Laura Lamont's Life In Pictures (33 page)

“And how many of the barbiturates did you take before getting into the pool?” Dr. Baker crossed his legs just like her father had, with one ankle hooked over the opposite knee.

“Hmm?” Laura turned and stared out the window, as if she hadn’t heard him. She didn’t like talking about the pills. They had always been her little secret, and it wasn’t anyone else’s business. It wasn’t that she
needed
the pills, it was just that they made everything easier. Talking to a doctor about her blues was like dancing naked in the middle of Sunset Boulevard. She just wasn’t prepared to do it, and certainly not without taking a few pills first. She’d taken a small number—two or three, no more than five—every day since Irving died. Her blood pressure was starting to rise, and there was a growing feeling in the back of her throat, halfway between thirst and anger. Laura wanted the doctor to stop talking, to go away, to back his way slowly down the hall. It sounded so much more shameful when he said it out loud, so much more shameful than she’d ever let herself believe.

“We found a large number of barbiturates in your system, Miss Lamont.” Dr. Baker was going to be patient with her, she could tell, but still Laura found herself unable to turn away from the window. On the other side of the hospital, women were being handed their babies for the very first time, and hearing those squawking cries. Laura didn’t want to be in the hospital; she wanted to be at home with Junior and the girls, all of them curled together like a litter of puppies on the living room rug. She didn’t know what Harriet had told the girls. Even if she’d told them the truth, it would only have been
her
truth, anyway, and not the real story, though Laura wasn’t sure what the real story was. The doctor didn’t know about Irving, not really. No one knew anything more than they’d read in the tabloids, and that wasn’t them at all. Laura blinked back the tears that were forming behind her eyelids. She wondered whether anyone had called her mother.

“When can I go home?” Laura asked, turning back toward the doctor at last.

He looked down at the clipboard in his lap, her facts and figures written so plainly in black ink. “In a couple of days,” he said. “Get some rest.” Dr. Baker stood up. He was tall, with broad shoulders, and his white coat skimmed his body like a raincoat. In another life, he could have been an actor, a proper leading man. Laura opened her mouth to tell him so, but then thought better of it and didn’t. He paused by the door. “If you need anything,” he said, and nodded, leaving the rest of the sentence hanging there like a string of lights around a Christmas tree. Laura started to make a list of all the things she needed, but in the end, it was only three items long, and impossible for anyone except Orpheus, and even he had failed.

L
aura asked Harriet to stay with the children while she was in the hospital, but when Junior wouldn’t stop screaming in the middle of the night, and was wetting his bed besides, which he hadn’t done since he was a baby, Harriet took the three children back to her house instead. In the nearly twenty years that they’d known each other, Laura had never once been to Harriet’s house, nor did she know precisely where it was. There was a public bus that Harriet took to Beverly Hills in the mornings, on Mondays, and a bus she took home on Friday nights. She lived with her sister and their mother,
somewhere to the south, but that was all Laura knew. Once she’d overheard Harriet telling Florence a story about roosters waking her up by crowing in her bedroom window. Laura had laughed—there had been roosters in Door County, noisy pests, and she’d always hated them.

“In Los Angeles?” Laura had asked, incredulous. The look on Harriet’s soft, relaxed face had changed in an instant.

“Yes,” she’d said. Harriet stared at her hands. The lights were off in Florence’s room, but Laura could see Harriet well enough.

“Oh, no,” Laura said, “I didn’t mean anything by that. I miss those sounds, now that I don’t hear them anymore.” Laura had lingered in the doorway, waiting for Harriet to resume her story, but after a few minutes, Laura realized that Harriet was waiting for her to go, and so she did.

It was going on a week at the hospital. Dr. Baker had smiled at Laura a total of four times, including once when he thought she was asleep. Only Florence came to visit. Everyone decided Junior was too small to see his mother all trussed up like a turkey, and so he went to school, or stayed home with Harriet.

Laura was staring out the window when Florence knocked. She turned toward the door and saw her daughter’s head poking through the narrow slit of the doorway.

“Come on in, sweetie,” Laura said, shifting her body so that she was sitting up straight. The most jarring part of being in the hospital for so long was being separated from her makeup. Laura couldn’t remember when she’d gone without lipstick for longer. Of course, now she had no one to wear it for. The same was true of all her jewelry, and the dresses made for her body alone. She didn’t deserve any of them anymore, no more than she deserved her beautiful children. Of course, she probably wouldn’t be able to afford such things for very long, either.

Florence tiptoed across the room, as though afraid of rousing some invisible roommate. She slid her body onto the plastic visitor’s chair without making a noise.

“How are you feeling?” Florence’s hair hung down almost to the middle of her back. Laura’s own mother would have cut it off herself, with Florence sitting in a kitchen chair, a towel draped around her neck, but Laura didn’t mind. The hair covered up some of the knobbier parts of Florence’s body—she was still scrawny like a child, as narrow as a pine needle. Sometimes, especially at night in the hospital, when she was all alone, Laura wondered whether other mothers had those kinds of thoughts, thoughts about the vast, unknowable parts of their children’s brains, or whether other mothers knew the insides of their children’s minds as intimately as the contents of their own sock drawer.

“I’m fine, sweetie. How are you? How’s Harriet’s house? How’s school? How’s your brother?” Laura felt her eyes well up. She held her hands together in her lap and stared down at them. All she’d wanted was for Irving to come back, one simple, impossible thing, and instead she’d driven everyone else out of the house too.

“I’m okay. School’s fine. Harriet’s house is small. Her sister is always cooking. Sometimes it smells weird. But we’re having fun—Harriet’s sister and mother are really nice.” Florence pulled her purse onto her lap, and Laura realized that it was in the middle of the school day, and she didn’t know how Florence had gotten to the hospital. The children all had pocket money, but taxis were expensive. Laura had a flash of Florence with her thumb out on the side of the road, her long dark hair whipping around her face, but blinked the image away.

“And your brother?” It was possible that someone had driven her, or sent a car. Laura didn’t think that Louis Gardner had been talking
to the girls, but she’d been out of the house for days. Surely the tabloids knew where she was, and if the tabloids knew, so did Louis. Sure, she was no longer on the Gardner Brothers payroll, but it seemed odd that no one had sent flowers. Did no one think she’d had a horrible accident? Laura wanted to call Josephine and her mother; she wanted to yell until someone gave her the benefit of the doubt. But, of course, she didn’t deserve it. And Florence, her beautiful Florence, as narrow as a reed, was right there in front of her. It was more than she deserved.

Florence screwed up her face. “Well,” she said, clearly in possession of some information that she didn’t quite know how to dispense. “He’s been getting into a little trouble.”

“Junior? Your brother?” When Laura went to sleep, she imagined her son in a bed beside her. Sometimes she pictured it so perfectly—his tiny glasses on the hospital tray in between them, his white sneakers on the ground, laces all whipped up together like a couple of tango dancers—that she could almost hear his chest moving up and down with his sleepy breath. She put her hand to her throat. “What are you talking about?”

Florence tugged at a pleat on her skirt, pulling the gray fabric down toward her ankle, then stopped abruptly. She looked up at her mother. “He’s been wetting the bed.”

“Yes, sweetie, I knew that.” Laura’s heart swelled with sympathy for her son. At least Clara and Florence had never known Gordon to be a good man or a reliable father. There were no illusions to break. Junior had more to miss.

“And he set something on fire. In Harriet’s yard.” Florence’s cheeks were pink.

“Something?”

“They think it was a squirrel. Or a small opossum. It was hard to
tell, as it was running away. There was definitely a tail.” Florence swallowed hard, as if she could take the words back, take everything back. “I wasn’t there.”

“I see,” Laura said, though she didn’t. She could picture a front yard, its untended grass drying in the sun, and she could see her son kneeling down, and she could see a small wild thing running in circles, thankful for finding a fallen nut, but she couldn’t see a box of matches in Junior’s hand, or a flame, or the moment of connection. She couldn’t see that part at all. Florence didn’t say anything after that, but sat next to her mother in silence until it was time to go.

A
ll told, it was two weeks. Ginger came to take Laura home. She had her car waiting out front, with a driver at the wheel and Bill waiting at the door, like a bellhop dressed for the rodeo, complete with cowboy hat. Ginger had her arm around Laura’s waist. It was the first time in years they’d actually touched—Laura couldn’t remember the feeling of anyone’s arm around her waist, let alone Ginger’s. She’d had to argue with the nurses about not using a wheelchair. Of course, the nurses all loved Ginger’s program, and she flashed her kooky smile at each of them in turn, and there weren’t any problems after that about what Laura could or couldn’t do.

“They like you more than they like me,” Laura said. This was a fact. Nurses and lab technicians and orderlies and custodians who hadn’t so much as batted an eyelash at movie star Laura Lamont were tripping over themselves to get a look at Ginger. One young nurse was gearing up to ask for an autograph before a coworker smacked her arm back down.

“I’m in their living room,” Ginger said.

“I suppose that’s true.” They reached the sliding glass doors that separated the inside of the hospital from the outside universe—Laura watched cars drive by, always in a hurry. Life in Door County never moved so fast, not even when something was on fire. Laura thought of what Florence told her about Junior—no, it couldn’t be true. He was a moody boy, sure, but who wasn’t moody as a child? It didn’t mean anything.

The day was bright—Laura wished she’d packed her sunglasses, but then she remembered that she hadn’t packed anything at all. Dr. Baker had prescribed some milder anxiety pills—that was what he called them, mild. Louis hadn’t sent flowers to the hospital or to the house, and he hadn’t come to visit. Even Ginger had only phoned, and hadn’t come upstairs. Laura felt like her entire life with Irving had been an elaborate fantasy, in which she had both success and love, like people had in the movies. The only thing she cared about was getting home and seeing her children.

Bill was waiting at the curb. “You look beautiful today, Laura,” he said, lying through his teeth. The yellow overhead lights at the hospital had made Laura’s skin sallow and sickly. She needed to dye her hair, as her light roots were starting to grow back in, the gap between Laura Lamont and Elsa Emerson beginning to widen. Laura put her hand to her scalp.

“You don’t mean that,” she said, and tried to smile. He was trying to be charming, and she appreciated the effort. Bill did a funny little bow to the waist, and opened the back door of the car. Laura took one look behind her at the hospital and saw a small cluster of nurses pointing her direction. “Oh, Ginger,” she said, and tucked herself deep into the belly of the car without another moment’s hesitation. Laura kept her face against Ginger’s shoulder until the car stopped again, and they were home.

Harriet had Florence and Junior waiting in the living room. The boy looked spit-polished, with his brown hair shellacked into place behind the ears. The moment she saw him, Laura knew that Florence had been wrong—there was no way that her beautiful son had done anything so heinous in his life, nor would he. His hair was getting long in the back—Laura could see that all the way from the door. She wanted to put her face there and breathe in nothing but her son’s neck, the perfume of soap and sweat and cotton. He stood up, expectant.