Criminals (21 page)

sleepover

A
ngie sat up. “Come in,” she called, but no one came and there was no second knock. She got out of bed stiff from hard sleep and opened the door. A woman stood there in a purple bathrobe very like her own, long and quilted, with a satin collar. It was Cham. Cham, the housekeeper. Angie put her hand on the commotion in her chest. No need for it. She was in her daughter's house, in the guestroom. One of the guestrooms. Cham was here.

“Somebody here,” said Cham. “Boy.”

“Who is it?” Angie responded foolishly, reaching for her own robe. Hers was red, given her by Bill Diehl just before he got married, as a consolation. A size too big, owing to her loss of weight. Cham helped her with the inside-out sleeves, not even glancing at the arrow of scar where it sank cleanly down the neck of Angie's nightgown when she reached back for the armholes.

“Boy,” Cham said again. “In there, with girls. One girl turn off alahm.”
One girl.
Not
Erika, your granddaughter
. Cham's face gleamed with oil and she had a purse in her hands. Would she keep a gun? In a special purse, for the nights she was alone with a child in this outsized house?

Would thirteen-year-olds at a slumber party let in someone they didn't know? A sleepover. “Don't say slumber party,” her daughter Pat had warned her. “Or pajama party.”

“We're in this together, Cham,” Angie said. Cham's feet were bare and a strong smell of nutmeg wafted to Angie, perhaps the oil Cham had on her face. I don't see why she can't be friendly, Angie thought, following her down the long hall like a child, but they had reached the great dim room and Cham was already turning without a word to leave her there.

The moon was high and the skylights spread four pools of gray light on the floor. At the far end of the room where candles were burning on the glass table, the girls huddled in a cloud of pillows and sleeping bags. Sniffing for marijuana Angie got only nail polish remover and candle wax. The heavy couches with their rolled backs seemed more ponderous in the semidark, under the vaulted ceiling. A hushed laugh drifted in the room.

“Your grandma!” someone hissed.

Next to her granddaughter in the circle sat a blond boy.

Angie's heart attack had been written up in a medical journal. She was proof that women might have a reaction all their own to having their arteries blown open with balloons, or cut up and spliced. They might repay the most delicate and constructive of procedures with clots, wild rhythms, ugly infections, fevers. “Now, Patty, would you not give me that look,” she said to her daughter on the first day of her visit. “Just remember, when you came down to see me I was using a toilet chair. I've come a long way. And what about you, if you get any thinner you can live in that wall of yours.”

Pat's wall was a block long, built high enough that no one on the curving boulevard to the lake could see a house behind it, even the roofline, let alone the lake below. Apparently no law said a city ought to be able to see its own lake. The wall was a foot thick and had its own miniature roof of slate tiles. Pat said nothing, but went on looking at her, and it was true that in the vast, smoky mirror over
the fireplace, a wraith could be seen standing with Pat, nodding and pointing, instead of a solid woman with round arms and a good neck for sixty-seven.

Sometimes, Angie did not say to Pat, it seemed the blood pumped off during her bypass and fed oxygen for all those hours had run back into her carrying seeds of despair. But at least she had not lost her wits to the pump, as people her age frequently did. They woke up confused and stayed confused. Pumpheads, the doctors called them. Once it was clear it hadn't happened to her, her friend Terri had told her about pumpheads. Terri was an ICU nurse.

Angie was not a pumphead. Still, she had not really picked herself up and gone on. She was waiting to decide. Decide what? Pat would say. Pat had her own copy, from the Internet, of the article about Angie's case. Nothing would convince her that Angie understood it. Coronary artery bypass, or microchips, or the human genome: Why should somebody like Angie try to catch up? Angie's territory was the past. But the past that clung to her was mixed up, for her daughter, with movies that had come out long afterward, and dressed things up. The Summer of Love, and Woodstock—it didn't matter to Pat that Angie had not been at Woodstock and had in fact been a pregnant woman in her thirties at that time, with a husband too sick some days to get out of bed.

Pat didn't remember her father Rudy. Angie could supply her with dates: How she and Rudy had started in before there was any such thing as a hippie, crisscrossing the country in a van and signing people up to buy record albums that might or might not come out. How long she had been married and how tired she was, by the time Woodstock came around, how hungry to go back to Oregon and live alone with her husband and, at last, their baby. Pat.

“OK, so a beatnik,” Pat would say. And she didn't mean the real past, anyway, she meant the past-in-the-present. She meant Angie's shawls and posters, her friends who got arrested on picket lines. Her boyfriends, who might be younger, in their fifties, and wear those thin ponytails—or like Bill Diehl, fluffy blow-dries—and see no harm in accepting loans from a person like Angie who always had work.

*

Early in the course of the birthday party, Angie had angled the big suede armchair to give her a good view of the girls. Just when she thought one face was perfect, another would come up from the tray of colored bottles—they were painting each other's toenails—and this one would be dreamier, longer-lashed, more perfect. Then fine red hair would fall across that face and another would look up, skin taut, full lips parted. That was her granddaughter Erika, getting up with the phone to her ear. Then a composed, high-cheeked face with shining bangs: that was Tamiko, who had come to the door in the company of her uniformed driver. Then another, fringed in unruly curls, a child's face, black-browed, heart-shaped.

I'm old! Angie thought, without any real opposition. I don't envy beauty any more!

The girls had on T-shirts in parakeet colors that bared the studs in their navels. “Our birthstones! Stick-ons!” they crowed, pulling them off to show Angie. “Except Erika's.” Erika had a thin gold ring threaded through a real hole. They all wore ankle bracelets and multiple rings. With that high agonized laughter of theirs they kept falling on their sides on the rolled-up sleeping bags.

“Don't let them fool you, these girls are tough. They all do sports,” Pat had told her. “Basketball, track. Wait till you see Erika run the four hundred meter. And the relay! See those legs?”

Angie thought of saying, “Long, all right. Eric's genes in action,” because of the important tone Pat gave the word “relay,” when it was just another form of tag, something you did at recess.

Or she might say to Pat, “Is she as smart as you were?” Angie saw Erika roughly once a year, she didn't have much to go on. Erika didn't seem to have the brains Pat had had in school.

“Erika's the leader,” Pat went on patiently. “You'll see it. They all follow her like ants.”

“Maybe because she's tall,” Angie said. “The tallest ant.” It must be that they considered Erika the prettiest, she decided. And their standard must be just this blondness and slenderness and height, and the
air Erika had, patient but dissatisfied. Like a woman in a store trying on shoes, nothing unfriendly about her but nothing obliging either.

Angie watched the muscles slide in Erika's telephone arm as she moved away from the others, talking seriously. When the call ended she spiraled in one motion down onto her back, laughing and slinging the bag of cotton balls in the air so they rained down on the others. “Wait, wait—it's on my foot! Hey, Jessie just did my third coat!” The girl with the innocent, triangle face drew her black eyebrows together in a mock scowl. Then she, too, lay back with her arm over her eyes, gracefully waving the foot with the cotton ball stuck to the toes. She was a pretty little thing, more a little girl, perhaps, than the others. Watching her, watching all of them with their long waists, their pearly collarbones, was like being sung to, Angie thought. One of those songs in Gaelic or some old tongue. Rudy's material, sung at county fairs when he was first starting out. Ballads. Before the war heated up and all those lords and maids and cherry trees and narrow beds were put away, and the guitar took up a harsh line.

She could see him, in the full-sleeved shirt she had embroidered with birds and ivy, and in tiny script on the collar—it was when sewing machines first did that—his name, Rudy Rudeen.

Now the five girls were on their backs with their hair spread out on the rug, waving their legs, all talking at once. Erika was on the phone again. They had on that three-chord harmonizing stuff they listened to now. Boy bands. When the time came, Angie's job was to light fourteen candles on the cake and carry it in. She didn't see any presents. These girls might be beyond presents.

The armchair in the computer alcove was so big there was room for a small child on either side of her. And this was no alcove, really, it was an area as big as her own apartment, enclosed by plants and low bookshelves, with two computers and a copier and two fax machines on a counter of grainy stone. It was part of the same room where the girls were, but Angie was some distance away from them. The whole center of the house was laid out in an open design, with divisions suggested by slate inlays in the shining maple floor. You could lose your balance out there, as if you had wandered into a bullring.

Tropical plants in stone tubs marked the inlays at either end. Most of the lake-facing front of the house was glass, and four skylights poured light on the tall, muscular plants and the area rugs and scattered islands of furniture.

This was a famously dark, rainy city, but in her daughter's house you would think you were out on the lake in some kind of a glass atrium. Maybe on a cruise ship, where you could unwrap yourself behind a palm and quickly slip out of sight in a warm pool. Angie had been on a cruise, to Mexico. Her daughter had sent her on it, along with Bill Diehl. “Why not take your pal Bill.” That was what Pat called him the whole time he shared Angie's place. “The car salesman,” she called him after he moved out and got married, although Bill didn't sell cars, he sold boats, a harder job, more uncertain.

Bill was sixty-some, a few years younger than Angie, but Angie's friend Terri, the one he married, had just hit her forties. Angie was the godmother of their baby girl. “Well, you remember Terri,” Angie had said when she called Pat, after she sent Bill off in the U-Haul with his couch and his cat, “how pretty she is.” She was half hoping Pat would offer up some female curse and half relieved that she did not. “And beauty is everything,” Angie went on. She liked a conversation that would go from there, even an argument. She would have welcomed “Beauty is nothing!” or “Are you kidding? We're talking about sex!” so that she could reaffirm her hospital vow to keep clear of the negative and appreciate everything. “I'm not making excuses for Bill. It was one of those things.”

“Right,” said Pat. In the past she would have said to Angie, “What's with these men? Why is this the story of your life?” But by the time the godchild came along, Pat was no longer making painful or intimate remarks to her. “I don't know about my daughter these days,” Angie said to Terri and Bill. Terri had placed the baby in Angie's arms and she brought its wide-eyed face close to hers. “What do you think? Think maybe aliens took my girl and sent a copy?” But what happened with Pat is a secret, she thought. A secret from me because I was the mother.

The metal stairs at either end of the huge room were like the companionways on a ship. Guests, if there were any guests, climbed up
them to the second-floor wings, where they could settle into one of the balcony rooms, or the suite with its own kitchen, where Angie would have been staying on this visit except for the fact that her daughter had taken one look at her and said, “Wait, I'm going to put you in the little courtyard room down here. Rika, ask Cham to make up that bed.”

Erika's bedroom was up the metal stairs. Angie had an idea it was something to see, but she had not yet had a look at it. She had tried to, going up hanging onto both rails. At the top a metal walkway ran the length of the great room, a sort of open-work bridge. When she got close to the top she turned and sat down to rest. She waved to Pat, who said, “Come down. Now. And hold on.”

Pat said the previous owner, a man whose company had done business with hers, had hardly finished remodeling the house in this semi-industrial style when he retired and moved to Hawaii. He had left a full wine cellar behind. “Well, sure I will, I'll have a glass of wine,” Angie said.

“Oh,” said Pat. “Sure. I never think of it.”

“Red wine is good for me. And you said he was going to live here all by himself?”