Refund: Stories Read online

  Anna crawled in beside him.

  “You can’t just sit here forever,” she said.

  “You want her to sit in the dark, screaming?”

  “We’ll tell her we’re here.”

  “What if we gave her everything? What if she felt so loved she wasn’t afraid?”

  The girl’s pastel ponies and kittens and bears regarded them from their perches.

  “But you can’t sit here your whole life,” she said.

  He looked at her with a sharp expression. “Sometimes I think you don’t know anything about me,” he whispered. “What am I thinking right now?”

  “Who still owes you money.”

  He rubbed his hand over his face. “Okay, okay. They needed something. I helped.”

  A sheer curtain lifted and fell with a breeze from the window, as if it were trying to breathe.

  “Our children can be president if they can just shed their fear,” he said. “I know it.”

  “But we can’t be with them every day,” she said. “Every minute.”

  “So?”

  “So they still have to learn to fall asleep,” she said.

  He sighed, sharply. “And then what?” he said. “How long can you listen to her scream? Five minutes? Ten? Thirty?”

  She looked away. “I don’t know.”

  She thought, suddenly, of Warren Vance’s naked body. He was not only wide but also surprisingly tall, his head almost touching the ceiling. Warren wrapped his arms around her and began nuzzling her neck. She closed her eyes, trying to get the thought of him out of her head.

  She looked at her husband, his long legs stretched in front of him. She understood that they married not only to love each other in the future, but also to remedy the past—to give each other what they had not had as children.

  “I don’t know what to do,” he said.

  “I know,” she said.

  They sat, frozen, beside each other. The girl was finally asleep. Anna reached over and clasped his hand. She felt the pulse of his heart in his palm.

  THREE DAYS LATER, SHE WAS MAKING DINNER WHEN THE PHONE RANG.

  “Annie,” said Warren, “You never call. You never write.”

  She stood against the counter; she felt pinned, even though she was the only one in the room.

  “Been thinking about you,” he said. “Been thinking about that girl in auto shop who could take apart a carburetor faster than any of them. Remember her?”

  The children were in the living room, watching the television as though they wanted to eat it. “I guess,” she said.

  “That girl should be standing on a cliff watching the sun set on her personal slice of the Pacific,” he said. “Would you believe five grand?”

  She could taste his voice in her mouth. “I don’t know,” she said.

  He cleared his throat. “What did you think of Vance, Anna? Be honest.”

  “Why?”

  “Should Vance have had children, Anna? Tell him. His wife didn’t want to. Should Vance have gone to business school? Maybe Vance should have learned Russian. Arabic.” He was short of breath.

  His anxiety alarmed her.

  “Do you know that I am the fattest man in my zip code?” he said, sadly. “I like all cuisines. I hate nothing.”

  It was dusk. The windows glowed. She moved from the refrigerator to the microwave, defrosting meat. She held the phone to her ear.

  “Tell me what you used to tell me,” he said. “After.”

  Her heart jumped. “What are you talking about?”

  “You know.”

  She remembered when she was eighteen years old and lying naked beside him, the experience of love so new that she felt she had been taken apart and reassembled. She closed her eyes and spoke to him, a soft, obscene endearment.

  “Say it again,” he whispered.

  She did. The moment was clear and full.

  “You say it,” she said.

  He said the word to her. She closed her eyes and breathed.

  “Thank you,” she said, solemnly.

  She was frightened. The kitchen looked drained of light.

  “I have to go,” she said.

  “Wait,” he said.

  She clutched the phone and listened to his breath.

  “Let me get you a deal,” he said, softly.

  She laughed. Hearing this, a business offer, after she spoke to him the way she had twenty years before, was so absurd it was a relief. “Oh, right,” she said.

  “Grab what you can,” he whispered. “Just a little money down. Five thousand. Investment in the future.”

  She barely heard him. She thought of herself, her family standing on a cliff together looking at a sunset. Her guilt at speaking to Vance so intimately made her want to buy them something. A plot of land.

  “I can even take credit cards,” he said.

  She read him her Visa number, slowly, and he wrote it down.

  “Thank you,” he said. “You’ve made the right decision. Vance will call back in a couple days.” He hung up.

  TWO DAYS PASSED, THEN THREE. SHE DID NOT TELL ANYONE ABOUT HER sudden purchase of a beachfront lot. She picked up her phone quickly whenever it rang. She had been so captivated by the idea of her family and the sunset, and the idea of this, a promise, a deal, she had not considered the obvious: they didn’t have an extra five thousand dollars.

  A week went by.

  She did not hear from Warren Vance. The credit card bill arrived. She had allegedly purchased $548 worth of gourmet steaks from Wisconsin, $1,234 worth of airline tickets via Orbitz, and $3,284 worth of watches at Cartier.

  She stood, trembling, reading his longings. Then she tried to call him, but the number was dead.

  The next day, she told the babysitter to stay late and sped out to his office. The sky was blue and empty of clouds. She drove too fast, past the palm trees, the superstores, the blue-silver chaparral on the golden hills, the giant parking lots—they were all bleached by the white light, as though they had all, in some crucial way, been imagined, and she gripped the steering wheel with the same fierceness she had when she had come back from the reunion.

  She turned the car into the parking lot where his office had been. A couple young, bulky men were carrying mattresses into his office. She ran toward them.

  “Where’s Vance’s Real Estate?” she asked.

  “This here’s Ed’s Beds. No one here by that name.”

  Panic fluttered through her. She ran into the Subway outlet. Margie was at the register, her hair now arranged in a net.

  “Where’s Warren Vance?” Anna asked.

  Margie’s eyes flashed, as though the name woke her up. “The fucking jerk. He said he’d give me forty bucks for saying I was his secretary, bringing coffee, smiling, et cetera, and then one day he didn’t show. Where is he? Do you know?”

  Anna rushed out of the store into the parking lot. The sky was so bright and hot her eyelids hurt. She started to type a number into her cell phone; then she stopped. She stood under the hard blue sky and watched the workmen bring in mattresses to Vance’s former office, one mattress after another, and she watched a few customers come in and out of the Subway.

  The phone rang. She lifted it to her ear.

  “Yes?” she said.

  “Can she eat peanut butter? I forget, a lot of kids can’t eat peanut butter,” the babysitter asked.

  “Yes, she can eat peanut butter,” Anna said.

  “Okay, thanks! See you soon,” said the babysitter, and she hung up.

  Anna felt the weight of the cell phone in her hand; she slid into the car, set it on the seat beside her, and began to drive home.

  THAT NIGHT, SHE CALLED THE CREDIT CARD COMPANY TO CANCEL the card. “You didn’t purchase the steaks, the tickets, the watches?” asked the customer service rep.

  “No, I did not!”

  “Aha. Well. Unfortunately, I see that you never purchased the customer fraud insurance plan, just $8 a month, so we can’t guarantee all wil
l be returned—”

  “Are you serious?” she asked.

  “You could purchase it now,” the customer service rep said, cheerfully.

  It took her three more days to show the bill to her husband and inform him about the absence of the fraud insurance plan. They sat at the kitchen table, and she put the bill in front of him. He read it, and then he stopped.

  “Five hundred dollars of steaks?” he said. “Did he eat a whole cow?” He paused. “And watches? Who are we subsidizing here?”

  She realized that she was drawn to his moral quality because she was always waiting to be judged.

  “It was an accident,” she said.

  They looked at each other. He leaned forward and touched her arm.

  “What’s going on?” he asked.

  She closed her eyes. What? She remembered the musty odor of the hotel carpet, the sudden, surprising beauty of Warren Vance. She thought about how she had hunched under the chair, listening to the bullets, the cries as people were hit, the sound of people diving for the floor, running out. She thought of the way he nodded toward the door, and how she ran through the hallway, following him, her footsteps echoing through the empty corridor until she got to the parking lot of the Mercury Hotel, and stood at the edge of it, looking at the freeway, the cars a pure ribbon of light.

  “I was almost shot,” she said.

  She heard each word as she spoke them. She did not look into his eyes. She felt the sweet presence of his fingers on her wrist.

  “What did you think about?” he asked. “During?”

  She had had no thoughts. The chair leg, the carpet. The taste of salt in her mouth. She remembered a sense of urgency in her arms, a trembling. To move.

  Then she ran.

  “I’m not sure,” she said.

  “Did you think about the children?” he asked.

  She paused. “No.”

  “Your parents?”

  “No.”

  “Did you think about me?”

  She paused. “No.”

  He leaned back. “Why not?”

  “I thought about myself,” she said.

  That was true. There had been the thunder of bullets, the carpet against her cheek. The slow pulse of her breath. And when she had run outside, there had been this gladness, her chest full of cool air. She was here. The asphalt was warm, crumbly under her bare feet. The light from the cars lifted off the freeway. She surveyed it all, wanting it, wanting to reach out and feel the light in her hands.

  They sat in silence for a moment.

  “I would have thought of myself, too,” he said. “I know it.”

  How perfectly could they recognize each other’s sadness? It was the imperfection that they had married and pledged to care for. She leaned toward him and kissed him. His hand grabbed her shoulders as though they were both floating, moving without gravity through the air.

  THE LIGHTS WENT ON IN ANNA’S HOUSE EACH NIGHT, AS THEY WENT on in the other houses on their street. The houses clung to the arid hills, temporarily finding a foothold in the brush. One night, Anna told her husband they had to tell their daughter good night and then leave the room while she fell asleep. He looked at her and closed his eyes for a few moments; she did not know what he was thinking. Then he opened them and agreed. Anna kissed the girl’s hair. The girl stared at them, her eyes dark and burning.

  The girl screamed for twenty-three minutes and then fell asleep.

  The next morning, the girl stood up in her crib. “I awake,” she said. Her tone was matter-of-fact. She stood in the fresh light, gazing at Anna eagerly. Anna stumbled toward her and lifted her out. The girl kicked softly in the air.

  “You did it,” she whispered to the girl. The girl was bored; she wriggled in her arms, looking for her toys. The morning spread out, glazed and damp and blue, outside the windows. Anna clutched the girl’s soft, living weight against her chest.

  The boy abandoned all cards to focus his attentions on soccer. The girl decided to eschew princesses to become a witch. She sat at the dinner table wearing a pointy black hat.

  Anna and her husband lay in their bed. Her husband’s arm came over her body at night, and she held it. One night, she whispered to him the intimacy she had spoken to Warren Vance, so softly she did not know if he heard it. He said the word back softly and pressed his face against hers. They huddled in this island of time together before they would all separate again.

  Theft

  Ginger Klein held all the cash she owned, which came to $934.27, in an envelope in her red velvet purse. As she waited in line for the first dinner seating on this cruise to Alaska, she fingered the muscular weight of the bills. The ship’s ballroom was a large, drab room, tricked into elegance with real silver set out on the linen, sprightly gold foil bows on the walls, white roses blooming briefly in stale water. The room was filled with couples, friends, tour groups, glittering in their sequins, intent on having a good time. The guests greeted each other, their faces gilded by the chandeliers’ silver haze. Gripping her purse, Ginger watched them and tried to decide where to sit.

  Until a few months before, Ginger had been living in a worn pink studio apartment on Van Nuys Boulevard, storing her cash in margarine containers in her refrigerator. She was eighty-two years old, and for the last sixty years, she had sometimes lived in better accommodations, sometimes worse; this was what she had ultimately earned. On good days she sat with a cup of coffee and the Los Angeles phone book, calling up strangers for contributions to the Fireman’s Ball, the Christian Children’s Fund, the United Veteran’s Relief. Her British accent was the best one; with it, she could keep confused strangers in Canoga Park, Woodland Hills, Calabasas on the phone. “Congratulations for being the sort of person who will help our cause,” she told them, and she heard their pleasure in their own generosity. She cashed the checks at different fast-cash stores around the San Fernando Valley, presenting them with one of the false IDs from her bountiful collection.

  One day, she took the wrong bus home. She looked out the window and was staring at a beach that she had never seen before. The water was bright and wrinkled as a piece of blue foil. Surfers scrambled over the dark, glassy waves. Ginger felt her heart grow cold. She had succeeded for over sixty-five years as a swindler because she always knew which bus to take.

  She had actually intended to pay the doctor if the news had been good. He asked her a few questions. He held up a pair of pliers, and she had no idea what they were. She returned to the office twice and saw more doctors who wore pert, grim expressions. The diagnosis was a surprise. When he told her, it was one of the few times in her life she reacted as other people did: she covered her face and wept.

  “You need to plan,” her doctor said. “You have relatives who can take care of you?”

  “No,” she said.

  “Children?”

  “No.”

  “Friends?”

  His pained expression aggravated her. “I have many friends,” she said, because she pitied him.

  She listened to him describe the end of her life and what she should expect her friends to do for her. Then Ginger had to stop him. She told the secretary that her checkbook was in the car and left the office without paying the bill.

  SHE TRIED TO COME UP WITH A GRAND SCHEME THAT WOULD PAY for her future care, but her thoughts were not so ordered, and each day, she lost something: the word for lemons, the name of her street. Peering out her window at the lamplights that pierced the blue darkness in her apartment complex, she imagined befriending one of her neighbors, but her neighbors were flighty college dropouts, working odd hours, absent, uninterested in her. Ginger did not want to die in a hospital or an institution. Dying in this apartment would mean that she would not be discovered for days; the idea of her body lifeless, and worse, helpless, was intolerable.

  She was watching television one evening when she saw an ad for a Carnival cruise. Many years ago she had sat with a man in an airport bar. He had been left by his wife of thirty-six years a
nd was joking about killing himself on a cruise ship. “Someone finds you,” he said, on his third bourbon, “A maid, another passenger. Quickly. It’s more dignified. You don’t just rot.”

  He was on his way to the Caribbean, desperately festive in his red vacation shirt festooned with figures of tropical birds. “What an interesting idea,” she had said, lightly, deciding that it was time for a game of poker; she got out her rigged cards. When he stumbled off two hours later, she was $150 richer and certain she would never be that hopeless.

  Before she went on her cruise, she wanted to buy a beautiful purse with which to hold the last of her money. Three public buses roaring over the oily freeways led her to the accessories counter at Saks. The red purse sat on the counter like a glowing light. It was simple, a deep red with a rhinestone clasp; when she saw it, she felt her breath freeze in her throat. The salesgirl told her that it was on hold for someone.

  “It’s mine,” said Ginger, her fingers pressing so hard on the glass counter they turned white.

  Perhaps it was the hoarse pitch of her voice, or the pity of the salesgirl toward the elderly, but the salesgirl let her buy the purse. In it, Ginger put her cash and also two bottles of sleeping pills. The Caribbean was sold out this time of year, so she spent most of her remaining money on a cruise to Alaska.

  SHE WOKE UP EARLY THE FIRST MORNING OF THE CRUISE, RESTLESS, trying to remember everything she had ever known. The facts of her life flurried in her head: names of hotel restaurants, the taste of barbecue in Texas versus Georgia, the aqua chiffon dress she had worn at a cocktail party in 1959. She sat at the table scribbling notes on a pad: Fake furs on Hollywood Blvd., 1966 cloudy, blue fur hats from the rare Blue Hyena from Alaska, lemon meringue pie at the cafeteria on W. 37th St., New York, 1960s, the seagulls flying on the empty Santa Monica beach at dawn, how much money I made a year, $37,000 from Dr. Chamron in 1977—

  Magnolia in Los Angeles, she wrote. She remembered the scent of magnolia as she and Evelyn stepped off the train in Los Angeles when she was fifteen years old. She remembered her sister Evelyn’s walk—Evelyn just seventeen then—her walk her first successful con; stepping hard onto her feet, shoulders lifted, she tricked Ginger into believing that she knew what to do. It was 1936, and they walked off the train into Los Angeles, two girls alone, armed with an address for an aunt they would never meet.