This Must Be the Place: A Novel (45 page)

“Maybe.” She rubbed her nose with the back of her hand. “Where’s Mom?”

“Like mother like daught—” Arthur mumbled cryptically, before losing his voice and turning the color of skim milk. “She’s—she’s checking you out. At reception.”

The waiting room teemed. A little kid holding a bag of ice in a baseball mitt against his knee was hiccuping, great violent hiccups that shook his body like sobs (or maybe they were sobs, what did she know, she could barely feel her brain). Nurses and doctors and people, so many people, were walking and hustling and hobbling, crisscrossing, narrowly avoiding collisions, between the check-in desk and the waiting area and the hallway with all the little half-curtained alcoves, where they’d sat her on a table, blinded her with a tiny flashlight, and pronounced her a little drunk but whole. Someone had called her mom—she thought she remembered filling out a form with her name and her
telephone number. Friday night, full moon,
Halloween
—so it wasn’t a myth that emergency rooms went nuts like this. Or maybe it was the vodka that made everything seem louder and brighter and made her, in the center of it all, feel slow and exhausted and like she didn’t give a rat’s ass about any of these stupid people flitting around like guppies. She didn’t know for sure if what she was feeling was buzzed or shock. She’d never felt either before tonight.

And then there was Mona.

Looking even worse than Arthur, which Oneida wouldn’t have thought humanly possible until it was staring her in the face, in plaid pajama pants and sandals, hair a shambles, puffy and red and eyes leaking tears.
I
did this, Oneida thought.
I
have brought Mona to this state.

Oneida almost barfed again, right on the floor of the ER.

“Mom,” she said. Mona started to cry. Actually, to
cry
. Then she wobbled on her feet and slammed into Arthur’s side and Oneida understood what he’d meant when he said
like mother, like daughter
: Mona was drunk. Mona wasn’t devastated with worry, she was
drunk
. Oneida needed her mother, and her mother was
drunk
, and Oneida was too buzzed herself to see the irony in the situation. She was only ashamed and embarrassed. For both of them. She shut her eyes.

Then she stood from the sticky blue vinyl seat and swayed on legs like warm bubblegum. Arthur darted forward and caught her under one elbow to steady her, and she pitched forward, her face smashing against his chest and her arms whipping around his back, where she clung, because Arthur was real and Arthur didn’t move. She remembered Arthur’s bristly chest wounds and hoped they were healed or, at the very least, that her head butt had missed them.

She closed her eyes and buried her face in Arthur’s shirt. “What the hell happened to my mom?” she asked him.

“She’s fine.” Arthur sounded like he was halfway to crying himself. What the hell was this all about? What the
hell
. “She’s right here. Your mom is fine.”

Oneida rolled her head to the side against Arthur and watched Mona watching her, blinking but lacking the capacity for speech. She hugged Arthur tighter. Mona swallowed but didn’t say a word.

“Come on,” Arthur said quietly as he maneuvered her to face forward,
propped her with an arm around her back, and led her through the emergency room, away from the guppies in lab coats, the wounded Little Leaguer; and somewhere, hidden from her, Eugene Wendell—Eugene Wendell, whose cool hand she’d held in the ambulance and, once they arrived at the hospital, who’d been borne away on the human tide. She’d noticed a very tall, very thin man with a beaky nose swim by that she thought might have been Eugene’s father. That was long before Arthur and Mona showed up. Before they showed up, but after they blinded her with the little flashlight, and a man in a dark blue uniform with watery eyes had asked her to describe what she remembered. She told him everything, which wasn’t much, but which included numerous repetitions of the name
Andrew Lu Andrew Lu Andrew Lu
.

Everything was swimming.

“Come on,” Arthur was saying. “Just a little farther.”

She didn’t even look to see if Mona followed.

The automatic doors whooshed apart. Cold October air smacked her in the face.

“I’m sorry,” she said. She wanted to specify—
I’m sorry that I can’t walk like a human being
—but it seemed like too much work.

They crossed the street, approached a parking garage, got into an elevator. “Come on,” Arthur said again, and shifted his arm around her. Is this what having a father felt like? Did dads haul their drunk-ass daughters out of emergency rooms so calmly, so steadily? Arthur was warm. He smelled like soap and something she couldn’t quite place, something harsh and chemical, and, on top of that, sweet. Sugary. He smelled like her mother. She squeezed her arm around his middle and opened her eyes to see that Mona had, in fact, followed them from the emergency room and was pressing a button on the elevator panel.

They rode to the rooftop level. Oneida summoned the last of her mental energy to appreciate that the ambulance had driven them to one of the hospitals in Syracuse instead of the local clinic.
You know what that means,
she tried not to think but couldn’t help herself:
Eugene needed more than an Ace bandage or a sling or a booster shot or a lollipop
. There was a city six stories down, all around; traffic lights blinking from red to green. Streetlamps glowing. There was so much—sound.

The station wagon was parked a few spaces over from the elevator,
and Oneida let Arthur guide her the rest of the way, the last few steps to the car and into the front passenger seat. The seat belt hurt where it rested against the bruises she’d gotten earlier that evening.

Arthur dropped into the driver’s seat and started the engine. She heard a third door slam as Mona got inside.

“What happened to Mom?” Oneida asked. Everything was slipping away. She couldn’t keep her eyes open, couldn’t be aware any longer. Not today. She just needed an answer to this last question, she told her brain; just hang on for this one answer.

Arthur didn’t respond. Oneida felt the car back out of its space and slowly corkscrew through the parking garage, slaloming down to street level. She heard Arthur talking to the parking attendant.

“What happened.” The car floated down a curb, turned right, stopped at a traffic light. Oneida’s eyes opened blearily. Round red stoplights swayed in the blue darkness.

“It was an accident,” Arthur said.

21
Arthur’s Accident

Everything in Arthur’s life was because of an accident.

All of it. Absolutely all of it, Arthur thought: all of my life is because of
one accident
. Because of one moment that was never supposed to happen—one moment that bred a maelstrom of cause and effect and randomized happenstance—that’s the only explanation. That’s the only explanation for how he—Arthur Rook, photographer, husband, born in Somerville, Massachusetts, and transplanted to the City and County of Los Angeles—could find himself the sole sober person in a car hurtling through Syracuse, New York, at midnight on a Friday night, in the position to explain to the daughter of the creator of his world—
Amy, Creator of Worlds
—that he, Arthur, had come to destroy hers.

It was an accident.

“Nobody gets drunk by accident,” Oneida said.

Arthur tried to catch Mona’s eye in the rearview but Mona was staring out the window.

“Go to sleep,” Arthur told them both. He didn’t know which had a stronger hold over them, alcohol or exhaustion, but sleep was the solution. He looked sideways at Oneida, at the streetlights rippling over her pale face as he drove beneath them.
God, she looked like Amy.
He could see it now—it was so plain, so clear. That long face, her jaw, her nose, her eyes; the timbre of her voice; and the way she stood, the way she walked, all strange angles and flat planes. Architectural brutalism in the form of a girl. This is what Amy must have looked like, back when Mona knew her—a collection of parts, of pieces, that by the time she met Arthur had learned what they meant in relation to one another, how to move as one.

How had he not seen this? How had he, Arthur, not
seen
what was physically in front of him—the best parts that Amy left behind? Her brain, her blood, her heart?

Arthur Rook was awake. He had been awake for three hours and fifteen minutes, give or take. In that time he had thrown up once. He had eaten one slice of lemon, because it was in his hand and he wanted to taste something cold and sour and real. He had held Mona until she stopped crying. He had answered the telephone and handed it to Mona when the anonymous voice asked to speak to the mother of Oneida Jones; that was when he threw up. The mother of Oneida Jones was Amy.

His Amy.

Who was
dead
.

Arthur merged into traffic heading south on the Route 81 overpass. The wagon’s tires whined on the high bridge surface. He could theoretically understand why it had been easier to keep Oneida in the dark. He couldn’t imagine how you prepare for a conversation like that, let alone what it would feel like to be on the receiving end of that news—but wouldn’t it have been easier to tell her the truth from the beginning? Not to lie to her, ever? Not that anything could be done about the choices Mona had made years ago—and not that they had anything to do with
him
.

Choices she made when she was a kid, choices she lived with for half her life. Choices she loved. There wasn’t a doubt in his mind that she loved Amy’s daughter (the same way she’d loved Amy, he thought) with an intensity that defined her entire existence, a sort of paralysis of love. Which, if he was being honest with himself, was also how he loved Amy: blindly. What had Amy been to him if not his entire world in Los Angeles?

Amy was
dead
.

Arthur’s stitched-together chest pulsed like a toothache. His mouth tasted metallic. He rolled down his window, and the cold night air stung. He felt each hair on his body rise, his skin pucker; he felt like throwing up again, thrilled to be so near what was left of Amy in this world. He wanted to tell her everything and was terrified he would actually do it.

And there was so much—so much to
tell
. To everyone. He thought
of his brother, David, and his sister-in-law, of his father and mother. He remembered Max and Manny and realized he had probably been fired. He tried to remember the last thing he ever said to Amy, and she to him. He couldn’t.

He tried to imagine his Amy—his wife—leaving a baby,
her
baby, behind in a bathtub. He couldn’t reconcile the Amy that Mona described with the Amy he had known for years, who was a little intense, a little nuts, but whom he loved so much he just didn’t care. She fell asleep to
The Late Show
with her head on his shoulder. She kept a can of olives in the refrigerator and ate them off her fingers as a snack. She blasted Depeche Mode on the stereo and danced around in a T-shirt and a pair of his boxers. She was warm against him as they lay side by side, their backs against the cooler, green woolen blanket scratchy beneath their legs on the lawn of the Hollywood Forever Cemetery, where movies were screened on the side of a mausoleum on hot summer nights. Just last year they’d gone to see
Rosemary’s Baby
—had watched Ruth Gordon kill Mia Farrow with kindness and a little Tanis root—and now, Amy lay. . . .

Amy’s body.

Arthur’s hands went numb on the steering wheel. What had he told them to do with Amy’s body? He remembered being asked the question and not knowing. Had he answered?

He was struck with a sudden image of his cell phone in his palm, and in the middle of its tiny blue screen, a picture of an envelope. Flashing. Ten missed calls. From Bill (Stantz), one message saying, more or less,
There’s been an accident, Arthur, where are you?
And where was his cell phone now? What had he done with it? He hadn’t seen it in days, in weeks, and he had never felt its absence before this moment.

How many messages would be on it now?

He exhaled slowly. How the
fuck
had he done this to himself?

That wasn’t quite true: Amy did this. The accident did this. His entire life was made in the image of one accident.

No.

Two accidents. For he was sure Oneida’s conception had been an accident—not her birth, but what Mona told him about Amy and the tenant sounded too simple to deny. An avowed
inappropriate
relationship,
a stupid risk: an accident. So which accident was it, then, that made Arthur’s life, the one that brought Amy to Los Angeles or the one that sent him back into her past?

Oneida turned away from the center console to rest her forehead against the passenger-side window. She breathed mindlessly, contentedly. It horrified Arthur to think she had begun her life on a bed of cold white porcelain by her mother’s hand. He could barely accept Amy had done it—
his
Amy wouldn’t have—but acceptance wouldn’t change the fact that he had loved her. That he
still
loved her. And that he loved Mona, too—for keeping the pieces of Amy she hadn’t wanted but were hers: for keeping them and loving them and letting them grow up, until they were old enough to have catastrophes of their own.