Such a Pretty Face (36 page)

Grandma collapsed on the floor, and Grandpa stumbled to his chair.

I went outside and swung on the porch swing and tried not to let my mind crack open.

About fifteen minutes later Grandma came out to visit me. I was still shaking and asked her if she’d actually seen Command Center and Punk. I knew she would say no, but that’s what living with someone with schizophrenia can do. Every day the whole situation tests your sanity. Every day you question what’s real and what isn’t, and you teeter on the edge of keeping your mind together.

I snuggled into my grandma’s warmth as she reassured me she hadn’t heard or seen anyone else, because they weren’t real. A few minutes later, Grandpa came out and sat with us, his arm around my shoulder. He dropped a kiss on Grandma’s lips.

“Hardship, honey, builds character. Having struggles in your life, dealing with your mother, will make you a stronger, more courageous adult. Learning how to find joy in the little things, the stream that runs through our property, the mountains, art, animals, the weather, this will set you up for a life of gratefulness, and that will give you happiness. People who don’t have to deal with heartache, or don’t allow themselves to reach out to other people who are enduring heartbreak, end up being shallow, superficial, boring people, sweetie. They never truly live. They never get what life’s about. They never become full, compassionate, caring people able to live with wisdom and grace.”

We rocked on the porch, amidst the darkness and the sprinkling of stars, the white shining moon, the howl of a coyote, the whinnying of the horses in the barn, and the meow of a cat.

“Praise the Lord,” Grandma said. “I try to thank Him all the time for what we have and ask Him for strength to deal with what we don’t have.” She sighed. “But I’ve never thanked Him for Punk and Command Center. Damned if I ever will. Punk’s got those weird red eyes and he’s slithery, and Command Center is obnoxious. Such terrible manners! A horrible house guest!” She winked at me.

Grandpa chuckled. “I feel sorry for Punk’s wife. He’s creepy. I wouldn’t want to sleep with anyone with red eyes.”

I giggled.

Grandma said, “Yes, and Command Center is so noisy. I’ll bet he’s single. Who would ever marry
him?
”

I giggled again, and then I said to them, “Punk’s a punk!” And for one shiny moment I thought I was clever. My grandparents laughed at my joke.

“You’re right, Stevie. Punk
is
a punk!”

Schizophrenia is never pretty. It’s a disaster, plain and simple.

But it is easier when you have a grandma and grandpa to sit with, on a deck outside the Schoolhouse House, near a garden full of flowers and vegetables, their hands in yours.

Portland, Oregon

I
had put the Dornshire letter into an unmarked manila envelope and dropped it off at the post office.

Legally, and playing by the rules, we were required to disclose everything to the other party during the discovery part of the lawsuit with the Atherton family’s attorneys.

But I knew, without a shadow of a doubt, that if Crystal found that letter, she would destroy it. She would not disclose it. She would do a skinny-ass victory dance in her high heels, close the door to her office, and shred it faster than you could say, “You lose, Danny boy, tough luck.”

And that would be it. My goodness, that would be
it.

Would the Athertons lose their case without the Dornshire letter?

Maybe.

Maybe not.

It was a tough case. They did sign off on the medical paperwork, acknowledging the danger of the operation, and Crystal would make sure that the jury felt the evidence was “squishy” on whether Danny’s problems were because of a natural, although unhappy, outcome of the operation or the placement of the breathing tubes. She would have medical witnesses paid to say it was the former.

With the letter, would the Athertons now win?

Yes.

They would win. Slam dunk.

I opened my garage, pulled out a plastic sheet, dropped an old chair on it, and started my questions.

“Are you happy? What does that word mean? Should we strive for it? Should we be content with contentment? If you’re not happy, how do you become happy? Is happiness a choice? How so? Is it necessary to live a good life?”

The chair’s name was Stacey. I don’t know why. I painted it yellow and later would paint a fat raccoon on the seat eating a chocolate bar and grinning, and I would attach willow branches in an arc above it.

I don’t know why.

In the morning, on my deck, I found rain boots with red roses on them and a ribbon. The card said they were from Jake. I smiled. Inwardly, I did a jig.

At night I dreamed I was in a cozy house in a huge tree in the sky with a well-tended vegetable garden, golden sunflowers, pink roses, petunias, and marigolds. From the house you could see the sun rising up and down, pastel colors waving across the sky. There were other houses in the tree, and me and Sunshine would fly to visit our friends and neighbors, glittery wings on our backs. Butterflies would sail past and wave their wings at us, bluebirds sang trilling songs, and hummingbirds darted to and fro. We had tiny pink pastries and tea in blue and white china cups.

It was all lovely until a black cloud came and settled on the tree and shook it. The houses fell out of the tree, and the black cloud reached down and ripped our wings off our backs. We tumbled to the ground and smacked it and died, and I knew I should have saved Sunshine. It was my fault.

The black cloud was Helen.

I didn’t sleep the rest of that night.

I slept fitfully the next night.

In the mornings I got up and walked in my rain boots with red roses.

And walked.

I tried to chase the nightmares down.

I kept clucking. I wrote checks for my medical debt. It was going down. In my chicken suit one night I thought of the chickens on our farm in Ashville. I could not go back there.

Could I?

Could I do it?

Why would I do it?

Did I want to do it?

I called Aunt Janet to see how she was doing with her classes.

“I love them! But I love the people more. Everyone’s so different, not the old fuddy-duddies Herbert and I hung around. One of my and Virginia’s best friends is a woman from Iran. She wears a burka. We have another friend from Mexico, and two gentlemen are from Somalia. They’re teaching me how to think and how to have an opinion and how to understand debates. I didn’t get that before, dear.”

“That’s because Herbert squashed that in you.”

“Too true, sweetie.” There was a silence and I waited. “But I let him. I let him squash me. I’m having a hard time forgiving Herbert for being such a mean, selfish person, but I know I’m going to have a harder time forgiving myself for being so weak.”

“I know how you feel. I have the forgiving-of-self problem, too.” I changed the subject. “How’s everything else going? How do you feel about the anniversary party?”

“The anniversary party? I feel sick about it, sweetie. Sick. It makes me feel like vomiting.”

On Tuesday night, Jake and I went to watch Zena at another roller derby competition.

She’d only needed to borrow a scarf from me that morning when she’d hissed at me from behind the pillars in front of our building. You see, she is so slender, she was able to wind the scarf around and about her black T-shirt with a giant lipsticked mouth on it so it didn’t show. She’d flipped her black skirt inside out so the skulls were hidden.

“Nice, Tinkerbell,” I’d told her.

She’d kissed my cheek. “You have to go clubbing with me one of these days, Stevie. You can dance until your brains fall out.”

“Thank you, but I need my brains in my head.”

“Overrated,” she’d said, popping in breath mints and swiping on lipstick.

The roller derby women were, again, dressed in fishnets, short black skirts, and red satin shirts. Some of the women wore striped socks. A couple were in black tutus. Tonight, they were out for blood. They screeched around the track, tackled, flew, crashed, hit, got penalized for intentional tripping and intentional falling, and swore at each other.

“Go, Zena!” I hollered, then corrected myself. “Go Badass Z Woman!” Jake cheered for the team, too. Badass Z Woman was penalized twice and then expelled for “unnecessary roughness.” There was only a minute to go, and when her team won, Zena skated to the middle of the track where the women had actually made a pyramid pile, their joy at winning overflowing.

I wish I had the courage to do what Zena did, I wish I did.

I wrapped my arms around myself. I was breathless. That bout had been breathtaking. One of the stay-at-home moms had broken her arm, and she was pissed. “How the hell am I going to change diapers now?
Shit!
”

Afterward, Jake drove me to a hill above Portland.

“Let’s dance,” he said, holding his hand out for mine.

“Here? Outside?”

“Here and outside.” He pulled me in close, one arm behind my back, our hands clasped.

And there we danced, under the stars, under a white moon, lights twinkling in the distance. I thought of how often my grandparents danced together on our deck at the Schoolhouse House, toe to toe in their cowboy boots. They knew how to love each other, they did.

Jake’s kiss met mine, and I closed my eyes so I could feel every delicious curve, his heat, his taste, his passion.

Man,
that man could kiss.

And, okay, his hands wandered well, too.

I wanted to use the sparkly, glow-in-the-dark condoms, but I couldn’t.

Something held me back. I can only compare it to being corralled by invisible reins and yanked on. My body wanted to fling myself onto Jake, but my mind was scared to death, almost hyperventilating at the thought of getting that serious with anyone, with opening myself up physically and mentally to so much…unknown, to possible hurt and emotional destruction. Being with Jake meant that eventually I would have to tell him all about myself. All the secrets, my past, my weight issues, my shame, my guilt, the babies, everything.

It was too much. I hoped I would be ready for the sparkly condoms later.

I did notice something, though. My hands weren’t shaking as much anymore.

I thought of Jake’s smile.

The next time Crystal met with the Atherton family, I told her I wanted to be there because I was learning so much from her about how to nail a case.

“Winning, that’s the only thing you need to do as an attorney, Steve. That’s it.
Win
. Crush the opposition. Mangle them up and spit them out. Doesn’t matter who they are.” She put her high heels up on her desk. I was sitting in front of her desk so I was staring at the bottoms of them, Mt. Hood in the distance. “You can come, but I’ll need you to stay late to get your other work done.”

I agreed. I could barely contain myself, I wanted to go to that next meeting so bad.

“I heard about Polly. I didn’t know she was your cousin. Didn’t put it together until yesterday. Also didn’t know that you’re Lance Barrett’s cousin, either. I had no idea you were from such a prominent, wealthy, old Portland family.” She narrowed her eyes at me, as if I’d deliberately hidden something from her. “Isn’t Lance a multimillionaire because of his companies? Didn’t he play pro football?” She tapped her toes together and said, “Is he single?”

“Yes, he is single.”

She stared up at the ceiling, and I could hear her brain grinding away. A Rich. Single. Man. And she’d been treating his cousin pretty darn bad. “Well, you and I get along well, don’t we, Steve? Why don’t you set me up with Lance some night?” She smiled thinly.

“No.” The word dropped out of my mouth as if it had been sitting on my tongue.

“What?” She removed the bottoms of her shoes from my vision and leaned forward, like a viper ready to puncture flesh. “Why not?”

“Because I don’t think you’d be good for Lance. I love him, I know him, and you and he would not be good together.”

“We would be fabulous together. Two driven people—both highly successful, well-respected, intelligent people who are connected socially and politically. We both play the game, and we play it well. Together we’d be on top of this city, probably this state. We get money. We get business.
We get it.
”

“That, Crystal, right there, is why Lance would not want to go out with you. You’re not what Lance needs.”

“And what does Lance need, Steve?” she snapped.

“He needs someone who is caring and kind and funny and understanding. He needs someone who’s tough, but compassionate and interesting and engaged with living, not making money. He needs someone who loves him for all he is, and all he isn’t, and who will love him no matter if he lost everything tomorrow or decided he wanted to go and live in a tiny town in eastern Oregon with cattle circling his home.”

“Well! That’s a nice vision, Steve, but I don’t think that’s what he needs.”

“How would you know? You don’t even know him. All you know is that he’s a millionaire businessman and you love the sound of that.”

She sputtered, she huffed, she puffed, and I walked out.

Darn but I hoped she wouldn’t exclude me from the Atherton meeting.

Zena and I had lunch at Pioneer Courthouse Square three days later.

“Why would a woman get a Brazilian wax?” Zena handed me a handful of blueberries.

“What’s that?” I bit into my tuna sandwich.

“It’s when a woman goes to a waxer lady and they take off all her hair around her privates, except they might leave a little strip of hair.”

I stopped chewing. “How do they do that?”

“They put hot wax on your privates and—”

“They put hot wax on your privates?” As my grandma would say, “Good Lord.” I handed her a tangerine.

“Yep.”

“You mean like melted candle wax?”

“Think so, Stevie.”

“And then what do they do?”

“They pat it with a cloth, then strip the cloth up, and all your hair comes out.”

I dropped my tuna sandwich back in my bag. “You have got to be kidding.”

“Nope. Heard about it the other night. One of my roller derby friends does it. It’s the stay-at-home mother. She says she dyes the remaining strip of hair pink.”

My mouth dropped. I hardly knew what to say.

“She does it because then she can remind herself, every time she’s sitting on the toilet, that she’s still a wild gal, still young and hot and sexy.”

“Does it work?”

“Probably not. She’s got four kids and she runs the Parent–Teacher Association at school. She says a lot of the women there are sharks. One of the women actually threw an entire PTA notebook at someone else because that woman didn’t vote to sell wrapping paper for the school fund-raiser.”

“Aren’t there other ways to feel young and hot and sexy that don’t involve hot wax on your vagina?”

Zena took a sip of her strawberry banana fruit drink. “Not for her, sugar. Not for her.”

We pondered that.

With visions of a pink private dancing through my head, I hurried back to the office for the Atherton meeting.

It started out much as before. Mr. and Mrs. Atherton appeared as exhausted as ever. They were both a palish-gray color, the lines etched even deeper into their faces. I again thought of their son, in their green and yellow dining room, hooked up to all those machines. There cannot be anything more wrenching on this planet than watching your child in that state.
Nothing
.

And yet.

In their eyes was a light, a light of…could I say,
victory?
Of hope? Of enjoyment? I clicked my heels together under the table. Why, by golly, they had gotten the Dornshire letter. I’ll bet they loved it. I’ll bet they treasured it. Was it framed yet? I bent my head to hide my smile.

This was gonna be fun.

The negotiations started again.

“The Athertons, on our recommendation,” Sonja said, her head held high, the circles under her eyes not so bluish, “have decided that we will not mediate this case any further. Our initial demand of ten million still stands. It is a reasonable request due to the severe and expensive nature of Danny’s medical problems caused by the hospital.”

Ha! I’ll bet Sonja danced a jig when she got the Dornshire letter.

Crystal laughed. Then she made this sighing sound that said, loud and clear, “Stupid people. You’re so stupid, it’s laughable.” She laughed again. “We’re going to trial then.” She flicked her black hair back. “There is no way in hell we’re going to pay you that much. None. Nada. Forget it. There are reasonable people in this city who will sit on the jury and they’ll see through this for the shakedown that it is.”

I heard Mr. Atherton grumble. His wife put a restraining hand on his arm.