wouldn’t tell me. He said he didn’t want to oversell it, but I guessed!”
Jessica rubs her forehead again. She clears her throat. Down the hall the music has the dizzy sound of the tracks they play when cartoon animals discover they are falling. In the background on the landlady’s end of the line, the dog is still barking. She says, “Well then, um.… What seems to be the problem?”
“Oh yes. It’s just that the neighbors have been complaining about his poor dog.”
“His dog?”
“Yes. Grace Kelly has been out in the yard barking ever since he went to the hospital.”
“Hospital?”
“Yes. You don’t know? Oh for heaven’s sake, this makes much more sense now, you always seem like such a lovely person in your films. I was in Palm Springs visiting my sister, and when I got back I resumed my usual weekly property visits, and this time, when I came around, your father’s handsome white malamute was just barking in the backyard, and Mrs. Lippincott from next door comes rushing out into her driveway. Says an ambulance came to take him to the hospital shortly after I left town and the dog’s been outside ever since. I say, ‘Hospital?! Why, that’s Jessica Lessing’s father, you know. Have the papers reported a visit to town from her?’ No, she says, not hardly. She herself has been dropping food over the fence each day just to keep the poor dog from starving. I say, ‘That can’t be. She would never let that happen. Remember her in
Personal History
? Remember her in
A Passage to the Heart
? I’m going to call her the instant I get back to my house.’ ”
Jessica rubs her temples. Behind the multiheaded beast of her feelings about herself and her past as a girl and a daughter is a backdrop of yearning thrown up by this woman’s mentions of her films. She ignores it over and over, but a dozen times a day, every day, every week for five years, she has wished for a brief escape into the perfect satisfaction of using this mess—this crazy tangle of childhood memory and shame and self-righteousness and hope and fear—to create a character (utterly real but blessedly pretend) who can tell a story that will make others not just weep (she has done that before) but also understand.
Understand!
And (as if that in itself wouldn’t be enough) afterward clap, stand up, go home, and never think of her again.
“Are you still there, dear?”
“What? I’m sorry—”
“Mrs. Lippincott said she felt she had no choice but to call Animal Control. There’s a notice on the door now. They’re coming by tomorrow to pick her up unless somebody comes and claims her.”
Akhil’s palms are flat on the counter, as if to hold the whole kitchen in place.
Jessica says, “Do you know what hospital my father is in?”
“Summerlin, I should think. But if you don’t mind my asking, how could you not have known about this? Have you been on location somewhere, dear? Somewhere remote?”
3
Spiders
T he third is much younger, just a girl standing that night in a T-shirt and panties in front of an open refrigerator in North Las Vegas, eating squares of deli ham from a partitioned package—crackers, circles of turkey, stars of yellow cheese. The top shelf makes almost a halo behind her—a stick of butter, the blue-white ceiling above, a gallon of Sunny Delight. She brushes the blond hair from her damp forehead with the back of her wrist, chewing. The kitchen is small, with white-linoleum floors and chipped white formica counters, and through the dormer window above the sink, she can see the asphalt tile roof of another section of the same building. There are two sounds: from down the hall a din of rushing water—strangely amplified like the crash of some interior waterfall—and through the tiny open window, the metronome bark of another neglected dog.
This is Vivian.
She looks at a doorway at the end of a narrow neck of hall.
She looks at the clock on the stove: 7:15.
On the scratched surface of the metal
Jessica rubs her forehead again. She clears her throat. Down the hall the music has the dizzy sound of the tracks they play when cartoon animals discover they are falling. In the background on the landlady’s end of the line, the dog is still barking. She says, “Well then, um.… What seems to be the problem?”
“Oh yes. It’s just that the neighbors have been complaining about his poor dog.”
“His dog?”
“Yes. Grace Kelly has been out in the yard barking ever since he went to the hospital.”
“Hospital?”
“Yes. You don’t know? Oh for heaven’s sake, this makes much more sense now, you always seem like such a lovely person in your films. I was in Palm Springs visiting my sister, and when I got back I resumed my usual weekly property visits, and this time, when I came around, your father’s handsome white malamute was just barking in the backyard, and Mrs. Lippincott from next door comes rushing out into her driveway. Says an ambulance came to take him to the hospital shortly after I left town and the dog’s been outside ever since. I say, ‘Hospital?! Why, that’s Jessica Lessing’s father, you know. Have the papers reported a visit to town from her?’ No, she says, not hardly. She herself has been dropping food over the fence each day just to keep the poor dog from starving. I say, ‘That can’t be. She would never let that happen. Remember her in
Personal History
? Remember her in
A Passage to the Heart
? I’m going to call her the instant I get back to my house.’ ”
Jessica rubs her temples. Behind the multiheaded beast of her feelings about herself and her past as a girl and a daughter is a backdrop of yearning thrown up by this woman’s mentions of her films. She ignores it over and over, but a dozen times a day, every day, every week for five years, she has wished for a brief escape into the perfect satisfaction of using this mess—this crazy tangle of childhood memory and shame and self-righteousness and hope and fear—to create a character (utterly real but blessedly pretend) who can tell a story that will make others not just weep (she has done that before) but also understand.
Understand!
And (as if that in itself wouldn’t be enough) afterward clap, stand up, go home, and never think of her again.
“Are you still there, dear?”
“What? I’m sorry—”
“Mrs. Lippincott said she felt she had no choice but to call Animal Control. There’s a notice on the door now. They’re coming by tomorrow to pick her up unless somebody comes and claims her.”
Akhil’s palms are flat on the counter, as if to hold the whole kitchen in place.
Jessica says, “Do you know what hospital my father is in?”
“Summerlin, I should think. But if you don’t mind my asking, how could you not have known about this? Have you been on location somewhere, dear? Somewhere remote?”
3
Spiders
T he third is much younger, just a girl standing that night in a T-shirt and panties in front of an open refrigerator in North Las Vegas, eating squares of deli ham from a partitioned package—crackers, circles of turkey, stars of yellow cheese. The top shelf makes almost a halo behind her—a stick of butter, the blue-white ceiling above, a gallon of Sunny Delight. She brushes the blond hair from her damp forehead with the back of her wrist, chewing. The kitchen is small, with white-linoleum floors and chipped white formica counters, and through the dormer window above the sink, she can see the asphalt tile roof of another section of the same building. There are two sounds: from down the hall a din of rushing water—strangely amplified like the crash of some interior waterfall—and through the tiny open window, the metronome bark of another neglected dog.
This is Vivian.
She looks at a doorway at the end of a narrow neck of hall.
She looks at the clock on the stove: 7:15.
On the scratched surface of the metal
Similar Books
Semi-Human (Harper Hall Investigations Book 2)
Isabel Jordan
Suddenly Famous
Heather Leigh
Chasing Abby
Cassia Leo
Atonement
J. H. Cardwell
The Jake Helman Files Personal Demons
Gregory Lamberson
Around the River's Bend
Aaron McCarver
Bring On the Night
Jeri Smith-Ready
Blood War 1: Last Stand of the Legion: Rift
Rod Carstens
Shackled: A Stepbrother Romance Novel
Arabella Abbing