“And some of ours,” Serena added.
“And some of ours.” Ettore nodded. “Including a credit card, which he has already used apparently.”
“Stronzo,” Timoteo commented.
My knees trembled. I became instantly scared of having taken off my rubber suit because now my heart was a bigger, more vulnerable thing and my family appeared to me like a desperate, distant bunch, all of them wailing a song nobody would listen to into the rain.
“What now?” I asked.
“I’m finishing this fucking film. No matter what!” Ettore declared.
The car started moving again. I pulled toward the front seat to look at him up close. New lines had appeared under Ettore’s eyes—pinkish, vulnerable skin. There was a curl to his mouth, a desperate frown. Complication dwelled on his lips.
I stayed quiet, looking at the paint marks on his flannel pajamas and wool slippers. We drove past my high school. From the street things looked like a postcard of what schools were supposed to look like in America. Something outside us, that didn’t belong to our lives—as if we were taking a road trip into the idea of California. The gates and grates, the empty parking lot, I saw everything with new eyes, pretending to be a tourist.
“Is our house in Rome still ours?” I finally asked, but nobody answered.
—
When we got home, Max’s familiar chaos was still around but none of his stuff. Ashtrays were filled with cigar butts. Empty hangers from the dry cleaner clinked against one another on the wheeled clothes racks in the living room. My bedroom smelled of men’s cologne and cigar ash. A pile of receipts and empty shopping bags from the Sherman Oaks Galleria spilled across the floor. I found a Victoria’s Secret body spray by my bedside table with a little note written on a small scrap of paper: Dear Eugenia, sorry I took up so much space—in your room and in your life. I hope this spray will help you get rid of me as much as it helped me get rid of you. Gracias, Max.
I didn’t show the note to my parents and helped Serena set up for lunch on the backyard patio. The sun was strong. My father sipped whiskey on the rocks and poured her a double.
Timoteo moved in circles, shooting a basketball at a hoop over the garage, hitting the rim over and over. I noticed the patio was covered in paint drips. My father had been hate-painting. White canvases covered with abstract, angry tar blobs were propped against the house. He sat on the ground next to his new creations, sipping his drink, pouring more tar on the canvases.
“Should we call the police?” I asked.
My father shook his head without looking up from the blobs.
“We wouldn’t do that to Max,” Serena explained.
“But you had a contract, right? I mean he can’t just leave us like this. He can’t just disappear if there’s a contract, right?”
“Yes…we…well…” Serena jiggled the ice in her glass nervously.
“Tell them,” Ettore insisted without lifting his eyes.
Serena huffed and lit a cigarette. “Fine. Fine. I! Are you happy now? I didn’t finalize the contract—”
“Finalize? You didn’t even start!” he insisted.
“Okay, fine. I didn’t do the paperwork.”
“What kind of producer doesn’t take care of the paperwork? That’s so unprofessional.” That word again.
“We never would have thought this of Max. He was like family to us!” my mother said, trying to justify her actions.
“Wasn’t stealing from family like stealing from yourself?” I repeated my father’s business motto.
“Not this time, apparently.”
“You know, it’s not true he wrote that Phil Collins song. I saw the album. He’s not credited.” I sighed.
“I mean you guys are such idiots!” my brother lashed out, throwing his basketball on the ground. He walked to Ettore and handed him a scrunched-up slip of yellow paper he had taken out of his pocket. His report card. More bad news.
“I got a D in all my classes. Too many absences. You have to sign it.”
“Have you been ditching school?” Serena asked, putting on a tired, severe tone because that’s what parents had to do when kids got bad grades.
My brother rolled his eyes at her. “It’s the film, Mom. You took me out of school for two weeks. It’s your fault. Not mine.”
“It’s okay. You’re smarter than them anyway,” Ettore sneered. He ripped the slip from my brother’s hands, signed blindly, and returned it to him. “And you?” he asked me.
I had gone out of my way to make up lost tests and keep up with reading material in school. Mrs. Perks had been clear with me: If I wanted to apply for college the next year I had to stay on track. Sometimes I worked at night to catch up. I had never told anyone about my ideas about applying to a university, neither Deva nor my parents. I just kept the letter in the drawer and read it.
“I got a letter from USC,” I said. “They liked an essay I wrote and encouraged me to apply to their school because they have a good writing program.”
Serena took another sip of whiskey and coughed. “Well, that’s good. Will you guys help me set the table so we can finally eat?”
“Yeah, let’s eat,” Ettore concluded.
—
That night the phone rang and rang. It woke me up and I thought it was Max, that he was calling to apologize and say it was all a big mistake and the money was on its way. But it was my grandmother’s cleaning lady in Rome. She had found grandmother in bed in her apartment. When she opened the house she knew right away because of the smell. She’d been dead for three days.
20
Serena was the only one who was allowed to go to Rome for my grandmother’s funeral. It was almost Christmas. Tickets were expensive and who knew if they’d let us back into the country a second time, now that we didn’t have Max to help pull strings. Our living budget had been reduced to zero, but Ettore insisted on finishing the film no matter what. He was now editing in an underground dungeon-type studio in North Hollywood, hanging on to Miramax’s interest in distributing the film once it was complete. It was a matter of finishing fast and things would pick up.
“Vi chiedo un ultimo sforzo,” our father pleaded, asking for a final effort on everyone’s part.