Trauma (6 page)

The waiter came up. “You want anything else, ma'am?”

“No, thank you,” said Bonnie. “What I need, you don't have here.”

She stopped halfway along Hollywood Boulevard, double-parked, and went into the Super Star Grill. It was noisy inside, all tiles and chrome and Meatloaf screaming “Bat Out Of Hell.” She bought a giant chili dog with onions and kraut and sat in the car and messily devoured it, watching her eyes in the rearview mirror as she did so.

So this is what death looks like. A thirty-four-year-old blonde with chili round her mouth
. She finished the hot dog and drove away with sticky hands. She hadn't even driven as far as Vine Street before her vision was blurred with tears.

Duke had bought her a dozen red roses, which lay wilting on the kitchen table. He came in from the yard still blowing out cigarette smoke. She didn't like him smoking in the house. He was wearing a faded black T-shirt with a Harley Davidson emblem on it.

“Hey, look, I'm sorry,” he said.

She put down her shopping bags. “What are you sorry for? Everybody has off days once in a while.”

“The Mexican chicken thing. That was—”

“Insane? Yes, it was. But that was yesterday and this is today and thank you for the flowers. How much did they sting you for them?”

Duke shrugged and looked sheepish. “They were—well, I got them for not very much.”

“How much is not very much?”

“I got them for free, okay?”

She picked them up. “You got a dozen red roses for nothing? What did you do, take them off somebody's grave?”

“Rita at the florist. You know Rita. I told her what happened, and she kind of took pity on me.”

“Oh, so now
Rita
knows that we had a fight about Mexican chicken? Who else did you tell? Jimmy down at the TV repair shop? Karen at the beauty parlor? I suppose the next time I go to the market they're all going to be clucking at me and singing ‘La Cucaracha'?”

Duke banged his fist on the draining board. “Why do you always have to be so goddamn funny? Why don't you ever listen to anything I ever say without making a goddamn comedy act out of it? I brought you some roses, right, because I wanted to tell you that I was sorry about yesterday, right? I brought you some roses because I meant it. And what do I get? ‘Did you take them off somebody's goddamn grave?'”

Bonnie carefully laid the roses back on the table. It was way past seven, and she should have been starting the evening meal.

“This time yesterday,” she said, “three young children were getting themselves ready for bed.”

“What?” said Duke. He was totally baffled. “What children?”

“One was nine and one was seven and one was only four. I even know what their names were.”

“So—so what? What the hell are you talking about?”

She glanced up at the kitchen clock. “That was yesterday. Today they're dead.”

“What?” said Duke. Bonnie came up to him and wrapped her arms around him and hugged him tight. “Hey, I can't breathe here.”

“You don't have to be sorry and bring me flowers or anything. It's me. I don't know what's happening to me.”

“You work too frigging hard, that's all. Why don't you give up this cleaning thing? It's not a nice thing to do, you know. I know it brings in the shekels, but we could sell the truck and make a few bucks, right? And I'll tell you what I'll do. I'll get myself a job, right? I will, I solemnly swear to God. Doesn't matter what it is. Dog walking, anything. I swear to God.”

“You hate dogs.”

“They're okay. Just because that Schnauzer took a hunk out of my ass.”

Bonnie laughed. It was the first time that she had really laughed all day.

She stood naked on the bathroom scales and stared at herself in the mirror.

Height 5 ft 4½ inches

Target weight 132 lbs

Actual weight 147 lbs

Ray knocked on the door. “Come on, Mom. I'm going to miss the bus.”

“I'll drive you,” she said. She needed to look at herself a few minutes longer, as if to reassure herself that she wasn't going to vanish.

That morning she had two of her three part-time assistants to help her, Ruth and Esmeralda. Jodie had scalded her arm and had to take two weeks off. Ruth was wearing a bright cerise track suit, her hair tied back with a yellow chiffon scarf. Esmeralda was a plump, solemn Mexican woman with dark-rimmed eyes, as if she hadn't slept in a month. Today, as usual, she wore black, with black lace-up shoes that monotonously squeaked on the kitchen floor.

Between them they rolled up the living room carpet. They had to lift the couch over it, and the couch weighed so much that it left them gasping.

“I'm getting too old for this,” said Ruth.

“You should exercise more. Why don't you join my t'ai-chi ch'uon class?”

“Because I'd never go to it, just like
you
never go to it.”

“I went last week. Well, maybe the week before. It's so hard to find the time, that's all. My life seems to be so—
filled up
.”

In an oddly uneasy voice, Esmeralda said, “That stain has gone right through to the floorboards.”

Bonnie came over and looked at it. Aaron Goodman's blood had soaked right through the underlay and formed a wide brownish blotch, like a Rorschach test.

Bonnie said, “That's all right. It's oak. We can probably get most of it out if we scrub it with sodium perborate.”

Esmeralda crossed herself. “I think it's better if I make a start on the wall.”

“You're sure? This is nothing like so yukky.”

“No, no. I do the wall.”

“Is something wrong?” Bonnie asked her.

“My knee's bad. I can't do too much bending.”

“You crossed yourself.”

Esmeralda gave her a hollow, noncommunicative look. “A small gesture for the dead, that's all.”

“Okay … you can do the floor then, Ruth. I'll start bagging up the bedcovers.”

They worked for an hour and a half. Bonnie's steam cleaner hissed and whuffled in the bedrooms, while Ruth's vacuum cleaner droned around the rest of the apartment and Esmeralda's scrubbing brush set up a brisk, percussive rhythm on the walls.

Bonnie usually sang while she worked. “Love, ageless and evergreen …” But in Naomi's bedroom she
was silent. She couldn't take her eyes away from the bloody stencil patterns that Naomi's hands had made across the wall, yet somehow she couldn't bring herself to clean them off. It would be almost like denying that Naomi's last few moments of pain and bewilderment had ever happened.

She found herself wondering what Naomi must have thought of her father, as she crawled across the floor. She couldn't bear to think that she might have cried out to him to help her.

Esmeralda came in with a cloth and a Dettox spray. “The wall's finished,” she said. Without hesitation she sprayed the handprints and wiped them away.

Bonnie switched off her steam cleaner and it gurgled into silence. “You can start on the couch if you want to.”

“She's keeping the couch?”

“That's a thousand-dollar couch, easy.”

“I couldn't keep my couch if my husband killed himself all over it. Even if it was ten-thousand dollars. I would always feel that there was a dead man sitting there.”

“Yes, well, I get that with Duke when the World Series is on.”

The room was hot and humid now, and smelled strongly of damp carpet. Bonnie went to the window and opened it wide. On the windowsill stood a large, leafy fig plant in a terra-cotta pot, and she shifted it to one side in case the drapes blew against it and knocked it over. As she did so, something black dropped from one of its leaves—something that squirmed.

“Urgh!” she said, and jumped back.

“What's the matter?”

“It's some kind of maggot or something. It dropped off that plant.”

Esmeralda came over and peered into the compost inside the pot. A fat black caterpillar was crawling up the stem of the plant, its body undulating as it climbed.

“That's disgusting,” said Bonnie. “Look—there's more of them.” Half concealed in the foliage were four or five more caterpillars, all of them steadily eating, so that the edges of the fig leaves were all serrated in tiny jagged patterns.

Esmeralda crossed herself again, twice.

“Why do you keep doing that?” Bonnie demanded.

“I hate these things. They come from the devil.”

“They're caterpillars. They won't hurt you.”

“I hate them, the black ones. They bring bad luck.”

“You're so darn superstitious, Esmeralda. You're worse than Ruth. But if you don't like them, go get the permethrin spray and zap them. Anyways, I don't think that Mrs. Goodman would appreciate what they're doing to her fig.”

Bonnie looked around the bedroom to make sure that she hadn't missed anything. Naomi's bed was completely stripped now, and later this afternoon she would come back to take the rest of it away. The bunk beds she would dismantle and take down to the American Humane Association's children's home.

A warm breeze stirred the nets and brushed them against the houseplant, and Bonnie's attention was drawn back to the caterpillars. She had seen just about every variety of bug and maggot since she had
started cleaning up trauma scenes, but she had never seen anything like these before. Maybe the eggs had already been mixed up in the compost when Mrs. Goodman had bought it, and they had only just hatched out.

Esmeralda came in with the insecticide spray.

“Wait,” said Bonnie. “I want to keep one of these. Maybe Dr. Jacobson can tell me what they are.”

She tugged out a disposable plastic glove and blew into it. Then she held it under one of the caterpillars and shook the leaf on which it was perched. It clung tenaciously, but in the end she flipped at it with another glove and it dropped off into one of the fingers. She pulled off a few fragments of fig leaf and pushed those into the glove, too.

“Don't want it going hungry,” she said.

Esmeralda wrinkled up her nose. “Why do you want to keep such a thing?”

“I'm curious. I'm a naturally inquisitive person, that's all.”

“It's bad luck, that thing.”

Esmeralda sprayed the fig plant backward and forward until Bonnie was almost choking with the fumes. One caterpillar began to writhe, and then another, and then one by one they dropped off onto the windowsill.

“I think you're enjoying this,” said Bonnie.

“You want me to pretend that I'm not?” Esmeralda sprayed another caterpillar and said, “Die, you wriggly son of a bitch!”

Bonnie left her to it and went back through to the living room. They were practically all done now. With the help of a muscular young man they had
recruited for ten dollars on the corner of Hollywood and Highland, they had already cut the Goodmans' carpet into three manageable sections and loaded it onto the back of Bonnie's truck. The walls were clean, although the hole from the shotgun blast remained untouched: Bonnie didn't redecorate, although she could refer people. The cream leather couch was clean, too, but it had lost its shine. The metallic smell of blood had been replaced by a mildly antiseptic tang, like that in a dentist's waiting room. Ruth had vacuum cleaned everywhere, although she hadn't polished. “We clean up, we sterilize, we don't do maid work.”

Where Aaron Goodman's blood had spilled there was still the faintest phantom of a stain, but the only way to get rid of it completely would have been to pry up the floorboards.

Bonnie walked around the stain. She wasn't very happy about it. “This is really the best we can do?”

“It soaked right into the grain. I could have another try with a stronger solution, but I don't want to bleach out the wood.”

Bonnie walked around and around, and she couldn't stop looking at the stain. She didn't know why. For some reason it disturbed her, like the words of a song that she couldn't quite remember, or a whispered warning. It was the shape, she supposed—like a huge pale flower, or a giant moth.

Bonnie arrived home that evening sweaty and lightheaded with exhaustion. Apart from the Goodman home, she and Ruth had cleaned up a natural death scene in Westwood. A woman in her mid-eighties had died in her sleep and lain undiscovered for nine weeks. Her son had prowled up and down the hallway while they worked, a podgy, pale man with a jet-black hairpiece, constantly checking his watch. Bonnie had resisted the temptation to ask him why he hadn't called his mother in all that time.

“I live in Albuquerque,” he had suddenly volunteered, as they were stacking away their plastic buckets.

Oh, really
? Bonnie had thought, grim-faced.
And they don't have telephones in Albuquerque
? On the way
home, she thought:
I should have shown him his mother's sheets
.

She went into the living room, where Duke was watching baseball. She kissed him on the top of his head, and he immediately ran his fingers through his hair to reerect his pompadour.

“How was your day, honey?” she asked him, perching herself on the arm of his chair.

“Okay, I guess. I called Vincent at the Century Plaza. He might have some bar work for me.”

“That's great! What would you have to do, mix cocktails and stuff? One frozen daiquiri, coming up! Pina colada, madam?”

“Unh-hunh. It's fetching and carrying mainly.”

Bonnie gave him another kiss. “It's a job, though, isn't it? It's a start.”

“Sure, it's a start,” he agreed, shifting his head sideways so that she didn't block his view of the television.

Bonnie washed up and changed into a flowery yellow dress and a big yellow bead necklace. Her lucky color. She went into the kitchen and took six pimply chicken thighs out of the fridge.