by Alix Ohlin
She thought that waiting to read it would make the letter seem too important. Better to read it as quickly as possible, then throw it away.
She saw the words Annie, we need money before she panicked and crumpled it up. Even though she had stopped reading, words kept throwing themselves at her: television and please and need and baby, each one giving her a strong, unpleasant, sickening sensation. How could she have taken in so much of the letter when all she wanted to do was get rid of it?
“Sweetie, do you want a Xanax?” the stylist said. “Please try not to cry, it’ll be hell on your makeup.”
Two more weeks of twenty-hour days, all workouts and hunger, tanning and fittings. She was stretched into a new shape, her skin and muscles reconfigured, cut from new cloth. At night she dreamt of cheeseburgers and banana splits. She had never had trouble keeping her weight down, but this was a whole new discipline, and she embraced it. She didn’t even have to try to forget the phone call and letter; her body was too busy forgetting everything for her.
She made friends with the PA, who sometimes came over after work with some Zone meals for dinner. They’d watch movies, and several times the PA slept over on the couch in the living room. Her name was Lauren, but Anne still thought of her as the PA. It comforted her to wake up and see her there; Anne would make coffee and bring her a cup, happy to do at least one thing in her day for somebody else.
So she was surprised and a little annoyed one afternoon when the girl brought her a phone and said her sister was on hold.
“Please,” Anne said. She was wearing a leather bustier and five-inch stiletto heels and could barely move. “I thought I told you.”
“She keeps calling,” the PA said. “I know you said you don’t have a sister, but this woman … To be honest, Anne, the producers kind of want to know what’s up. They’re wondering if something’s, like, weird. That the media might get a hold of? No judgment or pressure or anything. They totally understand that everybody has, you know, some family strangeness. But here they’d just like to know the particulars.”
At this, Anne’s eyes narrowed. “Give me the phone,” she said, then held it to her ear. There was breathing on the other end, and she felt like she was going to be sick when she heard a long, gentle sigh, like a sheet settling on a bed. “Hello?” she said.
There was no answer, just another sigh. It was like getting a crank call from a ghost.
“Well, talk to me if you’re going to call,” she said.
What came through the line was the sound of weeping, and this was so unexpected, so shocking, that she dropped the phone on the ground. “Whoops,” she said to the PA.
The girl instantly picked up the phone and held it to her ear.
From her expression Anne could tell that the call was still connected. “Damn,” she said under her breath, and held out her hand.
“Annie,” Hilary said all in a rush. “Please don’t hang up. I saw you on television, and we need help.”
Anne’s stomach twisted uneasily. “What’s going on?”
“Alan lost his job and then the baby got sick and we don’t have insurance, and now the hospital says we owe thousands of dollars, and our parents don’t have any money either.”
“Where are you?”
“We’re at home, we’re still right here.”
“You’ll figure it out,” Anne said, remembering the day in her apartment when Hilary’s uncle revealed all the lies Hilary had told, how Anne had heard nothing from her when the baby was born. Words came back to her from the long-ago past, not her mother’s hysterical voice but Grace’s calm, soothing, maddenly therapeutic one. You can be anything you want to be. You don’t have to be like them. “Don’t call here again,” she said, handing the phone to the PA, who took it back with an expressionless nod and went off to get her some coffee.
In New York, it was late fall. In the year she’d been gone she’d been back only once, for upfronts when the show was picked up, the visit a blur of luncheons and parties with press and execs, questions about how much was she like the character she played and did she enjoy the romantic scenes with the handsome guest star and did she have a boyfriend in real life and was he jealous. Each night she’d return to her room and tumble into bed, too tired even to watch TV, then she’d get up the next morning to face more of the same. She had barely been outside in the three days it lasted, and before she knew it she was leaving the hotel for the airport, hardly having set foot on a sidewalk or sat in a cab or seen anything of New York at all.
This time was different, the city colder and drabber than she remembered, void of the color that gave every day in California a sense of health and possibility. She was in town for some meetings and a magazine photo shoot, but she had a few hours to kill. Leaving her Midtown hotel, she walked south in a daze, not planning her route, trying only to avoid the worst of the crowds. She had always liked the big department stores on Fifth Avenue; they reminded her of old movies and the wholesome glamour of an easier time. Gradually she moved east, then south, past Union Square, not even tracking how many blocks she’d walked, and then she looked up and realized that she was staring at the windows of her old apartment.
Had she really allowed a grubby teenage runaway and her pimply, construction-worker boyfriend to live in her apartment and sleep in her bed? It felt like someone else’s life.
People were walking in and out of the building, all strangers, not a single one of the old ladies who’d once clustered there. Maybe the landlord had succeeded in replacing them all with higher-paying tenants, or had sold the building. There was no movement in the windows of her apartment. There was nothing to see.
The day was brisk, winter skidding leaves off trees, and she wasn’t dressed warmly enough. She wrapped her sweater around herself and walked on. Down the block, a baby was wailing miserably, and she saw the mother pushing a stroller toward her. For moment, she had the insane thought that it was Hilary; but this woman was older and looked wealthy, bundled in a cashmere scarf, her long hair a cascade of glossy curls. The baby had a big round head that rolled from side to side. The wind had whipped his cheeks to a rosy red, like children in old picture books. Jowly and fat, with a cascade of chins, he was a little clown in a big white suit. As they passed Anne, the baby stopped crying and stared at her, and she looked back into his bright blue eyes.
Farther down the block, he started crying again, and the mother took him out of the stroller and held him to her chest, kissing the top of his head. Anne studied the scene for a moment, thinking how strange it was that Hilary would be doing these same things—as if she’d stepped across a threshold into another country, and Anne couldn’t imagine what it was like to live there. Rarely, if ever, did she think about those weeks when she herself had been pregnant, or imagine how old that child would be now if she had decided to keep it. She remembered feeling no physical or emotional change back then, only the sheer sensation of panic, like a bird trapped in a house, flapping her wings in frenzy and desperation.
It all seemed so accidental, how lives were invented and chosen. A child enters the world. A child exits the world. Both for almost no reason at all.
Of the events leading to the pregnancy she thought even less. She had been hanging around at the Faubourg after school, doing homework and drinking coffee to avoid going home to her bickering parents. She used to tell them that she was at a friend’s or studying at the library or seeing Grace. In truth, all she wanted was this hour or two by herself, to drink bitter coffee and bum a cigarette from some guy and inhale until she could feel the smoke burning her lungs. Then she’d go into the washroom, her head buzzing from the caffeine and nicotine, and press those small, precise cuts into her skin. She called it surgery. She’d swipe a finger through the drops and lick the blood; the taste of it was like knowing herself, a confirmation that she existed. Then she’d go back out into the shopping center, feeling a little sticky, a little dirty. It was a trespass on the otherwise pristine routines of her life.
&nb
sp; On one such day she came back out and cadged a cigarette off a French guy who was reading La Presse and drinking an allongé in the food court. He was old, wearing a suit, and had touches of gray at his temples, appraising her breasts with an old man’s smile.
“Qu’est-ce que tu fais dans les toilettes?” he said.
“Sorry.” She shook her head as if she didn’t understand the question, although she did. He had been holding the cigarette out to her but now took it away, folding his arms with it clasped in his fist. She put her hand on her hip. Her coat was open and her school uniform visible beneath it, and she could see him looking at her pleated skirt, her wool tights. The schoolgirl thing was such a cliché. They all went for it.
“What you do in the bathrooms for so long?” he said. “You were in there a long time.”
“Makeup,” she said, licking her lips as he stared at her, hard. Suddenly, before she could react, he reached out and lifted up her shirt, then dropped it. In days to come she would wonder how he knew to look there, where the most recent cuts ran in three parallel lines to the left of her belly button. The square of paper towel she had pressed against them fell to the floor. His eyes flickered, and she knew that the blood excited him, even more than the wool skirt and the white button-down and her being sixteen. Before he had been playing, but now he was serious. He wanted something.
He stood up. He wasn’t much taller than she was, but he was older, a man, and his voice held authority. “Come with me,” he said. “I want to show you something.”
He led her upstairs and down a hallway into a part of the concourse that was under construction, where the shops hadn’t yet been opened, the area empty and dark. She was still wondering what it was he’d show her—drugs, she hoped, wanting to try something new—when suddenly his mouth was on hers and his hand was under her shirt scratching the cuts and adding new ones, the other one pressing her shoulders against the wall. Then he pulled down her tights and unbuckled his pants and suddenly he was inside her.
He never covered her mouth, nor did she call out for help. She wasn’t sure, later, if she had even said no. It all happened so fast. She was a girl who did her homework, who pleased her parents, who wrote thank-you notes. She had no practice in refusal.
He groaned into her shoulder and it was over. Without looking at her, he buckled his pants and walked away. Her tights were still around her knees, and her legs wobbled as she pulled them up. After he was gone, she realized he hadn’t even given her the cigarette.
She never told anyone, wanting the secret to be contained and buried. Later, she did tell her therapist she was pregnant. A quiet, brown-haired woman with circles under her eyes, Grace wore earth-toned sweaters and simple silver jewelry, and Anne found it impossible to imagine that she had ever had sex, or done anything bad, in her entire life. As soon as Anne told her, she regretted it. Her eyes turning moony with sympathy and concern, the therapist wanted to understand and to help. Sixteen years old, shaking with hate, trapped at home with her hopelessly unhappy parents, Anne knew that nothing Grace said could help her. In some respects, her life since then had been a repudiation of the whole idea of help, a big fuck-you to it.
Anne now thought of that time and the incident at the Faubourg without anger. It was years ago, and whatever injuries she’d suffered had long since healed over. It wasn’t an excuse for the person she’d become, just another memory; but it was the first time she had learned to walk away.
Being in New York made her L.A. life feel made up, unreal, and now that she was here, she felt no loyalty to California. She spent the day walking around her old neighborhood, looking in store windows, people-watching. The Midtown hotel seemed like a bad mirage, nothing that had anything to do with her. She was eating egg rolls at Panda Kitchen when she finally checked her cell phone. There were seventeen new messages, all from various people she hadn’t attended to, about the events and appointments she had blown off. Five were from Adam, asking her to call him as soon as she could. She deleted these without even listening all the way through, and cutting him off mid-sentence gave her no small amount of satisfaction. The last was from Julia, confirming their dinner tonight. Anne texted her that she wouldn’t be able to make it.
She licked the salty residue of the egg rolls off her fingers. She had a photo shoot in the morning and knew she’d get in trouble; too much salt made her lids puffy and gave her skin a creped quality. But maybe she wouldn’t do the photo shoot. Maybe, she thought with a smile, she wouldn’t go back at all.
She didn’t return to the hotel until midnight, and she threw a blanket over the blinking red voice-mail button on the phone and went to sleep. In the morning, she took a cab down to Tribeca for her photo shoot, where her late arrival earned her a cursory, halfhearted scolding from the publicist. They were used to this kind of thing. They dressed her up in a variety of outfits—a spy, an executive, a nurse, and the president of the United States, if the president were very young and a little bit slutty.
The lights beat hot on her face and people were yelling instructions and a woman kept oiling her cleavage, then dusting it with sparkly powder.
Amid the hubbub she became aware, after a while, that Adam was standing in the back, watching with a lazy, proprietary interest. An hour later, he came up as she was removing the many layers of makeup. Her fake eyelashes felt exoskeletal, and she peered at him through their spiky, bristled edges. Outside of L.A. his posturing looked even more ridiculous, his tan incongruous, his teeth strangely uniform, plastic.
“That was hot,” he said. “You’re going to do fine.”
“Why are you here?”
“The show’s going off the air,” he said. “It underperformed.”
He had arranged his features into an expression not of concern or reassurance, or even of a readiness to listen and explain, but of complete neutrality. Don’t blame me, it said. You’re on your own.
“So that’s it?” she said.
He put a hand on her bare shoulder. “I should’ve canceled the shoot, but there’s this little fucker at the magazine that I’ve been waiting to get back at for years. So now they’ll have to eat the cost. I’m glad you showed up. I thought maybe you were on a bender or something.”
“I don’t do that,” Anne said mechanically. She was out of her pinstriped miniskirt now and slipping on her jeans.
“No, you’re a wholesome girl,” Adam said. “Good luck.”
She cabbed it back to the hotel, where her room had been tidied, her clothes folded, the toiletries replaced. She took a long bath, her skin pruning. When she got out, her cell phone was beeping. There were two messages: the first from Julia, who almost sounded like she was crying. She was sorry about the news, she said, but while she understood that Anne might be upset, the time to get back on the horse was now. It was the most sympathy Anne had ever heard from her, and she was surprised. The second message was from Hilary—there was no doubting the tears in her voice—begging for Anne to call back.
She deleted Julia’s message and listened to Hilary’s again. The baby was making noises in the background, and she thought about the baby she’d seen on the street outside her apartment, staring back at her, curious and unafraid. But Hilary’s baby was in a small town that Anne couldn’t picture and would never see.
Suddenly she was crying too, the short, dry sobs shaking her all over, her body shivering involuntarily. There was no one to go to or run away from. What had Neal said—that if you have nothing to mourn, then nothing in your life’s worth anything?
She was dangling at the end of her particular tether.
She spent an hour like that in the dark, sterile room, and she felt dismantled. Ended.
Okay, she finally thought. Okay.
So everything was over, the short wild ride. She called her landlord in L.A., broke her lease, and told him to sell whatever was left, which wasn’t much. She decided that today she would do one good thing. She rooted around in her purse and wrote out a check to Hilary for the entire amo
unt she’d earned from the TV show, more money than she’d made in her entire life and far more, she was sure, than Hilary had ever imagined. She put the check in an envelope, added the address in Utica, and left it with the concierge to mail.
When she checked out, she was carrying a single bag that was no bigger than the one she had had when she first got to New York. Rinsed of all her trappings, she felt lighthearted and at ease. For years she had been escaping into one life after another, and this wasn’t the time to stop. People like Hilary and Alan were only temporary runaways. They would always go home; they belonged to the place they came from. Other people were destined to keep leaving, over and over again.
ELEVEN
Montreal, 1996
GRACE DEBATED FOR DAYS whether to even make the trip. What did she expect? She turned it over in her mind, picturing the bestand worst-case scenarios. Eventually she decided to go, because at least she would stop thinking about it and be reckoning with something real.
Tug had never talked much about his hometown or his life there. When Grace spoke of her childhood, which came up naturally every now and again, he’d nod and listen but only rarely reciprocated with stories of his own. Looking back, she understood that this elusiveness had been part of his appeal; he withheld himself, and kept her wanting more.
Knowing this didn’t mean she had stopped feeling that way.
At the funeral, she had stayed in the back and watched his parents—well-dressed, quiet-looking people, his mother in glasses, his father balding, slightly stooped—navigate the service. They didn’t know who she was, or even that she existed, and she wasn’t about to introduce herself then. Perhaps this wasn’t an appropriate time either, but she couldn’t help wanting to go.