I'll Be There (27 page)

Chelsea laughed a blush of a laugh, and the two girls sat back to eat their lunch.

I’LL BE THERE

179

Michael Barron

Barron, Malamud and Stern

Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania 15213

Michael,

This is letter number I don’t know how many, but the time has come for me to cut the crap and get directly to the chase. After your daughter was born I swore to high heaven if you ever tried to see her, I’d personally take her out of the country and go into hiding forever.

As you know, since Bertie’s death I have been her guardian and since she has come to live with me I have gotten to know her very well. Now what I feel has changed. I am writing this to tell you that I will do whatever it takes to get you to see her even for a day. Not for me, because as far as I’m concerned my feelings remain the same, but because this girl who is coming into her womanhood needs it. She knows you’re out there and I can tell it would help her to see you and to ask you questions and just look at your face and get some idea of where she comes from.

I have heard that you’re sometimes in Los Angeles on business, and I am asking if you, on one of those trips, would spend one or two hours with her. It won’t hurt you and it could change her life.

Please, Michael, please. Meet her. I swear to God, nobody wants your money, nobody wants to trap you into anything, all we ask, or I should say I ask because I would never tell her I am trying for this, so she won’t be disappointed if you should refuse, is for you to give her a few hours of your time. Michael, this is just a personal appeal. Not legal or business or anything like that. If you can only find it in your heart.

Cee Cee

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MA’FI-HERS, KENDALL AND SIVITZ

Ms. Cecilia Bloom

Malibu, California 90265

Dear Ms. Bloom,

I am in receipt of your recent letter to Michael Barron. Please be advised that this office represents all of Mr. Barton’s legal interests, and that in the future, any questions you have regarding Mr. Barton’s paternal obligations, i.e., child support, should be addressed to me.

Sincerely,

Ronald J. Sivitz attorney to Michael Barton

MAUI, HAWAII

1989

A SMALL PLANE flying very low over the water takes you from the Maui airport to the airport at Hana, and the hotel sends what they call a limousine, which is really a van, to pick you up. Cee Cee was so glad to be out of Los Angeles on a vacation with Nina she didn’t care what they sent, or even that two other families were being herded into the van behind them. One of the families consisted of an older couple with a daughter in her thirties who had the same sour expression on her face as her mother. The other family was a tanned, blond, robust preppy-looking couple with three towheaded children all under the age of ten.

As the van took off through the rich green tropical foliage, Cee Cee watched Nina watching the family with children wistfidly. Their togetherness had a brochure dazzle, and an unreality about it that was made even more pronounced by the fact that all five of them were dressed exactly alike in white shorts, yellow-and-navy-striped rugby shirts, and brown Topsiders. Later at the beach they all wore matching red bathing suits and ran out of the surf holding hands with the water splashing symmetrically on either side of them as if the scene of their emerging from the water had been staged for a commercial.

The hotel suite where Cee Cee and Nina were staying was a twobedroom cottage overlooking the ocean. It was furnished with tan wicker-and-bamboo chairs and couches and headboards, and bright floral-printed fabrics on the pillows, bleached wood floors, white walls, and a ceiling fan that made clanking noises, but neither Cee Cee or Nina could locate the switch to turn it off. Nina searched

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around in her suitcase, looking for one of her bathing suits, finally pulling one out and putting it on before she unpacked, which was unusually spontaneous for her. When she walked into the living room of the suite and Cee Cee looked at her, she was startled for a minute by her slim perfect legs and longwaisted body with high perfect round breasts poking their nipples forth under the bright blue nylon of the top, and astonished at how adult she looked.

So many times these days she found herself surprised by Nina’s growth. A pair of shoes left in the living room couldn’t possibly be little Nina’s, she would think in amazement. The shoes were bigger than Cee Cee’s now. In fact it was probably Nina’s hurtling toward womanhood that prompted Cee Cee to call her producer and insist on a few weeks’ vacation so she and Nina could take this trip during a school break. The time was moving fast and this person who was a little girl a minute ago was teetering on the edge of an age when her friends’ approval meant everything and, if the profusion of recent expressions of mouth turned down and eyes rolled heavenward meant anything, everything Cee Cee had to offer was worthless.

Junior high offspring spend a lot of time in their rooms, usually behind closed doors, wondering why their parents don’t understand them. And yet they give us little to go on, few chatty intimate revelations which could make the muddle clearer for everyone. When they do talk, it tends to come in an unexpected rush, a sort of hurrying to get everything said before the next secretive mood descends. And even during these moments, few personal thoughts are revealed.

That was true of Nina most of the time now. But occasionally if Cee Cee got her alone someplace where it was just the two of them, it was possible to get her to talk. To break through the wall she had always put up, even as a tiny child, and which adolescence had made more impenetrable.

Once over a dinner on trays in Cee Cee’s room in the Malibu house, the two of them gabbed while they ate and watched the sunset, and when the room became dark and they were deep in conversation, neither of them moved to turn on a light, as if the cover of the falling night was just what they needed to give them each license to tell the

I’LL BE THERE

other what she felt. It was after Cee Cee had done some reminiscing about Bertie that Nina told her, “I’m starting to get to the point where I don’t even remember my mother. Sometimes I try but nothing comes. Just a vague picture of a lady with pretty hair who was always hovering over me.”

“Really?” Cee Cee asked, shaking her head in disbelief, as feelings of guilt and inadequacy rose in her chest. She had been sure that her efforts over the years to tell Nina stories about her mother and to have photos of Bert around were enough to keep the memories alive, and if that hadn’t worked then she hadn’t done her job or kept her promise. “I can’t believe you don’t remember. It hasn’t been that long.”

“Maybe for you it seems as if it hasn’t. But six years for me is a big part of my life.”

“Do you want to look at some old movies of her? I had all her eight millimeter movies of the two of you when you were a baby transferred to tape. Of course some of them are nearly impossible to watch because I was the one who shot them and believe me —”

“No,” Nina said, and it was unequivocal. “It doesn’t matter.” “Of course it matters.”

“Why should I set up a situation that makes me feel sad? To look at a picture of someone I’ll never be able to see or talk to or be with again?”

“So you can get who she was, and know where you come from.” Nina shrugged. “If I wanted to know more about that I would have gone looking for my dad, who’s alive. But I don’t care. Life goes on. I’m me. Knowing why doesn’t change that.”

“You really don’t ever want to meet your father?” Cee Cee asked, worried now because she had written many letters to Michael trying to convince him to see Nina, thinking it was big of her to be right out of the King Solomon story, the one who really loves the child is willing to share her and all that kind of bullshit. Michael’s response had come from a lawyer telling Cee Cee to fuck off. But somehow Cee Cee still harbored the hope that he would change his mind. Prayed secretly that somewhere along the line he would get a pang of conscience and want to know what his daughter had become.

“No. I really don’t care,” Nina said, running her finger around the rim of an empty glass on her tray.

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If the father never comes to see the children and they ask you why, I advocate that you tell the truth. If you dream up some cover story for him and the children find out later that you have lied, you will have destroyed your credibility with them.

After Cee Cee had found that advice in one of her books years ago, any time Michael’s name came up, she called on the speech she’d practiced in her head at)out him. You re a fabulous gtrl. But your fathe s screwed up. So badly he can’t let himself see you. The poor guy doesn’t know what he’s missing. By now she had said those things to Nina many times, and the response was always a kind of absent “uh-huh,” which made Cee Cee back off, thinking the “uh-huh” meant the subject was too painful. Now Nina was telling her it was genuine lack of interest. Cee Cee wasn’t sure she believed her, but she was surprised at the enormous relief she felt hearing it, because in spite of her efforts to reach out to Michael, the fear that sometimes woke her at four in the morning and other times kept her from falling asleep to begin with was that some day he would show up at her door, push past her, and before she could get to the stairs he’d be on his way out of the house arm in arm with a willing Nina, leaving Cee Cee to that lonely abyss she had called a life before Nina was in it.

“There are a few beaches at this place,” Nina said reading from a pamphlet on the coffee table. “One of them is a few blocks down, and the closest one, the Red Sand Beach, is just on the other side of that cliff,” she said, pointing out the window.

“Cliff?” Cee Cee said. “That’s a word I usually put in the same column as rope-tow and hang-glider. The heading on the column is ‘Things to Stay Away From.’” Nina, who knew enough about Cee Cee by now to ignore her protests, handed her her tennis shoes, slipped a pair of rubber thongs on her own feet, and they were out the door to the Red Sand Beach. Over the path past a few other bungalows like theirs, to the cliff above the cove.

Nina walked in front down the steep path, reaching back to hold Cee Cee’s hand, and Cee Cee, who managed even with her rubbersoled shoes to slip twice, crept along trying to keep her eyes closed so she didn’t have to look over the steep drop at the crashing surf on her right, letting Nina’s hand guide her until they reached the bottom and stood on the Red Sand Beach.

I’LL BE TIIERE

The sand was a burnt rust color, and after Nina spread her towel out, she sat on it and opened a bottle of Hawaiian Tropic oil, which smelled so powerfully of coconut and pineapple it made Cee Cee’s stomach rumble, while she squirted her own white number-fifteen sun protection cream on to her hand and spread it everywhere on herself, then lay back on the big white towel. She loved the sun, even though she’d read all the articles that said it was dangerous and aging, but she didn’t care. With a sigh of satisfaction over her wise choice to take a vacation, she stretched out on her back and welcomed the rays of heat, grinning as if the warmth was from the heated body of a lover moving on top of her.

Nina stayed arched up on her elbows watching the waves, then looking at the clusters of people gathered in various spots on the beach. Far off in a cove she could see a tan, lean couple wearing very tiny bathing suits and oiling one another’s bodies, and her eyes lingered on them for a long curious time, then moved to the young family from the airport van having a picnic lunch, then to four ladies who had big bellies and varying shades of frizzy hair and who sat on a blanket playing a four-handed game of cards.

“I’m going in the water,” Nina said after a while to Cee Cee’s inert body, then stood, brushed some sand from her legs, and ran down to the shore, her long curly hair flying behind her.

Cee Cee dozed and woke every few minutes to look out at the water to be sure she could spot Nina bobbing among the waves. Nina was swimming vigorously with a powerful stroke Cee Cee had seen her use in the pool at home, and confident that all was well, she was about to turn on her stomach again when she caught a glimpse of the family who was now coming down the path to the beach.

What must have stopped her eye was the resemblance the woman had to Bertie, something about her that reminded Cee Cee of her instantly. Not feature for feature, in fact the woman was a blond and Bertie’s hair had been a chestnut brown, but she definitely had Bertie’s carriage, her style. In the last few years Cee Cee’s nearsightedness had worsened decidedly so she could never really trust what she saw from a distance, but this woman really was a Bertie-type, holding on to her little girl’s hand in the same no-nonsense grip Cee Cee remembered Bertie using with Nina.

Nina was still stroking away in the water, splashing and jumping

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up out of the waves every now and then as sleekly as a dolphin. Cee Cee wondered if when Nina saw the woman who looked like Bertie, it would evoke the memories she said she no longer had. Behind the woman trotted a little boy who was whining about something as they passed and behind the boy came a thick-waisted husband who wore mirrored sunglasses and a baseball cap with the letter “P” on it. The father was reprimanding the boy as they passed, and Cee Cee caught the words “I decide what this family is doing and not you, and if you don’t get that…”

She turned on her stomach now and after a few minutes fell into a sweet warm sleep, which was interrupted by the drops of cold water falling all over her from Nina, who was shaking herself like a dog to dry off, and laughing. “The waves are awesome,” she said when she sat, the water beading on her oiled body. “You should go in.” She had brought A Tale of Two Cities with her because she was reading it for school. After she dried her hands, she opened the book to the page she had turned down on the flight to Maui from Los Angeles. For a while she read quietly to herself, and when she looked up, something she saw startled her. “Oh, my God,” she said with such drama in her voice that Cee Cee, who had been trying to drift back to sleep, opened her eyes thinking Nina must have spotted the woman who looked like Bertie.