Laura Lamont's Life In Pictures (32 page)

The morning had been hard; Laura’d woken from another dream about Irving, the third night in a row. In it, he’d been sitting in the corner of the room, just watching her sleep. Some nights he was smoking, some nights just leaning forward, his hands woven together under his chin. In the dreams she slept on, unaware of Irving’s presence, and so when she woke up, her first thought was to check the chair to see if he was still there. He never was.

Laura had taken four of the blue pills instead of her usual two, and the outside edges of her body were already feeling fuzzy and soft. She put one foot in the shallow end of the pool and found that the water was only a little bit cold, and nicely bracing. Once her whole body was in, she wouldn’t even notice. Laura remembered that from summers in Lake Michigan—the water was cold only when you got out and your wet skin met the air. As long as you stayed in the water, you weren’t cold at all. She stepped her other foot in and walked a few feet farther, until the water was over her knees, and then up to her hips. There was barely a breeze, but the tops of her thighs were prickly with goose bumps as the water moved back and forth.

The idea was not to drown. Laura loved her children, and Junior in particular was so young. She thought of the heartbreak she’d felt at her own father’s death—no, Laura would not do that to Junior, not until she had no other choice. But she couldn’t rightly say that the thought of drowning hadn’t occurred to her, either. If Gordon knew about what she’d done with Harry Ryman, then who else knew too? Maybe Clara was right, and she’d been that kind of girl all along. Laura wanted to let the water come in through the windows and doors and through her mouth and nose and ears until there was no oxygen left, only water. She walked farther into the pool, until she
was on her tiptoes. The water closed around her neck, all the way up to her chin. She opened and closed her mouth like a fish, moving the water in and out, in and out. It was Irving’s idea to get a house with a pool. Laura loved bodies of water as they were found in the wild: lakes, rivers, oceans. A swimming pool said something else:
We can afford to bring the water to us
. And so they did, trucking out mounds of dirt and rocks and filling the hole with gallons of treated water. Though Laura wasn’t sure what they could afford anymore. Was it to make Clara and Florence love him more? They’d never had any other choice, or known any other father. Laura wasn’t sure whether Clara remembered having Gordon around—she hoped not. His toothless smile came to her some nights, when she couldn’t sleep. She would turn over and face the empty side of the bed, Irving’s side, and there Gordon would be, his yellow eyes open and his gaping mouth pulled into a wet, sickening smile. In her dreams, Gordon was always laughing at her. It was he who drove Irving away, who had made him sick—the complication of her life before him. Laura thought she was crying but couldn’t tell—her entire face was already wet. Had it started to rain? It rained so infrequently in Los Angeles that the girls acted as if the rain were made of bleach, and ran for cover when it started to fall. They knew no other way, which was Laura’s fault, just like everything else. Junior’s softness. His father’s death. Gordon’s addictions. Each one seemed like something that Laura could have prevented, if she’d been trying harder. She swallowed a mouthful of water and pushed herself forward into the deep end.

Laura opened her eyes underwater, which she had always liked to do. Hildy had been afraid to, complained that her eyes stung, but Laura—
Elsa
—had always enjoyed it. The bottom and sides of the pool were painted blue, as if another color would have made the water seem less inviting—better to pretend they were in the ocean, with the sky reflected and an entire world hidden beneath the surface. A palm
leaf from next door had slunk all the way down to the drain, and Laura thought about diving down to retrieve it, but didn’t. If she were to make a list about what she needed to do in life, Laura would have started like this: Go back in time. Go back farther. Go back to the beginning. Water was starting to slip up her nose, and Laura turned her face so that her mouth was again above water, and she gulped a few large breaths, dragged the air down deep into her lungs. If there were two of her, one Elsa and one Laura, each half as sorry as the other, which one would stay underwater? Which one would rise to the top? Laura wished that her life could be as static as a still photograph, all the players well lit and handsomely dressed. Sometimes Laura thought of herself as having had three sisters: Josephine, Hildy, and Elsa, with Josephine the only survivor of their shared childhood.

H
arriet had been going around the house, shutting all the windows, which the girls always left open, as if they wanted every fly and pest in Los Angeles to move in. She had grown up in California, just like Clara and Florence, in a house that could have fit into two rooms of Laura’s, but that didn’t matter. The girls were her responsibility, as Laura was her responsibility, and the house too, all of it under her careful watch. Harriet’s father had died when she was a child, no older than Junior, and she knew the mess that Laura was in, and how long it would last. The least she could do was make sure the rain didn’t get in and ruin anything, that a soppy rug wasn’t added to Laura’s miseries. It was when she was closing the window of the living room that Harriet saw Laura facedown in the swimming pool. She told Laura later that she felt like she had an electrical current running through her body, starting at her feet and going straight to her brain. There were a thousand thoughts at once, but they were all
the same:
Get to her. Get to her now
. Harriet let go of the window frame and ran to the side door, not thinking about getting wet, or her hair, or her clothes. She threw her body into the water, even though she was a poor swimmer herself, and dragged Laura to the shallow end by her outstretched arm, her body resisting. Laura’s body, usually so light and thin, felt dense with water, and too heavy. Harriet’s and Laura’s bodies struggled together on the lip of the pool—Laura felt as if she were being dragged down by her darkest thoughts, and Harriet was trying to rescue a drowning woman who hadn’t been drowning at all, only wallowing. Laura’s skin was puckered and faint, with her dark, soaked hair like a bloodstain around her head.

“I’m fine,” Laura said.

“What the hell are you doing?” Harriet asked, panting. Water dripped from her chin.

“I was swimming,” Laura said. She knew she didn’t sound convincing.

“What the hell were you doing?” Harriet asked again.

“I don’t know.” Laura rolled onto her side and tucked herself into a fetal position. She felt Harriet’s weight on top of her, and let herself be pulled in toward the soaked cotton of Harriet’s dress. “I miss them,” she said. “I miss all of them.”

“I think you’ve had enough of those pills,” Harriet said. She put her arm underneath Laura’s, helped her inside, sat her down at the kitchen table. Puddles formed at their feet while Harriet picked up the telephone and spoke. “Operator,” she said. “I need a doctor.”

T
he ambulance arrived just as Junior was coming back from school. Laura tried to argue with the men that she didn’t need an ambulance, or a stretcher, or to be taken away at all, but they wouldn’t
listen. All she could think about were her children, and her husband and her father and Hildy, and how they were all going to feel as though she had let them down, let them
down
, as if that were an adequate description of her halfhearted betrayal. The yellow bus usually stopped right out front, but it double-parked a few houses back and waited for the ambulance to depart. Junior was standing in the front stairwell of the bus as his mother was wheeled out to the ambulance on a stretcher, and he was so stunned that he found he could not cry out for her, which was something that he regretted for the rest of his life. He told his mother on his fifteenth birthday that if he was ever given any moment in his entire life to live over again, it would be that one, when he could have raised his voice and shouted loud enough for her to hear him. He would have shouted loud enough that she would have heard how much he needed her. But as it was, Laura went to the hospital alone, and Harriet and Junior followed soon after, leaving a note for Clara and Florence that told them not to worry, though the note was written in such haste that the girls could not help but panic, and nearly forgot to lock the front door on their way out.

T
he hospital was discreet. Laura was in a private room with large windows that overlooked a courtyard with benches and graceful little stone paths. From the bed, she could see the tops of palm trees and the other wing of the building, the happier side, where women went to deliver babies. It wasn’t so unusual to have a building divided that way. Laura thought of her parents’ house, and Hildy’s room, always shut away behind a closed door, and of her own house, with her bedroom that had become a mausoleum. She couldn’t imagine that anyone would use the swimming pool again, at least not for a
long while. There were parts of her brain like that too, sections that she’d tried to wall off, like a bombed-out eyesore: her happy years with Gordon, her mother’s hurt feelings. That seemed harder to do.

The nurses never left. One of them was always in her room, even if just sitting in a chair by the door, looking slightly dozy, or doing her knitting. Laura didn’t want to talk to the nurses, and they didn’t seem to want to talk to her either. But they were always there, no matter what time Laura woke up and opened her eyes. The second thing Laura noticed was that it was
hard
to open her eyes—not just the physical action, but to keep them that way. She wanted to sleep all the time, even at the brightest hour of the afternoon. The doctors would cycle in every few hours and rouse Laura long enough to ask her questions about how she was feeling, always the same questions with the same answers. The doctors seemed not to communicate with one another very well, or else they thought they might trip her up eventually and get a new answer. But no, Laura said over and over again, she wasn’t trying to kill herself, not really. It was the “not really” part that they always repeated back to her. One of the doctors was a handsome man, probably Laura’s age if not a few years younger, and she hated it the most when he asked, because his big brown eyes were so round and clear, like two perfect marbles. She thought he might cry, and she felt so ashamed of putting him in such an awkward position.

“When you say ‘not really,’ what do you mean?” The follow-up questions were even worse. The doctor’s name was Baker. In her whole life, Laura had never met a doctor in a social situation. She knew scores of actors and writers and directors and even lawyers but not a single doctor. Maybe they never left the hospital, and slept in the hallway closets, lined up like so many winter coats. No one in Los Angeles had any real need for coat closets, but they kept building the closets anyway.

“I mean that I wasn’t really trying to kill myself,” Laura said. She
was wearing a nightgown that Harriet had brought from home, but even with the heavy hospital sheet over her legs, she felt exposed, and her body gave an involuntary shiver. The room was cold, and she felt her nipples push against the thin cotton of her nightgown. She crossed her arms over her chest.