She just leans back with her elbows on the top step, her back wedged against the cracked concrete between the bottom and middle stair. “I wonder,” she says. “I wonder if you'll ever forgive me for not protecting you.”

It's a new note in the old song, and for once, I have to think of my line. “That depends,” I say.

“On what?”

“On whether or not I can forgive myself.”

One dark night long ago, a bad man did a bad thing to a little girl who's been bad inside ever since. Nobody saved me the way Maggie tried to save her family.

Even I fought for my friend more than I ever fought for that little girl. Maggie meant the world to me. Why should I be worth any less?

I feel that Ferris wheel again, and I'm tumbling out of it, fingers slipping, wondering if I can let it all go.

Then the record skips and gets back on course.

“You were just a kid, hon,” my mother says. “Just a child.”

“I know.”

We're all just little kids in the big wide world. Making choices every day. Right or wrong. Skinning our knees and getting back up again until the day we simply cannot rise.

I pull the photograph from my pocket and give it to her. The last picture of her innocent little girl.

My mother gasps, staring at the photo in her hands. I can feel her heartache, homesick for that child's smile.

She puts an arm around me, and I let her pull me into a small half hug.

We sit on the steps, our shoulders pressed together, her head leaning against mine. I can feel it through my bones when she echoes my words. “Yeah,” she says. “You know.”

August in Pasadena. Fire, heat, and ash as the Santa Ana winds blow out of the west, scouring the dead fronds from palm trees, igniting the manzanita and chaparral. It's the song of Southern California, fire, mud, and earthquake; tear it down, build it up.

The earth shakes, the houses burn, and people die, damned and unforgiven, or saved. But the rest of us remain.

Maggie Kim is gone.

I'm the one who must
endure.