I'll Be You(41)

Her eyes narrowed into a squint of mistrust. She took yet another step backward, pushing the door farther closed until she was just speaking through the crack. “I’m sorry but I think you should go now,” she said. “You’ll have to come back when the owners are here. They get home at six.”

Behind her, the little girl wailed in protest. The dog gave one last yelp—a high-pitched whimper, as if it had just been squeezed—and then fell quiet. The crack shrank until all I could see was the babysitter’s nose.

I shoved my sneaker into the doorjamb, trying to stop her. “Can I just leave a message for the owner? Can you have them call me?”

The door banged against my foot, hard, and I yelped and pulled it back, giving the babysitter her opportunity to slam it shut entirely. I kicked the wood, and then yelped again as pain shot through my toe. Charlotte looked up at me with alarm.

“I shouldn’t have kicked the door. The situation wasn’t that girl’s fault at all, and I took my frustration out on her,” I told her. “That was poor impulse control on my part. Don’t do what I did.” Charlotte stared at me blankly.

I trudged lopsidedly back to my car, Charlotte fighting me to get down. I deposited her in the car seat with a fistful of Puffs and then fished through the console until I found a solitary sticky note that had lost most of its stick. No pen, but I did find the stub of an eyebrow pencil swimming in the bottom of my purse.

I scrawled on the Post-it as neatly as I could: “Looking for info about Elli Logan. Can you call me?—Sam Logan.” I added my phone number and examined the results. It looked like a ransom note written by a psychopath, but it was the best I could do.

I walked back to the front door. There was a brass slot by the entrance, jammed with the day’s mail; a fat Restoration Hardware catalog jutted out of the gap. I tugged this out and looked for the name on the label: Michaela Blackwell. The name didn’t ring a bell.

I shoved the catalog back in the slot and added my smeared sticky note on top.

As we drove away, the front door flew open once more and the little girl came charging out, with an armful of stuffed animals. She stopped at the end of the driveway and watched us go, her face slack with disappointment. A plush unicorn fell from her arms to the concrete as she raised her arm and waved once—goodbye, or come back, I couldn’t quite tell.

Then we turned the corner, and she was gone.



* * *



—

The second address on my sister’s list was an hour farther south, in the ocean town of Laguna Beach. Almost as soon as we got on the freeway, I realized that Charlotte’s tolerance for our expedition had already expired. Five hours in the car was too much to ask of a toddler. She squirmed and whined no matter how many strawberry Puffs I tossed over my shoulder at her, no matter how many times I tried to get her to sing “The Wheels on the Bus.” She flung herself against the straps of her car seat until her face turned the color of a tomato.

“Lala play!” she shrieked, as if it had finally occurred to her that she’d missed a critical opportunity back in Burbank, a potential new friend.

“We’ll play when we get to Laguna Beach,” I promised her. “Just hang in there a little while longer.”

“No.”

“You have to, kiddo. I promise we’ll go to the beach when we’re done.”

She burst into tears. Any previous happiness or future happiness had been utterly trumped by the perpetual Now, a Now in which she was straitjacketed in a car seat in a Pull-Up that was growing increasingly damp. Something about the expression on her face felt familiar to me, an echo of the neediness I used to feel as I popped an Oxy-Vicodin cocktail and washed it down with a G&T. Perhaps addiction is just a grown-up variation of a toddler compulsion: the constant need for instant gratification.

“Play,” she whimpered.

“Puffs?” I offered.

She wailed from Burbank to Anaheim, finally passing out from exhaustion as we got close to Disneyland. I drove in merciful silence as the tip of the Matterhorn passed by on our right, squeezed between the hotel towers. A pop of memory: our ninth birthday, first time at Disneyland, parents fretting over the cost of the souvenirs. Elli wanted to go on the teacups but I insisted on Splash Mountain, promising that I’d hold her hand the whole time; but then it turned out that we couldn’t sit together, and instead I listened to her scream in terror in the seat just behind mine. I knew that it was my fault that my sister was alone with her fear; I had done that to her. I spent the rest of the day doing penance in Fantasyland—riding Dumbo in lazy circles—and even though Elli moved on from the trauma, I remained convinced I had broken something critical inside her.

A random thought popped into my head: I’ll take Charlotte to Disneyland someday, when she’s older. A funny idea, but I liked it. And suddenly I could imagine us there, aunt and niece, standing in line for a roller coaster holding cotton candy fluff and wearing plastic mouse ears while Elli remained at home, not wanting her daughter to know that she was afraid of Splash Mountain. I’d get to be the cool aunt, the one Charlotte would confide in when her mother was behaving like a control freak, the one who would take her shopping on Melrose and go to rock concerts with her and buy her beer for the first time and…Oh. No. Maybe not the beer. But still, I liked this vision of our future together. It was, I realized, the first clear vision of any future I’d had in some time, particularly one with the anchor of a familiar human being.