Wit's End Read Free

became a columnist, his work turned personal. He was struggling to learn how to be a father and a mother both, he wrote, and he was sharing his struggle with the entire population of Cleveland, Ohio. And its environs. A few international subscribers.
    Rima found this out one day after he’d been actively soliciting confidences. She remembered it later with outrage, how she’d offered up her biggest secret so that he could feel like a good parent. She’d told him about a boy she liked in her world history class; she told him that this boy didn’t know she was alive. She asked her father how to get a boy to notice her, even though she knew this wasn’t a problem he could help with. It was all about him, this generous pretending that it was all about her.
    The whole conversation was the topic of his next column, a musing on how you didn’t really grow up until you watched your children grow up. He stopped short of discussing the boy, but not his daughter’s—he actually used these words—budding sexuality. The next day when Rima went to school, there was no one there who didn’t know she was alive.
    Rima was particularly incensed at how well her father had come off in his own column. Not stammering and useless, the way he had actually been, but awash in midwestern profundities. Every woman in Cleveland was in love with him—the number of women who wished to date him was directly inverse to the number of boys who wished to date Rima, if negative numbers could be applied, and Rima felt they could. And he wasn’t even completely real. (But when has that ever stopped a woman in love?)
    Rima herself loved the useless, real father so much more than the wise, revised one. “I was very fond of your father,” Addison said when she called to insist that Rima come stay with her, and of course it was Addison who’d added the third Bim Lanisell, the entirely fictional one.
    And why, Rima’s mother had asked Rima’s father from time to time, make you a wife-killer? And, once or twice, why the sort of wife who would be (though wasn’t) played by Kathy Bates in the movie version?
    The entirely fictional Bim had actually killed three people, but the wife was the only one Rima’s mother ever seemed to talk about. Granted it was the murder with the most panache, the murder Addison had clearly put her heart into. Surely this was the murder in the original dollhouse.
    Rima had her own questions for Addison. If Addison thought it was fun going through the Shaker Heights public schools with a famous murderer for a father, she could think again. Addison might technically be Rima’s godmother, but it was a decision long regretted, at least by the women in the family. Addison had never really risen to the role anyway.
    None of Rima’s friends had thought that going to Santa Cruz was a good idea. It seemed like a dangerous place, they’d told Rima, and they didn’t know the half of it. They didn’t know about sharks, or the undertow. They didn’t know that at the same time the sea cliffs were eroding, the ocean was rising—at least two millimeters, maybe more, every year. They didn’t know there was a disease you could catch from sea-lion urine that no doctor knew anything about, and if you were infected, you’d be sent to a veterinarian, who wouldn’t know much about it either. They didn’t know that the mountains were dotted with meth labs or that Highway 17, the route in from San Jose, was one of the deadliest stretches of road in the whole gigantic state, and was commonly referred to as Blood Alley, at least until the highway dividers went in. They didn’t know that a clown stalked the downtown like something from a Fellini film.
    What they knew was earthquakes and vampires. Some of them had been watching the World Series with their families all those years before, when the Loma Prieta quake hit. They remembered how the television