In Search of Us

* * *

  Moving boxes up the flight of stairs goes slowly. By the time the sun drops and the day starts to give up, the Buick’s two-thirds empty and they’re both sticky, struggling with one of the heaviest boxes in the load, containing Marilyn’s books.

  As Marilyn backs up the stairs, the muscles in her arms burning, she sees a man’s figure—tall, broad-shouldered, dark-skinned, head down—crossing the street toward them. She blows a strand of hair away from her face and regrets that her hands are full, because she wants to lift them into a frame, to take a picture of him in her mind as he steps beneath a jacaranda tree and into its puddle of purple petals collected in the gutter.

  As he walks quickly up the pavement toward their building, she can see that he must be close to her own age: though he looks physically grown, he still has the wide eyes of a boy. He wears basketball shorts, sneakers, and a white T-shirt, soaked down the front with sweat. Tattoos cover his left arm.

  “Marilyn! Stay with it! The time to go on one of your little journeys is not while we’re carrying a load of your bricks,” Sylvie complains. And, perhaps hearing the noise, he turns and sees Marilyn staring. She watches him as she struggles with the weight of the box, manages a backward step up the stairs.

  He looks away, but after a moment, he’s climbing toward them.

  “You need help?” His voice is different than she would have imagined. Softer, shyer. The sound of it seems to match the gentle blue of the early-evening sky.

  “My goodness, yes! What a darling. Someone must have sent us an angel.” Sylvie immediately drops the box, never one to refuse the charity of others.

  “I’m Sylvie, and this is my daughter, Marilyn. It’s her birthday.”

  Marilyn is grateful for the exertion, which has undoubtedly already turned her cheeks pink, disguising her blush.

  “Happy birthday,” he says simply. She thinks she can feel the heat radiating off his body.

  “Thanks.” She lets her eyes drift upward to the gulls floating high against the pink clouds. She tries not to look at his shirt sticking to his muscular body.

  “And you are?” Sylvie prompts.

  “James.”

  “James. Good to know we have a strapping young lad in the building.”

  “You guys moving in?”

  “Yes yes. We’re up there. My daughter’s an actress, we thought it would be better if she were closer to Hollywood.”

  Marilyn knows how silly this must sound—she’s obviously not an actual actress, or they wouldn’t be moving here. But James just nods and lifts the box, his body so close to Marilyn’s that for a fleeting moment she can smell his skin. Though she can hear the effort in his breathing, his face doesn’t indicate any strain as he carries the books into the apartment.

  “We’ve got a few more in the car, you wouldn’t mind terribly would you,” Sylvie says (more than asks). Marilyn winces.

  “Sure,” James says, and she can’t tell if he’s irritated.

  Sylvie stays inside, making a show of looking busy as she starts to unpack, but Marilyn follows James up and down the stairs with the lighter boxes, determined to do her part. He laps her on every round and doesn’t make much eye contact.

  When they’ve finished, Sylvie thanks James again and Marilyn follows him downstairs so she can lock up the car. The sky’s beginning to darken, and the heat of the day has suddenly given way to the empty cool of desert night. She feels a chill, her clothes still damp with sweat.

  At the bottom of the staircase, he turns to her. “So, how old?”

  For a moment, Marilyn’s confused, before she remembers it’s her birthday. “Seventeen.”

  He nods. “Me too.”

  She looks out at the sidewalk, littered with scattered trash—a Coke bottle, a crushed beer can, a Carl’s Jr. bag, of all things. Carl’s Jr. was the last commercial she’d booked, five years ago. Residual checks don’t last forever.

  “So where you guys coming from?”

  “Orange County. We’re staying with my uncle again. We lived here when we first came to LA.”

  “You’re an actress?”

  “No, not really. My mom wishes I were. I was in a couple of commercials forever ago … it’s her thing, but I’ve been playing along for so long I guess it’s become routine.”

  “Yeah, I feel that. I mean, you gotta be what you gotta be for the people you love. It’s not always you, unfortunately.”

  Marilyn nods. She can smell someone’s dinner cooking, can hear a distant siren.

  “Thanks again for helping us.”

  “No problem.”

  She smiles at him and for the first time he seems to be really looking at her.

  “Later,” he says.

  As Marilyn watches him disappear into the apartment below her own new home, her skin feels prickly, her senses uncannily acute. The building at 1814 South Gramercy suddenly seems beautiful.

  * * *

  Marilyn’s uncle does not look happy to see them when he comes in an hour later to find Marilyn unpacking dishes and Sylvie on the phone with Domino’s. Woody’s a slight man, with long graying hair pulled back into a ponytail and a tiny gut.

  “Hello, ladies,” he says dryly. “Welcome back.”

  Sylvie hangs up the phone and turns to him. “Thank you for letting us stay,” she gushes in her best Sweet’N Low voice.

  “You were my brother’s wife,” he says remotely.

  Sylvie hides her wince fairly well, but Marilyn catches it. To Woody’s credit, he did agree to give up his bedroom for Sylvie and sleep on the couch. Marilyn’s tiny room, it seems, had mostly been storing boxes, which now litter the hall.

  “Like we talked about,” Sylvie adds quickly, “it will only be for a bit. In the meantime, we’ll make lovely housemates. The place will be spic and span. You won’t have to worry about a thing.”

  “I do love your mashed potato casserole,” Woody hints.

  “I’m planning on making it for you tomorrow. I’ve just ordered us a pizza for this evening. You know, it’s your niece’s seventeenth birthday,” she prompts.

  Woody looks at Marilyn, sizing her up. Since they moved out, Marilyn has seen him only a handful of times, the last of which was two Christmases ago when he came down to the OC with a twelve-pack and passed out on their couch.

  “Well,” he says, “you sure have grown up since last you were here. Even since the last time I saw you. Grab me a beer, would you, doll?”

  She goes to the fridge and pulls out a Miller Light, briefly pressing the cold bottle against her cheek. She feels vaguely feverish. Though it’s cooled down outdoors, Woody’s apartment seems to have caged the day’s heat.

  “Get one for yourself if you like, it’s your birthday,” he says.

  Marilyn does not.

  When the pizza arrives, Sylvie insists they put birthday candles in, which she’s managed to fish out from one of the unpacked boxes. Marilyn leans over the flames that are starting to drip spots of pink wax onto the cheese: I wish that by this time next year, I’ll be far away from here, in college in New York City, beginning a life that belongs to me … But as she closes her eyes to blow out the candles, it’s James she sees behind her lids, the image of him tugging at her like an undertow.

  * * *

  Lying awake atop the creaky single bed, between the worn My Little Pony sheets her mom bought her years ago, Marilyn hears muffled voices floating in through her window. One of them sounds like James’s, and there’s another, a kid’s voice. She strains to hear what they’re saying, but they talk softly and she can only make out words: Nana … shoes … school … promise … A faint bit of laughter.

  The voices go quiet, and she’s alone with the emptiness of the room where she once spent her first sleepless nights in the city. She stares up at the familiar patterns in the ceiling as a helicopter circles overhead. Then, moments later, there’s music. She thinks she recognizes the melody, and the sweet voice that comes in from the night. Try me, try me … She imagines James in
bed listening, and the sound becomes an invisible bridge between them. She finally drifts off, sharing his song.

  Marilyn wakes in a sweat to early-morning light flooding in through her window. Outside an ice cream truck plays its song, over and over. She surveys the boxes strewn around her, her chest tightening. She takes a deep breath and holds her hands up to frame a photograph of the detritus of her life, blinks, and takes a picture.

  She’d discovered her love of photography when she joined yearbook last year, mostly as a means of having a worthwhile extracurricular to add to her college apps. But instead of simply photographing her fellow students, she soon found herself using the school-issued 35-millimeter camera at every chance she got—capturing a child struggling to be released from his father’s grip, a girl tucking a white rockrose behind her ear, the streaks of a plane left behind in the pale blue sky, Sylvie on a plastic lounge chair at the apartment pool leaning down to paint her toes. As Marilyn looked through the lens, her surroundings had become something worth watching. Worth keeping. She began to go to the library to look through photography books, studying the work of Robert Frank, Carrie Mae Weems, Sally Mann, Gordon Parks. She’d discovered that by learning to click the shutter at the right moment, you could make art out of anything. But, of course, she’d had to return the camera to school at the end of the year. In its absence, she’s begun taking mind-pictures—an effort to salvage the much-needed connection to the world around her.

  * * *

  When Marilyn slips out of her room, she finds Woody shirtless, smoking a cigar, planted in front of an old computer with a Planet Poker logo on the screen, above a green card table and several animated players.

  “Morning,” she says.

  He coughs. “Dear,” he replies, an edge in his voice, “you’ll have to make yourself scarce when I’m working. Can’t afford to break my concentration.”

  “No prob—” she starts to say, but the look on his face suggests it would be better to opt for silence.

  Woody’s made money at cards for as long as she’s known him, but apparently “work” now extends to online poker. When he first moved to LA he’d landed a job at the Ford factory, her mom once explained, but when it closed down he gave himself over to gambling full-time, hoping to become the next Amarillo Slim—onetime winner of the World Series of Poker who appeared on talk shows, charming the country with his slow Texas drawl.

  Marilyn pockets the twenty-dollar bill Sylvie had slipped under her door along with a list of groceries to pick up for dinner. She steps outside, relishing the slightest lift of a breeze against her skin. The hot air smells of a mix of faint flowers and exhaust. She has no idea where the nearest store is, so she sets off wandering and finally finds a bodega, where she purchases her mom’s dinner ingredients plus a Mexican Coke and a banana—her breakfast. By the time she makes it back to the apartment an hour later, she’s sweaty and sticky. As she crosses the street toward 1814, she sees James step outside, his shirt off, carrying a hummingbird feeder. As he moves to hang it near a window, she notices a tattoo of the dark outline of a bird on the back of his left shoulder. Without thinking, she sets down the heavy bags and lifts her hands, framing his V-shaped back, the shadow-bird on his shoulder, a real live hummingbird hovering uncertainly some distance above it. Just as he starts to turn, just as his eyes become visible, she blinks and snaps the imaginary photo.

  It takes her a split second to reemerge into reality and realize how odd she must seem, standing at the edge of the driveway staring at James through her rectangular hands. She quickly drops them and waves. He frowns and does the same. His gaze leaves her feeling naked, as if with a single glance he could strip away her layers of defense.

  As he turns and goes inside, the hummingbird that was hovering descends on its feeder, tiny wings fragile and fluttering.

  * * *

  Marilyn tiptoes past Woody, who’s exactly as she left him, and spends the rest of the day cleaning and unpacking. Still looking at the image of James behind her eyes, she scrubs away the layers of dust on the sills, the hidden grime on the floors. She scours the bathroom with bleach, and is oddly soothed by the smell that erases the scent of the house, creating a blank chemical slate. She puts her mom’s clothes into drawers and then unpacks her own. She lines her books in neat, single rows against the walls and tapes up her photographs—favorites she’d copied on the Xerox machine at the library.

  From the bottom of the last box she pulls out a stuffed lion with matted hair, holding on to a red heart, now just by a thread. Though she doesn’t remember getting him, she knows Braveheart (as she’d named him long ago) was a gift from her father. She tries to recall his face, as she often does, and feels the usual sense of vertigo. He can’t be seen head on; he’s like a turning kaleidoscope, a boat drifting farther out to sea. Her memories of her youngest years all feel that way—fuzzy and fleeting, as if she were recalling a childhood that hadn’t belonged to her.

  When Marilyn thinks of her father’s death, it’s Sylvie’s scream she hears. He’d had a heart attack while he was at work. In the following weeks—or months, she couldn’t know—there was the murmur of the television, their small Amarillo home filling with the scent of Sylvie’s Salem Lights, possessions sold off at a yard sale, neighbors with uneasy smiles who came to wish them farewell. The quiet dread that crept in and nestled in Marilyn’s chest as she stared out the window of the car moving over the sun-bleached, wide-open desert landscape—an earth without borders. On the second day of the trip, she fell asleep beside the boxes and woke in the night as the car climbed a dark road, revealing an ocean of dotted lights spread in the distance. For a moment, in her half sleep, she was disoriented, thought she was seeing stars. Were they upside down? Had the sky fallen to the ground? The touch of her mother’s hand, squeezing her own. “Look, baby. We’re here. City of Angels.”

  * * *

  Sylvie’s starting supper—the mashed potato casserole Woody’s so fond of—when she turns to Marilyn, who’s sitting at the table peeling potatoes. “You forgot the milk!”

  “It wasn’t on the list,” Marilyn says, sure of it, because she’d checked the basket against her mother’s scrawl twice.

  “Yes, it was. Now what? Woody will be back any minute…”

  “I can go get some,” Marilyn offers, though she resents being blamed for the oversight.

  “There’s no time. It’ll take you half an hour at least. Go ask that boy—the one who helped us with the boxes.”

  She’s embarrassed by the thought of knocking on James’s door asking for milk, but Marilyn knows her mother’s worried Woody will have had one too many drinks during his “shift” at the casino, that she hopes to keep things calm with the promised casserole.

  So she steps into the sticky twilight and hurries downstairs. As she stands in front of the door next to the hummingbird feeder and knocks, she’s surprised by the intensity with which her heart pounds against her chest.

  A few moments later a boy answers. He looks maybe eleven—on the very precipice of adolescence, without having yet crossed its border. His features are a near-perfect copy of James’s, minus the self-possessed reserve, plus a layer of baby fat.

  “What’s up?”

  “Hi. I’m Marilyn. We just moved in upstairs.”

  “I know. My brother said.”

  “Oh.” Her heart rate doubles. What exactly had James said? Enough for his brother to recognize her at least.

  “You live with the weird old dude.”

  “Um, yeah. He’s my uncle.”

  “Justin? Who’s there?” A man’s deep voice comes from inside.

  “The girl!” And just like that, Justin takes her hand and pulls her through the doorway.

  An older man in his late sixties sits on the couch watching Jeopardy! He’s tall, broad-shouldered, with a bald head and a warm smile. Their grandfather, Marilyn guesses.

  “Hi, um, I’m Marilyn. We just moved in upstairs?” For some reason it comes out as a question.
>
  He nods. “Alan Bell.”

  “James! The girl’s here!” Justin calls out. He drops Marilyn’s hand, leaving her standing in the center of the living room, smells of dinner drifting in. The colorful furniture is worn in a nice, lived-in way. The bumpy walls, so ugly at Woody’s, are hardly noticeable beneath the family photos, children’s handprints in clay, and carefully arranged artwork.

  Alan looks at her expectantly. “You’re here for James?”

  “No, I—I was just, um, I forgot milk at the store today and my mom needs some for her recipe, just a cup and a half. I didn’t know if you had any … we could borrow.”

  “Of course,” Alan says, just as James emerges. The way he eyes her makes Marilyn feel like an intruder.

  “James, get her a glass of milk,” his grandfather instructs. A woman in fuzzy pink slippers and a matching pink robe shuffles in from the next room, her eyes creased with smile lines, hands covered in flour.

  “And who’s this?” she asks. Marilyn’s surprised by her voice, which is soft and high, like a young girl’s.

  “Marilyn. She’s just borrowing milk,” James says.

  “You’re a pretty girl. Don’t let him get after you.” The woman grins as James disappears into the next room. If he heard his grandmother’s comment, he doesn’t acknowledge it. “I’m Rose,” she offers, and then calls out to Justin to set the table while Alan calls out to the television: “Gin!”

  Marilyn turns to see the clue on the screen: It’s the liquor you might drink while playing a card game of the same name. When a bespectacled contestant guesses the same right answer, Alan slaps his hand on his knee.

  Marilyn feels a hot kind of longing arise in her chest. Longing for a family like this one, a family that laughs and shouts and sets the table for dinner together, a family that lives in a place that smells good, that feels like a real home. She can’t help but let her eyes drift toward the photos on the wall. There’s one of James and Justin as young boys, with a woman in a red flowered dress and a brilliant smile.

  James approaches with the glass of milk and catches her lost in the picture.