The Girls (15 page)

“I've never met him,” I said, my voice impassive. So my mother would know I was lying. The fact of the lie hovered there, and I watched her till for a response.

“I just wanted to warn you,” she said. “So you know that this guy is out there. I expect you and Connie to take care of each other, understand?”

I could see how badly she wanted to avoid a fight, how she strained for this middle ground. She'd warned me, so she had done what she was supposed to do. It meant she was still my mother. Let her feel this was true—I nodded and she relaxed. My mother's hair was growing out. She was wearing a new tank top with knit straps, and the skin of her shoulders was loose, showing a tan line from a swimsuit—I had no idea when or where my mother had been swimming. How quickly we'd become strangers to each other, like nervous roommates encountering each other in the halls.

“Well,” she said.

I saw, for a moment, my old mother, the cast of weary love in her face, but it disappeared when her bracelets made a tinny sound, falling down her arms.

“There's rice and miso in the fridge,” she said, and I made a noise in my throat like I might eat it, but we both knew I wouldn't.

The police photos of Mitch's house make it look cramped and spooky, as if destined for its fate. The fat splintered beams along the ceiling, the stone fireplace, its many levels and hallways, like something in the Escher lithographs Mitch collected from a gallery in Sausalito. The first time I encountered the house, I remember thinking it was as spare and empty as a coastal church. There was very little furniture, the big windows in the shape of chevrons. Herringbone floors, wide and shallow steps. From the front door, you could already see the black plane of bay spreading past the house, the dark, rocky bank. The houseboats knocking peaceably against each other, like cubes of ice.

Mitch poured us drinks while Suzanne opened his refrigerator. Humming a little song as she peered at the shelves. Making noises of approval or disapproval, lifting tinfoil off a bowl to sniff at something. I was in awe of her at moments like that. How boldly she acted in the world, in someone else's house, and I watched our reflections wavering in the black windows, our hair loose on our shoulders. Here I was, in this famous man's kitchen. The man whose music I'd heard on the radio. The bay out the door, shining like patent leather. And how glad I was to be there with Suzanne, who seemed to call these things into being.

Mitch had a meeting with Russell earlier that afternoon—I remember noticing it was strange that Mitch had been late for it. Two o'clock had passed, and we were still waiting for Mitch. I was silent, like they all were, the quiet between us expanding. A horsefly bit at my ankle. I didn't want to shoo it away, conscious of Russell a few feet away, perched on his chair with his eyes closed. I could hear him humming under his breath. Russell had decided it would be best for Mitch to come upon him sitting there, his girls surrounding him, Guy at his side, the troubadour with his audience. He was ready to perform, guitar laid across his knees. His bare foot jiggling.

There was something in the way Russell was fingering the guitar, pressing silently on the strings—he was nervous in a way I didn't know how to decipher yet. Russell didn't look up when Helen started whispering to Donna, just a low whisper. Something about Mitch, probably, or some stupid thing Guy had said, but when Helen kept talking, Russell got to his feet. He took a moment to lay the guitar against his chair, pausing to make certain it was stable, then walked over swiftly and slapped Helen in the face.

She gave an involuntary yip, a strange burble of sound. Her wide-eyed hurt draining quickly into apology, blinking fast so the tears wouldn't fall.

It was the first time I had ever seen Russell react that way, the cut of anger aimed at one of us. He couldn't have hit her—the stupid blare of sun made that impossible, the hour of afternoon. The idea was too ludicrous. I looked around for confirmation of the frightening breach, but everyone was staring pointedly away or had arranged their faces into disapproving masks, like Helen had brought this on herself. Guy scratched behind an ear, sighing. Even Suzanne seemed bored by what had happened, like it was no different from a handshake. The vinegar in my throat, my sudden, despairing shock, seemed like a failing.

And soon enough, Russell was petting Helen's hair, tightening her lopsided pigtails. Whispering something in her ear that made her smile and nod, like a goopy-eyed baby doll.

When Mitch finally showed up at the ranch, an hour late, he was bearing much-needed supplies: a cardboard flat of canned beans, some dried figs, and chocolate spread. Rock-hard Packham pears, individually wrapped in pink tissue paper. He let the kids clamber up his legs, though normally he shook them off.

“Hi, Russell,” Mitch said. A lace of sweat on his face.

“Long time no see, brother,” Russell said. He kept his grin steady, though he didn't get up from his chair. “How goes the Great American Dream?”

“Things are good, man,” he said. “Sorry I'm late.”

“Haven't heard from you in a while,” Russell said. “Breaking my heart, Mitch.”

“Been busy,” Mitch said. “A lot going on.”

“There's always a lot going on,” Russell said. Looking around at us, making long eye contact with Guy. “Don't you think? Seems like there's a lot going on and that's what life is. Think it only stops when you die.”

Mitch laughed, like everything was fine. Passing out the cigarettes he'd brought, the food, like a sweating Santa. The books would identify this as the day things turned between Russell and Mitch, though I didn't know any of this at the time. Didn't pick up on any meaning in the tension between them, Russell's fury muffled by a calm, indulgent exterior. Mitch had come to give Russell the bad news that there would be no record deal for Russell, after all: the cigarettes, the food, all of it meant as a consolation. Russell had been hounding Mitch for weeks about the supposed record deal. Pushing and pushing, wearing Mitch down. Sending Guy to deliver cryptic messages to Mitch that could oscillate between threatening and benign. Russell was trying to get what he believed he deserved.

We smoked some grass. Donna made peanut-butter sandwiches. I sat in the circle of shade cast by an oak. Nico was running around with one of the other kids, chins crusted with remnants of breakfast. He snapped a stick at a bag of trash, the garbage spilling everywhere—nobody noticed but me. Guy's dog was out in the meadow, the llamas high-stepping in agitation. I was stealing looks at Helen, who seemed, if anything, insistently happy, like the exchange with Russell fulfilled a comforting pattern.

The slap should have been more alarming. I wanted Russell to be kind, so he was. I wanted to be near Suzanne, so I believed the things that allowed me to stay there. I told myself there were things I didn't understand. I recycled the words I'd heard Russell speak before, fashioned them into an explanation. Sometimes he had to punish us in order to show his love. He hadn't wanted to do it, but he had to keep us moving forward, for the good of the group. It had hurt him, too.

Nico and the other kid had abandoned the trash pile, squatting in the grass with their heavy diapers sagging. They spoke rapidly to each other in serious Asiatic voices, with sober, rational inflection, like the conversation of two little sages. Breaking into sudden hysterical laughter.

It was late in the day. We drank the dirty wine they sold by the gallon in town, sediment staining our tongues, a nauseous heat. Mitch had gotten to his feet, ready to head home.

“Why don't you go with Mitch?” Russell suggested. Squeezing my hand in submerged code.

Had a look passed between him and Mitch? Or maybe I am imagining that I witnessed that exchange. The logistics of the day were shrouded in confusion, so that somehow it was dusk and Suzanne and I were driving Mitch back to his house, hurtling along the back roads of Marin in his car.

Mitch was sitting in the backseat, Suzanne driving. I was up front. I kept catching sight of Mitch in the mirror, lost in an aimless fog. Then he'd jolt back into himself, staring at us with wonderment. I didn't fully understand why we'd been chosen to take Mitch home. Information passed through selectively, so all I knew was that I got to be with Suzanne. All the windows open to the smell of summer earth and the secret flash of other driveways, other lives, along that narrow road in the shadow of Mount Tam. The loops of garden hoses, the pretty magnolia. Suzanne drove in the wrong lane sometimes, and we shrieked with happy and confused terror, though there was a flatness to my yelling: I did not believe anything bad could ever happen, not really.

Mitch changed into a white pajama-like suit, a souvenir from a three-week sojourn in Varanasi. He handed us each a glass—I caught the medical whiff of gin and something else, too, a tinge of bitterness. I drank it easily. I was almost pathologically stoned, and I kept swallowing, my nose getting stuffy. I laughed a little to myself. It seemed so odd to be in Mitch Lewis's house. Among his cluttered shrines and new-looking furniture.

“The Airplane lived here for a few months,” he said. He blinked heavily. “With one of those dogs,” he continued, staring around at his house. “The big white ones. What are they called? Newfoundlands? It tore up the lawn.”

He didn't seem to care that we were ignoring him. He was out of it, glazing over with silence. Abruptly he got to his feet, putting a record on. Turning the volume up so loud I startled, but Suzanne laughed, urging him to make it louder. It was his own music, which embarrassed me. His heavy belly pressed against his long shirt, as flowing as a dress.

“You're fun girls,” he said dimly. Watching Suzanne start to dance. Her dirty feet on the white carpet. She'd found chicken in the refrigerator and had torn off a piece with her fingers, chewing while she moved her hips.

“Kona chicken,” Mitch remarked. “From Trader Vic's.” The banality of this remark—Suzanne and I caught each other's eyes.

“What?” Mitch said. When we kept laughing, he did, too. “This is fun,” he repeated over the music. He kept saying how much some actor he knew liked the song. “He really got it,” he said. “Wouldn't stop playing it. Tuned-in guy.”

It was new to me, that you could treat someone famous like they weren't that special, that you could see all the ways they were disappointing and regular or notice the way his kitchen smelled of trash that hadn't been taken out. The phantom squares on the wall where photographs had once hung, the gold records leaned against the baseboard, still wrapped in plastic. Suzanne acted like it was really only she and I that mattered, and this was all a little game we were playing with Mitch. He was the background to the larger story, which was our story, and we pitied him and felt grateful to him, at the same time, for how he sacrificed himself for our enjoyment.

Mitch had a little coke, and it was almost painful to watch him shake it out carefully onto a book about TM, staring at his own hands with a queer distance, like they didn't belong to him. He cut three lines, then peered at them. He fussed around until one was markedly bigger and snorted it quickly, breathing hard.

“Ahh,” he said, leaning back, his throat raw and pricked with golden stubble. He held out the book to Suzanne, who danced over, sniffing up a line, and I did the last one.

The coke made me want to dance, so I did. Suzanne grabbing my hands, smiling at me. It was a strange moment: we were dancing for Mitch, but I was eaten up by her eyes, how she urged me on. She watched me move with pleasure.

Mitch was trying to talk, telling us some story about his girlfriend. How lonesome he'd been since she'd left for Marrakesh, on some tear about needing more space.

“Baloney,” he kept saying. “Ah, baloney.”

We were indulging him: I took my lead from Suzanne, who nodded when he spoke but rolled her eyes at me or loudly urged him to tell us more. He was talking about Linda that night, though her name meant nothing to me. I was barely listening: I'd picked up a small wooden box rattling with tiny silver balls and tipped it, trying to get the balls to drop into holes painted to look like the mouths of dragons.

Linda would be his ex-girlfriend by the time of the murders, only twenty-six, though that age seemed vague to me then, like a knock on a faraway door. Her son, Christopher, was five years old but had already been to ten countries, bundled along on his mother's travels like the pouch of her scarab jewelry. The ostrich-skin cowboy boots she stuffed with rolled-up magazines so they'd keep their shape. Linda was beautiful, though I'm sure her face would've grown bawdy or cheap. She slept in bed with her golden-haired little boy, like a teddy bear.

I was so lulled into feeling that the world had winnowed itself around Suzanne and me, that Mitch was just the comic fill—I didn't even consider other possibilities. I'd gone to the bathroom, used Mitch's strange black soap and peeked in his cabinet, loaded with bottles of Dilaudid. The enamel shine of the bathtub, the cut of bleach in the air so I could tell he had a cleaning lady.

I had just finished peeing when someone opened the bathroom door without knocking. I was startled, reflexively trying to cover myself. I saw the man sliver a glance toward my exposed legs before he ducked back into the hallway.

“Apologies,” I heard him say from the other side of the door. A chain of stuffed marigold birds swung gently from where they hung by the sink.

“My deepest apologies,” the man said. “I was looking for Mitch. Sorry to bother you.”

I sensed him hesitate on the other side of the door, then tap the wood lightly before he walked away. I pulled up my shorts. The adrenaline that spread through me lessened but didn't disappear. It was probably just a friend of Mitch's. I was jumpy from the coke, but I wasn't frightened. Which made sense: nobody thought until later that strangers might be anything but friends. Our love for one another boundless, the whole universe an extended crash pad.

I'd realize a few months after that this must have been Scotty Weschler. The caretaker who lived in the back house, a tiny white-paneled cabin with a hot plate and a space heater. The man who cleaned the hot tub filters and watered the lawn and checked that Mitch hadn't overdosed in the night. Prematurely balding, with wire glasses: Scotty had been a cadet at a military academy in Pennsylvania before dropping out, moving west. He never shook his cadet idealism: he wrote letters to his mother about the redwoods, the Pacific Ocean, using words like “majestic” and “grandeur.”

He'd be the first. The one who tried to fight back, to run.

I wish I could squeeze more out of our brief encounter. To believe, when he opened the door, that I had felt a shiver of what was coming. But I'd made out nothing but the flash of a stranger, and I thought of it very little. I didn't even ask Suzanne who the man was.

The living room was empty when I came back. The music blaring, a cigarette leaching smoke in the ashtray. The glass door that led out to the bay was open. I was surprised by the suddenness of the water when I went out on the porch, the wall of woolly lights: San Francisco in the fog.