Laura Lamont's Life In Pictures (39 page)

She could hear motion, and the constant beating of the water, but nothing else. There was nothing interrupting the flow of the shower, no irregularity of water hitting skin, hitting the tub, hitting the curtain. Junior wasn’t actually taking a shower at all. “Open the door. I’m serious—open it right now, or I’m calling the front desk, and they’ll open it for me.” She threw her body against the door, over and over, but the wood didn’t weaken beneath her weight.

There was a louder crash and the sound of porcelain shattering. Laura watched as the lock turned, and the door slowly pulled open from the inside.

Junior was on the floor, the shower rod sitting in between his legs.
The wet cloth curtain was spread around him like a petticoat. Behind Junior’s back, the shower continued to beat against the tub.

“What happen—” Laura began to ask, but then she saw—attached to both Junior’s neck and the shower rod was his blue nylon belt, a sturdy thing she’d bought for him at a sailing shop in Malibu.
Indestructible
, the label had boasted. Laura dropped to her knees and began to pull at the curtain, trying to detach the rod from her son’s body. Junior was gasping for breath, his chest pumping in and out in shallow heaves. Of course Junior looked just like Hildy—how had Laura not seen it before? The full, berry-stained lips, the short, soft nose, the pretty eyes. She had to shake her head to knock the image loose, Hildy’s swinging body in her bedroom. This wasn’t that—Junior was alive, not dead. She had come in time. Her relief was the ocean, the galaxy—it was too big to be contained by her body, or the hotel, or all of Los Angeles. Laura thought that if someone was listening hard enough, they could hear her exhale all the way in Door County.

“No no no no no no,” Laura said, the words spilling out with neither thought nor effort. She unwound the belt from Junior’s neck, a deep red stripe marking its place. He was starting to breathe normally again, but refused to look her in the eye, staring at the corner of the tiled floor instead.

Laura wrapped her arms around her son’s shoulders and rocked him back and forth, with the water from the shower still beating steadily behind them. It didn’t matter that the floor would get wet, or that their clothes would soak through. Laura didn’t care whether the shower flooded the entire Beverly Hills Hotel. She would stay there as long as Junior needed her to. There was a knock on the door to the bungalow, and Laura kicked the bathroom door shut, keeping her foot taut against the lip of the door. If it was in or out, then Laura had already made her choice.

T
he doctors explained what Laura had always known: that Junior went up and down as quickly as a yo-yo, his moods swinging because of a chemical imbalance in the brain. Laura’s first thought was of her sister, and her second thought was to finally say, “Yes, yes, there is something wrong, but we can fix it.”

The psychiatric ward looked much the same as it had when Laura was a patient, though with newly refinished floors and more comfortable chairs in the rooms. The walls were painted a salmon pink, which Laura thought did seem comforting, in a certain way, as if they were all swimming upstream. She wore her sunglasses in the elevator, taking them off only when she approached the desk and gave Junior’s name, though she knew where his room was, because she’d come in with him two days before.

“Irving Green, Junior?” The nurse repeated. Hearing his name from someone else’s mouth felt like a hole through Laura’s lung.

“That’s right.”

“Follow me.”

The nurse led Laura through the common area filled with people playing board games and watching television, and down a well-lit hall. It was Laura’s fault that her only son had ended up in a place like this; she could admit that to herself. She tried to keep her breath steady. Someday Junior would forgive her. The nurse stopped in front of a glass-paned door, and Laura saw Junior sitting in a chair by the window, looking out onto the courtyard.

“This is the hospital you were born in, you know,” Laura said, stepping over the threshold.

Junior turned around, his narrow face wan. “Mom,” he said, standing up. He was wearing borrowed pajamas; Laura had brought his own in her bag, along with a robe and some slippers. She remembered
that about staying in the hospital: It was funny to get dressed when you knew you weren’t allowed to leave. Better to turn it all into a big slumber party.

“Love,” she said, walking briskly across the room until he was in her arms, his narrow rib cage rising and falling with quick, short breaths. He smelled like hospital soap. Someone had cut his hair. “Oh, love,” she said again, over and over again, until Junior knew for certain that his mother would do anything for him, for the rest of his life, for even longer than that.

J
immy, the dear, had been on the phone all day, updating everyone who needed to be updated, a one-man phone tree. He’d called Josephine right after he’d called his wife and sister-in-law, and she was in Los Angeles that night. When Laura came home from the hospital, when visiting hours were over, her sister was already curled up on the sofa in the bungalow underneath a thin cotton blanket. Laura set her keys and purse down quietly by the door and walked to the side of the couch, where Josephine’s bent knees poked out.

“Hey,” Laura said, wiggling her hips into the available space. Josephine sleepily raised her feet to let Laura in, and then set them back down on her lap. Laura ran her hands over her sister’s socked feet. No one in Hollywood had ever complimented Laura on her feet—no costume designer, no smarmy actor, not even Irving. Laura had Emerson feet, just like Josephine’s—as wide as they were long, and flat as flapjacks. It was nice to be in such close physical proximity, even though they hadn’t spoken in months, and only via cursory birthday cards and the like. In the end, it didn’t matter. Sisters were sisters.

“Is he okay?” Josephine asked. She stayed lying down, her face turned toward the coffee table and the dark square of the television.

“He will be,” Laura said. “I’m glad you’re here.”

Outside, some hotel guests were taking a midnight swim, and Laura heard the splashing of a cannonball, followed by peals of laughter. The watery sounds filled the living room, and both Laura and Josephine stayed quiet, appreciating the liveliness so nearby.

Josephine rolled onto her back and inched backward until she was sitting up. In the relative dark—the only light in the room came from the floor lamp beside the sofa—Josephine’s features seemed not to have aged at all. Intellectually, Laura knew that her sister was sixty-three years old, but even with her blond hair now gray, she didn’t look old to Laura.

“Me too,” Josephine said. She had lost some of her middle-aged weight, and now just looked sturdy.

“How is Helen?” Helen had been Josephine’s roommate for the last decade. They were both retired, and Laura knew that they were happy together by the look on Josephine’s face when her name was mentioned. Laura imagined a woman in her twenties, a slim, modest beauty, the way Josephine’s girlfriends had looked once upon a time. “I’d like to meet her one of these days.”

“That would be nice.” Josephine held her kneecaps, one in each hand. “Listen,” she said, as if Laura were doing anything else. They both sat in silence, preparing for whatever Josephine was about to say. “I know you think you know everything about Hildy, and I’m sure this brings it all back for you.” She paused. “But you don’t.”

Laura licked her lips and then swallowed. “Okay.” She both wanted Josephine to hurry, to open her mouth wider and let the words stream out, and for her to take it back, to take it all back, to never have to walk into that bedroom ever again as long as she lived.
One at a time,
Laura thought.
I can only take one thing at a time.
But she didn’t move, and so Josephine continued.

“You remember Cliff?” Light fell on only half of Josephine’s face, and the other half remained in darkness. There were still sounds coming from the pool, happy, joyful noises, but Laura could hear only her own heart, which was beating faster, and somewhere around her ears.

“Of course.” Laura nodded.

“And you know they were together?”

She nodded again.

“Hildy was pregnant. She was pregnant when she killed herself, Else.” Josephine put her hands flat against her cheeks and slowly moved her fingers over her lips, until her hands were in prayer position, resting at her chin.

“Really?” Laura pictured their parents’ house, and Hildy’s room, back when it was a living thing, and not a neglected museum. She could hear the sound of the staircase at night, when Hildy came in late, and the sounds that Hildy would make when she and Cliff were alone together. Laura didn’t know what her parents would have done if they’d known Hildy was pregnant. Or maybe they did.

“Did Mom and Dad know?”

Josephine shook her head vigorously. “No,” she said. “No. Just me.”

Laura was still in Hildy’s bedroom, sitting at the foot of her bed. Her sister was still alive, still beautiful. Hildy’s hair was long and brushed, a thick braid hanging over her left shoulder. Laura was close enough that she was sure she could almost touch her sister, almost hear her voice. Hildy looked so young—for the first time, Laura saw her sister as a child, a teenager, a girl barely on the cusp of everything.

“Do you think that’s why she did it?”

Josephine winced. “I don’t think so. Maybe. I think it would have
been something, if it wasn’t that. She was sick, Else, you know? Like Junior. She was sick.”

Laura felt her body bristle with the discomfort of understanding that her sister was right. The shiver ran through her arms and legs and heart and spine before it landed, gently, on her tongue. “I wish I could have helped her,” she said.

“I know, sweetie,” Josephine said, finally pulling the blanket off her knees and sliding next to her sister. She wrapped her arms around Laura’s shoulders and pulled her close, until their torsos were flat against each other. Laura thought that if they had tried to fuse their bodies together precisely at that moment, they could have, so unified were their feelings, so in sync. If they had tried to conjure Hildy out of thin air, they could have, brought her back to life with nothing more than their love and sorrow and regret. Both Laura and Josephine cried the way they had cried when they lost her the first time, each wetting the other’s shoulder with tears. When they were finished, Laura invited her sister to sleep in Florence’s room with her, and so they slowly made their way down the hall and climbed into bed, their bodies side by side and completely still until morning.

T
he day that Junior was to come home from the hospital, Laura got dressed and stood in front of the mirror in the bungalow’s bathroom, which had been replaced. It reflected her only from the belly button up, and showed her hair, which needed to be washed, hanging straight to her shoulders. She’d been spending so much time with Junior that she often forgot to shower for days, or to feed herself anything that didn’t exist in the cafeteria, unless Josephine or Florence reminded her. Junior would be healthy; that was all that mattered,
and Laura deeply believed that it was true. He would recover, just as she had recovered. There were broken parts inside each of them. No parent could keep her child whole; that was the truth. All she could do was to show up every morning with a smile on her face and something new for him to read. Laura quickly brushed her teeth and splashed some water on her face. It would be better when he was home.