by Ava Dellaira
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For my husband, Doug Hall
Prologue
ANGIE
Behind every man now alive stand thirty ghosts, for that is the ratio by which the dead outnumber the living.
—ARTHUR C. CLARKE, 2001: A Space Odyssey
The living are catching up with the dead. Back when Arthur C. Clarke was writing in 1968, they had us outnumbered by thirty to one. But now, we living humans have multiplied so quickly, we’re down to fifteen ghosts apiece. Angie knows the facts: there are over 7 billion people alive, and 107 billion who once were.
Angie’s dad is one of the dead, or so she’d believed. She’d often imagined him beside her, the leader of her little ghost tribe, fifteen strong. She pictured him the way he is in the photograph with her mom. He looks the same age she is now: seventeen. His smile wide and bright, his skin dark and his teeth white, his body muscular and long. He wears a backward baseball cap, like a ’90s dork, she thinks. In the photo, he and her mom, Marilyn, are at the ocean, on a boardwalk. Her mom’s wearing overalls over her bikini, hoop earrings glinting, long sun-gold hair falling around her pale face. She’s leaning against him like she belongs there, her head thrown back in laughter, his arm draped over her shoulder. All that blue water behind them, seeming to go on until it meets the sky.
She first discovered the picture a year ago, while she was getting ready for Sam Stone’s sixteenth birthday dinner. She’d been rifling through her mom’s drawers looking for lipstick while Marilyn was at work, and at some point the search expanded. She found herself digging, though she didn’t know for what. Then, at the back of her mom’s underwear drawer, she found a wooden box. Inside was a worn manila envelope stuffed full and sealed, and beneath it, the photograph.
Angie stared down at the grinning black boy who was staring back at her, and though she’d never seen him before, she knew her father instantly. For a split second, she wondered who he was with. As it came into focus, Angie saw that, of course, the girl was her mom. She looked so carefree. Young. Full of possibility. Happy.
Suddenly Angie’s chest felt hollow. She wanted to pull the boy out of the photo. To make him grow up into a man, to make him be her dad. To make him make her mom smile like that again.
Instead she tried to put herself inside of the picture—to imagine what it would have been like to be there with her parents—how the sun would have felt, how the ocean might have smelled. And though she’s never even been to the beach before, she could almost hear the far-off sound of the waves under their bright laughter.
* * *
Angie has one more year of high school, and then comes The Future. She has no idea what she wants to “do with her life,” where she belongs, or how she’ll ever be enough to make good on everything her mom has given up for her. When she finds herself struggling to breathe, her chest tight, the anxiety nameless and uncertain, Angie thinks of the seven billion humans and counting living on earth. The unfathomable numbers ease the panic, and she starts to feel light—the kind of light-headed that you get from laughing too hard or staying up too late, or both at once. She’s smaller than a drop in an ocean. So what does it matter what one girl—Angela Miller—does with her life?
She considers herself average, unremarkable: she likes history and science (particularly biology), running hard, grilled cheese with burned edges, soccer, coffee with soy cream, vinyl records, hip-hop blasting in the privacy of her headphones; she comes armed with lists like this, prepared for the necessary profiles, meant to give some practiced but tenuous definition to “herself,” whoever that is. The feelings that loom inside her, threatening to spill over, she had diligently learned to keep at bay. But today, everything will change.
* * *
Angie holds the photograph of her parents in her hands now, listening to Janet Jackson sing “I Get Lonely” on a Walkman she found at a Goodwill for $2.99. The song plays from a mixtape labeled FOR MISS MARI MACK, LOVE, JAMES in faded blue pen. The early-morning sun is already turning too hot, piercing, chasing Angie into the shaded part of the porch. Flecks of cotton drift through the warm air, pooling in the gutters like summer snow. In front of her sits a duffel bag with T-shirts and socks, underwear, and her two favorite dresses carefully folded inside, along with the envelope from her mom’s drawer and the listings for Justin Bell between the ages of twenty-four and thirty-five, or of unknown age, living in the Los Angeles area. Marilyn left for work almost an hour ago. When she comes back, she’ll find her daughter gone.
* * *
Angie has lived in this house with her mom since the day Marilyn picked her up from fifth grade and told her she had a surprise.
“What is it?” Angie asked, when Marilyn didn’t produce any of the usual treats—a Milky Way, gummy bears, a chapter book, or a new set of colored pencils.
“Just wait,” her mom answered, “this is the best surprise yet.”
She got on I-40, then pulled off and drove through Albuquerque’s Old Town, a part of the city they visited only when Angie wanted to go to the natural history museum. Were they going now? But no, her mom was weaving through streets with huge cottonwood trees and ivy-covered houses. And then, as they reached the edge of the neighborhood and the houses started to get smaller—little flat adobes with nicely kept yards—she parked in a driveway. The house was short and squat, with a blue roof.
Angie turned to her mom. “Come on!” Marilyn urged, girlish excitement in her voice.
Angie followed her mom up to the front door as Marilyn fumbled with her key ring. Whose house were they at?
As the lock clicked open, Marilyn looked at Angie and said, “Go on, go inside. It’s ours.”
She was only ten, but Angie understood then that her mom had given her what she herself had never had—a house to grow up in. The two of them painted it together: blue in the living room, yellow in the kitchen. Ocean green in Angie’s bedroom.
Angie’s always loved the thick walls that stay cool through the summer mornings, the rounded archways, the worn paisley couch where she and Marilyn would stay up on weekends watching romantic comedies, eating popcorn sprinkled with Parmesan or frozen root beer float bars.
* * *
When she was little, Angie believed she had the kind of mom other kids ought to be jealous of—one who packed the best lunches, with carefully made sandwiches cut into triangles, and made the best brownies for bake sales. She’d wake Angie in the mornings when Angie didn’t want to get out of bed by blasting “Dancing in the Street,” and together they’d spin around the house laughing in their pajamas. Her mom decorated for the holidays, including New Year’s and Halloween. Every Fourth of July she’d make red-white-and-blue cupcakes and cook hot dogs in the pan. She’d buy sparklers, and once it got dark enough, Marilyn and Angie would stand outside in their garden, writing their names with the glittering wands. It didn’t strike Angie as strange then, when she was a kid, that it was just the two of them. That they didn’t go to othe
r people’s barbecues, that when her mom would drop Angie off at friends’ houses, she never stayed to socialize with the other mothers, who often spoke to Marilyn in patronizing tones. That at parents’ nights at Montezuma Elementary, she was the youngest mom by far, and though Angie would notice some of the dads being nice to her, Marilyn always turned away to search for her daughter. Even when her mom eventually shut the door on Manny—the first (and last) man to come to their house for dinner—Angie had learned to accept the loss.
Ever since Angie was a little kid, Marilyn has told her she’s her beauty, her light, her reason for life. Her precious little angel. But sometimes, when she thought Angie was busy with a coloring book or the television, Angie would see her staring out the window, tears running down her cheeks.
* * *
As Sam’s Jeep turns the corner and parks in front of the driveway, Angie presses stop on the Walkman and pulls off the headphones. She thinks of her mom coming home to an empty house tonight, and she almost turns to go back inside. But instead, she picks up her duffel and heads toward the car.
Sam wears a rumpled white T-shirt, a pair of cutoff sweatpants that hang on his tall, narrow frame, and mirrored aviator shades. His hair is the same kind of messy it’s always been.
“Hey,” Angie says, wishing she could see his eyes.
Sam merely nods in greeting, takes her bag from her, and stuffs it into the back seat. Angie climbs into the car, which smells vaguely of marijuana and seems to be storing several weeks’ worth of breakfast burrito wrappers. The ’90s Cherokee that Sam named Mabel gives an unhappy rumbling noise as it starts.
As they roll down Angie’s street, Sam remains wordless and turns up the music. Angie glances back at her home disappearing behind them, and then she looks down at the girl in the picture with her dad. The one who must have sped through the night with the windows down and the music loud, inhaling the scent of the sea, the one who must have known the feeling of freedom and air rushing into her lungs and a life, a new life, about to start. The one who must have known the way that falling in love brings the world closer, as if everything were in reach. At least that’s how Angie imagines it.
MARILYN
18 Years Earlier
Marilyn is seventeen today. She stares back at her own eyes reflected in the car window, transposed over the man on the corner wearing a CASH FOR GOLD sign and a woman pushing a shopping cart full of clattering bottles. They pass an Arco station where a crew of boys with backward baseball caps carry away cigars and sodas. The backs of her thighs stick to the seat, and she can feel sweat beading around her hairline. The classic end-of-summer Los Angeles heat wave has hit. It has to be at least a hundred degrees out, and the ’80s Buick, loaded down with boxes, has no working AC.
“It’s just for a little while,” her mom, Sylvie, rambles on. “Until we get another break, you know. You have your appointment with LA Talent in a couple weeks.”
Marilyn nods without turning her mother’s way.
Her last audition (where she was to be one in a family of four out to buy a television) was a downright disaster. She’d understood the stakes, and all morning, sitting in the waiting room with the other girls, her chest had felt tight, her stomach queasy. She tried to concentrate on her book—The White Album by Joan Didion—but she’d been stuck on the first paragraph, unable to focus, rereading the same opening sentence: We tell ourselves stories in order to live. As she’d gotten in front of the camera, she found she could hardly breathe.
When her mother came to pick her up, Marilyn didn’t mention the sense of panic, the dizziness, or the casting assistant who’d brought her a glass of water and shot an oh god look to the director across the room. She endured Sylvie’s look of deep disappointment—brows arched in tension—when a week later their supper of Lean Cuisines was interrupted by the news that Marilyn had failed yet again. As Sylvie hung up the phone and stared out the window at the pool and its plastic lounge chairs, Marilyn pushed a piece of wilted broccoli around her plate.
After a long moment of silence Sylvie poured herself a third glass of white wine and turned to Marilyn. “It’s a wasteland around here, really. I’ve been thinking we should move up near Hollywood, get closer to it all,” she said, too brightly. “I mean, who knows, you could run into a casting director in the grocery store.” As if they weren’t fleeing the apartment they hadn’t paid rent on in months.
Marilyn knows her mom would let her go ass-first in a photo (like the girl sprawled on the billboard over the freeway, advertising jeans) if it meant the money that would get them into a shiny new house in the hills above the city, above everything, where she believes they belong. As far as Sylvie’s concerned, a new and better life is just around the corner, the revolving door to the future a mere step away.
As a child, perhaps Marilyn believed in Sylvie’s dreams of a better place, but by now, she’s given up on ever walking through the door in her mother’s fantasies. She holds tightly to the thought that it’s only another year until she’ll be eighteen, moving away for college, beginning a life that belongs to her. She sees the future like a little diamond of light at the end of the tunnel; she’s learned to fix her gaze on it, to struggle toward it, to keep that diamond in her mind.
* * *
A car honks at Sylvie as she holds up traffic behind her to make a left turn onto Washington Boulevard. Marilyn takes in the sunburned look of the streets, the smell of meat drifting from a taco truck mixed with the faint scent of the ocean, the bright bougainvillea growing up a chain-link fence.
Sylvie ignores the honking and navigates the Buick onto South Gramercy Place. Marilyn vaguely recognizes the residential street lined with dilapidated apartment buildings. LOW DEPOSIT advertises one banner. She notices a red flower box hanging out of a window, a laundry line where clothes wave like flags. A man leans against the building below, dragging from a cigarette.
“Marilyn, look. You can see the sign from here.” The car swerves through the middle of the road as Sylvie turns around in her seat to point to the white letters: H-O-L-L-Y-W-O-O-D on the mountain in the distance, standing stalwart through the haze of smog that comes with the summer heat.
“Mmm-hmm.” Marilyn does her best to ignore the dread building in her chest as they continue down the block and pull up to 1814—a two-story duplex at the corner, with crumbling pink stucco and an unkempt yard, where a few orange trees survive nonetheless.
* * *
Lauryn Hill’s voice drifts up from a radio in the apartment below: How you gonna win … Sylvie fumbles for the key under the mat, the curls in her dyed blond hair falling loose in the heat and sticking against her pale cheeks. As they enter, Marilyn is transported back in time by the familiar scent—some odd mix of cigars, Febreze, and cooked meat.
Pieces of furniture lie haphazardly about the room—the couch slightly askew from the wall, the coffee table butting diagonally against it, holding a candy jar filled mostly with butterscotch wrappers. Late-afternoon sun streams though barred windows, casting spots of light on the shag carpet.
For a moment they both just stand there.
“Well, this could be worse,” Sylvie says with forced cheer. Marilyn wishes that somehow she’d been able to do better. That she could have managed just one more commercial, one more success that would have kept them away from here.
In the tiny bedroom that was once hers and will be again, Marilyn opens the windows, letting in a burst of hot air. It’s already past five o’clock, but the heat hasn’t let up. She stares out at a distant line of skinny palm trees, their tops wavering. She thinks they look like scattered soldiers, the last ones still standing in the battleground of the city, and raises her hands in two opposing L shapes in front of her eyes—the frame of a photograph. With a blink—her imaginary shutter—she freezes the image in her mind.
“You’re so beautiful.” Sylvie’s voice startles her. She turns to see her mom watching her from the doorway, as the radio from below goes to commercial and a voice instru
cts her to double your pleasure, double your fun. Marilyn wants to collapse on the floor, suddenly exhausted.
As Sylvie moves to wrap her arms around her, Marilyn remembers the day—almost ten years ago now—that they left Woody’s and moved into the then-brand-new apartment they’ve just left behind in Orange County. Sylvie loved the pool and the fresh carpet, but Marilyn’s favorite part was the air that didn’t smell like anything. She’d been in her bedroom putting her clothes away neatly in a new pink dresser when she heard her mom scream her name.
She rushed into the living room to find Sylvie in tears and her own face on the TV. Marilyn-on-screen opened the top of a My Little Pony and pulled out a jeweled bracelet, exclaiming There’s a surprise for me! before kissing the top of Twilight Sparkle’s head. The image of herself gave Marilyn an uneasy feeling—that wasn’t her, was it? Not really. No. She found herself wanting to back away from the screen, but when Sylvie pulled Marilyn to her and said, in whispered awe, “You’re so beautiful. My baby girl. You’re on TV,” she couldn’t help but revel in her mom’s pride.
Marilyn now lingers in Sylvie’s arms, engulfed in her perfume—Eternity by Calvin Klein? Sylvie’s scent is a rotating kaleidoscope of samples from the counter at Macy’s, where she spends her workdays convincing customers that a bottle of Chanel or Burberry is a potion powerful enough to transform them into the kind of women they want to be.
“It’ll all work out. You’ll see,” Sylvie says, almost to herself.
She releases Marilyn from her grip just as suddenly as she’d embraced her. “Let’s unload now, so we have time for the birthday dinner.”
Marilyn can see her mom is working, even harder than Marilyn herself, not to crumble.
“Great,” Marilyn replies, and kisses her on the cheek.