The Comeback(11)

My mom behaved strangely at dinner, laughing loudly at the wrong moments and fluttering her eyes at Able like a marionette. Emilia smiled reassuringly at me whenever I looked at her, but I could tell she pitied me for my mother’s theatrics. I frowned at my mom and watched as my dad stared somewhere over my manager’s head for most of that first dinner, and all of the subsequent ones.

In the end, it didn’t matter anyway, because these strangers were all only tolerating my parents to get to me. I tried to be lively and entertaining whenever they spoke to me, and I told myself that I was doing it for all of us, to let these men know that we were in on the joke, when I gestured to my parents and apologized for bringing the Addams Family. The men erupted into laughter, Able whacking the table repeatedly even as he apologized to my dad, and Emilia allowing herself a small smile. My mom seemed confused at first, but then she joined in, grinning and laughing loudly along with them. I hated to see her make a fool of herself, but the men, who had been studying me closely since I arrived, were charmed, and that was what we had all dressed up for, wasn’t it? She’d been so excited all week, and I told myself that I could give all of this to her for the rest of her life if tonight just went well. I tried not to notice the growing patches of sweat underneath her armpits, or the way she kept licking her lips before she spoke.

The more she drank, the more revealing her stories became. We were all used to her being the heartbeat of any group, but it turned out she didn’t know anything about this new world I was joining, and she told embarrassing stories that always circled back to her modeling career. At one point she described in excruciating detail exactly how her career had been hindered when she married my dad instead of moving to Los Angeles as a teenager herself. Able listened patiently and asked the right questions about my dad’s construction company, but even then I realized that he was just handling them both. For the first time I saw my parents through someone else’s eyes and felt embarrassed for them. I interrupted them both after that, cutting across their stories, and in doing so I understood implicitly that I was giving the men permission to do the same. My mom stopped talking as much, and I tried not to see the disappointment in my dad’s eyes. After a while, it just became easier not to look at either of them.

My parents’ role in the plan was laid out from the start. All they needed to do was create a loving and stable home environment for me to return to, and since their role was to treat me like a regular kid, it was better that I didn’t associate them with work in any way, or vice versa. As soon as the visas were sorted, my family obediently scuttled away to their new home. Anaheim was the only place in America we’d ever visited as a family, and I guess my parents liked the convenience of being so close to Disneyland or something. Or maybe it was the relentless sunshine and right-wing politics. I don’t know, I have no idea why they chose Anaheim, but I’d rarely slept more than five nights in a row at their house until last year. From that first movie on, my mom and I fought like rabid dogs, or like two people more similar than they would ever admit. As far as I knew, my mother never tried to find modeling work in California, and they certainly didn’t make any effort to find new friends. I never knew if she was bored, lonely, envious or a combination of all three, and I didn’t hang around to find out. Of course I understand that I was the one who’d left them behind, but I also understood that they’d let me. By the age of fifteen, I was more used to being alone on a movie set than with my family, in theory watched after by a guardian, but in reality tethered to absolutely nothing at all.

I tried to keep in touch with Esme, sending her gifts when I remembered, but soon after moving to Anaheim she applied to a boarding school for gifted children, and she gradually turned into just another person around whom I had to play a part, only this time I was pretending that I was still her big sister.

Able was the writer and director of that first movie, and every movie I made after that, except for one disastrous horror movie that was sold to me as the new Scream. It was supposed to set me free but it tanked, and, under the advice of my agent, my manager, my parents and basically every single person that I met in the street, I ended up back with Able. My fate was more sealed than ever before—I was his muse and he was my Svengali. His work was at its most brilliant when I was in it, and, for my part, I glowed on-screen like nobody else around me. The other two assassins faded into adolescent obscurity after the second film, but not me. I was untouchable, unstoppable, hurtling down a path to immortality so rapidly, so immaculately, that not one person stopped to question how it all worked so well, a fortysomething man and a teenager being so inextricably linked.





CHAPTER NINE





I arrive back in LA as the sun is rising. It’s easy to forget the things you loved about a city that has ruined you, but I always liked this one small window of time when Los Angeles just looks like any other city in the world. It happens only once the streetlights have stopped twinkling in the dark, but before the golden sun begins to light the city like a movie set. It was the only time of day that LA ever felt like home to me.

I pull up outside the glass house in Venice. I don’t have the key anymore, so I ring the bell. There is a cactus next to the door that I don’t remember being there before. I reach out and touch it, but it’s softer than I thought it would be, and my fingernail leaves a wet, crescent-shaped mark.

My husband opens the door wearing a white T-shirt and a pair of boxer shorts. It’s what he wears to bed every single night, and he somehow looks both exactly the same and entirely different from how I remembered. I try not to think about when we first met, when we were just two teenagers staying up all night in his apartment in Los Feliz, drinking tequila as we talked about all the people we’d left behind to be there. For me it meant leaving my parents and sister who had moved across the world for me, and for him it was leaving a close-knit family in a town where fireflies lit up the sky and people kept guns in their glove compartments. When he had to leave the room to throw up from the tequila, I slipped quietly out the front door, leaving a note in my place that read you’re perfect in lowercase, drunk letters that didn’t touch each other at all.