Deceit

TWELVE

Once upon a time, Littleton had aspired to a kind of Palm Springs-hood. They’d broken ground for a Robert Trent Jones golf course and two sprawling resorts, ascribing to the build-it-and-they-will-come theory of urban development.

They didn’t come.

Maybe because Palm Springs had Bob Hope and Shecky Greene and a host of other aging Friars Club members, and Littleton had Sonny Rolph.

It didn’t help that Littleton’s major real estate developer went belly-up in the stock collapse of the early nineties, just as Vegas turned into a cheap ticket option for Los Angelenos looking to grab a weekend getaway.

The resorts were never finished-the golf course suspended at nine holes and counting.

Now mall openings were true cause for excitement.

This one was first-rate.

Rodeo clowns handed out balloons twisted into tiny pink dachshunds. Humming machines spun out glistening spools of cotton candy. Someone who looked like Billy Ray Cyrus sung a country song about his girlfriend leaving him red, white, and blue.

Which happened to be the color of the ceremonial ribbon deftly cut in two by Littleton’s three-term mayor. Patriotism was clearly in these days. The voracious crowd promptly surged through the massive doorway in search of bargains and air-conditioning. Not necessarily in that order.

Nate Cohen, my intern from Pepperdine, accompanied me to cover this earthshaking event. Nate the Skate his frat buddies called him, he informed me the day we met.

Why?

I don’t know, he said, looking puzzled at the question.

Nate tended to pepper me with journalism questions when he wasn’t gabbing to his girlfriend. They had matching cell phones, he stated proudly, both of which could take camera-quality pictures. He proved it by showing me his girlfriend, Rina, reclining nude on an outdoor chaise longue.

“Isn’t she cute?” he asked.

“You sure you want to be showing people that?” I asked him.

“You’re not people. You’re my mentor. Sort of.”

“Maybe she wouldn’t want your mentor seeing her naked?”

“Oh, she wouldn’t care. We go to Black’s Beach like all the time.”

Black’s Beach was a notorious clothing-optional cove just south of La Jolla.

We discharged our duties with perfunctory professionalism.

Somehow interviewing the middle-aged saleswoman who generously splashed me with Calvin Klein’s Eau de something failed to get my journalistic juices flowing. Same for the home-appliances manager-despite his flawless demonstration of a combination juicer-toaster, and hand vacuum with built-in computer chip.

I was preoccupied.

Belinda Washington had made it to her hundredth birthday and then suddenly passed away. I’d heard it on the radio this morning.

On a sad note, the local radio announcer had said, our very own centenarian kicked the bucket today. Belinda Washington has moved on to that great big nursing home in the sky.

We should all be so lucky, the show’s cohost had cheerily intoned.

After I dropped Nate off, I drove back to the home.

I’m not sure why.

When I entered the lobby, Mr. Birdwell was ushering a middle-aged couple out the door.

“So let us know,” he said to them. “Space is kind of limited.”

He was already trying to fill her bed. Old-age homes were like in restaurants these days; the good ones had waiting lists that were miles long.

Mr. Birdwell had no trouble remembering me.

“What brings you back, Mr. Valle?”

“I heard about Belinda. Just following up.”

He stared at me with a puzzled expression, as if he were waiting for a second part of the sentence.

“I was wondering what she died of,” I said.

“She was 100,” he answered, as if that provided all the reason necessary.

“She seemed pretty okay the day I was here.”

“Her heart,” he said. “It just gave out.”

“I see.” I remembered the chill of Belinda’s hand-the opposite of Anna’s hot-blooded grip. Cold extremities were a sign of pure blood circulation. Her heart, sure.

“Can I see her room?” I asked.

“What for?”

“For the story.”

There wasn’t a story. Even as the words passed my lips, I knew I was lying.

“There’s not a whole lot there,” Mr. Birdwell said. “But okay.”

He turned and motioned for me to follow him.

We passed the nurse’s station, where wheelchairs were lined up like shopping carts. The nurses seemed subdued today. Maybe they’d been fond of Belinda, too.

A bathrobed man was tortuously making his way down the hall with the aid of walker and oxygen mask. He looked up and squinted at me as if trying to focus. He had been in the rec room that day, I remembered, and briefly wondered if he might be Anna’s father, the one withering away from Alzheimer’s.

Belinda’s room was at the end of a long fluorescent-lit hall.

It was conspicuously empty.

She’d had it all to herself. Just one double bed. A TV screwed into a movable platform was tucked into the corner.

A small brown dresser supported a lone picture frame half turned to the wall.

I picked it up and peeked.

A mother and son.

It was unmistakably her-just sixty years younger.

The same smile she’d bestowed on me the day I interviewed her. She was sitting on a bench with a small boy nestled in her arms.

Just above her head was a sign suspended by chains: Littleton Flats Cafe.

“She grew up in Littleton Flats?” I asked Mr. Birdwell, trying to remember if she’d mentioned that to me.

“Oh yes,” Mr. Birdwell said. “Belinda was our homegrown celebrity. You know that weatherguy on NBC-Willard, what’s his name, Scott-who wishes happy birthday to 100-year-olds around the country? He put Belinda’s picture on a few weeks ago.”

I looked down at the boy sitting in her lap.

He passed on a long time ago…

“Her son. Did he die in the flood?”

“Uh-huh,” Mr. Birdwell nodded. “A real tragedy. Belinda worked as a live-in for a family here in Littleton. Apparently she always spent the weekends home. Not that weekend. She was asked to babysit the family kids. The flood happened on a Sunday morning when everyone in Littleton Flats was home. Including her son.”

I tried to imagine what that must’ve felt like-taking care of someone else’s children while your own drowned. And you not being there to hold him.

He say he forgive me, she’d said.

Now I knew why.

“Did she have any other children?” I asked.

Mr. Birdwell shook his head. “She had him kind of late in life. I’m pretty positive Benjamin was it.”

I miss things.

Yes. She’d missed Benjamin enough to conjure him up from time to time. A woman in the first throes of dementia, and the last throes of loneliness.

“Can I have it?” I asked Mr. Birdwell.

“The picture? What for?”

“The story,” I said, lying again.

He hesitated, evidently debating the ethical parameters of releasing personal property to a journalist.

“I’ll return it,” I said.

“Well, okay. Don’t see why not.”

I’d already slipped it into my pocket.

Later that night, after I’d downed two glasses of tequila while watching back-to-back episodes of Forensic Files, I lifted the phone and punched in some familiar digits.

I waited four rings until he picked up and said: Hello, hello…?

Sometimes I form the words back.

In my head I do.

I say I’m sorry, that I’ve been meaning to pick up the phone and tell him just how sorry I am, and that I apologize for taking so long. I hear the words in my head, and they sound genuine and contrite. I just don’t hear them coming out of my mouth. They get lost on the way from here to there.

Tonight I formed them again and they sounded slightly boozy and sad.

Hello? Hello… who is this?

It’s me, I said wordlessly. It’s me. Tom. I’m sorry, really.

He hung up.

I waited till I heard the depressing hum of an empty line.

When I leaned over to put the phone down, I painfully discovered the picture lying on my floor.

It must’ve fallen out of my pocket when I tried, unsuccessfully, to fling my jeans over a chair back. The glass had cracked, leaving small shards where my left foot stepped on them.

I was bleeding.

I hopped into the bathroom on one foot and managed to locate a bottle of iodine. I extricated a sliver of glass from just below my big toe, then swathed and bandaged it. I gingerly shuffled back into the bedroom, carefully scraped the remaining slivers into my right palm, and deposited them in my overflowing trash bag reeking of four-day-old food.

There was the wounded photograph to tend to. Speckles of bright blood had given the mother and son the look of accident victims. I felt as if I’d desecrated something fine and irreplaceable.

I wiped it with a tissue, but the blood had seeped into the fabric of the photo and dimpled it. I carefully removed it from the cracked frame and gently blew across its surface.

Something dropped to the floor. A folded piece of paper that had been stuck to the other side.

I placed the picture on my dresser and reached for it. My lacerated foot screamed.

It was a note.

Happy hundred birthday, it began.

I sat on the bed, spread the letter out over my knee.

Happy hundred birthday.

I wish you hundred kisses.

I wish you hundred hugs.

Love, Benjy.

P.S. Greetings from Kara Bolka.