Girl, Unframed

by Deb Caletti

  Max jumped on Meredith with excitement, and he was all we could deal with at first. And then he calmed down, and Meredith set her bag on the floor and looked at the White Room in astonishment.

  “Holy shit,” she whispered. Meredith hardly ever swore. She walked straight to the windows. The view pulled you in like that. “This is incredible. The bridge is right there.”

  It was a strange combination, feeling self-conscious but wanting to show off, too. I opened the doors to the back patio and walked out so she’d follow. The fog had already lifted, and the ocean was also showing off. Seeing it through Meredith’s eyes—it looked magnificent.

  “Down there, that’s China Beach. Anytime you want to go down there, feel free.”

  “Look at those stairs. That is so cool. Like a maze.” She moved her hand back and forth, indicating the switchbacks. “Wow.”

  “Sometimes the fog is here all day and it’s not as awesome. It gets depressing.”

  “I can’t imagine being depressed here. You’re never going to want to come home.”

  “The tide is really low right now. We could walk all the way to Baker Beach, which you usually can’t do. Want to go?”

  “Sure.”

  “I’ll show you to your room and stuff.”

  “Okay. But where’s your mom? It’s like we’re all alone in this huge place.”

  I wanted to say, Welcome to my life, because that’s how I always felt. Instead, I just said, “Sleeping? She doesn’t like to wake up before noon, at the earliest.”

  “Whoa. That’s so late! My mom did that, like, once in her life, when she took a pain pill after her dental surgery.”

  We bump-rolled Meredith’s bag up the stairs as Max sped ahead. Meredith stopped at the landing and looked up at that huge poster of Lila in Nefarious.

  “Nice to see your mother’s crotch every time you go up and down,” I said, and we both cracked up. It felt like the old Meredith and me.

  But then Meredith said, “We watched it once.”

  “You did? You never said.”

  “My dad got all embarrassed at that part. He left the room to find us some sodas.”

  I lived in two different worlds. And right then, I felt like a visitor in both of them.

  * * *

  “Your room. Your bathroom. Wi-Fi password: ‘Nefarious.’ Is this okay?”

  “Okay? I’ve never even seen a house like this before, let alone stayed in one.”

  We left Max at home until Meredith could get more used to him. He scared her a little. Meredith and I raced each other down the orange stucco stairwell to the beach, wearing our bathing suits, me carrying the beach bag. It was colder than it looked, and I could see goose bumps rise up along Meredith’s arms.

  “Want my sweatshirt?” I asked.

  “I’m good!”

  “I usually find a big rock to lay behind so I can sunbathe out of the wind.”

  We walked the stretch of shoreline to Baker, where I promised Meredith that she’d get the best photos. She stopped along the way to look at the starfish and anemones, which you could see because of the low tide. At Baker, we rolled out our towels, and she told me more about Cora and Bryce, how Bryce’s family had this boat docked at Shilshole, and how they’d go there alone. Meredith was shocked at this. Cora was going to get into trouble. Cora was going too far. I wondered if Bryce was going to get into trouble. I wondered if he was going too far. I hoped the concealer on my neck wasn’t too obvious in the sun. I tried to tell her about Nicco, how he was more than just a casual friend. We were supposed to all go out together on Monday night. I guess I wanted to warn her. I would have gone to an empty boat with him in two seconds.

  “Nicco’s bringing his friend Carlos.”

  Meredith made a face.

  “Don’t look like that. He sounds really nice. It seemed better than it just being the three of us.”

  Then we dropped the subject. We replayed the shocking ending of The Night Dweller, and I pretended I still loved R. W. Wright. We laughed about the time Ivy Reese caught a crab during a race and flew out of the boat. Caught a crab—when you put the oar in the water at the wrong time, which can shoot you up and out like a cannonball. We talked about how we should do something big next year to celebrate our seventeenth birthdays, like run a half marathon or do a polar plunge.

  The sun was shining, and kids were playing on the beach, and my best friend was sitting next to me on a towel, so there was no real reason for the feeling I had as we were talking about crossing finish lines and dashing into icy cold waters. It was the strongest feeling, empty and deep as a newly dug grave, and dark as one too. The ghost—she stood beside that grave and shook her head. All of the stuff we were talking about doing next year—none of that was going to happen. None of it. The feeling passed over me, a cloud over the sun, and then the sun was out again.

  We were laughing about something, I don’t even remember what, and Meredith was drinking sparkling water out of the bottle and I was putting lotion on my legs, when this guy came up to ask us for directions to Golden Gate Park. He was maybe, I don’t know, thirty, with that kind of straight haircut that makes you look like a newsman. Blue shorts, shirt off, to make sure we saw that he worked out. By the way he was looking at us, I knew he didn’t really care about Golden Gate Park.

  “No idea,” I said.

  “You tourists, too?”

  “No idea,” I said again. Meredith crossed her legs and folded her arms over her chest.

  “Wow. Wouldn’t kill you to be friendly,” he said, before turning away and walking off, pissed.

  “Ew.” Meredith grimaced. And then, “Oh, God! Don’t look!”

  Which of course made me look. It was just old Chet in his Dodgers cap, strolling down the beach in all his glory. As the summer had gone on, he’d been getting tanner and tanner. He was brown as a handful of… well, I was going to say nuts.

  “That’s just Chet,” I said.

  “You know him?”

  “Well, not know-know. Familiar with. He’s here all the time. He’s harmless.”

  “You said you saw nudists, but wow.” Her face was beet red.

  “I tried to take pictures once to send to you guys.”

  “Syd,” she said. She sounded like Ellen.

  It was pretty clear that only I had gone from my regular legs in the boat that day to these legs now, stretched before me, legs that made a guy stop and look, legs that belonged to someone who wanted things. Only I had moved from the place where you’re separate from the bigger world, to the place where you aren’t.

  “Let’s go back,” Meredith said.

  But there was really no going back, was there?

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  Exhibit 52: Photo of the Aphrodite of Knidos, fourth century B.C.

  When Meredith and I climbed our stairs again and reached the top, there she was, Lila, sitting at the table on the patio, wearing her sunglasses and her ivory satin robe with the embroidered sleeves, and eating a bowl of strawberries. Max was lounging in the shady spot under the roof. His tongue was out, and he panted his huh, huh, huh.

  “Baby!” Lila said when she saw us. “And Meredith! We’re so glad you’re here. Look at you two beauties!”

  “Oh, I look awful,” Meredith said, brushing sand off her legs. “And thank you so much for having me. I can’t believe I’m here. And, oh my God, you’re so beautiful in real life.”

  Lila stood, drew her into a hug. “What a sweetie you are.” This wasn’t the regular Meredith, who held that oar with her muscles bulging. This was a less confident Meredith, but it was okay, because she was pushing every Lila button, and Lila was loving it.

  “My parents are huge fans.” Wrong move, because it would only remind Lila of her age. “And so am I. All of our friends are.” Recovery. Meredith for the win.

  “Anything you need, you let me know. Our home is your home.”

  “How about the keys to Jake’s car?” I joked.

  “All right, ba
by, you smart-ass. Anything but that. He loves that thing more than me.”

  “Yellow Lamborghini,” I said.

  “You told me.”

  God, I was being a show-off. With Meredith there, all my insecurity floodgates had opened, and I was plugging the holes with stuff we didn’t even care about at home.

  “I made a reservation at Foreign Cinema. Sound good? I thought you girls might enjoy that.”

  “Great,” I said, as though I knew what it was, even though I didn’t. Insecurity can make you such an ass.

  “I thought it’d be fun for Naomi to join us. She just arrived in town. She’s here playing Tink at the Orpheum, but the first show isn’t until Friday.”

  “Naomi Meadows?” I said to Meredith. She’d been in the pilot with Lila, but everyone knew her better from that TV series New School.

  “Oh, wow.” Meredith’s eyes went wide. She loved that show.

  On the way back to our rooms to shower and clean up, I showed Meredith the painting in the dining room. “This is kinda cool,” I said. I pointed to the corner of the painting where his signature was.

  Meredith squinted. “No idea.”

  “Picasso.”

  “No way.”

  “Way.”

  “It can’t be real.”

  “It’s real. Jacqueline. His second wife. She was twenty-six and he was seventy-two.”

  “That’s disgusting.”

  “He was a ladies’ man. I read that he had two wives and, like, six mistresses and hundreds of affairs.”

  “I don’t know where that expression came from, ‘ladies’ man,’ ” Meredith said. “They should just be called creeps.”

  I’d heard that expression so often, I’d never stopped to think about it before. My father was always called a ladies’ man. Papa Chesterton, too, and even Jake. But there was no such thing as a men’s lady. And Meredith was right, because ladies’ man made it sound almost polite, when what they really did was go through women like a sick kid goes through Kleenex.

  The point of this story, though, about Meredith and the beach and Lila and the painting, is not really about naked Chet, or the rejected, shirtless beach guy, or ladies’ men, or even the ways I needed to show off to Meredith how great things were in San Francisco because I was actually miserable there.

  The point is those sunglasses. The ones Lila was wearing. Because that evening, as the sun was beginning to set, as we were driving toward the Mission to the restaurant, Lila still had them on. Meredith and I sat together in the back seat, but I noticed anyway, because it had to be hard to see in those, now that the sky was turning golden.

  “What’s with the glasses, Lila?” I don’t think Meredith had even seen Lila’s eyes yet.

  “Oh! I look horrible! Bruised my silly cheek walking into an open cabinet door. Good thing this place has low lighting.”

  She lifted her glasses to her head for a moment, and even with the yellow evening light in the rearview mirror, we both could see it, Meredith and me. It was covered in makeup, but there was a dark ring under her eye. I remembered the night before, the fight she had with Jake.

  My stomach felt sick. It was the second bruise. The horror trickled in. Tick, tick, tick went the clock.

  In the car, Meredith looked over at me, and I looked back. A black eye, our glance said. Meredith looked out the window after that, pretended to watch the scenery. She looked uneasy. She started picking at her fingernails, the way she did when she was worried.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  Exhibit 53: Sworn statement of Naomi Meadows

  Naomi Meadows was already at the table, and so was her leading man, Gavin Isaacs, who played Captain Hook in their production. Naomi was stylish and stunning, wearing slim jeans with a wide belt and a red silk blouse, and he was a very, very good-looking Captain Hook, with dark eyes and shadowy stubble and shoulder-length dark hair. The kind of good looking that shuts your mouth in nerves. Charisma came off him in waves. He looked familiar, but I couldn’t place him. Later, we realized he was one of the bad guys in that series of action movies, Thriller Road, one, two, three, etc. Mer and I had seen maybe the first one and that was all.

  The restaurant was large and industrial inside, but the outside patio where we sat was romantic, strung with white lights, the tables candlelit and warmed by heat lamps. It was called Foreign Cinema because a movie played on the wall of a building in front of us. That night, it was The Princess Bride. You couldn’t really hear it, it was too noisy out there, but the flickering images played above that beautiful patio, charming and dreamlike.

  There was a lot of talk about the hip new version of Peter Pan they were in—how audiences were different in various cities, a recounting of where the show would go next and next and next. Naomi Meadows, who was a bigger star now than Lila, was still all Miss Lila this, and Miss Lila that. There was playful, fun reminiscing about the shooting of the pilot years ago. They ordered drinks and appetizers—antipasto, a pear and endive salad, another salad of beets and blood oranges—but we didn’t order dinner yet because Jake was supposed to be joining us later, something Lila hadn’t mentioned before.

  Meredith was acting so shy and nervous that it was making me nervous. Or maybe I was nervous on my own, because people kept staring and whispering and someone came and asked Gavin Isaacs for his autograph, proving that people had watched way, way more of those action movies than I had.

  The waiter kept returning to ask if we were ready to order dinner, but we were still waiting for Jake. The appetizer plates were taken. Meredith asked if she could take a photo with all of them, which embarrassed me, but Lila loved it. Gavin Isaacs got his third Mosswood whiskey. Lila was on her third glass of wine. Naomi Meadows ordered another sparkling water with lime. Lila kept looking at her phone. Gavin Isaacs said he was starving, so we all ordered anyway. He was acting like the leader, the way that some guys do, even at a table of women.

  In spite of the beautiful plates—the swordfish and Kobe steak and duck breast and sesame seed fried chicken—as well as Naomi’s laugh and Gavin Isaacs’s joking (probably due to the fourth Mosswood), I could feel the mood slipping. Lila kept saying things like He must have gotten caught up and There must have been an emergency and His phone must have died. Meredith kept looking at the movie screen, and Gavin Isaacs’s eyes began to search for the waiter. The waiter brought complimentary desserts, and Gavin Isaacs’s face dropped, as if the tray held a stack of pressing paperwork instead of cheesecake drizzled with a pomegranate and cranberry sauce.

  If the mood was already slipping, it then took a plunge. Naomi Meadows leaned across the table and set her hand over Lila’s. “I hope you’re all right,” she said. In that loud room, it sounded like, “I HOPE YOU’RE ALL RIGHT.”

  Lila took her hand back. “I’m fine.”

  “I mean…” Naomi Meadows circled her finger in the direction of Lila’s eye.

  “I walked into my closet door.”

  Meredith kicked me under the table. Of course I’d heard it too. How she’d told us cabinet door and now said closet door. I started to feel anxious. No. I felt alarmed.

  “I hope you know I’m always here for you,” Naomi said. Things turned suddenly too intimate. Gavin Isaacs pushed his chair back and hunted down the waiter. I saw him shove his credit card at the poor guy; he wanted out of there so bad. Lila was smiling, but it was like cracks were forming on her face. Bits of her psyche were showing through.

  “And I am always here for you,” she said.

  * * *

  We rode home in silence, though Meredith kept nudging my foot with her foot. Lila was driving a little too fast. I was sure Meredith had been counting those glasses of wine. Meredith’s fingers gripped the edge of the seat. I didn’t know what she expected me to do. When we got home, Lila threw her car keys on the kitchen counter. “Fucking bastard,” she said.

  Meredith and I crept upstairs away from Lila and her anger. Awkwardness sat like a third person between us. It reminded me of wh
en weird Andrew Wilcox would sit with us at lunch.

  “Do you want to watch a movie or something?” I said.

  “I think I’ll just go to bed. I’m really tired,” Meredith said.

  “Okay. See you in the morning.”

  I took Max out to pee. On the third floor, the window of the guest room was open. Over the sound of the Max waterfall, I could hear the low murmurs of Meredith’s voice on the phone. I wondered who she was talking to. At that hour, it was probably Ellen. As I stood in the garden, I felt the shame of us, the truth of us, my so-called family. In the moonlight, Max trotted around the yard, and I watched the clouds glide through the skeleton bones of the house next door. Finally, it was quiet. Meredith must have hung up.

  I took a photo of the sky. Big moon, I texted Nicco. We hadn’t talked all day, with Meredith visiting. I was so lonely for someone who knew me. I’d probably felt that way my whole life.

  Big missing, he texted back.

  I stared at the guest room window. I wondered what Meredith was thinking up there.

  Even in the garden under the moon, I could feel Meredith’s worry. In that house, the tension had been ratcheting up and up and up, but I’d been living with it. I’d maybe even gotten used to it, little by little. But there was something about having Meredith there. There was something about seeing everything through someone else’s eyes, not just a city.

  And for the first time, I was anxious because she was anxious. I was shocked because she was shocked.

  I was scared because she was scared.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

  Exhibit 54: Sworn statement of Gavin D. Isaacs

  Meredith and I had fun the next day. I was trying hard to erase the night before. I took her to City Lights Bookstore, because I knew she’d love it. I ordered us car service again. I wanted Meredith to have a really good time. No more Creeps of San Francisco.