Page 38

37.

The Smoothie Factory was in a neighborhood of San Francisco I’d never walked through before, an upscale waterfront enclave that Lionel told me was called the Marina. We found the juice bar sandwiched between a beauty supply store and a Mexican restaurant in a busy shopping strip. Lionel had to drive in circles around the block for nearly twenty minutes before a parking spot finally opened up within eyeshot of the store. We parked just minutes before eight o’clock.

It was a Saturday night and so the sidewalks were crowded, the women in heels that made their ankles wobble and the men in variations of the same striped rugby shirt. They milled from bar to restaurant, coats flung open despite the chilly night. I thought of what Lionel had said about misfits. These were not them.

At eight o’clock, the lights inside The Smoothie Factory flickered off. A few minutes later, two women appeared in the doorway. One turned to lock the door behind her. The other scanned the street and then stepped out into the pool of light being cast by a streetlamp.

It was Desi.

She had changed the color of her hair—it was purple now, not blue—and she was wearing an expensive-looking leather motorcycle jacket (a jacket that I suspected I had paid for), but other than that she looked exactly the same. Same pink bra, same torn black jeans and tiny little top.

I poked Lionel. “That’s her.”

He peered over the steering wheel at her. “Oh, so she’s a punk?”

“Is that what you call it?”

He threw me a look. “Do they not have punks in Montana, either?”

“Not where I lived.”

He shook his head in disbelief. “I guess now we wait and see where she goes.”

But where she went was immediately next door, to the Mexican restaurant, where she remained for nearly an hour as we sat in Lionel’s car, which still smelled awful. (“I let my sister borrow my car and she spilled a latte in the back seat and didn’t tell me and it hasn’t been the same since,” Lionel explained.) When she finally exited, she was staggering.

“Now she’s a drunk punk,” I observed.

Lionel’s laugh was disarmingly horselike, it convulsed his whole body, which put us in danger of losing track of Desi as she weaved her way down the sidewalk in the opposite direction. I hit his arm. “Drive!”

If Desi had bothered to look behind her as she walked, she would have noticed that a geriatric Volvo was following her as she turned right and then left and suddenly bolted to catch a crosstown Muni bus. She also might have noticed that this very same Volvo was there when she disembarked twenty minutes later, in a neighborhood of shabby apartment buildings just north of Fillmore Street. But presumably she was too inebriated to notice, because when she finally turned to climb the steps of a peeling converted Victorian, she didn’t even turn her head to see our car pulling up beside her. Instead, she just staggered her way up the stairs to her door, fumbling her keys out of her pocket.

We caught up with Desi right before the door swung closed behind her, wedging our way into the entrance of her apartment. She turned, swaying in her Doc Martens, and regarded us in the dim light of the hallway. Our presence seemed to register on time delay.

“Oh. Fuck. It’s you. Where’d you come from?”

“I want my bag back.” The adrenaline had worn off during the drive, and my hangover had returned. My voice sounded like it was coming from somewhere far away.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” She looked glassily from me to Lionel. “Who’s this? Your boyfriend or something? I thought you said you were here to visit your mom.”

“Don’t be an asshole, just give it to her,” Lionel said. His expression was bright and defiant. I got the distinct impression that he was enjoying playing savior. Standing next to him, his hip just grazing mine, I felt pleasantly inviolable.

“I don’t have it anymore.” She drew the leather jacket tighter around her.

“Bullshit,” Lionel said. “You’re lying.”

She pivoted to glare at me, almost losing her balance in the process, her eyes struggling to focus. “I’m not the liar, you are. You’re not a college student, are you? What kind of college student carries around that much money? I mean, twenty-three-thousand fucking dollars? What are you, like, a drug dealer or something?”

Lionel froze at this and cast a sideways glance at me; but then he recovered quickly from this momentary hitch and turned and stalked with purpose down the hallway. Desi lived in a railroad apartment that smelled of moldy carpet and stale beer, the hallway littered with unidentifiable flotsam. I followed him, and together we threw open one door and then another as Desi stumbled along behind us mewling protest. Two of the doors revealed her roommates’ bedrooms—one occupied by a couple passed out on a bed, naked limbs flung out from under limp sheets, another by a girl in underwear who swore at us when the door was opened—and one was a filthy bathroom, but behind the last door we finally found Desi’s bedroom.

A bare mattress sat on the floor surrounded by piles of clothing, like an iceberg drifting among its floes. CD jewel cases were haphazardly stacked against the walls, and an old-fashioned decorative mirror was set up in front of a stool covered with crusty makeup palettes. In the middle of the room, a pyramid of brand-new electronics—astereo system, a mini fridge, a television—were spilling out of their boxes.

In the middle of this mess, ineffectively concealed behind the mirror—as if Desi had made a half-hearted attempt to hide it before losing interest entirely—sat my duffel bag.

I walked over and unzipped it as she lunged at me from the doorway. Lionel grabbed her arm to stop her, and she swayed in his grip like a broken swing.

“Everything’s still there?” Lionel asked.

I riffled through the contents. “I think so,” I said. The bag still contained stacks of paper-wrapped bills, though considerably fewer than before. The folder with my father’s handwritten pages was still there, too, crumpled at the bottom of the duffel. As for the IBM hard drive, it was sitting right out in the open, next to the bag, and I hastily jammed this back into the duffel as they both watched.

“I was trying to sell that computer thingy on Craigslist,” Desi mumbled. “But no one responded to my ad. Maybe I was charging too much.”

The triumphant expression on Lionel’s face was slowly fading, like a deflating party balloon, as he watched me wrestle with the unwieldy drive. Now he mostly seemed watchful and wary. He edged toward the door. “You got what you need, Esme?”

I hefted the duffel over my shoulder. “Yes. Let’s go.”

We walked quickly back down the hallway toward the front door, Lionel a few steps in front of me. He seemed distracted, his eyes fixed on the filthy carpet; he didn’t even react when Desi let out a wail of frustration behindus.

“Lying bitch! You better watch out!” Desi called, her voice high-pitched and quavering, until we slammed the door behind us and couldn’t hear her scream anymore.

Outside on the sidewalk, we paused and looked at each other. The street was dark, the only light coming from an anemic streetlamp a half block away. I couldn’t quite see Lionel’s face. I stood there with the heavy duffel bag hanging awkwardly from one hand, unsure what to do next.

Lionel had his hands shoved deep in his pockets. When he spoke, his voice was soft and unsure. “Esme? Where did all that money come from? And why are you carrying around a giant hard drive?”

I looked down at the bag, realizing I’d made a critical mistake. I let go of the handle and it fell to the ground with an alarming thunk. “It’s all my father’s. I took it when I left.”

“Why?”

I tried to think fast. “I was mad at him.” It was technically the truth, I told myself, even if it wasn’t the whole story.

“Is there something important on the hard drive?”

“I honestly don’t know.”

“Oh.” I could tell that my answer was unsatisfying. Then, “Is there…anything that you want to tell me?”

My smile felt unconvincing. “About what?”

“I don’t know. It just feels like maybe you haven’t told me everything.”

There was so much I wanted to tell him. The traces of the MDMA still in my system strained toward radical honesty, a compulsion to tell him all my darkest secrets and have them met and returned with love and understanding. The previous night, when we were still kissing in the dark, it might have been possible. But twenty-four hours later, both of us depleted and sour-stomached—with only the chemical edge of the drug remaining in our bloodstream—I couldn’t muster the courage. What would he think of me if he knew who I really was, and what I had done? It wouldn’t be good. It wouldn’t be good at all.

“You know everything important about me,” I said. “Everything that truly matters about who I am. The rest is just autobiography. Details I can fill in as we go.”

And then, because it seemed the best way to stop this conversation in its tracks, I wrapped my arms around him, a move that still felt more awkward and contrived than natural to me. But his arms slid around my back, and he pulled me in so that my chest was pressed against his and my face was nestled into the crook of his shoulder. He sighed. “That’s cryptic. But OK.”

I melted into him with relief, feeling the faint pulse of his heart, his breath in my hair; I was glad I didn’t have to look him in the eyes. “You’re unlike anyone I’ve ever met,” he said, almost to himself. “It kind of freaks me out.”

“You like me,” I said into his shirt.

“I do like you.”

“I like you, too. And I know that I haven’t actually met that many people, so I’m lacking comparison points, but I think that even if I had I would still think you were special.”

“Wow, that’s a ringing endorsement.” But I could hear the smile in his voice. He pulled back and yawned. “Look, let’s get out of here before that crazy girl comes outside.”

I clutched the duffel bag as we drove back across town, the weight of its secrets heavy in my lap, my head hollowed out with exhaustion. I couldn’t help wondering if this was a Pyrrhic victory, whether the retrieval of my bag might have caused more problems than it solved. Lionel was too smart to be satisfied for long by my nonanswers. But there were so many more auspicious things to think about—the fact that I appeared to be in my first relationship, even if I didn’t yet understand the rules; the growing proximity of my mother, assuming Nicholas Redkin would be able help me; and, most of all, the return of my father’s pages, and the answers they might contain—and so I closed the door to my fears.

Better to believe that luck might last forever; better to hope that I might decide my own fate.