She pushed me inside her cabin and closed the door behind us, sharp and sober. She quickly straightened her hair and rubbed her fingers below her eye sockets for a fresher look. She advised me to go home and hurried out. I looked at the storm, trying to gauge whether it was possible to walk down the mountain and back to the Valley, but every crevice in the canyon was now a riverbed. I waited. The room was cold. The water level beneath the cabin was beginning to rise. Soon it would flow through the floorboards and under the bed. I kept my ears pointed toward the main house. Silence and rain, then Deva’s father screamed about something I could not understand. A door slammed, resolute steps came down the hill, the crepitation of mulch under someone’s feet.
Deva’s cabin door swung open. Her father stood there with his hair pulled back in the usual meager ponytail, beady eyes striving to open wide. His beard had grown further and was now split down the middle. The hair on the center of his chin had not grown as fast as that on either side. His face was particularly red and his jeans dirty and frayed. His crow’s-feet reached the top of his cheeks, but somehow that was not the thing you took in when you saw him. It was the eyes. They were a golden brown, so penetrating and bright they made him ageless.
“So Deva says she didn’t go to work because you were up in the canyon and didn’t know how to get back to the Valley?”
“Yes…there is a boulder in the way and traffic is blocked.”
He took a breath, looked around the room inquisitively, then back at me. “I’ve seen you before, right?”
“I came here once. With Chris.”
He walked toward the bedroom window and pushed it all the way shut. “Here, otherwise it’ll get so humid your bones will ache,” he said.
I smiled and thanked him.
“Well don’t just stand there. It’s cold in here. Come up to the house and call your parents!”
I followed him up the yard toward the main house. He moved slowly like a bison, undulating from side to side. Inside was just one big room lined with dusty record covers and Deva’s father’s rock music awards from the eighties. The albums had earthy mystical names like Cosmic Sands, Vesuvius, and Vacant Voodoo. One of the record covers read Sarofeen and Smoke and featured a bunch of cool-looking musicians sitting cross-legged on a rock in what looked like the Topanga creek. Deva’s father was probably one of them but I couldn’t recognize him without the beard. There was a beautiful woman in the forefront.
“She had a voice,” Deva’s father commented, noticing my curiosity. “Better than Janis Joplin and Ellen McIlwaine. One of those guys went on to perform with Muddy Waters, you know.”
I smiled widely to show him I was impressed. Beneath the vinyl albums were boxes filled with CDs and tapes. I picked up a broken CD case. Phil Collins’s face was on the cover—a sultry black-and-white profile looking down; it was Another Day in Paradise. I turned the cover over with anticipation, looking for Max’s name in bold somewhere. I scanned the booklet, but his name didn’t appear anywhere in there. I put the CD back in the box and took in the house for the first time.
It looked like a dump. Rain had blown through the open windows and soaked the floor that was now covered in mud. Wet towels and empty beer cans were scattered about, and rotten plants hung from the ceiling inside cracked pots. Only one corner of the room was dry and clean. It was furnished with a pristine office desk. Deva was sitting on a swivel chair in front of it.
Her father pointed me to the fax machine on the desk and invited me to call my parents, then disappeared into another room. Deva spun lightly in the chair and passed me the receiver. She held her pained shoulder with her hand, shielding it defensively from the space around her. Next to the fax machine was a computer monitor and a silver frame with a picture of Deva. She was a pale ten-year-old girl, squinting at the sun from a natural watering hole in the canyon. A stash of her father’s glossy black-and-white portfolio pictures were set almost votively around her photo. It looked like a strange altar.
When my father picked up the phone I told him the road was blocked off and I didn’t know how to get home.
“But we need you back on set! This is so unprofessional!” he screamed.
He liked using that word now. It was part of his new armory. He flaunted it, entitled by his Johnny Depp Polaroids and Miramax correspondences. He hung up. I acted like the line had dropped and called back.
“Don’t hang up on me. It’s not my fault,” I said.
“I have too much to do now. Call when the road is clear.” Then he hung up again.
I held the receiver in my hand and kept speaking Italian, pretending he was still on the line. I didn’t want anyone to think my family would get rid of me so quickly. I glanced at the immaculate altar desk, the neatly arranged folders and portfolio pictures. It made me think of my father’s oak desk at home, the only thing that was ever kept in order during those days, piled with perfect production schedules that my mother and Max printed out each week. I felt a surge of guilt. My father said he needed me, but I could not be there for him.
Chris was in the room, leaning against a wall in a corner of the kitchen, nibbling from a plastic bag of cashews. He had not said a word—just nodded at me.
A toilet flushed. Deva’s father walked out of the bathroom and gave me a look.
“I guess you’re staying, then?”
“I don’t have anywhere else to go while the road is blocked.”
He rolled his eyes at me, then turned to Deva.
“Did you fax those press releases today?” he asked her.
Deva got up immediately from her chair and started fumbling, searching through the folders on the desk. “Oh my God, I forgot!”
“I told you a hundred times! They were supposed to go in yesterday. I don’t have time for this.” He groaned as he walked over to us. He gave Deva a light little smack on the back of her head, then grabbed the sheets from her hands, annoyed. She giggled apologetically.
“One thing I ask! One thing.”
Her father assembled the sheets demonstratively, then handed them to his daughter so she could load them into the fax machine.
“I was doing that!” Deva complained and started over.
He stood over her, watching. When she bent forward he pulled back slightly and glanced down her back. Her shirt had ridden up and her crack was showing.
“I don’t like you wearing these pants. Everyone can see your ass.”
Deva didn’t answer. The sound of the fax went off and she cautiously placed the papers in it. The two of them stood in front of the machine, waiting for the pages to scroll through.
“That’s good,” Deva’s father said as the last page went through. He caressed his daughter’s bare lower back absentmindedly. “Off you go. All of you. Get out of here. I need to work. There’s bread and eggs if you girls want to make dinner.”
He took Deva’s place on the chair, switched on the monitor, and slipped a pair of headphones on.