“These?” He lifts a hand from the steering wheel to lightly tap his right ear. “You can say hearing aids, Suzette. They’re not bad words.”
“Sorry.” I clear my throat and try again. “When did you get your hearing aids?”
“A few months ago,” he says, navigating toward Sunset Boulevard.
The top of the Jeep is off and the night breeze skims over my shoulders, rustling through the thick knot of dreadlocks gathered at the back of my neck.
“I started getting these dizzy spells, and then I would have to stay in bed for, like, days,” Emil says. “My doctor thought it was just an extreme case of vertigo, but I have this thing called Ménière’s disease.”
“I guess I’m not familiar.” Which makes me feel even dumber, that he’s been dealing with this thing all year and I’ve never heard of it.
“Neither was I. It’s an inner-ear disorder. There are different degrees of it, and not everyone loses some of their hearing, but…”
“I’m sorry, Emil.” I’ve never thought about what it would be like to lose my hearing. Maybe he hadn’t, either.
“Ménière’s is… mostly manageable.” He slows for a red light behind a beat-up old VW bus. “The aids aren’t as bad as I thought they’d be. They’re waterproof. And they help me hear better, which is the point, I guess.”
He grins and I grin back and we ride quietly for a while, bumping along the asphalt in his graphite-colored Jeep. We take surface streets the whole way to Laurel Canyon, passing endless rows of strip malls and bars with flashing neon signs and fast-food places all crammed together at the busy intersections of Hollywood.
“What’s going on with everyone now? Anything new?” I ask, realizing that I’ve been twisting my hands together so tightly the bones are starting to hurt.
I saw everyone over winter break, but that was back in January, and the only person I’ve talked to with any frequency is DeeDee. The party is for me, but like the last time I was home, I’m nervous that things will be too different. That I won’t fit in, that everyone will have moved on and not made room for me. Especially since it seems like they already did that to my brother.
“Just the usual,” Emil says, turning right on a red light. “The group hasn’t really changed much since you left. Except there’s more alcohol now.”
I sit back as he navigates the twisty canyon roads with ease. Emil didn’t even have his license when I left, and now he’s basically a pro driving through one of the trickier parts of L.A.
He maneuvers the Jeep up the hill at the top of DeeDee’s street, parking in the dusty open space in front of the yellow DEAD END sign. He gets out of the driver’s seat, and I should get out, too, because I know he’s going to come around and open my door, which is so fucking nice it’s unreal—but I can’t move.
His face shows up on the other side of my door. He pulls it open, but I don’t get out. “Ready?”
“Not really.”
He raises an eyebrow. “What’s wrong?”
“Emil.” I finally turn to look at him. “Be honest: Did everyone stop talking to Lionel because of his… because of what happened?”
“What? Is that what he told you?”
I swallow. “He said you guys weren’t there for him while I was gone. DeeDee says he stopped coming around, but—that doesn’t sound like Lionel, to just stop talking to people… unless he has a reason.”
“It’s not as simple as that,” Emil says. “DeeDee and I knew what happened with him, and everyone else knew something was up, but we didn’t tell them exactly what it was… out of respect. So people may have come to their own conclusions.”
I frown. “Their own conclusions? Like what? That he’s dangerous or something?”
That’s what a lot of people think about bipolar disorder. I found out when I was researching it online, when I wanted to find out more about what Lionel was going through than the information that filtered from his doctors and through my parents to me.
Emil shakes his head. “People aren’t sitting around talking about your brother. I think… You weren’t here, and no one knew the best way to handle it, and we just kind of drifted apart from him.”
I gaze into the thicket of oak trees stationed behind the DEAD END sign: dark and leafy and quiet. “I never should have gone away.”
“You can’t blame yourself,” he says firmly. “You don’t know what would’ve happened if you’d stayed.”
“I do know my brother would probably be in this car with us instead of staying home to read a thousand-page book.”
“Maybe. Maybe not.” Emil holds out his hand. “But you can’t spend all night worrying about it. Come on.”
He’s right, even though I don’t want to admit it. So I swallow down the contrary response on the tip of my tongue, and then I take Emil’s hand and hop down from the Jeep.
DeeDee’s mom is an architect, and the Sullivan house is designed to meet her every desire. She obviously has a deep, abiding love for glass, as the entire front wall of the house is made up of windows that stretch all the way to the second floor. A modern chandelier with vertical glass tubes housing skinny, soft blue lightbulbs hangs almost to the floor in the foyer, and every time I am here I think how DeeDee is tempting fate by letting us hang out. Someone would only have to step the wrong way for the whole thing to shatter, but DeeDee says she doesn’t want to waste time worrying about bad things that might happen, and so far that’s worked out for her.
The whole front of the house is empty, but I can hear a few people around back, voices floating through the open door off the kitchen that leads to the veranda. Still-sealed packages of hamburger and hot dog buns sit on the counter, nestled among bottles of liquor and cheap wine. DeeDee’s parents are decidedly not here this evening.
I do a quick scan as we walk out to the patio, but I don’t see her anywhere. The space is, however, dotted with my old group of friends: the creative types at school, ranging from modern dancers who are always moving, to brilliant, socially awkward musicians, to visual artists who create pieces that make adults complain at the school’s gallery shows.
“Well, look who’s back to grace us with her presence,” Catie Ransom says in her trademark flat voice as she strolls over. She makes angry art, like the small-scale wire installation depicting abused laboratory animals that she presented at the end-of-year show last spring.
“Holy shit, it’s Suzette.” Tommy Ng walks up and strums a buoyant note on the guitar strapped over his shoulder as if he’s ready to start busking for drinks. Tommy never goes anywhere without that thing.