The Comeback

by Ella Berman

  Emilia smiles as she passes me the plate and a knife and fork, and then at the last minute she rips into a loaf of sourdough and drops a chunk on top.

  “You’re young—you can still eat gluten, right?” she asks as she sits down opposite me.

  “I’m so sorry, Grace, were you expecting to find Able here? He got rid of his assistant because he thought he could run his own calendar better, but he’s just horrible at it. Did he tell you he was away for the next couple of weeks? He’s doing reshoots in Utah and promised me he’ll be back to help get everything ready for Christmas, but you just never know with him. Do you want some wine? I have the least addictive personality, so I can do things like drink wine at one p.m., but most of my friends can’t.”

  “I’m okay,” I say, but I watch as Emilia takes two wineglasses down from the cabinet over the sink anyway. She pours a full glass for herself, then a smaller one for me. She is warm, relaxed, no hidden indignations or insecurities sharpening her angles. Her life is easy, I realize now, watching her.

  “Well, I can’t be drinking alone when the girls come home,” she says, smiling, and it’s okay, because I already know I won’t touch it. I need to stay focused, alert in this house.

  I’ve never been less hungry, but I eat a small mouthful of the eggs. I can tell instantly that they are perfect, steaming hot and creamy, falling apart as soon as they hit my tongue.

  Emilia watches me closely, and I concentrate on eating normally: chew, chew, chew, swallow.

  “Come on then. Tell me everything I need to know about you. You look great, but then you always did, and Able told me to stop worrying about you even when you became emaciated for that war film.”

  “He did?” I grip the fork tightly. I manage to swallow something sour at the back of my throat before I stick my fork into the pile of eggs again.

  “Oh, you know.” She waves her hand. “I think he just knew you so well, knew what phase you were going through and when. I was always an outsider with you two, in the best way.”

  I focus on pushing the last mouthful of eggs onto a piece of bread, trying to disguise my trembling hands.

  “You know, I’m pleased you’re here, and I know Able will be, too, when I tell him. The kids would also love to see you—can you wait around until four?”

  The kids. Two little girls who cried when they had to go to bed at my sixteenth birthday party. Able’s hands clamped on their shoulders in the photo on his office desk. The room fragments around me, fraying at the edges so that I have to place both palms on the table to steady myself.

  “I actually have to get back now. I have a meeting,” I say, and before Emilia can ask me anything else, I stand up and loudly scrape the chair underneath the table.

  “Another time then. The girls are nearly nine, if you can believe it? Silver is very bright but can be a monster when she wants to be, and Ophelia is just a pleasure to have around. Everyone says you don’t have a favorite, but my God, do you. Luckily, Able prefers Silver—he’s always liked his women complicated.” Emilia laughs as she follows me out of the kitchen, seemingly unaware of my urgent need to be anywhere but her house.

  When we reach the front door, Emilia seems immediately despondent at the thought of me leaving, asking in a childlike way, “Do you really have to go?”

  “Thanks for having me, Emilia,” I say. “I’ll see you around.”

  “Gracie?” Emilia calls after me, just as I reach the fountain in the middle of their expansive drive. I stop and face her, the gentle sound of trickling water accompanying her words.

  “Take care of yourself,” she says, but she looks like she wants to say more. For the first time, I wonder whether she feels guilty about how everything turned out for me. I nod and turn back around, forcing myself to continue slowly, calmly down the hill to Coyote Sumac. When I reach the bottom, I look back up at the peach house. Emilia is still standing in the doorway, watching me.

  * * *

  • • •

  I’m covered in sweat by the time I reach the sand. Panic is pressing through my veins, and I don’t know how to make it stop. I don’t know what I was doing, moving here and going back up to the house on my own. Letting Emilia cook for me and say his name ten times. I don’t know what I would have done if Able were there with her. Was I planning to confront him? Would I have kissed him on each cheek as if nothing had ever happened? Would I have taken a kitchen knife from the island and plunged it into his neck in front of Emilia, watching the terror in his eyes as they bulged out of his head, crimson blood spraying over us all like something out of a cheap horror movie? What do you do when you can’t even trust yourself?

  I stand in front of the ocean and try to remember how it felt to be underneath the surface, the burning pressure in my lungs as the need for oxygen tore through me, the sun sparkling just above. I try to remember that I chose to be here. I sink into the sand and breathe slowly, cupping my hands over my mouth and breathing hard as tears roll down my cheeks. When none of it works, when it still feels as if my brain is covered in thousands of scuttling beetles, I text Laurel to ask her to come over. At the last minute I add another line: Bring some of our old friends.

  I never said I was very good at protecting myself.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  Laurel pulls out two bottles of Casamigos tequila and a large vial of white powder. She places it all on the glass table in front of the sofa and smiles at me innocently.

  “I assumed you meant these old friends, because we hate everyone else.”

  I look for a couple of glasses in the kitchen even though I know I don’t have any, and I can feel the familiar anticipation building in my chest. This is what it used to be like, back when I did this every night. Sometimes I wanted feverish pain and sometimes I wanted blinding euphoria, and then there were the times I just wanted to feel my body jerk and burn as I threw up. I wonder what type of night it will be tonight.

  “I don’t have any glasses,” I say as I sit next to Laurel on the sofa. She pulls the stopper out of the tequila and has a long swig before she passes it to me. I have a smaller sip, and it burns the back of my throat as it hits.

  “How are you finding your new home?” Laurel asks, with obvious distaste as she racks up a couple of lines. She remembers how I like mine, skinny and long. I keep my eyes trained on the coke, ignoring her question.

  “If Dylan the Saint could see us now,” she says when I lean over to snort mine using the straw she passes me. The coke tastes metallic, cut with something petrol-like, hopefully not actual petrol.

  “Did you go to rehab last year?” she asks after doing her own line, which is much smaller than mine. I shake my head, wishing she’d stop talking for a minute so that I could feel the adrenaline make way for the strange buzzing calm, closely followed by an intense spike in clarity.

  “For fuck’s sake, Grace, talk to me.”

  “I told you, I went to my parents’.”

  “For the entire year? You were in Anaheim for a year. Less than one hour away. What were you doing there?”

  I try to remember. What was I doing there? Now I can feel the coke flooding through me. My skin feels tingly, and I’m already clenching my jaw, so I grab the bottle of tequila and have another swig. It’s always a balancing act between the two. Too much coke and you feel on edge, too much alcohol and you feel weighed down.

  “I think I was trying to make my parents like me.”

  “Did it work?” Laurel is talking faster now, leaning toward me. Urgency drills through me, and it’s bordering on too intense, and I know that the only way to harness it is to grab it quickly and channel it somewhere. I focus on Laurel, the concern in her eyes that I’m only now thinking may actually be real. I always get everything wrong.

  “My mom said it was ‘illuminating’ spending so much time with me.”

  “As in, you lit up the entire house?”

&
nbsp; “I don’t think so.”

  We drink some more tequila and do another couple of lines each. I forgot this about us; we never knew when to stop when we were together, and the time between racking up lines would diminish until we started moving like a time-lapse film, cutting out all unnecessary pauses as we dipped our heads.

  “What did you come back for? Dylan?”

  I shake my head. Another line, this one thicker than I like. I wish we weren’t in the sticks of Malibu and that there was somewhere nearby I could buy a pack of cigarettes.

  “Me?” She puts her hand across her heart like she’s flattered, and I shake my head, then point at her, acutely, perfectly.

  “Definitely not you. You’re the worst,” I say, and Laurel is pissed for a moment before we both collapse into ridiculous, charged laughter, but I’m only really feeling 10 percent of it. I do another line of coke.

  “I came back because I realized I was trying to be someone who doesn’t exist anymore,” I say, my throat stinging.

  “But then when I’m here, I just feel like I’m letting everyone down all the time too. I’m never going to be what anyone wants me to be, you know? Even that little shit in Best Buy or my own fucking sister—they think I’m going to be . . . I don’t know—” I search for the right word to perfectly, irrevocably encapsulate how I feel, the coke charging through my bloodstream now and coating every word I say with a thick, urgent intensity. “Cool. They think I’m going to be cool. I’m not cool. I’m not impressive.”

  Laurel bursts out laughing again, and some powder falls out of her nose. She claps her hand across her nose and mouth, and you can’t even tell that she’s laughing anymore, other than the snorts escaping.

  “I fucking missed you. You’re worried that people don’t think you’re cool?”

  “No, I’m worried they do think I’m cool.”

  “You’re an idiot, Grace.”

  We sit on the floor with our backs against the sofa, and everything seems brighter in the room, the lights glowing around us.

  “You left me too. You know that, right?” Laurel says. “And I don’t think it’s better when you’re not here.”

  “I’m paying you, you don’t count,” I say.

  “You think you’re paying me?” Laurel looks at me as if I’m insane, and it all suddenly seems so funny that I start to laugh. She doesn’t laugh this time, and I can see instead that she’s warming up to the idea of having a meaningful coked-out chat, but the tequila and coke both hit me behind the eyes at the same time.

  “I thought I was supposed to like myself by now,” I say, and now my eyes are stinging with tears because it’s finally the truth and it makes me think about how nice it would be to tell her, to get the thing off my chest and set it free into the world, to let it feed off somebody else’s oxygen, somebody else’s bones, but instead I start to gag as the bitter coke drips down the back of my throat. It’s too much and I run to the toilet to throw up, hot messy tears running down my cheeks while Laurel strokes my hair.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  I wake up facedown on the sofa, my mouth tasting like petrol. Every inch of my flesh is covered in an icy sweat as my brain pulses in my skull, knocking against the back of my eyes. I know that sleep isn’t an option from this point on, so I stumble through to the bathroom, avoiding looking directly at the mess from the night before. I turn the shower on and make sure it’s scalding hot before I step into it, then I crouch on the floor like an animal, my head in my hands as the water floods over me.

  I have just wrapped a towel around me when someone knocks at my front door. I stagger across the living room, assuming it’s Laurel with provisions, like it always used to be. She would turn up with a bottle of 5-HTP to top up our serotonin levels, a packet of Emergen-C to replace the nutrients we lost, a weed pen and sometimes a Xanax, depending on how much coke we’d done the night before, because we weren’t actually trying to kill ourselves at that point.

  I open the door, and Dylan is standing there with his hands in his pockets.

  “Oh fuck,” I say, stepping forward in an attempt to shield him from the scene in my living room. Two empty bottles of tequila, my clothes strewn across the sofa, traces of white powder on the coffee table and the unmistakable stench of tequila-laced vomit.

  Dylan looks over my shoulder and then back at me.

  “Dylan . . .” I start, but there’s nothing I can say.

  “It’s okay, I should have called,” he says, backing away. “I just wanted to check how you were doing, but it looks like you’re all settled in.”

  I reach out to stop him from leaving, but he sidesteps my touch and then tries to smile at me to show just how okay the whole thing is. I feel sick as he walks down the steps, and I know that, after everything, he’s still only trying to act normal so I don’t freak out, which makes everything worse. Surely there must be some limit to how many times you’re allowed to hurt another human.

  I watch him get back into his car and drive up the dirt track. When his car disappears at the top, something inside me breaks and I slide down the wall of the house, sobbing like I haven’t since my first night back in Anaheim. As tears fall down my cheeks, I look up at the peach house, shimmering on the hill above me.

  * * *

  • • •

  When the beetles take a break from scuttling over my brain, I force myself out of the house to get something to eat. Laurel isn’t answering my calls and I don’t trust myself to drive, so I walk up the hill to the highway instead, instantly regretting it when I realize that Los Angeles isn’t playing fair today. It is fiercely, unfathomably hot, and the ash from forest fires one hundred miles north is coating my lungs. Sweat patches have already formed on my T-shirt, and I can’t remember ever having been this thirsty. If this were Venice, I’d already be in possession of a forty-dollar green elixir smoothie promising me beauty and vitality and the cleanest liver in town, but it’s Malibu, so all I can do is walk into the first place I come to—a gas station on PCH. I buy some dill-flavored potato chips, a pack of Babybel cheese and a huge bottle of water. As I’m paying, I notice the hot counter next to the till, and I point to a slice of stale pizza, which the attendant drops stiffly into a brown paper bag, all the while staring at me as if I’ve made some terrible life choices to get here. I grip the bag with sweaty hands and am stumbling out of the store when someone says my name.

  “Grace.”

  I turn around. It’s a man around my dad’s age, slight, with acne scarring and dark eyes. At this point, it seems like as good a time as any to mention that everyone I meet feels at least slightly familiar to me, so the fact that I think I recognize him means nothing. An example—I meet my driver for the night and become convinced that he also worked behind the cash register in the bookstore I visited the day before. I’m aware that it says a lot about my self-absorption that I think strangers are on some sort of rotating wheel, orbiting my life like something out of The Truman Show, but does being aware of that make it better or worse? It’s hard to say.

  The man in the gas station reaches into his cross-body bag, and now I notice how heavy it is, how much he’s trying to blend in with his backward gray baseball cap and white T-shirt. He pulls out a long-lens camera and grins at me.

  “This is my lucky day. Welcome home, Ms. Turner. Do you mind?”

  “Can I say no?”

  He shakes his head, still smiling.

  “You know how it works.”

  I nod and then I quickly turn around, pushing open the door and running as fast as I can to the first crossing on PCH. The paparazzo is only three seconds behind me and I can hear the frenzied clicking of his camera. At this point I have a choice between running across four lanes of fast-moving traffic in my Crocs, or being a sitting target for him while I wait for the light to change. I look down at the sweat marks on my stained shirt, the brown paper bag in my hand with grease
spots already soaking through, and I make my choice. The first lane is clear so I run straight through it, slowing to weave in between two cars in the second. A car honks at me, and someone shouts something imperceptible out the window.

  “What are you doing, you crazy bitch?” the photographer shouts after me, and even through the traffic sounds, I can hear how much he’s enjoying himself. Cars honk at me as they speed past, hot air whipping my face. I wait half a second and then I take the third lane, ducking in front of a VW camper van moving more slowly than the rest. One more lane to go. I can taste the sweat on my lip as I spot my moment, after a black Range Rover with no traffic behind it. I have timed it perfectly, ready to duck behind it as soon as it passes, when the driver spots me and panics. She slams on the brakes and I catch the rear bumper with my thigh. I tumble to the ground but I’m not hurt; in fact, I feel amazing, invincible, like a superhero stopping traffic. I jump up and streak across the road and into the woodland opposite me. I think I can still get down to Coyote Sumac this way, but the paparazzo won’t know that’s where I’m going.

  The wooded area is cooler, shaded by pines and eucalyptus trees. I run through the thicket, navigating the dry, crumbling hill down to my house in my Crocs. Its starting to feel unnecessary, tripping over branches and rocks like I’m fleeing a monster, but I can’t risk the photographer finding out where I live and camping out, waiting for me to do something dumb again. The adrenaline is slowly wearing off, replaced by the anxious fog from the night before.

  When I get to the bottom of the hill, I realize that I made a shitty decision, running like a wild animal instead of handling the situation. My frazzled, drug-addled brain finally catches up with what just happened when I stop moving and sit down on the steps of my porch. The photographer isn’t anywhere near me because he was never following me. He didn’t have to because he’d already got what he needed. I open the paper bag in my hand. I dropped the motherfucking slice of pizza when I was crossing the road.