Commonwealth

  “Get out of here,” Fix said, his voice keening. “Get out!” They had him back in his seat but his legs were still twisted. He kicked at Franny but she got his feet back on the paddles. Caroline got behind the chair and Franny grabbed their purses. They were not exactly running with their father but they were going as fast as they could. Franny raced ahead and held open the door to the long, carpeted hallway, and then they were through the lobby, past the crazy neon rainbow pulsing above the popcorn stand, past the teenaged ticket-takers in their brown polyester vests. Bang! They burst through the glass double doors and out into the unbearable flood of sunlight.

  “Fuck that!” Fix screamed at the parking lot. A mother with two children was crossing towards them but then stopped, reconsidered, and went the other way. Franny laughed and then buried her face in her hands. Caroline bent from the waist, putting her head on the curve of her father’s shoulder.

  “Happy birthday, Dad,” she said. She gave him a small kiss on the neck.

  “Fuck that,” Fix said again, this time discouraged.

  “Yeah,” Franny said, and rubbed his other shoulder. “Fuck that.”

  After the movie they went to the beach. Franny and Fix were against it. They said they were tired and wanted to go home, but Caroline was the one who was driving the car.

  “I will not allow that to be my memory of Dad’s birthday,” she said, tapping at the accelerator to remind them what the car was capable of, what she was capable of. “I want to wipe that movie off my eyeballs. We’re going to go look at the ocean.”

  “Turn on Altamont,” he said. His voice half-vanished, as if the roar of his invective to the movie theater parking lot was all he had left.

  “Do you think we might kill him, going to the beach now?” Franny said to Caroline.

  Fix smiled. “That’s how I want to go. I want to die at the beach with my girls. We could call Joe Mike to come out and give me last rites.”

  “Joe Mike’s not a priest anymore,” Caroline said.

  “He’d do it for me.”

  It was harder getting their father out of the car the second time. He wasn’t as able to help them, but Franny and Caroline managed. Caroline had, of course, been right about the beach. Almost all of the days in Santa Monica were beautiful, and this one, by virtue of the fact that it was no longer playing out in a movie theater, was more beautiful than most. Fix had a permanent handicapped placard for the Crown Victoria and they got a magnificent parking space when no parking spaces were available.

  “Writing out a two-hundred-dollar ticket to some able-bodied asshole in a handicapped spot.” Fix shook his head. “That is a pleasure you’ll never know.”

  Franny pushed the chair down the sidewalk blown over with sand. They took it all in: the gulls and the waves, the bikini-clad girls, the boys in board shorts, the lifeguard in his wooden tower watching over them like a god. Young people so beautiful they should have been making commercials for tanning lotion or ever-lasting youth played volleyball with no one watching. People ran with their dogs or ate sno-cones or stretched out on brightly patterned towels the size of bed sheets and baked.

  “Don’t you wonder who all these people are?” Caroline marveled. “It’s Thursday. Doesn’t anyone have a job?”

  “They’re celebrating my birthday,” Fix said. “I gave them all the day off.”

  “Why aren’t those kids in school?” Caroline looked at a half dozen children with buckets beavering away on the rearrangement of sand.

  “Do you remember when I used to bring you girls to the beach?” Fix said.

  “Every year,” Franny said.

  Fix looked out at the waves, at the tiny figures of men skating the water on bright-yellow boards. “I don’t see any girls out there,” Fix said.

  “The girls are lying on their towels,” Franny said.

  Fix shook his head. “That isn’t right. I would have taught you to surf. If you had lived out here with me I would have taught you to surf.”

  Caroline reached out and combed back her father’s hair with her fingers. All she had ever wanted when she was young was to live with her father and no one would let her. “You didn’t know how to surf.”

  Fix nodded slowly to the waves, taking it all into account. “I wasn’t a good swimmer,” he said.

  They watched a boy with a pink-and-red dragon kite that raced straight up, spun in wild circles, and then plummeted down. They watched two girls in bikinis roller-blade past them, their long legs nearly brushing Fix’s knees.

  “Your mother wasn’t like that,” Fix said, his eyes still on the surfers.

  Franny didn’t know what he was talking about, the roller-blading girls? but Caroline picked it up. “Mom wasn’t an orthopedic surgeon?”

  “Your mother was better than that, that’s all. I’m not one to go sticking up for your mother but I want you to know, she wasn’t the way that woman played her in the movie.”

  The two sisters looked at each other over the wheelchair. Caroline gave her head a sideways tilt.

  “Dad,” Franny said. “None of those people were us.”

  ‘That’s right,” Fix said and patted her hand as if to say he was glad she’d understood.

  When they got back in the car Caroline and Franny both checked their phones. They’d turned them off for the movie and in the aftermath had forgotten to turn them on again.

  “I wish I had a phone,” Fix said. “I could be a part of the club.”

  “Check your Thomas Brothers guide,” Caroline said, her thumb rolling down an endless stream of texts from work.

  Franny had two texts, one from Kumar wanting to know where the checkbook was, and one from Albie that said “CALL ME!!”

  “One second,” Franny said, and got back out of the car.

  He picked up on the first ring. “Are you still in L.A.?”

  They had e-mailed a week or two ago. She had told him she was coming out for her father’s birthday. “I’m standing in front of the ocean right now.”

  “I need a huge favor, which you owe me for not telling me that fucking movie was coming out this week.”

  “Don’t see it,” Franny said. The kid still had the dragon kite up. There was just enough wind.

  “My mother’s sick. She’s been really sick for three days and she won’t go to the hospital. She tells me she’s fine and she tells me she’s sick all at the same time, and I don’t think she’s fine. I can get down there by tonight but I’m worried she needs to go to the hospital now. I can’t get her neighbors on the phone, her best friend’s out of town. Mom was never exactly what you’d call social, or if she was social she didn’t tell me about it, so I don’t have a lot to work with. I don’t want to send an ambulance and scare her to death when maybe there really isn’t anything wrong with her.” Albie stopped for a minute, breathed in. “What I want to know is if you’d go over there and check on her. Jeanette’s in New York, Holly’s in fucking Switzerland. I can call Mom and tell her you’re coming. She’ll be mad but at least that way she’ll open the door.”

  Franny looked back at the Crown Victoria, knowing the car could fly there. She looked at her father and sister in the front seat, staring at her through the window like two people who were late for an appointment. “Sure,” she said. “Give me the address. Then I’ll call you and tell you whether or not you should come.”

  There was a pause on the line and Franny wondered if her phone had gone dead. She wasn’t great about remembering to plug it in. Then Albie’s voice came back. “Oh, Franny,” he said.

  “Your mom doesn’t know about the movie, does she?”

  “My mom doesn’t know about the book,” he said. “It turns out a novel isn’t the worst place to hide things.”

  It was more than twenty years since Albie had taken the train to Amagansett. He had finished reading the book before he left and had given it to Jeanette. He had walked the three miles to the actress’s house from the station and knocked on the door to find out how his life had falle
n into someone else’s hands.

  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.