American Girls(8)

My sister rolled her eyes and pulled out her phone. At least she had an escape.

After a minute Delia gestured at the middle water tower.

“Anna,” she whispered, “see that tower? A Canadian tourist was staying here and they found her body in it, but not until it was badly decomposed. The residents of the hotel had been using the water for weeks.”

The wind picked up as she was talking, and I felt a chill.

“Are you serious? You mean that actual water tower?”

“Completely.”

The water towers looked like oversize cans that should have been recycled long ago. They creaked to life every time someone flushed a toilet or ran a shower. I wanted to be home as much as I’d ever wanted anything in my life.

“Gwiazdeczko,” Roger said, and kissed my sister on the mouth. “Misiu.”

He was reaching for my cheek, but I put out my hand instead. My sister might have been confused about her relationships, but I was not even remotely confused about mine.

“Oh,” he said. “You are so much bigger and formal now.”

He was looking me up and down like I was trying out for some part in his idiot film. Hollywood people could be gross even when they weren’t trying. Pimps and butchers.

“She looks more like you every day, you know.”

“Rest assured she has a mind of her own,” Delia said. “I figured it would be okay if she came today. She knows the drill.”

“You are not in school?” Roger asked, like he cared.

“No,” I said. “Keen eye for detail.”

“Always the mouth,” he said, and gave me a shut-the-eff-up smile.

“So I had a breakthrough,” he said, and he took my sister’s face between his hands, like he was going to make out with her or snap her neck in one swift move. “I know. I know who you are.”

“That’s reassuring,” I said. “You did live together for five years.”

My sister glared and Roger ignored me. Just like old times.

“Your character. Do you know how many children Charles Manson had?” he asked, like it was the riddle of the Sphinx. “How many grandchildren? He probably wasn’t allowed conjugal visits, but no one knows what is really possible in prison. Could he have found a way around that? There were many children from his family who were placed in foster homes, who never knew who they were, let alone who their father was. And the sex was so promiscuous then, no? I thought she was going to be like Catherine Deneuve in Repulsion, right? So maybe it’s in my unconscious, this woman who is victim and sadist. Manson. Polanski. I feel it out there.”

I had to hand it to Roger, he was good at acting like he had an audience even when the two of us were pretty clearly underwhelmed.

“I’m a Manson girl?” Delia gave Roger her “Would you care to rephrase that while I melt your face with my mind?” look. I almost felt sorry for him. “Isn’t that a little obvious?”

“No,” he said, prickling. “Not a Manson girl, and not obvious. You are a child of California. All of those girls were children of America, reckless children. Heartless children. Cruel children who hated their parents. They confused love and hate, death and life. It may not be Manson, it may be one of the others at the compound, but it is part of that hot desert, that last summer of the 1960s. I need to think.”

That was an understatement. I was starting to get cold, and I didn’t like the sound of his movie. He was just the kind to pitch someone off a roof as part of his method, to scare up publicity for his latest failure.

My sister sucked in a long breath and exhaled. “Well, you need to shoot, because the light’s changing and I don’t think they’re going to want us up here all week. Dex gets home Friday, and the rest of this week is zombies. Once he’s back I can’t just shoot anytime you like. You need to pick a schedule and stick with it.”

“Dex,” Roger said, and left it at that.

My sister turned her phone on and handed it to me.

“Just keep the sound off,” she said, and gestured at a place for me to sit near where the elevator had opened.

I pretended to be texting, because I didn’t want to give either of them the pleasure of finding what they were doing interesting, but it was hard not to watch my sister. I always learned more about my sister by watching her than by listening to her. If you ask Delia about her father, Mom’s first husband who left and never looked back, she’ll give her standard “That sonofabitch, I’m glad he’s gone” answer. But my mom told me that after he left, Delia cried whenever the doorbell rang. It didn’t make sense, according to my mother, because it’s not like he didn’t have a key. She would open her mouth and her eyes would get so open, and then they’d just shut. It was like a light went off, and she wouldn’t talk about it. That’s what my mom had told me. I didn’t get to see that much with Delia, any kind of openness, but she could bring it out when the cameras were rolling. I imagined that might have been what she looked like as she started wandering around the roof of that building, like she was waiting for a doorbell to ring, for someone missing to come home.

I’d been using Delia’s bag as a pillow, waiting for her to let down her guard so that I could search the contents. If she saw me open it, she’d ship me back to Atlanta for sure. Roger had her posed at the edge of the building, sitting so close to the edge that it made my stomach drop just to look at her. They seemed to be disagreeing about which direction she should turn her face, so without moving any other part of my body, I slipped my hand into the side pocket of her bag and pulled out the paper that had been posted to her door. Inside there was one word, handwritten.