2
Levi
Five days ago
Is there any sound worse than the buzzing of a tattoo machine? It sounds the way tattoos feel. I thought I would be used to it by now, the pain too, but head tattoos were a whole other deal. There was nothing between your scalp and your skin; you were tattooing right over the bone.
My phone had been buzzing on the coffee table, and I had been ignoring it. I’d converted the living area of the suite I was staying in into a guerilla tattoo studio. I liked to treat myself; tattoos were something I didn’t scrimp on. I’d been on the waiting list to get this one for months. The phone was still going. What if it was someone important?
I caved and asked the artist to stop while I took the call. Bad idea. If you tapped out mid-tattoo, chances were you weren’t going to be able to sit again. It was almost done. He was shading already. He hadn’t let me see it yet, but I knew it would look great. I walked over to the window and caught a little of my reflection in it. Bald. I’d had to shave my head to get it tattooed. I looked like a different person.
I looked at my phone. It was Ari, my lawyer. It was eight at night here, which meant it was eight in the morning in New York, where Ari was.
“Hey, Ari, who’s mad at me now?” I asked, picking up.
“Are you fucking serious? Is this what I have to do to get in contact with you?”
I rolled my eyes. He’d got me.
“Max. I’m busy, what do you want?”
“Busy my ass, where the hell are you?” I held the phone away from my ear because Max was yelling. He was so dramatic. I could see him now, in a suit during a steamy New York summer, in Ari’s office screaming his head off like a maniac.
“Did you want something?”
“I can’t… you’re honestly unbelievable.”
“Uh-huh. If all you wanted to do was yell, you could do that without making me listen to it, Max.”
“Where the hell are you?”
There were windows in the hotel, and if I looked out of them, I would see nothing but skyscrapers and Hong Kong traffic.
“Tribeca,” I lied. “Why?”
“The fuck you are! Your doorman hasn’t seen you in a week. Where the hell are you?”
“Do you want something Max, I’m in the middle of something?”
“Mom always said you were a fucking psychopath, I swear to God. Now I finally believe her.” I sighed. If there was a point, he wasn’t getting to it fast enough.
“Wonderful. Goodbye, Max.”
“Are you fucking serious? Your dad just died, Levi. What the hell are you doing? Where are you and why aren’t you in Marin?”
“Why are you so mad? Dad’s still going to be dead when I get back to Marin. Calm down, bro. You’ll lose the rest of your hair and then what’ll you do?” I asked.
“We can’t read the will until you show up.”
“Why? Because you need help? You can’t read?”
“Levi-”
“Thought so. Don’t call me again.”
“Levi, I swear to God, get your sorry ass back to California right now…” he said. Or what, I wanted to ask him. What would he do?
“Uh-huh, stop bothering my lawyer. He has important work to do.”
I hung up and turned my phone off. I walked back to the massage table. Room service had actually brought one up when I had asked. We didn’t need one, we could have easily used a couch, but I wanted my artist to be as comfortable as possible. I was busy dammit. Fuck Dad for choosing now to croak.
The machine sounded again, and I felt the stinging scrape of it against my skin.
Dad had just died, huh? About fucking time. The stubborn asshole had had one foot in the grave for ages now. I had gotten some messages from Mom, so it wasn’t news to me that Dad was dead. I just didn’t care. Max, oldest son and clear favorite of the dead man stood to gain the most from our father’s death. Maybe he’d even killed him himself.
Another Strickland scandal for the papers to run. I sort of hoped he had killed him; then he’d be the one they talked about for once.
He didn’t sound like a man who had just come into money over the phone. He was stressed out. He hadn’t said it over the phone, but it was because Mom, my mom, had been named executor. Plot twist. Even I hadn’t seen that one coming. The old man had grown erratic the worse his kidneys had gotten.
We had different mothers, Max and I. People got divorced and stepped out on their wives all the time, but the way my mother had become Jackson Strickland’s wife was one for the books. Before she was Silvia Strickland, she was Silvia Guzman. She was Silvia Guzman again after the divorce, but before the marriage, she was Silvia Guzman, the Strickland’s twenty-three-year-old Argentinian au pair.
My younger sister and I hadn’t been born until after the divorce with Max’s mother was final, but he had never taken to us, understandably. I didn’t know the finer details of Jackson’s relationships with the women who gave him his children, but even I was a little surprised my mother was executor. I mean, Max’s mom had even kept the Strickland name. I’d probably be seeing her soon enough because of this.
All of this was unnecessary. You didn’t need to be present for the reading of a will. The executor just needed to tell you what was in it. Dad, dramatic as always, had probably done it on purpose. He really wanted all the people who he had made hate each other to get together again?
It was finally done. My artist let me look at it in the mirror. It was bleeding, but that was just because it was a head tattoo. It was a geometric pattern that went up the back of my neck and the back of my head, fading out at the top of my back and before it reached my temples. It would be covered when my hair grew back in. Until then, there was no way I could hide it. My first tattoo had been my first fuck you tattoo, but this one was putting the final nail in the fuck you coffin. I had gotten the first one right on the inside of my right arm, so it was visible when I wasn’t wearing long sleeves. It made my dad mad, so I got it. The rest had been for me. Tattoos were like drugs; once you had some, you wanted more.
I had paid my artist in advance, plus a tip. Always a tip. I let him go and went back to my phone to see who else besides Max I had ignored while getting it done. A few more missed calls. I looked at the number. I smiled, calling back.
“Hey Sissy,” I said when she picked up.
“Levi,” she said shortly. Ha, she was mad too. Was I going to get a call from Mom next? Uncle Tate? Aunt Bunny? “Max called me. He thinks you’re here. Where are you? He threatened to fly over here and drag you back home himself.”
“New York,” I said.
“That’s where he was; try again,” she said.
“Hong Kong,” I admitted.
“In dollars, American and Hong Kong, how much damage have you caused?” she teased. I rolled my eyes. My hotel party days were over; I hadn’t trashed a Hilton suite in years. At least two.
“Why aren’t you in Marin?” I asked her.
“Dad hated me, remember?” she said. Celeste was my younger sister. There were just seventeen months between our ages. I’d called her ‘Sissy’ all my life. She hadn’t lived in the States for years. She had moved after Dad had disowned her. Disowned, like this was the fucking twenties or something and she’d gotten pregnant in high school. She hadn’t. Dad had just been in the wrong place at the wrong time, and she had been caught doing the wrong thing. He’d been home when she had had her friend Heather over to study with her. He had walked in on them going to second base in her room and had nearly murdered her on the spot.
Sissy was a lesbian. A major league dyke. Gold star bulldagger. Never sucked a dick in her life. Dad had been fucking livid. I bet the old bastard would have preferred to find his daughter with five guys running a train on her rather than her kissing another girl. He wouldn’t even look her in the eye after that.
As soon as she graduated, she moved into her college dorms and from there disappeared across the Atlantic. I hated that she lived so far away. We talked all the time, but it wasn’t the same. She was the only one of us three who had settled down. She had been with the same woman for almost five years, a British girl named Katherine, and they were expecting their first baby.
She was also my favorite sibling. Max walked around like he had a stick up his ass. He was older than us too. He had a different mother than us, and it was like he went out of his way to make us remember that as often as he could. Our mother, like a fucking mother should, sided with her daughter and basically told Dad he wasn’t going to treat her daughter like a criminal in her own home. The divorce was quick, and we moved out. Not far enough, though. Still in fucking Marin. Mom didn’t live there anymore, though, she’d moved to Los Angeles.
“I have to face that asshole alone?” I said.
“Mom asked me to come. She said it would look bad if I didn’t at least show up for the funeral. I’ll be there next week. I can’t say for sure. Kat doesn’t want to come, but I want her to be there.”
“I’m counting on you, sis,” I said. “How’d you find out?”
“Mom told me.”
“How do you feel?”
“Like it was about time… I bet he didn’t even tell people he had a daughter after I’d left. Once Mom had divorced him too, he just rotted to death in his lonely fucking castle. I’m not sorry.”
I wasn’t either. How did you mourn someone you didn’t really care about? The answer was; you didn’t. You just flew back home for the funeral because it would make your Mom happy.
“I bet he left you the house,” Sissy said.
“The one he died in? I don’t fucking want it. Bastard probably made sure he died there to drop the property value.” Sissy laughed. ‘The house’ was the house we had grown up in. A sprawling mansion in Mill Valley, Marin County.
“That’s better than nothing, which is what I’m getting.”
I wanted to think that Dad maybe wasn’t petty on top of being an asshole, but I knew better than that. He was the worst kind of bastard—an old one. He had stopped accepting new ideas around 1980. Mom had secured trusts for Sissy and me which were protected from Dad, so she had that. She was right thinking she most likely wouldn’t be getting anything else.
“If I get the house, I swear I’m knocking it down.”
“Level it and put up a Denny’s,” she said. “Get back to Marin, please. I can barely deal with Max when he’s being civil. I can’t take him angry. Also, if Mom’s there, she’ll need the backup.”
I told her I would and hung up the call.
Jackson Strickland. Our dad. Even in death, he was not a binding factor between his children. We were literally strewn across the globe. My mother’s request to go back to Marin had been enough for me to go. It had. I was just busy. There was actually a good reason why I was in Hong Kong, not just to get tattooed.
Getting back to California would take fifteen hours, approximately. I could be there, theoretically, the next morning with the time difference. I scrolled through my phone to my pilot’s personal number then stopped. I’d take my time.
* * *
My mother, Max and his mom made a picture all together in Dad’s attorney’s office.
“It’s about goddamn time,” Max grumbled as I walked in. I was late. I knew that. I had done it on purpose. I kissed Mom and politely acknowledged Max’s mother, Bernice.
Hamish Green, Dad’s lawyer, reminded us all why we were there before he finally let Mom get on with reading the will. When you looked at her, you’d guess she was Hispanic, and you would be right—dark features and naturally tanned skin. When she spoke, though, she was as American as they came. She’d ironed out her accent as soon as she had become Mrs. Strickland.
This was the boring part. Why did I have to be present to listen to a list of the shit that my father had acquired during his life? I zoned out.
“I leave all my business holdings to my first son Maxwell Strickland,” I vaguely heard my mother say. Figured. Max was the good son. He’d followed in daddy’s footsteps studying the major he wanted him to do and moving on to work under him at one of his many companies. He was good at it, but I sometimes wondered whether there was a whole other Max that I didn’t know about because he had modeled himself so much after Dad. He was the only one of us who looked like him too. Sissy and I looked like Mom—black hair and dark eyes. Max had Dad’s red hair and green eyes.
I caught some of the other things. Money for Bernice Strickland, ex-wife. Money for Mom, other ex-wife. Money for Max, a little for me. Didn’t need it. None for Sissy—she’d called it. His personal art collection, library, antiques and other junk were to be auctioned through the Strickland auction house—more things that didn’t matter. I vaguely heard the words ‘Marin’ ‘Levi’ and ‘house’ come from my mother, catching my attention.
“What!” I heard Max scream. What? What had happened? I looked at my mother.
“What was that?”
“The house in Marin? It’s yours. He left it to you.”
I sat up. What? I got the house?
“There’s no way he left him the house,” Max yelled standing up. He shouldn’t have done that. Why did he make it so easy for me to push his buttons?
“Heard it from the dead horse’s mouth, Max! What’re you going to do? Fight me for your birthright?”
I watched Max try to lunge at me and his mother and my mother try and hold him back. They asked him to leave the room so the rest of the will could be read. Exactly as I’d thought. Max would take over Dad’s investments and financing. The real estate and property development was mine. Always was anyway.
I got up to leave, walking out the door after thanking Mr. Green and saying bye to my mother. Unnecessary. What in that fucking will had I really come to hear that I didn’t know already, besides the shit about the house? Max came up behind me, grabbing my shoulder.
“You can’t have the house,” he said to me. It was like looking at dearly departed Jackson Strickland himself. Max sounded a little like him. He also had male pattern baldness like he had. I had warned him about the steroids, but he didn’t listen. Shooting testosterone didn’t make you big; working out and eating right did. He was on the gear and still lighter than I was, and he was losing his hair.
“Too little, too late. Dad already gave it to me.”
“What the hell are you going to do with it?” he asked pointedly. “You don’t live here. You haven’t lived in Marin for years.”
I shrugged. I didn’t live in Marin even when I came to California. I was based in New York. The house had been elegant at one point, but Dad had had it modified, and so many parts added onto it that it looked like an architectural Frankenstein’s monster. I had no practical use for it. No real desire for it. I wasn’t going to let Max have it, though. Call it sibling rivalry. Call it an investment because someone rich would pay me a lot of money to build them a house there.
“That’s the beauty of it, Max. I don’t have to do anything with it if I don’t want to. Though, I might sell it. Why not? You’re right; I hate that place.”
“We grew up in that house.”
“No, Sissy and I grew up in that house. I don’t know where the fuck you grew up.”
“Just give it to me, Lee. Why are you being an asshole about it?”
Because I could? Because Max had never done anything in my life to make me want to be nice to him? Because he was just like our father and I hated that guy? Because the house was rightfully mine to do with as I fucking pleased? Yeah, that was why.
“Go talk to Dad about it if you don’t like it, Max.”
“I can contest the will. The house is mine. I want it.”
I ignored him. He could contest whatever he wanted.
Fuck him; I was moving in.