I'll Be You(31)

The woman couldn’t stop gaping at me. She thrust the folder out to me, almost as if it were a defensive shield. “Do you want to just take these? I’m supposed to leave them in the upper drawer of the console in the living room.”

I took the folder from her hand. “What is it?”

“Comps, mostly. An inspection report. Some documents for her to sign.” She hesitated. “You’re not staying here, are you? Because we need it vacant for the open house…”

“I’m not staying here.”

She looked relieved. “Oh good. We’re hoping to be in escrow by this time next week. Move while the market’s hot.”

This sounded awfully hasty to me, but then again I wasn’t exactly a real estate expert. “When did she decide to list the house?” I asked.

She shrugged. “I was told on Monday a week ago.”

I did the math: This was just after she texted our mother that she was planning to stay at the retreat “a few more days.” Now I had to wonder if she ever intended to come back.

I thanked the real estate agent and closed the door, a tight headache coming on, the wrongness of everything pulsing at my temples. I looked down at the sheaf of papers in my hand: What was I supposed to do with these? Right, the console in the living room.

The console was a marble-topped mahogany chest, carved with flowering vines, with a big drawer that locked with an old-fashioned key. I opened this and discovered that the drawer already held a pile of folders labeled in my sister’s handwriting. I picked up the stack and flipped through them. Here were the important documents that had been missing from the file drawer upstairs. The folders held her birth certificate, the deed to the house, her passport and immunization records, and the title to her BMW.

Why here, and not in the desk? It was as if she’d pulled them out from the drawers up there and left them here for someone else to find.

I riffled through the pile again, realizing that the most important folder, the one I’d been looking for in the first place, was the only one that was still missing. Where were Charlotte’s adoption papers? Why was there nothing at all documenting her existence in Elli’s life? Surely there would have been reams of paperwork, a trail leading back to the very first point of contact, even if she was just being fostered. Had someone already removed this folder?

There was one last file folder on the bottom of the stack, this one unlabeled and seemingly empty. I flipped it open, just to check, and out fell a yellow piece of paper, torn from a lined notepad. It drifted to the floor, and I picked it up to examine it. The page contained a list of addresses, scribbled in hasty handwriting that I recognized as my sister’s.

17344 Catalpa Way

Burbank, CA

72 Buena Vista Ave

Laguna Beach, CA

825 Joshua Tree Drive

Scottsdale, AZ

Why had my sister written these addresses down, and why were they here among her most important documents? I examined the addresses again; nothing about them struck a note of familiarity. None of them local to Santa Barbara, I noticed, and none with names attached.

The list could be nothing at all—a folder she thought was empty, mixed in here by accident. Still, something about its presence felt significant.

An arc of small red droplets fanned out across the top of the page, like the splatter from a miniature garden hose. I scratched at the biggest splotch with my fingernail, but it had soaked into the paper long ago. It looked suspiciously like dried blood.

This time, I wasn’t taking chances. I took the pile of folders and shoved them all in my purse. Maybe the person who had taken the GenFem binder and Charlotte’s adoption paperwork was planning to come back for these, too. If so, I sure as hell wasn’t going to let her have them.





THEN


11




ELLI AND I DIDN’T return to Hollywood until we were fifteen years old, more than a year after we were killed off To the Maxx. Instead, we spent our freshman year of high school playing at “normal,” attending a public school in Santa Barbara down the hill from our house, alongside kids who lived in the neighboring homes but were mostly strangers to us. My mother insisted this was her idea. “It would be good for you girls to take a break from acting, have a normal life,” she’d said, as she filled out the registration packets. But I knew that Elli had begged her for this behind my back. I’d seen how, whenever we visited Santa Barbara, Elli would eye the girls who walked past our house in the morning—backpacks slung over their shoulders, giggling behind open palms, flicking their ponytails into the sun. I could see how much she wanted this, and so when my mother suggested, “Maybe we give high school a try for a while,” I shrugged and said, “Fine.”

I tried—I really did—to be OK with it.

My sister threw herself into high school with a fervor I’d never before witnessed in her. She went out for cheerleading. She joined the student council. She tried out for the soccer team and volunteered for school fundraisers and even attended homecoming with an exchange student from Sweden.

Meanwhile, I sulked. Santa Barbara didn’t feel normal to me anymore. “Normal” was the life we’d left behind in L.A.: our tiny trailer and the Hollywood sets we knew by heart, the catering wagons that fed us Caesar salad and chicken skewers, the sterile apartment building full of aspiring actors with symmetrical faces. I hadn’t had friends my own age in years. Outside of Elli, my friends were the middle-aged grips and the woman who patted concealer on my pimples every day and fed me Adderall. How was I supposed to go sit in a classroom with a bunch of strange kids and pretend I was suddenly interested in Shakespeare and passing notes when I had already lived in the sophisticated world of grown-ups, gone to the Emmys, shopped for designer dresses at Barneys, and gotten a paycheck with five figures on it?