Afterparty by Ann Redisch Stampler
For Rick, Laura, and Michael, as usual
It is not the ending I expected. The free fall from the roof and the torn green awnings. Her body landing in a heap at the foot of a hydrangea bush. The hedges lit with pink Malibu lights that glint off the sequined skirt, the blouse half open, and her pale hair.
The thud, the doorman running down the sidewalk, and then sirens and more rain.
Siobhan the Wild and Emma the Good.
I was the good one . . . maybe not so much.
Poor Siobhan.
She could batter mean girls with a field hockey stick and make it seem accidental. She could break your heart and make it seem accidental.
And then she couldn’t. Then she was gone.
Maybe.
Maybe she is only temporarily asleep—but more likely, she is only temporarily alive.
Hanging on by her fingernails is what they say.
The wild one is gone and the good one . . . isn’t good. Because good girls don’t usually wear long sleeves to cover where their best friend’s fingernails scored their forearms. Good girls don’t usually slip out their bedroom window in a silver dress and taxi to the Camden Hotel late at night.
Good girls don’t usually kill their best friend.
PART ONE
CHAPTER ONE
THE BEACH CLUB WHERE WE land our first day in L.A. is all white and sun-bleached, with striped awnings and a platoon of valet parking guys in shorts and starched safari shirts, like privates in the tap-dancing division of a silent movie’s tropical army. The sky is dazzling blue with a faint grayish haze, a smudge all along the horizon.
My dad thinks it’s some smog-like form of breathable dirt.
I think it’s the edge of Paradise.
On the drive from the hotel to the beach, I start counting palm trees, but there are so many, I lose track. Then I count cars so low to the ground that you could use their hoods for coffee tables, and then landmarks that I’ve seen in movies. The pink-and-green fa?ade of the Beverly Hills Hotel. The gates of Bel Air. The Ferris wheel on the Santa Monica Pier.
My dad says, “We’re not in Kansas anymore.”
Although you wouldn’t know that if you looked at us.
My dad is in creased khaki pants and a blazer and a white shirt and cuff links. I had to fight with him to leave off the tie because, seriously, it’s a beach party at a beach club at the beach.
I am wearing a sundress that is saved from intolerable dowdiness only by the fact that it’s vintage. (Hint: If your dad insists you wear skirts that are several inches longer than any skirt worn by a girl who wasn’t Amish since the nineteenth century, go vintage.)
Cinched waist, wide belt, Audrey Hepburn flats, and big cat’s-eye sunglasses.
I say, “Best city yet. So far.”
We have spent almost my whole life wandering all around the North American landscape like a tiny band of lost nomads from the icy North, pausing at medical schools that needed a visiting professor, my dad, who could work on their research grants, and then pack up and leave. Dragging his kid behind him.
Until now.
My dad says, “Ems, are those polarized lenses? Blue eyes and sun don’t mix.”
I say, “Dad. Of course they are.”
Welcome to California.
I have been here for less than twenty-four hours. I am sitting in the backseat of a limousine behind a driver in a jet-black cap who drives too fast. I am dressed for 1958. And already I am telling lies.
We head down a sharp incline at the edge of a bluff toward the beach and up the coast. I can’t tell if we’re in Santa Monica or Malibu or some other sunbaked city that I’ve never heard of.
I start counting cars with surfboards strapped on top of them, and cars with surfboards sticking out of hatchbacks. I start counting cars with out-of-state license plates, with drivers who look ecstatic to be here and not there when we pass them.
I am counting license plates because I don’t want to think about whether there’s some way my dad can check out if my sunglasses really are polarized.
I am trying to think about all the seagulls here and all this light instead.
How I’m wearing coconut oil instead of dermatologist-approved number 50 sunblock so I can get tan during the last remnants of afternoon sun at this beach party.
I feel very princess-y in the back of this black car. The valet and the driver and my dad all lunge to open my door.
My dad wins. There’s not a minute that he isn’t trying to take care of me. Sometimes maybe too much, but still.
We are here because the head of the Albert Whitbread Psychiatric Institute dropped dead on the last day of July, by the side of the road, on his annual bicycle trek through Provence. The Institute started trying to hire my dad to replace him when his corpse was still in a cooler in France. My dad has spent the month of August trying to decide whether to sign the contract sentencing him to five years in Sodom and Gomorrah, which, if you’re not up on your Biblical trivia, were the ancient prototypes of Sin City.
Usually I am the person protesting the move while my dad tries to explain why moving from Montreal to Toronto to St. Louis to Philadelphia to Baltimore to Washington, D.C., to Chicago in the space of ten years is a good thing.
Not this time. This time I want it.
We walk under a striped awning toward a cluster of white clapboard buildings between the parking lot and the sand.