4. Nicola
Nicola
There’s a spot about a block away from the school and the carpool lines where I wait for Emmy.
With the windows down, I lean my head back and see if I can will the thumping sensation in my temple to slow down.
I close my eyes for what feels like a second and listen to the distant traffic coming from Wilshire—horns honking, laughter, rap music from someone’s car.
I grip the wheel, my white knuckles reminding me of how I didn’t drive after the accident for three whole months.
I wouldn’t even get in a car. Our Range Rover sat there, deteriorating and collecting dust. On street sweeping days, Emmy would make sure it was parked properly, taking my keys gingerly from the glass dish in the kitchen and heading out silently to move it from the Monday spot to the Tuesday spot, and then back again.
Part of it was my leg. The other part was that I couldn’t be in a vehicle, couldn’t think about hearing the sound of the engine, the pull of the tires along the asphalt. The speed. The power.
“You’re, like, going backwards,” Emmy said that day.
I agreed with her, though I hadn’t expected her to notice.
I was backsliding, more aptly, into a version of myself maybe I’d never been before.
Alone. Without Ben. Without anyone, really—except my kid.
And that day weighing on me created the sense that my life now was a heavy recurring nightmare from which I could never awake.
A knock on my passenger side door makes me bolt upright. It’s Emmy. My hands fumble for the lock, and I sit up, heavy with the second Imitrex I took coming out of Dr. Constance’s office.
I remove some snacks I took from the Club Level from her seat, and Emmy slides in, cramming her legs with her backpack. Her face is sullen.
“How was your first day?”
She stares at the floor, her breaths even but heavy. “Pretty lame overall.” A hand reaches up to her head, and she winces. “My head hurts.”
I reach for my purse in the back and pull out a couple of ibuprofens from the little red pouch where I keep all my emergency pills and offer them to her.
She frowns. “No, the strong ones.”
“Are you sure?” I ask her.
She nods slowly. “It’s bad today.”
“Okay, baby.” With careful, even motion, I reach out and touch the ends of her dark, curly hair, and she flinches. From my red pouch, I dig out a single tramadol and hand it to her. “Lots of water, okay?”
She nods and downs the single pill, then settles into her seat.
“We’d better get some food into you now,” I add.
“Sure, whatever,” she says sleepily. The last time Emmy took the pill on an empty stomach, she vomited for hours.
“How about In-N-Out?”
“Okay,” she answers.
“Eat the granola bar in the meantime, okay?”
“Mom, chill. It’s like five minutes away.”
It’s more like fifteen, but I don’t argue.
I put the car in gear and release the brake. I turn to glance at her as we make a left and turn toward Wilshire.
“Em, talk to me,” I try. “Tell me what you did today.”
Emmy shrugs. Her little body hunkers down into the seat so she’s hardly visible from the exterior. “Normal stuff. Went to class. At lunch, some girls were talking about me, but whatever.”
Her hand instinctively reaches up and lightly touches the scar on the left side of her head, the pink-brown skin, new, still settling. It will be months before the scar fades and the skin smoothens out completely.
“What were they saying?”
“Stupid stuff. Like we’re poor, and I need new shoes.”
“What the hell?” My voice is high-pitched, scratchy. I clear my throat, trying to remain calm. “Why would they say that?”
My daughter releases a little grunt. “Maybe because I do, Mom. Okay? I mean, when is the last time we went shopping?”
A note of guilt sings up from the center of my chest. She’s right, of course. I try to picture the last time Emmy and I were shopping together, and I can’t. I don’t even remember.
“We can go tonight if you want …”
Emmy perks up a little. “Yeah? ”
“Yeah. Why don’t we grab some food and go get you some shoes?”
“From where?”
I sigh audibly, knowing the next argument we’ll have, but I say it anyway. “Why don’t we try one of those trendy thrift stores?”
“Oh, God. Mom, are you serious?” Emmy faces away from me, staring out the window as we pull onto South Beverly, with its high corner buildings catching the afternoon sun.
Tourists in sandals and colorful tank tops photograph each other in front of the iconic Beverly Hills street signs.
Others in designer outfits entering and leaving the expensive stores and shops carry armfuls of bags from Louis Vuitton, Chanel, Dior in cruel irony.
“Mom!” Emmy shouts. My foot slams on the brakes, and the car screeches to a sudden stop behind a Tesla.
“I’m sorry. I’m sorry.” I check the rearview mirror. The woman behind me is applying makeup but stops just in time.
“What are you doing?”
“I’m sorry,” I say again. “I wasn’t—”
Emmy releases a deep sigh, her eyes red with tears. “It’s okay. Let’s just get there in one piece.”
The traffic pulls off, and Emmy squirms in the seat. “Ugh, I feel so sick.”
“Eat the granola bar,” I instruct her and turn toward Santa Monica Blvd, which leads to West Hollywood.
Emmy lets out a very long breath and starts unwrapping it.
We fight through the traffic toward West Hollywood and the In-N-Out Burger. I find a parking spot but let the engine idle for a second.
Emmy stares out the window at a homeless couple standing under a shop front with a small gray Chihuahua. “We should get them something, Mom. They look hungry.”
My stomach flips, and I feel my hands clench a little. “You know I would, Em, but we just don’t have the money.”
“I have some.”
After we order, Emmy gets another two burgers. I watch from our little window seat as she takes them the food. I think I can see them saying “God bless” to her over and over.
Back inside, Emmy comes over and slides into the little seat facing me.
“That was sweet of you, honey.”
She gives a little half smile. “It wasn’t much.”
“It was a lot to them.”
Our food is up, and Emmy hops up to the counter to collect it.
Outside, a leaf blower pushes garbage around the street.
Emmy has recently become vegan, so all she has in front of her is a baffling array of fries and a bun with the vegetables, which she dips in packets of ketchup and mustard smeared onto a napkin.
I watch her stroke the colors along the white paper, mixing them together until they make brown.
She takes a bite and chews the meatless wonder.
“What?” she asks, gazing up at me. I feel the sadness emanating from her like a scent and behind it a small, barely perceptible bite of anger that no one would notice but me.
Anger for the unfairness. The stupidity.
At the scar on the side of her head that won’t grow hair.
At this dinner and the one tomorrow and the next day and the day after that spent with just me, just the two of us.
The piece missing from its tightly wedged spot between us.
The gap it left, growing bigger. Emptier.
I put down my burger and look at her.
“Tell you what—in a few weeks when my paycheck comes in, we’ll go to Nordstrom for some shoes, okay?”
Emmy stops chewing for a second. “But I thought you said we don’t have the money …”
“Let me worry about that, okay?”
“Yeah, okay.” She looks at me skeptically.
A man and his son sitting to the left of our table turn and stare at us. The father turns away, but the boy in a little league outfit keeps looking. I sense Emmy growing uncomfortable.
A bite of burger sits in my cheek. With effort, I push it down, feeling a strange stab of palpable rage. It’s remarkable how it manifests in such acute ways, a hot fire that could swell any minute.
“Why are you vegan?” The words come out of me, even though I don’t intend them to. It’s the Topamax. Sometimes I say things I shouldn’t.
Emmy glances at me up from her bun, curious. “What do you mean?”
“I never asked you before, and you never got the chance to tell me. You know, without judgment.” I put down my burger.
Emmy carries on chewing, slowly. “There’s truth, and there’s lies. You can eat the truth, or you can eat lies. Do you get what I mean?”
I nod even though I don’t.
“Okay, good,” she says. She grabs my burger and positions it in front of her.
Her forefinger lifts the bun, revealing the remarkably thin, gray patty.
“When you eat a ‘burger,’ most people want to think that they are eating ‘beef,’ but that’s a polite way of saying they are eating a ‘cow.’ Not even just one cow.
Odds are, hundreds of cows are right here in this single patty. ”
My stomach churns.
“Beef is the lie. Cow is the truth. The truth is, a whole bunch of cows—living creatures—suffered and died for your burger. Your burger is made of hundreds of dead animals. So you are basically eating death. People don’t like to think about that when they chomp down on a juicy burger, but like I said, truth and lies. ”
“You have a point,” I say. “It’s just that … it’s a little extreme. Don’t you think?”
Emmy shrugs. She dives into her veggie-filled bun. “Death is extreme. That’s why I prefer not to eat it if I can help it.”
Later on, while I’m sorting through a few past-due bills, Emmy emerges in her PJs and plunks down on the living room couch, her head in a towel. “I’ve been thinking,” she says calmly. “Maybe we should drop the case.”
My body swivels to her, as if on cue. “What?”
“With Steve. About Daddy. Maybe we should just drop it.”
I don’t have the heart to tell her that there is no wrongful death case, that I can’t get Steve to take it on. That there’s not enough evidence, not even a sufficient police report to go after the driver. That we can’t pursue it much further, even if we wanted to.
“Someone broke the law. They hurt us, and they—”
My words get stuck, a clog in my chest, then the top of my throat. “They took your Daddy.”
“Exactly,” Emmy says, moving her feet onto the coffee table. “And nothing we do is going to bring him back.”
From the kitchen stool, I pull myself down and sit next to her on the couch. “Someone did something very wrong that day,” I explain. “They deserve to pay for what they did.”
Emmy looks at me, her eyes clear, certain. “Yeah, but that’s the thing. They can’t pay for it. No matter what we do, even if we catch the person who hit us, we can never make them pay. Not really. We can never be even.”
My clog grows bigger.
Even Steven.
Even Steven.
What does it mean to be even Steven?
“What if we find who did it and they go to prison for a very long time? Forever, maybe?”
Emmy shrugs. “I don’t know. To me, that’s not good enough. They’re still alive. And Daddy’s dead. You know?”
I do know. I know so well that some moments, it’s hard to breathe without feeling the familiar chirp of anger in me, my little parasitic friend.
“You’re right,” I tell her. “No amount of punishment would ever bring back your father. It won’t change our lives now.”
Emmy nods. “That’s why I think we should drop the case. Because we can never make them pay for what they did. It’s impossible.”
It’s not a them. It’s a him. And I know who he is now. The thought of Jason Redfern at the Whitmore burns in my gut.
“I’ll think about it,” I tell her, even though I won’t. In fact, I will do the opposite and go see Steve again to get him to reconsider taking the wrongful death suit on contingency. And I will tell him what I saw.
I stare at my wedding ring, the diamond glittering faintly under the low lights of our tired little rental kitchen. It’s the last thing of value we have.
Emmy says making them pay would be impossible.
But it’s not impossible. Not really. I can’t help but think it. It’s a dark, angry little thought that muscles its way up from somewhere deep and private. An intense wave of shame washes over me, like the thought is out loud for everyone to hear.
You can make him pay. An eye for an eye, after all.