Sinner

Isabel —

  Los Angeles. The first time I was here, a Yankee usurper, a bumbling almost-there, I snapped a photo of a Hollywood Boulevard street sign and sent it to my mother with a text: guess what i’m famous.

  Now I actually was famous, though I didn’t text my mother anymore.

  I’m back.

  It felt good. It was like when you had been unhappy and didn’t know it until you weren’t anymore. I had thought I was fine in Minnesota. Bored, lonely, fine.

  California, California, California.

  I could still feel the realness of Isabel in my arms. It was like the sun on my eyelids and the ocean scent in my mouth as I sucked the air in over my teeth. I’d been here before.

  This time was going to be different.

  I called my friend Sam back in Minnesota. He surprised me by answering immediately — he hated talking on the phone because he couldn’t see the other person’s face during the conversation.

  “I’m here,” I told him, picking at the taxi company decal on the interior of the car window. In the front seat, my driver had a hushed and intense phone conversation in another language. “My face is relaxed and content. My lips are curved upward.”

  Sam did not laugh, because he was immune to my charms. “Have you been to the place you’re staying yet? Is it okay?”

  “I’m fine, Mother,” I replied. “I haven’t been yet. I’m going to go see Baby now.”

  “I had the worst nightmare about you last night,” Sam mused. “You went around Los Angeles and bit about twenty people so you could have a pack of wolves there, too.”

  There is that old chestnut that when someone tells you not to think about a specific image, you cannot not think of it. Sam had in effect forced me to consider the idea of multiple werewolves in Los Angeles, which should have occurred to me before now, but hadn’t. It was not an entirely unromantic vision. Wolves galloping down Sunset Boulevard at dusk.

  “Twenty,” I scoffed. “I would never bite an even number of people.”

  “When I told you that it was a terrible idea, you told me you didn’t want to be alone.”

  That did sound like me, but there was no way I’d go around biting myself new friends. While I dazzled into wolf form for only a few minutes at a time, most people had to wear their lupine bodies for months on end. Which was exactly what had happened back in Minnesota. That left me with only Sam and Grace, and they’d both decided to go to college, of all places. Summer school. In Duluth. Who did that?

  “The worst part,” Sam went on, “was that the clock was set to radio and when I woke up, your stupid song ‘Villain’ was playing.”

  “What a great station you must have had it set to.” The taxi was slowing. I said, “I have to go. The future is here, decked in flowers and fruit.”

  “Wait —” Sam said. “Have you seen Isabel yet?”

  My fingers still felt the shape of her. “Da. We embraced. Angels sang, Sam. Those fat ones. Cherubs. Cherubim. I must go.”

  “Don’t bite people.”

  I hung up. The taxi driver put the car in park. “Now you walk.”

  I opened the car door. As I handed him some cash, I asked, “Want to come with me?”

  He stared at me.

  I got out. As I shouldered my bag on the sidewalk, a posse of young skater kids zoomed by. One of them shouted at me, “We’re skateboarding!”

  The others behind him keened joyfully.

  My lips still tasted like Isabel’s perfume.

  The sun beamed overhead. My shadow was tiny under my feet. I didn’t know how I could stand to be in my own head until dinner.

  Baby North lived in a Venice Beach house that looked like it had been built by a caffeinated toddler. It was a collection of brightly colored blocks of different sizes stacked on one another and next to one another and joined by concrete stairs and metal balconies. It faced the endless tourist-dotted beach and the touchable blue ocean. It was a more mirthful establishment than I had expected.

  People were afraid of Baby North. This was because she was a home wrecker, I thought, in the sense that she had destroyed the lives of the last seven people she’d put on television. It was sort of her brand. Get a train wreck, put it on television, wait for the explosions, toss a fluttering paycheck over the scene of the wreckage.

  Everyone who signed a contract with her thought they would be the one to escape unscathed with their dignity and sanity, and they were all wrong.

  None of them had seemed to know it was just a performance.

  I climbed the concrete stairs. When I knocked on the door, it fell open. There was no point calling for her. The music inside was so loud that nothing was for sure except the purest of the trebles in the vocals and the ugliest of the bass from the drums. It was the sort of track sung by a girl who might possibly have been discovered on the Disney Channel.

  When I stepped in, the air-conditioning hit me like a punch. I could feel every single one of my nerves tensing and considering their shape and species.

  This was going to be a thing here.

  It had been a very long time since I had been a wolf. And it had always taken a lot to convince my body to shift — a precipitous drop in temperature, an interesting chemical cocktail, a persuasive kick to my hypothalamus. The temperature difference now wasn’t enough to do it, but it was enough to shock my body into the seductive memory of shifting.

  Werewolf, werewolf.

  That would be a good song.

  Inside, the ceiling soared up above the concrete floor, all the way up to the exposed ductwork. There were four pieces of furniture. In the middle of them, Baby North stood bent over an iPad. I recognized her more from gossip blogs than our brief meeting years before. Her brown hair was cut in a heavy fringe over her deep-set eyes like a ’70s model. She wore scrunchy leggings and some kind of smocky-tunic thing made out of canvas or linen or something monklike. She was short and pretty in a disconcerting way — a way to look at, not to touch. I had no idea how old she was.

  I pointed toward one of the speakers overhead. The singer was chirruping something about how we should all call her and do something before it was too late. It was relentlessly catchy. “You know this stuff will make you go blind, right?”

  When Baby turned to me, her smile was huge and genuine and world-eating. She tapped something on the iPad, and the music died instantly.

  “Cole St. Clair,” she said.

  Though I was sure that she wouldn’t break me, I felt a twinge. It was the way she said my name. Like it was a triumph that I was standing here.

  “Sorry I’m late.”

  She clasped her hands to her chest, enraptured. “God, your voice.”

  A review of NARKOTIKA’s last album had summed it up like so:

  The title track of Either One/Or the Other begins with twenty seconds of spoken words. The boys of NARKOTIKA are well aware that even without Victor Baranova’s insistent drums and Jeremy Shutt’s inspired bass guitar riffs, Cole St. Clair’s voice would lure listeners to an ecstatic death.

  Baby said, “This is the best idea I ever had.”

  My heart stuttered hard, just once, like an engine turning over. It had been a long time since I’d been on tour. Since I’d been out in public as a musician. Now, with my pulse faster, I couldn’t believe that I’d thought I might give it up for good. It felt intentional, powerful, purposeful. I’d been in stasis for a year and now I was back on solid ground.

  I was not a disaster.

  Isabel was going to dinner with me.

  I had been taken apart and put back together again, and this version of me was unbreakable.

  Baby set her iPad on one of the four pieces of furniture — a birch ottoman or house pet or something — and circled me, hands still curled up on her breastbone. I had seen this posture before. It was a guy circling a car on the auction block. She had acquired me with a not-insignificant amount of effort, and she wanted to know if it was worth it.

  I waited until she’d circled once.

>   “Happy?” I asked.

  “I just can’t believe you’re real. You were dead.”

  I grinned at her. Not my real smile. My NARKOTIKA smile. One sly side of my mouth working wider than the other.

  It was coming back to me.

  “That smile,” Baby said. She repeated, “This is the best idea I’ve ever had. Have you been to the house yet?”

  Of course I had not. I had been haunting Isabel in Santa Monica.

  “Well, you’ll see it soon enough,” she said. “The rest of the band moves in tomorrow. You want something to drink?”

  I wanted to ask her about the band she’d assembled for me, but I thought it would sound like I was nervous. Instead, I asked, “You got a Coke?”

  The kitchen was big and spare. Nothing looked particularly residential or even human. The cabinets were all thin slats of pale wood, and the walls were covered with exposed PVC pipes headed to the upstairs. The fridge looked like a surprise, like it ought to have been a vat of some commercial fluid instead. I needed no one to tell me Baby lived alone.

  She handed me a Coke. One of those glass bottles, satisfyingly cold in your hand before you even cracked the cap. Baby watched me tip my head back to drink before she put hers to her lips. She was still appraising me. Looking at my throat and my hands.

  She thought she knew me.

  “Oh, I have —” She used just her pinky to pull open a drawer, and she withdrew a notepad. One of those tiny ones, palm-sized, that urged you to be brief. “This is what you wanted?”

  I was pleased she remembered, but I just nodded coolly as I accepted the pad. I slid it into my back pocket.

  “Look, kid,” she said, “this is going to be hard.”

  My eyebrows twitched at “kid.”

  “I want you to know that I’m here whenever you need me. If the pressure gets to be too much, I’m just a phone call away. Or if you want to come over, that’s fine, too. The house is only a mile from here.” Her concern looked genuine, which surprised me. From her body of work, I’d expected an infant-devouring monster.

  “Right,” I said. “You told me. See, I already have your number programmed.”

  I flipped my phone around so that she could see her number and above it, in the name field, Nervous Breakdown/Death.

  Baby laughed out loud, absolutely delighted.

  “But I am serious. You’d be surprised how the cameras can get to you,” she added. “I mean, they won’t be on you all the time, of course. Mostly just for the episodes. A little bit in the house, you and the band. You pretty much tell them where and when you need them. But, you know, the viewers can be pretty cruel. And with your background …”

  I just flashed my NARKOTIKA smile at her again. I’ve seen it, this smile of mine. In magazines and on blogs and in liner notes and in the ever-fond gaze of the mirror. I’ve heard it takes more muscles to frown than smile, and I’m sure it’s true when it comes to this particular expression. It’s just a twitch of the lips, really, just a narrowing of the eyes. Without a single word, it tells the other person that not only have I got them figured out, but I also have it figured out, where it stands for the world.

  I mostly use it when I can’t think of anything clever to say.

  “It’s been a bit much for others,” Baby admitted, as if we didn’t both know the fate of her previous television subjects. “Especially if they have a history of … well, substance problems.”

  I kept smiling. I swallowed the rest of my Coke and handed her the bottle.

  “Let’s see the house,” I told her.

  She smashed the Coke into a recycling bin the color of the sky. “What’s the hurry? You East Coasters are always in a rush.”

  I was about to tell her I had dinner plans, and then realized I didn’t want to tell her who I had them with. “I’m excited to see this future you’ve planned for me.”

  “I made sandwiches,” my cousin Sofia said as soon as I walked in the door to the House of Dismay and Ruin that evening. She said it so fast that I knew that she had been waiting for me to walk in the door so that she could say it to me. Also, I knew that even though she said sandwiches, what she meant was please look at this culmination of a culinary process involving more than four hours of preparation.

  I asked, “In the kitchen?”

  Sofia blinked huge brown eyes at me. Her father — one of the numerous males who had been jettisoned from our collective lives — had aptly named her after the drop-dead gorgeous actress Sophia Loren. “And a little in the dining room.”

  Great. A sandwich that filled two rooms.

  But there was no way I couldn’t accept one, even if I was meeting Cole for dinner. Sofia was my cousin on my mom’s side. She was a year younger than me and lived in breathless fear of failure, time passing, and her mother falling out of love with her. She also adored me for no reason I could discern. There were plenty of other people more worthy of her adulation.

  “They wouldn’t all fit in the kitchen?” I kicked off my slouchy boots at the front door, where they landed on a pair of my mother’s slouchy boots. The empty coat rack rocked, tapping against the sidelights before righting itself. God, this place was soul-sucking. Although I’d been here for twenty-one Tuesdays, I still wasn’t used to it. The McMansion was sterile enough to actually remove pieces of my identity every time I returned to it, insidiously replacing them with wall-to-wall white carpet and blond hardwood floors.

  “I didn’t want to be in anyone’s way if they wanted to make something else,” Sofia replied. “You look pretty today.”

  I waved a dismissive hand at her and walked into the dining room. Inside, I discovered that Sofia had spent the afternoon preparing a long, color-coordinated buffet bar of homemade sandwich toppings. She’d carved flower-shaped tomatoes, roasted a turkey, shaved a cow’s butt. Conjured four different flavored vinaigrettes and aiolis. Baked two different kinds of bread in two different shapes.

  It was arranged in a spiral with the vegetables in the very center. Her phone and huge camera lay at the end of the table, which meant she’d already put it on one of her four blogs.

  “Is it all right?” Sofia asked anxiously. She crumpled a napkin in her lily white hands.

  This was usually the part where people assumed Sofia suffered from heavy parental expectation. But the only thing I could tell that my aunt Lauren expected of Sofia was for her to be as stressed out as she was, and Sofia seemed to be doing that admirably. She was a finely tuned instrument that hummed in emotional resonance with whomever she was standing closest to.

  “It’s a gross overachievement as usual,” I said. Sofia sighed in relief. I circled the table, examining it. “Did you vacuum the entire upstairs, too?”

  Sofia said, “I didn’t get the stairs.”

  “God, Sofia, I was joking. Did you really vacuum?”

  Sofia peered at me with giant, luminescing eyeballs. She was such an imaginary animal. “I had time!”

  I attacked a piece of bread with a serrated knife. Goal: sandwich. Side effect: mutilation. When Sofia saw my struggle, she hurried around the table to help me. Like a slow-motion murder scene, I wrestled the knife out of her hand and cut two uneven slices on my own. Aunt Lauren had no problem with her being so goddamn subservient, but it bothered the hell out of me.

  “What about that book you were reading?”

  “I finished it.”

  I selected roast beef and shaved Parmesan. “I thought you had that collage-sculpture-thing.”

  Sofia carefully watched me select a very green mayonnaise. “The first part is drying.”

  “What is this? Arugula? When is your erhu lesson?” I wasn’t sure how I felt about Sofia as the whitest girl in the world taking erhu lessons. I couldn’t decide if they counted as cultural appropriation or not. But Sofia seemed to enjoy them, and she was good at it, like she was good at all things, and no one on her erhu blog ever seemed to complain, so I kept my mouth shut.

  “Watercress. It’s not until tonight. I a
lready practiced this morning.”

  “How about a nap? Normal people nap.”

  Sofia looked at me very heavily. What she wanted was for me to take it back and tell her that no, she was actually normal, everything was fine, she did not have to take deep breaths because this was not an emergency, this was life, and this was how it looked for everyone.

  Instead, I returned her heavy gaze with a long blink, and then I took a bite of the sandwich. I couldn’t believe Sofia had spent yet another afternoon with condiments as friends.

  “You should get a life,” I told her, swallowing my bite. “This is delicious and it offends me.”

  Sofia looked cowed. Whatever small creature that was my guilt was pricked. And now I was thinking about how my mother kept saying the same thing to me. Getting a life, I mean. I kept telling her I would get a life just as soon as I found people worth hanging out with. It was possible Sofia just hadn’t found anyone worth her time yet.

  I said, “Look, let’s go out tonight. You can put on something red.”

  “Out?” she echoed, just as I remembered that I was supposed to be going out with Cole. I couldn’t believe I’d forgotten, but on the other hand, I could. Because it was like having a good dream and forgetting it by the time you got downstairs for breakfast.

  I felt a not entirely great sensation in my stomach, like someone was opening an umbrella inside it. It was like I was afraid of Cole, but it wasn’t that. I was afraid that I wouldn’t be who he thought I was. He’d been so charmed by the idea of me in California, like the state and I would be good for each other.

  I wondered what I was walking into.

  “Damn,” I said. “Not tonight. I have dinner out. But tomorrow night. Red. You and I.”

  “Dinner?” she echoed.

  “If you keep saying everything I say, it’s canceled.” I took another bite of the sandwich. It really was an exceptional sandwich. “Where’s your mother?”

  I never knew how to refer to my aunt Lauren. When I said Lauren to Sofia, it sounded like I was being snotty. When I said your mother, it sounded like I was being cold. And I could not say your mom, because I never said the word mom if I could help it. Probably because I was snotty and cold.