American Girls(53)

“It is a good question.” Roger crossed and uncrossed his legs.

I didn’t feel like it was a good question; in fact, it was the kind of question that made me want to wash my own mouth out with soap. How could a person ever make up for the things that those women had done? And yet, when the dust settled, it seemed like all of the women who had been part of the murder had genuinely been shocked that Charles Manson wasn’t right. Helter Skelter didn’t usher in some beautiful new world, it just left the old one a little more awful. They’d been following some horrible, sadistic loser who didn’t know any more about the end of the world than the sketchballs in the liquor store parking lot. Was it so impossible to believe that a person, having regained what little sanity she might have once possessed, would then feel outright awful about what she’d done? The easy thing was to say, No, they were monsters, they had to be monsters to do something like that. But what if the truth was more complicated? What if they weren’t really as different as everyone wanted to believe? But it was the kind of thought that was impossible to hold, double impossible if I tried to keep it in my head next to the list of the victims, or the thought of that sad, flat gravestone. Still, I had to ask: What if they were really and truly sorry? Did it matter at all?

“Because women, my dear sister,” Delia said, “are f*cked.”

“Hypocrite.” Roger was matching her vodka for vodka. Not only was I not going to get a useful answer to any of my questions, I was also going to have to take a cab home.

“Oh, screw you, Roger.”

Then my phone rang. Dex. I slipped into the other room and answered.

“Are you okay?” he said. “Delia was supposed to call me hours ago. What the hell is going on? Is she just messing with me, or does she need help, because I can’t figure it out right now. I really can’t. And I’m starting to feel like a chump.”

Roger’s living room table was glass and steel, a window to the unvacuumed floor below, and the backpack he had carried to the shoot was open across its top. The faces that had been on the walls spilled onto the clear glass, on top of which was a young girl with a heart locket, lips parted and hair feathered away from her face. I didn’t recognize her. She might have been one of the real girls, the ones found in pieces around LA. She was no one famous. On the other end of the line, Dex was fuming. Irritated, worried, and mad—not a great combination.

“We’re at her friend’s apartment. She didn’t like how she felt on her pain medications, so she decided that vodka was better than Percocet.”

“Uh-oh.”

I slumped back into Roger’s couch. The impossibly perfect Anita Ekberg looked down from the wall, back arched and ankle-deep in a Roman fountain.

“I don’t think she wants you to see her face.”

“Why not?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I think she thinks that you might stop liking her.”

There was silence for a good minute or so. I thought he’d hung up.

“Do you know where you are? Do you have the address?”

There was a stack of mail on the counter. I read him our location.

“I’ll be there in thirty minutes. And please tell your sister to stop selling me short, okay?”

“Okay.”

When I returned to the patio, Delia and Roger were both quiet, staring across each other into space.

“Dex is coming to get us,” I said.

My sister stayed frozen. Roger repeated his name.

I had carried the picture of the girl with the heart necklace back onto the patio.

“Who is this?” I asked.

And because he’s such a dirtbag, a sketchball among sketchballs, I swear he was smiling. “The Geimer girl,” he said. “She was in some famous pictures, no?”

“No,” I said. “I’ve never seen this. Am I supposed to know her name?”

“I am paying you this money to research, you tell me.”

I passed the picture back to Roger and the three of us sat in silence, watching the garbage rot. Thirty minutes later I helped my barely upright sister into the back of Dex’s car.

Dex was doing the right thing, the kind thing, but he didn’t look happy. Once he buckled my sister’s slurring self into the car, he gave me one of those “Are you freaking kidding me?” looks that do not bode well. Delia smiled a little, too tired and too out of it to open her eyes. I honestly had to stop myself from telling her to wipe that stupid grin off her face, like I was her mom or something.

“Thanks for answering your phone,” he said to me. “She went on a film shoot today? Must be some kind of director.” He was disgusted.

My sister moaned and cracked the window, rubbing her head against where the glass opened into the night.

Thirty minutes later I was cross-legged on Dex’s couch, watching bad TV and thinking how only a mental patient like my sister could find a way to like Roger more than this.

*

That night I looked up the name of the girl in the picture, Samantha Geimer. No wonder Roger was smiling. She was a girl who had been photographed, and famously, by Roman Polanski two weeks before he pumped her full of champagne and quaaludes and raped her. Like everyone in LA, it seemed, she’d wanted to be famous: a model, an actress, a star. He convinced her to pose topless, which I couldn’t even imagine. I hated taking my shirt off in the locker room, or at the doctor’s office. I had breasts, enough that my bra wasn’t just one of those lacy things that flat-chested girls get to be part of the club, but they didn’t totally feel like a part of me yet. Having breasts was definitely better than not having breasts, but I still wasn’t about to parade them around town. Samantha was thirteen years old when Polanski raped her, and thinking of the picture it wasn’t just that she looked older, but that she didn’t even look like someone I recognized as a girl, baby-faced and Do me all at once. The slutty girls that I knew went all-in, Olivia Taylor style, and the ones who weren’t wore promise rings from churches and could list all the ways you were going to hell and the diseases you would catch if you let a boy too near your crotch.