Her eyes met mine. “This has everything to do with you,” she said, her voice cracking.
My hand on her wrist grew tighter. She winced, and I released it, giving up. What a waste this had been. My sister has become a stranger; she’s not my other half anymore, I thought. And then it occurred to me that this must have been what Elli thought when I showed up at her door, high and incoherent, time and time again; when I threw myself at her husband, in the name of “helping” her; when I took her money and betrayed her trust. All the way back to high school, when I guilt-tripped her into coming back to Los Angeles with me to perform a job she hated. She was right: We hadn’t matched in a long time, and that was more my fault than hers.
She was here to work out her issues. Well, hadn’t I been her issue since the day we were born? So maybe all this was my fault. I’d broken her—maybe as early as that day on Splash Mountain—and she’d never healed correctly.
I watched helplessly as she opened the door and peered down the steps, preparing to dash to the lodge. “So what am I supposed to do now?” I said to her back. “Just leave you here and go back to Santa Barbara to keep taking care of Charlotte for you? You want me to be her mother? Am I supposed to keep pretending that I don’t know who Charlotte really is?”
She stopped then, and turned to me, surprise on her face. “So you do know, then? You figured it out?”
“Figured out that you stole her? Yes. I already said that.”
“No,” she said, frowning. “I mean, who she really is.”
“Yes.” I was growing frustrated by her willful cluelessness. “Her name is Emma Gonzalez.”
“No,” she said again. “That’s not what I meant.”
“Oh for God’s sake, stop being so cryptic, Elli. Just spill it.”
She looked out the door then, down the steps to the lodge, as if measuring the distance between us and them. Faint voices carried up in the distance, the high soprano hum of women singing in unison. Night had fallen and the oaks rustled overhead, sending a shower of brittle leaves clattering to the stairs. Slowly, my sister closed the door, turning to face me.
“She’s yours,” Elli said. “Charlotte is your daughter.”
WHEN WE WERE CHILDREN, we treated it like a game: You be me, and I’ll be you. In the bathroom, when we were brushing our teeth; in school, when our teacher was droning on too long; on set, when we were picking up our lunch paninis, one of us would give the signal, and we would switch. Settling faces, rearranging limbs, changing inflections. By the time we got to high school it had become an art form. We studied each other’s mannerisms like a textbook—the way we each held our toothbrushes or doodled in our notebooks or chewed our sandwiches. We even came up with a secret hand signal, a twist of a flattened hand, that meant Let’s switch.
How proud we were that we knew each other so well. How secretly pleased to have two personae to play with, when most kids only had one. We didn’t realize how dangerous it was.
I remember eating dinner with my parents one night, our freshman year, and my father looking up just a few moments after my sister had flashed me the signal. He caught me slumping over my plate, idly smashing my spaghetti with a fork, while across the table Sam was neatly cutting her meatball into quarters. My father glanced at me, then at Sam, gave a small frown, then turned back to me: “Sam, pass the salt, please.”
Across the table, Sam laughed into her napkin and I thought I might explode with the joy of our secret.
I liked being Sam, more than I liked seeing myself in her. The Elli I saw mirrored back in Sam’s face was never quite as interesting, never quite as vivacious. I sometimes wondered why I didn’t just step into the Sam persona and stay there, forever. Why couldn’t we both be her?
Of course, I didn’t know then what lay ahead for her in life, how quickly she would crash.
The game stopped being fun on the night of our seventeenth birthday, the night I became Sam in order to kiss her boyfriend. When my lips met Nick’s—when I felt the strange, soft shock of his tongue—I suddenly knew that I’d given some critical piece of myself away to my sister. My first kiss had belonged to her; the desire he felt was for Sam, not me. I would never get that moment back. Some piece of first love was forever lost to me.
How much more of myself was I in danger of losing to our game?
Queasy, my stomach churning with Long Island Iced Tea, I’d leapt from Nick’s lap, but not before I’d seen my sister across the illuminated dance floor. She was watching us, her eyes hot with ownership. Not ownership of Nick, ownership of me. But—me as her, or her as me, or me as myself? It was all getting too confusing. Even drunk, I knew that we’d gone too far.
We had to stop, but I knew that if Sam had her way, we never would. And if I broke away—if I ended the game, killed our TV show, put space between us—it was going to tear Sam apart. What would happen to her if I wasn’t there to pick her up and set her straight?
Even then, even before she fell into the abyss, I understood where Sam was weak. She thought she was the tough one, the strong one, that she had to protect me from my fears—and she wasn’t wrong—but I also knew exactly what would make her fall apart. She was no good at all at being alone.
* * *
—
This was a Trigger Moment that I was unwilling to share, not with Iona, not with Dr. Cindy. I was afraid to tell them that I knew that Sam’s addiction was my fault, because I was afraid of getting lost in her, and so I sacrificed us in order to save myself. I was afraid of Reenacting this moment with them and changing it forever.
The guilt was all I had left of my sister, and so I clung to it, unwilling to let go.
19
I WAS IN A cult.
Even now, these many months later, these words feel strange in my mouth. Eleanor Hart, née Logan, former child actress, former cult member. Both feel equally antithetical to my vision of myself, and yet both are true.
When I first returned from Ojai, I spent many sleepless nights skimming cult recovery sites with names like Dare to Doubt and The Art of Leaving, reading testimonials and taking quizzes: Wonder if you are in a cult? Eleven important signs. I’d take the tests over and over, just in case the calculations might come out differently, absolving me of this particular sin—the sin of cluelessness—but the results were always the same. I could be absolved of nothing.
Like it or not, I had joined a cult.
Although what you also have to understand is that no one decides to join a cult. It’s something that sneaks up on you, like a frog in a pot with the heat turned up underneath it, swimming complacently in the warming water, until it boils alive.