Away for the Weekend (21 page)

The man in the work pants (who lives in a very expensive house with a really terrific view) is an example of what Remedios means when she says it’s easier to build a swimming pool than capture bliss. Drifting down a river on a raft is something this man always dreamed of doing when he was young. Just throwing some things in a bag and going wherever the current took him. Being free in the moment, with no ambitions and no plans; no things he felt he had to be or do. Indeed, it’s something he often dreams of doing now. But now, of course, his life is full of ambition, plans and things he has to do. Responsibilities. Expectations. He sits in his beautiful living room or on his shaded deck, gazing out on the terrific view, but it doesn’t make him happy. He wants to hear crickets and woodpeckers calling; the splash of fish jumping; the crackle and rustle of deer along the shore. He wants to be that boy again, to get back his dreams. And, as he comes around the next bend, he is imagining dragonflies grazing the water; leaves rattling; the sighing of trees. Which is why he doesn’t see Gabriela and Delila as he passes.

And they don’t see him because they are arguing about whether or not they’re going the right way. Except that they both know it should be in the sky, they can’t agree where the sun should be. Over there? Over here? Over there? They remember different landmarks, when they remember any landmarks at all. Gabriela would bet her favourite boots that they passed that lime-green house with Roman blinds on the way up; Delila would wager her favourite books that they didn’t.

“I hope you speak some Spanish,” grunts Delila as they round another twist in the road. “Then you’ll be able to get a job as a cleaner or something when we never find our way out of this place.”

“It’s not like we’re lost in the Amazon jungle,” Gabriela snaps back. “I mean, God, Del… The rate you’re going, you could probably make the Olympics worrying team.”

“Only since I met—” A sudden agonized scream from behind them cuts Delila short. “What the hell was that?” She looks around. “Do they have wild boar up here?”

But although there are wolves and coyotes in the Hollywood hills, there are no wild boars as yet. The agonized scream came from the jogger they don’t remember passing, whom they find lying on the ground, breathing heavily and groaning.

“Are you all right?” they call as they hurry over to him. And, because he has his eyes closed and doesn’t respond, shout again, “Sir! Sir! Are you all right?”

He should have known something like this would happen. Die if you don’t exercise; die if you do. He’s afraid to move. Everybody knows that the people in this neighbourhood don’t walk anywhere unless you count to and from the car. And most of them run first thing in the morning or on machines. So if he can’t walk, then he may be here for hours before someone finds him. Finds him, or runs over him. But then, feeling them more than hearing them, he realizes that he’s already been found, and opens his eyes expecting to see someone’s gardener or housekeeper.

Two teenage girls stand over him, looking vaguely concerned. He doesn’t really like teenagers. He doesn’t really like most people, but teenagers he finds especially depressing. At an age when they should be wild and irreverent and kicking up dust, they worry instead about what they’re wearing and what people think of them.
Ooh, you have the wrong kind of shoes … the wrong jeans … the wrong nose …
They’re always plugged into something, like lamps. Though these girls, amazingly enough, don’t seem to be attached to anything: no phones, no iPods, no iPads. They can’t come from around here, where the girls are all wannabe stars or spoiled princesses. Indeed, from the look of them – sweaty, slightly dishevelled, strangers to beauty parlours and hairdressers; the one dressed for strolling through an Eastern market, the other for an English boarding school in the fifties – they might come from another world entirely. Not that this makes him feel any more kindly towards them.

“I’m all right.” He pulls off the headset. “I just slipped.”

“We’ll help you up.” Hands reach towards him.

He bats them away. “I’m all right, I tell you. Just got a little winded.” He doesn’t like being ignored, but he doesn’t like people fussing over him, either.

The large, flamboyant girl says, “You always have that green tinge to your skin?”

The skinny, flat-looking girl says, “You sure you’re OK?”

“Yes, I always have a green tinge to my skin. And of course I’m OK. I didn’t land on my head.” But when he tries to stand the pain knocks the breath right out of him. “My ankle—” he gasps. “I must have sprained it…”

Gabriela kneels down beside him. “It’s swelling fast.”

He winces as the accidental movement of his foot causes another jolt of pain. “I’m not blind. I can see that.”

“You’re not exactly Prince Charming, either,” says Delila, as she kneels on his other side. “We’re only trying to help you, you know.”

He does know that; he just wishes he didn’t need any help. “I’m sorry. I’m just—” He’s never in a very good mood lately. He holds out a hand. “I’m Joe.”

“Ga— Beth.”

“Delila.” She starts untying his laces. “It doesn’t look broken.” Delila has three male cousins who live next door to her grandparents and is, therefore, something of an expert on limb injuries. “It probably is just a sprain. But we should get this sneaker off.”

“It could be a fracture.” Gabriela and her friends have sustained any number of clothing-induced injuries, so she is something of an expert, too. She forages through her bag and pulls out the scarf Beth carries in the event of sudden drafts or dust storms. “We can bandage it with this. But you’d better not try to walk on it.”

“No fear of that.” His smile comes out more as a grimace. “I couldn’t walk on it if I wanted to.” He looks from one to the other. “I left my phone at home, but maybe if one of you could call my housekeeper—”

“My phone’s kaput,” explains Delila. “And Beth left hers at the hotel.”

Gabriela smiles as if she’s used to life without a cell phone. “How far away do you live? We can help you get there.”

“Just a couple of blocks, but I don’t think two young—”

Gabriela waves this away, too. “It’s not a big deal. I’ve done this dozens of times. Really. It’s all about balance.”

“Besides,” says Delila, “you’re not that much taller than I am. And my granddad, Johnson? He sells old bottles. I’m used to lugging heavy things around.”

“We had to do this one time when my friend Hedda sprained her ankle because she got her heel caught in a crack in the sidewalk,” Gabriela informs him as she and Delila position themselves on either side of Joe. “It was really thin? The heel, I mean. It just wedged itself in. She went down like a bowling pin. You should’ve seen it. It was worse than yours. It looked like she was morphing into an elephant.”

“One … two … three…” counts Delila, and they heave him to his feet.

“You see?” says Gabriela. “And you’re not crying the way Hedda was. It makes it a lot easier.”

“Give me a few minutes,” he grunts. “I may be crying by the time we get to my house.”

He lives close by compared to, say, Las Vegas, but it’s still a good distance to be hauling a grown man, especially quite a large one, under the afternoon sun. Free to talk about things other than books, paintings and foreign films, Gabriela and Delila tell him what they’re doing in LA and keep up a constant stream of chatter to try to distract him from the pain. Delila talks about Brooklyn and her grandparents and recites a poem she wrote about the New York subway called
World Soup with Music
. Gabriela talks about her unfair and largely undeserved problems with Professor Gryck and the gruesomeness of the morning and how they were nearly arrested.

By the time they get to Joe’s house, they’re all laughing.

His housekeeper is out. He forgot she was going to the market.

“Damn woman,” says Joe. “When you don’t need her, she’s always underfoot; when you do, she’s miles away.”

They drop him on the couch, and Delila props up the bad leg with pillows while Gabriela goes to the kitchen for ice. She comes back with a bag of frozen peas.

“This is what we used on Hedda,” she tells him, not mentioning that what the hospital used on Hedda was traction. “And it really works. Plus you don’t have ice melting all over and you can just stick it back in the freezer and have it for supper.”

He leans against the cushions with a sigh of relief. “Today, this really is the City of Angels. I can’t thank you two enough.” He manages to smile without wincing. “My saviours.”

Gabriela adjusts the bag of peas. “The only thanks we want is directions back to Sunset. You know, before the Gryck calls out the National Guard.”

“The short cut would be good,” adds Delila.

“I’d take you myself if I could drive. Explain to your professor that you’re so late because you were being good Samaritans.”

“I don’t know why,” says Delila, “but I don’t think the Gryck’s really going to care.”

“You should see the shoes she wears,” says Gabriela. “They’re the shoes of a person with very little flexibility.”

“And what about my shoes?” Joe waggles his good foot. “What do they say about me?”

Gabriela gazes at his feet for a few seconds, considering. “They say you’re younger than you look.”

The shortcut, as it turns out, is to leave by the back door and go straight down through the jogger’s property, where they’ll be able to slip out through the bordering shrubs.

On the hill that overlooks Joe’s home is a mansion that was built to look like an old Spanish mission, complete with a bell tower – which, in fact, has never housed a bell but is a bedroom. The hacienda, as it is known in the neighbourhood, belongs to a very famous director who at the moment is in France. It’s from the window of the bell tower that Remedios has been watching Gabriela and Delila. She saw them stride up the road in the wrong direction. She saw them pass the jogger. She most certainly saw him stumble and fall. She saw them go to his aid. And now she sees Gabriela and Delila making their way past the swimming pool and the gardens and the koi pond. But she turns away before they emerge onto the road, straight into the arms of the waiting police – though she does allow herself a very small smile.

Beth, Gabriela and the LAPD

Interestingly
enough, Gabriela and Delila aren’t the only ones having an unexpected meeting with members of the Los Angeles Police Department this afternoon.

“So let me get this straight.” Officer Wynlot looks from his notebook to Beth. “You and your friend got on the bus because you saw some guy in a red sports car.”

“The stalker,” says Beth. “He’s been following us all morning. He even got onto the property of the Madagascar studio and set off the alarms.”

“In his car?” Officer Medina is Officer Wynlot’s partner.

Beth shakes her head. “No, he wasn’t in the car then. He was on foot. He was in the car when we were waiting for a cab. That’s why I got on the bus.”

Officer Wynlot nods, almost as though this is making more sense to him than anything else he’s heard in the last half hour since they stopped the runaway bus. “Right. Because you thought he was following you.”

“I didn’t
think
he was following us.” Not only is Beth not blushing, she seems to have forgotten how to stammer and whisper as well. “He
was
following us. He was everywhere we went at Sunset Plaza.”

“In his car?” asks Officer Medina.

“Of course not,” snaps Beth. Among the many fears Beth seems to be overcoming this weekend is her fear of figures of authority. “On foot.”

“Wait a minute.” Officer Wynlot is looking at his notes again. “You said this guy was on the bus? When did he get on the bus?”

“I don’t know. I didn’t see him until the snake got loose. He must’ve changed his clothes.”

“He changed his clothes?” Many people think that Officer Medina has a lovely, melt-your-heart smile, but Beth is not one of those people. “First you see him in his car, so you get on the bus. And then he somehow ditches the car, changes his clothes and gets on a couple of stops after you?”

“I don’t know how he did it,” says Beth, “but he was definitely on the bus.”

Officer Medina moves his mouth as though he’s impersonating a fish. “Well, he wasn’t on it when we searched it.” This is an accusation, not a statement. “And we talked to every passenger that came off your bus and there was no one like the guy you described.”

Officer Wynlot sighs. “What about you?” He turns to Lucinda. “Did you see this ‘weird’ guy on the bus?”

“Well…” Slowly and reluctantly, Lucinda shakes her head. “No, I didn’t see him on the bus. But—”

“Now that’s kind of interesting.” Officer Wynlot looks thoughtful as well as interested. “Because Miss Menz here says that he was sitting next to the tattooed man, but the tattooed man didn’t see this guy either. He says nobody was sitting next to him. How do you figure that?”

“I didn’t see him because I was busy trying to get my phone to work.”

“Of course. So that explains why the guy sitting next to him didn’t see him either.” He taps his pencil against his notebook. “But you saw him when you were shopping?”

“Well…” Lucinda’s eyes dart towards Beth. “Not exactly.”

Officer Medina takes his turn to sigh. “Not exactly ‘yes’ or not exactly ‘no’?”

“Well…”

“And when he broke into the back yard of the studio?” persists Officer Wynlot. “You must’ve seen him then.”

“Well…” Lucinda shrugs. “I was looking at something else then.”

“I thought he set off the alarms.”

She shifts from one foot to the other. “Well … they did go off…”

“So what you’re saying,” recaps Officer Wynlot, “is that you never saw this man who your friend says was following you around all day.”

Lucinda does some more foot shifting. “Well…”

“What the heck is going on here?” Shaking his head, Officer Medina directs this question to his partner. “Are we in the Twilight Zone or something? The bus driver went in the wrong direction on a route that doesn’t exist, but he never noticed. And nobody on the bus noticed either. They just rolled along like they were on their way home.” He turns his attention to Beth. “And now you’re reporting a stalker that seemingly can be in two places at once, change clothes in a matter of minutes, and who’s invisible to everyone but you.”