“I showed him some pictures at my desk in the prison, but I don’t know. Maybe he took one. I guess I knew it was missing, I must have, but I didn’t ever really pursue what that meant.”
For the moment she decided to let it rest. Maybe her dad really was just a sad old man reaching out to his daughter, and maybe Joey had done whatever he’d done all alone, without any help. Maybe.
“I need to see you,” her father said. “Can you and I get together?”
“Things feel too mixed up right now,” she said.
“You’re not alone there. But I need to see you, Lydia. Please.”
“Honestly?” she said. “The other day, after seeing Moberg, I started driving toward Rio Vista but turned around. I guess I wasn’t ready for that.”
“Okay.”
“I’m still not.”
Lydia sighed into the phone. She was contemplating hanging up when her dad spun the conversation into a new direction.
“Does David know about this whole thing with Joey?”
“David?”
“He should be taking precautions. Who knows what Joey was up to. Or who else was involved. Let me talk to him, will you? I’ll feel better about it if I don’t have to worry about you.”
Lydia froze. “You aren’t talking to David.”
“He’s a nice man, your David. Sounds from here like he’s treating you okay.”
She looked around her bathroom, at David’s razor on the sill, his black shampoo bottle in the shower caddy, a few of his hairs on the porcelain sink, and suddenly felt disturbed by how deeply entwined their lives had become.
“Tell me you’re not talking to David,” she said.
“I understand you’re worried. But don’t be. He’s a nice man, like I said.”
She’d known her father had been trying to get in touch with her but also assumed that David had been curt with him in their exchanges over the phone. But apparently not.
“You cannot speak to him,” she said.
“He knows, Lydia. You hear me? David already knows. That should change things, I would think.”
“You told him?”
“Of course not,” he said. “We talked about it, but then we talked about a lot.”
“You talked? When?”
Her father waited.
“Answer me,” she said, more shrill than she’d intended. “How much does David know?”
“Everything, Lydia. He knew everything long before he and I ever talked. He’s a stand-up guy. Maybe give him credit—”
“Don’t call here again.”
Click.
In the living room Lydia scooped up Raj’s cigarettes and lifted the window and climbed out to the small section of shingled rooftop that sloped over the porch. It was bitter cold tonight, yet she hardly noticed that she was wearing only a beaten gray T-shirt, jeans, and holey woolen socks. Under the lights below a man was walking a potbellied pig and the pig sprayed piss all over a fallen trash can.
For the next hour Lydia smoked on her roof alone, hardly able to feel the frozen air around her. At one point Raj leaned out to check on her, but she shook her head and he disappeared back inside. Through the barren trees she could see the cartoonish reach of the Cash Register Building over downtown, and she could hear cars tearing past on Colfax, their studded tires waiting for winter’s final thaw.
She thought back on her years with David and reassured herself that, with the exception of the memory of those hours beneath the sink when she was a ten-year-old girl, she’d given herself entirely over to him, and still that hadn’t been enough. He had to take the one thing she’d wanted—the one thing she’d needed—to keep for herself. And then to discuss it in secret with her father only added to the betrayal.
Before long, a gray sedan bounced through the potholed street below and backed into a parking space. David climbed out.
Lydia’s heart jumped and she crawled through the window. Raj was still inside, reading the newspaper with his feet on the coffee table.
“Was that David?” he said, scratching his cheek. “On the phone.”
“He just pulled up, Raj. Sorry about all this, but you should go.”
Raj grabbed his coat and hat and hugged her before slipping out. She imagined him brushing past David on the stairs.
The apartment door had barely closed before David had it open again. He set his bags on the couch and tried to kiss Lydia on the cheek, but she dodged his lips.
“Okay,” he said, his breath hiding beneath clean mint gum. “Did I do something?”
She grunted. Part of her wondered if she just didn’t care enough to fight, as if David had just given her the reason she needed to abandon this version of her life.
“So,” David said, leaning to catch her eye, “are you going to tell me what’s happening here?”
She pulled on a sweater and a pair of sneakers, scooped up her jean jacket, and walked past him to the door. He began to reach for her, saying words she could scarcely hear, but she shook him off and pulled away.
“Lydia? Please talk to me.”
As she stepped out of their apartment, her voice ripped through the building: “Don’t ever talk to my father again!”
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Lydia stepped inside the Supper Club, a steamy, velvety bar a few blocks from Bright Ideas where her late-shift comrades almost always ended up. Her hands and feet were so cold she could barely feel them, but the jukebox was cozy with crooners and sliding into a buttoned red booth made her feel warmer already. All she really wanted tonight were some comrades with whom to drink—there were always comrades with whom to drink—and in due time she was four hot toddies deep, listening to them chat about bounced checks and student loans and eviction notices, the cheapest vacations they’d ever taken, the worst rural Greyhound stations, their previous lives in Buddhist monasteries and Catholic convents and the American military, the best way to sprinkle Top Ramen’s magic golden flavor powder into a boiling pot of noodles without it clumping into paste. She heard someone say, “Never shop at a place with a parking lot,” and she couldn’t have agreed more.
The night had been going well enough for her to have almost forgotten why she was plunging her face into hot whiskey when suddenly one of her bespectacled, ponytailed comrades dragged the drunken bliss right out of her.
“Hey, bad news,” he said. “We had to make Hi Guy leave the store tonight.”
“Hi Guy?” she said. “You kicked him out?”
“It sucked. I thought you’d want to know.”
“Hi Guy?” she said again, and slapped her forehead.
“I know.”
Hi Guy was among the sweetest of the BookFrogs. A lanky man in his fifties, he parked himself most days in an old orange chair in Bright Ideas’ magazine section and muttered a gleeful Hi to anyone who came within five feet of his stretched-out legs. Over and over, Hi, Hi, Hi, with rarely another word. For whatever reason—Plath theorized it was pheromones—no one else ever sat in that chair, even when Hi Guy wasn’t around. He had beautiful teeth and shiny skin and flotsam in his hair. His eyes were milky and Plath once told Lydia that he read books upside down—that he was born with upside-down eyes. Plath wasn’t kidding. Lydia wasn’t so sure.