Deva moved her cast around the tub expertly like she was used to a permanent disability, accustomed to working around something that was broken or bruised.
“What if we get caught?” I asked.
“Bob only wishes. What would you do if you were a balding fifty-year-old dude with a crazy wife and you found two beautiful naked girls in a bathtub in the middle of a field?”
“I guess you’re right.”
“He’s a character, Bob, huh? He’s been here since forever. He gets all kinds of chic lady clients from Hollywood to do treatments with him. That’s why Heide is jealous.”
“What kind of treatments?”
“Scream therapy, laugh therapy, whatever therapy.”
Deva cackled, took a big sip of wine, then reached for the plastic bag with the Vicodin pills in the back pocket of her jeans.
She took out three and handed me one. She chugged the pills with the wine and lowered her head into the water.
I leaned back and looked up at the sky. It was pitch-black now and filled with stars, not the fuzzy ones from the Valley—the ones I’d seen with Arash, which were trying so hard to shine through the pollution—but real, sparkling stars like the ones from cartoons, from a time when things were better in the world. I turned the faucet on with my toes. The trickling sound contained us, creating an illusion of privacy. Our legs touched under the hot water. Deva’s makeup was smudged. She stared into space. I saw her leave her body a little at a time from the wine and pills until she was gone.
“We’re in the middle of nature,” she slurred.
“In a field,” I tried to slur back, but I was too sober and she was so far away already.
I drank more wine, trying to catch up.
Deva laughed, abandoning herself to the wave that was taking her over. She seemed to want to hop on any current that took her away from the present moment—even if the present moment was perfectly fine.
My stomach growled. I needed food. I lifted my body back up in the tub and suddenly remembered it was the night I’d invited Henry and his mother for saltimbocca. They were probably waiting for me at the house already. The thought of veal chunks made me instantly queasy and when the Vicodin finally kicked in, my body started to go numb and I let the thought drown.
We stayed there, half asleep from Vicodin, feeling our bodies move in waves. Our legs entwined, toes dripping outside the tub’s edge and slipping back in when they got too cold. Time passed. We added more hot water, mumbling, forgetting what we had just said. The only thing that kept us on earth was the stars above, reminding us we were beneath them and therefore, by force of gravity, on the ground. Everything inside me turned warm and fuzzy. When Deva spoke, she leaned forward and her body twisted in a beautiful spiral. The candlelight made her face soft, but when she laughed, a strange presence shadowed her features.
16
In November my father announced that I would be taking time off school. “We need help on set. In the wardrobe department. Your kind of thing,” he said.
“What about classes?”
“It’s okay. Max said it’s extracurricular. Colleges like it when students show interest in other things.”
“I think it’s only extracurricular if you do it after school.”
“They’ll never know the difference. When did you become so uptight?”
My father was hunched over his long oak desk, trying to fix the rental camera they were using to film the auditions. He raised his eyebrows and glanced at a bulky screenplay by his elbow, then picked it up and dropped it in my hands.
“We’re shooting on Monday. We’re missing a bunch of outfits. Read it, cross-check the actors’ sizes, find the rest.”
He stuck his nose back into the camera. The doorbell rang twice. Actors paced around every room, memorizing lines. Some sat in front of the electric fireplace in the living room, staring at the modest flames. Before transforming our house into a production office, my father remembered my grandmother’s last words of advice at the airport on her way back to Rome: “There is always a fake fire burning at the Forresters’ and they’re the richest family in LA. Don’t forget to get an electric fireplace.”
Phones kept ringing, but nobody picked up. Max circled the backyard screaming in Spanish on a portable phone.
“What’s wrong?” I asked.
“Absolutely nothing.” My father smiled.
“Why is Max screaming?”
“His money was held up, but it’s fine. We’ve mortgaged our house in Rome.” He finally lifted his eyes to meet mine. “Everything is under control.”
“What do you mean, you mortgaged our house in Rome?”
The actors all stopped mumbling and looked at me.
My father put a hand over my mouth to hush me. He sprung open the door to the backyard and dragged me outside, the broken camera dangling from his fingertips.
“Could you not talk like that in front of the actors? You’re scaring them! Max’s money is on its way. As soon as it clears he’ll pay back the bank, and we’ll pay off the mortgage on our house in Rome.”
We stepped back inside. My mother passed in front of us with a tray of homemade biscotti and espressos for the actors. She winked at me and said there was a surprise waiting for me on my bed.
On my way there, I noticed a pile of loose mail on the floor by the front door. There was a letter for me from the University of Southern California. It was written and signed by the head of the Literature Department saying they had read and enjoyed my essay in the “Bad Sex” issue of the literary journal and invited me to consider their creative writing program. They strongly encouraged me to apply the following year, the letter said. It was the first time anyone “strongly encouraged” me to do anything. I folded the letter and hid it inside a drawer in a closet where nobody would find it.
—
In our bedroom my brother stood behind a camera filming an actress with crispy hair that looked like a wig.
“I don’t understand what I’m supposed to feel,” the woman said.
“You are supposed to feel like you feel when you want to leave a place to go back home. You worry it might be haunted, but you’re not terrified yet.”
“Look, honey, if I feel a place is haunted, I cry.”
My brother shrugged his shoulders. “Okay, fine. Cry.”
The woman repeated her lines with emphasis and burst into tears—a woman of fifty taking directions from a thirteen-year-old kid. In a corner of the room, a male figure hunched inside my wardrobe, rummaging through my clothes. I recognized the skinny legs. It was Henry.
“What are you doing here?”
“I work here,” he replied in a passive-aggressive tone.
“You work here? Since when?”
“Since you flaked on me and never showed up at the saltimbocca dinner you organized for my mom. By the way, she was seriously hurt. She wants to start cooking classes now. It’s hell at home. Thanks.”
“I’m sorry I spaced on dinner. I called you. You never—”
“You called me, yes. Three days after we came to your house.”