In Search of Us

  Marilyn reads the lines again and again; she begins to thinks of the girl of seven on her mother’s lap, watching herself on television with a brand-new My Little Pony. How little care she’s given to that girl, how easily she’s banished her. She thinks of that girl’s fear, of her longing for her mother’s love. Of how she woke screaming from nightmares she could not remember. She thinks of the talent agent in Orange County and his disgusting couch. She thinks of the rage she felt—at him, yes, but also at her mother, who had left her in his charge when he said he wanted to work with her on audition skills “in private,” the mother who, when Marilyn said she did not like the man, told her she must be imagining things, the mother who twirled her hair during meetings, discussing her daughter’s “potential.” She thinks of that childhood rage, of how she swallowed it up and stuffed it down. So abandoned, it grew its own tiny beating heart in her belly, which she’s become obliged to carry.

  She thinks, then, too, of the girl of thirteen who was overcome with anxiety when she started to grow breasts. The girl who, for a period of time, stopped eating to see if it would make those breasts fade back into her body, the girl who could no longer say her lines without a flood of panic in her chest.

  Becoming someone else does not happen in an instant. No, the steps to reinvention are slow. Marilyn thinks of the western migration—endless miles to cross, only a covered wagon for shelter. But if you survive, before long the cold winters of the East are only a distant memory. You are somewhere, someone, else.

  And yet. What the mind allows to pass through time, the body does not forget.

  * * *

  Is it hours later? Just minutes? Marilyn glances at the window to find the moon gone. Eventually her eyelids grow heavy enough to stay shut, and she starts to sink into the quicksand kind of sleep.

  Until she is startled awake again by a thud against the glass. She sits up abruptly to see a sneaker falling from the window. She watches it descend back to the cement, where James stands in the drive looking up at her, one foot left with only a sock for cover. His dark eyes are their own glinting moons, suddenly and all at once in view.

  She feels herself orbiting them as she gets out of bed, still in a half-dream state. She dresses and cracks her door open, cursing its perpetual creakiness as she peers into the living room. Woody snores lightly on the couch, his dirty-socked feet askew on the armrest.

  She starts to tiptoe across the shag carpet but freezes as Woody’s snore stops, his arm dropping toward the floor.

  Finally, the snore begins again. Marilyn holds her breath and ventures to open the even squeakier front door, and—thank god—the snores continue. She steps into the night and looks down to see James, still standing in the driveway, his shoe returned to his foot.

  “Hey,” he whispers as she walks up beside him.

  “Hey.”

  “I couldn’t sleep, so I went for a run. I saw your light on.”

  “I couldn’t sleep either. Though I was starting to, before you woke me up.”

  “Sorry.”

  “It’s okay.”

  “I mean I’m sorry I was a jerk.”

  She nods. Though she still feels the wound of his withdrawal, here he is before her, the only salve.

  “I wanna take you somewhere—”

  She hears half a question mark at the end of his statement, the worry that she will not follow.

  But she will. She cannot resist the pull to him; it’s magnetic, nearly scientific.

  * * *

  It must be close to two a.m. by the time they arrive at Runyon Canyon, where they climb over the park’s gated fence (locked at dusk) and halfway up the steep side of the trail. The letters of the Hollywood sign loom large off to the side, the hill below dotted with homes and the small black rectangles of their swimming pools. James waits for Marilyn as she makes her way over a boulder, her heartbeat in a hurry, her lungs sucking in the cool night air. It smells faintly of fire smoke and seawater, and of the late-night Chinese takeout James carries alongside a six-pack of beer.

  “Don’t turn around,” James tells her. “Not till we’re at the top.”

  And when they are, when she does, she finds LA’s sprawl transformed into something sparkling and miraculous, spread below them. Tiny cars form crisscrossing lines on the roads, the lights in thousands of homes become twinkling stars. From this vantage point, as she leans her head against James’s chest, Marilyn can understand the city’s promise.

  “What does your hair smell like?”

  Marilyn winces, leans away from him. “Mayonnaise. Sorry.”

  “Mayonnaise?”

  “It’s supposed to make your hair extra shiny. Sylvie’s audition ritual. I have one for Levi’s tomorrow.”

  “White people are crazy.”

  Marilyn laughs. “My mother is, at least.”

  James pulls two beers from the bag and pops them open on the side of a rock. He unpacks the Chinese—kung pao chicken and lo mein—and hands Marilyn a Styrofoam box.

  “I could not want anything less than to do this thing,” she says.

  “So why are you?”

  “I don’t know. I have to try and make some money so I can at least leave my mom with something before I go away next year.” She sips her beer, feels the alcohol starting to loosen her grip on herself. “And I guess I don’t know how to say no to her.”

  “But what about you—some money to help yourself?”

  Marilyn shrugs and looks away, overwhelmed by a sudden, restless desire to break free of her own skin.

  “You’re mad?”

  “I don’t know. I guess I am, but I feel like I shouldn’t be.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because there’s no point. There’s nothing to do with that kinda feeling.”

  “Sure there is. Anger can be fuel, like anything else.”

  They sit in silence for a moment. Marilyn pulls at the label of her beer.

  “My first agent—this guy in Orange County—used to make me watch him jerk off.” It’s the first time she’s said it out loud, and the words feel gummy in her mouth. She wants to spit them out, to be rid of them. “… I tried to tell my mom, but she didn’t listen. She was too caught up in hoping he’d make me a star. I just got really good at leaving the room, you know, just going somewhere else. I think I used to go back to our old lives in Amarillo, before my dad died, but now I can hardly remember that stuff…”

  “Fuck that guy,” James says, his face hard. After a moment he reaches out to her and brushes a lock of hair from her face. “I’m really sorry.”

  But Marilyn doesn’t want sympathy. She doesn’t want him to stroke her head. She wants him to push her back against the dirt, to press his lips to hers, to let her lose herself in him.

  “I don’t want it to change how you think of me,” she says.

  “It doesn’t,” James replies. “But you know you don’t have to do that audition,” he adds eventually. “You don’t have to do shit. You’re in control.”

  “That’s not exactly true.”

  “I get it’s a bad situation. I get you feel all kinds of pressure. But you still have a choice.”

  “I guess.”

  “Be practical,” James says. “Is there something in it for you? If you get the part, can you use the money to fly to whatever school you’re gonna go to? To cover the cost of whatever a scholarship or loan won’t? Tell your mom you’re not just handing it over anymore. You’ll only do it if you get to keep half.”

  Marilyn swallows. James looks at her for another moment, then finishes off the rest of his beer and hands her the empty bottle.

  “Here. Break it.”

  “Break it?”

  “Break it.”

  “Um.”

  “You’re fucking mad. I can see it. Break the bottle, Mari Mack.”

  Marilyn looks back at him uncertainly.

  “You keep that anger all buried, and it won’t be useful to you. Eventually you’ll do something that’ll hurt you
or someone else, maybe without even meaning to. Think of that fucker and break the bottle.”

  Marilyn reaches up and hurls it with more force than she knew she had. It smashes against a rock, making a perfect shattering sound.

  She swigs the rest of her own beer.

  “Think of your asshole uncle,” James tells her, and she breaks the second bottle. The anger begins to feel good, like it belongs in her body.

  She pulls the image of an open road, barren land and endless sky, from somewhere in the depths of her memory. She thinks of the girl who crossed that desert with her mother at age six, of all of the children she used to be, and for the first time she doesn’t want to turn away.

  “It’s pretty, isn’t it? The glass,” she says. “I feel bad, though, leaving it all there like that.”

  James pulls the rest of the bottles out of the cardboard six-pack, gets up, and uses it to sweep the glass into the paper bag that had carried the food.

  She wishes she could be inside his mind, to hear his thoughts, to see the world through his eyes.

  “What are you thinking?” she asks him as he walks back to her.

  “I love you,” James says.

  Marilyn tries to study his face, but he stares outward to the city below, as if it were an ocean hundreds of feet below that he was preparing to dive into. But he’s already leapt, hasn’t he?

  She gently reaches out, puts her hand against his cheek, and turns his head toward hers. It is precisely the distance between them, she thinks then, that makes their connection all the more beautiful. The thin thread, however delicate, that ties them to each other—it’s made of gold. It matters more than anything else at this moment.

  “I love you too.”

  She does not know if it’s true, not yet, does not know if she even understands what love is—but it doesn’t matter. She knows she could love him. She feels sure now that she will.

  ANGIE

  It’s just after eleven p.m. when Angie and Sam arrive at his cousin’s, but the neighborhood is wide awake. They park down the block next to a row of palm trees. To Angie, they look magnificent and exotic; she’s surprised to see that they just grow, right there, between apartment buildings and the corner grocery. I love LA, she thinks as they step out of the car into the city-dark tempered by streetlamps and headlights and the distant neon of bars. There’s a passing siren; a beat-up car parked nearby blasts Chance the Rapper singing “Angels.” Angie thinks she can smell the ocean on the warm night air, though it must be miles from here.

  Sam takes her bag and his own.

  “Let me get something,” she offers.

  “Naw,” he replies. She doesn’t fight him on it.

  He leads the way to an old brick apartment building with arched windows and rusted fire escapes. He goes around the side and knocks on a door. The man who answers—well, if you’d call him a man, he’s just twenty-four—bears a family resemblance to Sam, though he’s much shorter and stockier.

  “Cuz!” He hugs Sam and slaps him on the back, then turns to Angie with a warm smile. “I’m Miguel.”

  “Angie.”

  As he ushers her inside, the first thing Angie notices is that it smells like something delicious has been cooked recently, the scent of warm spices lingering in the air. Her stomach growls.

  “Nice job,” Miguel says to Sam with a grin. “This is your mamacita?”

  A moment of awkward silence ensues. Finally Sam smiles. “We’re just friends.”

  Miguel raises his eyebrows. “But she’s the little girl you got all those shells for?”

  Angie’s not sure about being called a little girl—she definitely towers over Miguel—but she’s distracted by remembering the pain of the night, almost exactly a year ago, that Sam returned from LA with the collection of seashells—the night they had sex, the night she left.

  Miguel speaks before Angie can find the right words. “Okay, I get it, it’s ‘complicated,’” he says, making air quotes. “You guys had a long drive, more on this later.”

  “I’ve gotta piss,” Sam says, and takes off, leaving Angie alone in the living room.

  “Welcome,” Miguel says, “to our humble abode.”

  The apartment is fairly small, with plaster walls, but it’s full of life and color. Lines of empty Coke bottles holding single paper flowers line the windowsills; the gray-carpeted floors have been brightened by Mexican throw rugs. One of the walls has been tacked with push-pinned sketches, notes, fortunes from cookies. The opposite wall has been painted with a mural of a woman’s face, beautiful and haunted, emerging from a bed of silver roses. One of the thorns has made a gash under her eye, and a teardrop-shaped bead of blood runs down her cheek.

  “That’s me.”

  Angie turns from the mural to see a girl in her early twenties with rumpled, bright red hair emerging from the hallway. She wears hoop earrings, tights, and an oversize man’s T-shirt.

  “Don’t worry.” The girl laughs. “I didn’t paint a picture of my own self in the living room. Miguel’s the artist.”

  Angie nods.

  “I don’t live here,” the girl continues, with another giggle, “though I admit the mural makes me feel at home.”

  “As if you needed help with that,” says Miguel. “You pay no rent, and yet, you’re always here.”

  She swats his shoulder. “You’re grateful for my feminine touch.”

  Miguel turns to Angie and says good-naturedly, “Angie, this is Cherry. If you hadn’t guessed, I’m madly in love with her, but she refuses to move in with me, despite the fact we’ve been together since college.”

  “I’m old-fashioned-ish. Not until you put a ring on it. Or,” she teases, “get a tattoo to match mine.”

  She reaches a hand out to Angie and flips her palm up to show the inside of her wrist, tattooed with twin cherries on their stems.

  “In case I forget my own name.” Sam returns, and she rushes to give him a kiss on the cheek. “My favorite cousin’s here!” she exclaims, mussing his hair.

  “Hey, Soda,” he replies with a smile.

  “Like cherry soda,” she explains to Angie.

  Miguel’s in the kitchen, popping Dos Equis and stuffing little triangles of lime into the necks of the bottles. He passes them around the room. Angie sips timidly, liking the explosion of bubbles against her tongue.

  “You hungry?” Miguel asks.

  Angie nods. Actually, she’s starving.

  “I saved you guys some food.”

  Moments later, they’re sitting around the table eating chicken mole.

  “How is this even real? This is basically the best thing I’ve ever tasted,” Angie says.

  “I like her,” Miguel says to Sam. “You sure she’s not your girl?”

  Sam ignores him and explains to Angie, “He’s a chef on a taco truck.”

  “A yuppie one.” Miguel smiles. “Day job.”

  Everyone chatters on, and Angie learns that Miguel has recently gotten a commission to do a mural on the side of a new health food store on Melrose, and that Cherry has an internship at the city’s public radio station. To make money, she bartends at a small nightclub. Light-headed from the beer, Angie feels as if she’s landed in a foreign place where real lives happen. For a moment, she can almost forget about her mom alone tonight, about the anxiety of how she’ll find Justin, and whether she’ll ever find her dad.

  * * *

  “We’ve got one sofa bed,” Miguel says, “so y’all are gonna have to figure it out.”

  He hands them sheets and a couple of blankets and disappears into the bedroom. Cherry kisses the top of Sam’s head, and then Angie’s too, before she bounces off after Miguel.

  “I can sleep on the floor,” Sam offers.

  “No, I can. You let me tag along, I’m not taking your bed.”

  “Well, I’m not gonna be the jerk who lets the girl sleep on the floor.”

  “It’s fine,” Angie says finally, “we can share the bed. We’re just going to be sleeping,
it’s not that big a deal.”

  Sam stares at her for a long moment, until finally she gets up and goes into the bathroom to change into the green zebra pajamas that her mom bought her at Target.

  By the time she comes out, Sam’s made up the bed, and Angie hurriedly gets under the covers as he disappears into the hallway. She hears the sink turn on in the bathroom and remembers the playful arguments they used to have when she’d chastise him for wasting water by letting it run while he brushed his teeth.

  She reaches for her phone, stares at the black screen. She needs to find out if Justin’s called back, if he’s emailed. Her pulse rises as she pushes the on button.

  The screen shows only a single message from her mother. Are you safe? Nothing more. She’d expected panicked voice mails, a stream of texts. Is it possible Marilyn has just … let her go? Angie feels queasy as she types back, simply, Yes.

  The thought bubble appears. Angie waits. It disappears. What is her mother thinking? What did she type and then delete? The thought bubble reappears, and, after what feels like an eternity, the words: I want you to tell me every day that you are safe. Angie replies, Okay. And that’s it. No more thought bubbles, no declarations of love, of anger, of anything. She tries to imagine Marilyn in their home. Is she popping popcorn for a movie night alone? Does the house feel empty without Angie, too quiet? In her daughter’s absence, can Marilyn sense the ghosts? Angie thinks of typing, Good night, sweet dreams, I love you more than infinity times infinity, which she’s said to her mom every night before bed since she was a child. But she does not; she cannot say one thing without saying everything.

  She checks her voice mails again, wishing that one from Justin would have magically appeared, but there’s nothing. She shuts off her phone and faces the wall, pretending to be already asleep when she hears Sam come out of the bathroom. The weight of his body sinks into the other side of the bed. The lights of passing cars cast shadows over the walls, reminding her of the flicker of her mom’s candles. “Friends” by Francis and the Lights blasts from an open window: Remember who you know … The song fades as the car moves into the distance. Muffled voices from a nearby apartment. Another siren. Finally, Angie drifts off. She wakes in the night to the weight of Sam’s arm over her body and turns to see him, mouth parted, eyelids closed in dream. She watches him for a moment, and then, not wanting to wake him, not wanting him to move from her, she repositions herself carefully. She must lie like that, wide awake, breath shallow, for hours.