I'll Be You(71)

I made my way up to our hotel room and when I opened the door I knew immediately that something was wrong. The room smelled sour and sweaty, and Sam was lying on the bed, arm splayed across her chest, denim skirt twisted up around her waist. The snowy white pillow sham was smeared with flesh-colored makeup. On the desk, next to a half-pillaged welcome basket, were three empty minibar bottles of rum and a can of Coke.

The girls I knew back in Santa Barbara had been starting to experiment with alcohol before I left, but they mostly drank hard lemonade and cherry-sweet cans of fruit-flavored cider. Annika’s brother would buy her a four-pack and they’d drink one each under the bleachers during the football game, and then brag that they were soooo wasted. They did not drink hard alcohol. They certainly didn’t drink three minibar bottles’ worth over the course of an hour, plus whatever my sister might have consumed earlier that morning.

I tiptoed across the room to the bed, which made no sense, because Sam was so comatose that my carpeted footsteps certainly weren’t going to wake her up. It didn’t occur to me to think that she might be dead, though years later—after Sam had brushed up against death a half dozen times—I would realize that I should have been scared. But on that particular day it was not an overdose, or at least not a dangerous one. She was just sound asleep, a rivulet of drool slipping from her mouth to the makeup-smeared pillow.

“Wake up, Sam.” I shook her. She made a groaning sound and flapped a limp hand at me, but didn’t open her eyes. “What the hell, Sam,” I said loudly, hoping to jolt her into awareness, but she was already dead asleep again.

Sam’s purse was on the floor next to the bed. I picked it up and fished through it, remembering the bottle of Adderall pills that I’d found in her things a year back—the ones that she said made her feel like she’d been drinking coffee. I didn’t find a bottle this time, just a half-empty cardboard blister packet that said Diazepam 10mg. I wasn’t sure what this was, but it clearly had the opposite effect, at least when mixed with alcohol.

I thought back to all the times over the previous year that my sister’s moods had ricocheted from one extreme to the other, from manic to serene and back again. Of the way she so often kept her purse clutched to her body, as if expecting a bag snatcher to make a lunge for it. And the booze—had she been dipping into our parents’ liquor cabinet this whole time, or did the free access to a minibar trigger a sudden loss of control?

How much had I been missing?

I straightened my sister’s skirt and wiped the smeared mascara off her face with a tissue, then wrapped the minibar bottles and the blister packet of pills in another tissue and buried them in the bottom of the bathroom trash can. I flushed my sister’s vomit down the toilet and lit a scented candle from our welcome basket to chase off the smell. And then I sat on the bed next to Sam and held her hand while she slept. I was dimly aware that this was an Adult Moment and I wanted to live up to it.

Five minutes before Sam and I were due back downstairs in the press suite, I heard a knock on the door. I opened it a crack and saw our mother standing in the hallway. “What on earth are you girls—” Her eyes drifted over my shoulder and stopped when they landed on Sam’s inert body. Our mother was rarely silenced but this sight, for once, left her speechless.

“She’s asleep,” I explained. “I tried to wake her up but she’s pretty out of it.”

Our mother pushed into the room and stood over Sam’s body, her eyebrows knotting, as if she were doing a tricky math problem in her mind. She ran a hand over Sam’s forehead, checking for fever. Sam exhaled softly in her sleep, a slow bilious hiss.

“Poor thing,” she said. “She must be overtired. It’s too much to ask of you girls, this kind of grueling schedule on a weekend after you’ve already been in production all week. I need to talk to the producers.”

Surely our mother’s not that naive, I thought. Surely she smells what I smell, sees what I see. I was left wondering if she was lying for my sake or for her own; and then I questioned my own interpretation of the situation. Was it possible that Mom was right? That my sister was really suffering from exhaustion, and the alcohol and pills were just a symptom of a different malaise? Did my mother have a more sophisticated understanding that I was missing? I was left confused, reeling, acquiescent.

This would turn out to be a lesson that I’d take forward into the rest of my life: that we are the masters of our own spin, that disaster can be reframed as triumph if only you choose to tell it that way. Say something emphatically enough, and people will believe you despite all evidence to the contrary. Say it emphatically enough, and you’ll even convince yourself. I’m in a happy marriage. We’ll have a baby soon. My sister is going to get better. I feel good about my life choices. This is a self-help group, not a dangerous cult.

Of course, when you finally realize that your life is built on an edifice of lies, and that there’s nothing actually holding you up, the fall is precipitous.

My mother lifted the receiver on the phone and started to dial. “I’ll tell them that we’ll have to cancel the afternoon interviews,” she said.

My initial relief at this—no more interviews!—was quickly chased away by panic. I imagined how upset the publicist would be, how that might travel up the chain of command to the executives at Nickelodeon, and how my sister and I would get a reputation for being unreliable. The spurned press would be catty and mean. Maybe the producers would start closely monitoring our behavior on set, notice Sam’s secret habits, cancel the show. Sam would be devastated, I thought. It might even make her act out more.