Anywhere But Here, Chapters Ch 25–27
--
This novel is a work in progress and an experiment in crowd editing + serial posting. I wrote the first draft during NaNoWriMo 2012.
The story is told in alternating points of view between Sandra (mom) and Emily (teenage daughter).
Feedback in private notes or responses would be lovely.
Chapters 1–3 | Chapters 4–6 | Chapters 7–9 | Chapters 10–12 | Chapters 13–15| Chapters 16–18 | Chapters 19–21 | Chapters 22–24 | Chapters 25–27 | Chapters 28–30 | Chapters 31–33 | Chapters 34–36 | Chapters 37–39 | Chapters 40–42 | Chapters 43–45 | Chapters 46–48 | Chapters 49–50 | Chapters 51–53 | Chapters 54–57 | Chapters 58–60 | Chapters 61–63
Chapter 25: Sandra
San Francisco, Summer 2012
“Parker, you left Emily where?” Sandra demanded, on arriving home to the flat she shared with her friend Parker.
“The main library, Sandra Dee. All the local kids ride Muni.”
“But this is my fourteen year old daughter who has never taken a bus anywhere in her life, much less in a big city full of wackos!”
“I thought your affinity for wackos brought you to San Francisco?” Parker responded.
“Don’t make this about me! I thought maybe she’d explore Fillmore, or walk around the neighborhood, but you left her at the library near the Tenderloin that you know is a dodgy area. She has to take two bus lines to get back and I have no way to reach her!”
“I wrote the return bus lines on her map. Besides Sandra, you said she’s a smart kid.”
“Yes, Parker, book smart, not ‘aware of the crazies’ street smart.”
“She hadn’t left the house all week. I’m not even sure she showered. I took her to the library and made sure she noticed landmarks. It was the gentlest kind of tough love, I promise.”
“Parker, if anything happens to her…” Sandra started, unable to finish.
“It’s still light outside. Let’s give her until 7 before we send out the helicopters with search lights. How about a glass of wine?” he offered, pulling a bottle out of the cupboard.
“How can I drink now?”
“How can I get you to relax without a drink, is the question. Your kid will be fine.”
“You can say that because you have no kids.”
“Red, right?”
“No fair trying to change the subject by handing me a glass of wine,” Sandra said, taking a sip automatically.
“So how’s work?”
“Work? It’s worse than having no idea where my only child is in an unknown city, thanks for asking.”
“Worse? How so? Usually Cesco has a knack for getting his start-up act together. Are the people vicious and back-stabbing, or what?”
“No, the people are nice. Self-absorbed, but nice. Dana is endlessly patient and has a wicked sense of humor. I just have no idea what I’m supposed to be doing, and I’m sure I’m going to be fired. I would fire me!
“Next week I have to give a status update of what I did this week and what I plan to do next week, and all I can tell you is that the Indian food disappears
quicker than Chinese at lunch time.”
Parker laughed, then stopped when Sandra shot him a piercing look.
“I’m serious, Parker. What the heck am I supposed to be doing? What does a customer service manager do at a company that doesn’t have any customers, or even a product?”
“Relax. Drink that wine.”
“Wine is not going to solve my problems! My ability to live in the city relies on the paycheck from this job that every moment this week I feared being found out I’m a fraud. For years I’ve answered calls from customers that complain about their insurance coverage, like dumb-asses trying to get Lasix.” Sandra shot him a look.
“Ouch!”
“I don’t know the first thing about hiring or managing people!”
“Right now you don’t have anyone to hire or manage. Let me find something for you,” Parker waved his hand for Sandra to wait and walked into the dining room.
“Unless you’re hiding a magic set of beans to take me to a cloud in the sky, I hardly see how anything in your hutch could help.”
“Patience, patience,” Parker crooned, “Here it is.” He held up a printed document, showing Sandra the title page.
“Transforming the health insurance industry with the first health insurance web portal,” Sandra read aloud, “Parker, what is this?”
“It’s the business plan that I helped Cesco write, that got the seed money to start the company,” Parker said, “the company which now is your employer.”
“Business plan? Seed money? What does that mean in English?”
Parker grinned. “Bay area MBA in 30 seconds:
“1: Person gets idea;
2: Person creates a slide deck explaining the idea and how it will make lots of money. This slide deck is called a business plan;
3: Person is influential enough to convince others to invest money in this idea, which is called seed money or sometimes angel investor money; and/or Person has enough money from last time she or he did this to invest their own money in the idea;
4: Person starts company and employs other people, such as
yourself, and attempts to do what they said in the business plan
through means of sheer force of will, usually.”
“So, the business plan is someone’s idea for a company and how
it will make money,” Sandra said, “and what you’re holding is a
copy of this plan that you wrote with the man that hired me at a
cocktail party?”
“Yes.”
“And this stack of paper will tell me what product the future customers I am supposed to support, will complain about?”
Parker nodded with a sly grin.
“Hand it over, and I might forgive you if Emily is home in the next thirty minutes.”
“Only if you will relax by 20 percent. And finish the last sip in that glass.”
“Maybe.” Sandra speed-read through the thirty pages, absorbed in the details of the unmet needs provided by their proposed product, and then alliances required to make the product a reality. HealthCo, her former employer, was third on the list.
Half an hour later, the bottle of wine empty, Sandra glanced at the ideas she’d scribbled while reading the business plan. The front door opened with a burst of air that gushed down the railroad hall to the kitchen. “Mom! I’m back! Is Parker home?”
“Emily!” Sandra sprinted down the hall. “You’re okay!” Parker followed, walking.
“Um, Mom, you’re crushing me.”
Sandra relaxed her bear hug. “Oh, sorry. Parker told me he left you at the library, in the middle of the city, with a map, and …”
“I’m okay, Mom.”
Even better than okay, Sandra noticed. Emily was smiling and talking.
“So cupcake, how was the bus ride home?” Parker asked as they walked into the kitchen.
“I met a girl at the library today and she rode the bus home with me.”
“Sweet! Does she live nearby?”
“She said no, but that as an ambassador of San Francisco, it was her pleasure and honor to see me safely home on Muni.” Orbit walked into the kitchen, rubbed her ankles and meowed plaintively.
Emily looked at her Mom, “did you feed Orbit yet?”
“No, sorry Emily.”
“About Orbit … I did get a surprise on my bedroom floor today when I returned. Cat vomit is so lovely to step in with bare feet.”
“Um, sorry Parker,” Emily looked sheepishly at her toes, “but you did rush me out the door …”
“I figured it was your cat’s retribution because I forced you to leave the house today.”
“Honey, there was a package for you today,” Sandra said.
Emily ran back to the kitchen, “A package? Where?”
“On the table by the front door.”
Emily brought in a small brown box, broke the tape with a kitchen knife, and took out a mobile phone and a note. “It’s from Dad.”
Sandra felt simultaneous elation and deflation. It would be good for Emily to have a phone, she thought, but the thin thread of hope that she could briefly talk to Drew before handing the phone to Emily was shattered. Even if he was hostile, she could still hear his voice. Now he could avoid talking to her altogether. “That’s great, honey.”
“It’s not an iPhone like Natalie has, but at least it’s a phone,” Emily mumbled, powered on the phone. “It’s a 916 area code, like home!”
Sandra stared at the empty bottom of her wine glass, swallowing down a lump of guilt.
At 8:30PM, precisely, an electronic ring sounded in the house.
“Not my phone,” Parker said.
“Emily, I think that’s your …” Sandra started.
“Coming!” Emily ran for the phone in the dining room. “Daddy!” she exclaimed as she answered.
Sandra tried in vain to hold back tears as she slumped to the floor inside Parker’s room, quietly closing the door as she heard the excited shrieks of her daughter talking to her estranged husband.
“Livie,” she heard Emily say, “and she has burgundy purple hair, Daddy.” Sandra wondered if that was the girl Emily had met at the library.
Chapter 26: Emily
San Francisco, Summer 2012
Emily woke early the next morning, full of energy and excitement. Her Dad had called! Her Dad sent her a cell phone! Was it too early to text Lauren?
He’d resisted getting her a phone forever, saying that it would create more problems than it would solve, so she was always borrowing Lauren’s phone to call her mom to pick her up.
She walked into the kitchen and saw her Mom. “Don’t you have work today?”
“Em, it’s Saturday,” Sandra replied.
“Saturday!” Emily responded. “But I want to go to the library! I was going to take Muni. Now I have a phone so you can find me.”
“I can drop you off if you want.”
Emily thought riding the bus seemed easy enough with Parker and Livie. She could try alone on Monday when her Mom was at work. “Okay, fine,” Emily said, like Sandra was doing her a favor, “when can we go?”
“Well, it’s only eight, the library may not be open yet.”
“What’s for breakfast?”
“Coffee with a side of newspaper,” Sandra gently shook the paper in front of her, “but I bought cereal last night. Let’s leave at 10.”
Emily paced the narrow hallway as her Mom grabbed her car keys and purse. “Now I just have to remember where I put the car. Next to the park, I think.”
They walked outside, turning right up the street towards Alta Plaza Park, where Emily saw endless concrete stairs leading up into a cluster of trees and grass. They walked on the sidewalk at the edge of the park looking for her Subaru. “Mom, how could you forget where you parked your car?”
“Try parking somewhere different every time you move your car, and see if you can remember one parking place from the next. It’s not like I can park in the garage or in front of the house!”
The retort silenced Emily, she couldn’t remember the last time her mother snapped back at her. They turned the corner around the park and saw the car.
“What’s that on the windshield?” Sandra asked, pulling off a white slip of paper. “A parking ticket? Street cleaning!” She exhaled in a burst. “Sixty-five dollars! I don’t have sixty-five dollars!”
“Mom, it’s just a parking ticket,” Emily said. Why doesn’t she have $65? Fear crept around Emily’s thoughts. She swallowed down a snarky retort. Her mom looked like she was going to burst into tears.
Her mom sighed deeply. “It’s just not going to be easy, is it?” Sandra asked.
You leave Dad and move us to San Francisco, Emily thought, you didn’t ask for easy.
“It’s hard enough to find a parking space, I also have to remember what day the street is cleaned,” her mom said, “In Folsom the streets were always clean, but I don’t remember anyone cleaning them. How is that?”
They got into the car, and Emily’s mom maneuvered the car back and forth, trying to get out of the tight parallel parking space. She hit the car behind them with an abrupt thud. “Shit!” her mom exclaimed.
Emily frowned, her mom didn’t swear. Ever. What was happening to her mom?
After inching the car back and forth five times, they turned onto the street.
Would Livie be at the library today? Emily wondered. They hadn’t made plans. Maybe she could just hang out for a while and see? Or hide somewhere and text Lauren? She didn’t dare take out her new phone while her mom was driving. Anything she said or did her mom would always pry open, digging for information. Best to keep silent until she was alone at the library. She could text Lauren later.
She regretted telling her dad about Livie, when he nearly shouted into the phone, “Purple hair!” Why couldn’t she keep her mouth shut to her dad? She thought he’d be happy she found a friend. He didn’t ask about Mom, or about Parker. Emily wanted to hate Parker, but at least he got her to the library yesterday, even if he was the reason she had to live in this stupid city.
Was there even a chance her parents would get back together? Her mom had a boyfriend, but boyfriends could be temporary. At home, Natalie used to run through boyfriends like cookies. But Natalie didn’t move cities to live with her cookies.
Was her mom going to ask her anything? Car rides were notorious for digging for information.
Her mom always asked questions, How was school today? How was your math quiz? Does Natalie still have the same boyfriend? Questions that felt like surgical tools inserted into her thoughts, without anesthesia. But now she asked nothing. Emily had ridden a bus in a foreign city, made a new friend, and no questions?
“Em, see if you can figure out how we get to the library,” Her Mom drove hesitantly through the narrow crowded streets, waiting too long behind a double-parked car, and the car behind honked vehemently at them. “Another reason to take the bus to work,” she mumbled.
Now her mom would ask about taking the bus, Emily thought, pausing, then unfolded her map. She found the red star for Parker’s house, and searched for the red star marking the library. “Do you know what street we’re on?”
“I’ll tell you when we get to the corner.”
They passed the neighborhood grocery store; “Fillmore!” Sandra and Emily said at the same time, smiling for the first time that morning. “Mom, pull over and I’ll figure out where we’re going.”
Sandra pulled into a long space next to a bus stop. As Emily found their current intersection on the map, a loud, blaring honk startled her.
The flat dirty white and orange front of Muni loomed behind them.
Her mom hit the accelerator, turning sharply left into traffic, then braked as suddenly, to avoid hitting a car driving by. Emily gulped.
“Mom, just go down Fillmore and I’ll try to figure out the directions. Pull over if you can.” Emily traced the map lines with her finger. “We can take Fillmore Street all the way to a street called Turk. Looks like we have a lot of blocks to go.”
“Go straight a lot of blocks then what do I do on Turk Street?”
“Turn left.”
The businesses on Fillmore Street morphed from trendy, clean boutiques to more decrepit storefronts, with a Goodwill store next to a bar with a dirty wood front.
“We haven’t passed it yet, right?” Sandra asked.
Emily looked at the map again, “No, it’s a few more blocks. I think we just drove over Geary Street.”
The sidewalk and street looked dirtier, more sullen. “Is that a McDonalds?” Emily questioned. It was the first she’d seen in the city.
Dirty-faced adults loitered on the grass below the golden arches, wearing patched and falling off clothes. Emily glanced at the door of the car: Unlocked. She wondered if locking the car doors would make her mom more nervous. She glanced down at the map, where her finger pressed firmly against a street line.
“One block away,” Emily said.
“Away from what?”
“Turk Street.” Hadn’t she just told her?
Sandra got into the left lane, misjudged the flow of traffic and was stopped in the middle of the crosswalk when the light turned red. A homeless person thumped the hood of the car and leered at them as he walked by.
Emily’s heart raced. She heard her mom hit the lock on her side, while Emily slammed her palm on the door lock. Her dad had told her mom to buy a new car for years. she wondered. The homeless pedestrian walked around the car to the other side of the street without pulling their car doors open.
Can we move back to Folsom now? They could move back in time for the school year, even if they had to live in a small apartment, they’d at least have parking out front and wouldn’t need a map.
She swallowed down that thought, thinking about Livie. She was quirky and unusual, and had promised Emily tours of the city that would make her love this chaotic place by the end of the summer. But summer heat, friends she already knew. Same boring summer plans, she thought. Boring? Since when did she consider Folsom boring?
She directed her mom to make two more turns until she saw the golden dome of the county seat. “You can drop me off here, Mom.”
“Is this the library? It looks like the state capitol.”
“Looks the same, right? It’s the county seat. The library is across the street.”
“I’d rather drop you off at the library.” She heard her mom mumble, “This is Parker’s idea of safe?”
“Okay, fine.” Emily found their current intersection and the library. “Turn right on the next street.”
Sandra started to turn, until she saw the headlights of cars heading towards her and slammed the car’s brakes. “One way street, Emily!”
“Oh, that’s what those arrows mean on the map.”
“What!?”
“Never mind. The next street I think you can take a right.”
Two more turns and their car was double parked by the side entrance of the main library. “Are you sure you’ll be okay to get home, Emily? This area looks scary.” Sandra repeated. Emily thought of the derelict people on the Polk Street bus from yesterday and said nothing. She wondered if her Mom would be safe trying to read a map and drive at the same time.
“I’ll be okay, Mom.” Just let me out of this car, Emily thought.
Chapter 27: Sandra
San Francisco, Summer 2012
The next morning, Sandra poured coffee from the French Press into her cup, frowning.
“What’s wrong, Sandra Dee?” Parker looked up from his iPad.
“My debit card was declined yesterday at Costco, I had a basket full of cereal, toilet paper, paper towels, and thought I was going die of humiliation as the cashier shouted it was declined.”
“Declined? Didn’t you just sell a house? Didn’t you get any money in the separation? Alimony, anything?”
“Turned out the house was worth less than we owed, we had to empty our savings account to get out of it without a short sale, and Drew said there was no way he was going to take that ding on his credit.”
“Yikes. I forget not everywhere is the bubble of San Francisco. What about alimony? He was the breadwinner, don’t you get anything for keeping him in dinners for 15 years?”
“I couldn’t ask.” She wouldn’t admit guilt and shame kept her from asking, and the cold, hard looks he shot at her when they were packing.
“So you got out of Costco with …”
“A chicken. I had $5 in my wallet, and I left holding a chicken.”
“It was a tasty chicken, couldn’t taste the embarrassment at all.”
Sandra looked at the container, full of bones. “There are worse problems, right?”
“Than abandoning a cart of toilet paper at Costco? I don’t know, Sandra Dee, that toilet paper might never get over its abandonment, wondering if it’s personal.”
“Thanks, Park,” Sandra grinned. “Where can I take Emily today that will show her a better side of the city? I had enough of driving through homeless central to get her to the library yesterday.”
Parker sipped his coffee, “How about the beach?”
“The beach?” Emily questioned. “But sand, and out of control waves, and gray. We can’t even see the sun today.”
“Well, we need to go somewhere. We can’t stay in the house all day.” I hope it warms up, Sandra thought, looking at the thick gray fog overhead. “Parker said it’s a pretty drive from the beach up the cliff.”
“Why didn’t Parker come?” Emily asked.
“He had plans today.”
“Hm,” Emily mumbled.
Sandra followed the directions Parker had given: left on Geary, then drive until you run into the ocean. She could follow those kinds of directions. For a street full of stop lights, traffic flowed fast, and they were further into the fog and turning into the empty parking lot adjacent the beach within ten minutes.
Sandra looked out onto the cold, gray, empty, July beach before them. Too late to give up now, Sandra thought. “Maybe it will warm up so we can have our picnic,” Sandra said, shivering. She had woken up early and gone to the grocery store to pick out some of Emily’s favorite treats.
“Mom, is there another beach in San Francisco?”
“Maybe, why?”
“Remember the one that we went to with Dad a while back?”
Sandra remembered instantly the beach that ran along the bay on the north edge of San Francisco, where as they were on the west, facing the Pacific Ocean. “That’s another place. I don’t know how to get there.”
“Maybe we can find it on the map? Seemed nicer.”
“Oh,” Sandra felt Emily’s chagrin. “We’re here now, can we try it?”
“I guess…” Emily followed Sandra as they got out of the car. “I don’t want to carry all the beach stuff though.”
“Let’s leave it in the car.”
Emily followed her Mom from the parking lot adjacent the beach down a dune, cringing as sand crept into her low-top Converse. “Maybe we could take off our shoes?” her mom asked.
“No, thank you,” Emily said with annoyance. “You know how much I hate sand, it gets everywhere. Is this place really called ‘Ocean Beach’?” Emily asked. “How unoriginal. If there’s an ocean, surely there’s a beach?”
“Someone lacking imagination?” Sandra flinched. Emily’s sarcasm bit more than usual.
“Why does anyone like the beach?” Emily mumbled, just loud enough for Sandra to hear.
There was so much about the beach that Sandra loved. She had imagined today they could sit near the water’s edge and watch the waves pull back and crash with regularity and power. They would be loud enough to block out her own chaotic, painful thoughts. She would run along the water’s edge with Emily, pants rolled up to their calves, chasing the waves, and sometimes being caught, as the cold water tickled their ankles. What kind of horrible mother am I, Sandra thought, that I didn’t remember Emily hated the beach? I could have taken her anywhere today, and I picked here.
“Why do you hate the beach so much, Em?” Sandra offered.
“Where do I start? It’s freezing here, but even if it was warm it would suck,” Emily said. Sandra cringed as Emily’s ankle twisted when she took a step. “First: sand, which is ridiculously impossible to walk on and it gets everywhere. It gets between my toes, up into my toenails, and those little black flakes of whatever that clung to my feet even after brushing the sand away. The sand does whatever it wants and makes everything unstable.”
“It’s easier to walk on the sand near the water, it’s more firm?” The sand does whatever it wants? Sandra thought.
“Then you risk the undertow,” Emily continued, “Some invisible force in the water can pull my helpless body out to sea? No thank you.”
They walked in cautious silence, careful to step over clusters of dried seaweed,saline-beaten planks of wood, and the empty feather carcass of what looked like a seagull.
“Add dead things. The beach is full of smelly, dead things.”
Sandra searched for some palatable conversation topic for her sullen teen. “Will you see your new library friend this week?”
Emily cringed. “I don’t know.”
“What was her name again? Libby?”
“Livie.”
Well, that was a dead end. Sandra scoured her mind for another safe topic to bring up. Not school, not friends, and at the beach, not even the weather was safe fodder. They walked in silence. “The wet sand is really more stable, we can stay out of the water.”
“Okay, fine then.” Emily pushed the legs of her skinny jeans up to her knees and pulled off her shoes.
“Emily, isn’t that a bit extreme?” Sandra had rolled up her jeans to mid-calf.
“No.”
Sandra noticed Emily watching the waves closely and leaping back to dry sand when they came close. “Watch out for the lumps of jellyfish!” Sandra exclaimed, as Emily was about to step down. Emily paused, looking at the ground beneath her at the glob of pale gelatin on the sand.
“Oh great, make that reason, what, number four that I hate the beach? Stinging jellyfish lumps.”
“Maybe we should turn around?” Sandra suggested, there was only so much of Emily’s attitude she could take before she’d start crying.
“Second best idea all day.”
What was the first? Sandra wondered. She didn’t think it was getting out of bed.
They retraced their trail of footprints in the wet sand until they disappeared. Sandra realized she had no idea where they’d entered the beach, looking at the white stately Cliff House in the distance.
“Can we go up to the street and walk on the sidewalk?” Emily suggested. “Of course my feet are already sandy…”
“Yeah, sure.” Could this day get any worse? Sandra wondered. The problem was finding a path from the beach through the tall dunes to the street. Sandra saw slippery trails, steep in the sandy dirt, which all seemed more likely she’d end up sliding back down on her behind. They walked further, Sandra hoping for an easier path, and finally came to a flight of stairs. Relief relaxed both of them, walking up the stable, concrete steps. “I don’t see the car, but I do see …”
“Concrete!” Emily finished, smiling.
If concrete makes her smile, maybe I ought to gift wrap a box of the stuff. Sandra squelched an urge to take Emily’s hand, a familiar habit that she was forced to abandon when Emily turned eleven. “Mom, I see the car!”
The dirty-white Subaru sat alone in the beach parking lot. They fast-walked up to it and sat inside the slightly warmer car, as Sandra turned on the engine, turned the dial for the heat to the maximum. “I’m sorry today sucked,” Sandra said, unable to hold back the tears. “I wanted this to be a good day.”
“Mom, I hate it when you cry! It’s not your fault the beach sucks and the weather sucks, and…”
But it’s my fault we’re in San Francisco. “I should have remembered you didn’t like the beach! There were a million places we could have gone today …”
“A million places, but none of them home,” Emily mumbled.
“Can we try this, Em? I know you hate it, I know I ruined your whole life, but can we try this?”
“Try what? Try living in a city so jam-packed all the houses are stuck together? Try dirty buses and homeless people and cold wet beaches?”
“And try to do something with my life beyond making dinner, and driving you places.”
“What are you supposed to do with your life? You’re a mom!”
She sounds just like Drew, Sandra thought. “Someday, Em, you may be a mom, that doesn’t mean you can’t be anything else.”
Emily stared out the car window in cold silence. “Can we go now?”
“How about hot chocolate?” she said, trying not to think of the money she’d spent getting Emily’s favorite foods for today. “We could try that white building on the cliff?”
Check + follow my publication for new posts:
Thanks for reading!
Studies have shown that recommending this post creates good karma. ❤
