I was right about the lack of scrutiny. The kid manning the safe-deposit station barely looked at the license or the signature. Two minutes later I was sitting in a little room, alone with the box.
I pulled out some thin gloves I’d found under the kitchen sink. Sooner or later they’d figure out someone had gotten into Hank’s box a couple of hours after he left the planet. I didn’t want them to know it was me. Good thing I watched CSI.
The photo was in an envelope under everything else. A much younger Tim Swift standing next to a bed on which a body lay. You could see the face.
Perfect.
I had Rae make the delivery. The man at its destination would remember me, and I’d be in Seal Beach for a while. Sooner or later he’d run into me, and questions might be asked. I didn’t need them. But he hadn’t seen Rae before. And I was certain she’d be leaving town soon.
But I watched from across the street. When she knocked on the door, Chuck answered. He had a package of CornNuts in his hand.
She asked him something and he shook his head. So she said something else and handed him the envelope with the photo. She spoke again. He nodded. She left.
When she was back in the car she said, “Daddy’ll be home in a bit.”
“Then our work is done.”
I’m guessing some of the Elliot people wanted to let it out immediately. Cooler heads prevailed, and it broke just in time for the evening news cycle. By 8 that night Tim Swift was in custody.
He was out the next morning. His campaign spokesman got on TV and whined about photo manipulation and smear campaigns. The local news people and the cable networks went bananas. Implication and innuendo filled the air. A former staffer came forward and said she’d had an affair with Swift six years back. The TV people all went hysterical.
By late that evening the Swift for Senate campaign had been suspended.
There was no service for Hank. We never saw Rae again, at least not in the flesh. I did spot her a few weeks later on TV, the day Tim Swift gave up his House seat. A reporter asked her how she felt about it and Rae gave him a look that would curdle milk.
Two months later we sold the place at Leisure World. Rented an apartment a lot closer to the water. The sea air is good for us, and so are the younger folks in the building. One couple has a boy of ten or eleven. In the right kind of light, at the right time of day, he reminds me of Jody. And that, I’ve been pleased to discover, makes me feel just fine.
Part II
Every Move You Make
Crazy for You
by Barbara DeMarco-Barrett
Costa Mesa
When I moved into Levi’s apartment in the converted motel on Placentia Avenue, the blue neon “i” of the Placent_a Arms sign was burned out. I worried it was an omen, a feng shui gaffe. It made me think too damn much of placenta, birthing, that whole entire mess — not a good thing when the sight of blood makes you faint. I’ve grown used to most things, and I figured I’d grow used to the sign, if I didn’t leave Levi or go crazy first. But I hadn’t grown used to it, and I was still here. It was going on three months and my feeling of foreboding had only increased.
The Arms, a chipping aqua U-shaped construction, was clean enough, but Levi’s apartment above the fray on the second story, right-hand corner, was growing smaller and duller by the day. So was Westside Costa Mesa, once idyllic cattle grazing land, then an agricultural haven. Now, about the only things that grew wildly were the illegal immigrant population, low-income housing, and Latino gangs. So different from where I was from. If I spoke the language it might be different, or if I was brunette. But I was blond, the only gringa in our apartment complex.
I pulled a folding chair onto the balcony and lit a hand-rolled cigarette, the only tobacco I could afford these days. In the Arms’ courtyard just below sat a square swimming pool that had seen better days. Sorry little children with loser parents — why else would they be living at the Placent_a Arms? — splashed in its murky depths. Even the mourning doves inhabiting the adjacent kumquat tree seemed weary of the pool, but then Southern California was mired in a ubiquitous drought and the pool must’ve been better than nothing, I suppose. Although you can make yourself believe pretty much anything if your life depends on it.
At night, after a drink or two, as you watched the lights beneath the water, all blue and tropical, it was easy to trick yourself into thinking you were at some lush Orange County resort and were one of the beautiful people. The reverie never lasted long, though, because one drunk resident or another would start singing off-key — Barry Manilow, Aerosmith, pop Latino — reminding you that you were not in posh Newport Beach, the next city over, or in Laguna Beach, just down the coast, but in lovely Costa Misery. My sister Leonora, a nurse, left home back east to work for a plastic surgeon — the perks included discounted enhancements — and I followed when I quit my teaching job, all because of Levi.
Levi was sixteen when we met, seventeen when we started spending time together — backstage, on the football field, in cars. I was Levi’s drama teacher, thirty-three years old, but young-looking for my age. My friends called him jailbait, this sleek pretty boy with sea-foam green eyes and abs to die for. I lusted after the kid, but when my soon-to-be-ex husband caught us in my car in the parking lot outside Bob’s Big Boy and threatened to have me fired, I decided I needed my job teaching more than I needed Levi, resigned, and moved here. I saw what happened to other teachers who crossed the line, who forgot they were teachers and not teenagers.
A year later, when Levi turned eighteen, he quit school and found me. He was of age, but still too young for me. I was still living with Leonora and her three dogs, substitute teaching in Costa Misery, along bus routes. The trip cross-country had killed my beater and I let my driver’s license expire. The better school districts never seemed to have an opening and I didn’t want a full-time gig at just any school. Levi had already rented the furnished apartment at the Arms and I planned on spending just a few days, thinking this would help to get him out of my system. But he guilt-tripped me into moving in, said he wouldn’t even be out here if not for me.
“Mimi, the guy’s a loser,” Leonora said. “You can do better.” But I was addicted to Levi’s body, his skin that felt like silk, and tired of being one of Leonora’s pack.
My stomach growled. I lit another cigarette and looked at my watch. Five o’clock. Levi would be home soon. I went inside to throw something together for dinner.
Levi worked as a handyman. Ten bucks an hour, sometimes more. Not what he thought he was worth, but it paid the rent, bought the beer. He told me stories about the rich people’s houses where he spent his days — brushing the walls of a nursery with designer paint or retiling a hot tub. He described how, at one home, the outdoor pool connected with the interior of the house through a manmade cave with faux boulders you had to swim through. So Orange County.
Another client owned two houses side by side — one of them they lived in and the other one was the kids’ playhouse. Playhouse! Homeless people lined up at church soup kitchens and lived in parks and alleys around the town. Life was indeed unfair. And I was a little envious. Some people in Orange County had too much, while others had so damn little.