Charlie had become Melody’s de facto personal assistant/nanny/food-fetcher/tantrum-queller/stand-in BFF after the starlet publicly—as in expletive-laced tweets, cover of Us Weekly, lampooned on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon—fired her entire support staff en masse. Cook, stylist, assistants, driver, trainers, maids, life coach, masseuse, gardeners, pool guy—everyone. Gone. “They’re sucking me dry,” she claimed. Since then Melody had refused to let any new employees enter the Chalet.
Leilani Costello, the “Le” in P.Le.A.Se., felt that, given Melody’s profile and status, she was one of, if not the, number one client and therefore worthy of a lot of special attention. And worse, Melody didn’t appear to want to work with anyone except Charlie. In the beginning she called and asked for her by name. That was how it started. Till one day Leilani had come into Charlie’s office and closed the door and told her she’d now be handling Melody Montrose exclusively.
“But I don’t want to,” Charlie had said.
“Just get her through the days,” Leilani had said. “Get her to set on time. Keep her together. I promise it won’t be long. Get her to the end of Thornglow and we’ll all be happy.”
“What do you want me to do?”
“Whatever she wants you to do.”
“She wants me to drive Zankou Chicken to her fucking mansion every goddamned day!”
Leilani pumped her manicured eyebrows. “She likes you.”
That was four months ago.
Charlie put on her blinker, waited for a pair of luxury SUVs to pass, and turned onto Mulholland.
“Was that Mommy?” Dustin asked from the backseat.
Charlie looked in the rearview and watched Dustin’s little feet dangling. Dustin was three and a half and already she felt like his chauffeur.
“Yup, that was your mom.”
“She sick this morning.”
“You spoke with her?”
“Daddy did. Them yelled.”
“They yelled.”
“Mommy is hung up as usual!”
In the mirror, Dustin’s eyes were a deep green, sparkling off his emerald T-shirt. He wrinkled his nose and dug something out of it.
“Don’t pick your nose.”
Was he that different from Abbott? Barring the fact that Dustin had sprung from the sacred union of two movie stars and Abbott was merely the product of a cinema studies professor and a publicist–turned–ad hoc personal assistant, were the two really so far removed? Charlie slumped in her seat. Yeah, they were. One and a half years younger than her son, Dustin possessed about quadruple the functioning vocabulary and an innate ability to articulate his thoughts. But Dustin wasn’t some anomaly. She knew this. The anomaly was Abbott. Her special little guy. Her cracked, beautiful dumpling. Splattered all over the spectrum like a Jackson Pollock. Abbott was at home in Silver Lake with Manuela, the Salvadorean lady who served as both nanny and housekeeper. Soon Manuela would take him to the Horizon School of Echo Park. Charlie herself was due there shortly for a meeting about Abbott’s most recent biting transgression. Eight thousand a year in tuition, and the humor inherent in the ritual of her own child being taken to school most mornings by Manuela while she crested the hills to drive another woman’s child to a different, more expensive—read better—school did not escape her. And if she didn’t hurry she was going to be late for this crucial meeting, and she did not want to be late, even though she had a good idea this crucial meeting would consist of little more than the Horizon School of Echo Park telling her and Rey that Abbott George Perrin was no longer welcome to attend the Horizon School of Echo Park.
It was already 8:15 and Melody hadn’t sounded good on the phone, so Charlie would have to go there first and assess the damage. Melody could not afford to miss the Nylon magazine shoot later that morning. Not with the way she’d been plastered all over the tabloids with this Patrick Kuggle thing. The public crying. The multiple nightclub breakdowns. The shoplifting. The judge had put her on probation, and this after an endless back-and-forth between Melody’s lawyers and the chain store’s lawyers. Charlie sensed, despite how much she drew at the box office, a great foreboding in the trajectory of Melody Montrose’s career arc. Hence the need for maximum focus. She had to get the girl back on track. Charlie stuck out her lower lip and chuffed a flyaway.
The Balmont Hall School, which Melody paid $21,500 a year for Dustin to attend, lay in the Santa Monica Mountains, just west of the 405. Charlie loved being in the hills. The feeling of getting away from it all, even though she wasn’t that far from anything. The windy roads yielded the same sensation as her jogs through Runyon Canyon: temporary escape.
Dustin name-checked cars they passed.
“Jaguar!”
“Bentley!”
“Hummer!”
Just like Abbott calling out street names. See! Maybe they weren’t so different? Though she doubted Dustin ever threw his own shit at anyone. Abbott had done this. Twice. The first time his target had been a school wall, the second time Rey himself, who at the moment of launch/impact sat grading papers at the kitchen table. That had not been a pleasant evening. She cringed at the thought of it and tried to focus instead on how beautifully the weather was shaping up. To think back east a hurricane was stomping through everyone’s lives.
* * *
Did she need another problem? No, she didn’t. The rain was a problem, or would be if it got as bad as they were saying. The foundation near the rear of the building had a crack. It leaked. She’d known about it for a while, but with George being sick and the hospital visits and the chemo and the mental breakdowns, she’d been putting off the work and now the storm was hitting. She wasn’t worried about the house. They’d waterproofed the basement years ago and it seemed to be holding up. But this crack in the concrete at the store was something relatively new, and the past couple brutal winters had only exacerbated the problem. And here she was, cursing herself for not having done anything sooner. God forbid anything happened to the store. She was the only one doing anything proactive about it, about anything. George = a million miles away. Like he’d already left. He didn’t want to get better. “I’m dying,” he said. Sometimes it was all he said. “You don’t want to listen to them,” them being the doctors, “but I’m dying.” And he was. But did he have to stop living? And had it been any different when he was well? When they thought he would be well? No, Ana concluded, it had not. It had been the same for years, and she wasn’t foolish enough to think he’d change. The best she could do was keep her head down and pray. Go to church and pray and light a candle and do it all as quietly as possible to avoid his ridicule. God would make it right. He would help her endure. No, not endure. That was not the word. He would make it better. It had to get better.
At her back, George & Ana Westfall Antiques was lit up bright before the gathering gloom. The gold-leaf lettering of their names, his and hers, was vibrant in the half-light. It was an old building. It had been around. Ana was, decades later, still proud of how hard they’d worked to get the place where it was. And how hard she’d worked in recent years to keep it there.
Audrey Tan arrived with Shadow loping beside her. “He’s a little sluggish today.”
“How so?”
“I don’t know, just not himself. We had a good time, though. We went to the water.”
Ana knelt to Shadow’s level and her bare knee settled against the cold, wet concrete. Shadow was an eighteen-year-old border collie whom Ana was petrified had, like her husband, reached the end of his life span. And then they’d be gone. When George and the dog were gone, what would she have? Nothing. No one. She didn’t even have the comfort of her children. No, she told herself, that wasn’t fair or true. She had Armie, and Armie didn’t appear to be going anywhere. But where was he? He’d told her he would meet her to help with the sandbags but he hadn’t shown up and now Carl was almost done.
The rain made noises like the patter of tiny feet. She and Audrey were all decked out in rubber and hoods and boots. T
hey stood under the store awning.
Audrey taught kindergarten, and ever since George got sick, she’d made a point of stopping by in the evenings on her way home to help Ana out by taking Shadow for a walk. Ana suspected the girl had a crush on Armie and that the feeling was mutual, and yet for reasons beyond her, the two of them managed to dance around each other like frightened embers, never meeting. She didn’t want to push Armie too hard. Not yet.
Carl came up the alley. He pulled his worker’s gloves off with his teeth and stuffed them into a poncho pocket. His poncho was speckled with fat drops of water. “That’s the last of them. If you can get Armie—”
“Oh, is Armie here?” Audrey asked. Shadow took a seat on the sidewalk and blinked at the three of them. He yawned and his tongue rolled out of his mouth, wide and pink.
“I’m sure he’s at the house,” Ana said. “Would you like to come over for some tea?”
Audrey frowned. “I need to get home to make sure my grandmother isn’t freaking out.”
Carl rubbed his neck. “We’re looking good here. I don’t think anything too crazy’s gonna happen.”
Carl and George were the same age, but to Ana, Carl looked at least ten years younger. Here he was, lifting sandbags and glistening with sweat, while George could no longer put on pants without her help.
“I can’t tell you how much I owe you,” Ana said.
“You don’t owe me anything.”
“I think it’s starting to get bad,” Audrey said, holding out her hand and letting rain collect in her palm.
“We should get home.” Ana looked at her phone and tried to resist the urge to send Charlie another text message but sent one anyway. Shadow let out a long, low whimper. “It’s going to be all right old boy. We’re going home.”
“We should probably board up the windows,” Carl said.
Ana looked at the building and nodded. “I think you’re right,” she said. “But you’ve done enough, Carl. I’ll get Armie to help me. Let’s go back. What do you say, Shadow?”
Shadow didn’t say anything.
* * *
They wound up and around the hilltop. Past Warren Beatty’s house, past Pamela Anderson’s house, past Paul Hogan’s house, past the house where Errol Flynn once lived. They crossed the highway, clogged in both directions. They rounded the Skirball Cultural Center and went left through the Balmont Hall gate. Dustin hummed the Wonder Pets! theme. Abbott also loved this show, but Charlie had grown to fear the way her son mimicked, with startling accuracy, the voices of Linny the Guinea Pig, Turtle Tuck, and Ming-Ming Duckling. Like his brain wouldn’t stop replaying the dialogue on a creepy David Lynch–type loop. He repeated the same lines over and over, and she sensed something sinister about the cadence with which he proclaimed their catchphrase slogan: “What’s going to work? Teamwork!” And yet, on a normal developmental level, he spoke hardly at all to her or Rey or anyone residing in the real world. TV characters, imaginary ponies, and Ernest the Donkey Puppet were the things he “conversed” with. This was the kind of stuff she tried to point out to Rey as evidence of just how different Abbott was. Somehow Rey was never around to witness any of it. And if he was, he just looked at her like she was crazy.
“He’s just going through a phase,” she said aloud in Rey’s French-tinged English.
Dustin’s head shot up. “Who?”
“What?”
She parked the Volvo just as her phone sprang back to full bars and dinged five times:
Melody Montrose: Where are U? I need help.
Rey: I think I’m going to be late.
Mom: STRM GETTNG BAD
Mom: UR FATHER BEHVING BADLY
Melody Montrose: I took pills.
She prioritized the texts. Was her father in the hospital again? “Behaving badly” meant yelling at nurses. She stuck out her lower lip and chuffed again and sent another stray hair out of her eyes. Pills? What the fuck did that mean? She held the phone to her ear with her shoulder, opened the back door, unbuckled Dustin, and hoisted him into her arms. He laid his head on her shoulder and kept humming. Melody’s phone went to voice mail.
“Hey, this is Melody! Leave a message!”
“Fuck. Oh, crud, sorry, Dusty.”
“Bad-word alert.”
“Yeah, that’s a bad word. Don’t say it. Hey, Melody, uh, got your texts, not sure what you mean by p-i-l-l-s. I’m a little concerned. Call me back, please. Like, now. I’m at Dustin’s school so I’ve got service again. Call. Please.” At the doors she put Dustin down and squatted in front of him and placed her hands on his shoulders. She straightened his backpack. He wore dark shorts with sailboats on them. His brown hair curled in all directions. “You said Mommy was sick?” He shrugged. “Did she call Daddy when you were at Daddy’s house?” Nothing.
Three years ago, when Melody was twenty-one and Charlie had just started working at P.Le.A.Se. Publicity LLC, Melody, riding the success of a coming-of-age high school romcom, was offered the starring role in a time-travel-vampire-teen-fantasy saga based on a cycle of YA bestsellers called Thornglow. The first film in the trilogy was Thornglow: Children of the Night. Melody played the vampire heiress Serena Thornglow. She had a brief, torrid, and highly publicized romance-followed-by-impulse-marriage-followed-by-divorce with her costar Patrick Kuggle, an already divorced twenty-eight-year-old heartthrob with chiseled facial structuring and perma-spiked hair who also happened to be the lead singer of a Top 40 power-pop band called Blast! The result of their yearlong union was Dustin, who now spent half the week at Kuggle’s Bel Air mansion and the other half at Melody’s Beverly Hills mansion. The child had access to two pools, both of which, Charlie liked to remind herself, were larger in square footage than the ground floor of her house. Thank God Kuggle’s character died in the first film and they didn’t have to endure each other’s presence on set.
Charlie didn’t think her face belied any worry about Melody’s “took some pills” text, but Dustin looked like he was about to cry.
“Is Mommy sick?”
“Mommy’s fine.” Charlie was still in her running attire: blue-and-white sneakers fitted to counter her overpronation, yoga pants, a sky-blue T-shirt and sports bra and her hair was pulled back. It was a source of pride for her that she never wore makeup. She was thirty-four but knew she looked twenty-eight. She had her mother’s hair—dirty blond and wavy to her shoulder blades. She was aware that most of the hands-on dads, of which there were many, were staring at her ass as they streamed around her and Dustin. This was cool by her. She liked the attention. “Let’s get you to class.”
She put out her hand and Dustin high-fived it and together they went in. She was back in the car at 8:45. She needed to be in Echo Park by 9:45. She called the school and pushed Abbott’s meeting back an hour. She felt an obligation to respond to her mother and inquire as to her father’s status, but that seemed the least pressing issue on the table. Her father had been sick forever, dying forever. The news was always bad, and so her logic was, it could wait. The director, a skittish woman named Melinda McCarthy, was annoyed.
“This is a serious matter, Mrs. Perrin. Abbott needs our attention.”
“Westfall.”
“Excuse me?”
“I use my maiden name. And we’re—my husband and I—we’re taking it seriously. Believe me. I’ll be there as soon as I can. Something came up with work and my father is sick. I just need an hour.” Charlie started the car.
“Please get here as soon as you can.”
“Copy that.”
Back over the clogged 405 and through the dead zone, but not before her phone dinged. A quick glance:
Mom: TRYING TO GET DAD IN FOR CHEMO SPOKE TO KARNAM CONCRNED ABOUT POWR OUTAGES
Nothing from Melody. She crested the first hill and started down Beverly Glen. She didn’t break down often but now she was crying. Inching behind a line of slow-creeping cars and crying. They were going to kick Abbott out of school. She knew this. And could you blame them? This time
he bit one of the teachers. On the neck! And this wasn’t the first biting, it was the third. “Not the first, Mrs. Perrin, the third.” And with the infamous poop-throwing incident lingering. Was she the kind of mother who failed her child? Was she a failure? She didn’t want to think like this, but the evidence in opposition was mounting. And what kind of daughter was she? Her father was dying. He was going to die and she wouldn’t even be there because she lived on the other side of the fucking country. She was positive her husband was cheating on her. Her proof? A pair of black Victoria’s Secret panties, with lacy aquamarine bordering, size M—she was an S since college—that definitely did not belong to her. She found them in her underwear drawer, which really creeped her out. Manuela probably scooped them up and washed them with the laundry and folded them away. What kind of adulterer left their underwear in the adulteree’s home? It was a direct slap in the face. Her entire existence felt transformed into a tapestry, and someone had located a crucial thread, the one holding it all together, and they were pulling it out, slowly and with savage efficiency.
At 9:20 she pulled up outside the Chalet. Slender palm trees curled along the curb. It didn’t look like much from the street—a closed wooden gate and enormous green hedgerows on either side. The only visible things were the curved terra-cotta roof tiles of the main house.
She turned in to the driveway and stopped at the keypad and leaned out to flash her card over the scanner. A loud beep and the gate slid open. She parked in the circular drive. The guesthouse was on one side and paths led through a garden to the grotto pool on the other. She let herself in. “Melody!”
The Antiques Page 2