The Paramour's Daughter Read online

  My daughter called when I was in Produce trying to figure out how many raw ones it would take to make one quart of cooked, whipped sweet potatoes.

  “Mom,” Casey greeted me with her usual exuberance. “Is it okay with you if my roommate, Zia, comes with us to Gran’s?”

  “It’s fine with me, but you need to ask Gran,” I said.

  “I did, she’s fine with it.”

  She told me she and Zia were already on their way from their campus residence hall to my house and had picked up some Indian food for dinner, as arranged. Asking for my approval was only a courtesy, a point of information for me; they were adults, over eighteen, and didn’t need permission for most things.

  Casey, a sophomore, my ballerina since she was a very little girl, had stretched up to a full six feet in height by the beginning of the fall school quarter, an inch taller than she had been at the end of her freshman year. During the summer a much-shorter male partner failed to assay a lift and dropped her, and Casey’s ankle was broken. The fracture healed quickly, but her future plans had not yet re-knit, as it were. There aren’t very many six-foot ballerinas for good reason; male dancers tend to be small. I hoped she was seriously rethinking her major.

  I was headed toward checkout when Gnarly Jaws came looking for me. He introduced himself, Ray Valdez, told me that he was a Los Angeles County Sheriff’s deputy moonlighting by doing private security. He said he had known my husband, Mike. Valdez offered his condolences. Everyone seemed to know Mike, or had heard about him. Eight months after Mike’s passing, I was still getting sympathy cards.

  Valdez took the handle of my cart and walked beside me. He was Hollywood-dark-and-handsome, could have been recruited for the Sheriffs straight out of Central Casting. Quite a few local cops, LAPD and Sheriffs alike, have part-time gigs in Hollywood as actors, extras, screenwriters, advisors and security because they are buff and smart and willing, and the pay can be good. Most have some sort of college degree or certificate, and they take seriously the local police culture of fitness; I have yet to meet a doughnut-eating young cop.

  “Sorry you were bothered, Miss MacGowen,” Valdez said. “That lady’s been hanging around the plaza off-and-on for about a week now, mostly just sitting on the patio drinking coffee. You’re the first person I’ve seen her accost.”

  “Lucky me,” I said.

  “Yeah.” He had a worried furrow between his heavy brows as he studied me. “You said you don’t know her?”

  “Correct, I don’t,” I said. “Never saw her before.”

  “She says she’s your mother.”

  “So she does,” I said, smiling up at Valdez. “I hope she isn’t expecting me for Thanksgiving dinner tomorrow because I already have plans. At my mother’s house.”

  He nodded, relaxed visibly when it was clear that the parking lot dustup hadn’t been a family squabble, smiled enough to show his dimples. “Holidays always seem to set off the wackos. I think ‘Jingle Bells’ channels secret messages to them.”

  Indeed, Christmas music was already streaming through the market’s speakers, an endless loop that would last through New Year’s Day. Drive a sane person over the edge after a while.

  “Woman just had a notion.” He actually winked at me. “Somewhere out there, there’s a fruitcake missing one of its nuts.”

  Valdez helped me unload my groceries onto the checkout conveyor. Too obviously casual about it, he said, “She called you Marguerite. Is Maggie short for Marguerite?”

  “I suppose it could be,” I said. “But that isn’t my name.”

  “But Maggie is short for something else?”

  “It is,” I said.

  He was thoughtful for a moment before he asked, “So, what is your real name? You know, like your whole name.”

  “My whole name?”

  He nodded, watching me intently, as cops do, always looking for the “tell.”

  “Keep it between us, but my real whole name is Margot Eugenie Louise-Marie Duchamps MacGowen Flint.” I caught him grinning. “You said, the whole name.”

  He laughed softly. “Margot, then, not Marguerite. That’s where you get Maggie.”

  “Yep.” I put a quart of non-fat milk on the conveyor. “Margot.”

  “That’s a lot of names for one little baby,” he said, just being conversational, or a typical nosy cop. Who knew?

  “I wondered if my parents had planned to have a big family, stopped with me, and just gave me all the girls’ names they had left over.”

  “You an only child, then?”

  “No.” I’d had to pause before answering the question. “Older brother and sister, twins actually. But they’re both gone. My brother died at the very end of the Vietnam War—I was just a little kid when it happened. My sister, Emily—”

  “You said, Duchamps.” He froze clutching a head of lettuce in his big hand, and stared at me, studied me. I nodded. “Emily Duchamps? Dr. Emily Duchamps?”

  I looked up into his face. “Did you know her?”

  “No, not really. I met her. The Doc spoke to my Academy class about some things to watch for, to protect ourselves against, when we went into people’s houses, different diseases. She’d go into the projects looking for kids with measles and TB, all alone. The worst of the hell holes, Jordan Downs, Nickerson Gardens—cops won’t go in there alone, but she did. Unarmed.” He relinquished the lettuce to the conveyor and picked up a bag of apples. “I was a rookie when...” He paused, wouldn’t look at me. Seemed at a loss for the right words.

  “When she was shot,” I said. “No one in the projects ever bothered Emily. But an old friend, well, that was different.”

  “I remember.” He nodded. “That’s the way it usually goes down, someone you know. God, Dr. Duchamps was your sister? I hadn’t put that together.”

  Was I an only child? No. Last one standing? Sadly, yes.

  Seemed Valdez was going to stick close to me until I made it safely out of the parking lot. If that was the case, we were going to talk about something other than my sister Emily.

  “Thanks for your help,” I said, running my debit card through the scanner. “What’s going to happen to that woman?”

  “Nothing.” Valdez shrugged one beefy shoulder. “We removed her from the premises, and that’s all we legally can do. She didn’t show a weapon or threaten anyone, so that’s it. We’ll escort you to your car when you’re finished here and make sure you get out of the lot.”

  I thanked him again.

  He took the handle of the cart and walked me outside. Making small talk, ever nosy, he asked, “So, who is MacGowen?”

  “Ex-husband.”

  He seemed to take note of the answer.

  Incident over, crazy woman banished, groceries safely loaded in the car, I drove out of the lot onto the side access road, Webb Way, named for Jack Webb I was told once, and stopped at the intersection with PCH for the light to change so that I could cross. I planned to continue up Webb Way, the first leg of the locals’ secret back way to access Malibu Canyon Road, my route home.

  The night was clear and chilly, almost wintery by Southern California standards, maybe fifty degrees. On the far side of PCH, in a vacant corner field, workers were stringing up lights for a Christmas tree lot that would open on Friday morning. A truckload of trees had already arrived and was waiting to be unloaded.

  Seeing the trees, this opening salvo for the holidays ahead, I was surprised by a sudden welling of sadness; maybe it was only fatigue, let-down from the day. And I missed Mike. I even missed his feigned Bah-humbug routine. Mike loved the holiday season, no matter how hard he tried to pretend he didn’t.

  I took a deep breath, flipped on a Diana Krall CD, Live in Paris, as a holiday antidote, and opened the moon roof so that I would be able to see the stars as I drove away from the glittery, crowded coast and up into the wilds of the Santa Monica Mountains to the canyon where I lived.

  I averted my eyes from the tree lot. And that’s when I saw her again, standing kne
e-deep in dry scrub at the edge of the vacant field directly across the highway, watching me. She took a step toward the road when our eyes met. I saw a narrow gap in the oncoming traffic between a delivery van and a Maserati, put my foot on the accelerator and blew through the light, slipped through the hole, squealed into a left turn and sped away.

  2

  Casey and Zia had brought home enough Indian food to feed a regiment. Potato samosas, murgh makhani, chicken tikka, and vegetable korma, all of it seasoned to vindaloo heat. We tamed the fire with sweet, milky iced tea and cold beer.

  We ate in the kitchen to keep an eye on the sweet potato mousse baking in the oven. Listening to the girls talk about classes, friends, end-of-quarter finals that were only a few weeks ahead, I felt like a spectator at a tennis match, head turning from Casey to Zia and back again. Now and then I chimed in, but was thoroughly happy to just listen to them deliver snapshots of their life at school. Casey and I had always been very close, and suddenly she was having a life separate from my own except around its edges. I was happy that she had adjusted so well, and I missed her very much.

  Children grow and develop in spurts. They seem to go to bed one night a scuffed-knee kid and wake up in the morning an emergent, gazelle-like adolescent. Casey suddenly, and recently, seemed to have made another of those leaps, this time fully into adulthood. Altogether, it seemed to me, she was more substantial than she had been when I deposited her at her dorm in October, six weeks earlier. I had seen her several times since, but I hadn’t noticed the change until that night. The contours of her face had new definition, her body seemed sturdier, less elfin. Less ballerina.

  But there was more to it. Casey’s conversation with Zia, a junior, an economics major, was sophisticated, informed, inquisitive, as any parent of a university student would hope it would be. She was still my baby, but when I wasn’t watching, she had become a grown-up.

  I put my hand on one of the well-defined biscuits of her biceps. I said, “You pumping iron?”

  She nodded with some enthusiasm and quickly swallowed a mouthful of something so she could speak. “The physical therapist I’ve been seeing since I got the cast off my ankle got me into weights to build strength again in my legs, but I’ve also been working on core strength and shoulders.”

  “She has a crush on her therapist,” Zia offered, grinning wickedly as she mopped up yogurt sauce on her plate with a piece of naan.

  “Who wouldn’t?” Casey’s face brightened, but she didn’t blush. “He’s amazing.”

  “But he’s like, thirty,” the roommate added, winking at me, teasing.

  “Old,” I said, passing the chicken tikka to Zia.

  “And very married,” Casey added, and with a wave of her hand aimed in Zia’s direction, she dismissed the man as a romantic possibility. “He introduced me to one of his other patients, a setter on the women’s volleyball team. He says I’m a natural for volleyball.”

  “Oh?” My straight line.

  “Let’s face it, Mom.” She leaned toward me. “I’m too tall for ballet. But I’m perfect for volleyball. I’m strong, I’m quick, and Lord knows I can jump. I met the women’s volleyball coach and she invited me to work out with the team. I’m not eligible to play this season, but I can get ready for spring tryouts.”

  “What about dance?” I asked, thinking about the scholarship that was helping with tuition.

  “I’ll always love dance—it’s been my life since I was a little girl—but I can’t make a career out of it. I’ve always known that.”

  “Have you?” The word “always” was a surprise to me.

  “You keep telling me I need a backup plan.” She grinned at me, a wiseass grin. “I listen to you, Mom, I listen. Really.”

  “What is your backup, assuming that it’s other than volleyball?” I asked.

  “I’ve been thinking maybe sports medicine.”

  Zia turned to me. “Told you the therapist is good-looking.”

  “Oh, he’s gorgeous,” Casey affirmed. “And he’s also really, really smart. He says that sports medicine and physical therapy have been built around the male athlete, and that model doesn’t always serve women athletes. There are so many more women athletes all the time. I’m thinking about aiming for medical school.”

  “Have you considered the coursework?” I asked. “Anatomy, physiology, biology, chemistry.”

  “She aced all her gen-ed science courses,” Zia said. “Straight A’s. I hate her.”

  “They aren’t that tough,” Casey said.

  “You’re your grandfather’s girl, after all. He’d have been awfully proud to have another doctor in the family.” We clinked glasses. Casey told Zia about her Aunt Emily, a public health physician.

  I was reminded how much alike Casey and Emily were in both build and intellect. As I listened to the girls’ conversation, in my head I was doing some rough math. A minimum of six more years of college tuition. I kissed off any notion I might have harbored after my meeting at the studio earlier in the day of returning to independent film production. I hoped Uncle Max, my agent, could pull something out of a hat for me if necessary, if my current gig crapped out on me.

  “I’ve had the cast off my leg for three weeks,” Casey said. “Reggie says that if I keep up physical therapy and keep my ankle taped, it’s safe to work out with the volleyball team.”

  “Reggie?” I asked, looking with wonder at this metamorphosed creature sitting at my kitchen table.

  “Oh, Mom,” Casey said, shaking her head at my naïveté with good-natured tolerance that bordered on patronization. There are times when parents, too, grow older in spurts.

  Before dawn, my bedside clock radio, set to the local morning news station, stirred me from a beautiful, deep sleep. I lingered under the warm comforter long enough to hear the weather and traffic reports: roads were clear, skies were clear, all systems were go for our drive north to Berkeley.

  When I walked downstairs, I could hear Casey and Zia talking in the kitchen. I dropped my duffel of weekend essentials beside the front door and, before joining the girls, stopped at the tall living room windows to wait for the first light of morning to reach the mountainside on the far side of the canyon below us.

  My house was in a small enclave that jutted like a thumb of habitation into the open lands of the Santa Monica Mountains Conservancy. There were twelve houses built up the steep face and nestled among the folds of a craggy mountainside. We were about halfway between Pacific Coast Highway in Malibu and the Ventura Freeway that bisects the San Fernando Valley, an acceptable commute to my studio in Burbank, but light years away from the clatter of greater Los Angeles that surrounded us. Coyotes, owls and red-tailed hawks kept the rodent population in check; deer ate my roses. It was a magnificent, unspoiled oasis only a few miles from the wilds of the big city and its own set of predators.

  Out in the yard, our trail horses began to stir in the corral we shared with the neighbor, Early Drummond, a co-worker of mine. I could only see their outlines against the dark as they moved about: Rover, my quarter horse, a rodeo circuit washout; Red, Mike’s big old roan; and Early’s feisty gelding, Duke, argued over access to the water trough, position at the rail, and anything else that occurred to them to fuss about. When the lights on Early’s front stairs snapped on, they suddenly went still, hopeful that he was coming down to feed them.

  For one moment, the living room was awash in the soft blue glow that immediately precedes dawn. The sky gradually turned rose and then, suddenly, as I watched, the first flames of sunlight lit the ridgetops on the far side of the canyon; the deep canyon bottom would remain dark for another hour. Heavy coastal fog spilled over the tops of the jagged peaks, white and puffy and beautiful like the foam on the face of breaking ocean waves. The dawn alone made the challenges of living perched in an aerie worthwhile.

  I looked up at the sky, deep blue now, and thought about the beautiful life Mike and I had worked so hard to make for each other.

  “Mom?” I tur
ned and saw Casey framed in the light from the kitchen. “You okay?”

  “Yes, of course.”

  “You were so still.”

  “Morning ritual,” I said, shrugging off a sudden chill as I walked across the room to accept the mug of coffee she held out to me. “You ladies ready to rumble?”

  “We are.” She was watching me closely, as she had since Mike died. Looking for what, evidence of my imminent collapse? I’d been through some very rough passages over the past eight months, but I thought the worst was over. My real concern was for Casey. She had shouldered too much loss already for someone her age. Some years ago, her father left us to start a new family—that order isn’t accurate; the new family was already started before he announced his departure—and never made room for her in his new life. Then, in short order, she lost her beloved grandfather and Mike. I thought that she kept her eye on me because she was afraid she would lose me, too.

  Zia, leaning against a kitchen counter hunched over a mug of coffee, stifled a yawn before she said, “Good morning. God, it’s early.”

  The kitchen radio continued the weather and traffic reports I’d been listening to upstairs. It is foolhardy to head out onto Southern California freeways without first locating the hazards and mapping alternate routes, especially on a holiday. There was a report of a fender-bender on the Hollywood Freeway near Cahuenga Boulevard, a big rig overturned somewhere in Orange County; our route was still clear.

  As I took the sweet potato mousse out of the refrigerator and bent to put it into the ice chest we were taking with us, through my own morning fog and something Casey was saying about plans to meet friends in San Francisco on Friday, I heard the radio announcer say the word “Malibu” and paused, held up my hand to interrupt Casey.