I'll Be You(11)
“Delete the photos,” I said. “Please.”
The woman looked down at her camera, mentally quantifying the value of what she’d just snapped, the bragging rights she could claim. When she didn’t move, I reached out and snatched her camera away. It was warm from being clutched so tight, greasy from her hand lotion. The woman just stood there, mouth agape, as I clicked the trash icon on three successive photos. Me, smiling and puff-chested; Elli, stunned, half-hidden behind me. Delete. Delete. Delete.
The woman snatched her camera back, glaring at us. “You have no right.” Her voice quavered, a hoarse bark. “This is a mall. It’s a public place.”
“We’re minors. It’s an invasion of privacy,” I responded. “And my sister doesn’t like it.”
The nearby tourists had edged away, the teenage girl discreetly pocketing her camera without snapping a photo at all. The shoppers who had slowed down to watch the show now hurried away, eyes averted. In the distance, I saw our mother returning from the bathroom, racing across the trampled lawn with murder in her eyes. Backlit by the sun, her sundress was nearly see-through, her legs pumping against the rainbow fabric.
“Well then,” the woman sniffed. Behind us, the fountain had begun its hourly dance, and she stepped away from its misty halo. She stuffed the camera back in her purse, fixed her gaze on me, and dropped one last prophetic observation before rushing off to Nordstrom.
“Your sister is clearly in the wrong business.”
6
THAT FIRST NIGHT BACK in Santa Barbara, after helping my parents wrestle Charlotte into bed—a process involving repeated readings of a book called Llama Llama Red Pajama—I called my sister. Her phone went straight to voicemail. I hadn’t spoken to Elli in over a year, and the soft lilt of her voice hit me like a punch to the esophagus. Her voice was still an echo of my own, but without the rough edges that came from too many cigarettes and cheap tequila shots.
“This is Elli, so sorry I missed you. Leave a message and I’ll call you back.” I would never have thought of apologizing for failing to answer my phone. I would never promise to return the call, either. For that matter, I hadn’t even bothered to record a message for my own voicemail; lately I’d just let it default to the robot lady. The idea of figuring out what to say to a stranger felt far too momentous.
No one called me anymore anyway.
“Hey,” I said to the empty air on the other end of the line. “I’m at our parents’. I’m with your daughter. What the fuck, Elli? You couldn’t even let me know that you adopted a little girl? I mean, I know that things haven’t been great between us, but Jesus, not even an email?” I heard something creeping into my voice, anger and panic, and took a breath. “She’s beautiful, by the way. I’m weirded out that I’m an aunt now. But you need to call me, let me know what’s going on. Don’t you think your spa vacation has gone on long enough? Dad’s convinced you’re having a breakdown and Mom thinks that you’re just cleansing Chuck from your system with colonics.” I immediately regretted having said all this. I swallowed it back almost as soon as it came out of my mouth and ended up making a strange squeaking noise into the phone. This wasn’t going to help my case.
“Anyway, I don’t know what’s going on with you but…” I couldn’t quite finish this sentence. But I wish I did? But I know it’s my fault that I don’t? But I want to convince you that I’m OK now, that you don’t have to hide from me anymore? But I miss us? But I’m sorry?
“Just call me,” I said, and hung up.
Now what?
In the other room, I could hear the sound of a wineglass being set on a coffee table, the murmur of my parents’ voices, the television clicking on. The sounds of my childhood. The evening looming ahead of me now—sitting on the sagging sofa with my parents, making small talk over America’s Got Talent—made me want a drink so badly I thought my skull might crack in two.
Was my invitation to come home a reward for good behavior, or was it punishment for bad? Suddenly, I couldn’t tell anymore.
* * *
—
I found myself an AA meeting. It was in the community room of a Mission-style church in downtown Santa Barbara, a stone’s throw from the hotels that sprawled lazily along the oceanfront. Santa Barbara likes to sell itself as an upscale Mediterranean resort—all red tile roofs, Mexican fan palms, and beachfront promenades, open-air fish restaurants and a harbor full of sailboats—but the local population is heavy on college students who surf and retirees who golf and Hispanic families who do all the heavy lifting. The truly rich residents live up in Montecito, where the views are spectacular and your neighbor might go by one name, like Oprah or Ellen or JLo.
Not surprisingly, then, the AA setup here was fancier than my regular meeting in Los Angeles: a Nespresso machine instead of instant coffee, cookies that came from a bakery and not a supermarket, chairs with built-in cushions. The rear wall of the room featured a giant mural, likely painted by a parishioner, of a Day-Glo Jesus with his arms wrapped around a multicultural collection of children with weirdly elongated torsos. Jesus was looking straight out of the mural, an alarming gleam in one eye that suggested he did not have the purest of intentions for these children.