Dog Stays in the Picture Read online

  Water (Oh my gosh, how many days’ worth?)

  Band-Aids (Exactly what good are Band-Aids going to do her if she breaks a leg or splits her head open? How about some plasma and a splint?)

  A flashlight (Yes. Thank you.)

  Nonperishable comfort food, like granola bars and raisins (Sorry, but all Eliza will eat right now is pancakes. May I throw in my special mix?)

  A small cuddly toy (Jeez. Can we please change the subject?)

  A photo of parents, and a card with the name and phone number of relatives or friends living out of state (Got it. Meaning anyone living safely away from the fault line. Meaning still alive. In case her parents are not. Okay. How about I just die right now and get it over with.)

  As it turned out, we did have a big earthquake in L.A., but Eliza did not need her Little Playmate by Igloo because we were all at home asleep when it hit. Eliza was five and her brothers were barely two. Ben was getting over pneumonia, which I was beginning to think I might be catching, so I had decided to try knocking it out with a good night’s sleep in our sub-ground guest room, accessed by its own separate entrance from the back patio, below the kitchen.

  We’d been living in L.A. for over a decade, and occasional earth tremors did not really faze us. If my extended family fretted about the possibility of disaster, I’d use the old comeback, We’re more likely to get hit by a car on the freeway than killed in an earthquake. In the night we’d sometimes wake up, our bedposts rattling from a little shudder, and I’d think, We can either get up and find out what’s going on, or go back to sleep. Either way, if we’re going to die, we’re going to die. That had been my careless attitude BC (meaning “before children”).

  They tell you the worst place to be in an earthquake is on the bottom level of a house, for obvious reasons. The night the big one hit I woke abruptly in my guest-room quarantine zone under the kitchen to a real nightmare—walls cracking behind my headboard; plaster speckling the quilt. A monster truck was driving through the kitchen overhead, and I did not roll over and resign myself to death or even take a second to think. I shot out the door onto the patio in the pitch-dark.

  It took a few seconds to get my bearings. House alarms and car sirens were echoing through the San Fernando Valley. The patio was bucking under my feet like a ceramic trampoline, and I sort of staggered in circles trying to stay upright while the beautiful Mediterranean tiles we’d installed on our roof a couple of years before plummeted down around me from three stories up, smashing left and right.

  I was focused completely on my family upstairs in the house. I knew the first thing to do in a situation this extreme is to immediately—DO NOT PASS GO—shut off the gas supply in case of a leak, so the house won’t blow up. In this particular situation, because I was closest, gas shutoff was definitely my job.

  Our valve was in the front yard. Shutting it off required a wrench, which we kept (as instructed) right by the valve for just this kind of emergency. But lately the boys had been toddling around out there—they were obsessed with that wrench—so when I blundered along the side path and out the gate to the front and scrabbled around for it in the dark—no wrench.

  I let myself in the front door to find the spare. We kept a toolbox in our garage, which was all the way at the other end of the house. Our burglar alarm has voice commands, and the backup battery must have kicked in because the buzzer was going, and a robot man’s voice was coming out of all the alarm panels. (Front. Door: Open. Of-fice. Win-dow: Open. Bal-cony. Door: Open.) It was about four thirty a.m. and pretty dark, but I could tell a lot of pictures had fallen on the floor, and there was quite a bit of broken glass. I will never understand why I didn’t cut my bare feet that night, but I managed to crunch safely over everything to reach the bottom of the stairs and call to David:

  —David?

  —Yes!

  —Is everyone all right?

  —Yes! Are you?

  —Oh, thank God! Yes! I’m going to get the wrench to shut off the gas.

  —Good girl!

  I have never forgotten that exchange. It meant the world to me.

  The story from David’s side was quite something. He was fast asleep when a freight-train sound came booming across the valley. He had no clothes on, and when the shaking reached our house and the beams of our four-poster began to rattle, he leapt into action, still partly asleep. The floor was bucking under him the same way the patio had for me, so he couldn’t get his footing and skinned his knees on the carpet, then made a dash for the boys’ room, running straight into our new live-in nanny, Yolanda, who was coming out of Eliza’s bedroom across the hall.

  Sometime after the twins were born, sleep deprivation raised legitimate safety concerns. Yolanda began helping us part-time, and we had only just asked her to move in permanently. This was her first official night. She was in the country on a work visa from El Salvador, which has had its share of deadly earthquakes, so this was not Yolanda’s first, nor was it the worst she’d been through. She kept her cool like a true veteran—didn’t even bat an eye at David’s lack of clothing.

  When David got to the boys’ room, Ben was standing in his crib. Knowing one child was alive, David asked Yolanda to grab Ben so he could get Sam, who was in the other crib, motionless, almost stiff, under a heavy dusting of plaster. This is when David remembered with a jolt why Yolanda had been sleeping in Eliza’s room—Eliza, going through a needy stage, was currently spending her nights with us in the master bedroom on a little pallet at the foot of our bed. So David tucked Sam under one arm and sprinted back for Eliza, ignoring Yolanda’s pleas. (Go find Mrs. Susan, Mr. David. I’ll stay with the niños.) There were three children to deal with, and anyway what could he do for me, two floors down under the house?

  In our bedroom, the alarm clock had landed on the floor and was blaring, along with Robot Alarm Man. (Bed-room. Win-dow: Open.) Eliza was very still, on her pallet, also covered in plaster. A large painting and a lamp were piled on top of her, but miraculously, like Sam, she too was asleep and, still holding Sam, David somehow pulled her out from under everything.

  With one child under each arm, David then stationed himself on the floor in the master-bedroom doorway. (We were told a doorway is the safest place. It worked out okay that night but it’s actually not such a good idea, we learned recently from an earthquake forensics expert. Doorways are weak. The best place to be, if possible, is tucked on the floor next to a large sturdy piece of furniture, like a desk or bureau—next to it, not under or you could get squished depending on how heavy the beams are when they come down. If you’re tight up against something solid, when the ceiling beams come down they’ll be more likely to tilt on landing, forming a triangle, and you’ll be inside a safe little pocket of protected space.)

  This was the scene when I called up the stairs about finding a wrench for the gas: Naked David with plaster-coated Eliza and Sam sitting in the doorway to our bedroom; Yolanda and Ben in the boys’ doorway across the hall. (Yolanda praying Santa María, Madre de Dios …)

  —David?

  —Yes!

  —Is everyone all right?

  —Yes! Are you?

  —Oh, thank God! Yes!

  I love reliving that moment.

  Because our house was deemed unlivable by the inspectors, we camped at a friend’s for a time, and subsequently moved to Philadelphia. David was beginning Sean Penn’s movie The Crossing Guard, a big break and an extremely challenging part, and he felt he’d worry too much if we stayed in California. He wanted us off the fault line permanently, and I agreed. Those few adrenaline-shot laps around the patio in the dark with sirens blasting and tiles raining down were my moment of truth. The kids, and safety, would always come first.

  Our dog and cat had to deal for a while. I’d like to say we knew we could count on their inborn self-preservation instinct to get through, but the truth is we were in shock, with thre
e little children to protect, and nobody can actually remember thinking about the animals during the earthquake and its aftershocks. I am so grateful we never had to face the awful Sophie’s Choice decision some Katrina survivors did, trapped on their rooftops, contemplating a rescue boat that could not accommodate anything besides humans.

  It took the kids, Yolanda, and me months to settle back east before we could send for Aya and Marbles, a recently rescued kitten still in recovery from her own singularly Dickensian early life before the earthquake. We stayed with many kind friends and relatives, and everywhere we went, Ben and Sam managed to locate a couple of wrenchlike objects first thing, and they’d march around brandishing them, sternly repeating, Gotta turn off da GAS, Mama!

  The series of moves was particularly discombobulating for Eliza. In Philadelphia I tried settling her in a local Montessori school run by the Saint Joseph nuns, who promised an appealing mission of caring for the “Whole Family” in their brochure, and I found a posttraumatic-stress-type family therapist for support. It was rough going—Eliza was quite out of sorts, and I wasn’t sure how to help.

  One afternoon I left her sleeping in the car for a few seconds while I brought in the groceries. We were house-sitting at a home with a long driveway, sheltered from the street in a peaceful neighborhood. It was toward the end of a cold February; snow was still on the ground even though the day was sunny and the temperature seemed okay. (So I thought. I had not yet got the hang of things on the East Coast.)

  When I went into the house, the phone rang. While I was answering I looked out the window to make sure Eliza was all right, and had to drop everything and make a dash for it. Eliza had woken up, the car was heating in the sun more quickly than I’d anticipated, and she was panicked, sobbing, and hyperventilating in the backseat.

  Eliza was unusually clingy at school drop-offs after that, and I had an unhelpful tendency to linger till she was happy. The PTSD therapist instructed me to stay very calm, matter-of-fact, and not to be overly demonstrative when saying good-bye. This behavior did not come naturally to me. I really felt Eliza’s pain, and wanted nothing more than to scoop her up and take her home with me. But I tried to be stoic, and Eliza’s sweet, gentle teacher would watch us at the door, perplexed: Eliza begging me not to go, and me with my poker face, forcing out awkward reassurance, Robot Alarm Man–style. (You will be. O-kay. I’ll be back. Ve-ry soon.)

  I don’t think it was only earthquake trauma that made me so desperately attached to Eliza; it just made things more complicated. I’d been this way since her jaundice, and when I’d wrestled myself away and shut that schoolroom door I’d go home with an uneasy feeling. There was something about the look on that teacher’s face. …

  David was still filming in L.A. Yolanda had agreed to come with us and help out in Philadelphia, and she and the boys were getting along famously. I was making a special effort to give our traumatized daughter as much quality time as possible, and so we went to her school’s Family Fun Day, just the two of us.

  Eliza and I were sitting with our juice boxes on a little patch of grass, watching jolly children and their parents walking by. Out of nowhere this stern old nun I had never laid eyes on before stopped and said: Hello, Eliza.

  Eliza did not seem to know who this was, and I smiled. But the nun did not make eye contact with me at all, and disappeared into the crowd. That uneasy feeling again.

  We’d moved to yet another post-earthquake temporary rental, a vintage Addams Family–style gabled Victorian, which usually served as our church’s rectory, and David came home from filming. One afternoon a friend brought her three children over for an afternoon playdate, and the house was busy. At some point I happened to glance out a leaded front window, and paused to watch a sort of ordinary man with a clipboard ease tentatively out of his car and linger at the end of our front walk, gazing up at the façade. Jehovah’s Witness, maybe? He seemed to be psyching himself up in exactly the way that banker with the briefcase used to screw up his courage before knocking on the Addams Family’s front door. Long story short: it was Child Protective Services.

  This was about the car episode. Eliza explained to me later that she had felt she needed a hug one day at school. She figured out she could have one if she told her teacher she was upset because her mother had left her in the car alone and it got really hot and she was sooo scared.

  Ever since Eliza’s outpouring, behind the scenes, her teacher began watching my weird Robot Mama routine at drop-off and scanned Eliza daily for possible bruises. She had mentioned something about Eliza’s car story in a conference I’d requested, but it didn’t occur to naïve me (or to the teacher, as she explained when I later called in a panic after Mr. Child Protector’s visit) that the headmistress (the creepy old nun from Family Fun Day!) had decided to alert the state.

  So now we had a new kind of danger to grapple with. This was my hometown—people knew me, sort of. But I was returning after more than a decade, with a new exotic identity: Wife of Movie Actor. Kurt Cobain had just died, and his wife, Courtney Love, was battling rumors of heroin addiction and trying to keep custody of their new baby. David and I were not interesting enough for the tabloids and never would be (thank God). But he was playing an ex-con in The Crossing Guard. David prepares for his roles meticulously, so he had this fantastic new hard-earned prison-yard bodybuilder physique; he had grown his hair long and was keeping it slicked back in a greasy little ponytail; and whenever he turned up in our small, cloistered new neighborhood, people did not quite know what to make of him. Our family portrait was not looking exactly suburban.

  David, Eliza, Sam, and Ben, 1994

  Here the children were, just recovering from a natural disaster, supposedly safe, only to be possibly ripped from their parents and dumped in foster care?!

  Mr. Child Protector turned out to be extremely good at his job, thank goodness. He talked to me and David, sniffed around our house a little, and took a few minutes alone with Eliza. Then he told us this was the most pleasant assignment he’d ever had (it was quite a novelty to evaluate a wholesome family for once, he said), and our slate was wiped clean as if nothing had ever happened.

  I ran into Eliza’s old teacher at the market some years later. We had a good talk, and I told her Eliza was happy in her new school, much more settled. She said things were a lot better for her students, too—they had replaced that creepy nun, their headmistress.

  The first weekend I ever dared leave our kids was the following year. David had been nominated for an award for The Crossing Guard, and the producers flew me out to meet him in L.A. for the ceremony. I lined up the children’s favorite, most responsible sitter, an assistant DA paying off law school. Eliza had a really hard time going to bed the night before I left, so we did not get much sleep, and I was in a bit of a daze getting on the plane. There was heavy turbulence midflight—long periods of shaking, the hammering kind where lights flicker and flight attendants take to their seats. Like the improbable threat of earthquakes, turbulence BC had never bothered me much. But on that first solo flight since the kids were born, I sort of snapped: Who will take care of them if I crash?

  I know you’re not in any real danger in turbulence, but I simply could not get it together—Okay, so I’m not going to crash but what about the next time I have to fly with the kids and we have bumps like this and they are a little scared? What if I make it even worse because I am freaking out myself? We’ll never be able to visit David on location, the children will not have a relationship with their father, and he will divorce me because we never see each other, and basically the world as we know it is going to end because I can’t keep collected on a bumpy flight!

  I was so desperate I picked up the air phone under my tray table and called my mother, of all people. For once, I did not object when she suggested we recite the Lord’s Prayer together. (The woman sitting beside me, who did not seem even slightly alarmed by the bumping, acted as if nothing was
happening.)

  I am not a prescription-drug-type person, but since then I’ve always flown with anxiety meds. They work! When the bumps start, all I am aware of is distant muffled screams—a lunatic lady locked in some secret, padded compartment deep inside my psyche, screeching and wailing. I feel completely at ease. I just smile sympathetically and think, Poor woman. So glad that’s not me.

  Another item I’d definitely have in my iPod for help with those acting preparations: the soundtrack of Mamma Mia!

  This is very serious stuff. I am about one-quarter Swedish, and I should know. Those ABBA Swedes have soul.

  Halfway through middle school I finally began to believe that Eliza had truly found her independence. The penny drop may have had something to do with the difference in protocol between lower and middle school. In lower school you could walk your child into homeroom, and most people did. Since homeroom drop-off was an option, there was no question: I was of course going to park the car and go in with my daughter. (If sitting in the classroom breast-feeding your eight-year-old on your lap all day had been an option, I would have seen it as my duty.) I never did get the hang of that lower-school drop-off technique, so when David was at home, that was his job, and he was a lot better than I was at separating calmly with Eliza in the mornings. I dropped the boys off. The boys did not give a rat’s ass who dropped them off, or even where. They had each other, so there was never an issue. Maybe God saw how badly I was muffing it with Eliza and gave us twins to save everyone a little stress.

  By middle school, with the help of wonderful Ms. Tinari and Ms. Ferguson in their full-length down coats, smiling and dancing from one foot to another for warmth at the frosty curb every morning, Eliza and I finally learned to release with dignity. Eliza would hop out and trot gaily up the steps. I would be okay, I guessed. By the end of eighth grade I’d only occasionally linger to watch her pink backpack disappear through the glass doors before I’d well up, and have to gulp it back on my way up the driveway. She’s growing up fast. …