Siren Queen(73)

“Put up with me for a while,” I murmured. “I’ll take care of you…”

“I might stay longer than that if you ask me nice,” Tara said as she opened the door and slid into the passenger seat. I stared at her. My brain told me she was a cut-out from some other life placed in whatever life I was in now. I could only marvel at how little sense she made here.

“You can’t be here,” I started, and she shrugged.

“Of course I can. I left Jacko with a dozen script changes, all of the ones he wanted and a few that he hasn’t come up with yet. He only needs me when he thinks of it, and if I’m not showing my mug around, it might be a while before he thinks of it.”

She leveled a steady look at me.

“You, he’s going to miss. What are you doing?”

“He can miss me all he likes,” I retorted. “I’m not staying today.”

“All right,” she said, settling into the passenger seat and passing her hat to the back. “Where are we going, then?”

I almost told her to get out of the car. I didn’t need her there, but I realized uneasily I did want her. Was that enough?

“To my place first. I need to call my mother. And then up to San Francisco.”

In those days, it was easily seven hours between Los Angeles and San Francisco. If all went well for us, it might be ten by the time we got there, and even if we turned around immediately, the odds were against us driving all the way back before Jacko opened another day of shooting.

Of course I cared. For the first time, though, I didn’t care enough.





IX


When I drove north to San Francisco in a dead man’s car, the Pacific Coast Road was California’s dream turned flesh, the way Illinois dreamed of Chicago. There was finally a way to race along the coast from Los Angeles to San Francisco, and I guided the Bentley up the ramp onto the hot ribbon of black.

I don’t remember very much of the ride up. I drove fast as the sun set into the ocean on my left hand and the dark mountains rose up on my right. Tara counted the cars that kept pace with us at first, but as they dropped off in Santa Barbara and Santa Maria, she grew silent. She had hitched most of the way between Chicago and Los Angeles, and she told me about some of it now, getting picked up by a man who insisted she pray through most of Arkansas and the trucker who stopped in the deep desert to howl at the moon.

The sun set, and the sky turned towards indigo. We were out from under the hand of the studio. Their influence wore off sooner than I would have thought, and the glamour that sat like a fug of cigarette smoke over the city was blown away by the winds from the ocean. I took a breath of surprise.

Tara was content to let me drive, but she insisted on deciding when and where we stopped. We relieved ourselves in wooded copses by the road, and when we needed food, she stayed in the car, slouched down until I came back.

“I don’t even know which bathrooms you should use,” she said as we came on one small town just after sunset.

“Why, the white bathrooms, of course,” I said, shocked it was even a question. “At least … I always have.”

She nodded uncertainly, and it occurred to me that things would be very different outside of Los Angeles. I decided to evade the question altogether, and when we could, we simply kept driving.

Soon after it hit full dark, we could both see on either side of the road the ghosts of the prison gangs that had built the freeway, moving silently and carting gravel and buckets of tar. Their eyes burned through the darkness, and I checked the Bentley’s gas gauge over and over again. We weren’t the ones that had forced them to build the road, but I had a feeling that they wouldn’t be too particular about their hunger if we were to stop so close to their uneasy rest.

“The ghosts of Chicago are a lot like this,” Tara said softly. “They walk in flame, and if they put their hands on you, they won’t let go.”

The ghosts of Los Angeles were usually painted in silver, and I felt very lucky.

Once or twice, the Bentley wanted to pull off the road. The forests of Big Sur called to it, and I wondered what it would become if I let it loose there to wander in the live oak and the Douglas fir. The thought was not a comforting one, but the car was loyal to Harry. It pulled at my hand slightly when the forests were their thickest, but otherwise it drove smoothly.

I was exhausted by the time San Francisco rose up around us. The worn little towns appeared, and then they flowed together and grew higher until we were surrounded. That late at night, the Bentley could roll freely down the streets, but we were hardly alone. Next to me Tara stared out the window, eyes bright and sharp. When she saw the Golden Gate Bridge next year, she would be lost and San Francisco would be her home. Even now, though, she could sense something about the place simply made sense to her in a way that Los Angeles never would.

We pulled over to puzzle at the map that my mother had handed to me. She admonished me to take good care of it, or at least to make a copy to bring back to her. She had never been out of Los Angeles, but having directions that would take her to her youngest daughter comforted her. As we sorted out the streets and made sure that the bay was on the right side, I ran my fingers along the velvet-soft creases that divided Grant Avenue and Stockton Street. My mother must have touched the paper often, wearing away the loose graphite from the lines. Did she have any token of me she touched the same way? Did she even need one when I was just on Rexford Avenue? I hadn’t come to Hungarian Hill in more than two years.