The Comeback

by Ella Berman

  “I’m not a child,” I say.

  “Then stop acting like a lovesick teenager. It’s embarrassing,” he says as he snatches his hand away, and the thing that gets me is he doesn’t even look at me once after that. He just stares out the window at a view he’s seen a thousand times before. He’s bored with the conversation.

  “Was the girl at the launderette an actress?”

  “Can you watch the road?”

  “Tell me the truth,” I say.

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he says.

  “Was the girl at the launderette an actress?” I repeat. “The girl trying on the sequined dresses. The broken girl who spat at me, who you chose to use as a lesson in my good fortune.”

  “Of course she was an actress,” Able says after a pause. “What were the fucking chances? Open your eyes, Grace.”

  “I was just a kid, you know,” I say, and my desperation is rendering the gaps between my words nonexistent. The lights on the road ahead flare in my tears. “And I couldn’t admit that I never wanted any of it, because then I would have to be a victim. I couldn’t afford to be a victim.”

  “So you’re here because you want me to absolve you? If what you just said was true, then you wouldn’t need me to do that,” he says, still staring out the window. I push my foot down harder on the accelerator and turn left onto Malibu Canyon at the last minute. As always, the truth is slipping further out of reach with every word he says.

  “Don’t do that. That isn’t what this is about,” I say, and I can see that he’s getting nervous about the speed I’m driving at because he’s looking at me again now.

  “I know. I know exactly what this is about, because I know you, Gracie, better than you know yourself. You’re upset that I stopped needing you. I understand that, nobody likes to feel rejected. Especially not an actress.”

  “This is not about rejection. This is about how I am unable to have a relationship because of you, and I don’t have a single person in the world to talk to. This is about how you ruined me. Not as an actress, but as a person,” I say, my voice thick.

  “Will you at least fucking look at me?” I say, driving even faster now. I feel like I’m underwater again, kicking and flipping in the black, pressure building in my lungs. I want to break the surface, but I don’t know how to make it all stop.

  “Pull over, Gracie, and let’s try to talk about this like adults. I get it. I’ve always cared about you more than your own parents do. But right now I’m the embodiment of everything you hate about your life, and I’m willing to take that blame until we can get you the help you need.”

  I press my foot onto the accelerator and swing around a bend, near blinded by my own tears. The drop on the side of the winding road cutting through the mountains is at least two hundred feet. I can feel Able tense as we climb even higher, approaching a tunnel.

  “Where the hell are you going? For fuck’s sake, Grace, pull over.” Able’s calm facade is slipping and his knuckles are white as he reaches over and grips the steering wheel. I swerve and he lets go instantly. Adrenaline rushes through my body.

  “Not until you admit what you did to me.” I push down harder on the gas when he tries to grab my arm. He closes his eyes and speaks through gritted teeth so that I have to strain to hear him.

  “You’re a fucking psychopath.”

  We enter the tunnel at seventy miles per hour, and I turn the headlights off so that the road ahead is lit only by the dim strip of lights lining the roof above us. Able is breathing heavily next to me and I can smell his sour, whiskey-laced breath in the dark. He turns to me and grips my thigh, speaking quietly but quickly, each word burning a brand onto my body.

  “Do you want me to actually fuck you? Is that it? You never once said no, Grace. Remember that when—”

  I never do get to hear the end of Able’s sentence, because by this point we are out of the other side of the tunnel and soaring through the night, pausing in midair for one pure, perfect second before we fall three hundred feet into the foothills of the Santa Monica Mountains. Funnily enough, it’s at that exact moment that I think maybe LA is quite beautiful after all.

  * * *

  • • •

  Things I remember from the accident: his voice—low and gentle, despite everything else about him. The feel of his hand on my leg just before I do it. A familiar something prickling through my body, too complex to label. The full moon hanging cleanly in the sky for the first time in a while. When I finally turn to look at him, he laughs because he doesn’t think I’ll go through with it. If I really think about it, this is what makes me do it. One small jerk of the wheel and then that perfect in-between moment just after we clear the road but before we start to fall. The sound of Tom Petty’s voice as we crash down, down, tumbling to the bottom of the earth. A piercing, jagged tear, and then nothing but stillness.

  After

  CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE

  I wake up on Christmas day with a tight, four-inch gash above my right eyebrow, a broken nose, a fractured patella and a mouth as dry as Death Valley in August. It turns out I was both unoriginal and ill prepared when I drove off Malibu Canyon at that particular moment. If I’d looked into it, I would have discovered that, in 1964, a couple walked away untouched from a wreck in the exact same three-hundred-foot ravine, and, more recently, in 2012, a car of six teenagers survived a crash in the same spot. I should probably have known I’d be invincible—I always get the things I don’t want.

  I tell the hospital that I don’t want any visitors, and the doctors and nurses fall over themselves to tend to me over the next couple of days, to tell me how lucky I am and how well I’m recovering. They list other actors with facial scarring, and tell me that they’ll put me in touch with the most prolific cosmetic surgeons for my second rhinoplasty. Every hour a new delivery of flowers or presents arrive. Even from my hospital bed, I understand that I’m infinitely more interesting after surviving this crash.

  I have to give a statement to the police, a simple process that ends when one of the detectives asks me to record a video message for her daughter. I shouldn’t be surprised anymore, but somehow I still am.

  “Why are you sorry?” I ask the male one after he apologizes for what happened to me for the fourth time. His skin is fleshy and pink, like a rare steak.

  “We know you were just doing the guy a favor. His blood alcohol level was through the roof.”

  “Through the roof,” I say, forcing a smile. “I get it.”

  I’ve always hated puns.

  The officer shifts uncomfortably in the plastic hospital seat, and the other cop takes over. She’s small with bad skin and perfect hands. I can’t stop staring at her hands, which become self-conscious under my gaze, twisting and eventually slipping underneath her legs. I force myself to meet her eyes instead.

  “Guys like this think they can just do what they want, huh? He was lucky you were there. You must be his guardian angel or something, mama.”

  * * *

  • • •

  I stop in at Able’s room on my way out of the hospital. My nurse told me that he has a cut that is almost an exact mirror image of mine, over his left eyebrow, acquired when a large piece of the windshield flew into the back of the car, slicing us both neatly on its way. Mine needed exactly two more stitches than his, twelve in total, but other than that they are almost identical. We will now forever be bound by our scars, along with everything else.

  Able’s room is filled with flowers and cards, most of them also identical to my own. We each received an enormous bunch of blooming white lilies from John Hamilton that are nearly indecent in their fleshiness. Able is asleep, secured to the bed in a web of needles and tubes. The nurse told me that his recovery has been slower than mine because of the alcohol in his blood, despite the angry pain that fills every nerve in my body when I put any weight on my right leg.

>   Even though the gauze dressing on his head is spotted faintly with coppery blood, Able looks peaceful, maybe even well rested. This is probably the longest time he’s taken off work in decades. I didn’t kill him, I gave him a vacation.

  I watch a monitor showing his heart rate and brain activity, and I figure that he’s just pretending to be asleep when he licks his lips quickly. I don’t get any joy from thinking he may be scared to be alone with me now. Whatever happens, he always wins.

  Laurel comes up behind me and tells me it’s time to go. I walk out of the hospital slowly, trying not to show my limp as I grip her arm. The wall of paparazzi, who have been camping outside the hospital for days, calls out for me like I’m a war hero.

  * * *

  • • •

  “So how about this weather?” Laurel says, once we’re in her car, and I look at her blankly, because of course the sky is forget-me-not blue, impossibly blue, always exactly the same blue in LA. My head is throbbing and it feels like the worst hangover I’ve ever had, squared. Or it could be approximately 980 percent of the worst hangover I’ve ever had, a hangover to the power of infinity, if I were a different person and had no respect for the rules of math.

  “It’s a joke, Grace. What the fuck were you doing?” Laurel says wearily, when I don’t respond.

  “I guess I lost control,” I say, and then when she turns to study me, I add, “of the car.”

  Laurel turns the engine on. I tightly grip the bag of prescription painkillers the doctor sent home with me, my fingertips leaving damp patches on the paper.

  “Are we really not going to talk about why you did it?” Laurel asks.

  “Were you really clean for six months before I came back?” I ask in response, remembering something she told me.

  Laurel shrugs and keeps her eyes on the road ahead.

  “Yeah.”

  “Why did you come over that night? What a dumb move.”

  “You’ve always been my blind spot,” Laurel says, and I shift in my seat because I can’t help but remember all the times I’ve either blown her off or used her since I’ve been back in LA.

  “I’m sorry,” I say, and she looks like she wants to say something else, but she doesn’t.

  “Thank you for picking me up,” I say, watching the smoke shops and trashy lingerie houses of Hollywood Boulevard slide past in the window. “But I’m so fucking exhausted.”

  * * *

  • • •

  We pull up outside Laurel’s house, a white craftsman bungalow just off Sunset in Silver Lake. Laurel’s girlfriend, Lana, is sitting at the kitchen table doing a sudoku or something on an iPad, her long fingers wrapped around a mug of coffee, and for some reason, when I walk in, I have to swallow a thick, unexpected lump in my throat. I lean against my crutches as Lana assesses me over her iPad in a not-unfriendly way. I wonder whether Laurel has told her to be nice to me, since I’m possibly both suicidal and homicidal at this point.

  “I’m Grace,” I say, holding up my hand.

  “We’ve met,” Lana says, smiling slightly. “At your house in Venice?”

  “Of course we have,” I say, pushing any thoughts of that house or my husband somewhere far away. Dylan seems as if he belongs to yet another version of me, a long time ago.

  Laurel pulls up a seat at the table and gestures for me to sit down.

  “Thanks for letting me stay, are you sure its okay?” I ask, directing my question at Lana. She nods.

  “Of course.”

  “That was close, Grace,” Laurel says, and she’s testing the waters, trying to assess my psyche at the time of the accident and also now, since I’m going to be staying with her for a while. She keeps her eyes on me as she speaks, tracking my reaction to every word.

  “TMZ said that if you’d lost control before the tunnel instead of after, a tree would have impaled the car and you’d have both been killed instantly. Some expert did all these diagrams to show all the ways you could have died, and they’ve been circulated everywhere. They’re even on the news. If you’d been going slower, something about the trajectory being altered, I don’t know, you’d also have been killed. It’s kind of insane, actually, there was really only one way you couldn’t die, and you happened to—”

  “Laurel!” Lana interrupts, frowning at her. “Don’t be so macabre. I don’t think Grace needs to hear about all the ways she could have died. The important thing is, she didn’t, and—”

  “You know, I am so tired. Do you mind if I rest?” I interrupt her, even though I know I’m being rude. I just couldn’t bear it if either of them told me how lucky I was.

  * * *

  • • •

  Laurel shows me to the spare bedroom, a pale yellow room with a monkey mural on one wall and a gray elephant mobile hanging over the bed. I stare at her and she shrugs, trying not to smile.

  “What? Maybe one day. Kids are Lana’s thing. Stop looking at me like that. One day at a time. And as you know, I really am back at day one.”

  Once I’m alone, I pull my phone out of my bag and scroll through the messages I received when I was in the hospital. Frantic texts from Dylan and Laurel checking that I’m okay, a couple from Nathan and Kit wishing me well, the last of which saying that they want to schedule a John Hamilton dinner for as soon as I’ve recovered, as if that will be some sort of incentive for me to speed the process up. Another one from Nathan, unable to resist an addendum about my name being the most searched for on Google on Christmas Day. A text from Esme saying only: What did you do!?! Two voicemails from my parents, both asking when they can come to the hospital to see me. I text my mom to tell her that I’m out and staying at Laurel’s, and that I’ll call her soon. No message from Emilia. I turn my phone off before shutting it in the bedside table. I’m embarrassed I ever believed I could be anyone else.

  CHAPTER FIFTY-TWO

  Time moves differently at Laurel’s. It creeps and cowers in the morning, slithering along until it’s time for dinner and I realize that I’ve forgotten to do anything all day. Now that I have no purpose other than to heal my bruised body, I spend most of my time in bed, aside from the occasional shower or slow shuffle to sit by the mossy pool in the backyard if I’m feeling adventurous, or trying to make Laurel feel better about my productivity levels. I take six painkillers a day, and I make sure not to mistake the warm glow they elicit for anything more than it is. I know it isn’t real.

  I think of Emilia sometimes, of what she wanted when she sent Able out with me that night. I wonder if she had any idea what I was going to do, if perhaps she wanted him to be punished for what he did to us both too. I try to imagine how she felt when she got the phone call about the accident, if a tiny part of her thought that some justice had been served, or if she just grieved for the father of her children, unconscious in a hospital bed at Christmas. Most of all, I wonder if any of our friendship was real.

  Laurel and Lana try to give me space, but they also spend a lot of time watching me closely, as if they are trying to work out what I’m thinking at any given moment. I want to tell them not to bother, that most of the time I feel like I’m still trapped at the bottom of the ravine, but I can’t quite make myself do it.

  I change my own dressing every morning like the doctor taught me, avoiding touching the raw skin unnaturally strung together with stitches. Every night I stroke the tender, yellowing flesh around the wound with arnica cream. My nose was cracked in the accident and it is now slightly off center, bulbous in the middle. I stare at this new, distorted face in the mirror and understand the irony of it all, that I’m no longer either Grace Turner or Grace Hyde.

  On New Year’s Eve, Laurel holds a Native American smudging ceremony in the living room, which I can’t help but feel is solely for my benefit. She waves a burning white sage bundle around the room and talks about cleansing our auras for the year to come, dispelling the negative energy that sur
rounds us, while Lana and I alternate trying to act as if we’re taking it seriously so as not to hurt her feelings, Lana working harder at it than me.

  My knee is throbbing, so I go to bed before the clock strikes midnight, but Laurel and Lana are still shuffling around the living room when it does. I can hear the warm murmur of their voices and the quiet jazz music playing from the speakers, and I think that they might be dancing with each other, even though I have no way of knowing for sure.

  CHAPTER FIFTY-THREE

  We spend the first few days in January watching horror movies on the sofa as the world outside carries on without us. I try to ignore the way Laurel and Lana watch me instead of the gruesome scenes most of the time. I’ve become their own personal horror story, one about the monsters and demons you don’t ever want to think about.

  I’m brushing my teeth later that evening when a memory hits me, nearly winding me with its force, and I have to grip the edge of the sink to catch my balance. The memory hurts more than it should, and I know it’s because it’s not the weddings or the funerals or the dark offices, but one of the everyday, forgotten memories that can get you in a place you didn’t even remember existed.

  Dylan and I were in the glass house, and it wasn’t the first day we were there, or even the first month, but it was a good day, and we were eating breakfast around the island in the kitchen. Dylan was talking about how many children we would have, he wanted at least four, and I suggested names that became more and more ridiculous, trying to make him laugh like I always did because it somehow made me feel as though everything was going to be okay, just for a couple of seconds. It’s weird to think that I could have pretended to be that person for so long, that I hadn’t already ruined it all by then.