I'll Be You(20)

He laughed. “I’m a high school English teacher. I’m on summer break. And so is my daughter, so you’ll get two for the price of one. Cool?”

“Very.”



* * *



—

We met at a playground that he suggested, with an elaborate, castle-like play structure that sprawled under the shade of an enormous oak. Charlotte took an immediate shine to Caleb’s daughter, Mae, a gamine little girl with paint in her hair and scabs on her knees. The two took off for the fort, Mae holding Charlotte’s hand as they wobbled across the swinging bridge and toward the fortress tower.

“She loves little girls,” Caleb said. “She keeps asking when she’ll be allowed to start babysitting.”

“How grown-up.”

“She’s a ruthless capitalist. She goes through my pockets every night and takes all the change. She tells me that she’s saving up to buy a helicopter.”

“Much more useful than a plane, if you ask me. Easier to land.”

We sat on a bench with a view across the playground. I studied him as I drank my coffee. He was wearing track pants and a battered T-shirt that read Cedar Forest Ultramarathon 2018. His hair had been repaired since I saw him last, trimmed into a severe symmetrical cut, almost military in length, that revealed a disarmingly delicate bone structure. The fabric of his T-shirt was so thin that I could see the wiry muscles in his shoulders, bunching and flexing.

I pointed at his chest. “You run ultramarathons? Aren’t those, like, a hundred miles?”

“Not all of them. I’ve never run farther than fifty.”

“Still. Sounds awfully time-consuming.”

“It keeps me busy, but I need that. Plus, you know what they say. Addictive personalities always need something to fixate on. So I run until I collapse. Endorphins are a much healthier high.” He gave me a sideways glance. “You? Do you have a vice?”

I lifted my coffee cup. “Caffeine and self-flagellation.”

He laughed at this, and then we fell silent, watching the children that swarmed over the play structure like locusts. It was ten a.m. on a summery Tuesday morning and every swing was full, children were jostling for a turn at the slides, and every bench was claimed by a diaper bag or an abandoned sippy cup. I’d wondered if meeting Caleb here would feel awkward, like a particularly G-rated Tinder date, but he exuded a kind of meditative calmness that was in sharp contrast to the mothers and nannies who surrounded us. They circled the play structure like sheepdogs, herding their charges away from danger as they wielded tissues and fish crackers and Band-Aids and disinfecting wipes. Caleb was one of the only men in the park, but he didn’t seem particularly bothered by his minority status.

“Is Mae’s mom”—I wasn’t quite sure how to phrase this delicately—“around?”

“Yes and no. We’ve been divorced since Mae was two. We split custody for a while but now Mae’s mostly with me. Her mom is…unstable.” He studied his hands, and I noticed that his cuticles were bitten to the quick. “It’s why I got sober. Mae needed someone who could be responsible. So.” He shrugged.

“How long have you been sober?”

“Six years, more or less.” Ah. So he was really sober. “You?”

“A year.”

He gave me a smile that I had grown familiar with, one of encouraging approval mixed with faint trepidation. A year was long enough to prove admirable commitment, but not long enough to be out of the woods. “You stopped acting,” he said abruptly.

I flushed. “I didn’t know that anyone had noticed. What, you looked me up on IMDB?”

Now it was his turn to flush. “I don’t know any other famous actors. So I paid attention, and yeah, I’d check IMDB to see if you’d been in something and then I’d watch it.”

“Even the horror movies?”

“Even the horror movies.”

“Yikes.” Something twisted in my stomach: Embarrassment, yes, but was it my own embarrassment at the state of my career, or embarrassment for him, for revealing his hand so quickly? What kind of person would stalk me like that and admit it?

I snuck a look at his face, trying to decide if he was a creep. He smiled back at me. “I’m not a creep,” he said. “I swear.”

“I’m not one to judge,” I lied, judging.

“Plus, I thought you were a good actress. You always elevated anything you were in.”

“As long as I was sober enough to make it to set. Which was never a given.”

“For what it’s worth, I used to be a pretty good journalist,” he said. “Until the L.A. Times fired me for showing up high to work too many times. So I’m not in a position to judge, either.”

An awkward silence fell over us. Over on the play structure, Mae and Charlotte were hopelessly entangled on the tire swing. Finally, he cleared his throat. “Anyway, what brings you back to Santa Barbara?”

“My sister has gone MIA. I’m helping my parents out and watching Charlotte until my sister comes back.”

“Of course, Elli. I’d heard she still lived in town.” Then, with a mild furrow of his brow: “MIA? What’s that mean?”

“She checked into some sort of self-help retreat in Ojai about ten days ago and hasn’t come back.” I sounded more nonchalant about this than I felt.