Chapter One

 

When a person receives theatrical training—either in film or television—she begins to think of the world in terms of scenes, snapshots, and still frames, each of which tells some aspect of a particular story.  When I first began to study acting, I noticed right away a kind of still-frame-effect, the capacity to notice and deconstruct little moments, the way two people stand apart from each other, the tossed off glance, the knowing look, the smudge of fingerprint low on the window.  At some point in my course of study, I came to believe that if you can just arrange a set of these frames into a series, you’ll discover an interconnected line of moments dancing across the space of time.  That little line will reveal something unusual, something that, if you’re lucky, will look an awful lot like truth.  I have always wondered whether that truth might be some kind of predetermined thing—whether something like destiny, cold, premeditated, and eternal, might actually exist.

            I had just written the words “dramatic tension” on the classroom’s mottled white board, dragging my sleeve as I wrote and ending up with a cuff marred with red marker when the sting of the ringing telephone threatened to upstage me.

            I answered the classroom phone.  Even in the age of smartphones, schools still keep hardwired phones hanging on their rooms, and I kept my back to the wall as so that I could look on at the kids.  It was probably a parent, I told myself, calling about the spring play.  The classroom was lit by overhead fluorescent lights that reached all the way back to the end of the long, narrow rectangle that someone in administration had thought made the space ideal for a drama class.  At the front of the room, the students sat at desks.  At the back, we kept costumes and big squares of wood, painted black, that could be imagined into furniture or hills or other features of the landscape, depending on where we placed them in a particular scene.

“Miss me?” said the voice on the other end of the line.  Its rippling sound hit me like cold air and I turned to face the wall.  I felt chilled like a diver who has thrown herself into a body of water imagining the temperature to be just right and discovering, only as the surface closes over her head, that she is hurtling into a pocket of biting darkness.

            I cupped my hand over the receiver.  “Why are you calling me here?”

            “Just called to say how much I care,” the voice said, in its familiar sing-song way.  “Or did you think I had forgotten?”

            I turned back to the class.  Little snippets of conversation and laughter were bursting through the quiet, hissing like bullets popping out of a gun.  One of the girls, a tall, sullen one, looked at me with her hound dog’s eyes and didn’t even try to look away when I stared back.

            “Hello-o?” the voice said.  “Well, it sounds like you’re tied up.  I guess that means I’ll see you later.  I’m in town, you know.  Love this little city.”  Her voice trilled the vowels in this last sentence, as though she could barely prevent herself from singing them.  I twirled the phone cord around my wrist, tightening the plastic length like a noose drawn downward by the pressure of a hanging body.

            She hung up with a metallic click before I could ask her what she meant.  Bianca was supposed be in London, working on her new movie, posing for paparazzi and buying six hundred dollar shoes, not skulking around in Santa Cruz.  I knew this because I had read it in The Hollywood Reporter, and because I had seen a record of her whereabouts on perezhilton.com.

I shuddered, pulled my sweater sleeves down, and touched the little golden key where it hung on a chain around my neck.  I was sure that I looked stiff and pale and that the students would know something was wrong, but they were bent over their textbooks, reading, or at least pretending to.  I stood next to the white board, shivering and wilted.  Her visit was a bluff, I told myself, a lie.  As sheer as the Santa Cruz cliffs that led all the way down into the lap of the churning ocean.

            That night, after an unproductive rehearsal, I excused the four students who had struggled through their scenes and locked the door of the theater classroom.  The students poured out into the darkness and I switched off the hallway lights, closed the building’s door, and locked it.  Through the industrial glass window, even the shadowed high school hall seemed ghostly, like a place that harbored secrets.

            Twenty minutes later, my old Honda slipped into the driveway.  A strange, black car was blocking my usual space.  The fog had come in.  I stepped out of my car, stood next to the foreign coupe, and shuddered.

            I could hear her breathing in the dark when I came in and I switched on the living room lights before my eyes had a chance to see her shape resolve against the darkness.

            I said,  “You’re parked out front.  It’s not as though I don’t know you’re here.  No point sitting around in the dark like this.”

            She was sitting on the sofa, a highball in one hand, her feet bare and milky against the blue patterned carpet.

            She slid her shoes on when she saw me staring at her feet.  “You ought to put a better lock on your door.  It was very easy to get in here.”

            “You ought to stop letting yourself in to places you don’t belong.  What would the tabloids do with this story?  Bianca Chase, rising star—petty criminal.  I bet it’d be as big as the Winona Ryder scandal.”

            This idea was so hilarious to her that she threw back her head and laughed a full, lusty laugh, the one she used onscreen.  For a moment, its luster filled up the room with so much warmth, it made me almost glad to see her.

 I threw my keys down on the hallway table.  “So are you going to tell me what you’re

doing here, or are you going to make me guess?  I know you’re supposed to be in London.”  I tucked the little key on its gold chain into my blouse and buttoned the top button so she that wouldn’t be able to see it.

Bianca, her legs pale and slender, stretched her body long, letting her stilettoed feet drag up onto the arm of the sofa.  “Who would have thought Sarah Neerly would admit to reading tabloids?  You should stop doing that,” she said and paused to hoist herself up to a half-seated position.  “They’re never right anyway.”

“So you weren’t in London?

“No.  I was.  But we wrapped principal photography last week.  It’s a shitty film.  Action, explosions.  You know.  The worst kind of thing.”

“Must pay pretty well.”

“Who cares?  I want to do better films.  Anyway, London is dismal place.  Gray, rainy, awful clothes.  You would call it buttoned up.  I imagine you would like it.”

“I suppose I would.”

“Well.  I didn’t want to stick around.”

I went over to the bookcase where I kept liquor on a low shelf and shifted the bottles until I found the one I was looking for. 

            “I’ve already fixed myself a Scotch,” she said, holding her glass up in a mock toast.  “You should have something though.”

            I turned to face her.  “You do know we’re in my house?  My house, the place you’ve just broken into?”

I poured myself a glass of sherry, porto bueno, Pedro Ximenez.  The liquor glowed amber as I swirled it in my glass.  I settled in across from her on the other sofa.  “So come on now.  What are you doing here?” 

Bianca turned a strand of chickadee yellow hair around one of her pale fingers.  She had done something different to herself, something with frosted lipstick and green eye-shadow, and I couldn’t help thinking that, although I’d seen her only a year before, somehow she looked older, more brazen, as though the makeup were highlighting some change in her, a creeping shift that was coming on slowly over time, like a feeling of disappointment.  

            I sipped my sherry and let the sting of the alcohol wash over my teeth and tongue.

She sat up and looked at me.  In the lamplight, her skin was pale and even, almost translucent.  “You’re out of sorts,” she said.  “Why is that?” 

I drained my glass and set it on the table between us.  “We haven’t seen each other in six months—and now you appear out of the ether.  I didn’t even tell you where I was living.  So I suppose I’m out of sorts because I don’t know why you came to find me or what, exactly, it is you're doing here—why you let yourself in like nothing’s happened.”

“Well,” she said.  “I wouldn’t say that ‘nothing’s happened.  You and I both know that’s not true.  It’s been exactly a year since…well.  You know.  I thought we should commemorate.” 

She always said that nobody cared what we had done.  Afterwards, when I was having trouble sleeping and wanted to confess, she had said that it wouldn’t matter, that even if some cop did believe your crazy story, it wouldn’t change a thing.  More likely, she had said, the police would think I’d gone completely out of my head, which by then I guess I sort of had. 

We’d had this last conversation sitting in my hotel room, on the top floor of the Roosevelt, with a picture window overlooking the gauzy lights of Hollywood Boulevard.  The time had ticked past midnight and we’d sat together, drinking liquor out of the airport-sized bottles from the mini bar.  As the alcohol took hold, I told myself things weren’t so bad.  At least I wasn’t going to turn out to be as crazy as my mother.

Bianca took her legs off the arm of the sofa and dragged her stilettos over the carpet, making long, uneven lines in the rug’s thin pile.  Her voice snapped me back to the warm wood tones of my living room. 

“I missed you,” she said.  “That’s why I’m here.  I just came to see how you are.”  Outside, the white lip of the moon had begun to show through gray clouds that hung in clusters, blocking out the darkness of the sky.

Bianca traced a manicured hand along the rim of her empty Scotch glass.  I got up and went to the window.  It was a cold night, brisk and blue, full of deep darkness you can only see near the water or in the blank reaches of the desert.

“So tell me.  What is it you’re really doing here?”  I reached up and touched the gold key where it sat beneath the wrinkled fabric of my blouse.  She must want the key, I thought.  The key—and the thing it would lead her to.

“Come on,” Bianca said, drenching me in the warmth of her most theatrical smile.  “Do I have to want something?  Can’t I just have decided to stop by?  Anyway, if I wanted something, why wouldn’t I have just taken it while you were out?”

My jaw ached where I had been clenching it and I reached up to touch my face.  I realized I was holding a band of tension in my teeth, gnashing them together like an animal.

Each of us had things at stake.  For both of us, there was our freedom, the fact that what we had done could still land us both in jail.  Then too, there was the matter of Bianca’s acting career and, for me, the question of my sanity.

I said, “I suppose it’s possible that you don’t want anything at all.  But then, doesn’t that seem unlikely?”

“Now that’s unfair,” she said.  “How am I supposed to answer that?  I don’t live inside that strange head of yours.”  Bianca swiveled around and sat up to face me.

I said, “I’m tired.  I can’t deal with this, with you, not tonight.  I’m going to bed.”

“Oh, come on.  You just got here.  Can’t we sit up and have another drink?  I thought we could talk.”

“I don't want to talk.  Not now, and not tomorrow. I want you gone.  Anyway, I’m exhausted.” 

“Ah,” she said.  “The glamorous life of a small-town teacher.  Early to bed, early to rise.  What’s that supposed to do for you again?”

“It’s supposed to keep your past away.”

“Am I the past now?  Is that what you think?  Poor Sarah.  So busy feeling sorry for herself, she doesn’t even know who her friends are.”

She smiled at me, a coy little smile, thrown out from her perch on the sofa.  In drawing attention to my current state, Bianca, with her air of superiority and box office success, was breaking the very last of the silent contracts between us.  She and I both knew it.  I finished my port and set the glass down on one of the ledges of the bookshelf.  The sugary liquor had left a film, like a crimson stain, around the bottom of the glass.

“You have somewhere to stay tonight?” I said, careful to infuse a dose of accusation into my tone.  “I assume you’ve made some arrangements?”

“I thought I’d stay with you.”  She laughed.  “Old times, you know—all that.”

“You weren’t invited.  I didn’t even know you were here.”

“Well, strictly speaking, I guess that’s true.  But I am here now.  What do you say?  You wouldn’t throw me out into the wilds of this little hippie beach town?  Where will I go?  What will become of me?”

When you’ve done something terrible together, something forbidden, as we had, an understanding springs up between the two of you, even if there was never one there before.  This understanding, in turn, breeds a kind of closeness that time and status cannot transcend, no matter how great the gap between you grows, even if one of you would prefer to never see the other one again.

 “If I let you stay,” I said, “I’d appreciate it if you’d be gone by the time I get up in the morning.”

“But we won’t be able to talk if I leave.”

“That’s exactly how I’d like it.  I have no intention of giving you whatever it is you’ve come looking for.” 

Bianca looked up, stunned, and I realized that my resistance was unexpected.  She had come to Santa Cruz anticipating that I would be moldable and pliant, that I would bend to her will just as I had so many times before. 

“The guest room’s on the right.”  I pointed down the hall.  “Strip the sheets and drop them in the laundry before you leave in the morning.”

“So many rules, the schoolteacher says.  So many reasons to break them.”

“Yes, I suppose,” I said.  “And so many reasons to be punished.”

The wind stirred the clouds into white streaks that seemed to underline the night’s thick blackness.  The tide had come all the way up and the primordial sighing of the ocean’s waves sang like a slow chorus, repeating the same line over and over again in a hushed, incessant liturgy.  The song seemed to promise something I couldn’t quite make out, its voice watery and thin as a frightened whisper. 

The port had rushed to my head and I felt it drop its gauzy curtain over me.  I left her with a perfunctory goodnight and went down the hallway to my room.  The oak floors were unusually silent under my feet as I walked, as though they too harbored a secret.  In the bedroom, I changed into the flannel shirt I liked to sleep in and checked the little safe, below the bed, still locked tight and tucked back, dust-covered and almost invisible between the iron bedposts.

In bed, I lay awake, listening for the sound of Bianca moving through the house.  She would wait for me to fall asleep, I knew, before trying to find the thing she’d come for.  She was probably regretting not having looked for it before I arrived.  Unless she had looked and failed.  In which case she would have needed to talk to me, to try to cajole or manipulate me into giving her what she wanted. 

I lay on my back and tried not to stir, trying to keep my limbs perfectly still and my breath low and quiet.  The silence and my stifled breathing gave my chest a heavy feeling, and I felt as though I might suffocate in the house’s stillness.  I could hear the mulling of the ocean, but beyond that there were no sounds, just the water’s crazy shushing.  I ached with anticipation, listening for Bianca, for a footstep or a breath or a wheeze, some subtle sign that she was moving around in the hall.  I promised myself I would stay awake, vigilant, listening for any sign of movement until she left in the morning.  Although I was sure I knew what she wanted, I didn’t know if she would guess at the right hiding place or where else she might try to find it. 

I kept my bedside lamp on all night, thinking the light would help keep me awake, but I must have fallen asleep at some point, lulled into abstraction by the soft hand of the sherry, because when I got up, the bedroom was full of intermittent gray light, the kind that comes in off the water in the early morning, airy and cool, touched with a spray of mist.  The red cube of my alarm clock told me it was 5:00 am and I got up and went to the window.  Through the haze, I could see that Bianca’s black car was missing from the driveway.  I walked out of the bedroom into the hallway, my feet bare cold against the hardwood, one hand clutching the little key, safe on its chain around my neck.  The morning sky was ashen, the same color as the relentless fog filtering in from the edge of the Pacific. 

She had left early, just as I’d requested, but not before ransacking the living room.  The sofa, the floor, and my little writing desk were covered with books and papers. 

The desk stood, stalwart and solitary, a lone soldier at attention, graceful in its humiliation in one corner of the living room.  The desk’s bottom drawer, the one with the rickety brass lock, was where I usually kept the photographs and other things I’d collected during our year together in Los Angeles. Now, that drawer, along with the others, hung open, empty, waggling on its ancient hinge like a kid’s loose front tooth. 

She had left papers and pictures, bills, magazine pages torn out for my hairdresser, receipts—everything I’d had neatly organized into the desk, strewn all over the rug and sofas.  Papers I hadn’t thought to look at in months covered the faded carpet.  Books were strewn around, opened and placed facedown.  The scene looked like someone’s idea of the work done by a sloppy burglar, like something you might see in a movie.  A little tent of a note, the only point of order in the chaotic room, stood like a sentinel on one end of the hallway table, a general’s outpost in wartime.

Bianca must have taken the books off of the shelves and distributed them around the room—a touch of theatricality that only she would think of.  After almost an hour of sitting on the floor, trying to set one of the piles of papers straight and failing to make any headway against the tidal mess, I stood up to get myself a cup of coffee and almost stepped on one of the pictures that she had tossed out from the bottom drawer. 

I noticed the photograph at the last moment, just as my heel was about to pounce on the edge of the slick paper.  I caught myself, picked up the photo, and turned it over in my hand.  In the picture, Bianca and I looked like specters of ourselves, apparitions against a bright blue wall.

The picture had been taken a few weeks before Brett died, when the days were still full of the soft yellow light that infuses the earliest part of the California fall.  In the photograph the five of us, our little group, make a slightly irregular assembly, standing together in the hallway of a house—one or another of the showy places we used to go to when we frequented parties together.  We are all smiles against a turquoise wall with white wainscoting, probably somewhere mid-city, where the Spanish style houses date from the 1920s.  In the photograph, Brett’s green eyes were full of that familiar mixture of sadness and pleasure that had colored them on those nights. 

Seeing his face suddenly like that shocked me and I held my breath for a long moment before carrying the picture back to the sofa.  I held the photo carefully, balancing it by its edges.  I didn’t want to leave a fingerprint on it, didn't want to mar it with the oil from my palm.  Anything of value is worth taking measures to preserve.  I set the picture on my desk, letting it float, feather-light, the last inch or two to the splotchy wooden surface.  I nudged the photograph to one side of the desk and began collecting the other pictures from where Bianca had strewn them around the room.  Brett was in almost half of them, and I began separating out the photos with him in them.  Down on the sand, below my windows, the Saturday surfers were starting to appear on the shore.  They wore slick wetsuits that looked like oilskins and swam out into the mouth of the ocean as though subjecting themselves to the forces of the current were the most natural thing in the world. 

How did I get here, I wondered, looking again at the photograph I’d almost trampled.  How did I start off there and end up here? 

One by one, I set the photos out on the surface of the desk, their matte rectangles forming a chessboard of images, squares of smiles, of eyes, of hands, all dancing in the catch light from unknown chandeliers.  You can’t outrun the past, even if you go at break-neck speed.  There it was, my past—or what was left of it—laid out in a pile of lovely pictures.  The story of a thousand nights, all spread out across the surface of the tiny desk in my living room. 

I felt helpless, surrounded by Bianca’s mess, and angry at her for leaving me with it.  I stepped carefully over the remaining books and papers and went to the hallway table where I picked up the neat, small note.  On it was a terse message, inked in her deliberate cursive: No need to tell anyone now.  Even if you want to—don’t do it.

She had underlined that last word for emphasis and I wanted to laugh at the silliness, the futility, of that neat, small mark.  As if mess she’d left wasn’t emphasis enough.  I tucked the note into the pocket of my palm and took it over to the desk, where I set it out in the last empty space, against the matrix of pictures.  I surveyed the line-up. 

            Don’t do it.

I wondered who she’d been talking to, and whether she’d told anyone her version of the story.  My story, I guess I should say, since I’m the only one who knows the whole truth.  Not just any version of the truth, but the objective truth, the one you get when you line all the pieces up together and slip backstage, behind the curtain.  It’s the version of the truth you get when you walk into the wings and see all the lights and pulleys, when they let you into the greenroom, into the closets where they keep the props and costumes, into the wings where the actors, ordinary people, wait to fool you with their extraordinary lines.  It’s the truth you can only see if you have a backstage pass to the production called What Really Happened.

Down on the sand, the surfers were peeling their wetsuits from their bodies, like seals shedding their skins.  They stood, half-sheathed in skintight black, little flecks of men against the tapestry of blue, seen from a distance.  Was Bianca on the sand, I wondered, smiling from beneath a wide-brimmed hat, her pale hair streaming over her shoulders, fluttering enticingly in the morning air?  Might she come back and try to take the proof of what happened, the only thing I had worth holding onto?  For a moment I was caught by the memory of what she looked like last night, the creeping wrinkles at the edges of her eyes, the way her legs draped over the faded arm of my sofa.

Let her come back, I thought.  I’d be ready.  I threw the padlock on the front door and went to my bedroom, where I stooped near the head of the bed, kneeling against the worn hardwood and straining to reach up under the bed’s iron frame.  I had to scoot up under the frame to reach the safe, and then had to press my fingers hard against the key to make it turn its one half-revolution in the sticky lock. 

The safe’s door gave, springing open almost violently, revealing the gleaming silver body nestled inside.  The pistol glinted in the sunlight, indifferent to the mess in the living room and to the memory of Bianca’s presence.  I took it out and turned it over.  Its metal was cool against my skin, like the memory of a lover.  In my hand, the tight little body gave me a jolt of fear and pleasure and I breathed deeply.  She might try to come back for it.  So what?  If I had to—I told myself—if I had to, I could use it.  She was like that, persistent, unafraid—capable of pursuing the past with the same determination that other people used to escape it. 

I slipped the gun into the breast pocket of my nightshirt and padded back into the living room with its heaping piles of chaos.  Perhaps I should have taken the time to calm down, to let my anger at Bianca dissipate like morning fog along the water.  But seeing Brett’s face in the photograph had done something to me, given me a shock that magnified my anger so that it seemed fresh and new.  I should have stopped to clean up the scattered books and papers, to breathe and reconsider.  Instead, I swept my arm across the desk, brushing the carefully laid out photographs to one side so that they rained down onto the carpet in a fluttery paper shower, shiny flashes of eyes and smiles raining to the carpet disembodied, apart from time and meaning. 

 

 

 

Corie Rosen