by Ella Berman
I walk into the living room holding the tray with the poppies and a plate of eggs, but my family isn’t in their usual spot by the TV. I turn around and they’re all sitting at the table tucked around the corner of the living room, the one we never use. The gingham tablecloth is out, as are four straw mats I recognize from when we lived in England. I put the beanbag tray down on the sofa and place the plate of food on the mat in front of Esme, then I bring the other three plates out.
“Please don’t make a big deal out of this,” I warn them as my parents start to make appreciative, over-the-top noises when they take a bite. “It’s scrambled eggs. Don’t make this weird.”
“This is delicious,” my dad mumbles, wiping some egg from the corner of his mouth.
“Very, very tasty,” my mom says.
“Good job, Grace!” Esme says overenthusiastically.
“Shut up, all of you,” I say, rolling my eyes.
After a moment, my parents start talking at the same time. Naturally, my dad concedes and my mom starts again.
“You know, Grace, I went into CVS the other week, and I noticed that this checkout girl’s wedding ring was very similar to yours. It was a small opal, set in a band of tiny diamonds,” she says, in mock surprise. “What are the chances!”
“She didn’t steal it, Mom,” I say, hoping beyond measure that she didn’t make a scene in the middle of the store in one of her velour ensembles.
“Yes, I’m aware of this now. The girl explained that her aunt had met some insane red-haired woman in the street, and that she had given all of her jewelry in the world away to her,” she says. “I knew that it had to be my insane, formerly red-haired woman as soon as she said it.”
“Thanks, Mom,” I say, rolling my eyes. “I’m glad that it’s gone to a good home.”
“Actually, she said that opal is bad luck and that she was only wearing it to scare off the nasty men, so I took her to buy another one,” my mom says, pleased with herself. “A diamond this time.”
“You shouldn’t have—”
She waves her hand in the air. “It’s all your money at this point anyway, as you so graciously reminded us last time you were here.”
I pull a face, and my dad shakes his head.
“Leave her alone, Olivia.”
“Leave her alone? I just got her ring back. A ring that she gave away to some cleaner like a mental person. I hope you didn’t tell Dylan,” she says, her eyes shooting up to the ceiling in despair. “Anyway, I have it if you want it.”
I watch as she pushes the eggs around her plate some more before putting the fork, loaded with toast and eggs, into her mouth. She chews slowly and then she swallows. She finishes the entire plate while my dad, Esme and I watch her in amazement.
“What?” she says, smiling to herself.
* * *
• • •
I’m nearly asleep when I hear a soft knock at the door. I assume it’s Esme and am already making room for her at the foot of my bed when my mom pushes open the door. She seems tiny, standing in the middle of my room in her bathrobe, lit only by the moonlight.
She waves her fingers and I move over so that she can sit on the edge of the bed next to me, even though there’s not enough space. She takes my hand and presses something cool into my palm. My wedding ring. I close my fingers around it.
“We need to talk,” she says, her chin set resolutely. “We should have had this conversation years ago, but I didn’t know how, and I would hate myself if we didn’t have it before you left again.”
“Mom. I’m twenty-three years old in one week. Please don’t let this be the moment for our first heart-to-heart,” I say, raising my eyebrows at her then immediately wincing because I forgot about the gash on my forehead.
“Just hear me out, Grace, and how did you become such a wiseass?” My mom takes off her glasses and cleans them with the hem of her bathrobe.
“Please,” I say quietly, but my mom’s jaw is already set, and the expression on her face is one I can’t identify. She opens her mouth to say something but then she stops. She doesn’t know anything, I tell myself, clutching the ring in my palm so tightly that the veins on the back of my hand become engorged.
“You outgrew us when you were still just a kid, and I’m not proud of how easily we let you go, or that I didn’t think about what happened to make you change like that. I was too busy thinking about myself.”
“I don’t want to talk about this,” I whisper, and I don’t know what my face is trying to tell her, but my mom has to look away from me.
“Grace, you drove yourself off a cliff on Christmas Eve. We have to talk about this, because if not now, when? Not when you’ve actually killed yourself.”
My mom’s breathing is rough and jagged, and that’s when I realize how hard this is for her, to admit that she failed at something too. After everything that’s happened, I think the discovery that I couldn’t even protect my parents will be the worst part of all, and I suddenly want to be out of this room, out of my own skin, under the water, flying off the mountain again, anywhere but here.
“We let you down,” my mom says, even her hands trembling under the weight of her words.
“I’m sorry I didn’t come home. I didn’t mean to outgrow you,” I say quietly.
“That’s what kids are supposed to do. Outgrow their parents,” she says, her voice wavering only at the end. “As I said, I’m not proud of how we dealt with it, but also I can only be who I am. Same goes for all of us.”
The veins on the backs of my hands have turned a deep blue.
“You know you can never go back,” my mom says then, but I just stare at the baby-pink nose of a cuddly toy koala peeking over the desk in the corner of my room.
“You just have to keep going forward instead.”
The koala stares back at me with dark, glassy eyes.
“I know that you’re scared, Grace, but you need to face up to what happened. To whatever he did to you,” she says quietly, and that’s when my heart really drops. I try to quell the shame that comes crashing over me. Suddenly, I’m right back where I was when I was fifteen, confused and alone, trying to make sense of what was happening to me.
My mom hovers above me, unsure of what to do next, perhaps waiting for me to finally tell her about it, for me to set the secret free in the way that everyone believes will instantly fix you, like taking a Tylenol for a fever, or compiling a list of pros and cons before you make a big life choice. Only I know that it doesn’t work like that. My secret is already out, trapped among the leaves of the palm trees that line the streets of Los Angeles, lying in the dirt at the bottom of the Santa Monica Mountains, and nobody feels any better for it. I look down at the blanket covering my legs, and all I feel is trapped, more entwined in Able’s web than ever.
“I can’t,” I whisper, and it’s when I see the disappointment register on her face, too, that I have to look away. My mom strokes my hair as the tears finally fall, slipping down my cheeks and soaking the collar of my T-shirt as my body racks with grief for everything I’ve ever had to break before it could break me first.
“Then you’re just going to have to forget it ever happened.”
CHAPTER FIFTY-NINE
The day of the Independent Film Awards, I wake in the middle of the night sweating, my pillow soaked. I dreamed Able was in the room with me while I slept, but I couldn’t move or call out because his hands were around my neck, pinning me down all over again. I reach for my painkillers before remembering I left them at Laurel’s. After that, I sob into my pillow until I can hardly breathe, while the sky lightens around me. I don’t know how to be normal, how to stop him from being able to reach me.
In the morning, I slip out early to go for a walk. I’m wearing one of my mother’s velour tracksuits because it fits perfectly over my knee brace, and it is nearly soaked through with rain by th
e time I get back to the house, holding a coffee in my crutch-free hand.
“Gracie.”
I freeze at the bottom of the porch steps. Emilia is sitting on a lounge chair, smoking a cigarette with her hair coiled into a low bun like she’s Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy reincarnated. She is dry as a bone and a soaking white umbrella lies on the deck next to her Gucci loafers. I remember now that I don’t trust anyone who remembers to carry an umbrella in Southern California.
“How are you?” Emilia asks softly.
I shrug, not wanting to move any closer to her but needing to rest my leg, which is currently sending white-hot signals of pain to my brain.
“Okay,” I say, climbing up so that I’m leaning against the porch railing, my leg extended in front of me.
“It really is a miracle that you are okay,” she says. “That you’re both okay.”
“When did you start believing in miracles?” I say, refusing to play the game with her.
“Look, Gracie. I came here because I wanted to . . . ask you something,” she says, looking down at her cigarette and then back up to me. “It’s not easy for me to say, but I hope that you’ll understand.”
I watch her stub her cigarette out on the deck, and then she just stares at it for a moment, unsure of what to do with it. She takes a deep breath, collects herself and meets my eyes again.
“I’m so sorry for what happened to you. I have tried over and over again to work out if I could have stopped it in some way,” Emilia says. “And you know I will never try to excuse it.”
“The thing about saying you’re not trying to excuse something is that you kind of already are,” I say, folding my arms across my chest.
Emilia blinks. “Able is in recovery in Utah as we speak.”
“Recovery,” I say, trying to wade through her words.
“He’s in therapy. He’s coming back for the awards ceremony tonight, and then we’re going to pack up the house and move to Greenwich to be nearer to my family. Permanently.”
I start to speak but she holds up a perfectly manicured hand to stop me. I look down at my own hands. My fingers are red and raw, the nails bitten down to the quick.
“It’s over, Gracie. We want to leave this here. You have my absolute word that he will never work in the industry again, or try to contact you. We won’t be coming back to LA.”
“Well, I’m so relieved that you’ve taken this opportunity to finally get what you want,” I say to her. “I hear Connecticut is beautiful in the spring.”
“Gracie . . .”
“You know that only you and Able actually call me Gracie, and it’s only ever when you want something from me, or when you’re trying to make me feel like a child.”
Emilia takes a deep breath before turning back to me.
“Please let me help you, Grace. Able wants to press charges against you for the accident. He has a statement ready to say that whatever happened between the two of you was when you were of legal age, and to his knowledge, fully consensual. I can stop him.”
I shake my head, and for just a moment, I think I must be dreaming.
“Did you know that he molested me when I was underage? Did he tell you that part?”
“It’s highly unlikely that your case would even make it to court. It’s not like in the movies,” Emilia says quietly. “There wouldn’t be enough evidence to sustain the molestation charges, and there are hundreds of people to testify how much you were drinking and doing drugs around that time, how you’d followed him around like a lost dog for years.”
“Were we ever really friends?” I ask her, because while she’s been talking, I realized how much we must have hurt each other.
“Don’t oversimplify things, Grace. You’re smarter than that. What did you expect to happen?”
“What do you actually want from me?” I ask, not able to look at her anymore.
“Do I need to tell you that I’m sorry again?”
“You’re not the one who should be sorry.”
“He’s the father of my children, Grace, and he made a mistake. He misread your feelings, and he was weak, and stupid, but what else can I do? What would you do if you were me? Of course I am so deeply, painfully sorry that this happened to you.”
“You keep apologizing for what ‘happened to me.’ Nothing happened to me. It wasn’t an accident. He did it to me,” I say slowly. “I know that you don’t like to think about bad things, but sometimes you have to.”
“Please, just tell me that you’ll think about what I’m saying.”
“You know, I really have to think that you don’t understand what you’re asking of me,” I say.
Emilia watches me, and then something crosses her face. “Of course I know exactly what I’m asking of you, and you may not see it now, but this is the only solution for any of us. If it even made it to court, which isn’t likely, the case could take years to build, and you’d be in career purgatory for that entire time—nobody would hire you while it was pending. The trial would then be covered on news channels around the world, and you would turn up to court every single day to find that every minute, private detail of your personal life now exists solely as material for the jury and the public to judge you on. You think you’re being judged now, but you can’t even imagine the things they’ll say about you. Every text message to Able, questions about your sex life with Dylan, even the medical report from the time you overdosed. I’ve heard your own team wanted to commit you because they thought you could be bipolar. Do you really want to put your parents through that? Do you want to put Dylan through that? You have to admit that you’re not the most reliable witness.”
It starts as a tingle, but by the time she’s finished, every single nerve in my body feels as if it’s on fire. I am roaring from the inside out, a lioness gathering myself up and protecting myself against the predators trying to ruin me.
“I need you to get away from me right now,” I say, and I hope my voice sears deeper into Emilia with every word as she stands on the porch in front of me. I hope she never forgets this moment, just like I know I never will. After a couple of seconds, she starts to climb slowly down the steps, stopping when she’s at the bottom, her umbrella forgotten as the rain skims down her face too.
“We can’t all be heroes, Grace.”
And who knows, maybe if she didn’t look so sad while she was saying it, I might have actually been able to do what she was asking of me.
CHAPTER SIXTY
I watch from the side of the stage as the young actress introduces Able simply, ridiculously, as the man who saved independent cinema. She’s never been in one of his films, and I can’t figure out the connection between them. When her introduction ends soon after that, I realize it’s because there isn’t one, that she’s just one more person desperate for the chance to be somebody else. I can tell from the surge in applause that Able has started to make his way up to the stage from his table in the middle of the floor, and that’s when I stroll past the event organizers at the side of the stage who are holding clipboards and timing everything perfectly down to each second. A woman in a headset puts her hand out to stop me, and I shake it off. “I’m Grace Turner,” I say scathingly. “I’m Able’s surprise guest.”
The woman sighs and waves me on, because her only other option is to physically remove me herself before I make it onstage, or to wait for security to escort me offstage when everyone is watching and the cameras are rolling. She knows who I am, and the risk is too high for her.
I showed up late to the awards show, missing the specific time slot that Nathan texted me for my entrance. I called Camila before I came, figuring if I lied my way through my last interview with her, at least I could give her the real story now. Camila escorted me down the red carpet, understanding implicitly how to sidestep the inane chatter from TV presenters about my dress, and other questions about my miraculous escape and app
reciation for the man of the hour. I moved slowly on one crutch, and was stopped many times by my peers who wanted to tell me how brave I was just for being there after what happened. I kept my mouth closed, and I posed in front of the IFA branding for the pit of photographers, my gunmetal armor dress catching the light of their flashes and glittering perfectly. The paparazzi called out for me like I was already a legend, and I tried not to believe them this time.
* * *
• • •
When I think that Able is close to the stage, I limp out into the spotlight, joining the actress behind the podium. She is confused, blowing a kiss to Able before she sashays off, leaving me alone in front of the audience.
“Hi, everyone, please excuse the change of plan. I only decided to come half an hour ago,” I say, and the audience titters politely. Able has stopped on the stairs next to the stage, gripping the handrail. His head has been shaved all over, and he has the gash over his left eyebrow, the perfect mirror image of my own.
“Come on up, Able,” I say, and after a moment’s pause, he climbs the rest of the stairs, his face ashen.
My hands are shaking so I slip them out of view, behind the podium.
“So I think this is the part where I introduce Able, and thank him for his unending commitment to giving independent films a platform, for his tireless contribution to our industry as a whole and, most of all, for everything he’s done for me. This is definitely what I’m supposed to do,” I say, my voice shaking. I clear my throat, and the audience is so quiet I wonder if they can hear my heart beating through the microphone.
“I have spent years trying to work out what I could have done differently, or maybe what my parents could have done differently. I should have told someone after the first time he made me touch him, or when he told me I was mentally unstable for the hundredth time. Maybe I shouldn’t have waited until every part of my life was already destroyed before I tried to kill myself. Maybe I shouldn’t have worked so hard to become, as I was told just this morning, such an unreliable witness. But it was never really up to me, was it?” I say, and then I pause because, look, there is the queen of Hollywood, watching me with growing interest, her hands still folded on the table in front of her. She’s nearly eighty now, and sitting at a table that is further away from the stage than she used to sit, but in Hollywood, not so much a town as a social construct, she still reigns. At the next table over is the actor who just got caught sleeping with a sex worker in Canada, and he doesn’t know what to do with himself in his reluctance to look anywhere near me. And there is John Hamilton, watching me with an expression of vague horror. He knows I’m about to fuck everything up, but it doesn’t really matter, as there are a hundred other girls like me who will get their breasts out in his film, and they’re probably younger and thinner than me anyway. He’s already eyeing up the nineteen-year-old actress at the table next to him, the one who wore the latex catsuit in his last movie and who, despite still sort of thinking about how she said the wrong designer’s name on the red carpet, already understands implicitly what I’m about to say. They all do. Whether they have guessed the truth about my story or not, they have all known stories like mine. And with that, I’m finally ready for this to end. I’m ready for this to be out in the world, blazing and soaring its way across news sites and text messages and conversations in bars, gyms, restaurants and offices all over the country. I’m ready for it to be anywhere other than just within me.