Shane and Carmen: The Novelization Ch. 13

"Music," Carmen answered right away. "We go to a lot of clubs and concerts. And of course, I'm a DJ, so I stay current on everything in the music field. Shane does, too, right, Shane?"

Shane nodded.

"Carmen's really wonderful," Jenny put in, thinking maybe they'd found something to talk about. "You should see her up there on the stage when she's spinning. She's just fabulous. And you know what? She does bar mitzvahs and bas mitzvahs, and a ton of Jewish weddings and stuff. And she does a lot of senior citizens centers when they have dances and all."

Carmen bobbed her, happily. "Yes, I do. I think I've DJ'ed, oh, gotta be twenty-five, thirty bar and bas mitzvahs. They're really popular out in LA And I don't know how many Jewish weddings. I could probably make a comfortable living doing nothing but Jewish weddings out there."

"She could," Jenny said. "And with her complexion, she could pass easily for Middle Eastern. She could be Italian, she could be Sephardic, she could be a kibbutznik, she could be a Persian princess, anything, you name it, Carmen could be whatever the customer wants or fantasizes."

"What is your heritage, dear?" Sandy asked.

"American," Carmen answered. "Born and bred. No Green Card or anything."

"No, I didn't mean that," Sandy said, coloring slightly. "I meant ... you're Hispanic, is that right? Your name is Morales. Isn't that Hispanic?"

Oh, shit, Shane thought. Please, Carmen, please keep it cool, she prayed.

But Carmen behaved herself. "Yes," she said. "My parents were Mexican. My mom is from Vera Cruz, and my father was a Maya from the Yucatan."

"A Mayan? How very interesting!"

"Uh, huh," Carmen said. "He was a Maya medicine man, he studied a lot about the Mayan culture and history and folklore, and he studied a lot about Mayan medicine and pharmacology, which is a very large and extensive field."

No, no, no, no, Shane and Jenny both prayed silently but simultaneously, please God don't let Carmen stand up and show them her tattoo, even though both of them had licked and kissed every last inch of it, flower box and all. Especially the flower box. Please don't tell them you have a tattoo of a rue on you woo-woo.

"And what about you, Shane? Where did you grow up?"

Now it was Carmen and Jenny's turn to cross their fingers.

"I was born and raised around Austin, Texas," Shane said. "And then, you know, I came out to LA Nothing special. Went to hairdressing school. That's about it."

"Well," Sandy said,"and I know I speak for Warren about this, too, but we're certainly glad Jenny has two such fine and devoted friends as you two."

As Sandy spoke Carmen had one of those moments of pure intuition: She knew that Sandy and Warren Ziskin had no clue about anything concerning their daughter's life. The last time they knew, Jenny had been a heterosexual involved with Tim Haspel, and had broken up with him. Everything after that was a total blank to them. Didn't know their daughter was a lesbian, didn't know she'd had an affair with Carmen, had no suspicion that Carmen and Shane were also lesbians, and lovers. As far as Sandy and Warren knew, Shane and Carmen were just a couple of gal pals, nothing more.

How could they not know? Easy, Carmen thought. Just like my mom doesn't know. Moms don't know, and they don't want to know. I've been a practicing lesbian for seven years AND living at home most of that time, and my mom still doesn't know. If they have suspicions, ideas, they simply choose to not know. It's all about denial.

After dinner they drove Jenny to the psychiatric hospital. Warren dropped them at the entrance, and then drove off to find a parking spot. Jenny had with her a small travel bag with the few possessions the hospital said she could bring. Nothing sharp, of course; and no belts, nothing with shoe laces. In the lobby there was a woman sitting at the reception desk who had been expecting them. They waited until Warren arrived, making small talk so small it was almost invisible. Finally Jenny stood up from the couch where she'd been sitting between Shane and Carmen.

"Okay, guys, I guess this is it," she said. Carmen and Shane stood, too, and Jenny went and hugged Carmen. "I love you guys so much," she said. She turned and hugged Shane. "The bestest, bestest roommate I ever had," she said. She was sniffling, tears running down her cheeks; Shane and Carmen were weepy, too. Warren stood uncomfortably watching, and Sandy had tears in her eyes. Finally Jenny broke the embrace and went to hug her mom.

"I love you, dear," Sandy said.

"I love you too, mom," Jenny said.

"I'll come in a few days, after you get situated, and bring you whatever else you need."

"'Kay, thanks, mom," Jenny said.

She went over to Warren and gave him the least affectionate hug Shane and Carmen had ever seen one human give another, a completely pro forma social requirement. "Bye, Warren," she said.

"Good luck, kid," Warren said.

Jenny sniffled, and turned to the receptionist. "I'm ready now," she said. The receptionist smiled, turned and unlocked a door at the end of the room. She held it open as Jenny walked to it with her bag. She turned in the door and gave everyone a little wave. "Bye," she whispered, so quietly no one could actually hear the sound.

Shane and Carmen thought it was the most heartbreaking thing they'd ever experienced in their lives.

Back at the Ziskin house Sandy did her best to try to make Shane and Carmen feel at home, but of course it was an impossible task. It was still early, and they all sat in the TV room, not talking and watching an episode of Law and Order. When it was over Sandy stood and said, "Well, I think I'm going to bed. Is there anything you girls need? No? Well, I'll see you in the morning. Goodnight."

"I think I'm going to turn in myself," Carmen said. "Goodnight, Mr. and Mrs. Ziskin."

"Yeah, me too," Shane said. "G'night."

They all went down the hall, leaving Warren in the TV room. Sandy turned right and went into her bedroom and Shane and Carmen went down the hall further and turned into Jenny's old room, which Sandy had showed them to earlier. Shane closed the door behind them, and laid down on the bed, and sighed.

"God," she said.

Carmen went around to her side of the bed and laid down next to Shane. "I know. I don't know which that was, the saddest thing I've ever seen, or the strangest." She pitched her voice low, almost to a whisper, because they didn't want the Ziskins to hear them, and had no idea how good the soundproofing was. "I hope they can help her. At the hospital, I mean."

They were so depressed they got undressed and went to bed exactly like what the Ziskins believed they were: just two friends of their daughter. Their goodnight kiss was perfunctory, and they made no attempt at lovemaking. The closest they came was when Carmen turned on her side and backed her butt into Shane's hip, and Shane spooned her with her arm draped over her hip. But sleep didn't come easily, not in a strange bed, in someone else's house, in a city they'd never been to before, in a home where there had been so little love, and so much hidden and unspoken.

In the morning Warren went to work before they got up, and Sandy, in a housecoat and fuzzy slippers, made them coffee and gave them orange juice and Cheerios for breakfast. After they'd eaten, Shane and Carmen had gone to their room to pack their few overnight things. Shane went to the window, parted the curtains, and looked out. The window overlooked the back yard, and beyond that a bunch of trees, not a forest, by any means, but still -- some sort of undergrowth, isolated, with paths. It was just large enough that something could happen back there, something bad, and that a young girl walking alone at night might experience a life-altering horror back there, and no one would know, or hear her muffled screams.

"You girls ready?" Sandy asked, coming to the doorway. They loaded their two large but nearly empty suitcases into the trunk of Sandy's car, having left most of the contents at Jenny's house and stacked into her bedroom closet and dresser drawers. They drove down the long block, turned left, and drove down another block. At the far end there was a large tract of land, and upon it the city had built an elementary school. It didn't look "brand new," to Shane, but neither did it look too old.

"When did they build this school?" Shane asked Sandy.

"The school? Oh, six or seven years ago, I guess. Jenny didn't go there, if that's what you mean. Her old elementary school is eight or ten blocks the other direction. No, that lot was just a big empty field when Jenny was growing up. Sometimes the circus would come to town and set up there. It was more like a carnival and midway. Not very classy, you know? Not like Barnum and Bailey and Ringling Brothers."

Shane stared out the window at the school, and the forest behind it. The hair on the back of her neck stood up, and she shivered.

"What's the matter?" Carmen asked.

Shane just shook her head.

***

Carmen had the window seat, and when they were airborne she slipped her hand under Shane's arm and laid her head down on Shane's shoulder disconsolately.

"Do you think we had anything to do with it?" Carmen asked quietly. It had been on her mind since the moment they'd found Jenny in the bathroom having her meltdown.

"What do you mean?"

"Us. Or even just me. Whether my having an affair with Jenny, and then her knowing it was you that I loved and wanted ... did that contribute to her breakdown? Was it Mark and those damned cameras and all the taping, the invasion of our privacy? The betrayal? Was it her loosing that ghostwriting job with Bull Connor, or that whole sick thing with Marina and Francesca, or the breakup with Tim ... any of it, all of it."

"No," Shane said at last. "No, we didn't do it. None of those things helped her, but they didn't cause it. Jenny had her demons, that's all. She brought them with her when she came to California."

"I remember you and I once talked about how strange she was, and you said she was a writer, and writers are supposed to be that way."

"Well, I meant, they live inside their heads. Jenny always did, anyway. Why, do you think it was something we did? Do you feel guilty about something?"

"Yes and no. No, I don't think we caused her breakdown. I just have this overwhelming feeling that somehow we should have seen it coming," Carmen said. "There were just so many warning signs and the things she did, especially right at the end, deliberately subjecting herself to that humiliation and self-loathing when she stripped at that horrible club. Knowing about Mark's taping us and keeping it a secret for over a week, while we were on vacation. Her pushing you and me together the way she did. And we read all her stories, all those demonic images and ideas. We should have known. Maybe, at some level, we did know, and did nothing about it to help her."

"What, do you think you have some super powers or something? That you could have saved her?"

Yes, Carmen thought to herself. I do have super powers. I have Ixchel. I am the daughter of a Maya medicine man. I am a healer. But I wasn't focused on healing Jenny, I was focused on healing you.

"We knew something was wrong. I mean, deeply wrong. And we didn't do anything."

"What could we have done? What would you have done any differently?"

"I don't know."

"Me, neither," Carmen said. "But suppose one of us had said, 'Jen, we think you need to see a shrink. We're worried that you are deeply weird and sick inside.' Is that what you think we should have told her?"

"No."

"And if we had, what then? She had very little money. She could barely cover the rent. She was stripping in a titty bar to pay for her food and shelter. How was she gonna pay a hundred bucks an hour a couple of times a week for some kind of therapy?"

"I know."

"And after what we've seen of her family in the last twenty-four hours, do you think if we'd suggested she move back home to get some help from her folks ... do you think that would have been a good idea? Would she have listened?" Carmen asked.

"No, and no."

"Well, then."

"Look, I love Jen as much as anyone, as a friend, and she's been my roommate longer than anyone else has ever been. I'd do anything in the world for her, if it was in my power."

"I know you would."

"There's something you don't know about. Remember at the airport when you went to park your car and Jen and I went inside, and when you found us we had been talking about something?"

"Yes. I could tell you'd been deep into something. But when I got there you stopped, and I decided to leave it alone."

"Well, what we were talking about was something that had happened to Jenny when she was little."

"Oh, you mean when she was raped?"

"You knew? How did you know? She told me she'd never told anyone out here about it."

I knew because Ixchel had told me, that we had talked about it. But Ixchel wasn't focused on Jenny any more than I was. She wasn't Jenny's protector, she was mine, and like me Ixchel was focused on you.

But Carmen couldn't say any of that to Shane.

"I pretty much guessed," she said, which in any case was also true. "I got the idea from all those horrible clown images and the dancing Hasidic men, and the carnival stuff, all those grotesques. You could tell something had happened to her, and she was working it all out in her stories. So what did she say?

"When she was nine or ten, there was this carnival that came to town."

"The one Sandy mentioned?"

"Yes. That's the carnival Jenny was always writing about. It used to be where that school is now. One night when Jenny was walking through those woods behind the school, some boys jumped her and raped her."

"Oh, shit," was all Carmen could say.

"Yeah, oh, shit is right. Anyway, the way Jenny told it to me, nobody did anything about it. She never got any counseling or therapy or anything. No police investigation, the guys were never identified or caught. I guess her parents knew about it, but you see how they are, and how they treat her. I don't think they were any help. Everything was buried and ignored, like it never happened. At any rate, I think that was probably how a lot of Jenny's problems got started."

"I just wish ... " Carmen started, then let it trail off.

"Just wish what?"

"I don't know. I just wish she had said something. I wish she had been able to talk about it to me."

Shane shrugged, put her head back against the seat, and closed her eyes. "Some things are just really hard to talk about," she said.

***

They were quiet on the rest of the plane ride back to LA, each of them thinking about Jenny and wondering what would become of her. Months and months of therapy, that much seemed certain, maybe even years, it was hard to tell about these sorts of things. Neither said much more about Jenny's parents, especially her mother, because nothing much seemed to be needed to say. They both understood right from the moment of first meeting all they needed to know about Jenny's upbringing, and the environment she'd come from. In many ways, her winding up in LA indicated Jenny had traveled just as far not in distance but in space and time and psychology as both Shane and Carmen had done. Like them, it was now apparent Jenny had traveled a long and hard road, and the road had been bumpier than anyone knew.

Because of the time difference between Chicago and LA, it was only 11 a.m. when they walked down the corridor from the plane to the terminal at LAX, pulling their carry-on luggage behind them. They were tired and depressed. As they walked past a restaurant with a bar, Shane reached her hand to Carmen's arm and said, "C'mon, this way. I need a beer."

"It's a little early for me," Carmen said.

"I know. But I want to talk to you about something."

So they went into the restaurant, sat at the bar, and ordered two Dos Equis.

Carmen sat quietly and patiently until the beers came, letting Shane work on it, whatever it was. The beers came, and they each took a swallow. Looking down at her hands wrapped around the beer bottle, Shane said, "I've been thinking."

"I know," Carmen said quietly.

"Huh? What? Er, how do you know?"

Carmen smiled. "How do I know you've been thinking? You've been thinking about whatever this is you want to say for four days now."

"Well, I guess I'm just slow," Shane said.

"You're not slow. You're just ... thorough."

That rocked Shane a little bit. "Who told you that?"

"Alice. She told me that's how you are, that people who don't know you well think you're slow, but she says that's not true. She says you're extremely thorough in how you think things out, and that you take in and process more information than all the rest of us, so it just takes you longer."

"Fucking Alice," Shane muttered.

"Don't be mad at her. She was doing me a favor ... and you, too, for that matter, explaining to me how your mind works. She said you'd once seen a therapist of some sort, who figured out how your brain works. Alice thought it would help us both and that I needed to know."

"She said too much."

"No, she didn't. Shane, don't be mad at her. What she said was important for me to know. And Alice realized she had gone to the limit of what she could say, because I was curious and asked what had happened to you that you'd seen a therapist, and Alice said she had already said enough, and that maybe some day you might tell me about it, but that it wasn't her place to do so. And then she said that the really important thing to understand about you is that you were really, really thorough in how you worked things out in your head, and that it took a lot of time. She said it would be a bad mistake to think it was because you were stupid or something, or indifferent, or didn't care. She said you required lots of time and lots of patience, that's all, but you were worth every moment of it."

Like now, for instance. Shane took another swallow from her beer and processed everything, ignoring the roaring noise in her head. Carmen sat quietly, and after a minute said. "I'm sorry I broke your train of thought. What is it you wanted to talk to me about?"

"I ... I've never done this before," Shane said. "I'm not ... "

"It's okay, Shane," Carmen said. "Just let it come out, any way you want. I'll put the pieces together. I'm not going anywhere, and we've both got all day."

Shane nodded. "I need a roommate," she said, "now that Jenny won't be back. And I don't want to put an ad on the Internet or anything. I don't want to go through that whole interview thing. And I don't want to move."

Carmen waited.

"So I was thinking ... would you want to move in? You know, you could have Jen--"

"Yes. Okay. I will."

"-ny's room ... Huh?"

"Yes. I accept your offer. I want to move in. I'd love to move in. I've been waiting for four days for you to ask me."

"Why didn't you say something?"

"Because it needed to be your idea. It's your house now, and it needed to be you who invited me, not me forcing myself on you, or it seemed like I was a U-Haul lesbian who couldn't wait to set up housekeeping with you. So it needed to be you who made the suggestion, because you wanted it, and not because I suggested it and you didn't want to hurt my feelings by saying no or saying you wanted to think about it."

"So you knew I would ask you? You knew four days ago?"

"No. I didn't know, not even close. But yes, I wanted to, four days ago. And even before that. What you can say is that four days ago I hoped you'd ask me to."

"I see."

"Because there's this other thing."

"What other thing?"

"This other thing that you said the other night, that you love me. And then there's this thing, that I love you. I have loved you from the first moment I set eyes on you, and have loved you every day ever since. That other thing." Carmen raised her beer to her lips and tilted her head back slightly, swallowing but still looking at Shane over the bottle.