IN JUNE OF LAST year, I emerged from yet another rehab stay—my fourth—and found myself living with my sister and Chuck while I “got back on my feet.” That mostly meant spending endless hours floating on a raft in their swimming pool and drinking can after can of fizzy water in order to keep my hands occupied while I tried to figure out a new future for myself. I read my way through the novels on my sister’s bookshelf, sweet romantic stories about star-crossed lovers who worked through minor character flaws and the occasional bout of cancer in order to find each other again. Nothing on my sister’s shelves was dark or twisted; even the tragedy was tear-jerkingly pure, of the Nicholas Sparks variety. It felt like a balm.
After so many years of existing on the opposite side of the divide from my sister, it was strange to be living inside her world. Elli’s life trajectory after On the Double could not have been more different from mine. It was as if, after a childhood that defied normalcy, every choice she’d made since was a middle finger in the face of her former unconventionality. While I was auditioning for horror films and going to parties in Chinatown warehouses, she was rushing for a sorority and majoring in interdisciplinary studies. While I was fucking my way through an ever-rotating cast of bad-boy actors and musicians and aspiring producers, she was married by twenty-four to her all-American sweetheart. She became a florist, of all things, and moved into a pretty house that perfectly matched the pretty houses of all the other affluent white families that populated our pretty hometown.
Most foreign of all to me, she wanted kids. Lots of them.
“We want three kids,” she’d told me not long after her wedding to Chuck (a three-hundred-person affair at a beachfront hotel in town). “Maybe four.”
I laughed. “You’ll need to trade in your BMW for a bus.”
“Right? With built-in seatback television sets and a cooler for snacks. A pop-up tent for soccer games and a hanging rack for ballet costumes.” She was being sardonic, but there was a shine in her eyes that took me aback, as if she thought this wouldn’t be such a terrible fate.
Seven years on, I still couldn’t figure out the appeal of that life, but I also knew that my sister would make an excellent mother. She cut the crusts off her own sandwiches. She went to see Frozen in the theater, for fun. I’d once watched her spend an hour patiently teaching an eight-year-old girl how to do a cat’s cradle.
And, of course, she was unfailingly reliable. I knew this from personal experience. The night that had kicked off this latest rehab stint had ended with me calling her in tears at four a.m. I’d gone to a bar in Highland Park with a DJ I was dating and had washed down two Valium with a half dozen tequila shots and blacked out. When I woke up, hours later, I was on the floor of an unfamiliar house in Eagle Rock and a strange woman in spangled tights was throwing water in my face while another woman was on the phone with paramedics. My date was nowhere in sight. Apparently, I’d left the bar with these two strangers and proceeded to smoke a joint with them. Then I passed out cold from a standing position and hit my head on a potted ficus. There was puke on the floor and blood on my T-shirt and when the woman gently asked me if there was anyone she could call, I’d said, “My twin sister,” and started to bawl.
Elli had driven the hundred miles in exactly eighty-two minutes. When she found me sitting on a dark porch, soaking wet and covered with blood, she went pale. I waited for her to rebuke me, or to remind me of my three previous failed attempts at rehab—one of which she’d paid for herself—and call me a disgrace. But instead, she just retrieved a clean T-shirt and a pair of cashmere sweats from the back of her car. “You’ll feel better in this,” she said, and began undressing me as I sat there crying, helpless as a baby.
The whole drive back to Santa Barbara she kept up a patter about a “really fantastic program” she’d recently heard about, with a whole new rehab protocol we’d never tried; she’d call as soon as they opened and reserve me a spot. When I wept that this time I was really going to kick it—really, I was—she just looked at me with a sanguine smile and said emphatically, “Of course you will. You’re my Sam. You can do anything, you just have to try.”
I tried. I really did.
The rehab stay had gone well, and it seemed to work; of course, it always did until it didn’t. But I was hopeful. And now I was back at her house, seven weeks later, waking up every morning to a fresh plate of eggs and the morning paper folded neatly to the arts section. Some days, I’d go with Elli to her workshop and work alongside her, stemming roses and culling the slimy leaves from the peonies. I liked these days the best, working in amiable silence in the cool dark space where she made her arrangements, the air thick with the smell of flowers and fresh dirt. I found the repetitive simplicity of the work calming; more than that, I liked the proximity to her. We hadn’t spent so much time together since Elli put the kibosh on On the Double.
My sister was quieter than I remembered, intently focused on her arrangements, frowning over accounting sheets that seemed to always end in red numbers. Our conversation was frequently stilted, and I wondered if that was because she didn’t know how to talk to me anymore, or if something else was bothering her. The fertility question, maybe? It had been seven years, and there was still no baby, though I’d found a bag full of ovulation kits under my sister’s sink. Sometimes, I heard her and Chuck talking in fierce whispers when I wasn’t in the room; he’d been sleeping more and more on the couch in the downstairs den, presumably because he was working late, but I had to wonder. The books by the side of her bed had names like You Are a Badass: How to Stop Doubting Your Greatness and Start Living an Awesome Life and Girl, Stop Apologizing: A Shame-Free Plan for Embracing and Achieving Your Goals.
I asked her, half joking, what those goals were, “because from where I’m sitting it looks like you’ve achieved most of your goals already.” Maybe I was projecting; maybe I just wanted her to be OK because I wasn’t prepared to deal with the alternative. I was selfish that way.
She smiled, a little wobbly. “You know. I just…hit a plateau. And I’m not sure what’s next. Don’t you ever feel…” She blinked and stopped, apparently unsure if she wanted to get into the endless morass of what I felt. “Anyway. Positive manifestation never hurt anyone, right? Isn’t that how you got sober?”
“No, you’re right,” I said, even though she wasn’t. What I’d accomplished was less positive manifestation than last stop before landing in a homeless shelter. But I smiled and let her hug me, and we both got a little teary as she whispered in my ear, “I’m so glad you’re here. I’m so glad you’re finally OK.”
Maybe she was right, I thought. Maybe I should read her books. Maybe I could use some positive manifestation, too.
I started to toy with the idea of staying in Santa Barbara. Maybe I could convince Elli to bring me on as a business partner. Why not be a florist? I had nothing left in Los Angeles—no auditions lined up, no career prospects worth mentioning, nothing but a tiny apartment with peeling paint and paltry few belongings. Tamar, my AA sponsor, had offered me a job at the hipster café that she managed, but beyond that, my life in Los Angeles had vanished into a yawning hole of nothingness. Here, I at least had my sister. I could start over again, back in my hometown, like winding my life back to the beginning and giving it another go.
One afternoon, Elli asked me to take over at the workshop while she went to an appointment with a fertility doctor. “We’ve been looking into IVF,” she said. She stood at a utility sink, prepping buckets. “It’s been a while, and nothing else is working.”
I stopped what I was doing and watched her, red hands plunged in cold water, her face a stone. “Kinda hard to get pregnant when you’re sleeping in separate rooms?”
She dropped the buckets to the ground with a clatter and by the time she turned to me she was smiling again. “Oh, that’s just because Chuck snores,” she said. “It’s been keeping me up at night.” She grabbed her purse and keys, looking at the wreckage of discarded flowers strewn across the floor of her shop. “You’ll clean this up?”
Her face was strained and pale. My sister had never been good at covering her fear. “Of course. You OK?”
“Fine,” she said brightly. “I’m still young. We have plenty of time to figure it out.”
* * *