“So did you have fun on the lot today?” I try to sound bright, but Andrea just stares out the passenger window of our truck, remote as always. “Well, did you?” My voice tightens over the words despite my best intentions.
“You were supposed to call Ms. Inez to watch me today. You knew it was a teacher work day.” The disdain in her voice is palpable, thick as the smog hanging over our city like a threat. Even if I didn’t know that summer’s almost here, I’d see it in the hazy evening sky tonight. It’s turned all purplish blue, like a bruise.
“I forgot, sweetheart. You know that.”
She heaves a weary sigh. “You always forget,” she says. “But Daddy wouldn’t. He would’ve remembered.”
“You’re right. He would have.” She turns to me, her ocean-blue eyes widening in shock at my new strategy. But why not admit the truth? I have no illusions. Her daddy would have done a better job at this single parenting drill than I’ll ever manage on my own. No wonder Andrea’s so bitter. She landed second unit with me, not first, and I’ll never be able to close that gap.
“You didn’t get me on the Evermore set, like you said.”
“I said I’d try.”
“But you didn’t.”
“It was a closed set!” I cry, blowing my cool, and a thin smile of satisfaction forms on her lips. It’s like she lives for this now, to see me lose control. It’s what she’s always after. Maybe because she needs some kind of reaction from me, anything other than this numbness that has such a stranglehold around my heart.
She says nothing else, just stares out the window of the truck again, outlining an invisible pattern on the dusty pane with her fingertip, something that only she can see. I clutch the steering wheel tensely, the familiar silence smothering us as we edge along the 101 toward home. Long damn way there, too, at least in this kind of traffic. Really need to sell the house and move somewhere closer to the studio, but I can’t bring myself to do it. Can’t bring myself to let go of Alex that way, not when all of our memories are tied up in that place. Well, maybe not all of them, but certainly most of the significant ones.
Just the thought of leaving our old bungalow on Mariposa Way makes my throat clench painfully. Nothing feels more like home than those eucalyptus trees that shade our tiled rooftop, or the thick jasmine vines knotted around our front steps. I can picture Andrea like it’s yesterday, maybe four or five years old, collecting handfuls of those white flowers as a gift for me. Here, Daddy! I picked them ’cause they’re beautiful, just like you!
We have family history that practically hums all around that house. It’s in the crevices of the wooden floorboards, on the craggy paths that lead up the canyon hillside away from the garden, and in the sun-drenched windows of the morning room. Every direction I turn, our life resonates there, and maybe that’s because memories have a spiritual life all their own. Where there’s been suffering, the dark atmosphere hangs over a place forever, becomes a kind of energy that’s imprinted in the air. Like at Auschwitz or Gettysburg, or even Fredericksburg, where I grew up, where the bodies of men once fell by the moment. Ghosts before their bodies had even hit the ground.
But when something’s been perfect and beautiful, as our family once was then the emotions linger like the perfume of angels. No wonder all my memories of that house are touched by sweet-scented jasmine.
We moved to Studio City because Alex practiced pediatric oncology at UCLA, so it made sense to live in that neighborhood, an affordable family one closer to the hospital. That was more important than buying a house near the studio, like West Hollywood where I wanted to be. Allie hated my insane hours on the set, wanted me home more, so we fought over that decision. In fact, I remember mouthing off that some of us weren’t doctors pulling down a couple hundred grand a year, that some of us really worked for a living.
God, the scorching, blue-eyed look I earned for that one. Alex was one of the warmest people I’ve ever known, but he could pack a feisty temper on occasion. The old stereotypes about redheads were true, I guess, because that day I got a pretty pointed lecture on the rewards of higher education versus those of pissing off my father by joining the army at age eighteen. That was okay, ’cause I also got a damned passionate kiss at the end. Making up was always the sweetest part of Allie’s firestorms.