1 By the time they took Pippa to college, the rift between Lu and Pippa was already a year deep. The trip was marked by Pippa's tapping. She drummed her thighs, tapped her pinkie nail against the window glass, plucked the taut elastic strap of her backpack. Ta-dum, da, da, da. Tsk-tsk, dum. Lu could tell she was trying to tap quietly, so as not to annoy George at the wheel, who was easily irritated by his daughter's compulsive rhythm-making except when it was part of their special game, but Lu couldn't fail to notice-nothing about her daughter escaped her notice, especially since Pippa's hostility had set in. When they hit the San Fernando Valley, the traffic turned rabid. Cars hurtled themselves from lane to lane as if their drivers misunderstood the laws of physics. Each was shiny-new or recently cleaned-their chrome serving as pilot lights that ignited the sun into blinding spears. Lu watched it all, aghast. It had been a while since she'd been to Southern California. She remembered the beaches, but not this endless concrete and asphalt, this hysteria. "Welcome to the Wild West," George said, peering into the rearview mirror at Pippa, hoping to get a rise out of her. Any conversation would have been better than none, since their hours with her were numbered. "Don't goad her," Lu said in defense of her daughter, though she, too, wished Pippa would talk instead of cocooning into herself, already gone. Didn't Pippa feel the zero-hour nature of this trip? Didn't she feel a need to come to some dZtente? Lu strained to remember what it had been like when she herself left home. Had her mother, Linda, been as bereft as she felt now? It was all so different back then. Lu and Linda had lived together, just the two of them in "The Nest," a six-hundred-square-foot house in Redding, until Lu was twenty and moved to Sonoma for a job at a spa. Lu twisted to look at Pippa, who was staring out the side window, one hand on the traveling case beside her, which held her cat, Alice. "I was just remembering that time when you were four years old and you wandered down Sunset Loop stark naked. Remember? You made it all the way to Juniper Road before someone found you. Do you remember that?" "No, Mom. I don't remember. You've asked me that a million times." "You were adorable. You weren't the least bit embarrassed. You were so happy in your own little body." "Okay. Okay. Can we not discuss this?" Lu faced forward again, catching George's eye. The incident had humiliated George, who hated to have their neighbors thinking of them as derelict parents, but Lu had loved Pippa's feral quality. She had loved looking out the kitchen or living room window and seeing Pippa's bare body dancing around the yard, gathering sticks and stones to build structures, squatting to dig holes in the dirt, drumming on the tree trunks, and making hats of the broad catalpa leaves. Sometimes she would lie on her belly and put her ear to the ground to see what she could hear-she heard raccoons and mice, she said, once a cougar. When George objected, afraid of who might drive by and see, Lu put her foot down and made him butt out. Along the side of the freeway embankments of dry grass rose like hunched shoulders, some of the grass blackened from recent fires. They passed under digital signs flashing notifications of delays. Lu was no stranger to heavy traffic, but this felt extreme. Where was everyone going? Why such urgency? She held her breath, afraid for them all. Her daughter, her husband, herself. Ta-da-da-dum. Ta-da-da-dum. Pippa's withdrawal, after years of exceptional intimacy between mother and daughter, began with her saying she didn't want Lu texting her at school, and she wanted to be called Phipps, not the infantilizing name Pippa, a shortening of her full name, Philippa. She recoiled from Lu's hugs and no longer confided in Lu about her days, her fears, her obsessions. Lu had tried to take Pippa's moodiness in stride, inwardly hopeful that things would change, understanding that all daughters needed to establish identities separate from their mothers, but privately she was heartbroken. How could you begin to call your daughter a new, tough-sounding name like Phipps after years of thinking of her as Pippa, your very own Pippa, the girl from the poem "Pippa Passes," which George so often recited: "The year's at the spring / And the day's at the morn . . ." Lu loved that poem and would have learned some of it herself if she'd had the talent for memorizing that George had. Now just thinking of the poem made her sad. With Pippa about to be so far away at college, it seemed less and less likely the two would ever get close again. Worse, George was probably right: LA was not the right place for their eccentric, animal-loving daughter. He had always talked about what he called California's Great Divide. The northern part of the state, where they lived, was home to the best and the brightest, he said, home to the people with intellect and taste and savoir faire, like Back East, where he had grown up, or even Europe, but Southern California was the Wild West, crass and lawless, a wasteland of concrete, populated by people committed only to hedonism and moneymaking. He would never have considered living there himself. You're twisted, Pippa would say in response to his rants. She had insisted all along that she wanted to study in this land defined by sun, and Hollywood, and this meshwork of twelve-lane freeways, but she had no idea what she'd chosen, Lu thought. Who did at her age? Lu had tried to support Pippa, pressing up against the veil of her daughter's unexplained hostility, but George, even now, had not made peace with her choice of UCLA. He had wanted her to attend college Back East, as he had, at one of the Ivies, maybe, somewhere small and genteel. Pippa had scoffed. If you haven't noticed, I'm not genteel. And I'm definitely not Ivy League material. But you're from genteel stock. George was insistent that Pippa take this seriously. His ancestors, the Barnes family, had come from England in the 1600s, and they'd made various fortunes for themselves, first in shipping, then in railroads; he wanted Pippa to feel proud to be a descendant of her brave and industrious forebears. Pippa would have none of this. She was a nonconformist, an outlier who needed to find her own path. She didn't care about George's fancy pedigree, nor did she care that her mother had no college degree. Lu applauded Pippa's rejection of status, even as she had accepted that this was an essential part of George, her husband of almost twenty years. Adaptation was a special skill of Lu's, almost a superpower, she thought privately, and she had discovered in her forty-five years of living that it was an especially crucial skill for surviving. Dum-dum. Ta-da-dum. Dum-dum. Ta-da-dum. "Have you been in touch with Evan?" Evan was Pippa's best and only friend at the private progressive school she had attended. "Yes, Mom." "He likes MIT?" "Mom-it's been like a week." "Right. Of course." Alice, the cat, began to howl, an agonized, guttural sound. Confined to a carrying case at Pippa's feet, Alice had endured the trip stoically until this moment. But now she sensed something had changed. Was she aware of the crazy traffic? Was there something in the air she smelled? Pippa leaned over the carrying case to croon reassurances. Riding shotgun beside George, Lu might as well have been a sponge for the way she felt her husband's blood pressure rising. The traffic, the howling cat, the gauntlet of driving through this parched alien landscape, was too much for him. She placed a hand on his thigh. "Calm down." He turned to her briefly, his bear-like quality shifting from teddy to grizzly. With his heavy black beard and salt-and-pepper curls, people often mistook him for a young Francis Ford Coppola, which pleased him. We're both vintners, after all, he liked to say. He was a laid-back man until he wasn't, and now he was not. His face had reddened, and sweat had brought a sheen to his brow. "Who brings a cat to college?" he muttered. Pippa was too immersed in soothing Alice to take the bait. The yowling continued. If the cat had been a human being displaying this level of distress, the car would have been stopped. "Shut that cat up!" George yelled. "I'm trying!" Pippa countered, fumbling with the travel case door to pet Alice. Alice escaped from her case and leapt onto his shoulder. George jammed the brakes. The Porsche driver behind them leaned on his horn, pulled out around them and cut in front, missing the Odyssey's bumper by inches. Alice's back was arched, her gray fur bristling into cat-punk, her claws digging into George's back and chest. "Damn it to hell! Get that cat off me!" "Sorry, Dad." Pippa reached out to grab Alice, but Alice evaded her and dove into Lu's lap, then up to the dashboard, then down to the gearshift, before Pippa finally gained purchase around the cat's midriff. "Back in the cage!" George yelled. "She's going. She's going." "Why did you take her out? What the hell were you thinking?" "I was trying to calm her down." "Well, you didn't." Back in the case Alice continued to whine. The humans maintained a strained silence. Animals had been a bone of contention between father and daughter for years. George was a lover of objects-art, books, wine-and devoted to what he called "the life of the mind," but he had no particular love for animals. He would tolerate them if they didn't get in his way. Pippa, on the other hand, was not herself without an animal to love and care for. There had been so many over the years-gerbils, snakes, guinea pigs, a tarantula-and they'd all helped to keep Pippa's superstitions and anxieties in check and get her through her rough patches-and there had been many rough patches. It was the ferret, Emilio, that really got under George's skin. Emilio, a definite handful, loved to dance to the music of Michael Jackson. He tapped out cacophonous rhythms with measuring spoons just like Pippa. Lu enjoyed Emilio's hijinks because they often led to uncontrollable communal laughter, but Emilio's unpredictability had put George on edge. The ferret often spirited away sets of keys left on the kitchen counter, and once, when George inadvertently left the door open to his third-floor study, Emilio ransacked the place, scattering books and pens and pencils, chewing on the potted philodendron, and shitting on his favorite Gabbeh carpet. The memory still made Lu chuckle, but George had not been amused. That was it-Emilio had to go. After Emilio, Pippa begged for a dog. George vetoed a dog of any breed-they all required too much maintenance, he said, and shed too much hair-but he finally consented to a cat. That was when Alice came on the scene, a boisterous kitten at the time, but downright tame compared to Emilio. In the four years that Alice had been with them, she had mellowed, though you wouldn't have known that from listening to her now. The traffic stalled. It pained Lu to spend this precious remaining time as a family in anger. If she had been alone in the car-alone with Pippa/Philippa/Phipps-she would have been laughing and weeping and telling her daughter how much she would be missed, even if Pippa only returned a stony silence. Lu couldn't imagine how her life would be without Pippa in it. Over the years, the two had spent so much time talking, Pippa reporting about her days, her worries, her odd notions. Would Mrs. Marvel be there when Pippa needed a listening ear? Mrs. Ruth Marvel-what a wonderful name for a landlady. As soon as Lu found the apartment being rented out by Mrs. Marvel, she felt reassured. The pictures were charming. A bougainvillea-covered outdoor staircase leading up to a one-room above-garage apartment. A designated sleeping area with a queen bed. A bathroom with a shower stall. A cooking area with a microwave and hot plate. The rest of the space was open to be fashioned however one wanted. Though not large, it was bigger than a dorm room and, most importantly, Mrs. Marvel was fine with Pippa bringing a cat, which was central, because Pippa had refused to go to college without her cat. Lu made the arrangements via email. An image of Mrs. Marvel burgeoned: a warm, grandmotherly presence who would provide solace when Pippa needed it. Mrs. Marvel wouldn't replace Lu, but she'd be a mother adjunct. George signed the contract and paid the deposit-not cheap, but they were prepared for that-and Lu gathered items that would make the place look cheerful. Colorful pillows and throws. Some artwork to fill the empty walls. Pippa said no to everything. She didn't want stuff. She would take the basics: sheets; a small selection of kitchen items; four or five changes of clothing, all jeans, T-shirts, and her omnipresent blue denim shirt; her computer, ukulele, and drumsticks. And Alice's needs, of course: litter box, food and water bowls, a scratching post. Teetering between sad and proud, Lu had watched Pippa and George packing this small assemblage of objects into the back of the Odyssey. Pippa firmly believed the world might end any day now, and she knew stuff wouldn't protect her. She was right, Lu thought, but still, the stripped-down look surrounding her daughter as they packed the car-the scant number of possessions she deemed necessary, her unadorned style of dressing, the unevenness of her half-shaved head-suggested something might be wrong. How could Lu help but feel sorrow with her only child leaving home? They slid auspiciously into a parking spot directly in front of a small blue stucco house on a tree-lined street exactly as quaint as Lu had imagined. With the ignition off, Alice stopped wailing. They stood on Mrs. Marvel's front stoop. Up close the house revealed itself to be in need of maintenance. The stucco was chipped in places to reveal the white dermis beneath. Paint curled off the wooden eaves. Lu was aware of the edges of her body, only inches from Pippa's, though the distance might as well have been oceans. They were the same height, but Pippa was more solid and given to stillness when she wasn't drumming. Staring at the brass knocker of Mrs. Marvel's red door, Lu pictured them as figurines in a doll's house, pawns capable of being lifted and removed and placed down somewhere entirely different. Surely Pippa must have been feeling a version of this too. Lu reached out and took Pippa's hand, and Pippa did not resist, though she didn't return Lu's smile. How desperately Lu wanted a smile from her daughter, that mischievous, sideways, slightly bemused smile. Lu's nasal passages and throat ached as she traveled a path from hope to despair and back. The to-and-fro of leaving. The cling-and-cut. A smile could not be commanded. The door opened, and Pippa dropped Lu's hand. Excerpted from Unleashed: A Novel by Cai Emmons All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
