Zero to the Bone Page 15

  He dropped his head as though it shamed him to appear on his daughter’s doorstep, asked, “Is this a bad time?”

  “It’s never a good time.” I lacked the heart to block the door and stepped away to let him in. “Just curious, were you outside earlier this evening?”

  He nodded, said, “I was getting ready to come up when you went out for your run, then when I saw you come back I thought I should give you a little time to wash up.” He looked me up and down, edging toward the center of the room. “You sure took off like a jack rabbit outta hell. You in fighting shape?”

  “Hope I don’t need to be, but yeah, I am.”

  He smiled as though that pleased him and I half expected him to test my reflexes with a punch like he used to do when I was a tomboy, before adolescence turned me into a girl and he only tried to hit me when he was serious about doing damage. I’d never imagined him visiting me where I lived, and the sight of him in my apartment so spooked me I couldn’t have aimed a camera without shaking the lens. “I don’t keep beer around,” I said. He liked beer, one of the reasons I couldn’t stand the sight of it. “But I can pour you bourbon if you want.”

  “That would be good,” he said.

  “On the rocks, right?” I moved to the kitchen cabinets, where I pulled down two tumblers, put three cubes in his glass, one in mine. I hadn’t meant to be polite but I couldn’t think of any other way to pour myself a drink without being rude, which I also didn’t mean to be. He was looking around the room like he was lost when I turned to hand him the drink.

  “I thought you were making money.” He glanced pointedly at the stained carpet and then reached to finger the splintered edge of the kitchen counter. “Maybe you could spend a little of it to move someplace decent.”

  “Tough to find a place willing to take an ex-con with a dog.” I didn’t tell him I’d been burned out of my last apartment and the landlord would rather shoot himself than provide a reference. I pointed to the dining table, cluttered with proof sheets and camera equipment, told him to have a seat. I wanted to ask him what he thought he was doing there but I kept my mouth shut. He’d tell me soon enough.

  “Cassie told you she was coming to live with me?” He reminded me where I get my drinking habits by downing his drink in one pull. “I’m sure you don’t think that’s such a good idea.”

  I got the bourbon from the kitchen and refilled his glass, then left the bottle on the table. I didn’t answer him one way or the other. Just because he had something to say didn’t mean I did. He shook his head when the silence grew long, then stared at me for a clean sweep of the second hand, but he’d come to me for a reason and the days had long passed when he could force me to do anything. I finished my drink and poured another, just enough ice left in the glass to cool the bourbon.

  “She needs family and she doesn’t have any other choices,” he said, watching me as carefully as I watched him. “Her stepfather? He’s in prison, the no-good son of a bitch. From what Cassie tells me, he’s not the kind of man wants to raise a kid anyway.” He pointed his glass to the futon-couch on the floor of the living room and the bareness of the walls. “You’ll admit this isn’t a good environment for a kid, if you could take her, and the way I understand things, you’re a single woman with a criminal record, you can’t. Don’t take offense now. I’m just tellin’ the truth.”

  “Why do you want her?”

  “She’s my granddaughter,” he said, astonished at the question.

  “Her mother was your daughter and you didn’t want her. I’m still your daughter and you don’t want me either.”

  “That’s not true. I may have been hard but I—”

  “You don’t like kids,” I said, cutting him off. “You liked us well enough when we were too small to rebel. I’d even go so far as to say you weren’t a terrible father, except for those moments you lost your temper. It didn’t help that you lost your temper at least once every damn day.”

  He shrugged his shoulders, said, “Mary, I’m not here to—”

  I banged the bottom of my glass on the table. Mary was the name I’d been born under, Mary Baker, a name I’d changed long ago. “My name’s Nina,” I said. “Call me by my name.”

  As we glared at each other over the table I watched the pupils of his eyes compress to pinpoints of rage, and I began the count to a beating I’d learned in childhood. I planted my feet on the floor and squared to face what had always followed his rage, as inevitable as the gravity behind a falling rock, but instead his eyes dulled and the rage subsided.

  “Okay. Nina,” he said, without irony.

  “Cassie is fifteen years old. When Sharon was fifteen you slapped her around so much she ran away.” My hands flew in unfettered gestures, hands that normally lay quiet no matter how great my agitation. “You did the same thing to me; the minute my body started to change you changed, too. Not that you didn’t hit us when we were younger. Of course you did. But the way you hit us changed. You hit us like you really meant it. You hit us like you used to hit Mom.”

  “You think you’re the only one who got smacked a little when you were young?” He wiped his eyes. No tears there. Just frustration. “My dad beat hell out of me when I was growing up.”

  “And that makes it right,” I said. No comment. Just said it flat.

  “No, damn it, it doesn’t make it right, but it makes it what it is. I turn on the damn TV and all I hear is somebody whinin’ about how much they suffered because their daddy did this or their momma did that and nobody loved ’em enough when they was growin’ up. In the end it doesn’t make a damn bit of difference, you play the hand you’re dealt with, you just play it out, and sometimes you look back and you don’t like the way you’ve played it, don’t like the way you’ve done some things and it’s too damn bad.” He stared down at his hands cupped around the glass, machinist’s hands cross-hatched with scars blackened by grease that never washed entirely clean.

  Cut open his chest, I imagine his heart looked the same way.

  “I didn’t mean to be hurtful,” he said, staring at his hands. “Sharon, I could never figure out how to handle her and so I did what I was trained to do, what I’d been told was the right way to raise kids, the way I’d been raised myself. When she started acting up I beat hell out of her. And you’re right, I got harder on you when you turned teenagers, because the consequences in life change when you stop being a child. It’s a lot easier to screw up your life at sixteen than nine.”

  “Sharon, she turned prostitute at sixteen and died a violent death before her fortieth birthday. All that beating, it sure stopped her from screwing up her life, didn’t it?”

  “I couldn’t figure out how to do it any different.” He blinked rapidly, as though dirt had been thrown into his eyes. “I thought she was just bad, she woulda turned out the same way no matter what I did. I knew I had a temper. Of course I knew that. I lost my temper and did some things I was sorry for, even then. But then both you and your brother, you grew up pulling in harness and so I thought I was doing things right. Sure, you were headstrong and didn’t always mind but damn it you didn’t give me one-quarter the trouble Sharon did. You were a good girl, right up until the time you snapped, went crazy on the world.”

  “What did you do then, Pop?” I asked.

  He pulled his head back and shook it, confused.

  “What did I do?” he repeated.

  “I was a good girl.” I stood from the table and backed toward the kitchen counter, taking deep breaths in a vain attempt to calm down. The Rott whined, like he sometimes did when I raged around the apartment. “I couldn’t even breathe in the house without worrying you were going to lose your temper and start hitting someone. Of course you thought I was being good. You tie somebody up, stick a gun in their face and tell them to be quiet, you know what? They’re going to keep their mouth shut. You keep someone that way their whole life, you think they’re gonna have any idea who the hell they are? Of course you thought I was good. You thought I was goo
d because I wasn’t even there! The person you were looking at? That wasn’t me. That was a hostage, a hostage to your rage and my fear.”

  “Mary—I mean Nina—I think you should—”

  “Shut up!” I shouted, and the Rott barked in response. “You know the worst thing about it? About being held hostage like that? I actually loved you for it. Every day I breathed I knew I was alive because you decided you weren’t going to kill me. And I felt grateful. I learned little ways to please you, things to say and do that would calm you enough so that you wouldn’t hurt me or somebody else. Sometimes those little things didn’t work and you beat somebody, but once you’d hurt us good you’d stop and then I’d be grateful again because I knew it could have been worse, a lot worse. When you gave me a split lip I saw that as you being merciful because you could’ve broken my neck.”

  I walked to the bottle and refilled his glass first, then mine. Maybe he was smarter than I gave him credit for. Maybe he knew what I needed to do. Because he didn’t move. Not even after I poured his drink. He stared forward and down, at a fixed point on the table just beyond his hands.

  “No wonder I went a little loco, eh?” I drank the bourbon I’d poured and made sure to leave the glass on the table when I backed again to the kitchen counter. I knew myself well enough not to leave a weapon like that in my hands. “This gets us back to the original question. What did you do? When I stopped being your good little girl and started to become the person I am. When I lost control of my life, my self, my anger.”

  He glanced from the fixed spot in front of his hands, looking like he didn’t know the answer or was too afraid or ashamed to say. I waited, a step away from flinging open the door and throwing him out.

  “Everybody sins and is sinned against in this world.” He let go of his drink and turned in his chair to face me head on. “I sinned against you and I’m sorry for that. I ask for your forgiveness.”

  “I can’t give it that fast. I’m sorry, I just can’t. One apology doesn’t change years of abuse. And one apology doesn’t mean you’ve changed.”

  “I’m not going to insult you by claiming I’ve changed. But I’ve learned some things about myself these past months, since your mother died. Those things I’ve learned, they don’t change who I am, but I don’t see myself the way I used to. I’ve lost my pig-headed certainty about some things. I’ve changed that, at least. I used to think I was the strong one in the family.” He lifted the glass to his mouth and breathed the whiskey before he drank it. “I was a real tough son of a bitch, the toughest guy on the street for thirty years straight, smacking around your mother and anyone else I felt like. What could be tougher than that?”

  He looked at the palm of his right hand like he’d never seen it before and slapped himself so hard the bourbon splashed from his glass. I stepped quickly back, startled by the speed of the blow, and before I reached the kitchen counter he pulled his right hand into a fist and punched himself in the face, his neck snapping to the side with such force that he spun off his chair, the glass rolling from his hand onto the carpet. “Damn me,” he said and hit himself in the face again, a left hook this time, then followed it with a right cross and another left, chanting “Damn me,” with each blow, hitting himself the way he’d taught me to hit others, in a timed combination of punches, each one setting up the more devastating blow to follow, cursing himself as he hit his face again and again, the beast in him finally eating itself with the same brutality it had devoured others.

  A good daughter would have rushed to stop him.

  I let him go.

  He stopped beating himself and wept, hiding his red and swelling face in the crook of his elbow. “I’m not so tough after all,” he said. Blood streamed from a ring-cut above his right eye. “Your mother, she was the tough one in the family. All those years, she stuck it out. We had ourselves some good times, I’m not saying we didn’t, and she knew I loved her. But I wasn’t worth the spit in her mouth, the way I treated her. She could have left me but she didn’t.” He pulled the bloodied sleeve from his face and stared at me. “Why didn’t she? Do you know?”

  “No, I don’t,” I said.

  I got rubbing alcohol and bandages from the medicine cabinet.

  17

  LONG AFTER THE alarm rang the next morning I remained in bed, my limbs like sand and blood, so heavy not even the Rott’s nudging licks could rouse me. I counted the drinks I’d consumed the night before, thinking I might be suffering from a hangover, but I’d stopped drinking at three shots of bourbon, and even though I knew the world was not a fair place, I’d never suffered the indignity of a hangover without a good drunk preceding it. If what I felt was the effects of a hangover, it was a strange one, my breasts so tender they felt like they’d spent the night at a soccer match, playing the ball. I rolled into a sitting position and told the Rott to leave me alone while I summoned the energy to stand. My breasts always hurt the day before my period. I stumbled into the bathroom to flush my face with cold water.

  The events of the day before still echoed through my head and I winced through a series of self-recriminations as I recalled the visit from Pop. Maybe my fatigue came not from an abuse of alcohol but an abuse of emotions, my hangover emotional rather than physical. Pop had left the apartment with neither my blessing nor my condemnation of his plan to bring Cassie to live with him. Most people would not consider a grown man beating the crap out of himself to be a successful demonstration of fitness to care for his granddaughter, but it convinced me of the depth of his pain and the sincerity of his remorse in a way that words never could. Pop was a man of action more than words. I trusted what he did more than what he said. I’d never seen him weak before and though it disturbed me, it didn’t frighten me nearly as much as when he abused his strength. Cassie was going to move in with him no matter what I said. She was far tougher than I’d been at her age. I decided I’d roll with it. Maybe after the first few weeks she’d be the one beating Pop.

  And what was Sean’s kiss about? I dragged through the morning rituals of face, toilet, teeth, and hair wondering what he’d meant by it. He knew involvement with me was career suicide but he put the gun to his head anyway. Sean had worked undercover, Frank said. Most police officers lead dual lives, the often brutal world of law enforcement balanced with the more tender necessities of family life. Undercover officers added another layer of complexity, working and partying with those they intended to arrest. Maybe Sean was working undercover even now and the kiss had been given to inspire false trust. Deception was probably part of his nature. Sure, that’s a good trait to have in a boyfriend. Based on my love history, Sean was just my type of guy.

  Whoever drove the PT Cruiser I’d seen at the Starbal estate the day before was even slower than I to get started and it wasn’t until midmorning that I spotted the car rolling down the hill from Trousdale Estates. I ordered the Rott to the floor and pulled out behind, pitching down onto Sunset Strip two cars back in the flow of traffic. The driver wasn’t in much of a hurry. The Whiskey A-Go-Go slipped by on the left, Book Soup drifted past on the right; two blocks later the driver wheeled left and parked in the lot behind Sunset Plaza. I made him as the guy I’d seen at Christine’s funeral when he stepped out of his car. I swung around to the back of the lot and parked. He locked the Cruiser and ambled across the lot, dressed in baggy jeans, red sweatshirt, and blue bucket hat.

  Sunset Plaza is a favorite haunt of celebrities slumming incognito, a mile-long stretch of high-rent boutiques where the traffic on Sunset gears down to gawk and tables and chairs spill on to the sidewalk from ersatz European cafés with Beverly Hills prices. I played tourist with a telephoto lens and snapped a few shots at a safe distance. The green-and-beige awning of a Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf franchise hung over the sidewalk midblock. When the guy veered beneath it, I bagged the Nikon and followed him in.

  I took a sidewalk table near the door and watched him order at the counter, wondering why he’d risked attending Christine’s funeral if he’d
been complicit in her death. Maybe his father’s wealth, fame, and power gave him a natural immunity against fear. His size didn’t match that of the assailant captured in the video. He better fit my image of the voyeur, the shadow flitting across the corner of the frame or the eye behind the camera. Or maybe he’d met Christine in a club, enjoyed a brief romance that he’d never fully given up, and now mourned her as his great, unrequited love. Maybe his resemblance to the man Charlotte McGregor had described at Starbucks was coincidence. The only way I’d find out was to ask. When he carried his coffee and a slice of cake to a dark corner table, I strapped my bag to the back of the chair across and asked if he minded sharing the table.

  He checked me out, his eyes dilated and his smile tilting so dangerously over his perfectly dentisted teeth I thought it might fall off, an expression made even goofier by the bucket hat. Beneath his lower lip he was trying to grow a soul patch, and his blonde hair drifted toward his shoulder a little too unevenly, as though he’d instructed his hair stylist to give him a cut that made him look like he wasn’t getting haircuts. He wasn’t a bad-looking kid, just a little vacant, and I thought he’d probably been smoking something that morning that explained his appetite for chocolate cake.

  “You’re Stewart Starbal, right?”

  He nodded, said, “Sure, whatever, sit down.”

  He reacted to things with the offbeat timing of someone going through life on a two-second time delay. He still didn’t have a clue what I was doing there and was just stoned enough not to care.

  “You don’t recognize me,” I said.