Under the Influence

This one is for David Schiff,

a friend for life, whose integrity inspired me

to create the quiet hero of this novel.

I
t was late November, and for a week solid the rain hadn't let up. My son and I had moved out of our old apartment back before school started, but I had left it until now to clear the last of our belongings out of the storage area I'd been renting. With two days left before the end of the month, I decided not to wait any longer for dry weather. Worse things could happen to a person than getting a few boxes wet. As I well knew.

The fact that we had finally left this town was good news. Not long before, I'd finally paid off the last of my debt to the lawyer who'd represented me in my custody trial more than a dozen years earlier. Now Oliver and I were living in a bigger apartment closer to my new job in Oakland—a place where my son could finally have a little space, with a little work studio for me, too. After a long, hard stretch, the future looked hopeful.

Money being in short supply, as usual, and with Ollie off at his father's for the weekend, I was taking care of this last run over to Goodwill with a bunch of things we didn't need any more. Just about everything was soaked through, and so was I. I had pulled up to a four-way stop, waiting for my turn. All I wanted at that moment was to get out of town, knowing that once I did I would never go back.

Almost ten years had gone by since the last time I'd laid eyes on Ava Havilland. And then that day, I did.

There is this phenomenon I've noticed in the past: the way that, in a vast landscape containing so much visual information seemingly of no significance, your eyes will be drawn to one small odd thing among all the thousands of others—the thing that calls to you, and suddenly, out of everything else your eyes are taking in and disregarding, they'll focus on this one spot where something doesn't make sense, or maybe it spells danger, or it just reminds you of a time and place different from this one. And you can't look away.

It's the thing you don't expect. That fragment in the landscape out of keeping with the rest. To another pair of eyes it might mean nothing.

I remember a day I'd taken Oliver to a ball game—one of those endless attempts to construct a happy, normal time with my son within the unnatural confines of a too-rare six-hour visitation. Halfway up the rows of bleachers, in a totally different section of the ballpark—in among the thousands of other fans—I had spotted a man from my Tuesday night AA meeting holding a beer and laughing in a way that made me know it wasn't his first. A feeling of sadness had come over me—terror, actually—because just the week before, we had celebrated his three-year sobriety. And if he could slip this way, what did that say about me?

I had looked away that time. Turned to my son instead, made some comment about the pitcher—the kind of observation that a person who knew more about the game might say to her son at a moment like this, a moment when a mother wanted to share the experience of a ball game with her boy and forget about everything else. This would be the kind of mother whose child never had to see her hiding wine bottles under the cereal boxes at the bottom of the recycle bin, or led into the backseat of a police car in handcuffs—the kind of mother who got to see her child every night, not just for six hours, two Saturdays a month. For years, all I wanted was to be that kind of mother.

This was a long time back. I hadn't even met the Havillands yet. I hadn't met Elliot (who, when I did, would have given anything to bring
my son and me to a ball game and be a part of our small, struggling family). A lot of things hadn't happened yet back in those days.

Now here I was at the wheel of my old Honda Civic, idling at that intersection in an unglamorous part of San Mateo where planes flew so low, taking off from the airport or coming in for a landing, that you sometimes got the feeling they'd skim off the top of your car.

A black car pulled up alongside mine—not a police car, but it looked like some official vehicle, not a limousine. But it wasn't the man in front whose face caught my attention. It was the passenger in the backseat. She was looking out the window through the rain, and for a moment her eyes caught mine.

In the few seconds before the black car pulled away from the intersection, I recognized her, and in the odd way the mind works—instinct not yet having caught up with experience—my first impulse was to cry out as a person would who'd spotted a long-lost friend. For a second there, this great wave of pure, uncomplicated happiness started to wash over me. It was Ava.

Then I remembered. Ava wasn't my friend anymore. After all that time, it was still an odd sensation seeing her and not calling out. Not even raising my hand to wave.

I let it go. Made my face stone. If she recognized me (and something in her eyes, staring out through the glass for those few seconds, suggested that she had; after all, she was looking at me, too), she showed no more inclination than I did to acknowledge all that we knew.

She'd changed a lot since the last time we'd seen each other. Not just because she was older. (Ava would be sixty-two years old now, I figured. Her birthday was coming up.) She had always been thin, but her face looking out the window now seemed skeletal—skin stretched over bone, and nothing more. She could have been a dead person, only they hadn't buried her yet. Or a ghost—and in many ways, that's what she was to me now.

In the old days, when we used to speak every day—more than once a
day, as a rule—Ava always had a million things to tell me, though part of what I loved was how ready she was to hear what I had to say, too. How intensely she paid attention.

She was always in the middle of some project, and it was always exciting. More than anyone I'd ever known, she possessed this air of purpose and assurance. You knew that when Ava came into the room something was going to happen. Something wonderful.

The person I caught sight of in the back of the official-looking black car that day looked like someone for whom nothing good would ever happen again, a person whose life was over. Her body just hadn't taken in the news yet.

Her hair appeared to have gone gray, though most of it was concealed under an odd red cap of a sort the Ava I'd known would never have owned. It was the kind of hat you might buy at a senior citizens' craft fair, that some old lady had knitted out of polyester yarn, because that was cheaper than wool. “Polyester,” she said to me once. “Can't you just tell from the name that the stuff is junk?”

But this was Ava, all right. Nobody else looked like her. Only the Ava in the car that day no longer sat at the helm of a silver Mercedes Sprinter Van. This Ava no longer presided over the big house on Folger Lane, with the black-bottomed swimming pool and that exotic rose garden, and a gardener on staff to tend it. There was no more Guatemalan maid to pick up her clothes from the cleaners and make sure they were perfectly arranged, by color, in her vast closet, with all the beautiful shoes in their original boxes, and the scarves, and the jewelry that Swift had picked out for her laid out on velvet trays. The woman in the backseat of the black car no longer dispensed gifts of cashmere shawls and socks for the lucky people she counted as her friends, and shepherd's pie from the backseat for homeless Vietnam veterans, and dog bones for strays. Impossible to imagine Ava without her dogs, but here she was.

Most unfathomable of all, this was Ava without Swift.

There had been a time when a day didn't go by that I didn't hear her voice. Nearly everything I did was directly inspired by what Ava told me, or didn't even have to tell me, because I knew already what Ava would think, and whatever that was, that's what I believed, too. Then came a long, dark time after she cut me out of her world, and the hard reality of that betrayal became—second only to losing custody of my son—the defining fact of my life. Losing Ava's friendship had left me unable to remember who I might be anymore without her. As strong a force as her presence had created, her absence was stronger yet.

So it was a surprise to realize, when I caught sight of her through the window of that briefly idling car, that a few weeks had gone by since I'd thought about her. And now that I did, I still registered a stab of sick, sad loss. Not that I wanted to go back to the old days at that house on Folger Lane. Now I only wished I'd never set foot in it.