I'll Be You(74)

The super, an older Latino man with a prosthetic leg, didn’t question me when I told him that I’d locked myself out of my apartment. He barely even looked at me. He just grumbled “otra vez” under his breath and then led me up the courtyard stairs to a door with a rusting mezuzah in the frame. A minute later, I was inside my sister’s apartment, no questions asked.

Years had passed since I last visited my sister at home. I knew that she’d been downwardly mobile for the better part of a decade—that once she sold the modernist condo that she bought with her On the Double proceeds, her living situation had gone precipitously downhill—but this barren box of a studio was such a comedown that it shocked me. A neatly made bed crouched in one corner, next to a small bureau, with a mountain of novels piled on an IKEA bookshelf that also doubled as a TV stand. A dining table the size of a postage stamp separated the kitchen from the living space. An ancient air-conditioning unit clung precariously to the window frame, just inches from a thrift-store couch.

On top of the bureau, next to a framed photo, was a small pile of metal coins in different colors. I picked one of them up and turned it in my hand. It was an engraved sobriety chip, marking my sister’s one-month anniversary of AA. One side read God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and wisdom to know the difference. The other: To Thine Own Self Be True.

I scooped the other five chips into my palm and examined them. Each one marked an additional month of sobriety, making a total of six months. I wondered if there was a seventh in her pocket right now. I wondered how long it would be before she fell off the wagon again, because of course she would.

The framed photo, I noticed, was a candid that was taken on the set of On the Double, something the assistant director of photography snapped while we were blocking a scene. In it, Sam and I were curled up facing each other on a bed, our noses just inches apart, laughing. We were perfect mirrors of each other, and yet the photo exactly captured our individual distinctness: the pliancy in my face and the slyness in Sam’s. The photo, I remembered, was taken just two days before I told Sam I was quitting the show.

I stared at the picture, waiting for some feeling of loss for the career I’d walked away from, for the fame we might have achieved if I’d stuck it out with Sam. But the truth was that I didn’t miss acting at all. I had never been comfortable on a stage. When I was on it, all I could think about was getting off. I had never wanted to stand out. All I had ever wanted was to blend in.

So the only real loss that I felt when I saw the photo was for the ease that I’d felt in that moment: the naive belief that my sister and I would always be that close.

I put the photo facedown on the bureau, and kept looking.

Sam’s apartment was so small that I found what I came for almost as soon as I started digging: a solitary cardboard box, tucked at the bottom of her tiny coat closet. When I lifted the lid I found a pile of documents, haphazardly thrown together. My sister’s important files.

I dug through the box, pulled out medical records and old car lease forms, unearthed an expired passport and a SAG card that was five years out of date. Finally, toward the bottom of the box, I dredged up a stack of pale pink documents, clipped together, each one emblazoned with a logo for BioCal Donation Center. I unclipped the top form and read it: It was a copy of an egg donor agreement, signed by my sister, dated almost four years earlier. I skimmed through the agreement, looking for the names and addresses of the intended egg recipients, but found nothing of interest, just a lot of legalese.

Two more donor agreements were clipped underneath the first, documenting three donations over the course of twenty-nine months. My sister had been a veritable egg factory. I thought I might be ill. How blasé she had been about her own fertility, even as I was struggling with mine. Did it never occur to her how much this would hurt me? I wondered. Then again, how could she have known? I’d never told her about our problems conceiving, never invited her to drink my raspberry leaf tea and talk about my empty uterus. I’d always let her addiction issues fill up the room instead, been a sounding board instead of a person.

I thought back four years, tried to remember what Sam and I had been doing at that point in time, and realized that it was the period following her failed rehab attempt at the Ojai treatment center. She was broke, so I’d paid for the program. “Throwing good money after bad,” Chuck had observed, but I’d covered the cost with my own savings, so he had no say in the matter. But then she’d bailed out a week early to go on a cocaine binge at the Beverly Hills Hotel with some sleazy Hollywood manager, proving Chuck right. I’d bailed her out of that, too, found her a local outpatient program in Los Angeles instead, and a sobriety counselor who charged me $150 an hour, because I wasn’t about to be the person who gave up on Sam.

I could still remember how I felt so helpless when I rescued Sam from the Beverly Hills Hotel, sweaty and pale and smelling of unwashed scalp. How could she keep doing this to herself? I didn’t understand how we could have started as the same person and ended up so very far apart. But I took her to Norms and watched her cry mascara tears into her untouched pancakes—as she repeated, “I’m such a terrible sister, I’m such a bad person, I don’t know how you can keep believing in me,” over and over again—and thought to myself, But of course I’d do anything if it will save you.

Apparently “saving her” that time around had prompted her to do this: sell our shared DNA to strangers.