The next five minutes must have been forever, because no sooner had Jeremy gone inside than the woman yelled into her phone, shut it off, and headed back into the house. For all I knew, she was getting ready to Taser Jeremy and drag him to some rich-person dungeon where she’d slice him up and serve him for dinner to her Paleo coven. Best-case scenario, she’d only call the cops. How would I ever explain this to anyone without the two of us looking like juvenile delinquents, the kind of sketchball teenagers that parents warn their children about becoming?
And then finally, moving a lot faster than he had on the way down, Jeremy opened the door and closed it silently behind him, and made his way up the hill. He was halfway to where I was waiting when the door flew open, and the woman emerged. Jeremy flattened himself against the hill, and she scanned the landscape.
“I have a gun, you know,” she yelled.
I closed my eyes and tried to keep my body from trembling.
“I’m calling the police,” she shouted and held her phone in the air.
Then she went back inside, maybe to get her gun, but we weren’t waiting that long. Jeremy had made his way farther back up the hill than I had thought, and he squeezed next to me and whispered, “I left a note.”
“You left a note? Are you insane?”
“And I moved around some of the things on the counter. Like you were telling me those people did in that experiment.”
He was remembering everything wrong. There was no experiment, just the Manson family practicing their creepy-crawling, breaking into homes and watching people while they slept, moving their furniture around and leaving without a sound.
“What did the note say?” I asked.
“‘Stop,’” he said. “They’ll know what it means. They’re not the only ones who can leave notes, right?”
Next to me, Jeremy felt warm, and I would have sworn that I could hear his heartbeat as well. And while I was lying there, waiting for the cops to show up and drag us away, I remembered why I recognized the stickers on the back of the convertible, “HH” and “SSI.” It was the same car my sister had been driving around LA the week of the zombie shoot, before Dex came back into town. We were at the nameless producer’s house, or he was inside. And if there was some jealous vixen stalking my sister, she may well have been the producer’s wife. Whoever she was, I’d have bet my life that she had her reasons and that my sister knew exactly what they were. I had to remind myself to breathe.
Finally, what felt like a million years later, the woman drove the red Honda down the long driveway and away from us. Jeremy gestured at the car.
“Look,” he said. “The plates match.”
But I wasn’t looking at the house anymore. I was looking farther down the hill, across the lanes of traffic that bisected this area from the area where my sister lived. I wasn’t great with directions, but even from this far away, I recognized the gaudy lilac paint job on my sister’s back porch, almost DayGlo in the sunlight. And then I looked harder at the house, and something clicked, some sixth sense that let me know something that I didn’t need to see from the front for proof. That the windows in the front of that house were wide and open. That the clear view up and down the canyon cut both ways. The porno house. This had to be the porno house that my sister was always pointing up the hill and laughing about, an inside joke between her and herself, and I was just one more person on the long list of people to whom Delia liked to lie.
“It’s not the car,” I said.
“It is the car.”
“It’s not. We have to go back.”
“They’re the stalkers. We should go back in and move a sofa or something.”
I looked at Jeremy, shirtless, earnest, and so tragically gorgeous, and I realized that he was treating this like a sitcom, like something that was going to have a neat ending where the doors opened and the good guys won. But there weren’t any good guys, not from where I was sitting. No good girls, either.
“Please,” I said. “I want to go back.” My face was about to rain down a total loser cocktail of snot and tears. I started climbing back over the hill, no longer caring if anyone inside saw us. I just wanted out of there. Jeremy followed, saying something about how he knew lawyers who would know what to do next. He was still excited. Even TV people got excited when you did something that seemed like it would be on TV. Only it wasn’t TV, because then I could have turned it off.
“Are you okay?” he said when we got back to the car.
“I’m not. I just want to go home.”
“Your sister’s place?”
“No. That’s not my home.”
“Dex’s?”
“No. That’s not my home.”
Knowing there was nowhere to go just made everything worse. My dad had called last night, excited that he and Cindy were engaged, that the trip to Mexico had been, as he put it, a “success.” He was mad that I used his credit card, but not as mad as he should have been. He was too excited about his future. But I wasn’t.
When my dad first split up with my mom, during his weepy and needy phase, I was his best friend. We’d watch Turner Classic Movies all of Sunday, and my dad would explain who all the old actors were, why the movies were important. After Cindy showed up, everything changed. If I got a meal alone with my dad, it was like some kind of international peace treaty had been signed. I was supposed to be so grateful; she was supposed to be so generous. And now I was going to be stuck with her, forever. She was probably knocked up already and they were just slow-playing it for fear that I’d run away for good. That’s probably why my dad suddenly didn’t have any money. The only thing left for me in Atlanta would be my mom and Lynette and their house of sick and weird.
It felt like my mom, my dad, my sister, they could all just take one relationship, trash it, and go on to the next thing, start building again, and expect everyone else to be excited. To throw a freaking party. But what about me? I was the leftover from my mom’s second marriage, about to get promoted to being the leftover from my dad’s first.
“Anna,” Jeremy said. “You’re not okay. Should I just take you back to the set?”
I nodded my head because it was the only place left to go.
16
My last full week in LA, Roger shot the final scenes of his film in front of what used to be 10050 Cielo Drive, but was now 10066 Cielo. The drive to the site was long and winding, with spider-vein-like cracks in the asphalt of the road ahead. As we wound our way higher above the city, the sound of the traffic below became increasingly muffled. A “No Trespassing” sign hung close to the entrance, with a redbrick wall in front of the sign announcing the new address in large brass numbers. From the outside, it could have been some tacky Atlanta minimansion. The estate seemed proud of its new identity, like it was daring you to try to figure out what it used to be. Nothing remained from the original home except for the telephone pole, to the right of the gate, which Tex Watson had scaled in order to cut the phone lines. It loomed like a forgotten remnant of the murders, of the 1960s even, a stake in the ground marking a gruesome past, an arbitrary last witness.
Barely any of the research that I did made it into Roger’s film. Since Charles Manson treated “knocking up ladies” the way other people did “taking out the recycling,” Roger decided that referencing it directly would be too much. Dex had warned me about this when he had told me about the movie business. He said that anytime you worked on a movie, whether you were writing it or researching it or shooting it, you could never forget that the end product was out of your hands. If you wrote a screenplay about Charles Manson, you shouldn’t be shocked if it wound up being about Willy Wonka. It still felt like a lot of wasted energy. But Roger paid me $600 more, which, with the money from my Chips appearance, was enough to pay my debts and even go home slightly ahead at the end of the summer.
The movie wound up being about a married couple. The wife was supposed to be my sister after her face got messed up, which you don’t learn until the end is something that
the husband did to her. You don’t really see the husband much; he’s mostly a voice that whispers in the air, which you think must be a ghost or a serial killer, but it’s not, instead it’s this actor who didn’t show up until the last weeks of shooting.
“It will be like Cassavetes,” Roger said. “A Woman Under the Influence. You think the whole time that she is crazy, wandering around like this, but she is being crushed, ground down by this man.”
There were three parts to the film, these haunted scenes where the ghost version of my sister visits murder sites in Los Angeles, scenes where the broken-nose version of my sister tries to live a kind of regular life but can’t quite hold it together, and then scenes with the new actor, the husband, where you see that the marriage, or whatever it is, is the real horror.
The final scene of the film takes place in a car, outside the old 10050 Cielo Drive, and the husband is whaling on my sister, really letting her have it. He’s berating her for the way she cooks pasta, for how she keeps her mouth open when she breathes, stuff you shouldn’t even notice or care about. Then he starts in on how she looks, that she’s getting older, that the only thing anyone will ever love about her is her face, and that her face is starting to wrinkle and fade. And while he’s giving her this part of the speech, my sister, who’s a good actress, but not that good, starts to shake, really shake. And then, I don’t know how it happened, but her nose started to bleed. I think she was trying so hard not to cry that it must have unloosed something, and the blood came down her face and looked so sad and horrible that I forgot that it was a movie, I couldn’t look anymore. I waited for Roger to say, “Cut,” to make it stop, but he was transfixed. The cameras moved in closer. My sister closed her eyes, and her movie-husband whispered, with perfect cruelty, “I don’t feel sorry for you, bitch.” It was the last thing that Susan Atkins had allegedly said to Sharon Tate, word for word, as she was pleading for her life.
Had it been anyone other than Roger, I probably would have thought it was a cool idea. Before the scene began, he explained to the actors that people walked around locking their doors and looking over their shoulders, mindful of the too-close footstep in the parking garage, the abandoned house with broken windows, the stranger in the shadows. But he had an epiphany part of the way through filming: he had been wrong in his original concept. The real danger wasn’t violence like you saw on the television news, random and exciting—the real danger was the vampiric kind, the sort that you invited in because it told you everything you wanted to hear. Charles Manson could never have been Charles Manson if there hadn’t been girls by the dozen, ready and willing, scarred by the silent cruelty behind those carefully locked doors.
“Which is not to say that you have not helped me,” he said, nodding to me at the end of his speech. “You and these Manson girls, you are my inspiration. This is the incarnation.”
The final scene was the first one that my sister had filmed since the splint had come off her nose. Where her nose had been perfect before, it had the slightest tilt toward the top now. She’d fix it later, I was sure of that, but for the moment it made her face more beautiful, it had the openness of a butterfly asking the world to be gentle to its first unfolding wings. She didn’t know that I was watching her while she got ready to shoot, the extra time she spent looking at herself in the mirror. I could feel the tears, the ones that didn’t come until the cameras rolled, mixed with blood. They weren’t pretend.
You would have thought Roger had just finished filming Citizen Kane, the way he clapped after he said “Cut.”
“You are more beautiful,” he said, holding a towel to my sister’s nose while she continued to cry. “You have made something real. So real.”
My sister was inconsolable. Maybe it was the place, something in the air that remained. They may have built a new house, reseeded the yard, put fifty years or even a hundred between the address and its history. It didn’t matter. Even in the warm late afternoon, maybe especially at a time like that, when it seemed like nothing savage could ever happen in such a quiet and beautiful space, the hillside still felt haunted.
“It doesn’t even look like my face anymore,” she finally said.
She was right, but it wasn’t just the nose. My sister was scared. Her face was her fortune, and it looked different. Better, I thought, but not the same.
The actor was on his phone, calling his agent. He didn’t seem terribly moved by any of it.
“I cannot ask you to forgive me again,” Roger said. “And still I ask.”
“It doesn’t matter. It can’t be fixed.”
“I think you look better.” I finally worked up the courage to say it, not just because I wanted her to feel better, but because it was true.
She had stopped crying and was looking at her face again in the makeup mirror she kept in her bag.
“It looks like a piece of modern freaking art. A fun-house mirror would be kinder.”
“It really doesn’t.”
“This better be huge at Sundance,” she said to Roger, and he nodded vigorously.
“Enormous,” he said. “We have tapped into the collective unconscious of America. Its violence. I would break my own nose if I could take it back, but the film, it is beautiful. It is something more than it would have been. You have truly suffered for your art.”
Please, I thought, please let her say yes. Please let him have to break his nose.
“You don’t have to be such a drama queen,” Delia said. “Plain old queen is bad enough.” She winked at me, and just like that, she was back.
“I’m out,” her movie-husband said, and we all shook hands and did a round of air-kisses and he was off to the next romantic comedy.
“We should celebrate,” Roger said. “It is our wrap day, your last week in Los Angeles, Anna?”
“It is,” I said. “I have to finish a paper.”
“Papers are for next week. Tonight we toast.”
“I don’t want to toast. I can’t toast.”
“Relax,” Delia said. “We’ll go somewhere low-key. I think I need beer goggles to get used to my face. Maybe after a few drinks I’ll look good to me again.”
“You would seriously have to kill yourself if you were actually ugly, wouldn’t you?”
“God, Anna, to hear you talk, you’d think I was the vainest person in the world. Did you see how I looked in that last shot?”
“Great acting,” Roger interrupted, “takes great humility.”
So it was going to be that kind of a night. I’d hoped they would drop me with Dex so that I could meet Jeremy for the Chips Ahoy! wrap party. The party started in three hours, so as long as Delia stayed sober enough to drive, or got drunk enough that I could sneak off, there was still hope.
Roger drove us to a tiki bar in Silver Lake, a hipster neighborhood that was near his home. I expected the place to be empty, but there were at least fifteen or twenty people, some working alone on computers, others sipping late-afternoon cocktails.
“I am a regular,” Roger said. “Do not order alcohol and we will be fine.”
The waitress who took our order was heavily tattooed, with black bangs and long, straight hair. She knew Roger and half smiled when he introduced me as a writer for his next movie.
“Make sure he pays you, kid,” she said, winking like we were old pals.
“I miss this place,” Delia said after her second scotch and soda. “Is it wrong if I just drink scotch?” She trailed her finger over the water beading on the side of the glass. Her eyes were still puffy from crying, and she hadn’t reapplied her makeup. “Have they rotated the music? I hope not. I never get over this way. You’d think I would, but it always feels like forever in the car. But I miss the jukebox. I hope they haven’t changed everything up. I’m going to go play something.”
I sat next to Roger, who watched Delia cross the room to the jukebox. My phone chirped a message from Jeremy: “C U in 30, buttercup?” I was bronzing the screen.
Delia came back as Johnny Cash
started singing “I Still Miss Someone.” My mom loved Johnny Cash, would play his music anytime we surrendered media control. She and Lynette didn’t listen to music as much now, except for kids’ stuff, and the song reminded me of the summers when Delia was still at home, when my mom and dad were still together. Delia was softly singing along and looking at Roger, sharing some moment from their horror show of a love affair. It made me feel more lonely and more sad that she was singing to Roger, when it should have been Dex, or me, or anyone else.
And then one of those things happened that I would have paid a million dollars not to have seen, that I will spend at least the next three summers trying to forget. Roger leaned across the table and kissed my sister. French-kissed her, and not like someone who was even kind of, sort of confused about his sexuality. And while I am no expert on kissing, there was no unseeing that in her boozed-out stupidity, she kissed him back.
“You can’t do that,” I said. “What are you doing? Stop it. Both of you. Stop!”
I truly believe they had forgotten I was there.
“That was harmless,” Delia said, avoiding my eyes. Roger looked about as sorry as a dog rolling in shit.
“It was not harmless. You would never do that in front of Dex. Why are you screwing your life up? Dex loves you.”
He’d never said so, and neither had she, not around me, at any rate, but I knew that it was true. And if my lunatic sister had the sense God gave an ant, she would have loved him back. But it looked like she didn’t, and didn’t again. I thought that I knew what it was like to hate my sister, but I had been playing around. This was the real thing.
“What is it you would have me do with my life? Get married and have kids and give up on my dreams?” She chugged her scotch and gestured for another.
“What are you talking about? Who said anything about any of that? I don’t care if you have zero or a million babies. I just want you not to make out with your ex-boyfriend. Are you going to lie to Dex now?”
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