Under the Influence (7 page)

W
eeks passed. Dwight and Cheri took Ollie and their son Jared to Disneyland, and then to Sacramento, and then to Cheri's parents somewhere in Southern California, and when I asked to see my son, Dwight reminded me Ollie needed to spend time with his grandparents, who weren't getting any younger. “I hate to say it, Helen,” he added, “but Ollie's just not that comfortable with you right now. We think what's best for him is a secure family environment.”

This was the kind of moment that would have sent me to the cupboard to open a wine bottle, in times past. But I didn't. Now I picked up the phone and talked to Ava. Or just drove over to Folger Lane.

Though a day hardly ever went by at this point that didn't include Ava, I tried Alice once, when a new movie adaptation of a Jane Austen novel came out, and I told her there was nobody else I'd rather see it with than her, which wasn't actually true. But Ava wasn't a Jane Austen type.

We had a nice enough evening at the movie, though I realized after I got home that my conversation that night had been all about the Havillands. Alice stopped calling, and I stopped calling her. Since accepting the job for Ava I was no longer taking catering work. So we didn't see each other there, either. Christmas—a time we always
used to get together to give each other presents from the Dollar Store and dress up in tacky Christmas sweaters—came and went.

Now when I thought about Alice, I felt the way a person might who's cheating on a lover. I avoided places I might run into her. One time, her name showed up on my phone. I didn't pick up.

I
t was mid-January when I finally got to see my son. As always when I arrived at his father's house on a Saturday morning, the television was on. Ollie was sitting on the floor with a bowl of cereal, eyes locked on the screen.

“It's a beautiful day,” I said. “I thought we'd get an early start.”

He didn't move or look up at me. Here was this person who used to melt into my body when I picked him up, a boy who started every day flying into my bedroom like a superhero, with a pillowcase around his shoulders for a cape, calling out, “Coming in for a landing!”

Now as I wrapped my arms around him, his body stiffened. His face was blank, and his eyes had a hardness to them. I had been the person he'd loved most in the world, but I was also the one responsible for the loss of that person.

“Where are we going this time?” he said. He sounded weary. Which would it be: the bowling alley, the children's museum, the batting cages, the movies?

“I brought your present,” I said, my voice, even to my own ears, sounding falsely cheerful. “I thought we could try it out.” I set the box with the camera down next to him. He didn't look away from the TV.

“I went on Space Mountain,” he told me. “I didn't used to be tall enough but now I am.”

“It's a camera,” I said, indicating the box I'd set down in front of him, that he had yet to touch.

“I've got one already.”

“Not like this,” I said, taking it out of the case. “This one's got some really cool features.”

“Uncle Pete took me to laser tag, too,” he said. “I got a robot gun. There were lights flashing all over the place. Every time you zap someone, it energizes your battery pack.”

“You can even take videos with it,” I told him. Ollie reached for the box, but with about as much enthusiasm as if it contained medicine or socks.

“You could bring me to Lazer World,” he said. He said it like a challenge. If I loved him, I'd bring him to Lazer World.

“I could. But I thought we'd have some quiet time.”

“What for?”

“We haven't seen each other for a while,” I said. I didn't want to sound needy or desperate. “I just miss you, and laser tag's so noisy I can't hear anything you say.”

Silence. The whole time I'd been there, Ollie hadn't taken his eyes off the TV screen.

“We could pretend we're photographers for
National Geographic
and take pictures up on Mount Diablo.”

He turned toward me then, and a sad, vulnerable expression came over his face. For a moment, it was as if a seawall had begun to crack, and you could sense the water pressing up against it, spilling out and flooding everything. This was the moment when my son might have fallen into my arms and said he missed me, too. He could tell me he wanted to come home.
Home
meaning with me. He might just have let his head fall on my shoulder for once, instead of holding his neck tight and his muscles tensed. He might have let me stroke his hair. But when I reached out to him he pulled away, and the hard, angry look returned.

“Taking pictures is boring,” he said. “You never take me anyplace fun.”

I gave him the yo-yo then. Also a shirt with a picture of otters on the front, because he had always loved otters, and a book of Shel Silverstein poems.

“Remember these?” I said. At one point, we used to read a poem from this book every night. We'd even memorized a couple of them.

He shook his head.

“Shel Silverstein. He used to be your favorite.”

If he had any memory of the two of us reciting “The Land of Happy” out loud as we lay together in the hammock on warm summer nights, or later, when I tucked him in, he showed no trace of it. That must have been some other boy, some other mother, some other planet his spaceship had departed from long ago.

Somewhere inside the body of the boy who sat here now, eyes locked on the TV screen—his shoulders tense, back arched, eyes stony, mouth closed tight—there was a child who was my son. I wanted to grab him by both shoulders and dig my fingers in.
Come out, come out.

“Laser tag, then,” I said to him.

I
t was March. Even if they were off at the Tahoe house or at one of the philanthropic events they were always attending, I went over to Swift and Ava's house several times a week now—often enough that even Rocco, though he didn't like me, seldom actually barked when I came through the door—he just let out his low, defensive growl. I could let myself in. I had my own key, attached to a hand-carved key ring Ava had given me with a medallion depicting the face of Frida Kahlo. I felt so proud that she and Swift trusted me this way.

But more often than not, the Havillands were around when I arrived. We had our routine down: the big greeting; Ava's presentation to me of whatever interesting item she'd picked up that day that seemed perfect for me; Swift's brief, explosive appearance, followed by his disappearance, back to the pool house or to whatever bodywork session he might be engaged in that day. We all knew I was Ava's friend above all else.

We'd settle ourselves in the sunroom then, or in the garden if it was warm enough. Wonderful food appeared on the tray. Estella knew by now that when serving drinks, she should fix me only Pellegrino with a little lime in it.

By this point my work for Ava had expanded to include a variety of other jobs besides cataloging art: having invitations printed for the party
of some organization on whose board Ava or Swift sat, arranging for the donation of a great many boxes of Ava's discarded clothes to a halfway house for battered women, talking with the gardener, Rodrigo, about the placement of 150 tulip bulbs that had been special-ordered from Holland.

Sometimes when I got to the house, Ava's car would be gone, and I'd know she was off with the dogs, or at her special Pilates class with a personal trainer who'd modified the Reformer routine to work for a person with spinal cord injuries. After Pilates, she often stopped by the animal shelter to check in on the dogs. Then there was the family she'd adopted in Hollister—a single mother she'd read about in the paper a few months back, whose husband had been killed fighting wildfires in Southern California, leaving her with four children. Ava went over with groceries for them once a week.

One day I stayed an unusually long time in the back room, working on the art cataloging project—almost eight hours. Sometime over the course of that long afternoon, I became aware of sounds coming from upstairs, the other wing of the house from the one in which I was working. At first I thought it was one of the dogs, but then I realized the voice was human, and there were two of them. It was Swift and Ava, upstairs in the bedroom, apparently unaware of the fact that I could hear them. Or maybe they just didn't mind if I could.

It could have been yelling, or crying, or both. But more likely, knowing those two, they were having sex.

It was the one part of their lives that remained off-limits to me, and though I didn't want to, I found myself obsessed with their sex life. It was so mysterious and, it seemed clear to me, so far beyond anything I had experienced myself, or could even envision. As close as I felt to Ava by this point, I didn't know the particulars of the injuries that had put her in her chair—didn't know at which vertebra her spine had been injured or what if anything was left in the way of feeling, and I didn't ask, same as I didn't ask how it had happened, or if there had ever been a time
(how could there not?) when she'd viewed her situation with despair. The fact that she now relied on the wheelchair never seemed to slow Ava down or restrict her. If anything, she seemed more driven because of it, though I hadn't known her before. She accomplished more in a day than most able-bodied people I knew.

She had helpers, of course. Not only the gardener, but a pool man, and occasional catering staff. And now me. But the person who made everything run smoothly in the household was Estella.

Estella was probably around my age, though she looked older. I never knew exactly how long she had worked for Swift and Ava, but evidently she'd taken care of Cooper as a baby, so she must have worked for the first wife, too. She had come north from Guatemala when she was just a teenager and pregnant with her daughter, Ava had told me once—riding on the roof of a train through Mexico, making her way across the Arizona desert with a
coyote
who'd charged her three thousand dollars it took her six years to pay off—all so her baby could be born in America. That was her daughter, Carmen. The way Swift felt about his son, Cooper, was how Estella felt about Carmen.

Estella was at the house on Folger Lane seven days a week, generally—moving through the rooms with a dustcloth, doing laundry, ironing the sheets, arranging Ava's wardrobe, picking up the groceries, walking the dogs. Her English was limited, so except for wishing each other
buenos días,
we didn't communicate much, though the first time we met she had shown me a photograph of Carmen, taken at her
quinceañera
. “This girl is U.S. citizen,” Estella said with pride. “Not just beautiful. Smart, too.”

I studied the photograph. It showed a lovely girl with dark brown skin and black eyes and a lively, intelligent face.

“My girl's in college now,” she told me. “You got kids?”

Sometimes it was easier saying no than explaining, but to Estella—a Guatemalan woman, living illegally in the U.S., who probably knew something about mothers living away from their children—I nodded.

“He lives with his father.”

Estella's English was limited, but she shook her head when she heard this and put her hand to her chest. “Hard,” she said. “My Carmen, she is my heart.”

In past years, when she was younger, Carmen had come to clean at Folger Lane alongside her mother, though Ava explained to me that it felt awkward having Carmen clean for them when Cooper was home. Carmen and Cooper were exactly the same age—born one month apart—and when they were very young, they'd played together in the pool or the game room. As he'd grown into his teenage years it had made Cooper uncomfortable seeing Carmen iron his clothes or vacuum his room, so Ava had decided it was best if Carmen didn't come around anymore.

“To be honest, I think Carmen had a little crush on Coop,” Ava told me. “She was always sweet on him, but what could he do? He didn't want to hurt her feelings. And then—let's just say we started having problems with her.”

Now Cooper was hardly ever home anymore, of course, having headed back East for business school, and thanks to Ava, Carmen had a job as a nanny for another family in the neighborhood. She had recently begun attending community college part time and was doing well there, I gathered. In another year she would transfer to a four-year school. That was the dream, anyway.

One day, when the family whose children she cared for was away, Carmen had brought her mother to work in their beat-up Toyota and set herself up in the laundry room with her books.

“
Mija
will get a good education,” Estella told me. “Someday, she's a doctor. You see.”

I looked in Carmen's direction—recognized the shirt she was wearing as one of Ava's that she had put in the discard pile the week before, a little tight around the bust. Carmen had a ripe, full body. She was beautiful.

I hadn't actually spoken with Carmen before, though I'd seen her once or twice, picking up her mother. Now she looked up from her textbook—something thick and dense like organic chemistry.

“My mom thinks I'm going to find the cure for cancer or something,” Carmen said. “Or get a full scholarship to Stanford, at least. That's how it is with mothers, right? They all think their child is the most brilliant, perfect person.”

Not necessarily, I might have told her, thinking of my own mother. But in Carmen's case, Estella's praise of her daughter didn't seem so extravagant. I had heard how she studied—eight hours straight, some nights, Estella said, after she came home from her nanny job. Weekends she attended classes.

She was a striking young woman, but there was more to the look of her than that long black shiny hair and tawny skin. She had a brightness and focus in her eyes as she bent over her books, a look of fierce intensity you didn't often see among the children who'd grown up on Folger Lane, for whom a college education was never a question.

“One day, my daughter will have a house,” Estella said. “Not so big like this one. But nice.”

“With a room for you, Mama,” Carmen said. “And you won't even have to do the ironing.”

“We find her a nice boy,” Estella said. “Hard worker. Good husband. Good man.”

“Suppose I don't want a good man?” Carmen said. “What if I want a bad one?” She laughed. Estella didn't.