These Dreams of You Read online

  Even as her older brother listens to glowering black rappers on their way up the river, Sheba remains besotted by the limey spaceman in the dress and make-up from thirty years ago. She sings his songs all the time; and mostly because he’s the annoying new obsession of his new sister, Parker cannot abide the man. Songs about electric-blue rooms and sons of the silent age drive him batty because they don’t make any sense: “Seriously?” he wails in the car at the CD. “Turn it off!”

  The small studio from which Zan broadcasts was discovered in what everyone believed was the Añejo’s storage space. There was a microphone, sound system, disc player. The bar’s owner, Roberto, explained, “Canyon had a station once, to the extent anyone could get a frequency in these hills,” but that lonely frequency has been as unoccupied as the canyon’s repossessed homes. “I have this idea,” Zan said to Roberto one day, “I’ll play music a few hours a night, do a little show–it will be a way to advertise the bar.”

  “Do a little show?” Roberto said. “Don’t you have to have a personality for that kind of thing?”

  “I have a personality,” Zan said evenly, “don’t you worry about my personality. What about a license?”

  “A license?” laughed Roberto. “For what?”

  “To broadcast?”

  “It’s the canyon. License? We don’t need no stinking license.” A few CDs lay scattered on the floor. “But what about the music?”

  “Don’t you worry about the music, either,” said Zan.

  On the way to an art workshop for kids that she teaches for extra income, Viv drops off Parker and Sheba at the Añejo as Zan’s shift ends, and in the car driving home Zan pulls off the road at the old railroad bridge down the road. The canyon abounds with competing legends all ending with the same conclusion, that the bridge is haunted, the only matter of contention being by whom, the ghosts of displaced Indians or the victims of devil rites or crazed hippie killers. This is the bucolic canyon from which, forty years ago, Charles Manson fled because it was too weird for him.

  Parker has been jonesing to see the railroad bridge since he noticed it one day from the car on the way to the ocean. But because it’s dusk, when the canyon light fails so fast and the heat so quickly turns cold, the boy doesn’t want to linger, as he and his sister and father stand in the middle surveying the decayed wood and listening to the sound of the creek beneath them. Up one corner of the bridgehouse runs a ladder to the rafters. From the apex of the frame, Zan and the kids have a view of the canyon and whatever should roll in from the ocean.

  Parker says, “Let’s leave.” He’s a fearless kid who will brave things Zan never did as a boy—some death-defying stunt on a skateboard, some preposterously lethal warp-speed roller coaster—but dark closed places push his courage to its breaking point. “Zan,” he says.

  “I want to stay,” says Sheba.

  “You only want to stay because I want to go,” Parker says.

  “I want to stay!” she says again, though it’s not at all clear what it is she wants to stay for other than to momentarily seize control of a life that always feels outside her control. “I WANT TO STAY, I WANT TO STAY, I WANT TO STAY,” and the railroad car becomes a megaphone, the four-year-old’s voice careening from bend to dell and hilltop.

  As the babble of the creek rises from the dark through the boxcar windows, a twelve-year-old imagination bubbles. Peering from the bridgehouse’s rafter toward the ocean, Parker says, “When it comes, will the tsunami reach this far?”

  The four were driving down Pacific Coast Highway, mostly in silence but for the harmonics coming from Sheba’s body, when they passed new signs demarcating “tsunami safety zones.”

  “Stop singing,” Parker was crying in exasperation to his sister.

  “I’m not,” said Sheba.

  “She can’t help it,” said Zan, “it’s not coming from her.”

  “It is coming from her,” said Parker.

  “I’ve never noticed those,” Viv said about the signs.

  “It’s coming from her but not actually. Through her.”

  “How big,” said Parker, “is a tsunami compared to a regular wave anyway?”

  “No,” Zan agreed about the signs, “they’re new,” then to Parker, “Big.”

  The signs apparently meant to indicate what level of ground people must flee to in order to be safe. “Would one hit our house?” said Parker.

  “No,” said his father.

  “We don’t have to worry about tsunamis,” said Viv, and though she didn’t mean it that way, the implication was there already were enough things to worry about. Zan wondered if Viv was thinking the same thing, which was, If the bank takes the house, bring on that damned tsunami—but more likely Viv was just trying to strike from her children’s running list of horribles one more horror. “The ocean might come up into the canyon a bit,” said Zan, and Viv shot him a look: Oh, great. Tell them the tsunami’s going to come into the canyon. “Just a bit,” Zan hastily stressed. “Where the canyon begins.”

  “Über cool,” said Parker. He’s at the age where it’s hard for Zan to tell the cool from the holocaustic; lately Parker and his friends call something “sick” when they mean it’s great. What does that say about the era? wonders Zan. How and when did something outstanding become “tight” and what connotations could it have to his twelve-year-old? When I was young, Zan remembers, things were “wicked.” Wicked was good and soon we were doing things that we thought were good that for centuries people thought were wicked. In our slang lies the future.

  Not long ago, Parker asked to trade his larger room in the house for a smaller one with no bathroom attached—which is to say a room that no one else in the family ever has reason to enter. The boy now is at an age when he happily barters twice the space for a door he can shut to the rest of the world. Lying in bed in the dark, Viv uttered to Zan four words that portended doom as surely as We are at war or All hope is lost: “He’s becoming a teenager,” and the father shuddered.

  Parker with his otherworldly beauty that always bewildered his parents, soon to kamikaze into acne and wet dreams as well as a newfound status—that Zan never could have imagined when he was Parker’s age—as the class heartthrob. Possessed of a new vanity so surreal and implacable that the boy views the speed bumps on the canyon boulevard as put there solely for the purpose of disrupting his immaculately positioned hair. Parker the stoic with his monk’s smile, allowing of course for the melodrama of a budding artist who already makes his own movies on Zan’s laptop as well as writing and drawing Shrimpy Comix, about a mutant, or maybe just odd, crustacean. Of course all this is interspersed with adolescent tantrums, but also the occasional moment when Viv catches their son reading to his sister Shrimpy #3, hot off the press, as the girl curls in the crook of the boy’s arm listening.

  In the car on Pacific Coast Highway, Parker said, “If they have a huge earthquake in Tokyo, would the wave roll all the way across the ocean here?” He’s never been to Tokyo but is fascinated by the idea of it, an animé city.

  Together Zan and Viv reached the same conclusion, which was there was no getting around a conversation about tsunamis. “No,” said Zan. “If they had one in Hawaii, maybe.” Viv shot him another look.

  “I don’t understand how it works,” said Parker.

  “The ground under the sea moves and the water is . . . displaced.” He looked at Viv: right?

  Viv shrugged. “First the water goes all the way out.”

  “If you ever go to the beach,” said Zan, “and there’s a lot more beach than you’ve ever seen, don’t go play on it.”

  “Get far away,” Sheba interjected for the first time from her booster seat in the back. Viv had the usual look on her face that said, Is this useful information or child abuse? Parenthood is another word for fear management. In the backseat Sheba stared out the window, already seeing the wave in the distance.

  When they got back to the house, Zan stopped at the top of their insanely steep driveway an
d dropped Viv off at the mailbox. He drove down the drive and got out of the car, anxiously gazing back up at Viv; he loved the days they got only junk mail, except for the once a year when there was a royalty check from some foreign country full of perplexing people who read Zan’s books from years before. Everyone had been in the house for five minutes when Viv said, just as Zan was thinking it, “Where’s Sheba?”

  Zan rushed back out onto the deck of the house and peered over the rail at the car parked below, from where Sheba was extracting herself. The little girl glared back up at her father. “YOU LEFT ME IN THE CAR!”

  “I’m sorry,” Zan sputtered, horrified, “I thought you were with Parker.”

  “Thank you VERY much for RUINING MY DAY, parents!” she declaimed, and months later the girl still hasn’t forgotten. Wherever they are or whatever they’re doing, out of nowhere, in the middle of any conversation or some rare silence, she mutters, “You left me in the car,” and who knows what scenario she considered in those moments strapped in her booster seat, having been left at an orphanage by her grandmother when she was two years old, having been left by her mother at the grandmother’s door when she was four months old: Did she wonder, Is this where I wait for someone else to come take me? and as she waited, did she watch for that hawaiian tsunami to come roaring down the driveway?

  Not until Viv got to Ethiopia to bring Sheba home did she learn the truth about the girl’s first two years. The second morning in Addis Ababa, she went to meet a woman who had been identified by the adoption agency as a kind of caretaker; the woman was in her mid-sixties but seemed older. She had blue cataract eyes and was dressed in traditional clothes, and accompanied by her grown daughter. When the women began to cry, Viv learned that the older woman was Sheba’s paternal grandmother and the younger was Sheba’s aunt, the sister of Sheba’s father.

  The grandmother spoke Amharic but the aunt spoke English. The aunt explained to Viv that–notwithstanding the adoption agency’s account, which always was vague–Sheba was raised by the grandmother. Sup­porting her family by making moonshine tej, the local honeywine, after her land was seized in the Eighties by the communist Derg that followed the fall of Haile Selassie, the old woman eventually was no longer able physically or financially to care for Sheba, who at the age of four months was left on the doorstep by the girl’s mother, an unwed Muslim.

  When Viv first met Sheba, the girl vacillated between a psychic desolation almost impossible to fully accommodate and the insubordination that meant survival for someone so young needing so much. Then, just when Viv thought she was turning a corner with the girl, Sheba wanted nothing to do with her, an abstinence that lasted for days. What have I done, Viv wrote to Zan, what have I gotten us into. But the girl always followed her new mother with her eyes, and in the middle of the night, as the sax line of a song drifted through the open window of the hotel room, Viv felt a small finger constantly moving along the outline of her face to make certain she was there. Sheba grabbed Viv’s face in her hands and pulled it close as if to share the same breath.

  Sheba’s father disputed his paternity. A former veteran of the Ethiopian Air Force and one of the countless wars that the country fought with the countries around it—or maybe it always was the same war—he insisted that wounds he suffered in battle made it impossible for him to be Sheba’s father.

  “The old war-wound excuse!” Zan said in disbelief when he heard it. The father had no job to support the child. That he was Christian when the mother was Muslim only made the circumstances more difficult. But the grandmother acknowledged the baby girl’s DNA even as the father wouldn’t, and only after two years when she became more infirmed did she take Sheba to the local orphanage, where for two weeks the little girl waited vainly in the yard for her grandmother to return.

  Relatively quickly, Sheba was assigned by the adoption agency to Viv and Zan, who had filed their papers some months before. Now the couple is amused by people who believe prospective parents saunter through orphanages choosing a child like someone picks a kitten at the animal shelter. The adoption process, involving medical tests, hours of online schooling, an impossible paper chase of countless forms and documents, and the scheduling of African court dates, was followed by Viv’s twenty-four-hour hejira to Addis Ababa by way of Chicago, London, Frankfurt and Cairo to get the girl.

  I chose you, were the grandmother’s parting words before Viv left Ethiopia to return with Sheba to Los Angeles, I chose you through God to be her mother and only in the final moments did the girl’s father bring himself to admit that Sheba was his daughter, as though anyone looking at the two would have any doubt.

  Given Viv, it’s not hard to believe she’s been chosen. Out of several billion women Sheba’s grandmother somehow plucked the truest heart, Viv who once wanted to bring to the house all the old homeless men of the canyon for a Christmas shower, Viv who will give away to the destitute whatever little money the family has left if Zan doesn’t stop her. Viv who would be field marshal of the world’s needing and needed as surely as she field-marshals the family priorities, when the family isn’t chafing at her command. “I’m a flawed human being,” she moans plaintively to Zan.

  Fifteen years ago, before either of the children, a photographic series on church stained-glass windows led Viv to her great artistic endeavor. These were steel-framed recreations of the windows in the wings of butterflies that had died after their full butterfly-lives of several weeks; as Viv would have it, the juxtaposition of wing and steel is a metaphor for life, but Zan knows it’s a metaphor for the woman, the fragile and gritty joined in all five-feet-two of her. The pieces attracted attention as evidenced by their exhibition in a number of galleries and acceptance into the permanent collections of two Southland museums, but most prominently by their plagiarism: Over the past several years Viv has found herself at the center of one of the art world’s most notorious scandales, when both the idea and medium of the butterfly stained-glass windows were stolen by the world’s most successful artist—a man as well known for cavalierly “appropriating” other people’s ideas as for making tens of millions of dollars dipping elephants in plastic. While numerous people have pointed out the grounds for legal action, it sums up the Nordhocs’ lives emotionally as well as financially that they have nearly as little psychological wherewithal as they do financial resources to sue the bastard.

  Rather Viv has poured her heart into Sheba’s adoption, which is less glamorous than television images of movie stars jetting in to scoop up African children. Months after the girl comes to live with them, Zan and Viv realize that the adoption they supposed might universally be regarded as a good thing is viewed as a gaudy display of trendiness. “We’re Brangelina!” Viv exclaims in dismay after watching a TV news story about an actress facing a public-relations backlash on the occasion of her third (or fourth) (or fifth) adoption.

  “Well,” allows Zan, “the Brangelina of canyon dwellers about to be foreclosed on, anyway.” Viv remains in contact with Sheba’s family back in Addis, every month sending money to Sheba’s grandmother; almost two years after the adoption, Viv continues to ask about Sheba’s birth-mother. The more that the grandmother and aunt and agency respond, “No one knows,” “It’s not good to ask,” “It will make trouble,” the more determined Viv becomes.

  She has visions of the mother driven from her home, becoming a prostitute or stoned to death. As someone who already was a mother before Sheba, Viv knows that if the woman is still alive then she’ll wonder what happened to her child and someday Sheba will wonder who the woman was who gave birth to her. Warnings and admonitions aside, Viv hires a young journalist she met in Addis to find the girl’s mother. “I hope I’m doing the right thing,” she frets to Zan, “I hope I’m not making trouble. Why does everyone keep telling me to leave it alone?”

  About most things Zan believes that Fate—the same fate that he knows is saving for him the Ultimate Trick—unfolds as it does for better or worse. There are things never to be known; not
every question in life is to be answered or even necessarily should be. Some secrets have their integrity. He’s also aware that, until Sheba’s arrival, his role in the adoption often has been that of a bystander.

  Yet Zan wonders about Sheba’s mother as well. If she’s alive, then somewhere on the planet is a woman with a hole in her heart. He thinks of her lying in bed or on a mat at night wondering, before she finally sleeps, who her daughter is or where she could be. He knows that when Sheba is older, this will become a burning question, and he imagines the recriminations for not having pursued the answer.

  Already Sheba resents the claims that Parker makes on Viv’s belly that she can’t. She covets his time in Viv’s womb and it becomes a weapon in the alpha-struggles between siblings that Sheba can’t win physically. “How did THIS PERSON,” she demands, pointing at Parker, “come out of YOUR TUMMY?” outraged that her brother should have had such sanctuary and that Viv could have given it. The day will come when Sheba ponders the unknown womb from where she was delivered.