Elsinore Canyon (4 page)

Dana pulled away and stared up at him as if he’d stuck a knife in her back.

“Isn’t it time?” he fumbled on. “Aren’t you ready to look up, and look around you? Dana, everybody—” He balked. The word was harsh even for six weeks ago, totally out of tune for today. His voice fell. “Dies.”

Dana glared at him in mock surprise. “My goodness. That’s
right.
They do. It’s a scientific fact.”

“Then why do you keep…mourning?”

She followed his eyes down to her black blot of a dress. “Oh. So that’s how you knew I was sad. But”—she looked deadly earnest—“my underwear is hot pink, Dad.” Mr. Hamlet leaned away as if he’d done all he could.

Dr. Claudia eased in. Head tilted. Reasonable. “Dana, of course you loved your mother. You’re obviously trying to be a good daughter—and you are. But—”

“If you want to flatter me then quit treating me like an idiot.”

“I’ve been in your shoes, Dana.”

“Did your father marry your aunt?”

“My mother died. Dana, she was your mother’s mother, too. We moved on. Not everyone lives in it the way you are. It’s nature’s course. I’d love to be your new mother. Can’t you let me?”

Dana loaded herself with some lethal retort, but Mr. Hamlet cut in gently. “Dana, at least don’t go off to Costa Rica. Stick around a while. Baby, I need you.”

Father and daughter searched each other’s eyes. She bit her lip and nodded. He kissed her forehead and steered Dr. Claudia away.

As soon as they were gone, Dana fell back against the wall and her face drained of hope. She slid her phone out of her sleeve, tapped the camera, and addressed her digital self hollowly. “Let me wake up dead.”

I rolled out from the back of the crowd. It wasn’t just me. It had to be the un-merriest party everyone there had ever been to.

“See what I mean?” Marcellus said. It was half an hour later, and he and I had regrouped in a room adjoining his office.

“Yeah. Say, why did you change your office?” It was different from the one he’d occupied for years.

“We’re all scattered. Me, Oscar, Polly, Perla, Miguel. But we like it as long as we’re not on the other side of the building.”

“What’s over there?”

“Her office. I’m probably not supposed to know, but the doctor is causing trouble in the Foundation. Some good partners are pulling away.”

“She’s been on the board for years, hasn’t she?”

“Yes, but now she’s taking over. I think she’s the reason for the…” He waved his hand in the direction of the adobe.

“Why haven’t you brought Mr. Hamlet to see it?”

“I can’t get through to him,” he said in frustration. “Everything goes through
her
now. I leave him a message or call, I get a call back from Polly or Oscar or another one of her gatekeepers.”

“But—”

“Horst, at some point he’s going along with it. That’s where it stops being my problem. If he doesn’t want to hear it from me, I’ll tell Dana and she can deal with him.”

“Right. When do you want to take her down there?”

“The sooner the better.”

“I haven’t been able to get a word in edgewise with h—”

“Horst?” came a jubilant voice. “Horst,
Horst!”
Dana. She was in the doorway, then across the room in a bound, flying onto my chest with such force that she knocked me backwards in my chair. Her flossy hair tickled my face—my hands moved of their own accord down her back and sides as she splayed herself on me, her warm, jiggly weight leaving me all horizontal and helpless in my contraption. Over her shoulder, I could see her golden legs periscoping out from the hem of her dress. “God bless it, I’m happy to see you!”

“I’ve…missed you.”

She pulled back—her face an inch over mine—and snickered. “Sorry,” she said tenderly. A tear dripped off her nose and onto my lip. “Is your head hurt?”

“No.”

She climbed off me, and I pushed myself back up. Left hand, right wheel.

“Wow,” she said, sitting next to me. Her shoes were off, and she mingled her knees and feet in mine. I have almost no sensation in them, but thanks to the compensatory erogenous responses that paras and quads develop, that was as arousing for me to look at as it would be for a normal person to feel.

“Sorry,” I mumbled.

“For?”

“It’s belated. I never did get to talk to you at your mom’s memorial.”

“Oh!” she cried with a harsh laugh. “No problem. You’re just in time for my dad’s
wedding.”

I noticed Marcellus ebbing into his office and closing his door softly. “It does seem kind of soon,” I admitted.

“Hell, Horst. It’s economical. All the caterers had to do was warm up the leftovers from the wake. I swear it’s like”—she looked at me through a crooked smile—“it’s like going to heaven and bumping smack into your worst enemy. Like what’s the point? Who cares if the quack toasted me? Maybe I don’t want people guzzling alcohol in my honor today.”

“I’m sorry.”

“But give her credit. Did you see that crowd out there? Aunt Claudia—or should I say
Mom
—tells them to move on, and by God they grab that Dom Perignon and move on. No one could care less that she’s ruining the Foundation, the family, everything my mom and dad built. By the time I’m ready to work for it, it’ll be a joke.
What
has got hold of my dad?” she retched. “Six
weeks
ago he was my dad. Married to my mom. He took such care of her, he’d blow on her coffee so she wouldn’t burn her tongue. Horst, I swear he and I were half dead ourselves when she died, and then somehow overnight he got to his feet and ran away from me. In six weeks! Just so he could—I can’t even say it—with that bitch. That
wannabe.
And then I’m supposed to act all cheery about it and endorse my own abandonment. I couldn’t stand to go back to school. I couldn’t face anyone.” Her voice dropped to a rapid, pleading whisper. “What do they think of me? Such a loser my own dad doesn’t care about me.”

Dana a loser. This is how crazy you get when your parents split up or leave, I thought.

She was still talking. “I couldn’t go to graduation. I don’t even want to go to Stanford. It’ll be the stamp of approval on the whole thing, the whole stinking, weird—oh, it disgusts me. I don’t want to do anything.”

“I’m sorry, dear.”

“Six weeks. How do you go from zero to ‘I do’ in six weeks? Especially when the zero is that the wife and sister
died.”

“What did your dad tell you?”

“What you heard out there,” she said, flinging a hand in the direction of the ballroom. “My aunt does all the talking now anyway.” She imitated Dr. Claudia’s saccharine reassurance: “We’re going forward. Thank you all for swallowing your Prozac and not rioting the way normal people would.”

Sometimes Dana was too good a comic. “Don’t do that for anyone else, or they’ll laugh.”

“And
her.
It took two of them. Two people that crazy at the same time. My dad and I were mourning and comforting each other, the two of us, and she
raided
our grief and broke it. What a joke, she thinks she can be my mom. My mom is the one who gave me answers when I was so ticked off about sex and hypocrisy and the stupid things they told us at Maroveus. And she can’t even tell me—I asked my aunt this, Horst, I got in her face and asked her and she won’t say—
where she slept the night of my mom’s wake.
The night of that very day when we scattered my mom’s ashes in the water, salt water, and it felt like we were floating on an ocean of our own tears, and my mom was dissolved in them. And she won’t tell me where she slept.”

“Jesus, Dana.”

“And she thinks she can be all that. No one can.
Could.
” She bit down her tears. “I can see her, Horst.”

I looked at Marcellus’s door. “Where?”

“Here. There. Everywhere.” She kept talking through her wobbly voice. “God, I want her to talk. Tell my dad to get his head out of his…never mind.”

“Dana, I’ve seen her.”

She gave me a sad frown. “What do you mean?”

“So did I,” said Marcellus. He was standing in his office door.

She looked from him to me and back again. “When?”

“Recently,” said Marcellus. “Today.”

Dana backed towards the door, her eyes pinned on Marcellus. “Today. You realize—”

“I realize. I’ve seen your mother twice on this property and Horst has seen her, too.”

It took a few minutes, but we brought her around and told her exactly what we’d seen. She declared that someone was being punked and she quizzed us over and over, the time, the place, the clothes, whether we’d told anyone else, the same questions again and again. She placed herself across the room from both of us. Her eyes moved only a sliver as they shifted between Marcellus’s face and mine.

“Everything I say,” she said, “is under the presumption of being punked.”

“Fair enough,” Marcellus said, “but if that’s it, I’m sick of it. Maybe you can get your dad to put a stop to it.”

“I want you to see it,” I said to Dana. “She’s sad. She wants you.”

“Anyone who would punk me with this would have to be the scum of the earth.”

“Just go see her, Dana.”

“All right. Let’s do it tomorrow. Are you up in Santa Barbara yet?”

“I’m on my way today. I’ll come back down.”

“That’s too much driving. You can stay here tonight.”

The house had a couple of suites that were accessible for me; I even had a favorite. Make of it what you will. I said “Yes.”

Marcellus and I weren’t the only ones talking about the Hamlets. Down a winding dirt road from the main house through unimproved land, then around a topiary garden, a three-hole golf course, and a strawberry patch, then down a small drive, stood Polly’s cottage. It was part of the Hamlet estate. Dana always liked it because she thought it was freer and more beachy than her stone castle. It was built of warm-colored woods, and it had levels instead of stories. The beach below it was sand, not rocks, so you could play on it and wade in. Phil and his sister Laurie had spent their early childhood there. Their mother had left when Phil was three years old and Laurie was six. Laurie had stayed with Polly and grown up in Elsinore Canyon, and Phil had gone to live with their mother in Hawaii, returning to stay with Polly and Laurie for his summers, then for good when Polly’s ex-wife died in a car wreck the year before.

Laurie and Dana had dug for tiny crabs, collected shells, and built sandcastles together as kids. They had both gone to William of Bourges, with Laurie two years ahead. They were always friends, but their styles and abilities were different. Where Dana flew, Laurie was a plodder. Laurie would get where she was going on schedule, she’d do her homework and write all her thank-you notes. She joined clubs and organized people for their own good. She preferred approval to attention. But she labored for every award she got, and she faded to grey the minute Dana entered the room.

As for Phil, it was hard to believe that half his genetic material came from Polly—assuming it did. Phil was a quiet guy, eager to please, similar to Laurie up to a point, but he possessed genuine quality in ways Laurie and most people for that matter didn’t. It was hard for me to admit, but he was seriously good at surfing and music, and killer good-looking. And tall. Never bragged about his talents although he certainly could have, made all the things he was good at look easy, and never had a hard word for anyone. Girls slobbered over him and said he was sweet. In baby pictures of Laurie and Phil, she was always leading him by the hand.

Laurie had just finished her first year at the University of Alaska in Anchorage and was back in Elsinore Canyon for the same reason I was. She was cutting her visit short because she wanted to get back to her fiancé, a newly graduated senior, before he took off for Harvard Law in the fall. Clark Jeffords his name was. Another damn movie star. For months Laurie had been slathering the internet with pictures of the two of them: wearing sweaters, posing in backpacks, eating macaroni, going to a dance, decorating a Christmas tree, paddling a canoe. A short, mousy girl next to a scruffily handsome guy. Every picture captioned with “my brilliant, gorgeous fiancé!” Even she seemed mystified at his presence.

Down in the cottage, Laurie was packing and giving Phil a sisterly earful. He sprawled elegantly on the stairs, still in his suit from the reception, and listened with a patient smile as Laurie stuffed bras and tampons into a suitcase and lectured him anxiously. “I never said anything before because I didn’t think it would go this far,” she said.

“How far is that?” he said mildly.

“Phil, listen. She’ll break your heart, she’ll leave you in the dust. Girls like her are users.”

“Girls like her?”

“She has bite-me money, she’s untouchable in this town—but you’re not. When the sex tape comes out, she’ll get her own reality show and you’ll be Mr. Nobody.”

“Sex tape?” he said painfully. “Laurie…”

“I know you’re not dazzled by her wealth. But you don’t think about the bad things it can do.”

“She never used it to buy my love.”

“Oh? Has she gotten it anyway?”

Phil fiddled with a cufflink.

Laurie went to adjust it for him. “Don’t forget: when she inherits everything Mr. Hamlet has, she also gets his job. Her life is not her own. Didn’t she say she wanted to go to Pepperdine with you, but that was overruled? Do you think she’ll have time for you up at Stanford?”

“I’m thinking those Stanford geniuses are better at managing their time than I am.”

“You may be Mister Perfect SAT Score, but that doesn’t mean you’re smart about Dana. Even if she really loves you, there’s all kinds of things, things beyond her control, that’ll keep her from being a good wife. The perfect wife you deserve.”

Phil wagged his head affectionately. “So first it’s a trashy reality show and then it’s a pillar of society who’s out of my reach.”

“Well, there are no good choices.” Laurie settled his head on her shoulder and mingled her cheek in his hair. “I still can’t believe Mrs. Hamlet’s dead. You and I are going to be brother and sister forever. Whatever happens between us, whoever else comes and goes, nothing will change that.”