Little Known Facts A Novel - By Christine Sneed Page 0,18
was born a few miles up the road in Lake Bluff. We met during our junior year at USC, and when a year and a half later I was accepted into UCLA’s medical school and was about to finish that first caffeine-fueled semester with high marks, we decided to get married, which we did in downtown L.A. at the city hall, one of Renn’s fraternity brothers and his girlfriend our witnesses. Renn was starting to get roles by then, ones that paid. He was twenty-two and very handsome and so naturally charming that if I had been a little smarter, I would have seen how impossible it would be to keep him from attracting the kind of friends, both male and female, with money and foreign cars and sailboats and, in one case, a private plane, who would tell him not to limit himself, to experience all that he could of life because who knew? Tomorrow he might die. Or even later that same day. What did anyone really know of fate? Carpe diem, gather ye rosebuds, etc. etc.
I hated fate, I told him more than once, barely able to tolerate these new, fashionably blasé friends who couldn’t stand me, the inconvenient wife, either—capable medical student or no, I was heavy baggage. Fate was a con, a fool’s game. There was only life, one day after the other. Then death, of course. Things happened, and no one could predict them. By then, I had seen hematomas in three-month-old babies. I had seen two-year-olds dying of leukemia while their mothers almost managed to overdose on barbiturates in the parking lot outside the hospital. We had an earthquake or two, gas shortages, bad air, wildfires, whales beaching themselves and dying three hundred miles up the coast. We also eventually had two perfectly healthy children, miraculous creatures that I couldn’t and sometimes still can’t believe Renn and I created out of nothing but two fifteen-minute acts in a darkened bedroom, an act repeated millions of times over throughout the country on any given day. We were hardly original in anything we did, but for a while it all felt so fraught and urgent and specific.
Today, December twelfth, would have been our thirtieth wedding anniversary. My daughter called this morning, sweetly apologetic but unable to resist saying that she had noticed this would-be milestone too. My son has not called, nor do I expect him to. He doesn’t always remember my birthday, or his sister’s, or his own, from what I can tell. Am I embarrassed or irritated with myself for continuing to observe, so to speak, the anniversary of my failed marriage? Not really. It is simply a fact of my life, like the myopia I have lived with since junior high, the knobby knees, the forgetful son.
“Dad’s back in New Orleans,” Anna informed me, even though I hadn’t asked if she knew where he was. “He had to reshoot a couple of scenes for Bourbon at Dusk.”
“I bet he’s just thrilled about that. Have you seen him recently?”
“A few weeks ago,” she said. “I thought I told you that he was in town for a couple of days before he went up to Seattle to visit the guy who’s doing the sound track.”
“Why didn’t he hire a musician in New Orleans?”
“This guy is from Louisiana, I guess, but after Katrina, he moved to Seattle. I think he still has a place down there though.” She paused. “When’s the last time you talked to him?”
“I don’t know. Over the summer, I suppose.” I could hear strangers’ voices in the background and wind hurling itself against Anna’s phone. She was probably on break outside the hospital where she and her classmates are doing clinicals.
“Have you talked to Billy this week?” she asked.
“I called him a couple of days ago, but he hasn’t called me back yet.”
“He and Danielle broke up.” She sounded embarrassed, as if she had something to do with it. Since childhood, she has had the unfortunate tendency of taking deeply to heart other people’s mistakes or bad luck, but I suppose it is also this impulse that influenced her decision to become a doctor.
“Oh, no. Why? Was it his decision or hers?”
“Hers. He’s such a bonehead.”
I was very disappointed to hear this. From the beginning, I liked Danielle; she has always seemed honest and kind and not the type of person who wanted Billy only because of his money or his connection to his father’s celebrity. At twenty-six, my son is