Ada Unraveled (33 page)

Unfortunately, John’s small family history
said nothing about Luke’s marriage to Ada and the birth of
Eddie—the only grandchild born to Victoria and Jake. Perhaps John
thought Eddie was dead too.

So I hadn’t answered the other two questions
I’d walked in with either, namely who fathered Eddie and a clearer
picture of Ada’s father and sister, Gordon and Hazel.

But I had taken too long. Rush hour, it
seemed, was a non-stop event now in Southern California. Or should
I say stop-stop. As I finally approached the turnoff from I-5, it
was after five. To pass the time of what I knew would be a long,
grueling drive I began reviewing what I’d learned today, first from
an angry Andrea, then from an inexplicably terrified Ruth, and now
from an irrationally remorseful John.

I turned my car to the east. At least the
traffic on highway 76 was moving fairly well. Sudden movement
behind me made me glance up in my rearview mirror. I froze, almost
releasing the wheel of the car, as terror swiftly flowed from my
gut to my brain.

Moving quickly from two lanes over was a
white pickup truck with a bulbar on the front.

The same bulbar
that had chased me
across half the Cleveland Mountains only a week ago.

It was gaining fast, and in the three
seconds it took for all this to happen I know I saw who it was. I
know I tried to escape the driver’s rage.

I know the bulbar was the last thing I saw
before the earth began spinning wildly on its axis, turning me up,
turning me down, twisting me like a sideways tornado.

I know it was noisy because all car
accidents are noisy. I know it was terrifying, because all car
accidents are terrifying.

I know I survived, because I’m telling you
this now.

I know…but…I don’t.

Monday-Thursday, October 12-16

I woke in a hospital bed. I’d been
transformed into a human neck made of shattered glass encased in
naked nerve endings. Someone was screaming.

The next time I rose from the darkness I
stayed long enough to cry for pain killers.

The third time--or maybe the
fourth--Matthew’s worried brow filled my vision. Two of our sons
were next to him. They were fidgety, making stupid happy noises. I
tried to move my hand to scratch at something liquid tickling my
hairline, but my hand appeared to be tied down.

I left again.

Returned again.

Left.

Three days of this in and out passed before
the doctors would allow Matt to bring me home. I vaguely remember a
uniformed officer at my bedside, asking me what I recall of the
accident.
Nothing
, I croaked. Nothing at all.

The trip in the new rental van, a Lincoln
Gas Guzzler XL—replacement for my beloved station wagon--was from
hell to hell. I couldn’t stop the tears from making their way to
the soft leather seat beneath me. The ceiling looked like velvet.
The ride was really smooth, quiet. I wondered about Matt buying a
car without me. I drifted in and out of sleep.

And in and out of luxury vehicle to modest
home. I still couldn’t find my arms.

Matt’s face was a patchwork of fear, worry
and weird smiles.

Was I paralyzed?

Of course not. Why would they just send me
home?

On the fourth day I decided I needed to find
out if I was really paralyzed or just stoned on pain pills. Matthew
was hanging about, worry weighting him down like a lead cloak.

“What day is it?” I think I asked.

“I’m right here. I’m not leaving you. You’ll
be fine,” he breathed, rushing to my side. He jostled the bed which
made me cry out.

“Oh! I’m sorry hon.” He was standing again,
looking as if he wanted to know if it was his turn to cry.

“What day is it?” I tried once more. “Am I
in the hospital?”

“No, you’re home. Take it easy.”

Okay, maybe I was paralyzed. He lifted a
glass of water with a bent straw and shoved the fool thing in my
mouth right behind a pill. I sucked in the cool water and left once
more.

Sometime Wednesday the phone rang. It was a
call from my bladder telling me it was full. I tried to answer, but
it went to the message machine in our office.

“Rachel? Hi hon, are you there? We’re so
worried about you.” Hannah’s chocolate voice. I smiled and decided
I might live after all.

I croaked, “Matt?” But there was no answer
and I had to empty my bladder now. The good news was my arms
worked. I felt around my head and discovered I was wearing some
kind of neck brace. So I rolled over on my side and promptly fell
on the floor and screamed again. This was getting to be a
habit.

“Rachel! I’m right here. I just had to
pee.”

Through my tears and moans I said, “Me
too.”

Poor Matt. It took him ten minutes to get me
back on the bed and cleaned up.

A little while later the phone rang again. I
listened to the message from a room away, a solitary “Rachel?” I
wasn’t sure but I thought it was Elixchel sighing on the other end
of the line. That’s all she left. Just my name and the sigh.

Late Wednesday afternoon the phone rang
again. This time it was Gerry, and she spoke to Matt for several
minutes. I heard him laugh lightly. I fell asleep again before
hearing what she’d said that was so funny, but her happy face
filled my mind with yet another reason to live.

I was experiencing a kaleidoscopic
shattering of space and time. I wasn’t sure if the phone was
ringing now or if the phone was ringing then.

I dreamed of Ruth, the biblical Ruth,
and…Paul, yes that was his name. The biblical Paul of Tarsus, who
drove a Taurus, wrote all those letters. Paul of the blue eyes and
race cars.

No. That was Paul Newman. I woke staring
into Matt’s blue eyes. I smiled dreamily.

“Ruth says Paul needs her,” I muttered, then
slid away again into dreamland.

Wednesday evening Elixchel called a second
time. Matt came and told me she called to say she couldn’t speak
Mayan. I think I giggled, and asked Matt why she would say such a
thing. He hung over me with furrowed brow, like Snoopy hanging off
his dog house.

“She says you called and asked her,
something about Ada’s quilt. She said she’s using Mayan embroidery
on a quilt she’s preparing for the January bee. That’s her bee, I
guess. I don’t think you should continue with this group.”

He slipped that last statement in there as
if he was hoping I wouldn’t notice it. Maybe to implant my brain
with the thought, like a subliminal advertisement
. Leave the bee
group; bee group no good
. I waited for him to say more but
couldn’t seem to focus my eyes long enough to keep watching him, so
I closed them.

He sighed. “She said there’s some professor
from Cal State San Marcos who has been helping her. Maybe he can
help you. You know Rachel, I’m worried about you. Maybe they
released you too soon.”

“Tell her it was snakeheads, not Mayan.”
With eyes closed and mouth stuffed with cotton.

The front doorbell rang, and Matt started.
He said, “Who the hell could that be at this hour?” He left the
room rubbing the several days’ growth on his face.

Moments later I heard fighting…no, I heard
someone arguing with Matt in a thick…Ukrainian accent. A nurse’s
uniform swooped angrily by me and went into our master bathroom.
Matt of-the-wrinkled-brow stood watching her from the bedroom
doorway as she made rifling noises in our medicine cabinet, the
whole while angrily muttering--something about how she was going to
report my doctors to the AMA for over-medicating me.

“Oxycontin! Vot the devil are they givink
her Oxycontin for? That’s an opioid!” The toilet flushed. And
flushed again. She swooped angrily back, almost bowling Matt over
on her way out the door. Not an easy task. Matt’s a big guy. Gloria
was a little woman.

“She can have an aspirin four times a day,
max, and that’s all. Do you hear me? Cold turkey!” I thought I
heard her cry as she disappeared down the hall.

Now I was worried. Did she just flush my
pain pills?

I slept again, until eleven at night. And
then I was through sleeping, probably forever. Nurse Gloria
Pusto-whatever had stolen all my pain pills!

The shattered-glass neck was back with a
vengeance. I threw up the soup Matt tried to feed me. I begged him
to give me a bottle of aspirin. The whole bottle. He stood just out
of reach and waited. I cried in frustration. I cried in fear. His
face mirrored my emotions.

Another definition of love.

Friday, October 17.

Somewhere in the wee hours of the fifth day
I finally slept, this time a normal sleep, a healing sleep. Matt
lay next to me, keeping stone still.

By Friday noon I was sitting up, alternately
cursing out Nurse Gloria P and thanking God that she’d come and
released me from the stuporous haze. My neck still yelled at me
whenever I tried to change positions. But now it was a normal
pain—if you can call feeling like your vertebrae have been replaced
with ground glass normal—and I had a more-or-less clear head
again.

Friday afternoon the phone rang again. This
call was for Matt, and then he left, off to deal with another
failed California marriage. We were up to at least two a week now.
It was an epidemic.

After he left I plotted and planned how I
would roll my legs over the side of the bed and
carefully
raise myself into an upright position. If I didn’t move too
quickly, I reasoned, I’d be okay. I walked slowly and carefully
into Ada’s bedroom and found her diary—the one that was purloined
during our search of her house.

Then back to bed, keeping my neck still and
rigid. A sense of urgency caused me to open the diary all the way
to the back. I needed to know how far into her life the book would
take her—and me. I stared in astonishment at the final words.

“
Hazel! Mark is dead! Mark is dead! Mark
is dead!

Please come get him. Please find him and
care for him. He is with you now.

My life is over.

Your loving sister, Ada.”

My heart was pounding. This could well be
the last time Ada recorded her life. Ada the young girl was
gone.

I flipped backward from this final entry,
only skim-reading, until I noticed a different handwriting in
several places throughout the diary, scrawled in blue printing
along the sides of the pages. I wondered if it was Eddie’s.

Realizing it would give me an insight into
this man’s thinking, I began reading them.

“
He killed Mark…just like he killed my
mother.”

“
Luke should have stayed in
Donovan.”

“
Luke can’t be my father! I’m not a
beast!”

And finally,
“I need to know that Luke is
not my father. Mark was my real father.”

But Eddie didn’t point to evidence, just to
his need not to be the child of Luke. I checked several pages of
the book near the added notations, and nowhere could I find Ada
saying the father of her child was Mark.

Near the middle of the small diary I found a
picture of Ada when she was very young, glued onto an empty page.
Next to the picture, again running vertically down the edge were
the added words,
“My mother Ada was beautiful before Luke made
her his drunken whore.”

I needed to get the diary to Detective Tom
Beardsley immediately. A more thorough read of the diary might
reveal evidentiary value.

Again the phone wakened me. I’d been
napping, the little diary lying on my chest like a small weight of
guilt. I heard Matt answer, and then he appeared in our bedroom
doorway.

“That was the Oceanside police again. They
want to know if your memory of the accident has returned. Now that
you’re off the hard drugs.”

I stared at him, thinking.

“No. It’s a blank.”

He stood stock still. He had something to
say, something he didn’t want to say. I waited. Finally he
began.

“You and the red wagon did four freeway
cartwheels.”

I smiled. He was trying to be funny. “Where
is it?”

He smiled back. “In the morgue.”

“Shame. I loved that car.”

“This is turning out to be an expensive
hobby of yours, quilting.”

I tried to remember the accident again. But
I couldn’t.

“Were there witnesses?”

“Yes.”

“And?”

He took a deep breath and said, “I had Will
following you.”

A sudden anger filled me. “What?”

“I had Will watching after you.”

“Since when?”
It was a building
wave.

“The day after we married. I knew I couldn’t
keep you without help and I couldn’t find a pumpkin so….”

“Matt! When did you put Will on me as a
tail?” I was yelling.

Snatches and bits seeped forward from the
back of my mind.

“You had Will following me! Like one of your
deadbeats, like…like a common…criminal!”

Where was this coming from?

I suddenly realized it was the pills, the
Oxycontin, still messing with my mind. I consciously relaxed my
body. Breathed in. Breathed out.

I said more gently, “He was in the library,
wasn’t he? In Carlsbad.”

“Yes.”

“I glimpsed some movement out of the corner
of my eye. But I never saw him. You can tell him for me I think
he’s amazing. So he saw the accident?”

“He saw a white truck with a bulbar on the
front of it. He didn’t catch a clear view of the driver. It all
happened too fast.”

I looked at him, smiled meekly. He smiled
back, nervously.