talked on the phone. She said she was sorry, that she shouldn’t have yelled, that she wasn’t mad at me and understood why I’d moved out. She’d been offered a lucrative job painting stenciled images and signage for a large women’s and children’s hospital in Los Angeles, which meant she’d be gone most of the time for a month or so and we wouldn’t see each other, but we’d continue to talk at night.
When she returned, she would start making canvas stick-on animals for the walls of children’s rooms. A hospital nearby hired her to do stenciled murals covering the walls of several rooms, and for another hospital she was hired to paint trees with stenciled donor names on the fruit. She hired an assistant to help with the larger projects, and they worked together in her converted garage, playing the Cranberries, Talking Heads, Paul Simon, Ladysmith Black Mambazo.
My parents would see each other around town occasionally, at Country Sun or Whole Foods. I heard about these encounters from my mother, who didn’t relish running into him, but reported that they’d been kind to each other, saying hello or mentioning something about me, or him asking her to say hello to Tina.
Tina and my mother were still friends, and they sometimes had breakfast at Joanie’s Cafe on California Avenue. When I asked how Tina was doing, my mother said that my father had been calling her ten or twenty times a day, leaving messages on her answering machine about wanting to get back together.
One morning my father read the newspaper and then sang “This Old Man” to my brother, identifying the paddy-whacked part and rolling my brother’s hands for the dog and the bone, my brother squirming to get free.
Laurene left the kitchen to change clothes for an aerobics class; my father stopped playing with Reed for a moment and looked at me.
“Hey,” he said, “how do you think Tina’s doing?” He had begun to ask about Tina when the two of us were alone, or alone with Reed, asking each time like it was the first time, as if the question had just occurred to him. It soon became the only topic, then, that he spoke with me about directly, making me feel important, so that even though it made me feel furtive, I also liked it.
“I think she’s doing okay,” I said. I didn’t let on that I knew about the phone calls, or that I understood that his question was less about Tina and more about himself. I knew too much. I didn’t want to give him so much information that he stopped asking. I felt a strange and wonderful power; knowing about Tina I was useful to him, even if I was disloyal, and sneaky.
“I really miss her,” he said.
When Laurene returned, we played with Reed in the kitchen and made lunch. My father left the room and returned with his camera, the big-lensed, expensive camera no one else was allowed to touch. I wanted to be in the pictures he took. I wanted it with an unseemly desperation.
I also wished to be my brother instead of myself. It didn’t matter if I had to give up my life until now because that was nothing. The way I imagined it, this would not be death but just, lucky me, I get to be him, this time born right. I could imagine the exhilaration. The wish was more powerful than any wish I’d felt before, and had an unfamiliar, urgent force, and because of this difference from ordinary life, I believed in some small way that it could happen. I searched my palms for a hint of when or how.
“Lisa, step aside,” he said, in a business voice, holding his camera in front of his eye, the lens like a marble or a deep, still pool.
I jumped toward the sink, out of the frame. From behind him, I continued to coax my brother to smile, so my father wouldn’t know it hurt.
“Lis can come in, Steve,” Laurene said. She held her hand out to me. “C’mon, Lis.” I went to stand beside her. I was so grateful to her it made me shake.
Early one morning Laurene took me with her on a trip with the Audubon Society. We rode in a van full of people to a nature preserve, with thin, tall trees on either side of a sand path, birds moving the branches.
A few days later, my father came into my room. He was distraught, pacing.
“What