From the pastor came another meaty sigh, then he backed up and walked to the window. Sun splashed through the trees outside, casting sinister shadows onto the opposite wall. He lowered the blinds and turned to the grieving mother, his eyes ragged and cavernous, as if all the suffering he’d seen throughout the years had suddenly laid claim to his face, and Mildred had to fight the desire to soothe him, saying something nice or lighthearted to temper the mood, but she was tired of keeping things together. Defiantly, she said, “That’s what I thought.”
“Oh, Mildred,” Ralph turned to her, merely a sliver of his long-suffering self. “What can I say? This is an unspeakable tragedy … it just sucks!”
“Ralph!” she blushed, half angry, half amused.
“Forgive me, but I’m at a loss and I’ve known you too long to play it any different,” he said, his voice recovering a bit of bounce. “The only thing I can assure you is that I have an unshakable faith in God, and mine is a Christian God, remember? A God who sacrificed His own son for the good of mankind. So if I were looking for answers, I couldn’t think of a better place to start.”
“You’re only saying what you’re supposed to say.”
“I’m telling you what I believe.”
“Well, at the moment, ‘it sucks’ is a little more restorative.”
“I understand, I truly do, but you have to trust that these feelings will pass and you’ll be whole again. And this is where faith comes in. Look, if you’re too angry at God, try talking to Brooke.” Mildred eyed him as if he’d gone mad. “She’s still here, Mildred. Maybe you can’t see it now, and this is why you must be patient, but Brooke is with you. She’ll be there whenever you’re ready.”
In the weeks that followed, Mildred in zombielike wanderings found herself drawn to the old maple. Many hours did she spend, barefoot, circling in the shade, or from the swing dangling her toes over the just-shorn grass, its tentacles prickly and stinking of summer, deep green leaves swaying in the breeze above her head. It wasn’t even their true color. That would come in a month or two when the chlorophyll drained into a gorgeous burst of yellow and orange, which every year reminded Mildred that Brooke’s birthday would be coming soon. It was impossible to believe there wouldn’t be another one, ridiculous to think she was here and her daughter wasn’t. Those colors were going to be difficult. She still couldn’t stand too long in the green before thoughts of sawing down the tree surfaced. Sometimes it was just too painful to look, let alone to begin a conversation.
Then one day from the kitchen window, Mildred spotted Cynthia idling in the swing, which in high summer seemed to drop straight out of the sky, its strings were so absorbed by the thick leaves. John Strong sat at her feet, his legs outstretched, hands planted casually behind his back, staring up at her with what Mildred could only describe as stars in his eyes, and she knew immediately that he’d never gazed upon Brooke with such intensity, and something in their easygoing yet intimate body language informed Mildred that this was no fly-by-night union. The two had been cavorting excitedly, hatching a plan to start an organization for families who’d been affected by violent crime, and they’d even appeared onstage together at the memorial in L.A.—another event attended by thousands, only this time it was held in an old Hollywood theatre, featuring a list of speakers any young actress would have been thrilled to number as friends. For her part, Mildred was numbed by the service, everyone saying essentially the same thing, some speaking with performer-like grace while others couldn’t get through their remarks, but all of it was too much.
Worse was the trip to clean out Brooke’s apartment. How difficult to assess which of a person’s belongings had merit or meaning, what to cart home or divvy up or hand out. And there were too many hands in the pot. Friends and neighbors and colleagues they’d never met before … Why were they all here? It felt like a tag sale, a bargainbasement free-for-all—who wants the Cabbage Patch doll? Brooke’s videotape collection? The Russell Wright dishes? After bunching a pile of old birthday cards and photographs and Playbills, Mildred felt dizzy. John led her to the couch they’d labeled for the Salvation Army and said he’d return with a glass of water. Mildred watched him take a few steps then pivot abruptly toward the bedroom. “What the fuck are you doing?!” he shouted. Some of the mumbling and sorting ceased, attention turning toward the inflamed voice. Mildred saw John jump a few feet into the room, his finger pointed, screaming, “Get your grubby hands out of there … !” Despite her headache, Mildred stood and ambled to the bedroom, where she came upon John Strong and a young woman engaged in a tug-of-war over a pink cotton robe. Mildred felt sick to her stomach. “Let go!” John shouted, face contorted, veins the size of earthworms in his forehead, and still she pulled. “You stupid fucking cunt, let go or I’ll smack your fucking head into the wall!”
“John, no!” Mildred covered her mouth.
Ignoring the plea from his girlfriend’s mother, he twisted the young woman’s arm up toward her face. “Ow!” she said, yanking back and tearing the robe. They scrutinized the severed garment.
“You ruined it,” she said. “And it’s Gita Moonsa.”
John grunted incomprehensibly as the woman, prize thwarted, turned and left the room. He watched her through the rictus mask of shock then tipped back against the wall, Brooke’s torn robe cradled in his palms. Slowly raising his head he caught Mildred’s doleful stare and frowned. “It’s her bathrobe,” he said softly.
“Oh, honey.” She went to him, arm curling around his shoulder, and every bone in his body seemed to collapse. She sat him down on the floor. He was hyperventilating so deeply his limbs shook. Tears streaming, he burrowed into Mildred’s embrace, and though she, too, was infuriated, she tabled her aggression and rocked him with all the compassion and succor she could muster, gently assuring him that nobody was going to take anything else. Not while she was there. And in her ability to afford a bit of relief to the grief-stricken boy, Mildred felt the bubble around her beginning to crack.
They took more, of course. Smuggled out things they thought they could collect or trade or sell. And why shouldn’t they? Once Brooke had become Jaymie Jo Rheinhart she belonged to her fans as much as to her family, and this is what Mildred, no matter how she reasoned it, could not forgive, even as she watched Cynthia and John gregariously plotting away underneath the old sugar maple as if they were on a mission guided by Brooke herself. And while it made sense that these two, so similar really, would dedicate themselves to Brooke’s memory, Mildred was besieged by a familiar worry about her younger daughter: that she would remain forever in the shadow of her sister, and with that came a certain solace that she was again fearing for Cynthia, although she knew there was not one thing she could do about it. As a mother you want to give your children the world, she thought, but in the end you give them to the world.
At dusk she walked to the tree. A misty pink glow on the horizon, smell of the earth rising up through the air. Mildred Harrison kicked off her sandals and raised her head to the leaves. “Hello, sweetheart,” she said, and told Brooke what she did that day.
APRIL 15, 1988: POSTSCRIPT
IOFTEN THINK ABOUT MY LAST NIGHT OUTSIDE. How I’d struggled and stowed away for hours, changing trains three times, to make it as far east as I could. It was cooler by the shore. And from a distance the water twinkled spectacularly, a muddy bluegreen in the last gasp of twilight, and I hoped you were recovering in a hospital bed.
Then I heard the news. In the drugstore. It was channel 9, I think, and the anchorwoman was visibly shaken. She said you had been fatally shot in your dressing room. She said police had arrived at the theatre after a 911 call about a fire and found the slain actress. She said they’d rushed you to the hospital but it was too late. They were now questioning your friends, family, and boyfriend, John Strong, and if anyone else had any information about the crime they were asked to come forward.
I bolted from the store, running straight down to the beach, my sneakers crunching into the sand, pac
ked hard from the previous days of rain. Heavy black clouds moved through creamy orange streaks of sky, air so damp it clammed my clothes. But I was sweating bullets: what a demented thing to say.
At the ocean’s lip, I dropped my backpack and walked into the waves splashing over on themselves in tiny whitecaps, paddling me at the waist. I thought about going deeper, setting myself out to sea, where I’d be reunited with Blair in the undersea world and maybe you’d be there, that look in your eyes, the one I’d first seen at my grandparents’ condo, it was there in those last few seconds, I swear. You had the look.
Cold suddenly in the black black water, I shivered. A couple of sea gulls fluttered nearby, one craning its neck sideways to jostle something on its back. It had a glowing pink glob caught in its feathers. Bubble gum. That stuff could take years to wash off. And it soiled with age. I imagined the old gull with a blacktop scar on its back. Anything good or sweet or brightly colored could eventually become damaging. I felt sadder than ever, out there waist-deep in the bay, and wished I had someone to talk to, but everyone was gone.
I slouched up out of the water and sat down on the beach. A jogger passed, the first person I’d seen in a while, and I watched him disintegrate into a black shadow as he ran down the beach and it looked like a fade-out, like dying, which slayed me all over. Wind bustling, I smoked a cigarette with my hands cupped, then emptied the contents of my backpack out on the sand. There was my bloody shirt, the copy of People, my half-destroyed, charcoaledged book. It smelled like a neglected campfire and felt lighter than ever. Flipping the frayed pages turned my stomach. You were everywhere—in sketches, cartoons, clips from magazines … I tore out a page and the wind lifted it up and carried it down the dark beach like the cloudy trail of an airplane, and I stood up and screamed into the rumbling bay, screamed, “Why? Why? WHY?!”
First I burned the magazine. Then the shirt. And, finally, the book, warming my hands over the flames as my life went up in smoke. Then I lay back and dozed for a while. When I awoke the clouds had edged out slightly, making way for a few intrepid stars, and I remembered I was still part of the world; in fact, I’d never felt so aligned with it—sand, water, and the great galaxy of emptiness above, I matched it molecule for molecule, as if my body were disassembling like people in the teleportation machine on Star Trek—and it made me think of a prayer I’d once heard on the radio out in Arizona: “You are a child of the universe, no less than the trees and the stars; you have a right to be here.”
Understand, I had to believe something. Why not proclaim myself part of an infinite universe, where you might return someday in a supernova of love and forgiveness? I was a bit like your mother in that respect, demanding you be bigger than this world. To this day, she maintains you got where you needed to be. As much as I try to believe her—and it’s taken awhile—I can’t. My heart is as dusty black and empty as that last night sky.
I still love you, Brooke, and I always will. For that I won’t apologize. The rest I offer up to the lawyers, judges, shrinks, and reporters, to all of your fans who hate my guts, to your family and friends and boyfriend, John Strong, although I recently heard he’s married your sister and, I’m sorry, that makes me mad. Seems like they’d have more respect for your memory, but who am I to say? We’re all supposed to be healing. So maybe this’ll help. All I ask is that you clean up the punctuation a bit and please be kind.
With or Without You Page 34