Twice a Child Read online

  “Yeah, I planned it all out, me and Grandpa. Just to fuck up your life. You’re a piece of work, Eddie. Look, can you meet me somewhere so we can figure this out? I don’t know this area. You do.”

  “Meet me at Cedars-Sinai, just grab a taxi. They called me. Apparently, he was saying my name and someone recognized it—nice to have the old man known in this town, eh? They got in touch with the studio who got hold of my agent and—”

  “And you waited to call me? Jesus! I’ll meet you there.” Tina ended the conversation, careful to step over a figure huddled under a bright blue tarp lying in the middle of the sidewalk. The baby wailed at her outburst.

  “We found Grandpa, little man,” she said, trying to soothe him. He sucked back tears and nuzzled his drippy nose into her shoulder.

  This is what happens around Eddie. Everyone, everything gets crazy, shook up, as if a mighty wind blows through and leaves nothing untouched.

  Tina tried to push away any thoughts of her father, though speaking with him gave her an odd sense of familiarity, a throwback, she decided, to a happier time. Even her mother seemed happier in those days; she’d hum a lot, sometimes pick Tina up and twirl her around, plunk her down on the waterbed where she could still feel herself sink in as her mother changed from scrubs into jeans. Dad would have something good cooking, sauce or fried chicken, and when the weather was warm he’d fire up the grill. He was a large presence in her memories; as a child, she couldn’t have wanted anything more, her world safe and comfortable. It swallowed her in its promise.

  And then he left. Vanished. When she had gotten home from school that day, the house welcomed her with the scent of a bakery: chocolate chip cookies piled high on a silver platter greeted her from the kitchen counter along with a note: “Never doubt my love for you, Teen.”

  Her mother started to carry herself as if she were weighted with ankle irons, her eyes perpetually red. She couldn’t place any time around it, like a holiday or birthday, no special occasion. He simply wasn’t there one morning and her mother ran around the house, half dressed for work, her hair damp and in ringlets all over her head from a new perm, which Tina could still smell whenever she thought of that day. The look in her eye was new to Tina. It was fear, as if a dog snapped at her heels.

  They would discover, much later, that The Night Lovers had been picked up by Warner Bros. with production getting underway near the time of his departure. Over time, it had become clear to Tina that her dad had been biding his time at home—taking her to school, making dinner, helping her with her homework—acting, until something better, something he wanted much more, came along. At first, after the shock of his departure wore off, she and her mom would fantasize that Eddie would send for them when he got everything set up, a house, a school, all the things a family would do during a move. Movies took time, they’d reason, and surely he’d be working on another, wasn’t that what he was doing there, writing another screenplay?

  Those thoughts and discussions would hold them for a little while so they could face the people they worked with or went to school with for another month or so, until six months went by with no contact from Eddie. He had changed his cell phone number. Her mother couldn’t make child support payments stick because she couldn’t find him.

  And Grandpa and Grandma stepped in every chance they could, often apologizing for Eddie’s behavior, as stunned as she and her mother that he could just . . . leave.

  She caught herself from falling into a familiar downward spiral of self-pity and shame. As much as she hated to admit it, she needed her father to help her navigate this new crisis. It was, after all, his town.

  By the time she and Joshua made their way through the labyrinth of the medical complex, Tina had been scanned, questioned and scrutinized by three different authorities. Even Joshua’s diapers had been checked, and she was glad—he needed a change.

  Grandpa had been in here most of the day, she surmised. Eddie had called around three-thirty. It was now close to six.

  He must be so frightened.

  As she found the correct spoke on a floor designed as a hub with six hallways joining it, she weaved around computers, IV drips, heart monitors, blood collection carts—an array of short, tall, and always blinking machines. Aides and nurses crowded the hallway, while an occasional patient navigated it in a stupor. Joshua crouched low in his backpack seat, his warm breath tickling the back of her neck.

  Eddie stood at the end of the hallway talking with a tall blonde woman wearing a white lab coat. She ducked behind an opened door and watched as he carried on a lively conversation with the woman, or doctor, as if his father, whom he hadn’t seen in a decade, were not lying in a strange bed in a strange place in a strange town, surrounded by strangers. There certainly appeared to be more frivolity between them than the gravity of the situation allowed.

  “Ouch!” Joshua pulled her hair. He let out a screech that could stop a cat on the hunt in its tracks. Eddie peered down the hall. He has aged so much. And that damn ponytail, why do balding guys do that? As she came closer, he stepped away from the blonde doctor, but she couldn’t read his face—pain or pleasure?

  “Who’s this?” he said, pointing behind her. She didn’t like the look in his eyes, as if any moment, anger, uncontrolled and unleashed, would replace annoyance.

  “My son, Joshua.”

  Eddie did not reply.

  “How is Grandpa?”

  “Ask her,” he said, hitching up his cargo shorts. He turned away from them to gaze out a tiny window, the only portal to the outside.

  “Your grandfather is very ill,” the doctor said. “He wandered into a school, thinking he was on his way to work, apparently. The principal called 911 after he fainted, and we admitted him for dehydration and tests.” The baby’s rhythmic breathing, his warm, soft body against hers, provided the comfort and strength Tina needed to hold it together.

  “How is he?”

  “Stable. Terribly confused. Usually on the first night’s stay, we ask a family member to be here with the patient—”

  “That’s you, kid,” Eddie said. “I got things I have to do.”

  Tina glared at him. You son of a bitch. She composed herself. “I’m afraid you’re wrong. Joshua wouldn’t make for a good night’s sleep for Grandpa.”

  The doctor followed the conversation like following a tennis match. “I believe she’s right, sir. It would be best for one person, an adult, to stay. A baby would be too disruptive.”

  Eddie fidgeted with change in his pocket. “Look, aren’t there aides for this sort of thing? I’m a director, for God’s sake. I can’t stop in the middle of a shoot just to sit with a deluded old man—”

  He plowed right through the silence that accompanied his outburst. “He’s not aware of who would be sitting with him, at least it seems that way. He didn’t even recognize me, Teen—”

  The bile rose in her throat. “You know, it seems that when Grandpa gets upset, he spins out into another place,” she told the doctor, turning her back on Eddie. “Yesterday, we were messing around on the beach and a wave came up and knocked him down and carried Joshua in his baby seat out a ways.”

  The doctor raised her eyebrow.

  “It turned out fine, obviously, but after that, he wasn’t making much sense. He kept talking about having to go back to work to pay for the medical bills.”

  Eddie shuffled his feet as she continued to speak.

  “I assured him a hundred times that Joshua was fine, that a lifeguard plucked him out of the water, that he was even giggling, but Grandpa seemed to grow more agitated. Then, this morning, he was gone.”

  The doctor weighed the information. “He mentioned another name, other than yours, Mr. Lillo,” she said. She rifled through the wad of forms on her clipboard. “Here it is, a ‘Rosemary.’ Ring a bell with either of you?”

  “Are you sure it wasn’t ‘Mamie?’” Tina offered. “That was my grandmother. She passed away last month. They’d been married sixty years—”
>
  “No, no, he did tell me he was married to Mamie. This was distinctly ‘Rosemary.’ Something about helping her, begging me, actually.”

  Eddie pulled out his cell phone.

  “You’ll have to go to the family lounge to use that, Mr. Lillo.”

  Tina stopped him for an instant on his way down the hall. “Can you help us out here?”

  His eyes were puddles, but his mouth drawn, cruel. He pushed her away, mumbling, “Got to take this,” and rushed down the hall.

  “Hey! Where are you going?” The frustration, the anger, a world of disappointment tinged her voice. She signaled for the doctor to wait. Joshua bounced and cooed on her back as she kept pace with Eddie who took an elevator before her. When she caught up to him in the atrium he had tried to bolt toward the parking lot.

  “You can’t just leave, not this time,” she yelled.

  Eddie stopped, surveyed the situation, and then guided her by the elbow to a concrete bench in the parking lot. That same feeling that started in the pit of her stomach years earlier when she listened at the top of the stairs to the two of them arguing, her mother pleading . . .

  She realized she was frightened of him, the way his eyes bugged out of his head, their focus unclear but their menace unmistakable.

  “Look, I don’t know why you dragged me in here. Hell, I don’t know why you’re even out here. Things were fine just the way they were.”

  A calm swept over her, the pit in her stomach gone. She pulled her shoulders back, stirring Joshua who began to giggle and pull at her hair.

  He’s nothing to be frightened of, why, not even his grandson is intimidated. Listen to him back there, as if someone were dangling a toy in front of him. He sees his grandfather’s heart, he knows something’s wrong. Running away again, like a scared little boy.

  “Why didn’t you come to Grandma’s funeral?”

  She braced herself for the usual outburst, a host of excuses delivered with venom, but Eddie simply sank into a bench and put his head between his legs, rocking back and forth. The sight surprised her. She sat down beside him, rubbing his back, a natural instinct to comfort she’d use to soothe Joshua when he got out of sorts.

  A continuous stream of people filed past them: doctors, nurses, visitors carrying bright, cheery balloons, children in wheelchairs. Cars parked, shuttles picked up, automatic doors whooshed open, and still Eddie sat on the bench, his head between his knees, her hand gently patting his back. When she caught sight of a palm tree swaying in the balmy breeze, she realized her folly.

  The enormity of what laid ahead, the unanswered questions, a maze of medical red tape to wade through, establishing some kind of life in a strange place with a sick grandfather and an infant—it all hit her with blunt force.

  This was no longer a father’s desire to find his son.

  This was survival.

  nineteen

  The hospital sent a bassinet from the nursery to Grandpa’s room along with a supply of diapers. Tina and Joshua stayed with him throughout the night as nurses scurried in and out of the room, adjusting monitors, taking pulse rates, waking him from whatever sleep he could fit in between interruptions.

  Joshua slept through it all, to Tina’s relief, awakening only for his three A.M. nursing.

  “Shouldn’t you start giving that kid more food?”

  She startled at the familiar croak of Grandpa’s voice.

  “Hi there. How ya doing, Grandpa?”

  “Why am I here?”

  She adjusted Joshua onto her other breast. “You wandered away and ended up at a school. I was so frantic, Grandpa. They told me you had fainted and someone, the principal, I think, called 911, and here you are.”

  He swallowed hard, looking straight ahead. When Tina followed his line of vision, she saw a blank wall.

  “You need water. The doctor also told me that you were dehydrated.” Tina scooped the baby in her arms, still nursing, and poured water from a bedside pitcher, offering it to Grandpa from a straw. He drank the entire glass and laid his head back on the pillow. His brow furrowed and his hand shook as he raised it to his forehead.

  A long, low moan filled with despair and misery permeated the hallway, a disembodied voice calling for the end of her agony, but the word bounced off the walls and sounded like “a-a-a-a-a-a-a-g-n-e” as it reached their ears. Outside their door a stream of white coats rushed toward the sound now increasing in intensity as if being poked or prodded. Tortured.

  Grandpa shot straight up from his bed, his eyes like beads: dark, glassy, yet filled with terror.

  “Where’s Rosemary? Where are they keeping her?”

  The baby’s eyes opened at Grandpa’s outburst, but she was able to soothe him back to suckling. The pit in her stomach felt like wet sand.

  “Who is Rosemary?” she asked, trying to keep fear from leaking into her voice.

  “Why are you playing dumb with me, Mamie?”

  Before she could correct him, he blurted, “Rosemary is ours and right now, they’ve got her and they’re doing God knows what to her—can’t you hear her?” He grew more agitated as the patient down the hall cried out, throwing his leg out over the bed. “You can’t just sit there with your tit hanging out feeding him when your daughter’s suffering. She might be dy—” He choked on tears, the machines surrounding him popping like instruments in a band roll call.

  Joshua’s wail chimed along with the discord.

  A nurse streaked into the room, calling out her distress to no one in particular. Tina shrank away from the chaos, wanting to run as far away as she could get.

  The nurse found her and Joshua in the family lounge. The baby lay on her chest. She wanted to keep him there forever.

  “What time is it?” she asked the nurse. God, she was so tired.

  “Nearly seven, shift change. That’s why I wanted to talk to you.”

  No, this was the first she’s heard of Rosemary. Not once did she hear her grandparents or her father, for that matter, mention that name.

  “It’s possible your grandfather is suffering from a delusion, brought on by the dementia, or that Rosemary actually existed.”

  Were it not for Joshua, his sweet scent, his soft skin, those innocent brown eyes, Tina knew she would have dissolved into a heap. But she’d get through this. Even if she had to remind herself every minute, she would survive.

  twenty

  She loved those red shoes. He had seen them at Marty’s Shoe Store one bright sunny day as he walked home from school, the sun’s dance on their sequins catching his eye. Though his book bag weighed him down from the homework the nuns assigned every night, Eddie stopped in front of the window to admire the shoes, standing first to one side, then to the other, assessing how all that sparkle would look on her tiny feet.

  That night at the dinner table while mom cut Rosemary’s meat into small, digestible bits, he said, “On my way home from school today I saw some shoes Rosemary would love.” He dug his fork into his mashed potatoes and stuffed them into his mouth before going on. Rosemary began wildly waving her hand at mom, who was trying to get her to eat a forkful of pork.

  “Eddie, be quiet! You know how hard it is to feed her. C’mon, honey, now open your mouth,” but Rosemary shut her lips tight and shook her head from side to side. Even at five, and despite her inability to perform the basic functions of life, like feeding herself, her will spoke for her.

  Eddie peeked at his little sister from the corner of his eye. “I won’t tell you about them, Rose, if you don’t eat that bite and the next one you know Mom’s going to shovel into you.” He stabbed his own piece of pork and made a show of eating it. “Mmm, you know what a good cook Mom is.”

  Rosemary opened her mouth and accepted her mother’s contribution. When she repeated her protest of the forkful of green beans, Eddie said, “uh-uh,” and she opened her mouth again.

  “Pop? Can I tell you about those shoes now?”

  His father smoothed his newspaper and sighed.

  �
�You might as well since you got her all worked up.”

  Eddie checked the bottle of Maker’s Mark and poured the last of it over ice, watching the sun dip below the horizon in a bright show of red, pink and lavender. He raised his tumbler to the display, emptied it, and sank back into the soft pillows as the room grew dark. Waves pounded the sand, a thump of a sound that echoed the headache beginning at the base of his skull.

  They took Rosemary to Marty’s that weekend. Pop had carried her from the Fairlane into the store and placed her on a seat as if she were made of eggshells. Eddie noticed another little girl trying on a pair of patent leather shoes beside Rosemary. She shifted away from his sister as if whatever was wrong with her was contagious. Both mother and daughter gaped at Rosemary who twitched and writhed in the compact seat, Mamie fussing about, trying to position her farther back into the chair, placing Rosemary’s hands on the metal arms so she could steady herself.

  A stack of shoe boxes was piled in the middle of the floor, at least six of them, three to a column. In an instant, Eddie decided to rush them, knock them over, and spill their contents all over the floor right in front of that prissy little girl and her nosy mother.

  “Eddie! Oh my God, what are you doing?”

  His mother could not leave Rosemary alone; she’d slide onto the floor. And his father had already stepped outside to light a cigar. “You put every one of those back in the box, young man!” his mother scolded. “Your father will deal with you when we get back home.”

  As he placed the shoes back in the boxes, he felt the little girl’s and mother’s eyes on him, shaking their heads in disapproval. Such a bad little boy.

  At least they were no longer staring at his crippled little sister.

  “You wore those things every day, didn’t you?” Eddie proclaimed to no one. He was drunk, more so than the other night when he needed a little liquid courage to take on Riley and her girlfriend. But he found himself surprisingly content. He had long ago shut out any images of his sister that scurried through his mind, and The Wizard of Oz was definitely off-limits. At the mere mention of ruby slippers Eddie’s throat would constrict. But now, their significance warmed his belly along with the bourbon. He found it easy to remember her because he knew she was still with him, had been all along.