Once Upon a Day (21 page)

I was so excited that I could no longer think about my point, and I turned around and told Stephen the demonstration would have to wait until another night.

“I’ll believe it when I hear it,” he said, raising his eyebrows. But then he reached for my hand and placed it securely in his. I was so surprised I burst into a smile, which he returned with one of his own. He held my hand as we walked back to the couch. Too bad it was a journey of only about twelve feet, because as soon as we got to the couch, I foolishly sat down at my usual place, a full cushion away, and he had to let go.

I would have been more miserable if I didn’t have my book awaiting me. Tomorrow, I thought, I’ll know if it is polite to change seats and move closer to him.

Stephen seemed very tired when the movie ended, and I was too. But I was wide awake again after I retired to his bedroom and began to read. The book continually confused and surprised me, especially the chapter about . . . sex. Here was a word I had never said aloud before, though Jimmy had alluded to it in an argument with Father, calling it “the physical relationship between a boy and a girl” and complaining that he would never experience it because Father was keeping us imprisoned in the “stupid” Sanctuary. He also threw in Father’s face that while Father himself may have been dead with respect to women, he, Jimmy, was not. I never felt sorrier for Father than I did that day because I could see in his eyes how lonely he was since he lost Mother. Even in my novels, men would remarry, but Father had never shown the slightest interest in finding someone new. Perhaps we O’Briens love for life, I thought, since Grandma had never remarried after Grandpa died either.

But sex, as I discovered in my book, was no longer even considered an aspect of marriage. The author of
Dating and Love for the Clueless
was very clear that marrying without having sex first was a recipe for disaster. In fact, it was presumed that couples would try sex after as little as four dates! And that wasn’t even the most shocking part. If you agree to go into a man’s house, the author wrote, you should understand that he will think you want to have sex. No exceptions. Even if you think you are only coming over for a home-cooked meal, the fact of being in the man’s house is enough to make him assume you are ready to move the relationship to the next phase.

The next phase. It took me a while to understand that the phase before sex was called “casual dating,” about as unromantic-sounding a thing as I could think of, described primarily as the process of trying to decide whether you ever wished to see the person again. (The author also provided advice for choosing the location of the dates, so you could quickly escape if the answer was no.) Serious dating included sex, but it was also moving toward a “committed relationship.” By this it was clear the author didn’t mean marriage, but she never defined precisely what it did mean. Serious dating could even lead to love.

Though “love” was in the title of the book and half of its ostensible subject, it was barely discussed, which was very disappointing. In the back there was a quiz that promised to help determine if what one felt was love. I tried to take this quiz, but right away I had problems since each answer was restricted to Y or N, no explanations, no wavering.

Q: Do you feel happier when you are with him than when you are thinking about being with him?

A: Very happy with both.

Q: Do you trust him with more of your secrets than your girlfriends?

A: No other friends, girl or boy.

Q: Has he met your family and have you met his?

A: Yes, my brother. No, he never even mentions them and I fear they may be dead.

Q: Do you respect what he does, and does he respect what you do?

A: Yes on the first part, except I would say I respect most who he is, what he thinks and feels, how he seems to care about everything he does, from cooking to driving to talking to Jimmy’s doctors. I hope the answer is no on the second part, since I myself have little respect for anyone my age who has lived such a sheltered, ignorant life. Yet I do plan to change, and I would like him to respect me for that. How I will change, I can’t say, but I would like him to have faith that I can.

Q: Is your sex life fulfilling, and if not, have you told him so?

A: Nervous, skip.

And on and on for many more questions, nearly all of which I couldn’t answer in the strictly yes or no required for the quiz to be scored. By the end I was so confused that I buried the book under the bed. I still had no idea how I should behave around Stephen, though I did want to make him happy. And I wanted him to hold my hand again, and possibly more. Much more if necessary, though it made me very nervous to consider being
that
bold.

I took out my new California book, so I could look again at the picture of the paradise that had apparently once been my home. I thought I would daydream about the past, perhaps even find more memories, but instead I found myself dreaming of Stephen and me in the future, standing on that beach together. He would teach me how to surf and swim, and I would ask Father to give him money so he no longer had to drive a cab with his poor weak foot. (Father would live there too somewhere. Father and Jimmy both. It seemed unlikely, but I would just have to beg and beg until they agreed to do it for my sake.) Stephen and I would be in a “committed relationship” (or even married, such a sweeter word), and he would
already be forgetting this ugly apartment where he’d been so sad and alone. Over time, he would go back to smiling easily and often, the way he always had before. I knew this because of the soft smile lines he had, which I took as evidence of his deepest self, the optimistic person he was meant to be, before whatever had happened to hurt him so badly that he’d turned away from the numerous friends he’d once had, friends who never called him or dropped by, but were always part of his stories, whether from childhood or college or even a few years ago.

I envied him his life with so many friends, even as I knew that if he still had them, he might not have found room for a new friend now.

My daydream reminded me of one of the sillier questions in the love quiz.

Q: Do you know about his past, and does he know about yours?

A: No and no, but then I don’t know about my own past either. I don’t know the past of my father or mother. I don’t know the recent past of my country. I don’t know if the past even matters, as long as there is still cause for hope.

Of course if Stephen had had a wife in the attic, like Mr. Rochester had in
Jane Eyre,
that, I thought, would be another matter entirely. But the very idea made me laugh. His building had no attic, and his one small closet couldn’t even hold a skeleton. It was too packed with clothes, his and mine.

I
T WAS DURING
the seventh day with Dorothea that Stephen finally lost it.

The morning started out with their usual routine. There was the usual awkward moment when he saw her step out of the bathroom after her shower, fully dressed, but with her incredibly long hair soaking wet. They always talked as she sat on the bed and brushed it out, and as always, he tried not to stare. She seemed to love hearing about anything he wanted to tell her, so it was easy to come up with something to say. That morning he told her about the house he’d grown up in, a basic three-bedroom ranch, with a carport and a finished basement, and the thing that fascinated her: no fence of any kind.

“How did you know where your property ended and your neighbor’s began?”

“The neighbors on one side had better grass and those on the other side had a line of rosebushes.”

He smiled because she was smiling at him in the mirror, but he was wondering if he could offer to brush her hair for her. Then he would have to sit down on the bed too, and they would be on the bed together. He could touch her hair, which was innocent enough, after all. Wasn’t it? Jesus, he didn’t even know.

“You could cross over to either side whenever you wished?”

“It wasn’t a big deal. Most of the kids in the neighborhood were running from backyard to backyard all day. Sometimes they would play baseball games that stretched across four families’ yards.”

“Amazing,” she said.

He closed his eyes for a half second. “You could say that.”

When she was finished with her hair, he made her breakfast; that day it was eggs. She always ate whatever mess he set before her, and she always said thank you. Then he went to shower, and she went back to waiting for him. He suspected she’d already spent hours waiting before she’d taken her shower, because she was afraid the sound of water would wake him.

He was still sleeping better than he had since before the accident, though sometimes he wondered if the only thing keeping him asleep was all the dreams he was having about Dorothea. He felt guilty about it, even though there was obviously not a damn thing he could do about what he dreamed.

On the way to the Western Union office, where they were headed before the hospital, they listened to the radio and she asked him about the songs he liked. She said they had plenty of records in New Mexico, but they were mostly from the fifties or before, jazz and classical. Their father didn’t want them to have a radio because he worried the news would upset them.

After talking to Charles O’Brien last night, Stephen was in a better position to understand why the man exerted such a pull on both his children. He was very opinionated, but he expressed his opinions with a weird mix of sensitivity that made it difficult to imagine telling him off. In the middle of grilling Stephen, for example, when Stephen had mentioned he was a widower, O’Brien had said, “I’m
very sorry to hear that.” It was the same thing most people said (except for those assholes who told him he was lucky he was so young, he’d have plenty of time to meet someone else and have more kids), but the difference was O’Brien sounded genuinely sad for him.

If Stephen had been close to liking Dorothea’s father, he certainly changed his mind when the man said he would pay a considerable sum if Stephen would guarantee his daughter would be safe while she was in St. Louis. Stephen found the offer insulting, and he told O’Brien that he didn’t need to be paid for watching out for Dorothea. What he didn’t say, what he wanted to say, was that no matter how close he watched out for her, he couldn’t guarantee she’d be safe, and O’Brien was a fool if he thought he could. Even walled off in rancho weirdo, she could have gotten sick or had an accident O’Brien hadn’t foreseen. There were dangers everywhere: just ask any doc who has ever done an ER rotation. One of Stephen’s friends treated a guy who ultimately died of a mouth infection from puncturing his gums with a tortilla chip.

At the Western Union office, Stephen discovered that Dorothea’s father had wired the money to
him
. His first reaction was irritation, but then he realized O’Brien had to wire the money in his name since Dorothea herself had no ID. He wondered if this was why she’d taken a bus to St. Louis, rather than a train or plane, where ID was required to buy a ticket these days.

He’d sent four thousand dollars to his daughter. A ridiculous amount even if Dorothea wasn’t living for free. What was she supposed to do with this money, buy more clothes? She had more than enough outfits already, and Stephen was positive O’Brien wouldn’t have approved of ninety-nine percent of the things she’d bought. There was nothing wrong with what she liked: shorter skirts, clingier tops, but they were a hell of a lot different from the fifties clothes she’d arrived in. She was even wearing small heels rather than her saddle oxford shoes. Stephen felt sure she didn’t notice all the looks guys were giving her now, but that only made it worse. What would
she do if he wasn’t there? What the hell would have happened to her if he hadn’t been at the bus station to begin with? O’Brien really was a fool if he thought he’d somehow protected his kids by giving them zero knowledge of how to handle the real world.

Along with the money, O’Brien had sent Dorothea a long message about contacting some woman named Janice Fowler in California for the information Jimmy needed about their mother. So he wasn’t sending the death certificate, but that might have been just as well. What if their mother had been murdered? Not by Jimmy, but by somebody. But why didn’t O’Brien just tell Dorothea what happened himself? It was one thing to want to avoid talking about tragedy, but another thing entirely to put your daughter in the position where she has to hear something like this from a stranger. Janice Fowler, whoever she was; Dorothea of course had no idea. When Stephen asked her if she was supposed to call this woman or what, Dorothea sighed and said her father had made a suggestion, but she’d have to talk to him first. She was unusually quiet all the way to the hospital, and Stephen wondered what else O’Brien had put in that message. If he’d told her she had to track down this woman herself, he really was a prick.

As Stephen watched Dorothea sitting with Jimmy, showing him the pictures of Malibu, he found himself thinking how much more mature she seemed than just last week when he’d picked her up in the cab. Part of it was how seriously she obviously took her responsibility to her brother. Stephen heard her tell Jimmy that when he was better, after they went home for a while, the two of them could go visit the West Coast together. It sounded like a good idea, though Stephen personally didn’t care much for Southern California. But maybe after she and Jimmy had seen L.A., they could head up to the Bay Area. He knew a dozen restaurants in San Francisco that Dorothea would love.

She was wearing a silky blue dress that Stephen was having a very hard time not being distracted by. When she crossed her long legs, he decided he needed to take a walk, have a smoke.

Ten minutes later, he came back in and found Jimmy sitting in front of the window and Dorothea standing behind him, humming and lightly rubbing his shoulders. She was really good-looking, there was no doubt about that. Especially when she was with her brother because her eyes got even brighter with her affection for Jimmy and she was always more relaxed in her body from the benzodiazepine. She was also one of the nicest people he’d ever met. She never saw a homeless person without rushing over to open her new purse and give them money. True, it wasn’t like she’d worked for the money, but then a lot of people hadn’t worked for money they had no intention of giving away. She was even nice to Nancy Baker, now that she’d decided Nancy was really trying to help Jimmy. Yesterday, she’d asked to stop at the flower shop so she could bring Nancy a plant. “It’s very plain in her office,” Dorothea had said. “The entire hospital is very plain, and I’m surprised. How can anyone get better without colors to see?”