"What do you think of David?” I ask Cici several days later, over the roar of the shower. She peeks out at me from behind the curtain. She blinks water from her eyes and reaches for the towel over the rod. I am sitting on the toilet with the lid down, still dressed in my sleep shirt.
“David who?”
“David, you know, from the beach, Trey’s friend.”
She drops back behind the curtain. “The tall one?” Her voice is muffled.
“Yes,”
“Why?” She turns off the water, and the towel slips off the rod and she slides the curtain back, her body glistening with water. I look away, standing up from my perch on the toilet seat so I’m not in her way as she steps out of the tub.
“Trey is taking us out on his boat. David wanted you to come.”
She smiles, looking young and a little giddy. “What kind of boat?” she asks, stepping past me and into the hall, leaving moist footprints across the bathroom.
“Does it matter?” I ask, incredulous.
“Not really.” She laughs. “So when is this proposed boating excursion?”
“Saturday or Sunday, either one. You choose.”
“I could go Sunday, I guess.” She drops the towel on her bed and stands naked in front of the closet. Her tone has shifted, and the giddiness has been stifled, leaving behind her practiced boredom.
“Great. It will be fun.”
On Sunday we load into my car because Cici’s Rabbit has a flat tire. I have written down directions to the marina on Anchorage Lane, and her job is to navigate me there. She was out too late last night, and I got her up too early for this excursion. She is sitting with her head propped in her hand, waiting for the ibuprofen to kick in. I wonder if she was just out, or if she was with Amber, working on her new career, but I don’t ask.
“I hate this car,” she says as we pick up speed and the wind starts whipping through her hair. She cranks the window handle and rolls it most of the way up.
“We could have taken yours, but your tires are always flat,” I say, glancing over at her sour expression. She rolls her eyes at me and looks away. Cici hates my car because there is no air conditioning; she doesn’t appreciate the quaint antiquity of it like I do. She has been crabby for days, it seems, and I’m tempted to take her back and leave her behind. I love Cici. I mean, we’ve been through a lot, but sometimes I have a hard time reconciling this person with the one I remember. She is just bitchy, and that wears me out. It takes a lot of energy to be around her lately.
“Enough, Cici,” I say when she starts in about a driver who merges in front of us, with plenty of room.
“What? That dumb-ass just cut you off.” She flips her middle finger at the car in front of us.
“No, he didn’t. There was plenty of space.”
“I just hate the way these idiots drive.”
I glance at her but hold my tongue. She’s an aggressive driver, and I know that I’m not. More than once I’d thought I was going to have to kiss my butt goodbye when she merged into traffic that didn’t make way.
“What is your problem, Ceece? You’ve been on a tear for weeks. What’s going on?” I didn’t know I was going to say it. I didn’t intend to call her out, but her level of agitation seems more than just hangover and traffic related.
“Fuck you,” she mumbles toward the window.
“What?” I snap, then straighten up, pushing my shoulders back to release the tension. “Do you have a problem with me?”
“Yeah,” she says. Her teeth click shut, and I know there is something more. “You and your charmed life.” It is mumbled, under her breath. We drive in silence, me trying to process the words she has said. Words I have said about Dylan, about Kelci, about almost anybody who didn’t have my life.
“Is this about the modeling?” I ask. “Because it’s not a lot money from that, you know.”
“Yeah well, whatever.” She drops her forehead onto the window and lets it bounce, a small percussion.
“That’s not fair. You know my life. It has not been charmed.” We drive in silence, and I let my anger rise. I want to pull off the interstate and loop around to go the other way, back toward Poway.
“What are you doing?” She turns to look at me, as I move toward the next exit.
“I am not spending my day like this. You don’t like me? You don’t want to be around me? Fine. I will not feel guilty because something good has happened for me.” I drive, my fury pulsing, my hand on the white shifter knob even after the exit I was going toward has slipped past. I don’t want to give up a day on the boat, a day in the sun with Trey. Taking her back to Poway will make me late, and they may give up and leave without me. I’ve hit my top gear, clenched in a fist. Minutes pass, and I can see her, from the corner of my eye, glancing from the window to me and back out again. I don’t look at her, and I let my jaw stay set. I let the wind twist my hair like snakes around my head. I let her feel the weight of me not caring about her, the weight of me not loving her, the weight of me not tolerating her bullshit.
We continue to drive in silence, exits slipping past.
“You’re right. I’m sorry. This isn’t even about you.” Her voice breaks, and she swallows hard. I glance at her and see tears pooling in her eyes. It’s such an unexpected sight that I let my foot up off the gas, and the car behind us honks and swerves around me, giving me the finger as he passes.
“Cici, what’s going on?” I ask, pushing the gas again and jerking forward.
“I talked to my mother a couple of weeks ago,” she says finally, and all the heat has gone out of her voice. That is enough to explain it. I don’t know her mother, but based on the things she has told me about her life, I’m pretty sure any conversation with her mother would be difficult if not painful.
I nod. “Ah, I understand.” I flip my signal to pass the driver in front of us.
“No, you don’t,” she hisses, throwing a laugh out at the end, an unamused chortle. “You always say that, but you don’t.”
“I’m not the enemy here. Don’t attack me.”
She doesn’t respond. As the wind roars around us, I try to figure out what I can say to make anything better, trying not to let my anger rise.
Just because my mother isn’t around to cause me any new issues doesn’t mean I don’t still have some. I wish my mother were around to call me. The thought jolts me, because I had no idea I felt that way, but in that instant, it is true. I wish she could call me and tell me whatever she wanted to. What she would say to me? What would I say to her? I would ask her about her bat costume. That’s what I would want to talk about: what gave her the idea that she could fly off the Ripson Bridge? Did she know there was a video of it? What would she think about people around Sorento still talking about that day? The tension in my jaw has lessened, and I’ve forgotten entirely that I am angry, playing out the imaginary conversation with my mother. Perhaps the best conversation we’ve ever had.
“I’m sorry,” Cici says, and her voice is so quiet and pathetic that I glance over at her again and nod, all anger gone.
“So what’d she have to say?” I ask, knowing that she wouldn’t have mentioned it if she didn’t need to talk about it.
“You remember my boyfriend?”
Of course I do. “My baby Daddy” is what she used to call him, saying it with some pride, claiming him as her own. She used to talk about him during the early hours of the morning when neither of us could sleep because our hips hurt or her sciatica was acting up. He was finishing high school while she was building their baby. He had wanted her to have an abortion. “We’re gonna get married,” she had said, “but just, not yet, you know?”: It had seemed so important to her, that he wanted to marry her.
When it is clear that she isn’t going to say anything more, I ask, “So, what about him?”
“He got married.” I feel gut-punched for her. “He married my best girlfriend growing up. She always did have a thing for him.”
“Holy cow,” I say, and we exit the freeway toward Rosecranz Street.
“Yeah. Holy cow.” She throws the cow at me, because that is not the word she would choose. I shift gears. “Her name is Tina. Her dad’s a preacher with a shotgun. I guess she came up pregnant, too. Had a baby boy. Daddy made him marry her.”
“Is he stupid?” I ask. “I mean, like, doesn’t he understand what causes that?” I let my fury rise for her. “Are you kidding me? Girl, you are so much better off without him.”
She sucks air between her teeth, and when I glance over, her face is melting. I misunderstood. I thought this was about the boyfriend, but it isn’t—it’s about the son.
I pull off into a parking lot and stop the car. “Oh, Ceece,” I say and lean across the divide between us, pulling her into my arms.
“That should have been me,” she says, a small hiccup wet on my shoulder.
I nod, because I can’t say anything. Tears are leaking out of my eyes, and my voice is caught in a bundle in my throat. I get it. I know. We should have been able to keep our babies. We should be changing diapers and listening to coos and watching them learn new things. At three months old, Emily would just be learning to roll over on her own, and at five months, her boy may be learning to eat mush.
“Why didn’t he marry me?” she asks when she finally is able to speak again.
“Because you didn’t have a daddy with a shotgun.”
“Ain’t that the truth.” We sit for a few minutes longer, her head leaning on my shoulder. We should have kept our babies and raised them together, like she had asked me to do, but I was so determined to do the “right thing” and so convinced that I wouldn’t be a good mother, I didn’t even give it any real thought. “You know what really sucks?”
“What?” I ask. “Besides all of it?”
She laughs a small breath. “I can never go home again.”
I want to argue, to tell her that they don’t matter, that of course she can go home. She has family there, people who love her. But I know if I were in her shoes, if Warren had married somebody and had a baby . . . how would I feel seeing his other baby, when I had to let mine go?