Still Lives(81)

I lie on the hospital bed, motionless, under the weight of my own swollen flesh. I fell. I lived. I am nothing like Kim.

For the first time, a dark idea spreads in my mind: What if Kim didn’t choose this subject? What if it found her because she sensed, deep down, that she was about to die? She might have felt it somehow, when she caked her blond hair in fake blood, and painted her own slumped body, face down, the red gore pouring out of her. Nicole Brown Simpson was the first painting she made in the series. It took a year, according to Kim, until she “knew what to do with all the blood.” She shaped a tree with it, upside down, bearing its tiny fruit. A life-bringing image in the midst of a slaughter. Meaning in the darkest horror of human nature.

Did she believe in that herself? We’ll never know.

But I think it’s what she wanted us to see.





SUNDAY





29

My mother, Lillian, perches in the vinyl chair by my bedside from eight in the morning until seven at night, leaving tactfully and resentfully when the nurses come to change my dressing. She brings her yarn and needles, a British mystery novel, and ham sandwiches that she made in my kitchen; she brings her practical clipped-back blond hair, the graceful way her neck arches when she knits, and the little hisses she makes when she drops a stitch.

Against the backdrop of this busy urban hospital, my mother looks pale, lovely, and slightly stiff, as if she’s been washed on the delicate cycle and gently flattened to dry. She broadcasts a friendly voice at the nurses, but her eyes are glinty and watchful until all medical personnel leave the room. She doesn’t trust them. When she knows they’re gone, a rush of tenderness softens her features and she takes my hand and holds it tight.

I’m grateful for the tenderness. It keeps me from thinking about Hendricks or Evie or the dreams of falling that wake me every night for the last four nights here. My mother refuses to discuss the case or what happened to me in the bower.

“You need to move on so you can heal,” she says.

So instead of being pushed into a pit by a murderer, it’s as if I’ve contracted some terrible disease that has swollen my midsection and made me too dizzy to walk. Once I get over this illness, I will go back to being the Maggie she knew, the good daughter, instead of the clumsy, wannabe reporter who helped get a girl killed, traveled the world, and then moved far away.

“We could fix up the old homestead for you, if you want your own place,” she says. “Your father’s dying for a new project.”

My mother has decided that I’m coming home with her. I’m going on disability leave from the Rocque, and bit by bit, she is packing up my bungalow. I want to ask her if she found any evidence, something Evie planted to frame me, but I can’t. It now sounds crazy, even to me.

“Don’t throw away anything without asking me,” I tell her instead.

“Your furniture’s not worth keeping,” my mother says.

“I mean small things, Mom.”

“Small things add up,” she says.

“Just in case, ask me.”

But she doesn’t ask. Instead, we talk about boxes, temporary storage until I decide what’s next.

What we both don’t utter aloud: I might not come back to Los Angeles at all.


There is, of course, one formidable opponent to this plan. My mother, recognizing a sophisticated adversary when she meets one, won’t budge from her chair whenever Yegina comes.

“Oh I’ll just knit over here in the corner while you chat,” she says.

So we can’t talk about real stuff—not about Don or Bas or the case—but Yegina, not to be outflanked, brings a plethora of temptations to stay: dark chocolate laced with raspberry; honeybush tea; wrapped and beribboned macaroons from an overpriced bakery. The more exotic the edible, the more convinced Yegina is that it will heal me. She thinks people in hospitals suffer from the lack of sensory stimulation, so she’s also made me CD mixes, pasted reproductions of Kahlo and Matta paintings up on my walls, and scattered lemongrass sachets in my drawers.

“It’s so international in here,” my mother marvels, and pats my hand.

Today the doctors have come by with news about my discharge—a few more tests and I can go.

I ask my mother if she minds returning to the apartment to finish packing. “The sooner we’re done, the sooner we can get home,” I say.

She brightens at the word home, but inside I feel the discernible prick of a lie. I picture Vermont in May, mud season giving way to crocuses and the delicate gold-green that explodes all over the woods. It’s still mine, but it’s also very far away.

“I’ll go for a couple of hours,” my mother says. She stands and regards me. “You’re looking better now.” She puts both hands to both her cheeks, and, for a moment, her resolutely cheerful manner slips. “I didn’t even recognize you when I first came,” she admits in a quavering voice.

“Oh, Mom.”

I let her hug me too tight. She leaves her knitting lumped on the chair, needles poking up, as if to prevent anyone else from occupying it.

As soon as she’s gone, I call Yegina.

“Just bring yourself,” I say. “And hurry.”

I’m so relieved to finally have time alone with Yegina that it surprises me when she walks in the room and I don’t know what to say. There she is, with her beautiful, alert face, laden with bags under her arms, my friend and rescuer. My memory flashes to the open door at her house, the anger in her eyes, Bas behind her on the couch—and then to Don, tumbling from his bike. I want to thank her with my whole heart, I want to beg her forgiveness, or to cry, or just to pretend nothing happened, but not knowing where to begin with her is terrible. It paralyzes me.