I'll Be You(56)
I’ll just go back to L.A., I thought. Forget any of this ever happened. But I knew it was too late for that now. I wasn’t going to abandon my sister to this, whatever this turned out to be.
We stopped just outside the gate. Ruth reached out and pressed the button on the call box and then peered up at the camera. She waved. “It’s Ruth and Suzy and Eleanor,” she called, speaking less into the call box than to the camera monitoring our presence. I looked up, too, and held my breath.
The red light blinked at us, there was a blast of static from the speaker, and then the gate swung open with a shattering squeal of iron on iron.
And just like that, I was in.
THEN
17
IN JUNE OF LAST year, I emerged from yet another rehab stay—my fourth—and found myself living with my sister and Chuck while I “got back on my feet.” That mostly meant spending endless hours floating on a raft in their swimming pool and drinking can after can of fizzy water in order to keep my hands occupied while I tried to figure out a new future for myself. I read my way through the novels on my sister’s bookshelf, sweet romantic stories about star-crossed lovers who worked through minor character flaws and the occasional bout of cancer in order to find each other again. Nothing on my sister’s shelves was dark or twisted; even the tragedy was tear-jerkingly pure, of the Nicholas Sparks variety. It felt like a balm.
After so many years of existing on the opposite side of the divide from my sister, it was strange to be living inside her world. Elli’s life trajectory after On the Double could not have been more different from mine. It was as if, after a childhood that defied normalcy, every choice she’d made since was a middle finger in the face of her former unconventionality. While I was auditioning for horror films and going to parties in Chinatown warehouses, she was rushing for a sorority and majoring in interdisciplinary studies. While I was fucking my way through an ever-rotating cast of bad-boy actors and musicians and aspiring producers, she was married by twenty-four to her all-American sweetheart. She became a florist, of all things, and moved into a pretty house that perfectly matched the pretty houses of all the other affluent white families that populated our pretty hometown.
Most foreign of all to me, she wanted kids. Lots of them.
“We want three kids,” she’d told me not long after her wedding to Chuck (a three-hundred-person affair at a beachfront hotel in town). “Maybe four.”
I laughed. “You’ll need to trade in your BMW for a bus.”
“Right? With built-in seatback television sets and a cooler for snacks. A pop-up tent for soccer games and a hanging rack for ballet costumes.” She was being sardonic, but there was a shine in her eyes that took me aback, as if she thought this wouldn’t be such a terrible fate.
Seven years on, I still couldn’t figure out the appeal of that life, but I also knew that my sister would make an excellent mother. She cut the crusts off her own sandwiches. She went to see Frozen in the theater, for fun. I’d once watched her spend an hour patiently teaching an eight-year-old girl how to do a cat’s cradle.
And, of course, she was unfailingly reliable. I knew this from personal experience. The night that had kicked off this latest rehab stint had ended with me calling her in tears at four a.m. I’d gone to a bar in Highland Park with a DJ I was dating and had washed down two Valium with a half dozen tequila shots and blacked out. When I woke up, hours later, I was on the floor of an unfamiliar house in Eagle Rock and a strange woman in spangled tights was throwing water in my face while another woman was on the phone with paramedics. My date was nowhere in sight. Apparently, I’d left the bar with these two strangers and proceeded to smoke a joint with them. Then I passed out cold from a standing position and hit my head on a potted ficus. There was puke on the floor and blood on my T-shirt and when the woman gently asked me if there was anyone she could call, I’d said, “My twin sister,” and started to bawl.
Elli had driven the hundred miles in exactly eighty-two minutes. When she found me sitting on a dark porch, soaking wet and covered with blood, she went pale. I waited for her to rebuke me, or to remind me of my three previous failed attempts at rehab—one of which she’d paid for herself—and call me a disgrace. But instead, she just retrieved a clean T-shirt and a pair of cashmere sweats from the back of her car. “You’ll feel better in this,” she said, and began undressing me as I sat there crying, helpless as a baby.
The whole drive back to Santa Barbara she kept up a patter about a “really fantastic program” she’d recently heard about, with a whole new rehab protocol we’d never tried; she’d call as soon as they opened and reserve me a spot. When I wept that this time I was really going to kick it—really, I was—she just looked at me with a sanguine smile and said emphatically, “Of course you will. You’re my Sam. You can do anything, you just have to try.”
I tried. I really did.
The rehab stay had gone well, and it seemed to work; of course, it always did until it didn’t. But I was hopeful. And now I was back at her house, seven weeks later, waking up every morning to a fresh plate of eggs and the morning paper folded neatly to the arts section. Some days, I’d go with Elli to her workshop and work alongside her, stemming roses and culling the slimy leaves from the peonies. I liked these days the best, working in amiable silence in the cool dark space where she made her arrangements, the air thick with the smell of flowers and fresh dirt. I found the repetitive simplicity of the work calming; more than that, I liked the proximity to her. We hadn’t spent so much time together since Elli put the kibosh on On the Double.