Permission. Saskia Vogel
was parked on the road, carrying something large on its bed.
One second we were looking at the truck, the next we were blinded by a bright, round light. A blue-flamed artificial sun. I had to look away. Chips of ash cast shadows on the kitchen table.
‘They’re shooting a major motion picture,’ my mother said. ‘That actress who looks like you is in it. What’s her name?’
I didn’t want to say it.
‘Lola?’
I nodded.
‘The location manager came by. Nice man. He seemed to worry that we would make a fuss. He invited us to drop by,’ my mother said, sounding as if she thought it were that easy. A nice man came to your door, you had a nice chat and then you were invited to the set, as good as in. She always made it sound like everyone else knew how to do life better, it was just me who refused to walk down Easy Street. Try harder. Be better. Be nicer. Be more like Lola LaForce, who was basking in the same blue light, but being fawned over and paid.
‘OK, I will,’ I said, and started to get up, but then she put her soft hand on mine. The green eyes I’d inherited from her, suddenly sharp.
‘Do. I want to know you’re going to be OK…because…’
The water was rising inside her. She wiped fresh tears away.
I hugged her. She was stiff in my arms. I let her go. We were closer than we’d been in years.
There was discomfort in her smile. Her eyelids, angry swollen red. She fished a tube of hemorrhoid cream from the pocket of her silk robe, squeezed some out on her ring finger, the gentlest finger, and dabbed it around her eyes. Like she’d taught me. Her fingernails were perfect pale ovals. She hadn’t even missed her fortnightly nail appointment at Janine’s. I teared up at the sight of her rings. She was still wearing them.
Her diamonds, her nails, these things that were as they always were: I expected Dad to arrive at any second. The car would rumble up the driveway, the door to the garage would open and slam behind him. He’d want to go for a run before dinner but would decide he was too tired, pour himself a drink, sit on the balcony, and look at the view until dinner was ready. But it was well past dinnertime. And the keys to his car had disappeared along with him, so the convertible was gathering dust in the garage. My mother said she couldn’t find the spare key. I couldn’t bring myself to rummage through his hiding places. Surely, she knew them too. But it was enough to believe we’d find them one day. When we were ready to start looking. Maybe we’d look together, and she’d open up boxes of things I’d never seen and tell me stories about their marriage that I’d never heard. Ones that didn’t end in pain or resentment.
My mother lit another cigarette.
‘It’s time to go home…’ she said in her mother tongue.
To preserve whatever sense of camaraderie we had, I tried not to let on how her words hit me. I did my best to sound calm. I might not have understood her, after all.
‘Haven’t I been…’ I started to say in English. She gave me one of her severe looks, her face all angles, just like mine. Disappointment, I thought, for not answering her in German.
‘I’ve been thinking about Munich or maybe Lake Constance,’ she finished.
She hated being interrupted, but there was nothing she liked more than making a plan, and the anticipation in the run-up, the Vorfreude. This was the best way I knew to apologize: ‘We haven’t been there since Omi died. Does your cousin still have the lake house?’
She tutted. ‘Not for vacation.’
Mom kept talking. Telling me about her plans when the paperwork was done: life insurance and lease policies, transfer of ownership of his business. Paperwork to declare death in absentia. We seemed to have both decided not to bring up a memorial.
‘Won’t it take years?’
‘It doesn’t matter,’ she said. ‘The house is in my name.’
I stood at the end of the driveway with a baggie and pipe I’d made out of an apple. I’d found some dry pot from god-knows-when in my closet. It wasn’t good, but it worked. I thought of it like a smudge stick, antiseptic and holy, driving the spirits from me: the what-ifs, the could-have-beens, the where-was-he-nows. I couldn’t ask why because I would only blame myself: if I hadn’t been so nervous as a child, if only I had been less afraid, he would never have been down there. I looked at my skin in the blue light from the film crew and played the air with my fingers. The shadows across the backs of my hands moved like light through water. I imagined pulling him to land.
The dinging of an open car door pierced the night. The sound was coming from the driveway across the road. It was coming from the hybrid. I waited to see the driver. For a second, I thought it might be my dad. Then I saw the silhouette of a woman. She put a box down on the driveway and faced the blue light, and then went back to unloading boxes. I forgot about the daddies. The arms of her T-shirt were cut-off, leaving her ribs exposed, and when she leaned into the car, the T-shirt shifted to show her breasts, small and high. Beautiful. Enviable. So unlike mine. She stopped and looked around. I wished for the cover of night, but she’d already seen me. The woman raised her hand in greeting, and I mirrored her gesture. There was something familiar about her. I was suddenly aware of my heartbeat, but also my cotton mouth.
She smiled and walked to the end of her driveway, across the street from mine.
‘Hey,’ she called out, as if we always talked like this. ‘What’s up with the light?’
But I couldn’t speak. It took everything I had to say: ‘Film crew.’ The words left my mouth, and as they moved in her direction, they left a trail in the air.
‘What?’ She took a step, as if to cross the road.
‘Film crew!’ Louder this time, so she wouldn’t come any closer. I needed to sit down, but I couldn’t tell how far I was from the ground.
We both looked toward the light. Over the waves came a buzzing from the bay. I knew what that was, too.
‘Speedboat,’ I added as a matter of urgency.
She shrugged, like what can you do, this crazy place. I watched her shoulder rise and fall, her beautiful collarbones. My head was nodding slowly.
We looked at each other, the rustle in the palm trees, the film crew working, the speedboat on the waves.
I should have said more, but I could only speak in nouns. I had one more in me and then I needed to lie down.
‘Night!’
Before she could reply, I scuttled back into the house and hid in my bed, staring at the ceiling, hot-cheeked. Hot in the sheets, my body reaching beyond its limits, an anemone waving in the water.
I WAS WATCHING THE SEA, high tide, low tide, pleading with the waves. The news said there were three hurricanes spinning across the ocean, part of a tropical storm. They were whipping up danger on south-facing beaches. In spite of such warnings, the ocean looked much the same.
My mother found me on a bench at the edge of our garden and sat, leaving plenty of room between us. A gust snatched at her hair. Mom started telling me about a cargo ship out in the middle of the Pacific that had been caught in a storm years before. Intermodal containers filled with rubber bath toys were batted off the deck by wind and rain. Tens of thousands of bright bobbing creatures spilled into the ocean: red beavers, green frogs, blue turtles and yellow ducks. Within the first year, my mother said, some of these ‘Friendly Floatees’ had washed up on the Alaskan coast, two thousand miles from where the accident occurred. She must have been sorry for what she’d said or how she’d said it and was offering me comfort, even if it was false hope. If a rubber duck could be found, so could my father. I remembered a news story I had read about human feet washing up on the shores of British Columbia. I didn’t want to think of him in pieces.
‘Rubber duckies. Thanks, Mom,’ I said.
‘It’s