Tides of the Heart (3 page)

“Dad’s in the Caribbean.”

The Caribbean? Not Martha’s Vineyard. “What on earth is he doing there?” she asked before remembering it was none of her business. Four years of divorce apparently did not wash away every stain of twenty years of marriage.

“The last I heard, he was buying a boat.”

Jess sighed, but did not comment that she wondered if her ex-husband would ever grow up. “Well, okay, honey. Thanks.” Then she added, “I miss you, honey. When can you come out for dinner?”

“Not for a while, Mom. I’m not in the city right now. I’m at a seminar. In Boston.”

“Boston?” she asked. “You’re in Boston right now?”

“Yeah. The beauty of cell phones, huh?”

Boston? she wondered. Wasn’t that awfully close to Martha’s Vineyard?

She closed her eyes and tried not to think what she was thinking. Then she said something like yes, well, call me when you get back into town, then good-bye. But when she’d hung up the phone, Jess stared out the window and did everything in her power to convince herself that the fact Chuck was in Boston meant nothing at all, that just because he was so much like Charles did not mean he followed in every one of his footsteps. Besides, she reasoned, Chuck was her son. And he would never do anything to hurt his mother.

She turned back to her list to divert her thoughts.

Father.

Miss Taylor
—the housemother.

P.J.
,
Susan, Ginny
—her long-ago friends.

She thought of her friends now and of how only Ginny—of all people—had had a happy ending. She smiled and wondered how Ginny would handle such an obscure letter, and if she would stoop to accusing her own child of the deed.

Ginny Stevens-Rosen-Smith-Levesque-Edwards preferred to divorce husbands. Not bury them. She stood in the front of the dim funeral home room in L.A. and stared into the oak casket framed in camellias, Jake’s favorite flowers.

“You son of a bitch,” she whispered at the satin-covered pillow that cushioned his motionless head. “You rotten, pig-fucking, son of a bitch.”

He had no right to die. For five years, Ginny had been faithful to him. She had
loved
him, for chrissakes, if love was a word that anyone could define beyond saying it was a feeling that made you do bizarre things, like be faithful and give a shit when you wished that you didn’t. But she
had
been faithful and had given a shit, at least for the past five years. And all it had gotten her was nowhere, except right here, staring into the box that held the bones of the man she had loved, and hoping she’d picked out the right kind of casket, and that he would have liked the pale blue satin lining.

Everyone but Ginny had been surprised that Jake had specified he did not want to be cremated in popular California style. True, Los Angeles was overcrowded and land
was at a premium. But Jake had always been afraid of fire, and Ginny knew that. She knew that the same way she knew so much else about her husband—the fact that he harbored a secret longing to be a singer though he couldn’t carry a tune, the fact that he had become a successful documentary film producer only because his alcoholic ex-wife, the mother of his two children, had not wanted him to, and the fact that he was the best goddamn thing that ever happened to Ginny.

And now where was he? Cold as a clam. Dead as a doornail. The rotten son of a bitch.

The touch of a cool hand at her elbow did not avert Ginny’s eyes from the pillow under his head.

“Ginny?” The voice came from Lisa, Ginny’s TV-star daughter, the only person left on earth now who gave a shit about
her.
“They want to begin the service, Ginny. Come and sit down.”

Drawing in a breath, Ginny nearly gagged on the pungent aroma of hundreds of floral grotesqueries: pots and baskets and sprays and vases from studios and clients and actors and producers—everyone in the movie business who was shocked that Jake Edwards had dropped dead at sixty-four. Of course, many of the flowers were from Lisa’s camp of ass-kissers: the herds of groupies who apparently felt it essential to send condolences to the girl they knew as Myrna the witch-bitch on
Devonshire Place
, the girl whose real-life sort-of-stepfather now lay in the box, which meant she must be devastated and they really must let her know that they cared.

“Ginny?” Lisa/Myrna repeated.

Ginny raised her chin and swallowed back a tear. Then she took a last look at the son of a bitch and let her daughter lead her to the bank of wing chairs reserved for the family that had been set apart from the white folding chairs and came complete with boxes of pop-up Kleenex at no extra charge.

•  •  •

She supposed she’d have to keep Consuelo on even though they’d never gotten along, even though the housekeeper/cook/laundress had never really liked Ginny, only tolerated her on account of Jake—the man she’d lie down and die for because if it weren’t for him she’d never have her green card. Jake had un-alienated her in a world of illegals; he had made her someone, a Californian, an
American.
And aside from the fact it had most likely been Consuelo’s cooking—her overindulgence of Jake by way of breakfast steaks and fried eggs—that had logjammed his arteries and crushed the life from his heart, the woman was probably entitled to some payback for her loyalty.

Shit
, Ginny thought, surveying the heaping platters of postfuneral noshes spread out for the guests like barley for geese, she might as well keep her because she couldn’t stand her own cooking and she’d never lifted a dust rag in her life. Besides, Jake would probably have wanted it that way. Consuelo, after all, had no one else: her revered Jake, his two totally fucked-up adult children, his unfortunate choice of a second wife, and the wife’s illegitimate daughter had become the woman’s family, like it or not.

Ginny plucked a stuffed artichoke leaf and wondered why those who serve ultimately are transformed into those who need to be served. It had been the same way with her mother: the woman who had once nurtured her little girl had ended up needing that same little girl to work her ass off to keep them in frozen dinners and booze, to keep bringing home tissues into which her mother hacked God-only-knew-what, until there was no more air left to come out of her lungs, until her liver was swollen beyond repair, until she was dead. Like Jake was now.

“Ginny,” Lisa said, guiding a bald, bulky man toward her, “I’d like you to meet Harry Lyons, my director. Harry, this is my mother, Ginny Edwards.” Ginny frowned at the daughter who oddly resembled Ginny’s mother more than
herself, then moved her gaze to Harry Lyons, the man who took credit for making Lisa a star. Ginny knew it had really only happened because of Jake. Jake, who had tirelessly bled his Hollywood connections until Lisa had screen tests secured from one end of town to the other. Jake had done it for Lisa, and he’d done it for Ginny, so she could be near the daughter she’d only just met.

But that had been almost five years ago, and it was Harry Lyons—a fat man with big teeth and jello-like jowls—who stood in front of her now, who had taken the credit for Lisa’s fast rise to fame.

“Mrs. Edwards,” the somber-face said perfunctorily, “I am so pleased to meet you. And I am so sorry about your husband.”

Sucking the stuffing off the artichoke leaf, Ginny wondered why he cared. “Thank you,” she said between the cream cheese and rosemary. “I’m sorry about him, too.”

He cleared his fleshy throat and eyed the hors d’oeuvres. “Lisa tells me you were an actor, too. You must have trained your daughter well. Or you must have fantastically creative genes.”

It came as no surprise that Harry Lyons was more interested in talking about Lisa—his abundant meal ticket—than in trading musings about dead Jake. But Ginny was too weary to explain that she’d never even laid eyes on Lisa until a few years ago. That she’d never planned to, that she’d never wanted to. “She’s my daughter, all right,” Ginny replied as expected, though a small part of her would have loved to watch his porky face fall if she told him that Lisa’s “fantastically creative genes” were the product of Ginny’s rape by her stepfather with a bit of her alcoholic mother thrown in for good measure. But that was cocktail party talk, and this was not a cocktail party. Not that any of the food-grabbing, drink-guzzling guests seemed to realize it.

“Lisa,” Ginny asked as she bypassed the artichokes and
scooped up a pair of cheesy, gooey quiches, “have you seen Brad and Jodi?”

Rolling her camera-perfect, huge topaz eyes, Lisa gestured toward the patio. “Brad is sulking. Jodi is meditating.”

“Excuse me,” Ginny said to Harry Lyons, “but I really must check on Jake’s children.” The blank look on his face made her want to shout:
“Jake.
The man who is dead, the reason you’re here.” Instead, she drifted through the French doors to the patio, pulling the black widow’s scarf from her throat as she went and tossing it onto the counter for Consuelo to pick up when the spirit moved her.

Brad, indeed, was sulking. He was slouched on a chaise, a beer in one hand, staring at Jodi, his white-robed sister. She was cross-legged on the concrete, eyes closed, arms folded, head raised toward the sky. Firmly planted atop her long, straight, flat hair was a wreath of daisies, the symbol of the New World Covenant to which Jodi had sold her soul several years ago. To Ginny, the girl merely looked like a leftover hippie who, but for the grace of three decades, might have taken up with Charles Manson instead.

“Mommie dearest,” Brad chided as Ginny strolled into the scene, “why aren’t you entertaining the guests? Too distraught over the loss of your dear departed?”

“Shut up, Brad,” she said. She sat down, kicked off her sling-back heels and propped her feet on another chair. “We have to talk. Do you think you can coax your sister from her trance?”

“I’m not in a trance,” Jodi’s light voice drifted from her pale, thin lips. “I’m trying to connect with Daddy’s aura.”

“Daddy’s aura is long gone,” Ginny said. “Now open your eyes and listen to what I have to say.”

Brad swigged his beer.

Jodi opened her eyes.

Ginny looked from one pathetic stepchild to the other,
and had no problem deciding where to begin. “I expect the reason you showed your faces here today is because of the money.”

“Ginny!” Jodi squeaked in her overmeditated, mousy squeak. “That simply is not true! I have no need for material things. New World is my life force … my essence rises above it all.”

Brad snickered.

“Well, whether you know it or not,” Ginny said to Jodi, ignoring Brad, “your father sent a ‘gift’ to that life force every month. Five thousand dollars, to be exact. The price to keep you rising above it all.” She shook a cigarette from a pack of Brad’s Marlboros that lay on the table and lit it with an old match. “And as much as I hate the thought, I’ll keep paying as long as you insist on staying there.” The truth was, Ginny feared that Jake would come back to haunt her if she didn’t. New World had been the only way to keep Jodi from relapsing into a drug-riddled hell.

Sucking in her breath and closing her eyes again, Jodi responded, “I do not
stay
there, Ginny. New World is my home.…”

“Whatever,” Ginny said and blew out a sharp stream of smoke. It had been years since she’d smoked: the taste was dry and harsh, like a mouthful of sand mixed with warm camel shit. She picked a shard of tobacco from her lower lip and turned an eye to Brad. “I couldn’t help but notice that you haven’t said a word.”

Brad shrugged, a slow, childish smirk creeping across his two-day-old beard growth and making him look like a cross between Tom Cruise and Don Johnson. “Whatever makes my sister happy …”

“Give it up, Brad. It’s a little late to try and impress me with your familial caring.” She narrowed her eyes at the errant son. “I am quite sure, however, that you are interested in the money.”

He shifted his well-worked-out, taut little ass on the flowered cushion and flashed his winning, Kennedyesque
smile. But the L.A.-speak that emerged from his mouth was just that: a phony, impossible-to-believe load of crap.

“In case no one’s told you, my father has died. I’m here to grieve.”

Ginny resisted the temptation to smack his cynical mouth, reminding herself that in a moment, Brad would have much more to grieve than the loss of his beloved father, whom he had done everything in his thirty-six-year-old power to humiliate, take advantage of, and otherwise suck off while the old man was still alive. She flicked her cigarette ashes on the ground. “I’d like to give you the benefit of the doubt, but experience warns me otherwise.”

“And we all know, Mommie dearest, that you do have experience.”

She disregarded the lash. “And
you
might as well know, Brad, that there’s no money for you.”

He did not answer, but steadied his eyes on his stepmother.

Studying the thin line of smoke as it rose from the orange-red cigarette tip and dissolved into the smoggy afternoon, Ginny felt grim satisfaction at her small contribution to polluting the air that Brad breathed. “A few years ago your father chose to put all his assets into my name, and my name alone,” she said. “The house, his business, his investment portfolio—everything is mine.”