I'll Be You(2)

“Not at all,” I offered graciously. “So what do you want me to do about Elli?”

“It’s not Elli, actually. What we need—what your mom needs, really—is for you to come help out with Charlotte. Your mother’s struggling a bit, physically I mean, and she’s been doing her best but Charlotte’s just starting to be too much for her to handle.”

This gave me pause. When you’ve spent the better part of a decade in various states of inebriation, it’s easy to forget names and faces. I ran this name through my spotty mental Rolodex, and came up empty-handed. “I give up,” I said. “Who’s Charlotte?”

My father sighed, his patience with me finally at its end. “She’s your niece,” he said.





2




THE NEXT MORNING I asked my boss at the café for a week off. “I need to go home and help my parents take care of my niece,” I told Tamar, all trembly lips and damp eyes. The tears were probably unnecessary—Tamar was also my AA sponsor, and had spent much of the last year listening to me rehash my family estrangement—but I wasn’t about to leave anything to chance. It’s a neat trick, to cry on cue. Not all actors can do it.

I still missed being on set.

Tamar flicked a clot of coffee grounds from the front of her apron and gave me a hard look. “Is that such a good idea? That’s going to be triggering and you know it,” she said. Tamar was ten years older than me and composed entirely of sharp angles and visible tendons. Her eyes constantly darted around the room as she noted dirty tables, monitored the length of the line, judged the crema on a macchiato. She’d been a cokehead, a decade back, and old habits die hard. Or maybe we just choose the drugs that amplify the instincts we already have, that let us be our unedited selves: paranoid, slothful, amped-up, wild. Our ids cranked up to one hundred.

Tamar turned her focus to me, noting something in my eyes that made her squint suspiciously. “Maybe someone should go with you. I don’t think you’re ready.”

“You offering?”

“Point taken.” She gave me the time off and told me to go find a meeting when I got to Santa Barbara.



* * *



—

My parents lived ninety minutes away up the coast, in a tile-roofed Mediterranean in the hills, not far from Rattlesnake Canyon. It was not the house that I’d been born in—that had been a far more modest two-bedroom bungalow in a neighborhood where you didn’t find hiking trails outside your back door. This particular home had materialized in high school, not long after my sister and I were cast as the stars of a middling Nickelodeon TV series. My mother had done quite well for herself, for a while, as manager of her daughters’ acting careers; better than I had done, it had to be said. Then again, any money she might have made off my career was probably better spent by her than by me, because she at least had a house to show for her percentage, while all I had for mine was an empty rental apartment and the scars on my psyche.

My mother was already standing in the garden when I pulled into the driveway. She wore a caftan printed with palm trees that billowed around her stout legs. A straw visor shaded her eyes, bright red curls neatly puffed into place. She waved both arms at me with an eagerness that bordered on aggressiveness. I hadn’t seen her since Christmas, which had mostly been fine, except for all the weeping.

“Darling!” She waited for me to approach and then threw her arms around me.

“Hi, Mom,” I said, and let her hug me for longer than felt necessary, considering. I guess she was relieved that at least one of her daughters wasn’t currently running rogue. She sniffled a little into my shoulder. She had grown smaller, I noticed, more askew. And when she turned to walk with me up the garden path I realized that she was limping a little.

“Osteoarthritis,” she said, noticing me noticing. “Just like your grandmother. You’ll have it, too, someday, I’m sure. It’s how all the women in our family go.”

I’d spent so many years skating right to the edge of death and then leaping back that it was strange to imagine my demise as a slow natural decline. Our parents’ bodies mirror our eventual mortality, unless we divert the paths ourselves. God knows I’d tried.

“Does it hurt?” I asked.

She lifted her chin, a plucky little display of bravery. “Of course. But I take CBD oil, and that helps. And Belva at Om Chakra gave me some aventurine and blue chalcedony, which are supposed to be good for pain and inflammation, so I carry those in my pockets all the time now.”

What I thought was What would really help you is some oxycodone, but of course I knew better than to say this out loud since it was only three years back that she caught me crushing up oxy pills and snorting them in the guest bath. The ensuing fight ruined her sixtieth birthday party completely. So, yeah, too soon to make jokes.

“Where’s the baby?” I asked.

“She’s napping,” my mother said. “And she’s not a baby, she’s a toddler. Two years old.”

I did the math—I hadn’t seen my sister in a while, but surely it hadn’t been that long. “Wait, how can Elli possibly have a two-year-old?”

“She’s adopted.” She bit her lip. “Maybe you know, Elli and Chuck had been trying for so long, and…” Her voice trailed off a bit. “Anyway, it’s been a big year. You heard that Chuck left? Just bailed out five months ago, only weeks before the adoption came through. Quite a surprise. Both Charlotte’s arrival and Chuck’s departure.” She practically spat out his name. Gone was the dulcet awe of Chuck who can do no wrong or Chuck the successful son-in-law, why don’t you find yourself someone like him, Sam, hmmmm? “Anyway, Charlotte has been a real consolation, a welcome distraction for all of us throughout that whole mess. She’s a blessing, really.”