What was it with the sign? “Welcome to Tarzana, Some Assembly Required.”
Yes, he was in Tarzana, formerly author Edgar Rice Burrough’s country estate, long since sub-divided and divided again. A city named after a fictional, tree-swinging, raised-by-apes hero. Tacky, but so what? It was just a place he drove through on the way home, an exit off the freeway, he didn’t know anybody here.
Yes, you do.
Then he remembered and he knew why he stopped.
Marty reached into his pocket and pulled out the photograph Molly tried to give him. The photo of her five-year-old daughter, Clara. And he remembered what she said, as she was bleeding to death in her car.
“ She’s at Dandelion Preschool in Tarzana, you’ll call the school from the hospital, let them know what happened?”
And she showed him the photo. The same one she tried to give him when the shaking started again. The photo he wouldn’t take because he was running away, leaving Molly to die. She screamed for him.
“Angel!”
He was almost home. Dandelion Preschool was out of his way. Clara wasn’t his responsibility.
Marty looked down Ventura Boulevard. He was so close to Beth now. Five, maybe six miles, then his ordeal would be over and they would be together again. That was the whole point of the journey, wasn’t it? To get back to his wife, to fight for her, and their marriage, again?
No, it was to get home. It wasn’t about their marriage, about fighting for anything, at least not when he started.
But he knew it was now. Somewhere along the way, the destination of his journey had changed.
Now that he thought about it, Marty could almost pinpoint the moment. It was when he met Buck. Almost from the start, Buck challenged him about who he was, how truthful he was with himself and with his wife, forced him to all but admit that he was a lousy husband and that his marriage was falling apart.
And now Marty knew why. He supposed he always knew, he just never admitted it to himself. Their marriage was dying because he gave up his dream of writing and hers of being a mother. He knew the reason he stopped trying to have a kid was the same reason he stopped writing. The obstacles were too much. He couldn’t deal with the failure.
But in the last two days, he’d overcome obstacles he would have found impossible to face before. Now the blank page and the empty semen cup didn’t seem nearly so frightening any more.
He wasn’t the same Martin Slack that he was before, he knew that now. And if he was going to prove it to Beth, he had to prove it to himself first.
5:11 p.m. Wednesday
The page Marty tore out of the phone book said that Dandelion Preschool was on Kittridge, which meant that technically it wasn’t in Tarzana at all, not that it made any difference now.
He didn’t have a map anymore, but he headed north on Wilbur because he vaguely remembered seeing a Kittridge street sign before, on his way to Costco, the warehouse store where Beth liked to buy things in bulk, not because they needed that much of anything, but because she couldn’t resist. It was like asking her take one potato chip from the bowl when she could have a handful instead. They were still using the same five-pound container of seasoned salt they bought there two years ago, and they probably still would be for years to come.
They didn’t take Wilbur to Costco, they took Tampa several blocks west, but this was the first north-south street he came across and he knew that if Kittridge crossed Tampa, and you could say the school was in Tarzana, then it had to cross Wilbur, too.
Marty didn’t know what he was going to say or do when he got to the school, but he knew he had to go there. Molly’s dying wish, even if it was implied rather than said, was that he save her girl. If Clara was even alive. And what if she wasn’t at the school anymore? What would he do then? How long and how far would he search before going home?
He didn’t have a chance to answer those questions right away, because he was immediately distracted by two things. First, was the Los Angeles River, which he could see to his left and right, which meant that he was over it and that the street he was on was actually a bridge. He’d been so lost in his thoughts, he hadn’t even realized he was walking on a bridge. But he considered his alternative. The banks of the river were nearly vertical slabs of concrete. If he didn’t take one of the streets over it, he’d have had to back-track all the way to Balboa Park near the Sepulveda Dam, scale the dry river bed, then come back this direction. He probably would have chosen this route anyway.
That’s what he thought, and tried to tell himself, in the split second between his first distraction, and the second one, which made the first all the more horrifying:
The aftershock.
The center of the overpass collapsed, turning both ends into immense, concrete slides. Marty rolled and tumbled, along with a dozen other people, two cars, and one motorcycle, down towards the concrete river bed below.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
T he valley?” Marty couldn’t understand what Beth was thinking. She might as well have suggested they move to Fresno. “Why would you want to move there?”
“Because you can get twice the house for the money,” Beth replied.
“That’s because no one wants to live there.”
“Michael Jackson lives in Encino.”
“I rest my case.”
They were renting a house in Westwood, two blocks south of Wilshire Boulevard, for $2200-a-month. The neighborhood didn’t have the cachet it once did, but when Marty walked the dog he still bumped into character actors, up-and-coming directors, and C-list screenwriters, and that was nice.
“Marty, for what it costs to buy an old, two-bedroom fixer-upper in Santa Monica we can go to the valley and get a new, four-bedroom Mediterranean mansion with a swimming pool and a huge yard in a gated community,” she said. “And, best of all, we won’t have to send our children to private school.”
“We don’t have any children.”
“We will,” she said. “That should be the criteria for choosing where we live, not whether it’s a hip place.”
“The valley has no character. It’s just shopping centers and freeways and tract homes. It will be like living in one of those rest stops on the interstate,” Marty argued. “What’s wrong with the Hollywood Hills or one of the canyons, off Coldwater, for instance? Or how about the Palisades, Hancock Park, or Brentwood?”
“Forget about the hills and canyons. I don’t want to be living on the edge of a cliff when the next quake comes. Besides, those houses have no yards at all and are on narrow, steep streets. Hancock Park, the Palisades, and Brentwood cost too much for too little, and we’d still have to send our kids to private school at $12,000-a-year-per-child,” Beth said. “I also want to know our children can play in the front yard and be safe, and in a gated community, you’ve got some measure of security.”
“So, in other words, you want to live in a country club prison out in the boonies,” Marty replied. “If we’re going to do time, let’s at least try to embezzle some money or rob a bank first, so we’ve actually earned the punishment.”
“I want the most for our money and the safest possible neighborhood for our family,” Beth said firmly. “You want a place you can brag about over lunch at Le Guerre, so when agents messenger you scripts at home for a weekend read they’ll be impressed by the zip code. Jesus, Marty, where are your priorities?”
He looked at Beth’s face. Her eyes were blazing with anger and stubborn determination. She was already a mother-bear protecting her cubs, and she didn’t even have any yet.
How could Marty argue against getting more for their money, the best schools for their kids, and security for his family? He couldn’t. She knew it and so did he. It was an infuriating position for him to be in.
Who cares that the valley was numbingly dull, choked with smog, and one evolutionary step above a vast trailer park? No matter what he said in opposition, he’d come off like an asshole.