Life Sentences (5 page)

Daisy sat on a soggy bale of hay in
the old barn, shaking the snow off her soft knit cap and smoking the joint
she'd found tucked away in Anna's favorite hiding place. The old cigar
box was full of odds and ends-their father's high school ring, Anna's childhood
ballet slippers, a handful of love letters from an eighth-grade boyfriend.
Daisy had found the joint pressed between the pages of her sister's diary.
She'd scooped up both the diary and its illicit contents and brought them
into the barn to sample. Anna was inconsistent with her diaries. Sometimes
she filled many pages in one sitting; other times she abandoned her diary
for weeks at a stretch. The leather-bound journal in Daisy's coat pocket
covered the months of January through June of last year, before Anna's
departure for L.A.

The barn doors were open, and Daisy
watched the whispering snow transform the world outside into a wonderland
of white. She drew her coat snug around her neck and sighed. It was so peaceful
in here, so quiet and beautiful, she never wanted to leave. Outside,
leaden clouds hung in the sky and the ice crunched and crackled underfoot,
and she remembered snowball fights and sleigh rides and experiments
with maple-syrup-flavored ice. Where are you, Anna? Why are you tormenting
us? Daisy studied her hand in a detached manner, as if somebody else
were causing the fingers to flex and spread apart. Her relationship
with her sister felt like a thought inside her head rather than a feeling
inside her heart. She dropped her hand in her lap, and her vision blurred,
darkness and sparks, then gradually widened again. The world outside
the barn doors sparkled like diamonds. A pair of cardinals flitted
from tree to tree while huge kaleidoscopic flakes came sifting down.

Detective Makowski of the LAPD
had promised to call her right back. That was yesterday. She dug her hands
in her pockets, hunched forward and shuddered violently. She didn't want
to mink about Mr. Barsum, but it was practically unavoidable in here.
Mr. Barsum had lived with the
Hubbards
a long time
ago, when the girls were very young. He'd stayed with them for several years,
until Lily finally discovered what he'd been up to and kicked him out.
The memory was painful, but it reminded her of Anna's favorite joke.
How many parents does it take to screw in a
lightbulb
?
Two. One to screw in the
lightbulb
, the other to
screw up your entire life.

Daisy shivered and sighed, making
breath clouds. Over the course of her troubled lifetime, Anna must've
consumed an entire pharmacy of drugs-
Haldol
,
Lithium,
Depakote
,
Vistaril
.
And that didn't include all the illegal drugs she'd taken-speed, cocaine,
ecstasy, pot. Anna went through periods of calm, periods of normalcy,
periods of chaos; but always there was that underlying neediness, the
sense that you owed her something. Daisy was tired of feeling guilty all
the time.

"Did you know that no two snowflakes
are alike?" Lily asked. She was standing in the doorway with her arms
crossed. She wore an old parka with a fringed hood that looked ridiculous
on her.

Daisy dropped the joint on the rough-hewn
floorboards and stomped it out with her boot. "Um… yeah," she
said.

"And that each flake has six
sides? Did you know that?"

It was terribly quiet inside
the barn.

"I'm sure she's fine,
Mom."

"God isn't malicious,
right? He won't take my baby girl away from me. Not after all the losses
I've had to endure."

Daisy suddenly realized that she
was stoned in front of her mother. It bit her with the force of a gigantic
pillow. The world outside the barn doors glowed from within, like an
enormous night-light. Lily looked like an Eskimo. Each flake seemed to
leave a vaporous neon trail in its wake. The smell of pot was palpable
inside the barn, but Lily didn't seem to notice. She probably thought it
was the fermented hay.

"Anna and I used to cheat in
Sunday school," Daisy confessed. "Did you know that, Mom?"

Lily frowned. "No."

"We never cheated in regular
school or anywhere else.

At least I didn't. I can't speak
for Anna. But we cheated; in Sunday school."

"Whatever for?"

"Out of spite, I think. We couldn't
stand our teacher, ¦] Mrs. Galina. She was so dementedly happy all the time,
so sickeningly up-with-people, you know? My attitude was that she didn't
deserve our respect."

"I don't pretend to understand
you girls." Lily tipped her face skyward and blinked as eddying, dizzying
) snowflakes caught on her eyelashes. She looked like a child with her
face held like that.

"I feel bad about it
now," Daisy said.

"You don't sound like you feel
bad."

"I bumped into her one day,
shortly after Anna was j hospitalized for the first time. I was feeling
pretty glum, and when I saw Mrs. Galina coming… I gave her such a dirty look.
I wanted her to know how much I hated her. And do you know what she
did?"

Lily shook her head.

"She smiled at me. She said
hello. She was genuinely ' friendly. It shocked me. It was as if she could
see right through me. She could see how miserable I was, and she didn't care
whether I hated her guts or not. She was going to like me anyway, in spite
of myself."

They gazed in silence at the falling
snow. A stone-colored bird landed on the cement ramp and plumped its feathers
against the chill. "One of us has to fly out there, you know," Lily
said, breaking an ice puddle with the toe of her boot.

Daisy greeted the thought as a
threat.

'To Los Angeles." Her mother
looked at her expectantly.

The silence stretched.

"If it wasn't for this diabetes,"
Lily said, "I'd go there myself. In a second."

"Mom, I'm at the most critical
stage of my research. I can't just drop everything."

"But you have to, sweetheart."

"Why?"

"Because. There is nobody else."

And she knew this to be the sad, horrible
truth. She gazed beyond her mother at the falling snow, at the big drifts scalloped
by the fluting wind. Anna was right. It took only one parent to screw up your
entire life.

"You're the strong one,"
Lily reminded her. "You can handle it."

But before she could respond to
this familial curse, Daisy's cell phone rang. It made a chirping sound,
and the bird on the ramp flew away. She took out her phone and said,
"Hello?"

"Daisy Hubbard?"

"Yes?"

"This is Detective Makowski
from the LAPD. We spoke yesterday."

Her spine straightened. "I
have news about your sister. Hello?" "I'm still here," Daisy
told him, while little wisps of snow metastasized into the barn.

"Is there anything I can do
for you?" Truett asked Daisy the following morning. "Anything
at all?"

"I don't think so. But
thanks."

The lab was empty. Everybody else
was downstairs in the lecture hall, listening to Claude
Bagget's
seminar on viral vectors. Last night another
foot of snow had fallen over Boston, winter clinging to spring like a bad
joke. The events of the past few days had left Daisy feeling hollow inside,
and she desperately wanted to fill in the void. Maybe the truth could
fill up this empty space. She buttoned her overcoat, put on her soft knit
cap and drew on her gloves. "Truett," she said, "I care about
you a lot…"

He put a finger to her lips.
"I don't want you to feel in any way responsible for the end of my marriage,
Daisy." He took her hand-his hands were surprisingly small for such
a big personality-and stood there with a hangdog expression. Truett
couldn't help himself; he had more culture than Yoplait. In his double-breasted
blazers, silk ties and expensive Italian shoes, he exuded class and
style. He'd transformed himself from a southern farm boy into an elite
intellectual, whereas she still splashed around in the great sea of
the American middle class. "We make a good team, Daisy. I wouldn't
want to break that up."

She smiled at him gratefully.
"It feels like I'm deserting you right when you need me the
most."

"Fiona can handle it until
you come back. You need to focus on your sister. Just be careful,
okay?"

"Good-bye, Truett."

"And do me a favor," he
said. "Stop calling me Truett.

Gives me the creeps."

"What should I call you,
then?"

"Marlon."

She shook her head. "I'm afraid
that would make me giggle."

"All right, fine. I don't wish
to quarrel with a respected scientist." He kissed her on the cheek
and said, "Be safe."

Daisy caught herself staring at
the flight attendant's elegant French knot and wondered why she didn't have
the flair some women had with their hair. As a scientist, she'd always
been hopelessly pragmatic when it came to her looks, and she seldom wore
jewelry, never used perfume or nail polish. Now she pressed her
unpowdered
forehead against the cold glass. They were
hurtling through the atmosphere, cruising along at six hundred miles
per hour under an illusion of stillness. The moon floated in the night
sky as if it were tethered to the ground by an invisible line. Daisy
gazed at the landmass below. They were flying over scattered American
cities-cities she'd never been to, cities whose identities evaded
her now, constellations of light blossoming out of the darkness. Clusters
of wattage, billions of bulbs.

She caught sight of her troubled
reflection in the window and tested her forehead for a fever. It felt
like a migraine had moved in and unpacked its bags. She'd; taken the
night flight from Boston to Los Angeles and was on her third glass of sour-tasting
Chablis, the Boeing 747's turbo engines droning steadily in the background.
She tried to process what the detective had told her over the phone:
Your sister stopped paying the rent and
disappeared from her apartment without a trace. Her current whereabouts
are unknown.

The plane began to shake with turbulence,
and the fasten seat belt sign blinked on. She hadn't reviewed! the emergency
instructions yet-a ritual she performed' before each flight-so she
picked up the laminated sheet and started reading. The printed instructions
reminded her that the seat cushions doubled as flotation devices,
the life rafts were stashed inside the overhead compartments and the
nearest exit doors were pretty far away from row 23, seat A. As she studied
the brightly colored diagrams, she became convinced that should the
plane crash for whatever reason, she and the strange man! seated next to
her would plummet into some polluted, unknown city and become one
with the asphalt.

Daisy shoved the laminated sheet
back in its plastic; sleeve and closed her eyes while the plane bucked
and shuddered against the oncoming wind. They were thousands of feet
above the cold, silent earth. She wanted an, aspirin badly but had packed
the bottle inside her checked luggage. The next jolt against the jet
stream took her breath away. Fear was shortness of breath. Fear; was rapid
breathing.

Now the strange man seated next to
her said, "
Watcb
the flight attendants. If
they're not scared, don't you be."

She smiled at him gratefully.

He offered her a peanut.
"What's your name?" he asked.

"Daisy."

"Hi. I'm Bram."

"Hello, Bram." They shook
hands.

"Are you from Boston, Daisy?"

"Yes." She wasn't very good
at idle chatter. Most people didn't like to talk about the things she wanted
to talk about-quantum physics, the earth's rotation around the sun, the
fact that Einstein got his best ideas while shaving.

"Just visiting?"

"Sort of."

"Sort of? What brings you to
L.A.?"

"My sister's missing,"
she blurted.

"Missing? Really?"

"She's schizophrenic. I'm a
little concerned. The police have no idea where she is."

He was looking at her oddly now, as
if she'd rattled off a list of fatal plane crashes.

"Wow, that's a conversation
stopper, huh?" she said with an embarrassed laugh, trying to make
light of it, but he'd already smelled the raw fear on her, and there was
no turning back.

They exchanged a few more pleasantries
before he fumbled for a magazine, then Daisy turned to stare out the
window again. It was dark on Planet Earth tonight. After a while, the turbulence
eased, and she could swallow normally again. She gazed at the pitch black
below, at the seeming emptiness of the American West. The sun felt all
of its 93 million miles away. She could hear Detective
Makowski's
voice inside her head, low-pitched and
authoritative
. We checked the Jane
Does. We've checked all the morgues. Nothing's come up
. She stopped
breathing momentarily, unable to absorb the fact that the police were
already thinking that her sister might be dead.

After they landed safely at LAX,
the man named Bram followed her silently off the airplane. The terminal
was a blur of activity. She trailed a huge crowd down a long green corridor
toward the baggage pickup area. There were countless twists and turns,
and they passed by two metal detectors. Daisy found an ATM, but it was
broken. She looked around and realized she was lost. "Which way to
baggage pickup?" she asked a passing stranger.

"Follow me." Bram took
her by the elbow.

Daisy didn't trust men who steered
you places, since there was no telling when the steering would end. It
was only eleven o'clock (2:00 a.m. back in Boston), and she'd had too many
bravery drinks. Most of the people inside the terminal were dressed
for the beach, colorful logos splashed across their jeans and T-shirts,
and Daisy was feeling seriously overdressed in her tailored blouse
and knife-pleat skirt. These terminals were well air-conditioned. She
felt a chill and wished she'd worn a sweater.

They found the baggage pickup
area and waited for their luggage to rotate by. The baggage handlers
kept hurling people's suitcases through a trapdoor in the ceiling.
Bram got his right away, then stood around waiting for hers to arrive.

"It's okay," she said.
"I'm fine."

"I'll wait."

"Thank you. Really."

He left looking mildly disappointed.

She didn't like the sickening fluorescent
wavelengths and grew dizzy watching people's luggage rotate by. Several
other night flights had arrived from the East Coast, and soon this corner
of the terminal was noisy and overcrowded. As the suitcases with matching
totes came flying through the trapdoor in the ceiling, Daisy instantly
recognized her ugly yellow suitcase, the one she'd dragged around with
her from college to graduate school to her internship at
Berhoffer
. She'd always been embarrassed by that cheap,
cheese-colored vinyl, which had never failed to give away her lowly status
as a scholarship student who knew nothing about cotillions or summers
in East Hampton, and who'd never set foot inside a country club. She'd
made the mistake of attending a liberal-arts school for spoiled rich
girls whose doting dads bought them Thoroughbred horses to be stabled
nearby, whereas Daisy had been brought up on her mother's accounting
salary. It'd never occurred to her how poor the
Hubbards
were until she'd gone away to college.

Now the baggage handlers tossed
Daisy's suitcases down the chute as if they were trying to see how far
they could throw. The wheeled Pullman landed with a crack on the terminal,
its lid popping open, her unmentionables spilling out.

"Idiots," she grumbled,
snapping it shut. She couldn't help feeling small and insignificant as
she wheeled her bags over to a plastic bench molded to fit the contours of
something-not the human body, that was for sure. She sat in exhausted silence
while people became pinpoints. The airport was so huge and impersonal
she dissolved into apathy. Banks of fluorescent lights made a constant
hum, like a dull chorus. So this was how Los Angeles swallowed you whole?
Right away, before you'd even set foot outside the airport gates.

She leaned against the cement
wall until the back of her head began to throb. She swore she could feel
the earth's motion somewhere underneath her breathing. Conflicting
noises washed over her like dust disturbed by a fan.
Anna's missing
. She didn't want to think about it. Fear was paralyzing.
Fear was immobilizing. She stood up, determined to keep moving, and
dragged her luggage across the lobby and through the sliding glass doors,
where she was hit by a torrid blast of muggy air.

She swam through this soup down
the gritty sidewalk toward the taxi stand. The cabdriver was tall and gaunt
and reminded her of an aging character actor. He deposited her luggage
into the roomy trunk of the cab while she slid into the backseat. All
around them, concrete terminals stood in beams of washed-out light.

"Where y'all from?" the
driver asked in a southern drawl that reminded her of Truett.

"Boston," she said, feeling
suddenly nostalgic for everything she'd left behind.

"
Beantown
,
huh? Miracle City?" He glanced at her through the rearview, tires
squealing as they swerved away from the curb. He drove past monolithic
buildings and dark alleyways-was the city always this desolate?
"Remember Dukakis riding around in that tank, looking like an idiot?"
he said. "And then his campaign tanked, remember? Miracle City,
ha. That was some miracle."

She didn't know what he was talking
about. She leaned against the sticky vinyl seat, the pain milling aimlessly
around inside her head now. They drove past a series of squat, empty-looking
buildings, then took an entrance ramp onto the freeway. The sky was filled
with millions of stars struggling to penetrate through the smog layer.
It was hard to believe that, thousands of years ago, there had actually
been glaciers in Hollywood instead of palm trees.

"I'm from Alabama originally,"
the cabdriver said, turning around briefly to look at her. His nose began
with a broad bridge and grew vigorously from his face before ending abruptly
in a pair of deeply grooved nostrils. "Me and the missus moved here
twenty-five years ago and never regretted it for a second.
Nossir
. There's plenty of advantages to living in the
second-largest city in America, you know? Out here, you've got more of
everything. Out here, everybody has their own set of wheels. Well,
that's not exactly an advantage for me,
heh
."

And it was true, the driveways were
crowded with vehicles of every kind-SUVs, motorcycles, trucks, mini-vans.
They were cruising through a residential area now, the
gridlike
streets stretching for miles past identical-looking
bungalows painted pink or persimmon or peppermint. Everything seemed
so promising here, so full of hope and opportunity.

"Hey, do you like pie?"
he asked out of the blue.

"Re?" Daisy blinked.
"Um… sure. I guess."

"Well, okay, then. You've got
to try the Pied Piper down on La Brea. They make fifty different kinds of
pies, I kid you not. You won't find anything like that back East, I'll
bet."

He dropped her off at a small, ugly
motel in the middle of West Los Angeles. A low-grade fear was making her
ill. The sky was deep cobalt, and the closer you looked, the more stars
you could see. She paid the driver, who tipped his hat and sped off. Then
she dragged her luggage across the asphalt toward die manager's office.

The middle-aged manager had a face
like a tight ball. His mouth was slightly open, and he stared at the color
TV on his desk. A ball game was playing.

"Daisy Hubbard," she said.
"I made a reservation."

The motel promised low rates,
air-conditioning, free parking and a swimming pool. AAA members received
a 10 percent discount.

Inside the privacy of her own cabin,
Daisy stretched out on the double bed and tried to find her inner self.
The air conditioner hummed noisily, and the room reeked of Lysol. She
thought she understood what might have drawn her sister to the West Coast.
Out here, you could reinvent yourself. You could slip on a whole new
personality, and nobody would care or even notice.

She went to the bathroom and
splashed cold water on her face, then tugged at her hair with wet fingers,
all her motions anxious and hard. The paleness of her skin alarmed her.
She had a bad hangover and pinched her cheeks, trying to feel something.
Even pain was preferable to this present torpor. She smiled at her reflection,
revealing a set of perfectly proportioned teeth. Back in the sixth grade,
she'd forgotten to brush them on a regular basis, and when the orthodontist
finally took her braces off, there were cavities in her front teeth
as random as bullet holes. These days, her porcelain fillings were faintly
stained because of all the coffee she drank. But she liked her smile. It
was wide and friendly, unafraid to show off its defects.

Daisy collapsed on the motel bed
and squeezed her eyes shut, trying to block out the luminous neon glow leaking
in through the cracks in the
miniblinds
. She tossed
and turned, while outside her window, fragments of light whizzed past.
After a while, she fell into an exhausted sleep, her dreams shallow
and disturbing as mild stomachaches. She had a dim memory of Anna back
home in Vermont, shuffling downstairs like a zombie and squinting into
the noontime sun as she entered the kitchen with a cigarette dangling
between her lips. Her long red hair was caught up in an elastic band at
the base of her neck, her eye makeup was smudged and her face was puffy
from too much sleep. Or maybe it was the meds. "Hey, you," she said,
trudging over for a lethargic hug and kiss on the cheek. "Finally made
your way home, huh?" She smelled of sleep, of the desire for oblivion.

Daisy stirred and opened her eyes.
The clock said 1:00 a.m. She sat up and turned on the TV, and some kind of
plucky banjo music assaulted her ears. A man in a cheap suit was standing
on his head. "You won't find a better deal, I guarantee!" he hollered
at the camera. He reminded her of Truett, same lanky sex appeal and
hard-sell sensibility. In the next shot, he was doing cartwheels.