Amen, L.A.

by Cherie Bennett

  “Because he’s still using,” I said, filling in the blanks.

  “Yeah.” She shook her head ruefully. “It sucks and I’ve tried so hard to—” She stopped midsentence and held up one of those oversized purses that girls in L.A. carry around—the ones that cost four figures and look like you could fit your entire family inside. “Clothes for him.”

  She looked so upset that I reached out and touched her arm. “You’re a good sister.”

  “If you knew me better, you probably wouldn’t say that.” She shifted the oversized purse to her other hand. “You can’t imagine the places I’ve found him—Runyon Canyon Park, people’s houses—stark naked, playing his guitar or someone else’s he happened to find. Sometimes by the time I get there, he’s already asleep. So far, no one’s called the cops. But it’s just a matter of time.”

  “My parents went upstairs to investigate. Come on, I’ll show you.” I opened the door wider. Her Geiger counter thing beeped more loudly.

  She stepped into the palatial entranceway. “I really want to thank you for helping me. Sometimes people aren’t so … compassionate.”

  “Well, as my mom would say, everyone has their demons.”

  “Your mother sounds like a saint,” Alex said.

  “Close enough. She’s a minister.”

  I led her upstairs and the GPS device beeped like a hamster in heat. We found my parents coming out of my room. I quickly introduced them to Alex and filled them in.

  “Your brother’s out like a light,” my father said. He cracked open my door so that we could peer in.

  Sure enough, Shepard was fast asleep, snoring on my bed, covered by the sheets and the white comforter. I made a mental note to find our new home’s washing machine as soon as he was gone.

  “Where’re Gemma and Chad?” I asked, concerned that my younger sibs might be freaked by all of this.

  “Out at the pool,” Dad assured me.

  Mom nodded. “No worries.”

  This might be the moment for me to pause and say that I have really nice parents.

  “So, what do we do now?” I asked.

  “I can take it from here,” Alex said. “Thank you all, really. For being so kind.”

  My mother gently touched Alex’s arm. Funny. It was the same gesture I’d made toward her downstairs. “We’ll wait in the den.”

  “Sure you don’t need us?” my father asked.

  Alex shook her head. “Trust me. I’m used to this.”

  Apparently, it was true. My parents and I only had to wait about ten minutes—we amused ourselves by watching the Weather Channel’s ten-day forecast for Southern California, which promised day after day after day after day of clear sunny skies and temperatures in the mid-eighties—before my bedroom door opened and Alex led her brother out of my room. He was now dressed in faded jeans and a white T-shirt. I willed myself to look everyplace except at … you know. I mean, having seen his—you know—and now seeing the outline of his you know through the jeans.

  Alex made the awkward introductions. “Well, I feel as if I know you already,” Shep quipped with a smile that showed off Chiclet white teeth. “Thank you for the hospitality.” He bowed gallantly. “And I’m sorry to have disturbed you.”

  “I’m guessing you’re wearing that ankle cuff for a reason,” Mom said.

  Shep nodded.

  “If we had little kids, I’d be a lot more upset than I am right now.” Dad’s voice was stern. “You need to be more responsible for your behavior.”

  “He’s working on it,” Alex said quickly. Somehow, I had the feeling that she was used to defending her big brother.

  “Because next time—fair warning—I will call the cops,” my dad added.

  Shep nodded. “Fair warning,” he echoed. “By the way, whose guitar is the twelve string?”

  I waggled my fingers in the air.

  “Fantastic instrument,” he said.

  Fantastic instrument. Obviously he was talking about the guitar. But it made me think about his you know again, and I swear if I hadn’t been intimately engaged with Sean’s you know the night before, I would not have kept obsessing in this direction.

  “I’d be happy to show you a few tricks sometime,” Shep added. “If you’re interested.”

  I opened my mouth to speak, but my father beat me to it. “Thanks, but I’d rather not have you teaching my daughter any ‘tricks.’ ”

  I could feel myself blushing again. “He didn’t mean—”

  “I think I’d better get my brother home now,” Alex interrupted. “Nat, want to walk us back?”

  It had been a long day that had started in Mankato and ended in this movie-set mansion in the Bel Air hills, but I would be lying if I didn’t say I was flying at Alex’s invite. Back in Minnesota, I had a lot of friends—Shelby was the best of them, but it wasn’t like we were soul sisters—most of whom I’d grown up with. One of my worries was having to make all new friends. Yet I’d been here for just a few hours and had already made a new friend in Sandra. Now there was Alex, too. In Mankato, a lot of my friends were also friends with each other. Maybe Sandra and Alex already were friends. It was possible.

  I turned to my parents. “Anything I need to be home for?”

  Mom shook her head. “Have fun.” She bumped a hip into my dad’s side. “What do you say we change into bathing suits and join the kids in the pool, handsome?”

  Once we were outside, Alex showed me a very cool shortcut to her house, which involved a you-wouldn’t-know-it-was-there-unless-someone-showed-you footpath that started about halfway down our driveway, a short jaunt downhill to a dry streambed, a walk north in this streambed with scrub brush and cooing pheasants all around us, past one huge brown mansion high on the hill, and then a hike uphill to a trail similar to the one we’d descended at my new place. We emerged on Alex’s back patio—roughly half the size of a football field, with a guitar-shaped swimming pool, a tennis court, a paddle-tennis court, and a hot tub. All the way, Shepard was normal as normal could be. I learned that until his arrest, he’d been the lead guitarist of Bruiser, a death metal band in the vein of Lamb of God. Not a band I adored, but Chad was crazy about them. Wait till he heard that their former lead guitarist had paid an unannounced visit to our new house, and my bed. As we walked through the ravine, Shep regaled me with stories of Bruiser’s recent tour of Japan, including a visit with the country’s foreign minister. Then, once we got to Alex’s deck, he excused himself with another thank-you to me and my parents for our help and went inside.

  “Let’s sit for a while, okay? You good?” Alex asked as she plopped down in a comfortable-looking wicker chair. I sat in the one next to hers. “Want something to drink? Iced tea?”

  “Okay. Sure.”

  “Great.” There was a steel and glass table a few feet away with a white telephone on it. She called the house kitchen and asked for a fruit tray, a plate of biscotti, a pitcher of iced tea, and two glasses of Fiji water. Then she thanked whomever had answered and came back.

  “We have a great house staff. Mrs. Cleveland? The cook? She used to work for Platinum. You know, the singer?”

  “I think I read that she’s in rehab again,” I mused.

  “Yeah, she and Shep had a thing. Of course, she and everyone have had a thing.” Alex closed her eyes and raised her face to the setting sun. “Anyway, we were lucky to get her. Miguel—he’s the houseman—will bring everything out in a minute.”

  Whoa baby. Alex’s family had a cook? And a houseman, which I assumed was the moral equivalent of a butler? What else did they have? Drivers? Gardeners? Housekeepers? Massage therapists who came to the house after breakfast and dinner? It was all so new to me. Back in Minnesota, no matter how busy my parents were, or how busy we kids were, we cooked, cleaned, and kept up the house by ourselves. We’d never, ever had a housekeeper or a nanny or any other kind of help.

  “Your parents must be really busy if you have a cook and a houseman,” I commented.

  “My pa
rents are dead. Northern Air flight 504? They were on it. It’s just us. Shepard, me, and my sister, Chloe.”

  My insides squeezed. I remembered Northern Air 504. It had gone down in heavy weather on approach to Honolulu three or four years earlier. The investigation blamed wind shear. The passengers and crew—more than 155 people in all—were killed.

  “I’m so sorry.” My voice actually cracked on the word “sorry.”

  “Yeah. Me too. But life goes on.”

  I raised my knees to my chin and wrapped my arms around them. “How old is Chloe?”

  “Eight. She’s away at camp for the summer, and then she’ll head back to boarding school. Which bites, if you ask me. But my brother has legal custody of us both. Which means he decides. I’m sort of along for the ride. Until I’m eighteen, that is. Then, we’ll see. At least money isn’t a problem. My folks had a lot of life insurance, and Shep made a ton of money when he was touring. But still …”

  “Being raised by your brother? That has to be hard.”

  I hated myself for saying that. It sounded like such a platitude, because it was. Somehow, though, it didn’t matter. Either Alex had been looking to talk to someone for a long time, or it was my having the-face-everyone-wants-to-spill-everything-to. Or both. Whatever it was, Alex talked, even as white-jacketed Miguel—a striking man in his forties with one of the best handlebar mustaches I’ve ever seen not in a movie—came silently onto the patio, set up our refreshments on the table, and left so quickly we didn’t even have time to say thank you.

  She talked about her parents. How much she missed them. How hard it was to have Shepard as her guardian—and how dicey it was with Shep being busted for drugs. She’d been very close with her father, who had been a CEO with one of the biggest record labels in town. Her sister, Chloe, had been super-close with their mother, who had been a city attorney and very active in local politics. In so many ways, Alex felt adrift.

  “But … you must have a lot of friends,” I ventured.

  “Sure.” She smiled wearily. “I’ll introduce you around. Tomorrow night a bunch of us are going to the movies at the cemetery. Maybe you want to come?”

  “Movies at the cemetery?” I was baffled.

  She explained that at the Hollywood Forever Cemetery in Hollywood, there were free movies during the summer; people came with blankets, chairs, and picnics. “I think tomorrow night is Sleepless in Seattle. It’ll be fun.”

  I grinned. “I’d love to.”

  “If you have any friends you want to invite …, ” she began. “But I guess not. You just got here.”

  I sat up straighter in the chair. This was working out perfectly. “I do, actually. Have a friend here, I mean.”

  “Cool, invite her.” Alex stood. “I’m going to the bathroom in the cabana. Call your friend if you want.”

  As she walked off, I slipped my cell from my pocket and dialed Sandra.

  “Sandra?” I began when she answered. “It’s Nat … Natalie … Shelton. The new minister’s—”

  “Oh, hi and shut up!” she ordered jokingly. “I already feel like I’ve known you forever.”

  A little bubble of happiness welled up inside me. “That’s such a sweet thing to say,” I told her.

  “You know how it is,” she went on. “Sometimes you just click with a person. So what’s up?”

  “I met one of my neighbors, and she invited me to come with her and her friends tomorrow to this cemetery to see a movie—”

  “Hollywood Forever,” Sandra interjected.

  “That’s it,” I replied. “And she asked if there was anyone I wanted to invite, so I thought of you, and, well, I’m calling.”

  “Sweet,” Sandra said. “I love that place.”

  “Can you come?”

  “I don’t see any reason why not. By the way, who’s the neighbor? Someone from church?”

  “I don’t know where she goes to church—or even if she goes,” I admitted. “Her name is Alexis. Alex Samuels.”

  Dead silence. I mean, really, really dead silence. So dead I thought I’d lost the call until I checked my cell and saw we were still connected.

  “Sandra, are you there?”

  More silence. Then: “Yeah. I’m here.” Her voice was hard. “Natalie, I’m going to say this once, and only because you’re new and have no way of knowing.”

  I had no idea what she was talking about. “Knowing what?”

  “This,” Sandra went on, her voice steely ice. “If you know what’s good for you, stay far away from Alex Samuels.”

  Chapter Four

  That night, as I lay in bed thinking back on the strangest twenty-four hours of my life, Sandra’s words on the phone came to me again and again. “If you know what’s good for you, stay far away from Alex Samuels.”

  What the heck was that about? Whatever it was, wasn’t Sandra being a tad melodramatic? Maybe living in La La Land just did that to a person after a while. I’d asked Sandra to tell me more, but she’d said something about how Christian girls don’t gossip, which I know for a fact is utter baloney. Gossiping is an equal opportunity character flaw.

  When Alex came back, I told her that my friend was busy and couldn’t come to the movie, which was pretty much the truth, in a way.

  For the next hour, before I got so tired I was ready to go home, I was two people with her. Person One was the girl truly interested in everything Alex had to say. As usual, like in the ladies’ room, she mostly talked and I mostly listened. Of course, her life was a heck of a lot more glamorous than my life. She’d visited forty countries. I don’t know if I’ve visited forty counties. She’d been to every great restaurant in Los Angeles and half the great restaurants in California. My dining experience in Mankato was pretty much limited to the same places you could go anywhere in the country, places that ended with an apostrophe s. Applebee’s. Denny’s. Like that. She’d dropped the names of designer boutiques she liked to shop—Alaïa, Kitson, Intermix—the way my friends and I talked about Target or Old Navy.

  Person Two, on the other hand, was watching and listening to Person One talking to Alex, trying to figure out why Sandra had warned me to stay away from her. I thought I had pretty good radar about people. For the life of me, I couldn’t figure out why I ought to run in the other direction. Besides, I’m not the kind of person who lets other people tell her who she should or should not be friends with. I liked Alex. I was the new girl, in a new place, and was happy to have a new friend.

  Then there was a bonus. Just before I went home, Shepard came down with a couple of Gibson acoustic guitars. As wigged out as he’d been in my room, he now seemed normal. He handed me one of the guitars—Alex said that when musical ability had been given out, she had been at the back of the line—and I got to jam with the best guitarist I’ve ever met. It was simple twelve-bar blues; I played rhythm and he played lead. For one golden sequence, though, at Shepard’s urging (and through my intense discomfort, by the way), I took the lead while he switched to rhythm. I protested, but Alex egged me on.

  So I played. It was glorious. Jamming with Shepard Samuels out on an open-air deck in the Los Angeles hills, the sun starting to set over the Santa Monica Mountains and the Pacific beyond. I’m not going to say that it changed my mind about the move. I still wanted to get on the next plane back to Minnesota. But it sure made the ending of the first day different from the beginning.

  My parents were already in bed when I came home from Alex’s, so I went up to my room. I got an email from Sean at ten o’clock, just before I went to sleep for the first time in my new house, with “Sorry I Missed Your Calls” in the subject line. It wasn’t very long, just saying he hoped that the day had been okay, that the new place was homey, and that he and I were still good now that we had done it. Not a word about how he felt, and not a question about how I felt, though there was something about God forgiving. I skimmed over that part really quickly, because I didn’t think God had much to do with the night before.

  Sean went on f
or a few lines about his day, shockingly ordinary in comparison to my own. He had a summer job as a custodial assistant at the Mankato Mall, where he spent his days on his hands and knees scraping gum off the tile floor. He said that if I wanted to IM him, he’d be online for a while.

  I checked to see if he was still online. He wasn’t, which wasn’t so bad. My day had started at five a.m. when you take into account the change of time zone. I wouldn’t have been much good in a chat, and if we turned on our webcams, he would have seen me yawn every three minutes. Not so attractive. So I emailed him back with a brief but newsy summary of my day, said we’d definitely talk the next day, then clicked off.

  I still wasn’t sure what I wanted to say about what had happened at the cabin. He’d written that he hoped he and I were still good. We were. But guilty as I was, I didn’t know if I had the guts to tell him how I’d felt about the experience, or even how uncertain my feelings were. As for Sean, I couldn’t imagine him getting emotional about the subject at all.

  That made me think about how we had been communicating lately. How we rarely talked about big stuff. How our conversations were always safe. I tried to remember the last really deep conversation we’d had, or the last real argument. I couldn’t.

  I got in the glass-enclosed brown and white marble shower, which could be turned into a steam room with the flick of a switch. There was also a marble bathtub with Jacuzzi jets in case I was pining for that in-home spa experience. The toilet was in its own separate little room, and there was a phone on the wall next to it. Then there was the vanity, in yet another connecting room, with a long marble counter with built-in cubbyholes and drawers in which to put my pathetically small collection of drugstore cosmetics. Mirrors covered one wall, and two of the mirrors pulled away from the wall so you could get a 270-degree view of yourself, which is either intensely cool or intensely intimidating. For me, it was intensely intimidating.

  After drying off in this luxurious bathroom with the same ordinary green towels I used at home in Minnesota—talk about a clash of cultures!—I thought about working on the lyrics to “The Shape I’m In,” but instead went to bed.