But the Adderall was my big secret. Especially from people at work. Pill-popping drug addicts didn’t fit the Blair employee profile. I imagined the disbelief on Faraday’s face if I asked for three weeks off to attend rehab. Would insurance even cover it?
What did it matter, anyway? Who had time for rehab?
Not me. With Mom facing the possibility of another cancer diagnosis and expensive medical treatment, my new job, my upside-down mortgage, and now the Paxton case in flux, I couldn’t afford to mess up. There was no room for fear or doubt. Everyone was counting on me. But my nerves were stretching like taffy that would soon snap.
“Miss Silver?”
“What is it?” I cried.
A secretary stood behind me. It was the same girl who’d walked into my office earlier. How long had she been here? How much of my anguished conversation with Tyler had she overheard? What if I’d been muttering out loud just now about the Adderall? Would she go back to her desk and write a memo to Thomas Blair?
“Sorry, I didn’t mean to startle you. I’m going on a coffee run and Samantha said to ask if you wanted anything.”
Tyler was right. I had to get a grip on myself before things got completely out of control.
My brain felt like syrup. God, I needed an Adderall. But what if neuroenhancers were now causing my problem? I couldn’t remember the secretary’s name. Some kind of flower. Phyllis, Amaryllis? And with that, I had it. Iris! The secretary’s name was Iris.
Mustering a smile, I said, “No thanks, Iris. If I have any more caffeine, you’ll be able to launch me to Alpha Centauri. But it’s awfully sweet of you to ask.”
* * *
That evening, I got almost to the freeway before I realized I’d left my cell phone charging on the desk. With resignation, I turned the car around.
Ten minutes later, as I waited to turn left into Blair’s underground parking structure, I saw a car pull out. Light shone from the security booth, illuminating the two men inside. To my surprise, I recognized Tyler sitting in the passenger seat of a red Nissan Z. His elbow rested casually against the lowered window and his lips moved as he gesticulated with his other hand, telling a story. The driver was smiling and nodding. He too looked familiar.
As the traffic cleared and the Z turned right and roared out of sight, I caught a good look at the driver.
It was the shambling workman, the Plumber.
Tyler had just gotten through telling me he didn’t even know the Plumber’s name.
I tried to think of reasons he might be sitting in the car of this man who had a knack of turning up whenever there was trouble on the Paxton case.
Maybe Tyler’s car was still acting up and the Plumber had offered him a ride home?
No, Tyler had said it was fixed.
The obvious conclusion stared me in the face: Tyler had lied about knowing Faraday’s operative. He’d seemed all casual in the car, like they were longtime buddies. They knew each other. They worked together.
There seemed little doubt that Tyler was complicit with whatever was going on at Blair.
Seeing Tyler with the Plumber had sent a charge of adrenaline shooting through my system. Now that too ebbed, leaving me more exhausted, confused, and brain-dead than ever. When I got home, I tumbled into dreamless sleep.
21
FALL 1993
It wasn’t like Anabelle and I suddenly stopped being friends after what happened that night in Playa del Rey when we were sixteen.
The next morning, I’d woken up with my head pounding and popped some aspirin. Anabelle was still asleep, tossing restlessly, uttering small, wordless cries. After reassuring myself that she was all right, I went back to sleep and dreamed of a bare concrete cell. I was tied to a chair and a red-faced policeman was shouting, his spittle hitting my cheeks, demanding to know why I’d abandoned Anabelle. When I opened my eyes again it was early afternoon and the shower was running.
Soon Anabelle emerged in a red silk kimono, hair wrapped in a towel. She was shaky and pale, her voluptuous mouth thinned in a tight line. So much for going to the police—the physical evidence had just swirled down the drain.
From the look she gave me, I understood that she didn’t want to speak about what had happened.
And so, because I was constitutionally incapable of denying her anything, we never did.
I hung around Villa Marbella as the afternoon unraveled, trying to recapture our usual Sunday groove. We drank coffee by the pool and read the paper, but everything seemed fragmented and made no sense. I listened for Luke’s footfall, but the big house was spookily quiet. For a while, I distracted myself by imagining that he’d driven back to Playa del Rey with a Dirty Harry Magnum to blow away those animals (never mind that the perps were long gone).
I kept this revenge fantasy to myself.
Instead, I put on U2’s Zooropa, whose cool Berlin techno never failed to animate Anabelle. She didn’t react. She placed Madame Bovary facedown on the chaise longue and stared with blank, sightless eyes at the tropical jungle of her backyard.
For the two of us, who could talk effortlessly about anything for hours, who were never at a loss for words, this new silence held a veiled menace. Since we couldn’t talk about what had happened, we found it painful to talk about anything at all.
The shadows lengthened. As dusk fell, the air grew thick with the indolic sweet stench of tuberose.
Like something had died.
“Are you okay?” I asked finally.
She shifted, and the book fell into a puddle.
“Why did Madame Bovary even bother?” She prodded the pages with a lavender-painted toe.
“Killing herself?” I asked nervously. “Or falling in love?”
Anabelle gave a slow, sad smile that about broke my heart.
Then she said, “Please don’t worry about me, Maggie. I just need to be by myself for a while.”
“Okay,” I said, unwilling to linger when I so obviously wasn’t wanted. “I’ll see you soon.”
But still I couldn’t leave. I stood there and the words welled up from my heart and got lodged in my throat, piling up unsaid until I thought I might choke on them. Finally, I hugged her. Her body was stiff against mine, her arms limp at her sides.
I got in my beater car and drove home to the Valley, blasting “Disintegration” by the Cure.
* * *
I still visited Villa Marbella after that. Anabelle and I continued to study together and listen to music and hang out. But a zombie had taken over my friend’s body. She made the right sounds and motions, but all life and joy had been sucked from her.
Anabelle’s parents remained blithely oblivious. Maybe they thought she was trying on a new persona, as teenagers do, and that their doom-and-gloom Goth girl would morph into something new by Thanksgiving.
The demise of our friendship wasn’t all dramatic, like in the movies.
The malaise crept in on little cat feet like Carl Sandberg’s fog, muffling our voices, blanketing us off from each other, obscuring the path back to what we’d had.
Then daylight savings ended and the world began slipping into darkness. Luke was rarely home, and when I did see him, he kept a polite distance and wouldn’t look me in the eye. I wondered if he was trying to track down the guys from that night. But he said nothing and I didn’t ask.
Around the time Anabelle showed me how to play chicken on the LAX runways, she began to hang with a girl named Raven who dyed her hair blue black and wore heavy whiteface makeup and rimmed her eyes with kohl. Raven’s boyfriend worked at the Viper Room in Hollywood and she’d get us in, but Raven and Anabelle kept disappearing into the bathroom. When the next invitation came, I stayed home.
Still, I told myself that clubbing might be just the distraction Anabelle needed. Her lethargy ebbed as the year drew to a close, replaced by a brassy shrillness. She’s just trying to get her bearings, I thought.
The invites to Villa Marbella came infrequently now. In class Anabelle often seemed dazed o
r hungover, though she still managed to pull A’s. Then one night at the Cathay de Grande, I found her in a bathroom stall with Raven, snorting cocaine off the toilet lid. When I told her I was worried, she rolled her eyes and said she had it under control. And she sneered when I declined her offer to get high.
“You’re such a good little girl. You try to disguise it with your thrift store clothes and your boho music, but deep down, you’re all about the money and the big house. I can see it in your eyes. But I’ve had it all my life and you know what? It’s like scooping up water with your hands. When you open them, there’s nothing there.
“And this,” she said, pointing to the white lines, “is what fills the empty spaces.”
* * *
“Henry,” I said nervously, several weeks later when I’d dropped by to pick up a sweater I’d “accidentally” left behind. “I’m a little worried about Anabelle. She parties all the time.”
Henry was in his study. He put down his pen and regarded me with his usual pleasant smile. “She’s keeping up her grades,” he said solemnly.
“But I get the feeling something heavy is bothering her,” I hinted madly.
“Have you asked her?” Henry said sensibly.
I hemmed and blushed and hawed and said, “We’re not as close as we once were.”
His eyebrows rose inquisitively and I could almost hear him thinking. Maybe our alienation was my fault. Maybe my personality wasn’t vibrant enough for his daughter. Maybe I’d come a-tattling to Daddy-O to get revenge on Anabelle for dropping me.
At last Henry said, “She’s just got a bad case of senioritis.”
“But what if it’s more than that?” I persisted.
“I know she’s experimenting and trying to find herself, Maggie. That’s normal. Anabelle will be gone in less than nine months. Off to college.” He smiled fondly. “She’s just trying out her wings.”
Big creaking leather wings. Taking her straight to hell.
“I appreciate the heads-up, Maggie. And I’ll have a word with her without mentioning your name. But I’m sure everything is under control.”
I turned away. It had taken me months to screw up the nerve to talk to him. But I lacked the courage to tell him the whole truth. Because it would mean exposing my own complicity in Anabelle’s wild decline. And then Miranda and Henry Paxton would hate me too and forbid me from ever entering their house again.
And so I thanked him and left.
And maybe Henry did talk to her, because Anabelle seemed to clean up her act. She even began dating a surfer friend of Luke’s. And the next thing I knew, Luke began dating Raven.
Clinging to Luke’s arm at the senior prom, they made a striking couple, Raven pale and luminescent as the moon, while Luke was a creature of the sun, all blond hair, golden skin, and blue eyes.
I’d watch the four of them drive off in Luke’s Mustang after school, heads thrown back in ease, lips parted in laughter, as beautiful and glossy and perfect as an ad in a luxury fashion magazine.
And it seemed impossible that I’d ever sat in that car myself.
I don’t think I could have borne our estrangement much longer, but soon after that came graduation and everybody scattered.
Anabelle was off to Peru for the summer to build shelters for poor Incas before heading east to Sarah Lawrence. Luke was on a surfing safari in Bali. I was working nine to five in a Van Nuys office, typing invoices to earn tuition money for UCLA. On weekends I scavenged the thrift stores for Chanel suits and signed first editions that I resold to specialty stores for pocket money. My biggest find was a signed first edition of The Sun Also Rises that covered my car payment for two months.
Summer passed in a depressed, airless haze. Then college started and I had other things to focus on.
When Anabelle flew home for the holidays and we met at a friend’s party, her laughter was harsh, her movements reckless. Still, she hugged me and promised to call. Each night I came home from my temp job and played back the messages, certain I’d hear her dear, familiar voice, inviting me to Villa Marbella.
The previous Christmas, we’d stood at her mother’s vanity table, dabbing Caron’s Nuit de Noël behind our ears from the ravishing black Deco crystal flask. It was Christmas in a bottle, rich and exotic, all mulled wine and candied chestnuts, green pine with sandalwood and roses and a holiday goose roasting on the horizon. Anointed for Midnight Mass, we’d floated down the stairs in a cloud of scent and black velvet.
Now I could picture the sixteen-foot Christmas tree in the living room, decorated with antique glass ornaments and wooden animals, strung with garlands of cranberries and popcorn. The maid would be in the kitchen, pulling out trays of gingerbread, the family gathered to sip eggnog.
I could almost taste the dusted nutmeg on my lips, hear Bing Crosby crooning on the stereo, feel the rustle of taffeta as Anabelle linked her arm with mine. The memories lodged like glass splinters in my heart, piercing deeper as each day passed.
Anabelle didn’t call. We were officially sundered.
22
Now I was ringing the Paxton doorbell again. It was early morning, but the news cycle never sleeps and we didn’t either when a case was in play.
I had a box of croissants in one hand and a package from Faraday in the other.
“Why don’t you use a messenger service?” I’d asked my boss. “Won’t they think it strange that I keep showing up on their doorstep?”
“Every politician I’ve ever worked with treats his aides like personal assistants and Paxton’s probably no different. He wants to see your smiling face, not some stranger’s.”
My boss had been up since five a.m., wheeling and dealing to set up an exclusive TV interview with Simon Paxton. The idea was to put Simon squarely in front of the national media where he would speak with remorse about his affair with Emily Mortimer. The other half of our equation was to keep the senator offstage.
Anabelle opened the door.
“Oh,” I said, stepping back, disoriented.
What was she doing here at Villa Marbella so early in the morning? Anabelle tugged her hair down over one cheek, her eyes reflecting disappointment, as if she’d been expecting someone else.
“Hullo, Maggie,” she said.
For a moment, I was sixteen again, awkward and tongue-tied, my nose pressed forever against the window, looking in. Do we ever really lose our insecure, adolescent self, or does it remain locked deep inside, where no one can see?
Then adulthood kicked back in and I noticed something.
Anabelle was already dressed and wore heavy makeup. But even layers of foundation couldn’t conceal her swelling, blackened eye.
“What happened?”
Quickly, she withdrew into the shadows.
“Did you hurt yourself?”
“Yeah.”
“How?”
“I’ll tell you over breakfast.”
In the kitchen, Anabelle poured coffee into giant mugs, set the table with linen napkins, and fetched a pot of raspberry jam from the fridge. I walked to the cupboard, reached for a wooden platter from memory—there it was!—and arranged the croissants like petals of a flower around the jam pot.
A shaft of sunlight shone through the bay window above the sink, illuminating the table like some sixteenth-century Dutch still life. How many mornings had I sat at that table, in that very same shaft of light? I felt like a time traveler living simultaneously in two worlds.
“That’s sweet of you to bring breakfast,” Anabelle said. “Mom and Lincoln are still sleeping upstairs and Dad left hours ago, if you’re looking for him.” She glanced up nervously. “He was already gone when I got up.”
“I’m delivering a package from Blair. Maybe you can call and let him know?”
“Sure.”
She got on the phone but handed it to me when she got her father’s voice mail. I left a message.
“We’ll try again if he doesn’t call back. Meanwhile . . .” I stared at my friend’s shiner and
frowned. “Want to tell me what happened?”
Anabelle poured milk into her coffee from a cow-shaped creamer, then took the engraved silver tongs and plopped in two cubes of sugar.
“I haven’t been completely frank with you, Maggie.”
“Oh?”
“Sometimes Randall”—she winced, and I held my breath—“has a few too many. You can’t believe the stress he’s under these days.”
“He hits you?” I found my own hands clenching into fists, recalling the tightly wound man in the kitchen the other day.
“I thought he’s the one who got you clean? You are still clean, aren’t you, Anabelle?” I said, hating the pleading tone in my voice.
Anabelle smoothed her hands over her pants. “I’d be dead in a month if I ever went back to using.”
“What about that infected spot between your toes?” I blurted out. “And don’t tell me your cat did it.”
I hated the inquisitorial tone that had crept into my voice. But I was angry. She’d lied to me. What else had she lied about?
Her lower lip trembled and I wanted to take it all back. Maybe if my husband hit me, I’d seek solace in drugs too. Besides, what right did I have to accuse her, when I popped Adderall all day, which was just a fancy white-collar word for speed. That made me the worst kind of addict—a hypocritical one.
“Okay, Maggie,” Anabelle said, her face white. “You want to know how I got that cut? Randall threw a pair of pruning shears at me when I was wearing flip-flops. He was mad that I’d come home late from the gym.”
Her words hit me hard. “Oh, Anabelle . . .”
She set her jaw and looked away.
“Can you blame me for making up the cat story? You come over after I haven’t seen you in sixteen years. What am I supposed to say? ‘Hi, Maggie, this is my husband. He’s got a lively temper and sometimes he throws things at me. Punches and garden tools.’ ” She rolled her eyes. “Yeah, right. Great way to impress my old pal.”
“Anabelle, I—”
She put up a hand. “Let me finish. I’ve had some rocky years. Sometimes I had to look up to see the gutters, that’s how low I was. But I climbed out. And I’ve realized something. Being alive rocks.” She gave me a tremulous smile. “I have Randall to thank for that.”
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