The bruise on her forehead was almost gone, the bluish tint had turned into a lilac patch of translucent flesh.
“I can help you,” I said and meant it. “You’re not seeing things the way they are.”
She stood there, cold and firm. Her eyes would not blink. They looked small and beady like her father’s. He must have put her on some kind of medication. She was a mask. There was something emotion-purged and unfeeling about her.
“We’re finishing something up. You better leave.”
She looked at my velvet bell-bottoms. They were hers. I wore them almost every day now. “You can keep them.”
“You can’t keep this up. You don’t have to be your father’s assistant.”
A thick vein pumped on her forehead. She was not a kid anymore.
“Go,” she replied firmly. Her eyes trembled with a slight rapid motion. She hugged me and pressed her cold face against my neck for a moment. “Don’t try to stop this. It will be all right.” Then she smiled.
She turned around and walked away. I felt ice-cold all of a sudden. I wanted to run after her, but instead I kept looking at her thick hair bouncing off her shoulders. I caught a final glimpse of her pale freckled cheeks before they disappeared inside the house. The door shut behind her. It was the end of halos and eucalyptus cones, of terraced apple orchards and crooked cottages. The end of the place above. I walked back down her driveway one last time and started to cry. Then I remembered how the trees of the house were like audience members. I tried to stop my tears. I didn’t want them to think I looked stupid.
26
My mother stood over a marble sink holding a dead guinea fowl, ripping its feathers out a few at a time. I hadn’t expected Henry to have a marble sink, but his new apartment was filled with the amenities of a new life. Everything was different after the money from the insurance came through, even his hair. He chopped it off. He didn’t care about showing his missing ear anymore. The new store space on Melrose Avenue was smaller and less cluttered. This was not a neighborhood where you could sit and stare at a screen or take bong hits in the back. He lived alone in the small apartment upstairs where we now sat—Henry, Phoebe, my brother, father, and I looking at Serena’s clenched teeth as she plucked the dead bird. Henry and Phoebe now took cooking lessons from her. After the quake Phoebe had moved to Agoura Hills, farther into the Valley.
“If I’m to die old and fat I’d rather do it where nobody can see me,” she said. But I thought she still looked beautiful.
When I was ten years old my mother smiled and said, “Taste this,” and put a sweet and gushy piece of flesh in my mouth. It was the tongue of a cow. I didn’t know meat could taste that sweet. I didn’t know cow tongues could be consumed and I got angry at her for feeding me a part of an animal I didn’t want to eat, but that’s how she was. She moved on. Dead birds, cow tongues, veal brains, she didn’t care if her kids thought it was scary or wrong to eat them. The world would adjust. I looked over at her from the dinner table and wondered if I’d ever be at peace with something dead, if I’d find the courage to keep going and move forward even when everything around me said it was too much.
“It’s important to massage the fowl, make it think it’s loved, even if it’s already dead,” she explained to Henry and Phoebe, her hands reeking with bird juices. Her hair was getting longer and her darker roots were growing back in.
Henry signaled me to go to his bedroom. We slipped away. It was the middle of June. The heat wave made everything hot and muggy, but his bedroom had a new remote-controlled air conditioner. We sat on the bed next to each other, and looked out the window onto Melrose Avenue. A group of drag queens in matching outfits stampeded down the street, cackling. I felt I was in a city again, a place where people existed outside the windows.
“Looks like they’re having fun,” Henry said with a smirk.
I turned to look at his face. I never realized how round it was when he had long hair—like a full, pale moon.
“I wanted to ask you something,” he announced uncomfortably. “I want to find and sell treasures. Real treasures. Hollywood is not like the Valley. People actually expect things here. I need help.”
“I love treasures.”
“Do you want to work for me? You transformed the old store and I know you could do great things with this one.”
“Like a real job?” I asked.
Henry looked away, his big eyes already apologizing for having been too bold. I put my hand on his knee, not wanting him to retreat.
“Sounds amazing.”
“A real job,” he continued, encouraged. “After school. You can start saving up for your creative writing at USC. You better apply, by the way, or you’ll end up a loser like me.”
“You’re not a loser,” I said. “And of course I’ll apply. My English teacher said she’ll help me.”
I let myself fall on his bed. I nuzzled into his pillow and took a deep breath. “Your sheets don’t smell like stale pot anymore.”
“There’s a Laundromat in the building.”
He lay down next to me. I turned my back to him, pulled my knees up to my belly, and wedged my butt against the nook of his bowed legs. I passed his hands over my side, and pulled him toward me.
“Are you spooning me?” he asked.
“No, technically I’m making you spoon me.”
We stayed silent, listening to my parents in the other room talking about the romantic holiday they were going to go on and how much they needed it after the Hotel Alexandria fiasco and Max disappearing into thin air. They said the same things over and over, like soldiers back from a war, tormented by recurring dreams.
“And we came home and everything was gone. Just gone. And he was nowhere to be found.”
Miramax did not take If These Walls Could Talk. Johnny Depp and his agent didn’t approve the elevator-scene cameo, saying he’d never signed a formal agreement. The Hustons kept coming over for lunch, but they were more interested in my mother’s cuisine than anything else. Not even Vanessa Peters managed to pull strings. It was as if the film had been doomed the second Max left. When the final cut was finally ready, my father sold it to an Italian television channel. In America PBS came forward asking for raw footage for a documentary they were putting together on haunted buildings in America. That’s what it had come down to: disembodied clips, raw footage, Italian television. It wasn’t the Hollywood ideal my parents had dreamed of when they flew in.
I looked at Henry’s partly missing ear and placed my index finger over the slight protuberance. The helix and upper parts were joined together in a shapeless lump of flesh and cartilage.
“What does it feel like when I touch it?” I asked.
Henry shrugged his shoulders. “Not much,” he smiled. “Except it’s nice to feel your hand.”
“I’m happy you cut your hair.”
“A missing ear is more punk rock than long hair.” He giggled.
“I agree. It’s probably better not to hear half the shit people say anyway.”