San Diego Noir

Helen tapped her pen on edge of the desk, like she was summoning up her words. “Kari, you keep talking about how he feels about you. How do you feel about him? Do you want to be with him?”

She considered this. “I don’t know.”

“You really need to think about that, Kari. And you need to think about what you want to do, long-term. You’ve made a remarkable recovery. It’s time for you to start thinking about the future.”

She tried to smile. “It feels so far away.”

“I know. But it comes before you know it. Look.” Helen hesitated; she wasn’t sure of something, Kari thought. Maybe not about what she wanted to say, but the words she needed to use, so that Kari would hear them. Finally Helen continued: “Your life is very different than it was, and you can’t do some of the things you used to do. You’re not going to be a lawyer.”

“That’s okay. I don’t want to be one.”

“Good. So why don’t you think about what you do want to do? And we’ll start focusing on that.” Helen opened up her day planner. “Next week?”

When she walked home, the bum was there, leaning against the telephone pole.

“Spare a dollar? So I can get something to eat?”

I gave you a dollar yesterday, she started to say, but then she thought, That was yesterday, and today he needs to eat again. She had a dollar and some change in her pocket. She gave it to him.

“Jesus loves you,” he said. “But the Shining Ones, the deceivers, they take a pleasing form.”

There were a lot of gaps in her memory. The stuff she’d learned in school, especially law school. Some of it was there, but she couldn’t connect it all together. And other kinds of things: incidents. People she knew. Places she’d visited. She’d remember, sometimes, if someone reminded her, that, oh yes, she’d been there. She’d seen that.

Other people and places were gone, no matter how well they were described to her.

The zoo was something she did remember. She’d been coming here since she was a little kid, for all her life, really.

Walking through the front entrance, seeing the flamingos across from it, smelling that strange chlorinated bird-shit smell, she thought of coming here with her parents, back when her parents were together, and her little brother.

Before everyone died.

“Let’s get some tacos,” she said to David.

Her father had died first. A heart attack. Had left the house to her and her brother. They’d talked about selling it, but Jake wanted to live there while he went to college. It was something the two had argued about, because she’d wanted the money to pay off her law school loan, but they’d decided to table the discussion for at least a year. There was insurance money from her dad, at least, to compensate her for the lost income, the money that Jake couldn’t afford to pay.

She’d graduated. Passed the bar. Her stepfather and mother wanted to celebrate. They’d all ridden together in her stepfather’s car: Kari, Frank, Mom, and Jake.

There was life insurance money from Frank and her mom. Money from the sale of the very nice house they’d owned in Del Mar. Money from their IRA. She’d had her own insurance, though it hadn’t begun to cover the total cost of her hospitalization and rehab.

The real money came from the lawsuit over the accident, which had just been settled.

“You’re going to need advice and guidance,” Helen had told her. “But you’re competent to make some basic decisions about your future.”

David wanted to be her advisor. He was her husband, it only made sense. But the things he wanted to do with the money—investments, expansions, new houses—didn’t interest her.

She hadn’t said no yet. But she hadn’t said yes, either.

“How much longer do you want to stay?”

He was already bored. They’d been there nearly two hours, including the time it took to eat, and they’d only gone to the Children’s Zoo and the Insect House and the Reptile House, then through the Monkey Trail and down to see the pandas.

“I don’t know,” she said. “We haven’t been to the tigers or the elephants yet.”

She thought that he sighed. “Okay. Let’s go see the elephants.”

The elephant exhibit was new. When you entered it, there were signs welcoming you to see the animals that were here in Southern California thousands of years ago. There were statues of mastodons and saber-toothed tigers, equipment for kids to climb on, all sitting in beds of ground-up tires; metal monoliths two, three times her height, with cutouts of gas pumps and faucets and bulldozers, slogans like Reuse and Recycle and Sustainability. There was a tar pit with animal skeletons—fakes, she figured.

And then there were the real animals. Rattlesnakes. Condors with wingspans as big as Chinese kites. Lions, with signs warning you that their spray range was seven to ten feet.