Louise Read Free Page A

He likes the longing that distance creates. He likes sharing dreams via email, seeing their plans typed up on a computer screen. They joke about their future apartment, one with a shiny chrome kitchen and floor-to-ceiling windows where they will stir-fry things in woks and drink sparkling wine. At night the hills of Santa Barbara will glitter with lights from outdoor living rooms and yards called “grounds.” They will do yoga on a sunny balcony with cacti in pots, and drink water with fresh-squeezed lime. Louise will walk down the clean, white sidewalks with arms full of shopping bags.
    Louise arrives on New Year’s Eve, 2005, and for one month their lives are not so far from this. They drink Mexican beer and wear bathing suits indoors. They do drugs and wander through organic markets, spotting celebrities. They wear aviator sunglasses and fearlessly turn their faces toward the sky. Their apartment complex is called Summerville.
    This would be their life now. That is what they believed.

CHAPTER SIX
    W hen Janet’s daughter was in the fourth grade, she collapsed at a Civil War site in Alabama. They were coming back from a family vacation in the Gulf Shores, famous for the squeaky sand. They had stayed in a high-rise condominium and swum in salty water for a week, and were now crowded in the station wagon again, pushing up north to their home in Michigan. This was before the divorce. Janet and Warner both wore gold rings and took turns driving. The children—Louise, Tom, and the baby, Michael—were sunburnt, and sipping apple juice from small tin cans. Warner had wanted to take a break and see a battlefield, so they had stopped at sunset. The air outside was so hot it made them pink, their stomachs and scalps stung with sweat. Then, right there in the graveyard, nine-year-old Louise fell and balled up on the scratchy yellow grass. She said she saw double and had a headache so bad she couldn’t move. For a second, Janet thought Louise was psychic, feeling the pains of those killed beneath her. Then she saw that Louise’s left eye had turned toward her nose. She couldn’t walk straight; Warner had to guide her to the car. Janet followed, carrying the baby and holding Tom’s sticky hand. He was five, silent and staring. Janet could do nothing.
    At first the doctors had thought Louise had a brain tumor. Then they said no: It was a clot of blood pressing down on her brain stem, a genetic irregularity. Their prescription: complete bed rest to allow the blood to reabsorbinto her brain. She had to miss the last three months of fourth grade, but her symptoms all went away. Her eye rolled back to the center and locked there. In gymnastics, she could walk across a balance beam. The blood was gone. She was allowed to go to summer camp with her friends, but the doctors had said she should abstain from “contact sports” just to be safe. She ran track. Not much was mentioned about it in the family again, except every so often, someone would say how strange it all had been.

CHAPTER SEVEN
    A fter four days in the critical care unit in LA, I’m back in Santa Barbara. Back in our apartment. I have to wear an eye patch. Claude calls me Captain Hook. I call him a jerk. He says he’s just trying to make things around here a little more lighthearted. My mother buys patches in pink, blue, and beige, but I never wear them. I wonder where she got these, in the costume aisle at some specialty drugstore?
    The eye patch helps me not see double. Without the eye patch, I cannot tell which of the two doorknobs is real. I hold a glass under the faucet, but it will not fill up. It’s like being very drunk, or like a baby, trying to walk.

CHAPTER EIGHT
    J anet knows she has done something wrong. She should have worried about Louise more. She didn’t call Louise for a week after she moved to California—she had wanted Louise to feel like a grown-up. Maybe she fed Louise bad foods when she was