Suze. Suzanne. A thousand memories of her face move through my mind, at so many ages and stages—the girl with absurdly long braids who wandered onto the beach one day when we were twelve; the tortured teenager who was cloistered away by her terrible, terrible father; the struggling actress; the movie star. She’s as fey as the Leonard Cohen song of the same name, as enchanting and elusive as sprites or faeries.
She’s just so beautiful. Beautiful like a royal. Even that first summer we met, when she was skinny and ate every minute of the day, as if she were feeding a roaring furnace, and her hair was ridiculously, foolishly long, it was hard not to stare at her. Her face was strong, big nose and wide mouth and oversize eyes of a color I’d never seen before and haven’t seen since, not quite blue, not quite green, like the curve of a wave rising to break—light-struck and impossible to ignore. When she turned those eyes on you, it was hypnotic. She hypnotized me, and all the guys, and then the world.
Never my grandmother, who said Suze was lost.
Now she’s back, and again broken even though she says she’s not. In my opinion, it started with the untimely death of her partner, Dmitri. He was an early victim of COVID, and died alone in his ICU room. It wrecked her. As it would anyone, but especially a woman who waited such a long time to find love.
I look up to the bluff. Lights have come on in the living room. I should go see her.
But rather than walking up the hill, I shrug into my rain jacket, pick up my oversize cup, and whistle for my dog, Maui. He’s a big black shepherd mix with shaggy, soft fur and the joyful heart of a three-year-old boy. My granddaughter named him for the character in Moana, and it suits his goofy nature. “Let’s go to the studio, buddy.”
Chapter Two
Suze
The first time I ever earned any real money, I bought a house, because Beryl, Phoebe’s grandmother, told me you can never go wrong with real estate.
Until that moment I’d lived a hardscrabble existence, first with my father, who never allowed me any money, then later trying to break into Broadway, waiting tables and scrambling for whatever parts I could get. But when I was twenty-one, I was cast as the lead in a very big film, A Woman for the Ages. Everything changed. I suddenly had so much money it seemed impossible to spend it all. Beryl advised me to buy a house, so I bought a cottage in Bel Air, and it started me off on the right foot. Two decades later, Phoebe was on a quest to save this place from ruin, and I bought it. To help her, honestly, though she didn’t see it that way.
Still, it’s one of my favorite investments and, at the moment, a refuge. The fact is, I had to get out of LA. I need to heal, and my therapist has been urging me to come here for several months. Last week, when I found myself rounding my house in Hollywood to check the windows for the fifth time, I realized I wasn’t going to regain my sense of safety living where the attack took place. So I’m here.
From the window over my sink, I can see Phoebe moving around in the studio. It’s such an open expanse of windows that anyone at the right angle could see in, but it’s really only my house that faces that direction. She’s backlit by a floor lamp I can’t see but know has a mica shade. She’s wearing a long red sweater beneath her apron, taping paper to the battered, paint-stained table that takes up most of the middle of the room.
How many hours did we spend there, joyfully drawing and painting and talking? Beryl played music on a turntable in the corner, and wiggled her ample hips as she painted delicate feathers and trees and creatures of both land and sea. She always had paint in her hair, on her hands. Once she had a streak of turquoise above her elbow for a week, and laughed her head off when Phoebe finally asked, “Are you ever gonna wash that off?”
A pang twists my heart. I miss her so much. She’s been gone only a little over a year, and it was hard on Phoebe. It was also hard on me, a fact that sparked the worst fight we ever had.
I met Beryl before I met Phoebe.
My dad was a preacher, a die-hard fire-and-brimstone type, who took over the Pentecostal church in Blue Cove, hoping to finally get the congregation he felt he deserved. It did finally come true for him here, but not for a while, not until Karen Armstrong got her hooks into him. It took her a couple of years.
My mama died when I was eight, of a virulent breast cancer that showed up and killed her over the course of six months. When she died she took all the softness and kindness of my world with her, leaving me with my father, harsh and dry as a moonscape, a man who only really cared about preaching.
He was an evangelical long before it was called that. He listened to Billy Graham and Oral Roberts and considered them a bit too soft. He called his churches the Blood of Christ, every single one of them, from Eden, Mississippi, to Rifle, Colorado, and Holder, Nevada, then finally Oregon. His specialty was reviving churches with declining membership, building them up, then being “called” to the next one. They were always small, off some big highway. The only difference in Blue Cove was the high tourist traffic, which he played to his advantage.
The church in Oregon came with a house, a sweet little two-story Victorian. It was plain, with a living room, dining room, and kitchen on the main floor and three bedrooms upstairs. My room had windows that looked out over the dunes to the ocean and the rocks, so I heard it crashing all day and all night, a steadiness that made me feel whole. In the spring, lilacs bloomed in clouds all over town and made the world smell like a department store.
The church itself was a white-framed building with a proper steeple and stained-glass windows all down each side. A steeple rose at the front, and he loved it as if it were his very own special signal tower to the heavens.
When we arrived I’d just turned twelve, and got my period three days later. There was no chance in hell I would tell him, so I stole a five-dollar bill out of his stash and took myself down to the local market, which was not a supermarket back then, not even close, but big enough I felt like I could buy pads without much notice.
But standing there, in front of all the options I froze. My underwear was stuffed with toilet paper and I was afraid it might soak through, but my face got hotter and hotter as I stood there, bewildered by the choices. So many different kinds! And tampons, too, but I didn’t quite get how that all worked.
I missed my mother wildly, wishing ghost stories could be real so I could ask her this one thing.
A woman in a floaty blouse and jeans stopped beside me. Her hair was long, salt and pepper, tied back in a messy ponytail. There was paint on her hands. “You need some help, sweetheart?”
I looked at her, then away, petrified. My voice was gone, but I managed to jerk my head into a kind of nod.
“Let’s see here.” She chose a box. “These should do. They have adhesive so they stick to your underwear. I’m a long ways past my bleeding days, but I’m guessing this small size will work just fine.”
I hugged the box to my chest and looked at her in gratitude. Her eyes were big and pale blue. Another streak of paint hung on her earlobe, and for some reason, it made it easier.
“You all right?” she asked.
I nodded.
“You just moved here with the preacher, right?”
Another nod.
“My name is Beryl Axford. I live in the house with the purple door down at the end of the road. You need anything, you come find me.” She smiled. “I have a granddaughter your age. She’ll be here in a couple of weeks. Maybe you’ll be friends.”
“Thank you.”
“You have money to pay?”
“Yeah.”
She patted my shoulder and left me.
Now, on a rainy day decades later, I press my forehead against the cold glass. Headaches have been my constant companion since the attack. The cold eases this one a little. I long for the studio space where Phoebe is moving around. It seems like I might be able to breathe there.