The Truth About Delilah Blue (13 page)

She started the car. “Okay, but keep your knees down. I’m not getting pulled over on top of everything else this week.”

“What else happened?”

“Nothing.”

“Oh, your mother. Right. Where was she all these years anyway?”

“Don’t want to talk about it,” she sang.

“Okay, pretty girl. It’s your wounded psyche.”

The exit was partially blocked by a few poorly parked cars. Rather than risk scraping the Datsun, Lila drove toward the adjacent lot, which appeared to sit a bit lower down than the first. As she attempted to guide the Datsun down what she imagined in the dark to be a gentle paved slope, the front end of the car dropped from underneath her and landed with a great crash about two feet down, killing the engine and leaving her hanging forward from her seat belt toward the steering wheel. The car’s back end was stuck on the upper lot and both her feet were stamped down hard on the brake. “Oh my God! It was a total cliff!”

Adam’s curled body had also slid forward and now rested against Lila’s seat back. He groaned.

“What do I do now?” squealed Lila. “We’re stuck.”

“I think I’m hurt. My nose is making clicking sounds.”

“My dad is going to kill me.”

Adam leaned closer and pushed against his nose. “Do you hear that?”

She spun around and squinted. “Maybe you should stop poking it.”

“Just check yours. See if it clicks.”

“I’m a bit busy up here, Adam. What should I do? Let the back end drop? I have to, right? We can’t go backward.”

“Why did I get in the car with you?” He was silent a moment, his fingers traveling across his face. “Wait…what?” He reached forward to adjust the rearview mirror. “Holy crap, my nose is totally bleeding. Take me to Cedars-Sinai. You broke my freaking nose!”

“How was I to know this would happen? It’s dark out and where was the cement barrier? There’s supposed to be a barrier, right?”

“It’s not that hard to spot. I can see—very clearly—this lot’s down in a ditch.”

“Which is why you should be in the front seat instead of back there with the surgical gloves and cartons of specimen containers.”

He pulled a few boxes closer and examined them. “Vaginal scopes? What the hell goes on back here?”

“Hold on to your nose. We’re going down.”

There was no alternative but to let the back end of the Datsun crash to the ground. Then pray like hell the car started. With one foot clamped hard on the clutch, the other stamped down on the brake, she shifted into neutral and, holding her breath, eased her foot off the brake. The car rolled a few inches, then the back end smashed down hard.

Adam howled from behind her.

Lila turned the key in the ignition, relieved to hear the engine rattle, thump, then roar to life. The radio station had changed. Joni Mitchell’s smoky voice crooned in the background. “It’s working!”

She spun around to find him crawling toward her. Blood stained his upper lip. “You’re going to bleed all over the upholstery.”

“Heartless.” He stared at her, blinking. “Yet validating.”

After turning off the engine, Lila trotted around the rear to open the hatch. “Climb out.”

He flipped himself onto his side and slithered to the back, keeping his face upturned to the sky and pinching his nose to stop the bleeding. “It’s nothing,” he sniffed, lifting his shirt to reveal a dark red scrape across his ribs. “I’m lucky I didn’t puncture a lung from all the paraphernalia back there. What the hell are you doing driving around with
a box of tourniquets? And what’s a”—he tipped a narrow box on its side—“Vacutainer?”

Something about Adam’s smile—equally arrogant and apologetic—reminded her of Victor when he asked for help with his sheets. Her father had been having more and more of these moments of confusion. There had been many perplexing conversations and they couldn’t all be chalked up to a sleepless night or a failed career. The Basenji, stepping out in front of an SUV, needing donuts for somebody named Gen. Maybe his reaction about the abduction, his refusal to discuss it, was just another episode. She couldn’t know for certain that he was being obtuse. She couldn’t know what was going on inside his head at that moment. That moment itself, with all its inherent stress, might have set off another episode.

She felt her pulse quicken. That was it. It had been the dementia talking. And she’d left him alone with his confusion. Didn’t give a thought to how lost or scared or terrified he might be.

Whatever her name, she was a terrible daughter.

Was it Alzheimer’s? Surely Victor was nowhere near old enough to succumb to such a disease. He had been increasingly forgetful this past year, but until recently any episode had been trivial. Losing his keys and finding them in his pocket. Misplacing his glasses and she’d find them in the car. Nothing alarming. If anything, these past episodes had been amusing. She’d teased him. Could Alzheimer’s strike out of nowhere and take out a perfectly healthy man in the middle of his life?

Surely it wouldn’t hit now, just when she needed him—and his answers—most. “That’s it,” she said to Adam.

“That’s it? What does that mean?”

“You need to find your own way home.”

“You’re deflecting again. You’re feeling stunted by your mother’s sudden reappearance and instead of taking me up on my generous offer to listen, you’re running me out of the car.”

She had to see her father now. He’d slept for a few hours and might be himself again. There had to be a good reason for what he did. He took her by mistake, maybe. He took her under some gross misunderstanding. Victor, for all his brusqueness, was a decent man. “Just go. Okay, Adam? Will you please just get out?”

“How will I get home?”

An old man pushing a grocery cart full of newspapers shuffled past, his cheeks and mouth sunken from loss of teeth, his ancient back gnarled into the shape of a comma, a garbage bag wrapped around his shoulders like a scarf. Adam’s eyes followed him, widening in horror. “I could be killed.”

“You have to go. Please.”

“But I can’t drive.”

“Walk out to Sunset.” She pulled a twenty from her bag. “Wave down a cab.”

“You shouldn’t be alone, Lila. You need a supportive shoulder to lean on. You need to explore your ambiguity about your mother’s unexpected emergence. You need to make sure you don’t use this sudden upheaval to sabotage your own existence.” He pulled a tissue from his pocket and stuffed the corners up his nose. “Besides, this is L.A. Getting a cab could take all night.”

“I’m sorry. I’ll see you in class.”

He climbed out and, still pinching the bridge of his nose, watched, as she sped away in the night.

B
ACK AT THE
cabin, Lila paused at Victor’s door. His breathing was deep, regular. Sure. There was no way she would sleep tonight without speaking to him. Her thoughts were racing in every direction and she needed to do something, anything, to streamline them. Turning the knob, she slipped inside his room and tiptoed across the shadows. She stood at his bedside and willed herself not to cry.

He hadn’t managed to make his bed after she left, but laid out the fitted sheet like a folded tortilla and climbed inside. But the elastic edges had pulled the top end down on to his head like a puckered hood that was stapled to his eyebrows. At the other end, his legs stuck out, bare from the knees down, with slippers still on his feet.

The top sheet lay twisted and useless on the floor. Proof he’d been having an episode. She was a monster of a daughter to leave him this way. He looked like a man completely unloved.

She went to her own room and gathered her quilt, laid it out over him, and pulled the fitted sheet off his face. She’d make his bed properly in the morning, tuck the top sheet in extra tight, just the way he liked it. As she dragged the chair closer to his bedside, he opened his eyes and reached for her hand.

“Where’ve you been, Mouse?” His cloudy eyes searched her face.

“I need to talk to you, Mister. So much has happened, I don’t know what’s what anymore. I’m just confused and, I don’t know, lost. But here’s the thing. You’re a good man. You wouldn’t have done it without a damn good reason. There must have been a misunderstanding. I don’t really know. I don’t really care. All I want right now, and I can’t promise
it will stay this way—for all I know I may not speak to you in the morning—is to see you as you. The man who raised me. The one who used to bounce me on his knee and push me too high on the swings and slip me the olives from his martini.”

His mouth stretched wide and the look in his eyes grew tender. As if it was what he too wanted. To return to a less complicated time.

“Dad, I guess what I’m saying is I love you. I shouldn’t, but at this moment I love you in a way that is scaring me. Do you hear me?”

He clenched her hand tighter.

She moved closer and waited, not daring to breathe. “Earlier, you were having another moment of fuzziness, right? When you said you wouldn’t tell me why you took me. I’ve been thinking it’s probably time to get you to a doctor for this. It’s happening too often and I think I’ve heard there are ways to slow down the progression if it turns out to be Alzheimer’s.”

“No doctors.”

“Why not? This was two episodes in one day. I’m pretty sure—”

He let his hands fall onto the thin white T-shirt covering his chest. “What happened tonight wasn’t an episode. I was perfectly lucid. I didn’t want to discuss what happened in Toronto.”

“And now?”

“Nothing has changed. I’m sorry if what I did hurt you. But what’s done is done and I don’t care to discuss the details.”

“You’re sorry if it hurt me? Of course it hurt me! You took away my childhood. You told me she didn’t want
me. There’s no ‘if’ in this equation and I deserve to know more.”

“It’s not a good idea. But what is…” He struggled to get out of the quilt and onto his feet. “…is getting myself to the toilet. I’ll never get back to sleep with a full bladder.”

The bathroom door clicked shut. With her lips pressed into a furious knot, she made his bed, fluffed his pillow, and adjusted her quilt. Then she stomped to the kitchen and stared at his empty chair, worn from years of sitting at the head of the table. The toilet flushed. The indifference, the ordinariness of water hurtling through pipes in the wall, whooshing and banging, was too much. She reached into the pantry for the spare can of corn niblets, opened it up, and dumped the contents into the trash.

Lichty’s classroom smelled like blood. Lila sniffed the air, trying to determine where he’d stashed the body—or perhaps where he stored the blood he sucked from his models—and determined the odor was coming from the metal gurney he appeared to have rolled out of the morgue and into his classroom. It was for her and no, the icy surface wouldn’t be warmed with a white sheet. That kind of nicety was reserved for corpses. Shivering models were expected to just deal.

Once on top of the gurney, she would be allowed any pose she liked, so long as her body reflected loftiness. Maybe even a bit of superiority. Both were doable. So long as the wheels of the cart remained firmly locked, she’d give Lichty both altitude and attitude. The students had a good clear view up her nostrils and into her cerebral matter. And, if she wasn’t dainty about her stance, straight through her vaginal pipeline, along her fallopian ductwork, to the gumball
machines that foolishly released an unfertilized child as a monthly option. After all, one didn’t come across a family brimming in such moral riches every day. It would be a shame not to continue the family line.

Turned out a good night’s sleep had done nothing to improve her father’s chattiness. Nothing this morning from him but another apology for what he’d done and a whole lot of silence when it came to explaining it. She had noticed, however, while he was waiting for his toast to pop up, that he peered out the window and scoured the vicinity for police presence.

After dropping her robe—the blue silk dressing gown that had long been hanging in the back of her closet, unloved and unworn until today—she climbed up onto the table and squatted like a cat to make sure the gurney was stable. It was surprisingly so. Then she stood and pressed her ankles together, bent her knees. With her head close to the ceiling, she twisted from the waist, assuming a pose she’d been thinking about for days: one where the muscle fibers on one side of her body would be different in action and shape from those on the other side. This would give the trapezius—typically drawn as a flat sheet—a swollen, bunched form that was sure to challenge the students. Fairly certain she’d achieved it, she stared across the ceiling at the lights. The longer she stared, the more she appreciated their closeness, their warmth. It was what she needed today—to come to class, pose. Made her feel almost normal.

“Wipe the look of stupefaction from your face, Model,” said Lichty from across the room. “If I wanted my class to sketch the vapid emotions of a cheerleader who’s misplaced her pompons, I’d go down to the football field and drag her back by the bleached-blond ponytail.”

He spun around and wrote the word “Crux” on the board. “Today we look up to the adult face as seen from the eyes of a newborn. The face holds in it all we need to know about becoming a human; as such, it is the infant’s preferred sight. The child needs to connect with mother for her very survival. But the human face contains more than just a source of food and comfort for baby. It holds the feelings she will mask and the injustices she will suffer and the hopes she will dare not dream. She looks to it to determine the very crux of life itself.”

As the students turned to their boards, glancing up for quick visual references, Lila became painfully aware that she should not have undressed. She could have been, if not fully clothed, at least wrapped in the robe. Shame spread across her flesh like a hot rash.

“And despite the fact that our brazened model insists on showing us her everything this morning, I’ll ask you all to refrain from sketching anything below the clavicles.” Lichty peered down at a black-haired boy in jeans and flip-flops. “For those of you unfamiliar with ‘big words,’ I am speaking of Miss Mack’s collarbones.”

She felt her cheeks redden and caught sight of the delicious pile of blue silk on the floor. Did she dare? “Um, Lichty?”

His head snapped around as abruptly as if the wall itself had spoken.

“If I could just break pose for a second to put on my robe. I didn’t know we’d be doing just the face.”

“Absolutely not. It is precisely the tension between your exposure and your humiliation, combined with no small amount of fragility, that gives us such a forbidden peek beneath the surface today. I’m fascinated to see how it will
manifest on paper. The models I use most often express subtle nuances of emotion in their poses and the challenge for them is to bare themselves—if you’ll excuse the pun—to interpretation. It’s a rare model who decides, with a tilt of her chin or a blush on her breastbone, what we should see. What she wants us to deal with.”

Yes, people. See what I’m feeling. And while you’re at it, check out www.findDelilahBlue.com and a few of those age-enhanced missing child posters. They’re dog-eared but fun. Bonus points if you can dig up a festering milk carton with my face on it. And once you’ve sucked the essence from that, spend a few minutes trying to get an answer from my abductor—the man I thought was my one and only ally.

Then go ahead and deal. Any way you can.

Lichty called out from across the class. “Only the face, people. You show me a breast or a shoulder, and your work goes into the recycling bin.”

There was no sign of Adam.

Which was, of course, not her problem. She hadn’t set out to meet up with him the night prior, she hadn’t suggested he mix medicine with alcohol, and she certainly hadn’t been under any obligation to deliver him home to beddies.

She had, as they say, her own shit.

Lichty bent down to correct someone’s work, then stood up and boomed, “Light bounces off faces from every direction, which only serves to muddy what the model is or is not showing you. It is your job as observer, as artist, to find what lies beneath. Not all is what it seems.”

It wasn’t as if she left Adam in such a terrible area. West Hollywood wasn’t bad. There were—what?—six hundred murders last year? In a town of fourteen million, what were the odds one chalk outline would be his? Besides, who could
stand the smell of NyQuil long enough to off him? Even a murderer had to have standards.

As the students continued to draw, Lichty wandered back toward the sinks, where he clapped his hands. “That reminds me.” He pointed to a sketch next to the window. “Did anyone of you do this drawing Adam pinned up? If so, I’d like to speak to you after class.”

Keeping her face absolutely still, Lila’s eyes shifted enough to see Lichty pointing to her black widow spider drawing. Adam taped it to the wall. In spite of everything, a little thrill shot through her body. She wondered what Lichty wanted. To punish her because he could somehow sense she’d used pilfered supplies, maybe.

Unless Adam told. No, Adam wouldn’t tell.

Where was he?

She couldn’t help herself. “Has anyone seen Adam today?” she asked.

“Model does not speak!” boomed Lichty.

The students, if they responded at all, answered in shrugs and uninterested frowns. What did they care about the paint-sensitive senior with the lopsided glasses and the one-way ticket to New York City?

“I have to admit I was wondering the same thing myself.” Lichty peered out the window and down to the courtyard. “In nearly four years, he’s never missed a class.”

An image of Adam lying faceup on the porn shop doormat, newsprint-covered windows behind him, appeared on the ceiling, first in grainy pixels, then in distressing clarity. His glasses had been knocked clear over to the Laundromat, as useless to him now as the twenty-dollar bill she’d rammed into his pocket. The killer’s knife had pricked Adam’s chest and sliced it open, nicking the medicine bottle on the way
down. The dark green of the tincture then mixed with the deep red of his blood, and it was a case of mixing opposite colors on the color wheel. What resulted would be a dead neutral. Color theory in action.

She was accessory to a murder. And there were thirty minutes of naked left before she could do a thing about it.

Once the bell rang and the students began packing up and trickling out into the hall, Lila jumped off the gurney and hurried into the changing stall to dress. She had to go looking for Adam. But before driving out to his place, she’d cruise past the parking lot and look for signs of a struggle. Pools of neutral fluids dried to near black by the morning sun. As she swung her backpack over one shoulder, she passed Lichty’s desk and remembered the spider drawing. She paused.

Clearly annoyed, the man ignored her, kept grading assignments from another class.

“Sir?”

“Mm?”

“It was me.”

“I’ve no time for cryptic communication, Miss Mack. Please decipher.”

“The drawing you mentioned. It’s mine.”

He looked up, silent. After glancing from her face to the spider and back again, he dropped his red pen and intertwined his fingers while Lila prepared for security to arrive and oust her from the building for using school supplies. “It’s very good,” he said.

“Thank you.”

“How long have you been drawing?”

She shrugged. “Ever since. Always.”

“Any formal instruction?”

She shook her head.

Leaning back in his chair, he considered the sketch again, squinting into the late-afternoon sun. “Strangely enough, I see why you excel at modeling. You understand form, you understand how to see. Do you have a portfolio?”

No. She didn’t. Nor did she have more than two or three lousy pieces of art to show for herself, with her tendency to destroy each piece as fast as she created it. And damned if, just last night, she hadn’t destroyed her very favorite. “Yes.”

“Bring it in next class. I’d like to see it.” Packing his papers into his valise, he stood up and pulled on his cardigan. “We’ve had a scholarship mix-up and you may wind up a contender.”

Scholarship. It was too much to hope for.

“Sir?”

He spun around, still buttoning.

“I’ll need more time. To get things ready.”

“How much more time, Miss Mack? An artist should be ready when opportunity knocks.”

“I can have it ready in two weeks.”