Some Kind of Miracle (7 page)

“Hello, Sunny,” she said, still not believing that this bizarre person could really be Sunny. “I’m your cousin Dahlia.” Then she stopped a few steps down from where Sunny stood. There was nothing in the woman’s eyes that remotely resembled recognition. Of course, the last time they’d seen each other, Dahlia had been twelve. Twenty-five years ago. Maybe Dahlia was supposed to explain to her now how, in the beginning, in those early years after Sunny was first put
away, if she’d even mentioned the idea to her parents that she wanted to go and visit her, her mother would immediately say, “Let’s not talk about it,” and shake her head nervously. Even at Aunt Ruthie’s house, all the pictures of Sunny, the ones that had been on the piano and on the mantelpiece, were taken down, because except for Aunt Ruthie and Uncle Max’s weekly visits to her, and Dahlia’s parents’ perfunctory visits to the mental wards to see their pitiful niece, Sunny’s illness had been treated like a death.

Maybe that was why Dahlia was feeling so uneasy and weird. It felt as if someone she’d thought of as dead had suddenly come alive. Like Jimmy Stewart finding Kim Novak in
Vertigo.
A distorted version of the person he once loved. Was this the time to say to Sunny, “I’m so sorry. I was too selfish to try to see you all these years? Or too afraid?” Sunny’s shocks of hair stuck out in bunches at the top of her head, reminding Dahlia of Bozo the Clown. And now she moved down another step.

“I’m Dahlia. Benny’s daughter. Our fathers were brothers. Do you remember that we gave each other lockets?”

Sunny blinked, and her jaw moved back and forth repeatedly.

“I drove down here from L.A. because I thought maybe we could spend a little time talking.” Dahlia heard the shakiness in her own voice. “Do you remember me at all?” A seagull shrieked loudly overhead, and Dahlia wanted to let out the same high-pitched sound, jump into her van, and leave.

Sunny dug in her purse and pulled out a pack of
Marlboros, which she flipped open in Dahlia’s direction.

“You shouldn’t smoke,” Dahlia heard herself say. “It’ll kill you.”

In a series of swift moves, Sunny turned the pack toward her own face, opened her mouth, sucked three of the cigarettes between her lips, pulled a lighter out of a pocket in the jacket of her red jogging suit, snapped it open, and flicked up a flame. Then, in a cloud of smoke, she lit all three, her eyes never leaving Dahlia’s. When her mouth was filled with smoke, she blew it at Dahlia.

“This way I can die three times as fast,” she said. Then she laughed at her own joke and turned and walked up the steps, and a chill swept through Dahlia at the familiarity of the raspy family voice. It was the way Aunt Ruthie sounded when she used to holler upstairs at midnight to tell them to stop singing and go to sleep.

Dahlia sighed. Oh, my God. I’ve got to get out of here, she thought, hating to admit to herself that Louie the weasel had been right. This woman was too far gone to remember a thing. There was probably no point in staying here one more minute. She clearly didn’t know Dahlia. This was a colossal waste of time. Dahlia’s mouth felt dry, and when she reached into her purse to look for a piece of gum, she saw the contract Marty Melman had sent over from the studio sitting there as a reminder of the reason she’d come, and she sighed. Don’t be a jerk, she said to herself. At least give it a try.

After all, if Sunny would sign the paper, who cared
if she remembered Dahlia or didn’t remember her? This person didn’t have to like her or want be taken to lunch by her. This was not some sentimental trip down memory lane. This was a business transaction, and Dahlia would have to treat it as one. To hell with feeling nostalgic. That wasn’t going to get her anywhere. She was talking to a woman who was smoking three frigging cigarettes at a time, for God’s sake, so how much sense did she have to make? Okay, she told herself, deep breath. Jump right in.

“Sunny,” Dahlia said, following her up the steps. This has to work, she thought, or I’ll be back watching Marty Melman pee. “I’m your cousin Dahlia. When I was born, you stood outside the nursery and told everyone they had to wash their hands before they came in to touch the baby. Remember? Everyone said I was your little doll.”

She could hear the television blasting inside. A doctor was talking to Oprah and the women in the audience about rescuing their relationships. It would be so easy to run down the steps, get back in the van, and admit this was a mistake.

But she couldn’t take her eyes from this woman’s face. It was so eerie to look at her and see Uncle Max’s eyes and Aunt Ruthie’s nose and her own mother’s pout. A blend of her entire family was in this face, her long-gone family. This person, this poor specimen of a person—unless you counted that monster Louie—was all she had left of that family, and look at her. She was a beaten shell of a human being, with eyes that didn’t seem to be able to focus when she looked at Dahlia. Unblinking, glazed-over eyes that made
Dahlia certain she didn’t connect her in any way to her past. It was a past that for Sunny had been blown away years ago.

As a child Dahlia had asked, she had tried, sometimes forcing herself to ask the questions even though she was afraid of what the answers might be.

“Mom, where is Sunny?”

“Sunny is in as good a place as she can be under the circumstances, but don’t worry, you won’t ever have to go there,” Rose would tell her.

“But I want to go there. To see her.”

“No,” Dahlia’s father would say, wearing an expression that meant, When you’re old and wise like we are, you’ll understand.

Well, it didn’t do her any good to feel guilty about all those years of staying away from Sunny. That’s what happened to everybody, wasn’t it? They got caught up in the minutiae of their own days and didn’t spend time thinking about anyone else’s. Unless the “anyone else” was their kids or their husband. Cousins didn’t fall into that category. Dahlia wondered if Sunny had any idea how many of the others in the family were gone. Her parents and Dahlia’s and all of the Gordon aunts and uncles.

Sunny was still holding those three cigarettes between yellow fingers, and now she took a deep puff, shaped her lips into a tight circle, and blew out a large O of a smoke ring. Then she leaned over and stubbed out all three in a very full ashtray on the railing. This is a lost cause, Dahlia thought. I should really just get back on the road to L.A. and take it like a grown-up when Seth tells me how he knew all along this wasn’t
going to work. You do things for bad reasons, you get bad results. Everyone knows that.

“Want to sit down?” Sunny asked, but when Dahlia looked at her face, Sunny looked past her, never making eye contact. For an instant Dahlia thought Sunny might have been talking to someone else on the porch. But there wasn’t anybody else on the porch. She could hear Oprah’s theme music coming from inside as the show broke for a commercial, and Sunny walked away and slid into a rocking chair.

Okay. Sunny asked her to sit down. That was a good start. Maybe after a while they’d chat, and she could take out the contract and deliver the speech she’d worked on last night.

“Sure, I’ll sit down,” Dahlia said, following Sunny and slipping into a rocking chair next to hers. Sunny rocked in the chair the way a child would, moving it vigorously back and forth, making her feet land hard on the wood porch, then lifting them as the chair moved back.

“Do you remember my mother? Aunt Rose?” Dahlia tried. “She loved you. You sometimes wore her jewelry when you went out on a date.”

But Sunny stared straight ahead and didn’t answer. Maybe talking about her dating was a bad idea. Aunt Ethel used to go on and on with her theory that it was while she was on a date that Sunny cracked, flipped, blew her cork, all those phrases they used behind Aunt Ruthie’s back to describe Sunny’s condition. Yes, Dahlia remembered how they all had tossed around the idea that Sunny probably lost control after being raped by some unnamed boy. The rape was a popular
family theory, because it placed the blame on an outside force instead of on the possibility that the genes all of them had in common with her might be faulty.

For a long time now, the only sounds were the creak of the rocking chairs and Sunny’s stomping feet, the crying out of seagulls, and the occasional rise in the voices of Oprah’s guests.

“Do you remember that we wrote songs together?” Dahlia asked. The only answer was the flick of the lighter as Sunny lit yet another cigarette. “One of them was called ‘Stay by My Side.’” A puff of another smoke ring came out of Sunny’s rounded lips, then another, but still her eyes never met Dahlia’s. “Well, I’ve become a professional songwriter, and I can tell you it’s a tough-ass profession. Sometimes you sell one song, and then you can wait years to sell another one. So you can imagine how thrilled I was to find out that somebody, I mean somebody really big, wants to buy that song from us. The one we wrote in your mother’s house when we were kids. Isn’t that wild?”

Sunny puffed hard on the cigarette. All right, Dahlia thought. Let’s cut the warm, fuzzy family stuff and move in for the kill. “You see, this is really a big deal in the music business. Someone actually wants to give us money for a song we wrote and use it as the title song for a movie. Millions of people could be listening to a song that we wrote. And at the end of the movie, our names will actually be on the screen. We’ll get a credit saying we wrote the song.” Now she was singing, “Stay by my side forever, stay by my side, my friend. Our love’s a perfect circle. That means it can
not end.” Sunny stared straight ahead and didn’t even glance at her.

After a beat Sunny stubbed out the most recently lit cigarette in the ashtray next to her chair and looked at Dahlia with a raised eyebrow. “Gotta go now,” she said, and Dahlia wasn’t sure if she was saying Dahlia had to go or Sunny had to leave the porch until Sunny stood, turned, and walked into the house. Her exit was so abrupt that Dahlia let out an outraged laugh. She was being dismissed. She’d come all this way to offer this woman a deal that could provide her with enough money to get her the hell out of this beat-up little rest home for fruitcakes, and the woman was walking away.

“Sunny,” Dahlia said, following behind her, “I haven’t seen you in so long. You can’t walk away. I need to tell you about this offer.”

Sunny didn’t look back, just headed right up the staircase. I can’t let her out of my sight, Dahlia thought. “Sunny!” she called, moving toward the steps. But before she could get to them, she was blocked by a large man dressed in a white jacket. He had a crew cut and a big round face, and he was smiling, a forced smile.

“We don’t like guests upstairs,” he said. She escaped, Dahlia thought. Before I could even get through to her. The man in the white coat didn’t budge from the bottom of the steps, as if he expected Dahlia to try to bolt past him. He was standing in a position that said he wasn’t going to move until she walked away.

Dahlia, go home, she told herself. You came here to take advantage of a mentally ill woman, which was a lousy idea, and not just
any
mentally ill woman—your own flesh and blood. The same Gordon family blood that’s in your veins is in hers. Go away and leave her in peace. You’d be better off robbing a liquor store for the money. Without turning around, she backed up toward the front door.

“Medications!” she heard the man in the white jacket call out as he lifted a small bell that he shook, and the shrill ring seemed to get everyone’s attention. Now she noticed there was a cart next to him with little cups of medication on it, and various members of the Oprah group were standing and heading in his direction.

Dahlia turned and walked out of the house, down the steps, and opened the passenger door of the van. Seth was napping, and the sound of the door woke him.

“How did it go?” he asked groggily.

Dahlia climbed into the passenger seat and shook her head. “It
didn’t
go,” she said. “Let’s just hit it and get out of here. I was wrong. You called it. It’s a fiasco. She has no clue who I am. She has no clue who
she
is. She just walked away from me. God, they must have burned her brain out.”

“Wouldn’t it be simpler just to write another song by yourself and use the same title?” Seth asked. “Maybe Melman would like it as well.”

Dahlia put her face in her hands. “Do you have any idea what it means for someone as big as Marty Melman to like a song and want it to be in his big-time Hollywood picture? You don’t just call a guy like that
and say, ‘Oh, hi. I decided I don’t want to give you that one. I have another one with the same title instead.’ Seth, he said he loved this song. He said it rocks. He was calling Jennifer Lopez to record it.”

Seth was quiet as he started the car. “Do you even want to bother going to that hotel?” he asked. “They said we could cancel up until four o’clock, and it’s only three,” he said, looking at his watch.

“And drive all the way back to L.A.?” Dahlia watched as the guy in the white coat came bounding out the door of the Sea View, slid into a battered station wagon with a bumper sticker that said
PLANNED PARENTHOOD
, and drove off.

“I guess you’re right,” she said, trying to keep back the tears of frustration. “No point in spending money I can’t even dream about getting.” Seth pulled out his cell phone and a card with the hotel’s phone number on it.

“Dumb idea. Poor Sunny,” Dahlia continued, picking up her appointment book from the floor of the van where she always kept it and flicking through the pages to see how many massages she was scheduled to do this week, wondering how she could get a few more clients so she could increase her monthly income. She felt sick about the idea that she had to tell Marty Melman she couldn’t sell him the song.

“Yeah, we had a reservation to check in this afternoon and stay tonight,” she heard Seth say into the phone. “And we’re going to have to cancel—”

But then Dahlia clutched his arm and stopped him from saying another word, because at that moment, filling the air and wafting down through the open
living room window of the Sea View, came a familiar refrain, and Dahlia strained to hear if it actually was what she thought it was or if her wishful thinking was making her hallucinate. Just a few more bars and it was unmistakable. She seized the phone out of Seth’s hand and spoke into it. “Never mind,” she blurted out. “We’re staying!” Because she could hear that on the falling-down upright piano in the living room of the board-and-care, Sunny was playing “Stay by My Side.”